Towards a new tool for individualized content delivery in classrooms

This paper focuses on orchestration in the digital, augmented classroom, and in particular the challenges involved with content individualization, and on individualized content delivery to a live classroom. The lack of widely adopted efficient digital tools in this area is established via a systematic e-learning literature review and a survey of existing software tools.

Mixed methods are used to investigate current orchestration practices and tools adopted by teachers in secondary education institutions in Denmark and Norway. Based on these initial findings, a prototype for a distributed orchestration tool was designed, implemented, and tested using a variation of an A/B experiment, with a group of university students.

Test data and post-test interviews showed that the tool was well received and usable even at this early development stage. An interesting discrepancy emerged in our triangulated data about the efficiency in the test tasks: the participants’ perceived, and self-reported, that performance efficiency was lower than what we measured, a phenomenon common when investigating tacit knowledge in practices.

These results are discussed, as well as problems with the current prototype and future lines of research.