An Agent-Based Framework for Personalized Learning in Continuous Professional Development

Abstract

In order to stay competent and update in the fast changing landscape of technological advances, professionals nowadays are expected to continuously upgrade themselves of professional knowledge and expertise in their respective fields. Many professional organizations stipulate that their members should take part in a minimum number of hours or training units of continuous professional development (CPD) activities in order to stay qualified for their membership. The requirements of CPD for modern day professionals who are very much mobile and work within tight schedules point to the need of an asynchronous learning environment that provides a learner-centered approach and offers learners greater flexibility and choices. In this chapter we argue that “personalization learning” (PL) that exploits the abundance of information and e-learning materials on the Web can be harnessed effectively to serve the diversity of CPD training needs. Moreover, we specialize in the concept of PL to Personalized CPD Learning and highlight the emerging technologies that are relevant to the development of personalized learning for CPD. We further proposed an agent-based architectural and conceptual framework for a personalized CPD learning portal (Personalized-CPD) which integrates these technologies to provide supportive functions for professionals to conduct CPD activities in a personalized manner.