The design and implementation of an adaptive e-learning system

This paper describes the design and implementation of an adaptive e-learning system that provides a template for different learning materials as well as a student model that incorporates five distinct student characteristics as an aid to learning: primary characteristics are prior knowledge, learning style and the presence or absence of animated multimedia aids (multimedia mode); secondary characteristics include page background preference and link colour preference. The use of multimedia artefacts as a student characteristic has not previously been implemented or evaluated. The system development consists of a requirements analysis, design and implementation. The design models including use case diagrams, conceptual design, sequence diagrams, navigation design and presentation design are expressed using Unified Modelling Language (UML). The adaptive e-learning system was developed in a template implemented using Java Servlets, XHTML, XML, JavaScript and HTML. The template is a domain-independent adaptive e-learning system that has functions of both adaptivity and adaptability

Adaptable Web content for e-learning communities

In this paper we explore an easy-to-use methodology aimed to optimise the design, construction and maintenance processes of Web-based educational material, which leverages on adaptive features to foster re-use and sharing between educational communities. Our approach is easier than those proposed by other organizations in the sense that it borrows the principal idea of describing learning material through meta-information (about properties and structures of the educational contents and the existing relationships between them), but discards the inherent complexity typical of their richer categorization schemas that may overwhelm the authors\u27 task. This simplification will favour, in our opinion, a more light-weight and more rapid production and delivery of educational content

Authoring Adaptive Hypermedia using Ontologies

Adaptive hypermedia has been developed to overcome the problems of disorientation by providing personalized presentation and link structure. An adaptive hypermedia system consists of an adaptation model, a domain model, and a user model. The user model describes various aspects of a user such as interests, knowledge, preferences, etc. The domain model describes the whole knowledge accessible in adaptive hypermedia. The adaptation model consists of adaptation rules that define both how to generate the personalized presentation and update the user model [12]. Authoring adaptive hypermedia typically starts by designing a domain model so that apprropiate adaptation model and user model can be created based the domain model. While there are authoring tools developed for creating domain model of an adaptive hypermedia, authors need to manually create basic concepts as well as their relationships for a domain of interests. In this paper, we present a system that transforms an ontology into the domain and adaptation model of adaptive hypermedia so that the authors can generate adaptive hypermedia easily. The system transforms classes and relationships between the classes defined in OWL ontology [7] into concepts and relationships between the concepts defined in the domain model of AHA! system which is one of best known open source general-purpose adaptive hypermedia systems [1]. Using our system, authors can utilize well-defined knowledge structure in ontologies for authoring adaptive hypermedia. On top of this, since designing domain model is generally an initial step to author adaptive hypermedia, our system can help authors reduce tasks to create adaptive hypermedia by automatically generating domain model from an ontology

Personalización: técnicas, herramientas y CRM

[ES]En este capitulo se presenta una amplia visión de la personalización que hay dentro del comercio electrónico. La principal personalización que ha en el comercio electrónico es la construcción de un modelo para guardar y utilizar cierta información para poder almacenar conocimiento sobre los usuarios. Durante el capitulo se describen las principales técnicas de personalización tales como la basada en reglas, la de filtrado colaborativo o la de descubrimiento de la información. La personaliza-ción se utiliza en el comercio electrónico para tratar de usar las preferencias de los clientes con un objetivo de negocio. En la mayoría de los casos, ese objetivo es directamente la venta, pero en otras ocasiones, lo es indirectamente. Para concluir el capitulo se presenta un caso de estudio que pretende ilustrar de forma practica el contenido teorico del capitulo[EN]This chapter presents a broad view of the personalization that exists within e-commerce. The main customization in e-commerce is the construction of a model to store and use certain information to store knowledge about users. During the chapter the main customization techniques are described such as rule-based, collaborative filtering or information discovery. Personalization is used in e-com-merce to try to use customer preferences for a business purpose. In most cases, this objective is directly the sale, but in other occasions, it is indirectly. To conclude the chapter, a case study is presented to illustrate in a practical way the theoretical content of the chapter

