Empowering personalized learning with an interactive e-book learning system for elementary school students

Today various types of tablet computers are used, including iPad and Android Tablets. These individual portable digital devices can be used as e-book readers to support mobile personalized learning. Though many studies have investigated e-books by targeting undergraduate students, yet less attention has been paid to children. Therefore, an Interactive E-book Learning System (IELS) was developed for elementary school students in this study. The interactive principles in multimedia learning were adopted to empower students’ personalized learning experiences with e-books. Meanwhile, in order to meet student’s learning needs, a group of in-service teachers were consulted for acquiring their domain expertise. Personalized learning functions, such as e-annotation and bookmarks, content searching, and learning process tracking, were designed to reinforce student learning. Two investigations were conducted for evaluation of the developed system. The first investigation was conducted with 166 elementary school students to evaluate the usability and functionality of the developed system and the feedback from the students. It was found that the usability and functionality of the developed system were well-suited for most of the students. The second investigation was to evaluate the learning effect of the developed system. The results showed that using an e-book or printed book made no significant difference to the students’ reading accuracy; however, the learning process tracking technique of IELS can provide detailed logs about the actual learning processes which can be used by the system to provide further assistance to individual learner. This study concludes that such a tailor-made e-book learning system could achieve a better personalized learning experience for elementary school students.