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Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=349832326025 Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal Sistema de Información Científica del Campo, Mª Elena; Saneiro, Mar; Santos, Olga C.; Boticario, Jesus G. PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITHDISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGH A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, vol. 3, núm. 1, 2010, pp. 237-247 Asociación Nacional de Psicología Evolutiva y Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores Badajoz, España How to cite Complete issue More information about this article Journal's homepage International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, ISSN (Printed Version): 0214-9877 [email protected] Asociación Nacional de Psicología Evolutiva y Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores España www.redalyc.org Non-Profit Academic Project, developed under the Open Acces Initiative

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Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=349832326025

Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal

Sistema de Información Científica

del Campo, Mª Elena; Saneiro, Mar; Santos, Olga C.; Boticario, Jesus G.

PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITHDISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION,

APPLIED THROUGH A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING

ENVIRONMENT

International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, vol. 3, núm. 1, 2010, pp. 237-247

Asociación Nacional de Psicología Evolutiva y Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores

Badajoz, España

How to cite Complete issue More information about this article Journal's homepage

International Journal of Developmental and

Educational Psychology,

ISSN (Printed Version): 0214-9877

[email protected]

Asociación Nacional de Psicología Evolutiva y

Educativa de la Infancia, Adolescencia y Mayores

España

www.redalyc.orgNon-Profit Academic Project, developed under the Open Acces Initiative

PSICOLOGÍA POSITIVA: EDUCACIÓN Y DISCAPACIDAD

International Journal of Developmental and Educational PsychologyINFAD Revista de Psicología, Nº3, 2010. ISSN: 0214-9877. pp:237-247 237

ABSTRACTThe psycho-educational support for students with disabilities is a constant need along the educa-

tional stages, regardless which teaching methodology is used. When the support is provided throughthe Web, different characteristics from the traditional learning process have to be considered. In par-ticular, physical and cognitive barriers on the resources offered through the e-learning platforms appear.In this paper, we focus on providing the required psycho-educational support drawing on the analysisof the specific difficulties encountered by these students as a result of the functional diversity issuesinherent to their disabilities. The goal is to advise the trainee to improve the learning strategies, capac-ities and competences that are lacking or inadequate to address tasks demands proposed in a givenlearning environment. In order to facilitate the psycho-educational support the following issues havebeen provided: i) a psycho-educational support service integrated in a VLE ii) a semantic educationalrecommender system that can be integrated into e-learning platforms and iii) a user centered method-ology to help the educator in the design of recommendations that address the psycho-educationalneeds previously identified. The support is provided both to tutors (when preparing the contents) andto students (when interacting in the course).

KEYWORDS: Dynamic and adaptive psycho-educational support, disabilities; personalization learn-ing strategies and scenarios; e-learning platforms; semantic educational recommender system.

PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION,APPLIED THROUGH A RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED

IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Mª Elena del Campo. PH. Doctor of Psychology. Holder of University. Psychology faculty.UNED. C/ Juandel Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid. Spain. Phone: 34-913986257. [email protected]

Mar Saneiro. Degree in Psychology. Technical Researcher of aDeNu Research Group. UNED.C/ Juan del Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid. Spain.Phone: 34-913986257. [email protected]

Olga C. Santos. Telecommunications Engineer. R&D Technical Manager of aDeNu Research Group. UNED. C/ Juan del Rosal, 16. 28040 Madrid. Spain. Phone: 34-913989388 [email protected].

Jesus G. Boticario. PH. Doctor of Physical. Holder of University. Technical colleges of computing UNED.Manager of aDeNu Research Group. UNED. C/ Juan del Rosal, 16, 28040 Madrid. Spain.

Phone: 34-913987197 [email protected]

PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGHA RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology238 INFAD Revista de Psicología, Nº3, 2010. ISSN: 0214-9877. pp:237-247

1. INTRODUCTIONThe objective of this paper is to present a suitable framework for the psycho-educational support

of students with disabilities in higher education considering their educational special needs in a virtuallearning environment (VLE).

