ALMANAC

ALMANAC is designed to provide learners with an engaging and intuitive learning experience incorporating a rich blend of multimedia including textual content, images, videos and animations. ALMANAC provides the learner with access to tailored learning experiences that are dynamically generated based on the learners immediate learning needs. The aim of ALMANAC is to generate learning experiences that engage the learner and encourage them to explore topics while at the same time having the information they need at their fingertips when they need it.

The learner can control their own learning experience through simple controls enabling them to tailor the learning experiences generated by ALMANAC to meet their own learning needs. The pedagogical complexity and length of learning experiences generated by ALMANAC can be controlled by the learner to ensure that the learning experience provides the appropriate level of pedagogical support to the learner while fitting into the time available to the learner. This user driven adaptive behaviour allows ALMANAC to tailor the learning experience to the learners needs without the requirement to implicitly modelling of the learners prior knowledge of a subject domain, which would be extremely difficult in a point of need context. The optional adaptation controls also remove the need to explicitly request information from the learner about their prior knowledge. It also empowers the learner to take control of their own learning and to practice their metacognitive skills.

ALMANAC dynamically composes educationally sound learning experiences from a range of different content sources. If desired, existing or legacy publisher content can form the basis for learning experiences as it represents a trusted source of content with a proven level of quality. In this respect, ALMANAC represents a way in which publishers can repurpose and remonetise content that previously might not have been available in formats other than text books. ALMANAC can decompose existing documents and use this material as the basis for generating new learning experiences. Through the dynamic composition process slices of this publisher content are recombined in new ways that increase content reuse through the use of multiple compositions strategies, broadening the range of scenarios in which the content is appropriate. For example publisher content that was originally developed for a text book designed to meet the needs of all students in a class can be reused as part of a tool to support struggling students or as a self-directed learning tool for more advanced students.

Additional sources of multimedia content, for example online services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr or curated repositories provided by 3^rd parties, act as a source of rich multimedia that ALMANAC incorporates into the generated learning experiences. Through the use of appropriate high quality multimedia content a more fun and engaging learning experience can be produced. This has the added benefit of bringing new life to legacy content that can often be more text based in nature without the need for more expensive manual editing of the content.

ALMANAC supports a wide range of different learning applications from K12 to corporate including advanced formal learning strategies such as ‘flipped classroom’, self-directed non-formal learning and point-of-need/just-in-time learning. Any scenario in which the learner is empowered to manage their own learning.

In 2015 ALMANAC was shortlisted for the Wharton-QS Stars Reimagine Education awards in the Hybrid Learning category.

Core Technologies

• Dynamic Content Composition and Personalisation
• Semantic Content Analysis

Challenges Addressed

1. Employees need access to on-demand, point-of-need learning using knowledge resources in the organisation and outside.
   • Personalised articles as a mash-up of internal (organisational) content and curated open source content
2. Need for adaptive personalised learning
   • A pedagogical strategy that gives the learner control over their own learning experience  with regard to both complexity and length of the article. The learner uses adaptation controls to take control over their own learning and to practise their meta-cognitive skills.
3. Need for flexibility; both with regard to learning modalities and learning strategies (e.g. non-formal bite-sized learning)
   • Multimedia-rich learning articles promote effective information processing and support different learning modalities.
   • Learner control and a tailored learning experience support a variety of learning strategies.  The learner can indicate their prior knowledge level and their preference for the length of the article.
4. Need for effective and efficient reuse of content
   • ALMANAC represents a way in which publishers can  repurpose and remonetise content  that previously might not have been available in formats other than text books through:
   • Automated analysis of large learning content repositories to facilitate content reuse and discovery.
   • Curating of external content
   • Dynamically extracting metadata for legacy content

Industry and Research Partners

• Trinity College
• NUI Galway
• CJ Fallon
• Radii
• Microsoft
• HMH

Status and Related Projects

The original Almanac core project has been the foundation for two externally funded projects:

• British Council Almanac (British Council)
• Almanac4Schools Innovation Partnership (CJ Fallon, Microsoft Wriggle)