QLearn: Towards a framework for smart learning environments

The new theory of education suggests that learner should be in the center of the learning process and the instructor playing an advising and facilitating role. Building smart learning environments supported by e-learning platforms is an important area of research. The rapid and continuous development of technology that has brought new learning skills for students forces the educational system to enter into a new era. This change is further justified by some unprecedented events that force students to learn remotely. QLearn is an e-learning platform developed as a web based application which provides quizzes for students enrolled at Advanced Programming Methods course from Babeş Bolyai University (Romania) as part of their formative and summative assessment. The existing set of quizzes has been proposed by students throughout the last three iterations of the course in a collaborative manner with course instructor, and this data set is expanding continuously with every new generation of students. QLearn is a smart learning environment offering the students valuable feedback and a good preparation for the exam. Some metrics that quantify the coverage rate of the course syllabus attained by students or their understanding level of knowledge are provided by QLearn. The Artificial Intelligent component of QLearn application uses these measures to make predictions for students’ outcomes at the exam, to find out which topics need to be practised more and to recommend learning plans according to students’ individual needs. The contribution of the paper is therefore twofold. Firstly, we propose a new learning design, based on students’ involvement in a collaborative manner. The second contribution of the paper is QLearn, a software application that provides support (implementation) for the proposed learning process design. Not only does QLearn platform provide a smart learning environment for students, but it also ensures the knowledge transfer from instructors to students in an efficient and effective way.