A Conceptual Model for Personalized Learning based on
Educational Robots
Dhekra Ferjaoui
PRINCE Research Lab, ISITC H-Sousse University of
Sousse, Tunisia
ABSTRACT
Over a previous couple of years, Distance learning has successfully
overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods of teaching and
learning, likewise increases student interaction and diversities of
opinion, online instructors could also be from any location across
the world. So students have the chance to settle on a learning strat-
egy most suited to their abilities, while education is streamlined to
satisfy the requirements of the individual in question. Due to the
on-going technological change, we are witnessing, Robots are get-
ting an integral component of our society and have great potential
in being utilized as an academic technology by providing students
with a highly interactive and hands-on learning experience. Indeed,
Robotics promises to inspire a replacement generation of learning.
With the aim of understanding how students can use robots to re-
view, we created and implemented a learning scenario through an
ontological conceptual Model for Personalized Learning supported
Educational Robots. This model enables us to supply inferences over
learning data and supply personalized learning resources, adapted
to the progress of the scholar within the learning process.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Applied Computing; • Education;
KEYWORDS
Distance learning, robots, learning scenario, personalized learning,
ontological model
ACM Reference Format:
Dhekra Ferjaoui and Lilia Cheniti Belcadhi. 2020. A Conceptual Model
for Personalized Learning based on Educational Robots. In Eighth Interna-
tional Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality
(TEEM’20), October 21–23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA,
5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436609
1 INTRODUCTION
Teaching should target forming the knowledge, abilities, and com-
petencies enabling the younger generation to be successfully inte-
grated into the trendy socio-technical systems, to efficiently main-
tain and develop the scientific and technological potential of the so-
ciety. Some people think that it’s necessary to be physically present
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436609
29
Lilia Cheniti Belcadhi
PRINCE Research Lab, ISITC H-Sousse University of
Sousse, Tunisia
during a classroom and to possess an educator with you all the time
in order to pass a "real training" or a "real test", to possess direct
interaction with an educator or instructor, this normally happens
on a group date and time.
With the daily evolution of the world , technology keeps chang-
ing and improving. In fact, we will already expect new technological
innovations during a few years, if not a couple of months. But in
particular, this development now affects all sectors, education, in-
dustry, medical, social or maybe political. Either way, educational
technology holds a vital place in today’s world. it has created amaz-
ing tools and resources, putting useful information at our fingertips.
Previously, information was scarce, expensive, and concentrated in
isolates, places of data like schools, universities, libraries and muse-
ums. Today, it’s becoming bloated: the problem is not any longer to
access it, but to sort it and reformulate the knowledge that’s why
online learning is becoming a replacement human process that’s
starting to act as an entire substitute for both distance learning and
therefore the traditional face-to-face class [1].
Online learning first and foremost has become an established
part of the educational world, with trends pointing to ongoing
growth, which has evolved from web-based, distance learning pro-
grams. this will be often evidenced today by expanded access to
courses, content, and innovative instructional practices , actually
it harnesses technology to rework what’s possible in teaching and
learning. These new learning models are designed to enable richer
student-teacher communication and interaction, either synchro-
nous or asynchronous, and optimize each student’s learning ex-
periences through robust personalized learning. Still, today, for
several students across the country where courses are unavailable
in their schools, online learning represents the only viable means
of providing high-quality course options within their district or
schools [2, 3].
In this respect we note that in recent years robotics has attracted
the high interest of teachers and researchers as a valuable tool
to develop cognitive and social skills for college kids from pre-
school, high school to university and to support learning in science,
mathematics, technology, informatics and other school subjects or
interdisciplinary learning activities, as well as they offers a fascinat-
ing, interesting and motivating way for college kids to strengthen
their skills, like inquiry, and improve learning program content,
they’re becoming an integrated part in certain fields and have great
potential as educational technology [6, 10].
This research work focuses on the academic potential of robotics
in schools and their uses for personalized learning. This paper
is structured as follows: In section 2, we describe the theoretical
background and therefore the keys concepts.
Section 3 presents the literature review on recommendations
systems associated with our work. In Section 4 we present our ped-
agogical scenario. In section 5, we offer an outline of our proposed
TEEM’20, October 21–23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain
educational resources recommendation ontological model and its
essential components. Finally, the conclusion and future works are
drawn in section 6.
2 DISTANCE LEARNING AND EDUCATIONAL
ROBOTS
When we think about the way to utilize technology to enhance
learning, the key’s to concentrate on what we are able to do with
information technology that we cannot do without it. Technology
can create environments that provide individualized learning ap-
proaches that serve everyone in ways that he or she will most
benefit.
