PAPER for an Educational Digital Library

GeogDL is a digital library of geography examination resources designed to assist students in revising for a national geography examination in Singapore. As part of an iterative design process, we carried out participatory design and brainstorming with student and teacher design partners. The first study involved prospective student design partners. In response to the first study, we describe in this paper an implementation of PAPER - Personalised Adaptive Pathways for Exam Resources - a new bundle of personalized, interactive services containing a mock exam and a personal coach. The “mock exam” provides a simulation of the actual geography examination while the “personal coach” provides recommendations of exam questions tailored to suit individual ability levels. This paper concludes with findings from a second study involving teacher design partners to further refine GeogDL.Accepted versio

Design lessons on access features in PAPER

Using Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation, this paper reports a user study with six usability-trained subjects to evaluate PAPER’s access features in assisting users to retrieve information efficiently, part of an on-going design partnership with stakeholders and designers/developers. PAPER (Personalised Adaptive Pathways for Exam Resources) is an improved version evolving from an earlier implementation of GeogDL built upon G-Portal, a geospatial digital library infrastructure. After two initial evaluations with student and teacher design partners, PAPER has evolved containing a new bundle of personalized, interactive services with four modules : mock exam; personal coach (practice and review); trend analysis and performance review. This paper highlights lessons learnt in the design of PAPER using Nielsen’s heuristics, and discusses implications for the design of access features in digital libraries in general.Accepted versio

GeogDL: A web-based approach to geography examination

The traditional educational approach with students as passive recipients has been the subject of criticism. A constructivist learner-centered approach towards education has been argued to produce greater internalization and application of knowledge compared to the traditional teacher-centered, transmission-oriented approach. Nevertheless, contemporary instructional design models argue for the use and integration of both approaches especially in complex learning tasks. This paper describes GeogDL, a Webbased application developed above a digital library of geographical resources for Singapore students preparing to take a national examination in geography. GeogDL is unique in that it not only provides an environment for active learning, it also adopts a pragmatic approach to learning that recognizes the importance of examinations especially in the Singapore education system. The paper discusses the components within the system that permit teachers to facilitate active student learning, to draw interconnections, and to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration. GeogDL was pilot-tested on a group of secondary school students in Singapore and the results suggested the viability of the system and also provided direction for future development.Published versio