A Business Process Management based Virtual Learning Environment - Customised Learning Paths

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as Moodle help facilitate the management of educational courses for students, in particular by helping lecturers with course administration and students manage their own learning. However, even today problems still remain; in particular, e-learning environments provide a “one size fits all” approach to the learning process, where each student must follow the same learning path through course materials, regardless of their prior knowledge, learning requirements or of possible learning disabilities. Many commercial VLEs allow course writers to build courses as groups of lessons, but it is currently not possible to customise the learning path of individual learners through the course material. This paper presents the development of an e-learning system based on Business Process Management (BPM) concepts, principles and technologies, which are used by the enterprise business community for managing workflow. The developed system allows for the creation of customised learning paths through course materials in a blended pedagogical approach within a custom VLE. Course designers can use visual BPM tools to design workflows using intuitive flow diagrams. The same diagrams can be used to visually track the progress of a cohort of learners through the course contents, viewing the learning paths followed, and allowing for a quantitative analysis of student(s) performance, which could lead to real-time design changes and additions to the course content. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits and limitations of our BPM implementation, and future extensions to investigate open documentation standards.