TCD spin-off leads revolution in e-learning

'Empower the User' project could even open up new business opportunities for the e-learning firms, allowing them to resell material that they already have, writes Ciara O'Brien

THE FACE of e-learning has changed dramatically over the past few years. Programmes have become more intuitive, more complex in design and increasingly tailored to a specific audience.

The idea that e-learning should simply mimic traditional education models in a virtual world is slowly being eroded, replaced with the realisation that e-learning can offer new ways to teach students and implement new tools to help train people more effectively.

The Irish e-learning industry has seen some innovation and successes over the past 10 years, but a new spin-out company from Trinity College Dublin may be about to revolutionise the industry once again, with an e-learning platform that promises to deliver dynamic, personalised content. The "Empower the User" project does what it says on the tin - it's all about empowering the user, and could have some handy benefits for companies too, in terms of faster, improved training methods and even lower costs.

To further underpin its potential success, the future chief executive of the company, Dr Declan Dagger, was the winner of the inaugural Enterprise Ireland One to Watch Award, which was presented at its recent Applied Research Forum, From Bench to Boardroom - Commercialising research.

It appears the old days of the "shrink wrapped" course, where users get the same course regardless of their knowledge and previous training, are numbered. "Empower the User" bases its services on the idea that no two people learn the same way.

"Now we can have a system dynamically compose content for the individual based on their role, their expertise and so on," explains Prof Vincent Wade, who has been heavily involved in the project from the beginning, and is director of the Centre for Learning Technologies.

The project is the product of several years of research in the area of personalised e-learning technology, based on an Enterprise Ireland commercialisation fund research project called Adapt. Originally starting out as a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Psychiatry in Trinity College, to train medical students and doctors in how to conduct interviews with patients and arrive at a diagnosis, the project's scope has since broadened.

The project was begun when the Department of Psychiatry approached the Computer Science department with the idea of building an online simulator or player that would allow the student to interactively interview different patients - at the time, it was aimed at psychiatric patients.

Previously, students were trained using role-playing sessions that were costly and limited in that they could only cater for a certain number of students. When numbers grew, training for clinical interviewing skills reverted to the lecture-based teaching methods, which may not have been as effective as training that is based on actual interaction with patients.

This is where the Adapt project came into the mix. "It performs like a virtual interview," says Prof Wade. "It allows them to ask questions of the virtual person, and the response is automatically composed by the system."

These answers are composed according to the expertise, goals and training needs of the individual. "We say one size fits one," says Prof Wade. "The key thing that's different about the technology developed in the project and company is that it allows content to be dynamic, personalised and composed for the learner as he or she uses it."

Although the project has taken its new technology into the area of soft skills, both Dagger and Wade say it can be applied to other industries.

"Particularly within the last few years we've been looking at personalised e-learning, the idea of offering educational experience that is just tailored particularly for you, down to the individual's requirement, learning goals, needs, competencies, their prior knowledge. It's trying to bring in all those different influences to create a unique educational experience for the user," says Dagger.

The technology that can achieve this unique experience is quite complex. "To date, a lot of the research and people who are trying to bring this out into the commercial arena have focused on trying to educate the education providers on how to build these complex solutions. But in real terms, they shouldn't be concerned with how technical something is to build," says Dagger.

This was a challenge for the team, who found themselves asking the question: "How do we put their capabilities into real teachers' hands?"

"As part of the Adapt project we looked at two key influencing factors in the educational experience. There's the actual delivery of the personalised experience to the learner, but also not to disenfranchise the provider, but to give them tools for them to build these adaptable experience. This is really where the opportunity arises," says Dagger.

"Empower the User" works on the premise that there are better ways to deliver content to the end user, with different content for individual users, and that it could even open up new business opportunities for the e-learning firms, allowing them to resell material that they already have.

"The common view to date is that content is king, but it's not really - it's really about the educational experience," says Dagger. "What these tools are trying to do is to say we've got a whole plethora of content that we can use and repurpose.

"You put the control of the dialogue into the learner hands. They pick the questions they want to ask, they choose the path of the dialogue they want to follow. All the time, you put educational scaffolding around it; you give them the appropriate feedback, you give them reflection time so they can take notes, you make it much more interactive and engaging."

The solutions also allow both trainers and students to get feedback at various stages. "Empower The User" claims the platform is more cost effective than some traditional methods of training, particularly when it comes to soft skills training. Dagger estimates that a single training session, which could include getting actors in to play the parts of patients and "role playing" with learners could cost in the region of €10,000 per session. The "Empower the User" solution could save a firm a few thousand on that figure.

Although the project started with Trinity College, there has been interest from outside the university already, with the University of Limerick and the University of Edinburgh both conducting trials of the technology. Meanwhile, a multinational corporate has spent a month working with the TCD researchers to see how these technologies could be applied in their company.

The company is leaving the subject matter to the experts - the trainers themselves - and instead is concentrating on bringing the delivery platform and composition tool to users that may not necessarily have the technical expertise to write their own course material. This will allow companies to create their own courses that can be customised for each learner, with "Empower the User" providing the technology to deliver the dynamic courses.

"We're focusing on being an 'enabling technology'," says Dagger. "This is where we see the real potential for the company. We don't want to become a content vendor."

Giving educators and businesses the tool to create their own dynamic content may not seem like good business sense to some people. After all, if companies can create numerous different courses from a single tool, how would "Empower the User" make money?

The answer is simple - through licensing, although there is no indication of what the fee would be. Both Dagger and Prof Wade point out that money is not the primary driver for this project - improving education is. However, lofty ideals won't keep a business running, so it is fortunate that "Empower the User" has a seemingly sound business case behind it. The Enterprise Award was simply the icing on the cake for Dagger, confirmation that the project is a potential success.

Its mettle will be tested in a matter of months, when its Enterprise Ireland funding expires in January 2009 and the company must spin out and seek alternative means of financing. However, Dagger and Wade are both quietly confident that "Empower the User" will be a successful venture, and that it will help improve e-learning.