Bridging the gap between digital libraries and e-learning

Digital Libraries (DL) are offering access to a vast amount of digital content, relevant to practically all domains of human knowledge, which makes it suitable to enhance teaching and learning. Based on a systematic literature review, this article provides an overview and a gap analysis of educational use of DLs.The research work presented in this paper is partially supported by the FP7 Grant 316087 AComIn ”Advanced Computing for Innovation”, funded by the European Commission in the FP7 Capacity Programme in 2012-2016.peer-reviewe

Building an Educational Recommender System based on Conceptual Change Learning Theory to Improve Students' Understanding of Science Concepts

Science misconceptions can be deeply held and difficult to change. Conceptual change learning theory (CCLT) applied in the classroom environment has been effective in helping students remedy their persistent science misconceptions. This work studies CCLT in an online learner-driven environment using five related studies. The first study creates the online learner-driven environment while the second study evaluates the resulting system. The last three studies create computational models that accomplish a teacher's task per CCLT. The first study uses participatory design methods to create the online learner-driven environment called CLICK2. This is an effective feedback environment because it can answer the questions: where am I? where am I going? how am I going? and where to next? in relation to a user's knowledge state. Results show that users were satisfied with the interaction design of CLICK2. The second study is a learning study that investigated how CLICK2 in- fluences learners' processes and outcomes. Results show that using CLICK2 improved users' understanding of seasons and their confidence in understanding this concept. The last three studies use techniques from machine learning and natural language processing to perform three critical tasks underpinning support for CCLT: prioritizing learners' misconceptions, extracting core concepts, i.e., learning goals and sequencing them. All three studies draw on analyses of human expert processes to inform the design and evaluation of the algorithms. Results show that an alignment of sequenced core concepts to misconceptions in a learner's work is a good feature for prioritizing misconceptions in the learner's work; reducing the extraction rate in a multi-document summarizer produces good core concepts; and dynamically generating useful pedagogical sequences from a list of core concepts is feasible. This work contributes to the scientific literature by introducing a methodology for automatically prioritizing core concepts and student misconceptions in a pedagogically useful manner. Furthermore, this work shows that conceptual change learning theory can be implemented in an online learner-driven environment

Introducing the TISMIR Education Track: What, Why, How?

This editorial introduces the new education track for the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR) and aims to provide guidance to both prospective authors and users of this track’s material regarding its context, goals, and scope. To begin, we offer TISMIR-specific context, including the journal’s history, its unchanged scope and remit, and the motivations behind introducing the new track. This context is supplemented by broader insights into developments in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), the personal pedagogical experiences of the authors, and the rapid, extensive development of Open Educational Resources across various domains. We highlight the key characteristics of educational articles in general and explore why the music domain may provide an intuitive and motivating setting for education across various levels and disciplines. The education track aligns with existing tracks in terms of TISMIR’s dedication to scientific research in MIR, broadly defined as the processing, analyzing, organizing, and creating of music and music-related information using computational methods. Educational articles within this track maintain the high standards expected in terms of scientific rigor, clarity of language, and compelling presentation. However, they differ in their focus on a tutorial-style delivery and their emphasis on existing MIR research methods, techniques, principles, and practical matters relevant to the diverse interests of the MIR community. Through this editorial, our objective is to offer guidance, clarify review criteria, and stimulate discussion on crafting effective educational articles, thereby laying the foundation for a broader discourse on education within MIR and beyond

The Knowledge Graph Construction in the Educational Domain: Take an Australian School Science Course as an Example

