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The popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has grown enormously, with communities of players reaching into the millions. Their fantasy narratives present multiple challenges created by the virtual environment and/or other players. The games' potential for education stems from the fact that players are immersed in a virtual world where they have the opportunity to manipulate and explore, thus motivating the construction of knowledge. The interaction and collaboration between participants allows students to exchange information, test their understanding and reflect on what they have learned. Given the promising results of using MMORPG technologies for educational purposes, this paper translates the multiplayer role playing game (MRPG) aspect, the essential concept behind MMORPGs, into the classroom context. We present the abstraction behind a Classroom Multiplayer Presential Role Playing Game (CMPRPG) and the development of a CMPRPG for teaching ecology. The game has a quest structure in which each result highlights a key teaching objective. It is implemented at a high level, with interaction between reusable game elements defined using triggers. It is observed that the implemented CMPRPG has appropriate usability levels, benefits the learning and application of the concepts of ecology and, in the interactive dimensions, it encourages participation and collaborative narrative structures among participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the new major directions in research on web-based educational systems is the notion of adaptability: the educational system adapts itself to the learning profile, preferences and ability of the student. In this paper, we look into the issues of providing adaptability with respect to learning pathways. We explore the state of the art with respective to deriving the most apt learning pathway to recommend to the learner. Our proposal suggests a novel way of modeling learning pathways that combines rule-based prescriptive planning, which could be found in many of the classic Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and Ant Colony Optimization-based inductive planning, for recommending learning paths by stochastically computing past learners' traveled paths and their performances. A web-based prototype has been developed using C# and .NET technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]