Given the enormous increase in the demand for education around
the world, distance learning technologies are attracting special
attention in this area. Various terms have been used to describe
the phenomenon of distance learning. properly speaking, distance
learning (the student’s activity) and distance teaching (the teacher’s
activity) together compose distance education, not only that but
also a virtual learning, which usually refers to courses taken outside
a classroom by primary- or secondary-school [4].
Among the new technologies and methods of online learning is
the use of robots which are increasingly occupying an increasing
place in education. This technology can improve learning, by boost-
ing content, increasing student motivation, providing equipment
suitable for distance learning, and personalizing educational paths.
The issues around these questions are important:
• The need to motivate students and personalize learning ap-
pears more and more clearly. This is a major asset in the fight
against dropping out of school and for equal opportunities.
• Faced with the increase in training needs, the possibility of
distance learning is a decisive advantage.
• Use of digital tools is a way to raise awareness of their uses.
Robots are considered as a complementary tool to enhance the
motivation and academic performance of scholars, which has gener-
ated a technological development that is increasingly incorporated
into our daily lives for the various purposes: Education, industry
and discipline, but in particular it’s generated great interest in re-
searchers, professors and professionals as support in learning in
several fields of data. Studies indicate that robotics is providing
benefits as a teaching tool, performing repetitive tasks with great
precision, flexibility, human-robot hyperactivity, since these devices
are presented with various characteristics providing to student’s
fun, motivating activities and real experiences, creating interactive
and attractive learning environments . Moreover , educational ro-
botics are designed as a teaching resource privileged because it’s
in itself a really motivating element for schoolchildren and may be
related to multidisciplinary environments that promote learning
and therefore the development of general skills. These skills are
supported approach globalization of the various fields of study,
generating an immediate link with the acquisition of skills promot-
ing scientific interest and curiosity, also as social skills through
work as in teams [21].The use of technological tools, compared to
traditional tools, offers an enticing and motivating way for college
kids to strengthen their skills, like inquiry, and improve learning
program content [18] .
30
Dhekra Ferjaoui and Lilia Cheniti Belcadhi
For Gaudiello and Zibetti in [7], educational robotics (RE) aims to
introduce a technological range of embodied artificial intelligences
(robots) within the school. Its goal is to push and renew student
learning. and teacher education. Stemming from the link between
the tutorial environment and technological progress, RE may be a
field of research that has currently benefited from popular interest
in primary and secondary schools for the past ten years, especially
in Quebec [22].
Many projects using robots are applied for the most part to
the learning of mathematical concepts in primary and secondary
education, such as: numbers, operations, plane geometry, geometry
in space, statistics, functions, algebra, etc. For example, the IniRobot
project[7]primarily concerns initiation into computer science and
robotics, but can also be used for the acquisition of notions of
other disciplines such as written and spoken language, mathematics,
experimental sciences, the arts, etc.
This research work [7, 8]is particularly interested in the use
of educational robotics as a teaching tool in order to improve the
teaching of a discipline external to robotics itself. In our case, in
response to the problem described in the next section, we are in-
terested in the use of RE to possibly enhance student interest and
personalize learning path. In the project RoboSTEAM a method-
ology is defined and a set of tools are available to help learners to
develop computational thinking by using / programming PD&R in
pre-university education internships. The project improves teacher
education, offering them with a framework for easy STEAM inte-
gration in different educational contexts, by providing guidelines
for good practices and lessons learned adapted to those contexts
[20] .
3 RELATED WORK
Many research works have been interested in personalized learning.
In [9], the authors proposed an evolving e-learning system that
can be adapted not only to its users, but also to the open web in
response to the use of its learning resources. Their system is open
in the sense that the learning elements related to the course could
be added, adapted or deleted. There are two types of collaboration
in such systems. One is the collaboration between the system and
the user, the other is the collaboration between the system and
the open web. Users do not have direct interactions with the open
web. Through the system, one can retrieve the relevant information
related to a learner and his / her learning characteristics. Learners
are free to learn whatever they want, which is unlike most other
web-based learning systems.
Learners are required to give feedback to the documents recom-
mended to them [11]. Therefore, depending on both usage and rat-
ings of a paper, the adaptive system changes the tags of a resource,
and determines whether the document should be kept, deleted or
placed in a backup list.
Much effort has gone into the design, modeling and, implemen-
tation of recommendation systems [11, 12]sowed that will analyze
some works concerning these systems, also we will do a compar-
ative study between these works to identify the weak points of
each system. There are several recommendation systems. In the
following we examine three main recommendation systems:
A Conceptual Model for Personalized Learning based on Educational Robots
The first system is PEL-IRT (Personalized e-learning system us-
ing Item Response Theory)which is a personalized learning system
based on item response theory that analyzes both course material
difficulties and learners’ abilities in order to provide personalized
learning. The PEL-IRT system contains two main parts: The back-
end that analyzes learner capacities (CA) and selects course ma-
terials from the course database based on the CA estimate. The
forward part: this part represents the agent interface that identi-
fies the status of learners, transfers requests and returns the list of
recommended courses to students .PEL-LRT provides also a search
interface to help students find course materials in a specified course
unit [15Chen,].