Uma técnica de recuperação adaptativa de obras em bibliotecas digitais baseada no perfil do usuário

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação.As bibliotecas digitais oferecem um modo eficiente de busca ao acervo graças à indexação de seu conteúdo. Apesar disto, caso o acervo seja grande, mecanismos tradicionais de busca podem não ser eficientes em recuperar informação mais pertinente às necessidades do usuário. O conceito de Hiperdocumento Adaptativo pode ser adicionado às bibliotecas digitais de modo a considerar o interesse do usuário na busca de informações, representando as suas necessidades de informação através de uma estrutura bem definida, denominada de perfil. Esta Dissertação tem como proposta aplicar os conceitos de hiperdocumento adaptativo às bibliotecas digitais, para que o resultado das consultas sejam apresentados de maneira organizada levando em conta o perfil do usuário da biblioteca, visando facilitar a identificação dos documentos relevantes no conjunto de documentos da Biblioteca. É realizado o agrupamento dos documentos recuperados, atendendo os critérios de busca em níveis de relevância e em cada nível os documentos são ordenados segundo um critério. Tanto o critério de agrupamento quanto o de ordenação são definidos baseados no perfil do usuário. Como base para a implementação da proposta é utilizada a Biblioteca Digital de Literatura Brasileira e Catarinense (LBC), desenvolvida no contexto do projeto CNPq SIDIE (Sistema de Disponibilização de Informações para o Ensino)

Mastering the requirements analysis for communication-intensive websites

Web application development still needs to employ effective methods to accommodate some distinctive aspects of the requirements analysis process: capturing high-level communication goals, considering several user profiles and stakeholders, defining hypermedia-specific requirements (concerning navigation, content, information structure and presentation aspects), and reusing requirements for an effective usability evaluation. Techniques should be usable by both stakeholders and the design team, require little training effort, and show relative advantage to project managers. Over the last few years, requirements methodologies applied to web-based applications have considered mainly the transactional and operational aspects typical of traditional information systems. The communicational aspects of web sites have been neglected in regards to systematic requirements methods. This thesis, starting from key achievements in Requirements Engineering (hereafter RE), introduces a model (AWARE) for defining and analyzing requirements for web applications mainly conceived as strategic communication means for an institution or organization. The model extends traditional goal and scenario-based approaches for refining highlevel goals into website requirements, by introducing the analysis of ill-defined user goals, stakeholder communication goals, and a hypermedia requirement taxonomy to facilitate web conceptual design, and paving the way for a systematic usability evaluation. AWARE comprises a conceptual toolkit and a notation for effective requirements documentation. AWARE concepts and notation represent a useful communication and analysis conceptual tool that may support in the elicitation, negotiation, analysis and validation of requirements from the relevant stakeholders (users included). The empirical validation of the model is carried out in two ways. Firstly, the model has been employed in web projects on the field. These case studies and the lessons learnt will be presented and discussed to assess advantages and limits of the proposal. Secondly, a sample of web analysts and designers has been asked to study and apply the model: the feedback gathered is positive and encouraging for further improvement.Lo sviluppo di applicazioni web necessita di strumenti efficaci per gestire alcuni aspetti essenziali del processo di analisi dei requisiti: l'identificazione di obiettivi di comunicazione strategici, la presenza di una varietà di profili utente e di stakeholders, le definizione di requisiti ipermediali (riguardanti navigazione, interazione, contenuto e presentazione), e il riuso dei requisiti per una pianificazione efficace della valutazione dell'usabilità. Sono necessarie tecniche usabili sia dagli stakeholders che dai progettisti, che richiedono un tempo breve per essere appresi ed usati con efficacia, mostrando vantaggi significativi ai gestori di progetti complessi. La tesi definisce AWARE (Analysis of Web Application Requirements) - una metodologia per l'analisi dei requisiti specifica per la gestione di siti web (ed applicazioni interattive) con forti componenti comunicative. La metodologia estende le tecniche esistenti dell''analisi dei requisiti basate su approcci goal-oriented e scenario-based, introducendo una tassonomia di requisiti specifica per siti web (che permette di dare un input strutturato all'attività di progetazione), strumenti per l'identificazione e l'analisi di obiettivi ill-defined (generici o mal-definiti) e di obiettivi comunicativi e supporto metodologico per la valutazione dell'usabilità basata sui requisiti dell'applicazione. La metodologia AWARE è stata valutata sul campo attraverso progetti con professionisti del settore (web designers e IT managers), e grazie ad interventi di formazione in aziende specializzate nella comunicazione su web

