An expert system for improving web-based problem-solving ability of students

Although previous research has demonstrated the benefits of applying the Internet facilities to the learning process, difficulty in using this strategy has also been identified. One of the major difficulties is owing to the lack of an online instructional environment that can advise the students in using the Internet facilities to solve problems. In this paper, an innovative approach is proposed, and it develops the knowledge base of an expert system by analyzing the online problem-solving behaviors of the teachers. Consequently, the expert system works as an instructor to assist the students in improving their web-based problem-solving ability. To demonstrate the innovative approach, two experts are asked to evaluate the performance of the expert system. Experimental results show that, the novel approach is able to provide accurate and constructive suggestions to students in improving their problem-solving ability.     

An auto-scoring mechanism for evaluating problem-solving ability in a web-based learning environment

The rapid development of computer and network technologies has attracted researchers to investigate strategies for and the effects of applying information technologies in learning activities; simultaneously, learning environments have been developed to record the learning portfolios of students seeking web information for problem-solving. Although previous research has demonstrated the benefits of applying information technologies to learning activities, the difficulties in doing so have also been revealed. One of the major difficulties is the lack of a mechanism to assist teachers in evaluating the problem-solving ability of the students, such that constructive suggestions can be given to the students, and tutoring strategies can be improved accordingly.     

Competence Assessment in Higher Education: A Dynamic Approach

Advances in the implementation of the European Higher Education Area have had a great impact on university environment and the process of design, evaluation, and implementation of new curricula. Identifying competence levels among students can help course organizers to improve both academic content and teaching/learning processes. The present study addresses this issue by examining the implementation of an Internet‐based competency assessment tool. We analyze the status and evolution of soft skills among students on the Official Masters program Creating and Managing Innovative Technology‐Based Companies at the University of Barcelona, using a tool known as Tricuspoid, specifically designed for evaluating entrepreneurial competences. The results show that the tool, first, enables students to identify their strong and weak points and to develop personal strategies for improvement; second, provides teachers with additional information about the effects of their input on student competences; and third, supplies useful information for quality management of the Master's programs, because it can detect trends in the training needs of new students and help to enhance content accordingly, and therefore match the design of the academic program to the requirements of labor market. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Learning style as a factor which affects the quality of e-learning

With the aid of the Internet, many organizations and schools have adopted the idea of applying the e-learning system, which is considered as one of the most important services provided by the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting the acceptance and use of e-learning system. There are a number of implicit and explicit frameworks designed to inform e-learning practice. Some of them suggest key components that influence the quality of the e-learning experience: technology, pedagogy, organizational context and creativity. Instructor feedback and student learning styles, significantly affect the perceived learning outcomes of e-learning students. Namely, quality of education will significantly be enhanced if instructors modify their teaching styles to accommodate the learning styles of all students in their classes. When the teacher creates the lesson plan, it is desirable that he or she puts as many activities as possible which will reflect different learning styles. Whereas, students have diverse backgrounds, abilities, and knowledge bases, teachers who are able to use various instructional strategies have been shown to be more effective than those who just use single strategies.     

E-Homebook System: A web-based interactive education interface

Children’s academic performance and social competence in school is positively associated with parent involvement. However, the researches about educational learning models often ignore the parent part. Moreover, Internet forms a new paradigm, education and communication approach is more complicated than ever. In this paper, we would like to introduce an Education Wheel model (EWM) which includes students, teachers and parents in the education environment. Under EWM framework, we design an E-Homebook System (EHS) with agents which provide a teacher–parent–student communication interface through Internet. The EHS comprises intelligent agents: interaction agent, instruction agent, information agent, evaluation agent and log agent. The agents manage a learning portfolio conception, observe and record students’ e-learning behavior through the web log, and provide teachers a reference of portfolio information. The agents adopt a trigger function to analyze the students’ learning behavior from Internet as well as from classroom, evaluate overall performance, then send an e-mail message automatically to the teachers and parents to guide and assist the students who need to revise their learning attitude. Similarly, the agents will record parents’ participation portfolio, then teachers may draft better communication strategy. The EHS provides a better communication role between students–parents–teachers, implements an integrated performance measurement method, and conducts a better teaching strategy support interface for elementary education.     