The evolution of the Internet technology and artificial intelligence has changed the ways we gain knowledge, which has expanded to every aspect of our lives. In recent years, Knowledge Graphs technology as one of the artificial intelligence techniques has been widely used in the educational domain. However, there are few studies dedicating the construction of knowledge graphs for K-10 education in Australia, and most of the existing studies only focus on at the theory level, and little research shows practical pipeline steps to complete the complex flow of constructing the educational knowledge graph. Apart from that, most studies focused on concept entities and their relations but ignored the features of concept entities and the relations between learning knowledge points and required learning outcomes. To overcome these shortages and provide the data foundation for the development of downstream research and applications in this educational domain, the construction processes of building a knowledge graph for Australian K-10 education were analyzed at the theory level and implemented in a practical way in this research. We took the Year 9 science course as a typical data source example fed to the proposed method called K10EDU-RCF-KG to construct this educational knowledge graph and to enrich the features of entities in the knowledge graph. In the construction pipeline, a variety of techniques were employed to complete the building process. Firstly, the POI and OCR techniques were applied to convert Word and PDF format files into text, followed by developing an educational resources management platform where the machine-readable text could be stored in a relational database management system. Secondly, we designed an architecture framework as the guidance of the construction pipeline. According to this architecture, the educational ontology was initially designed, and a backend microservice was developed to process the entity extraction and relation extraction by NLP-NER and probabilistic association rule mining algorithms, respectively. We also adopted the NLP-POS technique to find out the neighbor adjectives related to entitles to enrich features of these concept entitles. In addition, a subject dictionary was introduced during the refinement process of the knowledge graph, which reduced the data noise rate of the knowledge graph entities. Furthermore, the connections between learning outcome entities and topic knowledge point entities were directly connected, which provides a clear and efficient way to identify what corresponding learning objectives are related to the learning unit. Finally, a set of REST APIs for querying this educational knowledge graph were developed

A framework for structuring prerequisite relations between concepts in educational textbooks

In our age we are experiencing an increasing availability of digital educational resources and self-regulated learning. In this scenario, the development of automatic strategies for organizing the knowledge embodied in educational resources has a tremendous potential for building personalized learning paths and applications such as intelligent textbooks and recommender systems of learning materials. To this aim, a straightforward approach consists in enriching the educational materials with a concept graph, i.a. a knowledge structure where key concepts of the subject matter are represented as nodes and prerequisite dependencies among such concepts are also explicitly represented. This thesis focuses therefore on prerequisite relations in textbooks and it has two main research goals. The first goal is to define a methodology for systematically annotating prerequisite relations in textbooks, which is functional for analysing the prerequisite phenomenon and for evaluating and training automatic methods of extraction. The second goal concerns the automatic extraction of prerequisite relations from textbooks. These two research goals will guide towards the design of PRET, i.e. a comprehensive framework for supporting researchers involved in this research issue. The framework described in the present thesis allows indeed researchers to conduct the following tasks: 1) manual annotation of educational texts, in order to create datasets to be used for machine learning algorithms or for evaluation as gold standards; 2) annotation analysis, for investigating inter-annotator agreement, graph metrics and in-context linguistic features; 3) data visualization, for visually exploring datasets and gaining insights of the problem that may lead to improve algorithms; 4) automatic extraction of prerequisite relations. As for the automatic extraction, we developed a method that is based on burst analysis of concepts in the textbook and we used the gold dataset with PR annotation for its evaluation, comparing the method with other metrics for PR extraction

Simple identification tools in FishBase

Simple identification tools for fish species were included in the FishBase information system from its inception. Early tools made use of the relational model and characters like fin ray meristics. Soon pictures and drawings were added as a further help, similar to a field guide. Later came the computerization of existing dichotomous keys, again in combination with pictures and other information, and the ability to restrict possible species by country, area, or taxonomic group. Today, www.FishBase.org offers four different ways to identify species. This paper describes these tools with their advantages and disadvantages, and suggests various options for further development. It explores the possibility of a holistic and integrated computeraided strategy

AXMEDIS 2007 Conference Proceedings

The AXMEDIS International Conference series has been established since 2005 and is focused on the research, developments and applications in the cross-media domain, exploring innovative technologies to meet the challenges of the sector. AXMEDIS2007 deals with all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, interoperability, protection and rights management. It addresses the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, their impact and exploitation within academic, business and industrial communities

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Degree of Scaffolding: Learning Objective Metadata: A Prototype Leaning System Design for Integrating GIS into a Civil Engineering Curriculum

Digital media and networking offer great potential as tools for enhancing classroom learning environments, both local and distant. One concept and related technological tool that can facilitate the effective application and distribution of digital educational resources is learning objects in combination with the SCORM (sharable content objects reference model) compliance framework. Progressive scaffolding is a learning design approach for educational systems that provides flexible guidance to students. We are in the process of utilizing this approach within a SCORM framework in the form of a multi-level instructional design. The associated metadata required by SCORM will describe the degree of scaffolding. This paper will discuss progressive scaffolding as it relates to SCORM compliant learning objects, within the context of the design of an application for integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into the civil engineering curriculum at the University of Missouri - Rolla