Quality of experience aware adaptive hypermedia system

The research reported in this thesis proposes, designs and tests a novel Quality of Experience Layer (QoE-layer) for the classic Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) architecture. Its goal is to improve the end-user perceived Quality of Service in different operational environments suitable for residential users. While the AHS’ main role of delivering personalised content is not altered, its functionality and performance is improved and thus the user satisfaction with the service provided. The QoE Layer takes into account multiple factors that affect Quality of Experience (QoE), such as Web components and network connection. It uses a novel Perceived Performance Model that takes into consideration a variety of performance metrics, in order to learn about the Web user operational environment characteristics, about changes in network connection and the consequences of these changes on the user’s quality of experience. This model also considers the user’s subjective opinion about his/her QoE, increasing its effectiveness and suggests strategies for tailoring Web content in order to improve QoE. The user related information is modelled using a stereotype-based technique that makes use of probability and distribution theory. The QoE-Layer has been assessed through both simulations and qualitative evaluation in the educational area (mainly distance learning), when users interact with the system in a low bit rate operational environment. The simulations have assessed “learning” and “adaptability” behaviour of the proposed layer in different and variable home connections when a learning task is performed. The correctness of Perceived Performance Model (PPM) suggestions, access time of the learning process and quantity of transmitted data were analysed. The results show that the QoE layer significantly improves the performance in terms of the access time of the learning process with a reduction in the quantity of data sent by using image compression and/or elimination. A visual quality assessment confirmed that this image quality reduction does not significantly affect the viewers’ perceived quality that was close to “good” perceptual level. For qualitative evaluation the QoE layer has been deployed on the open-source AHA! system. The goal of this evaluation was to compare the learning outcome, system usability and user satisfaction when AHA! and QoE-ware AHA systems were used. The assessment was performed in terms of learner achievement, learning performance and usability assessment. The results indicate that QoE-aware AHA system did not affect the learning outcome (the students have similar-learning achievements) but the learning performance was improved in terms of study time. Most significantly, QoE-aware AHA provides an important improvement in system usability as indicated by users’ opinion about their satisfaction related to QoE

Supporting delivery of adaptive hypermedia

Although Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) can improve upon the traditional one-size-fitsall learning approach through Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH), it still has problems with the authoring and delivery processes that are holding back the widespread usage of AEH. In this thesis we present the development of the Adaptive Delivery Environment (ADE) delivery system and use the lessons learnt during its development along with feedback from adaptation specification authors, researchers and other evaluations to formalise a list of essential and recommended optional features for AEH delivery engines. In addition to this we also investigate how the powerful adaptation techniques recommended in the above list and described in Brusilovsky and Knutov’s taxonomies can be implemented in a way that minimises the technical knowledge of adaptation authors needed to use these techniques. As the adaptation functionality increases, we research how a modular framework for adaptation strategies can be created to increase the reusability of parts of an AH system’s overall adaptation specification. Following on from this, we investigate how reusing these modular strategies via a pedagogically based visual editor can enable adaptation authors without programming experience to use these powerful adaptation techniques

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences