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OPUS : Developing a personalised online learning environment for Continuing Professional Education

A survey of CPD students at Oxford University revealed that typically only 30% of course content is directly and immediately relevant to their professional needs. Thus the OPUS (Oxford Professional Updating System) project has been designed to produce a system that delivers a CPD course as a personalised learning programme This is a field in which existing work is much less developed than might be anticipated, and where progress has lagged behind scholarly discussion. The evidence from earlier projects provides us with far more questions than answers. However it does highlight several key issues in the areas of personalisation, knowledge diagnosis, learning objects, knowledge representation and learner models. Existing research in this area has focused primarily on the technical problems, and neglects the core area of user experience. As a result little attention has been paid to how students and tutors are affected by individualised learning. The research project has considered how professionals think about their learning requirements, and how this process might be aided to deliver the learning they need in a more focused and timely manner. As the project has progressed two contrasting approaches to development have emerged, centred on the system and the student respectively. The latter approach has emerged as the most appropriate from both a practical as well as pedagogical perspective, making it the focus for development and evaluation. In response to the issues outlined above, the project is developing a new emphasis on the discovery of sustainable extendable methodologies for individualised learning. This paper will explore these issues, discuss some of the solutions being investigated and stimulate discussion on the approach adopted in the OPUS project.