When the teaching/learning methodology is carried out through the web, different characteristicsfrom the traditional learning process have to be taken into account. From a psycho-educational per-spective there are some factors related to the VLE usability and accessibility features that should be con-sidered because otherwise the methodology, which is mediated by technology, will turn into a barrier toteaching and learning. The main factors are:

sensuality of the user interface (Hofmeester et al. 1996; Nielsen 1995) adjustment of the tasks, controllability, privacy, user subjective satisfaction, efficiency, personaliza-

tion possibilities, adaptation to learning capabilities (Schneiderman,1998). In addition, VLE should be adapted to the user’s physical, cognitive and perceptual abilities and lim-

itations, facilitating the accomplishment of the different social and academic tasks posed to the learner.In order to minimize or remove the obstacles and barriers faced by students with disabilities, a psycho-educational support service has been designed and integrated in the accessible OpenACS/dotLRN VLE(Santos et al., 2007). Furthermore an adapted course compliant with IMS Learning Design specification(IMS-LD) has been developed. IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) (IMS, 2003) is able to use any psycho-educational model and describe a full learning flow with several elements (roles, activities, environ-ments, resources, properties, conditions, monitoring services or notifications) (Koper & Tattersall,2005). IMS-LD supports eight different kinds of Adaptation being carried out in eLearning systems(Burgos et al., 2007): Interface based, Learning flow based, Content based, Interactive problem solvingsupport, Adaptive information filtering, User grouping and evaluation, and Changes on-the-fly (VanRosmalen & Boticario, 2005).

In the next section we describe the main actions developed to facilitate psycho-educational supportin a VLE. To illustrate how the support to students with disabilities will be offered, a learning scenarioconsidering the different roles involved in Higher Education is described in the following section. Finallythis paper will present the elicitation methodology of a recommender system that will complement thesupport facilitated by the Psycho-educational Support service (APES).

2. THE PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORTThe psycho-educational support is mediated by the Adaptive Psycho-Educational Support service

(APES) which is provided by the OpenACS/dotLRN LMS through an adapted course compliant with IMSLearning Design specification (IMS-LD) and complemented with the dynamic guidance provided by asemantic educational recommender system.

2.1 Development and integration of APES into the OpenACS/dotLRN LMSThe e-learning platform offers psycho-educational support to students with and without disability

through APES. The APES service facilitates support to different roles involved along the learningprocess (tutor/teacher, students, staff….) in terms of different topics that could impact on the student´sacademic performance (e.g. learning strategies, communication abilities, writing and reading difficul-ties, adapted format and contents according to the students needs and preferences, etc). The serviceconsist of specific sections providing orientations, guidelines, orientations and information related tothe activities carried out by each role along the VLE.

The APES service is linked to other services offered by the VLE, such as the Needs AssessmentSupport (NAS) service used to collect information about the learner’s psycho-educational needs andpreferences, the Resource Accessibility Information (RESACCINFO) service that allows to check thelearning content and resources accessibility, the Adaptation Look up (APTLOOKUP) service that offersorientation on who and how the learning content can be adapted, and the Applied Psychological Service(APS) that is to be contacted by the learner or tutor when they meet difficulties that cannot be solvedusing APES and need face to face psycho-educational support provided by a psychological expert.

2.2. The IMS-LD adapted course As aforementioned an IMS-LD compliant adapted course has been designed. IMS-LD courses can

be deployed into any VLE that supports this specification (e.g. OpenACS/dotLRN). To offer a personal-ized service, the course considers the information about the learners and tutors stored in the user model(UM). Technical details on the framework proposed are provided elsewhere (Santos et al., 2010).

The learner accesses and fills in the questionnaires about his/her needs through the NAS service,the user model stores these properties together with other properties such as the learning style or thetechnological experience using the platform. Taking into account this information, the learner is givenaccess to a course with activities and resources personalized according to the student’s profile. Thecourse will enable the learner to learn about the VLE itself and experience the functioning and the avail-able resources.

Moreover, the course contents and the resources offered have been designed according to thereusability criterion, which is meant to support learning needs that may arise in different types of dis-abilities. Learners share some learning difficulties when they are accessing both learning contents andservices (e.g. information processing, memory, reasoning, attention, language and understanding prob-lems). Cognitive processes can be functioning in a poor or inadequate way due to their own character-istics, which are imposed by their disabilities (Lerner, J., 1997). As consequence, learners are missingrelevant information to solve problems in the academic and real world context.

