Heterogeneous Expertise of Learners

This learning resource focuses on hetererogeneous skills or expertise of learners. Even in a single classroom students have different abilities. The starting point at Wikiversity is even more challenging in terms of age, social, cultural and educational background. As authors/teachers in a Wikiversity community we can react on that in different ways:

• Analytic Approach: decomposition of learning resources, e.g. in smaller categorized learning objects, so that the learner can select appropriate submodules. The learner decides if the submodule is necessary/helpful for her/his expertise.
• Synthetic Approach: to aggregate the knowledge pieces that
  • she/he has learned already and
  • she/he wants to learn

Furthermore we have to deal with:

• (heterogenous knowledge of students at university) Especially in Mathematics students come to university that a very heterogeneous knowledge about mathematical foundations that expected to be learned in school (according to curriculum at schools), or the time difference between the end of school and entering a university was to long and at lot of knowledge is gone (see e.g. OMB+ Online-Course for Mathematics - Germany designed for beginners at university, studying Physics, Engineering, .... and of course Mathematics).
• (create a user-profile) The key question is, how could learners generate a user-profile for their knowledge by using existing IT infrastructure in Wikiversity.
  • Wikiversity should not harvest user-data/user-profile (like TwoogleBook et. al. do that in the context of commercial data havesting. Wikiversity was not designed for harvesting user-profiles at it is not necessary in the Learning Management System.
  • The user data should be stored on client side only (i.e. on the computer or mobile device of the learner)
  • Creating a user-profile should end up with a product they need, so that the user get an immediate benefit for creating a user-profile. The product can be used for learning and revision of "What I know" and user-profile can be used to tailored learning resouces to the student's needs.
• (wikibooks as representation of an user-profile) A short analysis of exisiting tools in Wikiversity shows that the Wikibook is a feasible way to do it: The learner can be asked to create a Wikibook about his or her knowledge about a certain topic (e.g. Statistics), in doing so the learner gets a benefit. It is the wiki book exported a PDF, that represents the knowledge (useful for training and looking up definitions, theorems, applications, tutorials, ...). Together with the download link to the PDF document the learner in Wikiversity can download the corresponding user-profile stored as a JSON file. The JSON-file is more or less a list of resources the user has selected to create his or her personalized Wikibook. This exported JSON file e.g. "my_userprofile.json" (1st version) is stored on the learner computer only by default. The next book version (2nd version) defines the wiki book that is meant to be the set of learning object that he/she wants to learn. This could be defined user-driven by the learner or defined by a teacher or author of a whole course which could be a course profile that is provide for download in Wikiversity.
• (Individual Learning Path in Wikiversity) Starting from the known and discover the unknown is the underlying basic principle. Content links between learning resource in Wikiversity can be used to suggest a possible learning path in Wikiversity to aquire the intended scope of knowledge defined by the user herself/himself. This can realized with existing technological approaches already present in the WikiBook-creator with the feature suggest pages.
• (Teachering Scope/Curriculum) Furthermore teachers could define the scope of learning by creating a wikibook, that includes the requirements to understand the content of the course and the content of the course as well. This is exported by a Wikibook useful product for learners and stored e.g. as JSON-File "my_course.json" resp. the curriculum by "my_curriculum.json".
• (Tailored Learning Path) In computer science a diff between the two JSON-files
  • "my_userprofile.json" and
  • "my_course.json"

allows learning management systems to create recommendations for next learning resources and this can be used highlight uncovered area in the curriculum, provide self-assessment test for (see wikiversity Quizzes), .... The selection of resource be realized by

Mathematically graph theory and distance in weighted graphs may be relevant for understanding the background concept of suggesting a learning path. Anyway users can experience the page suggestion in a tailored Wiki book.

• (Systems Thinking) This concept of individualized learning is most important driver for support of systems thinking and cross-disciplinary problem solving within Wikiversity. Complex Problems do not have simple solution by definition of the word "complexity". Problem solving needs cross-disciplinary knowledge. In this setting the learner approaches the problem with an expertise in subject and being a novice in another subject. But for being a good problem solver in systemic problems learner needs at least basic knowledge from both subjects. Heterogeneous skills and expertise in a cross-disciplary environment is applicable for a professor as well and as for students. Crossing disciplines especially for experts in on area can might feel a bit uncomfortable for being a novice again. But digesting the Wikiversity principle it is a basic principle of switching between learner's and the teacher's role. Learning activities in Wikiversity encourage to take over even a minor teacher and author roles as soon the learner has learned something.

Conclusions

The concept mentioned above is consistent to the wiki philosophy,

• the tools are there (wiki book creator, suggestions algorithm),
• data structure for storing simple learning profiles from that by WikiBooks can be implemented easily,
• Wikiversity does not aggregate user data and JSON principle can be used by offline tools, even a locally stored HTML5 webpage, that suggests learning path offline within the browser with submitting anything to a server just by using the downloaded user-profile and course-profile. When the learner selects one of the recommended next learning resources, the learner is linked to the online resources in Wikiversity.
• (future of forking) Forking with all its down-sides e.g. of creating dead unused forks, can be handle by neuroinformatic approaches of aging of unused forks and detection of those. Forgetting in our brain seems to be negative but it has evolutionary benefits for effective reasoning and reduction of "cognitive load".

Learning Task

• Explore tailored Wiki book and create one for yourself and your expertise in Wikipedia by starting the Book Creator