r-TOLA: an architecture for real time open learning application for universities

Obtaining degree from university requires rigorous findings and research. Some subjects/courses are very challenging that made it essential to form study groups among students. Besides attending regular lectures, it is demanding to manage time for study groups. As a result, most of the time, students perform below expectation in their academic activities. meanwhile, managing a central real time open learning application will help in maintaining group study easily as well as improve students’ academic performance. Hence, this paper proposes a Real Time Open Learning Application for University (r-TOLA) which consists of huge academic study group’s history that will, help students to dig into archives, search case studies, questions, projects and answers. This will also benefit lecturer to know the trend in students’ performance

Recommending Personalized Summaries of Teaching Materials

Teaching activities have nowadays been supported by a variety of electronic devices. Formative assessment tools allow teachers to evaluate the level of understanding of learners during frontal lessons and to tailor the next teaching activities accordingly. Despite plenty of teaching materials are available in the textual form, manually exploring these very large collections of documents can be extremely time-consuming. The analysis of learner-produced data (e.g., test outcomes) can be exploited to recommend short extracts of teaching documents based on the actual learner’s needs. This paper proposes a new methodology to recommend summaries of potentially large teaching documents. Summary recommendations are customized to student’s needs according to the results of comprehension tests performed at the end of frontal lectures. Specifically, students undergo multiple-choice tests through a mobile application. In parallel, a set of topic-specific summaries of the teaching documents is generated. They consist of the most significant sentences related to a specific topic. According to the results of the tests, summaries are personally recommended to students. We assessed the applicability of the proposed approach in real context, i.e., a B.S. university-level course. The results achieved in the experimental evaluation confirmed its usability

Highlighter: automatic highlighting of electronic learning documents

Electronic textual documents are among the most popular teaching content accessible through e-learning platforms. Teachers or learners with different levels of knowledge can access the platform and highlight portions of textual content which are deemed as particularly relevant. The highlighted documents can be shared with the learning community in support of oral lessons or individual learning. However, highlights are often incomplete or unsuitable for learners with different levels of knowledge. This paper addresses the problem of predicting new highlights of partly highlighted electronic learning documents. With the goal of enriching teaching content with additional features, text classification techniques are exploited to automatically analyze portions of documents enriched with manual highlights made by users with different levels of knowledge and to generate ad hoc prediction models. Then, the generated models are applied to the remaining content to suggest highlights. To improve the quality of the learning experience, learners may explore highlights generated by models tailored to different levels of knowledge. We tested the prediction system on real and benchmark documents highlighted by domain experts and we compared the performance of various classifiers in generating highlights. The achieved results demonstrated the high accuracy of the predictions and the applicability of the proposed approach to real teaching documents