Pupils in Germany as in many European countries perform weak in natural sciences (PISA 2000 and PISA 2003). To meet this challenge a Blended Learning concept was designed and implemented within a pilot project at the University of Koblenz-Landau. The concept aimed to facilitate situated and self-directed learning and a shift from teaching to learning in science lessons at schools. From October ...

We introduce the adaptive and situated e-learning, a new e-learning model which puts emphasis on the “in site” learning, while using distance multi-site learning in a federated context to enrich the user’s experience. The system is adaptive: it is centred on the user’s needs and knowledge, in order to create specific paths, based on the choice of contents and their language. It is situated, bec...

Situated learning theory has emerged as a radical alternative to conventional cognitivist theories of knowledge and learning, emphasising the relational and structural aspects of learning as well as the dynamics of identity construction. However, although many researchers have embraced the theoretical strengths of this perspective, methodological and operational issues remain undeveloped in the...

Our research aims at building interactive robots and agents that can expand their knowledge by interacting with human users. In this paper, we focus on learning goal-oriented tasks from situated interactive instructions. Learning the structure of novel tasks and how to execute them is a challenging computational problem requiring the agent to acquire a variety of knowledge including goal defini...

This paper describes the challenge of teaching abstract scientific principles and the design and development process of the award winning Virtual Power Plant Website. This learning resource is actually an amalgamation of four online learning environments developed by a number of universities and industry groups and is designed to help students understand and apply thermodynamic principles in re...

Models that can execute natural language instructions for situated robotic tasks such as assembly and navigation have several useful applications in homes, offices, and remote scenarios. We study the semantics of spatially-referred configuration and arrangement instructions, based on the challenging Bisk-2016 blank-labeled block dataset. This task involves finding a source block and moving it t...