 |
ICTE
- INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION, 20-23 NOV., 2002, Badajoz. Anais.
2002. p. 131-134.
AdaptWeb:
an Adaptive Web-based Courseware 1[1]
Veronice de Freitas 1,2
, Viviane P. Marçal 1,2 , Isabela Gasparini 1,2
, Marília Abrahão Amaral 1,2 , Mario Lemes Proença
Jr.2 , Maria Angélica C. Brunetto 2 ,
Marcelo S. Pimenta 1 , Cora H. F. Pinto Ribeiro 1
, José Valdeni de Lima 1 , José Palazzo M. de
Oliveira 1
1
Instituto de Informática – Universidade Federal do
Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Av Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto
Alegre, RS, Brazil
2 Departamento de Computação – Universidade
Estadual de Londrina (UEL), Campus Universitário, Londrina, PR,
Brazil
Abstract. This paper describes an in
progress research and development project, AdaptWeb, planed to
present an adaptive educational content personalized to a
specific course and to a particular student profile. The project
is based in PHP and MySQL and the first running version will be
available in October 2002. Hypermedia teaching applications use
learning procedures as guided or suggested navigation,
hierarchical contents presentation, sequenced deterministic
presentations among others educational tactics. Normally these
techniques are used in a standard way for all the students. In
contrast, different students have different cognitive learning
styles, which implies in specific teaching tactics and they also
have specific presentation preferences. This paper presents an
adaptive environment application for Web-based learning, used in
a Numerical Methods course. This course is offered in three
different university programs: Mathematics, Engineering, and
Computer Science. In each program, the complexity (e.g.: theorem
demonstration or theorem presentation only), content sequence,
examples, and supplementary material for the same course content
present differences. In this version the student’s
presentation preferences and the program adaptation are
considered, in the next stage the cognitive learning style
adaptation will be added. Authoring software for syllabus
generation is provided, and a run-time environment adapts this
content, according to the student program and preferences.
In this paper, we focus on an application
for Adaptive Web-based Programs. In this context, student’s
preferences about learning contents, navigation resources, and
interfaces are evaluated. For that purpose, we are working with a
case study of a Numerical Methods course, which is included in
three different university programs, with differences in each
specific syllabus. According to the student’s enrolled
program (Mathematics, Engineering or Computer Science), and
preferences, different contents of the same course are presented.
Most of the available Web teaching systems
applies the traditional paper-based learning resources presented
as html pages, making no use of the new resources available in
the Web. Among the underemployed resources, adaptation is a key
feature for customized teaching in the Web. Many researchers have
addressed the adaptive learning supported by student’s
profiles [4, 5, 9, 10]. In the AdaptWeb research project, a
unique syllabus may be adapted to different programs and to
different student characteristics. The diversity of
student’s preferences and skills requires adaptive
techniques to fulfill the specific information required in
web-based programs [4]. In this project, the student’s
diversity is supported by the creation of a student profile,
where information about the student’s background,
objectives, hyperspace experience, and learning log files are
stored and continuously updated. The AdaptWeb System is divided
into an authoring environment and a run-time environment module.
The authoring environment component helps the author to develop
multiple presentation contents for a course, with alternatives
for different programs. The course creation process is based on
the construction of a topics hierarchy. The run-time environment
provides the course sequence of contents, according to the
student’s program, preferences, and characteristics. This
project is a cooperative action of Federal University of RGS
(UFRGS), and Londrina State University (UEL), supported by the
ProTeM-CC Framework of the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq).
In the AdaptWeb environment, the authoring component allows the author to include different contents for a same topic, according to different programs and different student’s profiles. The proposed system allows the customization of contents from a generic course structure, according to different programs and student’s skills. The authoring process is composed of the following stages: (1) specification of the course purpose; (2) specification of the course contents outline; (3) specification of contents structure, components, and visualization; (4) classification of contents as concepts, examples, additional examples, exercises and complementary material (pictures, movies, simulations, and links to additional information); Also, the complexity level of exercises and examples are stated, as easy, medium, or complex, and (5) specification of course contents, according to each program , using an authoring tool as shown in figure 1.
|
Figure 1 - Authoring
tool
Through the tool of authoring presented in
Figure 1, the author will be able to create and to specify the
structure of content organized during the authoring phase. Each
topic specified in this tool, the author will have to supply to
the name of the topic, summarized, prerequisite description, for
which courses desires to make available the topic and to inform
the archive associated with this topic. After the cadastre of the
topic, the author will be able to relate other archives related
to the topic, which is classified as examples, exercises and
supplementary material.
Through Figure 1 topic 2,2,12 in maintenance
can be visualized, that will only be to make available for the
pupils of the Engineering, and Computer Science Computation. In
the guides of Examples, Exercises and supplementary material, the
author will be able to specify other contents related to topic
2,2,1, always informing for each associated archive the white
public.
The AdaptWeb environment uses the Extensible
Markup Language (XML) [11] for data storage. In the present
project, the Numerical Methods course was selected and adapted to
three different programs: Engineering, Mathematics and Computer
Science. For each university program, a different XML file is
created, including the specific program course topics and
information about topics presentation sequence.
