A semi-automatic strategy for achieving learning content and practice repurposing

The development of instructional content using Information Technologies is an expensive, time-consuming and complex process that requires new methodologies. It was in this context that the concept of Learning Objects (LOs) was proposed in order to promote reuse. However, this goal is not yet fully attained and new contributions to increase reuse are still welcome. Besides, if content is conveyed in LOs that are easier to reuse, they must be combined and sequenced in order to build more elaborated and complex content. This paper presents a strategy to deal with these problems based on the definition of small LOs here called Component Objects (COs). These COs are structured and combined according to a conceptual metamodel, which is the basis for the definition of conceptual schemas representing the existing material, including not only content but also practice. This strategy for searching, extracting, and sequencing COs, supports a teacher to better control the implementation of complex content, reducing errors in the authoring process. This approach includes a specification language and an algorithm for semi-automatic sequencing learning content and practice. Finally, a case study that shows the proposed approach and some results of using the algorithm are presented.     

Evaluating pedagogical classification frameworks for learning objects: A case study

The use of toolkits and reference frameworks for the design and evaluation of learning activities enables the systematic application of pedagogical criteria in the elaboration of learning resources and learning designs. Pedagogical classification as described in such frameworks is a major criterion for the retrieval of learning objects, since it serves to partition the space of available learning resources depending either on the pedagogical standpoint that was used to create them, or on the interpreted pedagogical orientation of their constituent learning contents and activities. However, pedagogical classification systems need to be evaluated to assess their quality with regards to providing a degree of inter-subjective agreement on the meaning of the classification dimensions they provide. Without such evaluation, classification metadata, which is typically provided by a variety of contributors, is at risk of being fuzzy in reflecting the actual pedagogical orientations, thus hampering the effective retrieval of resources. This paper describes a case study that evaluates the general pedagogical dimensions proposed by Conole et al. to classify learning resources. Rater agreement techniques are used for the assessment, which is proposed as a general technique for the evaluation of such kind of classification schemas. The case study evaluates the degree of coherence of the pedagogical dimensions proposed by Conole et al. as an objective instrument to classify pedagogical resources. In addition, the technical details on how to integrate such classifications in learning object metadata are provided.     

Learning effective color features for content based image retrieval in dermatology

We investigate the extraction of effective color features for a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) application in dermatology. Effectiveness is measured by the rate of correct retrieval of images from four color classes of skin lesions. We employ and compare two different methods to learn favorable feature representations for this special application: limited rank matrix learning vector quantization (LiRaM LVQ) and a Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN) approach. Both methods use labeled training data and provide a discriminant linear transformation of the original features, potentially to a lower dimensional space. The extracted color features are used to retrieve images from a database by a k-nearest neighbor search. We perform a comparison of retrieval rates achieved with extracted and original features for eight different standard color spaces. We achieved significant improvements in every examined color space. The increase of the mean correct retrieval rate lies between 10% and 27% in the range of k=1-25 retrieved images, and the correct retrieval rate lies between 84% and 64%. We present explicit combinations of RGB and CIE-Lab color features corresponding to healthy and lesion skin. LiRaM LVQ and the computationally more expensive LMNN give comparable results for large values of the method parameter κ of LMNN (κ≥25) while LiRaM LVQ outperforms LMNN for smaller values of κ. We conclude that feature extraction by LiRaM LVQ leads to considerable improvement in color-based retrieval of dermatologic images.     

Perceived quality of multimedia educational content: A cognitive style approach

Cognitive styles influence the way how humans process information, with previous research demonstrating that they have significant effects on student learning in multimedia environments. On the other hand, the perceptual quality of the human multimedia experience is notoriously difficult to measure. In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study, which investigated the relationship between user cognitive styles and perceptual multimedia quality, in which users had the possibility to specify their desired Quality of Service settings — in terms of frame rates and color depth. Results show that whilst color choice is impacted by a participant's cognitive style, such Quality of Service parameters do not significantly affect perceived multimedia quality, and that users do not necessarily choose optimum presentation settings to enhance their perceived enjoyment and assimilation of multimedia informational content.     

