Dr. Claude Frasson
E-learning innovator
Entrepreneur
Work Experience
- Founder of uMind, a Montreal firm specializing in e-learning software developed during a long academic career
“The platform (uSim and uLearn) asks the learner about various types of information concerning culture, learning style, knowledge level, taking into account all these things. Then the software adapts, taking different learning strategies to automatically generate a learning path according to the learner’s preferences.”
- Director of Groupe de Researche Interuniversitaire en Tutorials Intelligents (GRITI)
“I’ve supervised this group for about 10 years. It’s a group distributed among seven universities in Quebec. We cover several disciplines, including education, psychology, medicine and history. Using the intelligence of each component of the group, we find we can understand better what the needs of the learner are. More recently we have to take into account the culture of the learner. Education is worldwide – what we have to explain to somebody in Europe can be completely different from the way we explain in Canada or the USA.”
- Director of Higher Educational Research ON tutoring systems (HERON) Lab, University of Montreal
“We use an EKG to detect the activity of the brain while the learner is trying to understand something. We detect, for instance, what are the conditions of learning, using real electrodes put on the head of the learner. We see exactly what happens in different regions of the brain. We can deduce that at one moment the learner is memorizing. Or, at another moment the learner has some difficulties and is anxious. If the learner is anxious, he will not be able to memorize or recall or remember some knowledge.”
Education
- Ph.D in data processing (1974) and state Ph.D (1981) in data processing, Université de Nice, France
“Since about 1998, I’ve worked on developing intelligent tutoring systems – systems intended to provide intelligence to education.”
Special Skills
- Research in emotional intelligence, with the goal of building IT systems that are able to control our centre of emotions and strengthen human learning. “I am interested in developing the learning profile – we have to personalize (e-learning), we have to respect the learner and take into account all his brain background. This includes not only the learner’s knowledge, but his pedagogical profile and emotional profile.”
Career Objective
- “E-learning is evolving, but sometimes it still amounts to using a PowerPoint presentation on the Internet, and that’s horrible. We have to adapt learning and teaching to the virtual culture.”
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