Personalized Education with the Percepolis Platform

This paper describes Pervasive Cyberinfrastructure for Personalized Learning and Instructional Support (PERCEPOLIS), which leverages technological advances, especially in terms of pervasive computing, to facilitate personalized learning in higher education. Fundamental to PERCEPOLIS are: (a) modular course development and offering, which increases the resolution of the curriculum and allows for finer-grained personalization of learning objects and associated data collection; (b) blended learning, which allows class time to be used for active learning, interactive problem solving and reflective instructional tasks; and (c) networked curricula, in which the components form a cohesive and strongly interconnected whole where learning in one area reinforces and supports learning in other areas. Intelligent software agents are utilized in PERCEPOLIS to customize the content of a course for each learner, based on his or her academic profile and interests, with the help of context-based recommendation algorithms. This paper provides an introduction to the PERCEPOLIS platform and the educational research that underpins its design.