PpcProject: An educational tool for software project management

The University degrees about engineering in general, and software engineering in particular, contain subjects related with Project Management. In this subject, the most commonly used software for practical classes and homework is MS-Project. Nevertheless, the students find that MS-Project is not easy to use and that it requires a high knowledge about Project Management and about the use of the software package. To fill this gap, a new educational software tool, called PpcProject, has been developed and introduced in Software Project Management classes in front of MS-Project. When assessed in practical classes, it was shown to be more useful for educational purposes than Microsoft Project both, in terms of usability and of students performance.     

GESTALT: a framework for redesign of educational software

Abstract Design of educational multimedia rarely starts from scratch, but rather by attempting to reuse existing software. Although redesign has been an issue in research on evaluation and on learning objects, how it should be carried out in a principled way has remained relatively unexplored. Furthermore, understanding how empirical research on information and communication technologies (ICT) should feed back into redesign remains difficult. The present paper addresses these problems from the viewpoint of carrying out pedagogical expert evaluations, in the absence of empirical studies of target learners, in order to generate recommendations for redesign. Firstly, redesign proposals should be based on a coherent reconstruction of pedagogical foundations of educational ICT (software, documentation). Secondly, redesign proposals should result from dialogue between stakeholders, such as future users, pedagogical experts, software designers, and deciders. To these ends, we propose a framework, called GESTALT ( G oals, ( E ) S i T uations, A ctions, L earners, T ools), as a 'boundary object' for dialogical redesign. Within an activity theory approach, GESTALT is based on analysis of available tools, the actions they support, the characteristics of learners who perform actions, and pedagogical goals that could be achieved in specific situations. An illustrative GESTALT analysis of educational software is provided, principally from the viewpoint of pedagogical experts. Finally, the strengths and limits of GESTALT are discussed.     

Practical load balancing for content requests in peer-to-peer networks

This paper studies the problem of balancing the demand for content in a peer-to-peer network across heterogeneous peer nodes that hold replicas of the content. Previous decentralized load balancing techniques in distributed systems base their decisions on periodic updates containing information about load or available capacity observed at the serving entities. We show that these techniques do not work well in the peer-to-peer context; either they do not address peer node heterogeneity, or they suffer from significant load oscillations which result in unutilized capacity. We propose a new decentralized algorithm, Max-Cap, based on the maximum inherent capacities of the replica nodes. We show that unlike previous algorithms, it is not tied to the timeliness or frequency of updates, and consequently requires significantly less update overhead. Yet, Max-Cap can handle the heterogeneity of a peer-to-peer environment without suffering from load oscillations. Mema Roussopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science on the Gordon McKay Endowment at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She received her PhD and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Stanford, and her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park. Her interests are in the areas of distributed systems, networking, and mobile and wireless computing. Mary Baker is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs. Her research interests include distributed systems, networks, mobile systems, security, and digital preservation. Before joining HP Labs she was on the faculty of the computer science department at Stanford University where she ran the MosquitoNet project. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.     

Presence: a unique characteristic in educational virtual environments

This article investigates the effect of presence on learning outcomes in educational virtual environments (EVEs) in a sample of 60 pupils aged between 11 and 13 years. We study the effect of personal presence, social presence and participant’s involvement on certain learning outcomes. We also investigate if the combination of the participant’s representation model in the virtual environment (VE) with the way it is presented gives a higher sense of presence that contributes to learning outcomes. Our results show that the existence of an avatar as the pupils’ representation enhanced presence and helped them to successfully perform their learning tasks. The pupils had a high sense of presence for both cases of the EVE presentation, projection on a wall and through a head mounted display (HMD). Our socialized virtual environment seems to play an important role in learning outcomes. The pupils had a higher sense of presence and completed their learning tasks more easily and successfully in the case of their egocentric representation model using the HMD.     