An examination of the impact of learning objects in secondary school

Very few studies have systematically evaluated the effect of learning objects in secondary school classrooms. The vast majority of studies have focussed on higher education. The current study examined the impact of learning objects from the perspective of 850 students and 27 teachers (50 classrooms) of science, mathematics, or social science. The results suggest that teachers typically spend 1 to 2 h finding and preparing for learning object based lesson plans that focus on the review of previous concepts. Both teachers and students are positive about the learning benefits, quality, and engagement value of learning objects, although teachers are more positive than students. Student performance increased significantly – almost 30% – when learning objects were used in conjunction with a variety of teaching strategies. It is reasonable to conclude that learning objects are a viable teaching tool in a secondary school environment.     

An enhanced genetic approach to optimizing auto-reply accuracy of an e-learning system

With the rapid development in Information Technology (IT), the Internet has become one of the central media for conducting learning. However, most of the existing web-based learning systems only provide stand-alone subject materials for browsing and may face some drawbacks. For example, if students encounter problems during the learning process, their learning performances could be significantly devastated due to no instant aid. As an on-line learning system may interact with thousands of students, it is almost impossible for the teachers or the teaching assistants to answer all the students’ questions manually, which is not only inefficient, but also human laborious. To cope with this problem, an e-learning system that is able to automatically answer the students’ questions on the fly based on the training cases given by the teacher will be presented in this paper. Moreover, an enhanced genetic approach is proposed to optimize the weights of keywords for each candidate answer according to the feedbacks provided by the students, hence more accurate answers can be provided in the future. Experimental results have shown that the developed system can provide more accurate answerers than existing approaches by employing the self-adjusting method.     

Promoting self-regulated learning in web-based learning environments

Self-regulated learning with the Internet or hypermedia requires not only cognitive learning strategies, but also specific and general meta-cognitive strategies. The purposes of the Study2000 project, carried out at the TU Dresden, were to develop and evaluate authoring tools that support teachers and students in web-based learning and instruction. This paper presents how the authoring tools of the Study2000 project can implement psychologically sound measures to promote (a) active and elaborated learning activities and (b) meta-cognitive activities in a web-based learning environment. Furthermore, it describes a study involving 72 university students in the use of such a web-based learning environment in a self-regulated learning setting at the university level. Results show that students spent almost 70% of their study time with texts, 11% with learning tasks and 12% with the active and elaborated learning tools, whereas meta-cognitive aids where hardly used (<1%).     

A Real-Time Data Mining Approach for Interaction Analytics Assessment: IoT Based Student Interaction Framework

Students’ interaction and collaboration with the fellows and teachers using the Internet of Things (IoT) based interoperable infrastructure is a convenient way. Measuring student attention is an essential part of the educational assessment for students’ interaction. As new learning styles develop, new tools and assessment methods are also needed. The focus in this paper is to develop IoT based interaction framework and analysis of the student experience in electronic learning (eLearning) so that the students can take full advantage of the modern interaction technology and their learning can increase to a high level. This setup has a data collection module, which is implemented using Visual C# programming language and computer vision library. The number of faces, number of eyes, and status of eyes are extracted from the video stream, which is taken from a video camera. The extracted information is saved in a dataset for further analysis. The analysis of the dataset produces interesting results for student learning assessments. Modern learning management systems can integrate the developed tool to consider student-learning behaviors when assessing electronic learning strategies. The tools are also developed for the data collection on both student and teacher ends. Correlation of data and hidden meaning are extracted to make the learning experience and teaching performance better and adaptable. IoT based infrastructure provides the facilities to fellow students about location awareness, fellows’ accessibility, social behavior and helping hand.     

An interactive teaching and learning environment for graph sketching

An Interactive Teaching and Learning Environment for Graph Sketching (ITALEGS) of polynomial graphs at college level was developed. The objectives of the system are to provide an environment for teachers to design their own lesson plans, to assist students to grasp the “sense” of graph sketching; and to evaluate the effectiveness of using it in teaching and learning. ITALEGS was constructed by integrating Visual BASIC and Maple^™ and to take advantage of the strengths of both packages. Such an approach can reduce the effort and time of development of the software and yield a powerful and user-friendly system. ITALEGS contains hypermedia for illustration on sketching graphs of polynomials, examples, and guided exercises. Teachers can design their own examples and students can explore graphs at their own choices. Interactive exercises are also provided. Two questionnaires were designed to collect users' feedback. Three experts in Mathematics teaching and twelve college students were invited to evaluate ITALEGS. Results indicated that incorporating Pedagogical Content Knowledge in a CAI or CAL system is a promising research direction in enhancing its effectiveness. Both teachers and students agreed that ITALEGS is a powerful and flexible system for both teaching and learning. However, further experiments are required to investigate more about its effect in the classroom environment.     

