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

Comprehensibility of UML-based Formal Model – A Series of Controlled Experiments

This paper summarises two controlled experiments conducted on a model that integrates the use of semi-formal notation, the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and a formal notation, B. The experiments assessed the comprehensibility of the model, namely UML-B. The first experiment compared the comprehensibility of a UML-B model and a B model. In the second experiment, the model was compared with an Event-B model, a new generation of B. The experiments assessed the ability of the model to present information and to promote problem domain understanding. The measurement focused on the efficiency in performing the comprehension tasks. The experiments employed a cross-over design and were conducted on third-year and masters students. The results suggest that the integration of semi-formal and formal notations expedites the subjects’ comprehension tasks with accuracy even with limited hours of training

Template-driven teacher modelling approach : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science at Massey University, Palmerston North

This thesis describes the Template-driven Teacher Modeling Approach, the initial implementation of the template server and the formative evaluation on the prototype. The initiative of Template-driven teacher modeling is to integrate the template server and intelligent teacher models in Web-based education systems for course authoring. There are a number of key components in the proposed system: user interface, template server and content repository. The Template-Driven Teacher Modeling (TDTM) architecture supports the course authoring by providing higher degree of control over the generation of presentation. The collection of accumulated templates in the template repository for a teacher or a group of teachers are selected as the inputs for the inference mechanism in teacher's model to calculate the best representation of the teaching strategy, and then predict teacher intention when he or she interacts with the system. Moreover, the presentation templates are kept to support the re-use of the on-line content at the level of individual screens with the help of Template Server

Automated Functional Testing based on the Navigation of Web Applications

Web applications are becoming more and more complex. Testing such applications is an intricate hard and time-consuming activity. Therefore, testing is often poorly performed or skipped by practitioners. Test automation can help to avoid this situation. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach to perform automated software testing for web applications based on its navigation. On the one hand, web navigation is the process of traversing a web application using a browser. On the other hand, functional requirements are actions that an application must do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correct navigation of web applications results in the assessment of the specified functional requirements. The proposed method to perform the automation is done in four levels: test case generation, test data derivation, test case execution, and test case reporting. This method is driven by three kinds of inputs: i) UML models; ii) Selenium scripts; iii) XML files. We have implemented our approach in an open-source testing framework named Automatic Testing Platform. The validation of this work has been carried out by means of a case study, in which the target is a real invoice management system developed using a model-driven approach.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208

Development of Telephone-based e-Learning Portal

The proliferation of mobile phones in Nigeria, particularly among the student community, has continued to inspire the development and delivery of e-Learning applications. Most of the existing web-based e-Learning applications do not support nomadic voice-based learning (i.e. learning on the move through voice), and consequently do not provide a speedy access to information or enquiries on demand. Internet access is required to get every bit of information from most school portal system, which is not directly available to everyone. Lack of provision for voice in the existing web applications excludes support for people with limited capabilities such as the visually impaired and physical disabilities. In this paper, we present a design and development of a prototype telephone-based e-Learning portal that will be used for course registration and examination. This study is part of an ongoing e-Learning project involving the following modules: enrollment, course registration and examination, enquiries/information, messaging/collaboration, e-Learning and library. The prototype application was developed using VoiceXML for the voice user interface(VUI), PHP for database queries, Apache as the middle-ware and MySQL database as back-end. A unified modelling language (UML) was used to model and design the application. The proposed e-Learning system will compliment the web-based system in other to meet the needs of students with a range of disabilities such as visual impairment, repetitive strain injury, etc, that make reading and writing difficult. It also makes multiple platforms available to all users as well as boosting access to education for the physically challenged, particularly the sight impaired in the developing countries of the world. In institutions where students are not allowed to use mobile phones or where cost is an issue, then the alternative is the use of PC-phone

The graphic user interface of the AudioGraph Recorder (PC version) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

With the popularity of the use of computers and the development of the Internet, many multimedia-authoring systems have been developed for computer-based teaching and learning. This is playing an increasingly important role in education. One authoring system is the AudioGraph project developed at Massey university of N.Z., which have been developed for recording audio-graphic presentation material for publication in an html reference environment, i.e. "on the web". One of the tools in the AudioGraph project is the AudioGraph Recorder, which is a Macintosh application for recording or authoring web-based multimedia presentations. Due to the success of the publication of the AudioGraph application and the need of PC users, an AudioGraph Recorder for the PCs is required. This project is about the porting of the AudioGraph Recorder from the Macintosh platform to the PC platform. First this project report explains the functionality of the AudioGraph Recoder (the Macintosh version), especially how the end users interact with the interface of the AudioGraph Recorder, and the corresponding state changes of the controls in the interface. Then the report compares the development tools used in both platforms. The Macintosh version of the AudioGraph Recorder has been developed with the PowerPlant framework in CodeWarrior environment, but the PC version uses MFC framework in Visual C++ 6.0. This report also describes in detail how the interface of the AudioGraph Recorder application was constructed with the MFC, and implementation of some functionality of the application. At the same time some internals of the MFC framework are discussed