User interfaces for semantic authoring of textual content: A systematic literature review

Practical approaches for managing and supporting the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data have recently made quite some progress. In particular in the area of the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content we have observed recently a large number of approaches and systems being described in the literature. With this survey we aim to provide an overview on the rapidly emerging field of Semantic Content Authoring (SCA). We conducted a systematic literature review comprising a thorough analysis of 31 primary studies out of 175 initially retrieved papers addressing the semantic authoring of textual content. We obtained a comprehensive set of quality attributes for SCA systems together with corresponding user interface features suggested for their realization. The quality attributes include aspects such as usability, automation, generalizability, collaboration, customizability and evolvability. The primary studies were surveyed in the light of these quality attributes and we performed a thorough analysis of four SCA systems. The proposed quality attributes and UI features facilitate the evaluation of existing approaches and the development of novel more effective and intuitive semantic authoring interfaces.     

Japanese educational and learning systems in the post-industrial society: A value chain of educational and learning systems

Japan's educational system has some major problems. The most important among these concerns is the basic concept of the educational process and the goal of education. The old concept of public educational systems has become outdated in today's Japanese society, although this concept had supported social and spiritual faith, economic success and selfless devotion to one's country for more than 100 years. Now, Japanese people need a new concept of the educational process and the goal of education for the twenty-first century. The paper proposes a value chain of educational and learning systems aimed at building a network consisting of multiple fields for fostering future human resources.     

Virtual learning spaces in distance education: tools for the EVA project

The EVA (espacios virtuales de aprendizaje, or virtual learning spaces) project applies artificial intelligence tools to teleteaching methods, in a way that eliminates or mitigates the need for synchronous and in situ education. (A) A taxonomy of the space of knowledge (also called ‘Learning Space'; currently our prototype teaches M.Sc. courses in Computer Science) is formed and discretized. (B) EVA finds each student's initial knowledge state (through a computer examination) and final (desired) knowledge state, and from these, a particular learning trajectory is designed for that student. (C) Personalized books (called polybooks, because they are formed by modules (chapters) written in a variety of media) are armed by concatenating — along the learning trajectory — modules from a large pool, and sent to the student through the net in a store-and-forward fashion. (D) EVA searches the net for teaching material which has not been indexed in the discretized learning space, using a tool (Clasitex) inside an agent that finds the main themes or topics that an article (written in natural language) covers. (E) EVA also schedules for each student synchronous activities (lectures in TV, teleconferences, on-line question and answering sessions, chats). (F) EVA suggests for each student suitable ‘classmates' (students having similar learning trajectories) in her town, as well as possible advisers (students or alumni having knowledge that the student is acquiring). The present status, problems, models and tools of EVA are presented.     

Using ontologies and Web services for content adaptation in Ubiquitous Computing

The diversity of small mobile devices and networks enabling users to access the Internet expands every day. In this highly dynamic environment of Ubiquitous Computing, current programming paradigms do not offer the flexibility needed for software reuse. To improve this flexibility, this paper proposes the use of ontologies and Web services, within a framework of components for the content adaptation domain, to facilitate the development of software based on reuse. A case study illustrates the use of the proposed solution.     

From data to knowledge: The interaction between data management systems in educational institutions and the delivery of quality education

No school is an island; it is a part of a continuum or a pipeline of institutions which together form an educational pipeline through which groups of students pass. To turn a body of data into useful information for knowledge-based decision-making at any level, data must be collected, organised, analysed and reflected upon. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how schools and other educational institutions can not only collect better data but learn how to transform that data so that the information held within can be effectively shared among all stakeholders. This process will help to ensure that the school and the entire education system provide a more seamless and effective educational pipeline for students, and ultimately improve the quality of education delivered in the country as a whole.     

Redistributing time-based rights between consumer devices for content sharing in DRM system

Device-based digital rights management (DRM) systems tightly bind rights for content to a device. However, it can decrease the consumers’ convenience because it disturbs consumers who want to use the already purchased content with their other devices freely. Previous research into solving this problem still have burdens such as restricting the number of devices that a consumer can use and requiring a special device that manages content sharing. In this paper, we propose a new rights sharing scheme which does not restrict the number of devices that a consumer can use and does not require a specialized device. In our scheme, the right to use content is represented as the right to use the content for a certain amount of time. Consumers can use the content with any of their devices by redistributing the usage amount of time between devices. The redistribution process only requires local synchronization among participating devices. To prevent illegal content sharing and to detect illegally increased content usage time, the amount of time that a consumer can have is limited and the rights for each unit of time has a unique number to prevent illegal duplications. We present data structures and protocols, analyze security properties of our scheme, compare our scheme with related work, and evaluate our scheme through implementation.