The run-time environment includes the student profile generation and maintenance and the adaptive presentation of contents. The educational contents must be dynamically adapted, according to the student’s evolution model. This model represents the current relationship between the student and the course, and how much the student knows about each application domain topic. The purpose of AdaptWeb training environment is to provide the necessary support to the learner’s style of interactions with a specific knowledge space represented by HTML pages with wide and rich didactic material. The AdaptWeb considers three aspects as relevant for the adaptation process: the student’s current knowledge, the student’s program, and the student’s navigation preferences. The adaptability techniques are supported by information stored in the student model [5]. Each student model is created in the first AdaptWeb login. Information about enrolled program and courses, as well as general student’s information, should be provided at this moment. Information about the student’s performance is captured from student’s monitoring.
At each login, the student must select one
navigational option: tutorial or free. In the tutorial mode
contents are accessed, according to a previously established
sequence. Consequently, for each new section, the presentation is
adapted to consider the previously accessed course components. In
the free navigation mode, every course component is available and
users may navigate through the course contents without
restrictions.
The general environment interface has built-in strategies that help the student to navigate in the hyperspace, such as direct guidance (that suggests the best link to proceed), and global maps. The interface presentation of component pages is dependent of the navigation choice. For the free navigation option, all topics are available, but students may use a search tool, provided for global orientation support. In the tutorial navigation option, students are guided by the use of global conduction technique. Some adaptive hypermedia techniques proposed by [3] and [2] are also used in the AdaptWeb. The selected techniques are: link disabling: used for navigation sequence enforcement; links annotation: to identify disabled topics, topics already visited and topics not visited yet; history list: to place the student in the study environment; link removal: to adapt the links according to the program (Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering). for each course topic. In particular, in the free navigation mode, the adequate contents are indicated with as a dark colored link, the already accessed with a light blue colored link and the available but inadequate links, meaning that some previous prerequisite content have not being accessed, are denoted by a gray colored link. A DTD have been developed, and a XML parser has being implemented, for the XML files validation, in compliance with Document Object Model (DOM) [8].
This paper describes a current project for
adaptive content presentation of Web-based courses, according to
selected programs and student’s profile. The proposed
solution is demonstrated with the application of the AdaptWeb in
the development of the Numerical Computation course, where
specifics and different contents of the same course are presented
for students from three different programs (Mathematics,
Engineering, or Computer Science). In the adaptive environment
provided by the system, course contents are customized with
different information complexity, sequence of contents access,
examples application, and supplementary material access.
Authoring software is provided for syllabus generation, supported
by XML standard files. The AdaptWeb also provides support for
student’s monitoring. As a result, the course contents is
adapted and presented to students, according to each
student’s program, current knowledge, and navigation
preferences. Now the we are working for incorporate a new
adaptation in the tool based in networking an the technology
available in the student. The AdaptWeb project home page is
available at http://www.dc.uel.br/adaptweb
[1] Bray, Tim;
Paoli, Jean; McQueen, C. M. Sperberg; Extensible Markup Language
(XML) 1.0. 1998. W3C Recommendation. February. Disponível por
WWW em http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml. [Accessed: Jun. 2001].
[2] Brusilovsky,
Peter. Adaptive Hypermedia, In: User Modeling and User-Adapted
Interaction, 11:87-110, 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[3] Brusilovsky,
Peter. Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia, User
Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, 1996, v6, n 2-3, pp 87-129
(Special Issue on adaptive hypertext and hypermedia).
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Methods and Techniques of Adaptive Hypermedia. Adaptive Hypertext
and Hypermedia, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.1-43, 1998.
[5] Brusilovsky, P.
(1999) Adaptive and Intelligent Technologies for Web-based
Education. In C. Rollinger and C. Peylo (eds.), Special Issue on
Intelligent Systems and Teleteaching, Künstliche Intelligenz, 4,
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[Accessed: Oct. 2001]
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AERTS, Ad; HOUBEN, Geert-Jan; WU, Hongjing. Making
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WebNet Conference, pp. 117-123, 2000
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Reference Model for Adaptive Hypermedia. Proceedings of ACM
Hypertext’99. Darmstadt, pp. 147-156, 1999.
[8] Document Object
Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification Version 1.0: October 1, 1998.
Disponível em:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/. [Accessed:
Sept. 2001].
[9] ROUSSEAU,
Franck; Garcia-Macías, J. Antonio, De LIMA, José Valdeni &
DUDA, Andrzej. User Adaptable Multimedia Presentations for the
WWW, WWW8 - The Eighth International. World Wide Web Conference.
May 11-14, 1999, Toronto, Canada. http://drakkar.imag.fr/awww .
[10] SOUTO, Maria
A.M.; VERDIN, Regina; WAINER Ricardo, MADEIRA, Milton;
WARPECHOWSKI Mariusa; BESCHOREN, Karine; ZANELLA, Renata; CORREA,
Juarez S.; VICARI, Rosa M., PALAZZO DE OLIVEIRA, José; Towards
an Adaptive Web Training Environment Based on Cognitive Style of
Learning: an Empirical Approach, AH 2002, 2nd International
Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web Based Systems,
29/5/2002 - 31/5/2002, Malaga, Spain
[11] Extensible
Markup Language (XML), URL: http://www.w3.org/XML/ [Accessed: May. 2002].
[1] This project is partially supported by CNPq