Development and Evaluation of an Adaptive Hypermedia System Based on Multiple Student Characteristics

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia systems (AEH) are amongst the most recent types of application to provide individualised instruction to students who undertake online courses. Such systems attempt to adapt to how individuals learn by personalizing instruction for each individual student depending upon one or more “characteristics” of the student. Prior knowledge and learning style have been identified as being prominent characteristics in this process but AEH systems implemented to date have generally been limited to only employing one of these characteristics. Such systems have also been limited in that they are specific to a particular course content and cannot be easily adapted to present different learning materials. This thesis describes the development and evaluation of a new AEH system that provides a generic 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 (and hence as an independent variable in this study) has not previously been implemented or evaluated. A separate non-AEH system, identical to the AEH system except for the absence of adaptation to individuals, was developed in parallel as a control. 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 AEH system which was developed in a generic template implemented using Java Servlets, XHTML, XML, JavaScript and HTML. The generic template is a domain-independent AEH system that has functions of both adaptivity and adaptability. The system was evaluated in an experimental research involving 67 undergraduate engineering students in the Department of Electronics at Yogyakarta State University. The learning material of Analogue Electronics was implemented into both the AEH system and non-AEH systems under seven chapter headings. The participants were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. During the 9 weeks of experimentation, the students studied the learning material in two randomly allocated groups, an experimental group using the AEH system and a control group using the non-AEH system. A pre-test was administered to measure initial student knowledge. The student achievement was measured at the end of each chapter of material using a chapter test and at the end of the experimentation as a whole using a post-test. Basic statistical analysis of t-test and Mann-Whitney U were conducted to investigate any difference of student achievement between the two groups. A further detailed analysis using multilevel modelling was conducted to investigate any possible effects of the adaptive parameters on the student achievement. A total of 7 hypotheses were tested during data analysis. Research findings are described as follows. Students who learned using the AEH system performed better significantly than those who learned using the NON-AEH system. The implementation of test repetition as a function of knowledge adaptation in the AEH system increased student achievement significantly. This was found to be the prominent effect. When the effect of test repetition was removed, the implementation of learning style and multimedia mode adaptation in the AEH system was still found to have significant effect upon student performance. Students whose learning style and multimedia preferences were matched with the system (AEH or non-AEH) achieved better results. In terms of the relative merit of each contributing factor toward a student’s achievement, the order of the effects was found to be (1) knowledge, (2) multimedia, and (3) learning style. Whilst repeated knowledge testing is an established cause of improved performance, the positive effects on student performance of using multimedia artefacts over choice of learning style is a new finding

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia based on Multiple Student Characteristics

The learning process in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) environments is complex and may be influenced by aspects of the student, including prior knowledge, learning styles, experience and preferences. Current AEH environments, however, are limited to processing only a small number of student characteristics. This paper discusses the development of an AEH system which includes a student model that can simultaneously take into account multiple student characteristics. The student model will be developed to use stereotypes, overlays and perturbation techniques. Keywords: adaptive educational hypermedia, multiple characteristics, student model

Modelling mobile health systems: an application of augmented MDA for the extended healthcare enterprise

Mobile health systems can extend the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider by bringing services to the patient any time and anywhere. We propose a model-driven design and development methodology for the development of the m-health components in such extended enterprise computing systems. The methodology applies a model-driven design and development approach augmented with formal validation and verification to address quality and correctness and to support model transformation. Recent work on modelling applications from the healthcare domain is reported. One objective of this work is to explore and elaborate the proposed methodology. At the University of Twente we are developing m-health systems based on Body Area Networks (BANs). One specialization of the generic BAN is the health BAN, which incorporates a set of devices and associated software components to provide some set of health-related services. A patient will have a personalized instance of the health BAN customized to their current set of needs. A health professional interacts with their\ud patients¿ BANs via a BAN Professional System. The set of deployed BANs are supported by a server. We refer to this distributed system as the BAN System. The BAN system extends the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider. Development of such systems requires a sound software engineering approach and this is what we explore with the new methodology. The methodology is illustrated with reference to recent modelling activities targeted at real implementations. In the context of the Awareness project BAN implementations will be trialled in a number of clinical settings including epilepsy management and management of chronic pain

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration