Engaging e-learning for risk management: the ALICE experience in Italian schools

Learning to behave in case of natural disaster is one of the most urgent challenges in our modern society. The school plays a major role in the development of educational plans for disaster reduction, designing appropriate resources and selecting didactic methods able to guarantee the retention and progression of the learning process. The challenge for the educational institutions is to introduce new learning and teaching approaches to engage the millennial students overcoming the main issues of traditional learning experience such as lack of empowerment, exploration, participation and locus of control. In order to contribute to overcoming these limitations with respect to learners' engagement, we implemented ALICE, an innovative adaptive environment for the e-learning able to combine personalization, interaction, emotional aspects. The experimentation and validation activities reported in this paper confirms the instructional value of complex didactic resources and the impact on learning process in risk education setting. © 2013 IEEE.