Learning style Identifier: Improving the precision of learning style identification through computational intelligence algorithms

Identifying students’ learning styles has several benefits such as making students aware of their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning and the possibility to personalize their learning environment to their learning styles. While there exist learning style questionnaires for identifying a student's learning style, such questionnaires have several disadvantages and therefore, research has been conducted on automatically identifying learning styles from students’ behavior in a learning environment. Current approaches to automatically identify learning styles have an average precision between 66% and 77%, which shows the need for improvements in order to use such automatic approaches reliably in learning environments. In this paper, four computational intelligence algorithms (artificial neural network, genetic algorithm, ant colony system and particle swarm optimization) have been investigated with respect to their potential to improve the precision of automatic learning style identification. Each algorithm was evaluated with data from 75 students. The artificial neural network shows the most promising results with an average precision of 80.7%, followed by particle swarm optimization with an average precision of 79.1%. Improving the precision of automatic learning style identification allows more students to benefit from more accurate information about their learning styles as well as more accurate personalization towards accommodating their learning styles in a learning environment. Furthermore, teachers can have a better understanding of their students and be able to provide more appropriate interventions.     

Intervention and strategy analysis for web group-learning

Abstract Owing to the lack of face-to-face interactions, students using a web-based learning system are likely to study alone and with relatively little classmate support and pressure. Teachers in a web-based learning system may apply a group-learning model to overcome this problem. Teachers first need to organise, manage and monitor the group learning and they must take appropriate actions based on teaching strategies to improve the learning achievements of the students. To perform these tasks effectively, teachers must obtain relevant information by analysing the huge volume of web-access logs or by monitoring web interactions. This paper presents novel methodologies for developing instruments to assist teachers in performing intervention and strategy analysis. The proposed methodologies apply data mining tools provided by existing database management systems. Database techniques, including the multi-dimensional cube, are then applied to make student web logs meaningful and helpful to teachers in managing group learning. The associate rule mining tool is finally employed to assist teachers in analysing their pedagogical strategies. These tools relieve teachers of tedious data collection and analysis, allowing them to focus on managing the groups to promote students' learning achievement.     

Constructing collaborative learning activities for distance cal systems

Many existing Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) systems use computer programs to simulate a teacher for individual learning. However, regardless of how good the CAL system is, a student should also interact with learning companions and human teachers. Due to the popularity and ease of access to computer networks and communication tools, network facilities can be incorporated into a CAL system to make it a distance CAL system. To attain an effective learning outcome, a distance CAL system must be able to: define a group learning model; constrain and advise the students to learn according to the model, and have query facilities which provide the teacher with information about what a student has done and learned, and what a student should do next. A rule‐based system that is conventionally used cannot sufficiently provide those required functions. This paper suggests why this is the case and how an active database system can achieve those goals. Distance CAL     

Dynamic computerized testlet-based test generation system by discrete PSO with partial course ontology

For the majority of E-learning systems their important role is the electronic teachers who can assist students to learn and review courses enrolled. Unfortunately, an E-learning system does not resemble a teacher who can evaluate the current students’ learning status by the immediate class observations and adjust his/her policy accordingly. Hence, to be able to dynamically compose tests to examine students’ learning status and clear their confusions becomes an important issue. This paper argues that how to formalize test requirements dynamically and how to select suitable items effectively are two main challenges in the current researches of computerized test generation. Hence, this article proposed a novel approach that can compose suitable tests to easily and efficiently evaluate the learning statuses of students. The proposed approach obeys the Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) scheme and uses partial course ontology to generate tests according to the studied materials. Besides, it also harnesses the notion of testlets to construct testlet-based tests for students. In the experiments, the results show that the proposed approach can effectively formalize the tested concepts and their weights, and also generate the well-scrutinized test in accordance with the test requirements in the acceptable time.     

Students' online interactive patterns in augmented reality-based inquiry activities

Inquiry learning has been developing for years and many countries have incorporated inquiry learning into the scope of K-12 education. Educators have indicated the importance of engaging students in knowledge-sharing activities during the inquiry learning process. In this study, a location-based augmented reality (AR) environment with a five-step guiding mechanism is developed to guide students to share knowledge in inquiry learning activities. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of promoting the knowledge sharing behaviors of students, an experiment has been conducted in an elementary school natural science course. The participants were 57 fourth-grade students from an elementary school in Northern Taiwan, divided into an experimental group of 28 students who learned with the AR-based approach and a control group of 29 students who learned with the conventional in-class mobile learning approach. The students' learning behaviors, including their movements in the real-world environment and interactions with peers, were recorded. Accordingly, the learning patterns and interactions of the two groups were analyzed via lag-sequential analysis and quantitative content analysis. It was found that, in comparison with the conventional inquiry-based mobile learning activity, the AR-based inquiry learning activity is able to engage the students in more interactions for knowledge construction. The findings of this study provide guidance for helping teachers develop effective strategies and learning designs for conducting inquiry-based learning activities.     

高校网络电视的构建及其在影视教学中的应用分析

本文将网络电视融入影视学科教学当中,构建基于网络电视的影视学习平台,使网络电视更好地促进教学和学生学习,旨在为一线教师提供可参考的数字化学习环境开发途径。     

The influence of student characteristics on the use of adaptive e-learning material

Adaptive e-learning materials can help teachers to educate heterogeneous student groups. This study provides empirical data about the way academic students differ in their learning when using adaptive e-learning materials. Ninety-four students participated in the study. We determined characteristics in a heterogeneous student group by collecting demographic data and measuring motivation and prior knowledge. We also measured the learning paths students followed and learning strategies they used when working with adaptive e-learning material in a molecular biology course. We then combined these data to study if and how student characteristics relate to the learning paths and strategies they used. We observed that students did follow different learning paths. Gender did not have an effect, but (mainly Dutch) BSc students differed from (international) MSc students in the intrinsic motivation they had and the learning paths and strategies they followed when using the adaptive e-learning material.     

基于SPOC视频学习数据的学习行为特征分析方法

在基于小规模限制性在线课程(Small Private Online Course,SPOC)平台的学习过程中,教育数据为学习分析提供了依据。为了帮助教师改进教学策略,帮助学生改进学习效果,本文提出了一种综合考虑学生分类和视频学习时间的学习行为分析方法,旨在发现学生潜在的学习现象,并根据该现象对不同类型学生的学习行为之间的相似性和差异性进行分析和总结,发现不同类型学生的学习习惯以及影响学生学习效果的时间因素。通过案例分析表明,该方法可以为教师教学和学生学习提供反馈,辅助学生的自我调节学习和教师的个性化教学。     

Recommendation System based on user interaction data applied to intelligent electronic books

Nowadays, new technologies and the fast growth of the Internet have made access to information easier for all kind of people, raising new challenges to education when using Internet as a medium. One of the best examples is how to guide students in their learning processes.The need to look for guidance from their teachers or other companions that many Internet users experience when endeavoring to choose their readings, exercises o practices is a very common reality. In order to cater for this need many different information and recommendation strategies have been developed. Recommendation Systems is one of these.Recommendation Systems try to help the user, presenting him those objects he could be more interested in, based on his known preferences or on those of other users with similar characteristics.This document tries to present the current situation with regards to Recommendation Systems and their application on distance education over the Internet.     

The study on integrating WebQuest with mobile learning for environmental education

This study is to demonstrate the impact of different teaching strategies on the learning performance of environmental education using quantitative methods. Students learned about resource recycling and classification through an instructional website based on the teaching tool of WebQuest. There were 103 sixth-grade students participating in this study and broken down into three groups: traditional instruction, traditional instruction with WebQuest and WebQuest instruction with outdoors. The major contribution of this study is the introduction of WebQuest into the outdoor instruction. The results of this study show that using WebQuest in outdoor instruction influences students’ learning performance positively. Two other interesting results are: (1) when WebQuest was used in real situations, students could acquire more knowledge and experiences, and (2) in the learning activity of the experiment, the students accomplished different learning tasks and expressed their own opinions and perspectives, which could foster their critical thinking skills. On the other hands, the students in outdoor situation could be positive to participate in learning activity; furthermore, they could ponder the learning contents by observing the real context and then they began to classify/categorize the resources. These findings will contribute to the development of teaching and learning for government, schools and teachers; for instance, teachers act as assistants or tutors and provide students with others public network resources, including PDAs, smartphones, tablet personal computers or the Internet, to improve their learning in outdoor learning environments, such as campus, museums or zoos.