Consuming,sharing, and creating content: How young students use new social media in and outside school

This survey study investigated 186 secondary 2–5 school students from two schools to understand how and why they used new social media both in and outside of school to consume, share, and create content. It found that whereas students tend to consume and share more social media content outside of school they create more in school. Perceived importance of sharing content with peers or others is the most significant predictor having positive impact on all social media activities, both in and outside school. However, the negative impact of self-regulation ability on outside school social media activities implies the conscientiousness of their social media engagement, which calls for a further investigation on the quality of the social media content.     

Artificial intelligence for BIM content management and delivery: Case study of association rule mining for construction detailing

The proliferation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications, in tandem with the extensive variation of building products, pose new demands on design and engineering firms to efficiently manage and reuse BIM content (i.e., data-rich parametric model objects and assembly details). Tasks such as classifying BIM objects, indexing them with meta-data (e.g., category), and searching digital libraries to load objects into models still plague practice with inefficient manual workflows. This research aims to improve the productivity of BIM content management and retrieval by developing an AI-backed BIM content recommender system. Using data from a case-study firm, this research extracted content from over 30,000 technical BIM views (e.g., plans, sections, details) in historical projects to build an unsupervised machine-learning prototype with association rule mining. This prototype explicated the strength of relationships among co-occurring BIM objects. Using this prototype as the backbone AI-engine in live BIM sessions, this research developed a context-aware recommender system that dynamically provides BIM users with a set of objects associable with their modeling context (e.g., type of view, existing objects in the model) and human–computer interactions (e.g., objects selected by the user). By mining association data from hundreds of historical projects, this development marks a departure from the existing prototypes that rely on explicit coding, recurring user input, or subjective ratings to recommend BIM content to users. The simulation and experimental implementation of this recommender system yielded high efficacy in predicting content needs and achieved significant savings in the time spent on conventional BIM workflows.     

Biomechanical analysis of upper trapezius,erector spinae and brachioradialis fatigue in repetitive manual packaging tasks: Evidence from Chinese express industry workers

This study aims to assess the effects of repetitive motion-induced fatigue during manual packaging on kinematics and muscle activity of the arm, back and shoulder. Eighteen participants performed a 60-min manual packaging task. Electromyography median frequency of RUT, RES, LES and RB decreased by 13.2% (p < 0.05), 12.8% (p < 0.05), 11.3% (p < 0.05) and 21% (p < 0.001), respectively over time. The head flexion and the right upper arm flexion angles significantly (p < 0.001) differed among different packaging sizes, and similar results were observed for left upper arm flexion and rotation. The trunk and pelvis angles significantly (p < 0.05) differed over time under three kinds of packaging. The results showed there was an increase in the rating of perceived exertion from 8.56 to 16.94 (p<0.01) during the task. The outcomes of this study indicate repetitive movements in the manual packaging task resulted in elevated prevalence of muscle discomfort in packaging workers, especially the right brachioradialis. Interventions such as specific work: rest ratios, workplace redesign should be explored to relieve muscle fatigue and discomfort.Relevance to industryFor workers performing repetitive manual packaging tasks, biomechanical analysis of different muscles groups can help in developing appropriate ergonomic interventions.     

Developing a conceptual framework of smart work packaging for constraints management in prefabrication housing production

Constraints management is the process of satisfying bottlenecks to facilitate tasks assigned to crews being successfully executed. However, managing constraints is inherently challenging in prefabrication housing production (PHP), due to the fragmentation of processes and information during project delivery. Enlightened by the broadly accepted work packaging method and the smart construction objects (SCOs) model, this study aims to define and implement smart work packaging (SWP) for constraints management in PHP. Firstly, the framework of SWP-enabled constraints management (SWP-CM) with three primary functions, including constraints modeling, constraints optimization, and constraints monitoring, is established. In addition, this study develops a layered abstract model as a prototype representation to elaborate on the implementation of SWP for practitioners. Finally, a laboratory-based test is applied to validate the framework. It can prove that SWP indeed opens new avenues for smart constraints management for PHP.