The second system is Course recommender system SCR which
uses machine learning methods to create a highly reliable course
recommendation system and which learns from course choices
made by students. The aim of this study is to assess the inter-
ests of students and to create a system that can be extended with
new features. The Course Recommend (SCR) system is a standard
implementation of the client / server architecture. The client inter-
acts with a graphical interface containing the logic and a part for
handling client requests for recommendations. SCR implements a
Bayesian network model. It recommends courses that have a high
probability of being relevant. The Bayesian network represents a
user model where the nodes are courses. As more courses are taken
by the student, the model is updated to calculate the likelihood of
relevance of other courses [17Simbi,].
The third system AACORN (Academic Advisor COurse Recom-
mendation eNgine) is based on the analysis of course histories in
order to recommend them to new students. It is based on the reuse
of the experiences of former students. The AACORN system is
based on the idea that students with similar interests or academics
choose the same course. This is a method that uses specific knowl-
edge from previous experience to adapt the old plan to the new
situation with only minor modifications [16].
This approach aims to enable students to achieve their academic
goals and meet course requirements for graduation. It uses course
selection data to make recommendations that respect existing cur-
ricula and thus provides a method that automatically accommodates
curriculum changes.
We have conducted a comparative study between the recommen-
dation systems to identify the weak points of each. The comparison
criteria are as follows:
• Use of semantic web technologies (ontology): this criterion
helps us to process data in different systems without encoun-
tering the problem of interoperability. The ontology assure
us a good manipulation of the data.
• Calculation of semantic relevance: the calculation of rele-
vance helps us select the appropriate resource for the learner
profiles to ensure a smooth functioning of the assessment
learning process to achieve a desired result.
• Competence-based recommendation: recommending re-
sources based on learners’ competency profiles guarantees
us an accurate assessment.
The majority of learning resource recommendation systems do
not take learner skills into consideration when recommending. This
can affect the learning outcome.
31
TEEM’20, October 21–23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain
After studying and analyzing the last mentioned contributions,
we noticed that many of recommendations systems do not con-
sider robots as technological tools to interact and deliver adapted
information to learners needs.
4 PEDAGOGICAL SCENARIO AND
CHALLENGES
An educational scenario presents an approach aimed toward achiev-
ing educational objectives and therefore the acquisition of general
or specific skills associated with one or more areas of life consis-
tent with the terms and specifications of the study programs. The
scenario are often to associated with a project, or a learning activity.
Here we present a scenario to motivate our work on developing
a model that describes the employment of robots to personalize
learning. At a time of lack of teachers in some schools, the place
of robots within the lifestyle of our youngsters may be a solution
already tested within the field of education. we’ve therefore adopted
a scenario that describes the advice of educational resources to use
educational robots to supply a learner the likelihood of obtaining
required skills, improve self-learning online, allows a disabled stu-
dent to possess the impression of being present, despite his/her
handicap.
Ahmed is a student who wants to learn. He wants to accumulate
knowledge and skills associated with a selected school subject
computer, mathematics, science, technology, literature. The robots
also are put at the service of the disabled people, make it possible
to stay more to the scholars faraway from school due to illness of
having the ability, via these robots, still go to class and to follow
their course, the school robot makes it possible to keep up the link
with school and to still feel a student. Ahmed may be a disabled
student or he has suffered from an accident which prevents him
from attending his classes.
Our approach will really give him the impression of being in
class so that he can follow his course, moreover it will offer the
possibility of doing a self-study, to improve his skills i.e. Ahmed
stays at home in front of his tablet and the robot stays at the institute
.He will simply pilot the robot to move around, interact within the
class, with his mouse, the arrows on the keyboard or a controller.
The learner needs to attend the course regardless of his location,
in addition to improve his skills or to acquire new skills.
For this we will need to access learning resources, these resources
allow learners to achieve his objectives. Due to the diversity and
the large number of resources available, finding the right resources
for the needs of learners becomes difficult.
Therefore, we need an approach to recommend the most appro-
priate resources for each learner’s profile [5].
To obtain the most appropriate resource for the learner’s pro-
file, a resource recommendation approach is implemented. This
approach consists of the following steps:
• Step 1:Interaction with the robot before accessing the plat-
form. Then, to access their profile, the learner must log in.
