The pedagogical benefits of remote design collaboration in a 3D virtual environment

Researchers are beginning to explore the role of digital design collaboration within multi-user 3D virtual environments. In the latest installment of an ongoing remote digital design collaboration project with the Sydney University Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, the University of Queensland Information Environments Program (IEP) co-coordinated an online performance of T. S. Eliot's 'The Cocktail Party' in a 3D virtual world environment. This paper describes the process and pedagogical outcomes of early learners collaborating remotely in digital 3D media

Context-Aware and Adaptable eLearning Systems

The full text file attached to this record contains a copy of the thesis without the authors publications attached. The list of publications that are attached to the complete thesis can be found on pages 6-7 in the thesis.This thesis proposed solutions to some shortcomings to current eLearning architectures. The proposed DeLC architecture supports context-aware and adaptable provision of eLearning services and electronic content. The architecture is fully distributed and integrates service-oriented development with agent technology. Central to this architecture is that a node is our unit of computation (known as eLearning node) which can have purely service-oriented architecture, agent-oriented architecture or mixed architecture. Three eLeaerning Nodes have been implemented in order to demonstrate the vitality of the DeLC concept. The Mobile eLearning Node uses a three-level communication network, called InfoStations network, supporting mobile service provision. The services, displayed on this node, are to be aware of its context, gather required learning material and adapted to the learner request. This is supported trough a multi-layered hybrid (service- and agent-oriented) architecture whose kernel is implemented as middleware. For testing of the middleware a simulation environment has been developed. In addition, the DeLC development approach is proposed. The second eLearning node has been implemented as Education Portal. The architecture of this node is poorly service-oriented and it adopts a client-server architecture. In the education portal, there are incorporated education services and system services, called engines. The electronic content is kept in Digital Libraries. Furthermore, in order to facilitate content creators in DeLC, the environment Selbo2 was developed. The environment allows for creating new content, editing available content, as well as generating educational units out of preexisting standardized elements. In the last two years, the portal is used in actual education at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Plovdiv. The third eLearning node, known as Agent Village, exhibits a purely agent-oriented architecture. The purpose of this node is to provide intelligent assistance to the services deployed on the Education Pportal. Currently, two kinds of assistants are implemented in the node - eTesting Assistants and Refactoring eLearning Environment (ReLE). A more complex architecture, known as Education Cluster, is presented in this thesis as well. The Education Cluster incorporates two eLearning nodes, namely the Education Portal and the Agent Village. eLearning services and intelligent agents interact in the cluster

SyTroN: a virtual classroom for collaborative and distant e-learning systemby teleoperating real devices

Distant E-learning is a main issue nowadays, and it is strongly motivated by social and economical considerations. The increased people mobility and the reduction of educational costs push to develop ad hoc solutions enabling to access to knowledge regardless to geographical situation and economical capabilities. These parameters should not be limits for good training: learning material's pertinence and efficiency have to remain the core of educational activities. In this paper we address the problem through SyTroN: a tele-learning system. This system combines virtual reality and teleoperation techniques to offer an open platform with two main objectives. The first one is to propose intuitive virtual classrooms/desks, including a real teacher supervision and supporting collaborative and individual distant learning. The second goal is to place learners in real conditions with remote connections to real devices allowing distant experimentations. Both goals participate to increase learning impacts and to reduce costs, that is, sharing costly real devices from anywhere at any time. After 5 years of development, our work has been validated by an extensive use at a high engineering school. In situ tests and learning impact studies have been done. They show some advantages and some drawbacks of our global solution

Semantic model for mining e-learning usage with ontology and meaningful learning characteristics

The use of e-learning in higher education institutions is a necessity in the learning process. E-learning accumulates vast amount of usage data which could produce a new knowledge and useful for educators. The demand to gain knowledge from e-learning usage data requires a correct mechanism to extract exact information. Current models for mining e-learning usage have focused on the activities usage but ignored the actions usage. In addition, the models lack the ability to incorporate learning pedagogy, leading to a semantic gap to annotate mining data towards education domain. The other issue raised is the absence of usage recommendation that refers to result of data mining task. This research proposes a semantic model for mining e-learning usage with ontology and meaningful learning characteristics. The model starts by preparing data including activity and action hits. The next step is to calculate meaningful hits which categorized into five namely active, cooperative, constructive, authentic, and intentional. The process continues to apply K-means clustering analysis to group usage data into three clusters. Lastly, the usage data is mapped into ontology and the ontology manager generates the meaningful usage cluster and usage recommendation. The model was experimented with three datasets of distinct courses and evaluated by mapping against the student learning outcomes of the courses. The results showed that there is a positive relationship between meaningful hits and learning outcomes, and there is a positive relationship between meaningful usage cluster and learning outcomes. It can be concluded that the proposed semantic model is valid with 95% of confidence level. This model is capable to mine and gain insight into e-learning usage data and to provide usage recommendation

Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors

Girardin, F., Ayman, M., & Josep, B. (2007). Towards a practitioner-centered approach to the design of e-learning competence editors. In T. Navarrete, J. Blat & R. Koper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd TENComptence Open workshop 'Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastucture' (pp. 99-104). June, 20-21, 2007, Barcelona, Spain: TENCompetence.This article reports on the background research on requirements and current approaches to editors for learning curriculum designers. First we take a critique look at the state of the art in the domain of learning activity editors. We then look back in the information visualization and interaction literature to discuss the design challenged of such tools. From these current theories and applied works we define a set a rules that are crucial for the design of CDP editors based developed on top of complex e-learning models. Finally, we exemplify the set of design rules with a prototype integrating tightly coupled map-based and Gantt chart views.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org