Taking into account that information, specific support has been designed and integrated into thecourse. Learning strategies such as cognitive, meta-cognitive, interaction, communication and affectivestrategies have been considered along the learning flow and applied to the units of learning, resources,activities and assessment. These learning strategies are collected in a taxonomy elaborated by some co-authors from the review of taxonomies by different authors and perspectives (Bloom, B.S., et al. 1984),(Ellis, E.S. 1993), (Woloshyn, V.E., & Willoughby, T., 1995), (Boulet A., Savoie-Zajc L., Chevrier J.,1996), (Johnson, L.A., Graham, S., & Harris, K.R. 1997), (Carmel, D. and Markovitch,S. 1998), (Ridley,D.S,1992).

In general the targeted learners receive the following resources: work schedule/organizer, studyregister, adapted learning materials (e.g. shorter lessons, content in video and /or audio format, mate-rial enriched with icons, easy reading), glossary of the services/resources available at the platform,glossary of specific terms related with the unit’s content, forum for comprehension/writing support,conceptual maps, adapted evaluations (true-false, matching, multiple choice, short answer..).

2.3. Development and integration of a Recommender SystemAs it is justified in Rodriguez-Ascaso et al. (2008) the aforementioned adapted course is not suffi-

cient to support the students since the personalization support should be provided by combining designand runtime adaptations (Boticario and Santos, 2007). For this reason, the psycho-educational supportis complemented with the usage of a recommender system (RS).

Next, we present a scenario in order to show the links between the APES service and the RS, andhow the later is integrated into the psycho-educational support facilitated by APES, offering dynamicsupport to the different roles involved in the teaching/learning process. In the fourth section, we com-ment on the Recommender system in more detail.

3. THE SCENARIOThe selected scenario collect the most typical activities carried out by the aforementioned roles

involved in Higher Education when supporting the students with disabilities according to their specificeducational needs. The APES service is related to the different services already mentioned as describedin Fig. 1.

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Figure 1. General description of APES

Next we comment on the scenario flow for the three roles identified: i) students with disabilities orforeign students, ii) virtual tutors, and iii) the university staff.

3.1 The Teacher/tutor flowWhen the enrolment process is over, the tutor/teacher of a virtual course receives a notification with

the list of the students with and without disability enrolled in the course. The received report containsspecific information about the accessibility preferences and psycho-educational needs informed by thestudents collected by the NAS service. In particular, in the scenario presented here, a student with dis-ability is enrolled in the course. At that moment, the RS recommends the tutor to access the APES serv-ice to learn how to address the psycho-educational needs of that learner. The APES service provides thetutor with:

General information about different education needs and the main difficulties that the student couldfind in the different academic activities depending of her/his disability (e.g. math, writing and reading,etc).

Guidelines on how to improve and create adapted content involving learning strategies in order tooptimize the student´s performance (e.g. creating alternative activities, adapting a presentation in aneasy reading format, using pictures to illustrate concepts, etc), alternative learning flows, integratingadditional resources…

Link with the Applied Psychology Service (APS) in order to get a more specialized support aboutthe special education needs.

After the tutor has accessed the APES service, the RS recommends the tutor to go to RESACCIN-FO service to check if the learning materials (text, video, presentations) that she is using in the courseare accessible according to the information collected by NAS. In addition APES service has an adviceremembering the tutors that they should check their learning materials’ accessibility in order to makethe needed adaptations according to the learners’ accessibility needs.

If the tutor has accessed APES more than one week ago but she has not accessed RESACCINFOyet, the RS recommends her go to the RESACCINFO service. In any case, the RS recommends the tutorto validate the course contents if she should provide the contents in less than one month and she hasnot validated them yet in the RESACCINFO service.

As a result, the teacher/tutor should go to RESACCINFO and validates the course materials’ acces-sibility. After that, she receives a notification pointing out the pending learning materials’ adaptations.For instance, if there are some contents pending of adaptation, the tutor should go to the ADAPT-LOOKUP service to find out how she can solve the problem. This service offers her two ways to adaptthe learning materials. The first one is using the Resource Adaptation Management (RESADAPT) serv-ice that will send the materials to a specialized department or institution (e.g. National Organization of

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PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION, APPLIED THROUGHA RECOMMENDER SYSTEM INTEGRATED IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Spanish Blinded People –ONCE- and the Audio Visual Media Spanish Center -CEMAV-). The second oneis to make the adaptation herself, in case she has been trained for it in the past.

After RESACCINFO informs tutor on pending learning materials´ adaptations and considering thepsycho-educational orientations facilitated by APES, in this scenario the tutor/teacher decides to offertwo versions of the course. The first one is the original version of the course –that is, the course with-out the adaptations provided in IMS-LD- with the RS integrated. In this way, if the learner does not suc-ceed in the activities and questionnaires, the RS recommends her the possibility to follow the adaptedversion of the course that could address her learning difficulties. In any case, the learner also receivesrecommendations pointing to internal or external resources, alternative activities, and actions on thecourse services that are most appropriate in each situation in the course. The second version is theadapted version commented previously in section 2.1. This adapted version will be elaborated by thetutor using the IMS-LD specification where different adaptations and resources have been considered(e.g. easy reading, videos with subtitles, glossaries, assessment with short question…) including thepending adaptations reported by RESACCINFO, and specific recommendations produced by the RSpointing to internal or external resources, alternative activities and services.

After the adaptations are over –no matter if they have been produced externally or by the tutor her-self-, the tutor resubmits the learning material to RESACCINFO to validate if the new adaptations thathave been made are adequate. If RESACCINFO service confirms that there are no pending adaptation,then the tutor can update the learning material into the platform and send a message to the courseforum indicating that there is available an adapted course version that could be used by different userssharing some learning difficulties (e.g. students with dyslexia, attention deficit, auditory impairment,foreign students). The course has a forum that can be used by students to solve their doubts. If thetutor/teacher detects in runtime that some students could benefit from the adapted course version, shecan suggest them to take this one.

3.2 The learner flowThe students can access to APES in different ways: 1) directly, 2) from NAS and 3) from APS. In

the three cases APES provides them with a set of common resources:General information divided into different sections according to the different types of disability and

the main learning difficulties that they could find in the different academic and administrative activities(e.g. writing and reading, social participation, presentations, math, etc.).

Information and description about learning strategies that could improve the academic performanceaccording to his learning styles and educational needs (e.g. planning, organizing, self-monitoring, howto improve her writing and reading abilities, how to optimize her social participation, etc).

A list of adapted courses (including their characteristics) where the student can check if there isavailable an adapted version of the course where he is enrolled suitable to his needs and preferences(e.g. the course “Discovering the platform).

The possibility to contact with the APS in order to get a more personalized evaluation of his psy-cho- educational needs.

Specific information depending on the access way is illustrated in the following sections. 3.2.1 Accessing from NAS service

After the learner is enrolled, the NAS service offers him some questionnaires that collect informa-tion about her accessibility preferences and psycho-educational needs. This information is stored in theUM to facilitate the adequate adaptation according to her profile. Taking into account the informationcollected by NAS and stored in the UM, the RS recommends him to go to APES because it would beuseful for him to read about his learning difficulties and how to deal with them. Specifically, APES willoffer information collected in the aforementioned common resources.

3.2.2 Accessing from APSThe student is enrolled in the course and he is already aware of some of his learning difficulties, so

he consults the psycho-educational support offered by the Applied Psychology Service. He is then eval-

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uated by the educational psychologist. The expert considers that his learning difficulties do not need apsycho-educational intervention but it could be beneficial for him to receive some orientations in orderto improve her attention difficulties. Accordingly the psycho-educational tells him to check theresources available in APES. Specifically, APES will offer information collected in the aforementionedcommon resources.

3.2.3 Accessing to APES directlyA foreign student enrolled in the course has some difficulties when he is reading and writing in

Spanish. He knows some of his difficulties and decides to check the psycho-educational support offeredby APES. In this case the service provides him with general information about the learning difficultiesencountered by foreign students when learning in a second language and learning strategies that couldimprove his reading and writing abilities in a second language.

3.3 The staff work flowThe APES service can also be accessed from the administrative departments. In this case, a uni-

versity administrative officer who is attending the students in the enrolment process may be interestedin using this service. For instance, if she is unconfident in dealing with students with disabilities as shedoes not know how to speak to them, how to support them when they are asking or filling information,etc. She may be responsible for making and uploading contents to the institutional website using dif-ferent administrative forms and would require checking the accessibility of the materials produced. Dueto these needs she accesses APES to get information and training to deal with those issues. In this caseAPES will offer her information collected in the aforementioned common resources like general infor-mation about learning difficulties related to disabilities with a description of the main difficulties thatthese students could find in administrative processes (e.g. filling an administrative form because theydo not understand the formal administrative language or the form is inaccessible). In addition she couldcheck guidelines about how to deal with disabled students, including descriptions of the main difficul-ties that they could find in social interactions (e.g. student with disability interacting with administrativestaff in poor lighting conditions, noisy environment, etc).

Moreover APES provides an advice reminding her that she should check out through RESACCINFOif the administrative materials match up with the student accessibility to make the required adaptationswhen needed. Thus the administrative officer is able to adapt the forms following the APES recom-mendations. In case she needs an adapted version of an institutional video uploaded into the universi-ty website, she can resort to RESACCINFO. The adaptation process will follow the steps described forteacher/tutor in the section 3.1. In that case, as she has not prior training, she decides to ask for therequired adaptations using RESADAPT. Once the resource is adapted and validated by RESACCINFO shecan upload the adapted video into the institutional website.

4. THE RECOMMENDER SYSTEMAt aDeNu research group we have developed a semantic recommender system that is based on a

recommendations model (Santos & Boticario, 2008). This model supports the course designer indescribing recommendations in learning inclusive scenarios, presents additional information to the userto explain why a particular recommendation has been offered, and requests explicit feedback from thelearner when she has shown interest in the recommendation process -to improve the recommender-.

In particular, this modeling of the recommendations describes i) what should be recommended (dif-ferent recommendation types have been identified and can be offered, which relate to the actions thatcan be done on the VLE objects, such as send a forum message, work on a particular objective or sharesome opinion), ii) when a recommendation it is deemed appropriate (considering the user and coursecontext, the conditions of application and the timeout restrictions), iii) how a recommendation shouldbe displayed (considering accessibility and usability criteria) and iv) why a recommendation has beenproduced (in terms of what category the recommendation applies to, what technique has been used togenerate it, and the source that originated the recommendation).

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In order to produce semantic recommendations according to the model, a user centered method-ology has been proposed (Santos et al., 2009). This methodology applies scenario-based methods(Rosson & Carroll, 2001) to involve psycho-educational experts in writing stories (i.e. scenarios) aboutthe problems taking place in relevant situations that come to their mind during their teaching experi-ence within the VLE.

Once recommendations have been designed, they can be displayed to the user in the VLE by usingthe information of the model. The idea is to show the recommendations as a list of actions that the usercan carry out in the system. Each element of the list (i.e. action) contains a link to the service of theplatform where the recommended action can be taken. The user can decide whether to read the rec-ommendations or not (and of course, once read, she also has the freedom whether to follow them ornot). The following figure shows how the recommendations list is presented to the user within the VLE,in the same way as other more traditional e-learning services, such as a collaborative forum and somelearning materials.

Figure 2. Recommendations within the e-learning platform

The RS is involved in the adaptive psycho-educational support service (dynamic guidance) asdescribed in the scenario introduced in section 3. Following the methodology proposed above to elicitrecommendations, several recommendations were identified to offer the dynamic guidance in APES,which are shown next. The recommendations address the different roles identified in the scenario. Sofar, we have focused on the tutor and learner roles.

4.1 Recommendations for tutorsThe recommendations for tutors have been defined to support the tutors in the process of prepar-

ing the materials for their courses in a way that suit the needs of their students. The following five rec-ommendations have been identified.

Table 1. Recommendation for the APES service

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Recommendation 1: Recommend a tutor to access APES to learn how to address the learning difficulties of some of the course learners What is recommended The APES service When is recommended When a tutor has some learners with learning difficulties (e.g.

attention deficit or difficulties with reading comprehension) How is recommended A link to the homepage to the APES service (in order to

facilitate where the information is, the tutor is not linked to the specific page but to the home of the APES service, and told in the recommendation to go to that particular contents)

Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have learning difficulties, so the tutor is recommended the APES service to

Table 2. Recommendation for specific contents in the APES service

Table 3. Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service

Table 4. Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service (deadline approaching)

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Recommendation 2: Recommend a tutor to access the specific APES contents of the APES service to a tutor to learn how to address the learning difficulties of some of the course learners What is recommended A specific content in the APES service When is recommended When a tutor has some learners with learning difficulties (e.g.

attention deficit or difficulties with reading comprehension), she has been recommended to go to APES but she has not accessed it in the last week

How is recommended A link to a specific content in the APES service Why is recommended The tutor was recommended to go to the APES so she reads

some specific content, but it has not gone for a week since the recommendation was clicked.

Recommendation 3: Recommend the tutor to access RESACCINFO to validate the contents produced by her

What is recommended The RESACCINFO service When is recommended When a tutor has a course with learners with learning

difficulties and has accessed the APES service more than one week ago but she still has to go to the RESACCINFO service

How is recommended A link to the RESACCINFO service homepage Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have learning

difficulties, the tutor has visited the page on APES focused on deficit attention needs more than one week ago but she has not visited RESACCINFO homepage yet.

Recommendation 4: Recommend the tutor to access RESACCINFO to validate the contents produced by her (when the deadline is approaching)

What is recommended The RESACCINFO service When is recommended When a tutor has a course with learners with learning

difficulties and has accessed the APES service more than one week ago but she still has to go to the RESACCINFO service and the deadline to hand the contents is approaching

How is recommended A link to the RESACCINFO service homepage Why is recommended There are some learners in the course that have reading and

Table 5. Recommendation for the RESACCINFO service (deadline approaching)

4.2 Recommendations for learnersFollowing the scenario, learners can be supported both inside and outside the course. In the first

case, they are helped to deal with their learning needs. In the second case, when students are interact-ing in the course, the recommender system guides the students in their learning by recommendingactions to take in the VLE (i.e. within a learning scenario) that best adapt –in each every moment- totheir profile and needs (e.g. accessibility preferences), taking into account at the same time theirprogress in the course. Table 6 presents sample recommendations of each type.

Table 6. Recommendation for the APES service

Table 7. Recommendation to use the forum

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Recommendation 5: Recommend a tutor to access ADAPTALOOKUP as there are no captions in some of the course contents What is recommended The ADAPTALOOKUP service When is recommended When a tutor has validated a course that lacks of captions in

some of the contents How is recommended A link to the ADAPTALOOKUP service homepage Why is recommended There are some contents in the course with missing caption,

so you should go to ADAPTLOOKUP to find out how you can solve the problem.

Recommendation 6: Recommend a learner that has learning difficulties to go to APES

What is recommended The APES service When is recommended When the learner has some learning difficulties How is recommended A link to the APES service homepage Why is recommended The learner has learning difficulties, so she can be benefited

from reading how to improve her learning by reading the information provided in APES

Recommendation 7: Recommend a learner with comprehension and reading needs to post a message in the forum to present herself What is recommended The forum tool When is recommended When the learner has some learning difficulties and has not

yet used the forum to present herself in this course How is recommended A link to the forum tool in the course space Why is recommended The learner has comprehension and reading needs, so she

may have problems to communicate to fellows, therfore it would be better to motivate her to post a message in the forum to introduce herself, if she has not posted any message yet in the course.

5. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSIONIn this paper, we have presented how psycho-educational support can be offered through the

Adaptive Psycho-Educational Support service (APES) in the OpenACS/dotLRN VLE through an adaptedIMS Learning Design compliant course and complemented with the dynamic guidance provided by asemantic educational recommender system. To illustrate our approach, we have presented a typical sce-nario in higher education universities that covers the psycho-educational requirements to support stu-dents with disabilities.

This psycho-educational support for disabled students can be applied through a recommender sys-tem, which is built upon a semantic recommendations model and integrated into the VLE. A user cen-tered methodology has been used to help the educator design recommendations that address the psy-cho-educational needs identified. In this way, the recommender system provides personalized recom-mendations to guide the tutors in the contents preparation and the students in their learning by recom-mending actions to carry out in the platform.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSAuthors would like to thank the European Commission and the Spanish Government for funding the

research involved in this work. In particular EU4ALL (IST-2006-034778) and A2UN@ (TIN2008-06862-C04-01/TSI) projects. Moreover, they would also like to acknowledge the work carried out by AlejandroRodriguez-Ascaso in the definition of the services, the work carried out by Manuel Montecelo fromaDeNu group who arranged the course contents using the IMS-LD specification following the require-ments provided to him by the psycho-educational co-authors and the development work carried out byEmmanuelle Raffenne, who made possible the integration of the IMS-LD player of the OpenACS/dotLRNplatform with the User Model developed in aDeNu group.

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Fecha de recepción: 1 de marzo 2010Fecha de admisión: 19 de marzo 2010

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