If a learner does not have an account, he/she must regis-
ter. Then he/she chooses the course / level / class even the
name of the editor he/she wants to obtain, an interface will
then be displayed. the learner selects the type of educational
resource he wants to have (videos, audio, etc.) as well as
TEEM’20, October 21–23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain Dhekra Ferjaoui and Lilia Cheniti Belcadhi

his initial capacities (if the learner is a beginner, the system

assigns him the course material with a moderate level of
difficulty) Finally, the list of resources is displayed.
• Step 2: Analyze the metadata, "description" and extract the
relevant concepts: the role of the "description" metadata is
to describe the resource. it contains the key concepts related
to the resource. Since we have many sources of information,
then it is necessary to find a way to organize this information.
We need a well-organized data structure so that we can
manipulate it and generate knowledge.
Figure 1: Learner Ontology
• Step 3: choice of the relevant resource: After calculating
the similarities between the learner’s concepts and all the
resources. The resource that gives us the highest score is
displayed. In this case, the learner will consult the course. concrete, and increase students’ motivation because the latter can
• Step 4: Finally, to complete our process, and after the learner build and program their own robots and participate in competi-
finishes his learning, the goal is reached, the skill is acquired, tions. Robotics can also enhance acquisition of Science, Technology,
the learner must note the resources he/she used. Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-based competencies and an-
other type of competencies such as collaboration, imagination, and
self-expression; and it is an especially useful tool when applying
5 ONTOLOGICAL MODELS FOR
problem-based learning, project-based learning or challenge-based
PERSONALIZATION USING ROBOTS learning approaches [19].
Ontology are hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things The following ontological tree (figure 2) summarizes the repre-
by subcategorizing them according to their essential or relevant sentative elements of an ontological model for the robot .
qualities also can be considered a conceptualization of a domain The Graphical Learner Interface (GLI) forms a knowledge portal,
or subject area typically captured in an abstract model related to a an extension tool to recommend and retrieve resources as needed
specific domain [13]. .GLI included several components such as:
Simply an ontology represents a conceptual model on which it
• Registration : write the necessary information about the
is possible to develop knowledge systems that are shareable and
learner. resource recommendations take into account the
reusable allowing thus, interoperability between several sources of
level of the learner, specialty to provide well-defined content.
information and knowledge.
To better understand the course and have a variety of re-
Our approach is based on the development of Learner Ontology
sources at the same time, we have several types and methods
(figure 1). The learner model is modeled in terms of several charac-
that facilitate learning according to the interests of learners.
teristics such as his name, his password, and his age, his preferences,
• Level : the learner select the level , specialty and the lesson
as well as his competency profile which is made up of required
that he would study then a list of resources will be displayed
skills and acquired skills, It also specifies the relationships between
. the components of the recommended list can be articles,
these components, such as logical dependencies and hierarchies.
videos, tutorials and exams .Each lesson is represented by
When a learner is studying, his/her learning activities (such as
a title and a small description which shortly describes the
his/her learning path, learning time, learning pace, and learning
content of the course .
achievements) analyzed and stored in historical, The learner can
• Learner Profile (Log In) : a procedure that the learner must
find the Learning content of interest according to his/her needs,
realize to access the resources.
age, progress in the learning process. These units can be lessons,
explanations, examples, exercises, tests, etc. related to knowledge
domain, level of study specialty. Moreover he/she can choose for 6 CONCLUSION
himself the type of course he wants as well as the level of difficulty To achieve our goal, which is Driven by the need to support lifelong
of the latter. learning according to the preferences, abilities and interests of learn-
Different types and levels of learning resources are provided ers we have proposed a resource recommendation approach based
to the learner, as well as using a new learning tool. Learners are on interaction with a robot, and which enable the recommendation
able then to build knowledge of the domain according to their own of learning resources adapted to the learner profile.
progress of learning and interaction with learning environment. In this paper, we have described an approach based on ontologi-
Besides the use of robots during learning can have an impact on cal models and which uses robots as a learning device to support
the acquisition of knowledge and skills in digital sciences: it makes and allow learners to get information anywhere, anytime accord-
it possible to work on transversal skills (social, cognitive, affective) ing to their needs and interests. Our method allows educational
and to stimulate motivation, creativity and cooperation (group resources retrieval according to the needs of the learner by using
work) [9]. robots and enabling inferences over heterogeneous data. In the
Indeed the use of robotics in education has gained popularity future, we will focus on the interaction relationship between the
especially thanks to low-cost and highly-accessible educational learner and the robot in particular through the integration of a
robotic kits. Tangible devices make program execution explicit and voice assistant to allow actions to be controlled by voice.

32
A Conceptual Model for Personalized Learning based on Educational Robots
Figure 2: . Ontological Model for The Robot
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