Authoring gamified intelligent tutoring systems.

Sistemas Tutores Inteligentes (STIs) têm recibo a atenção de acadêmicos e profissionais desde da década de 70. Tem havido um grande número de estudos recentes em apoio da efetividade de STIs. Entretanto, é muito comum que estudantes fiquem desengajados ou entediados durante o processo de aprendizagem usando STIs. Para considerar explicitamente os aspectos motivacionais de estudantes, pesquisadores estão cada vez mais interessados em usar gamificação em conjunto com STIs. Contudo, apesar de prover tutoria individualizada para estudantes e algum tipo de suporte para professores, estes usuários não têm recebido alta prioridade no desenvolvimento destes tipos de sistemas. De forma a contribuir para o uso ativo e personalizado de STIs gamificados por professores, três problemas técnicos devem ser considerados. Primeiro, projetar STI é muito complexo (deve-se considerar diferentes teorias, componentes e partes interessadas) e incluir gamificação pode aumentar significativamente tal complexidade e variabilidade. Segundo, as funcionalidades de STIs gamificados podem ser usadas de acordo com vários elementos (ex.: nível educacional, domínio de conhecimento, teorias de gamificaçãoe STI, etc). Desta forma, é imprescindível tirar proveito das teorias e práticas de ambos os tópicos para reduzir o espaço de design destes sistemas. Terceiro, para efetivamente auxiliar professores a usarem ativamente estes sistemas, faz-se necessário prover uma solução simples e usável para eles. Para lidar com estes problemas, o principal objetivo desta tese é projetar uma solução computacional de autoria para fornecer aos professores uma forma de personalizar as funcionalidades de STIs gamificados gerenciando a alta variabilidade destes sistemas e considerando as teorias/práticas de gamificação e STI. Visando alcançar este objetivo, nós identificamos o espaço de variabilidade e o representamos por meio do uso de uma abordagem de modelagem de features baseada em ontologias (OntoSPL). Desenvolvemos um modelo ontológico integrado (Ontologia de tutoria gamificada ou Gamified tutoring ontology) que conecta elementos de design de jogos apoiados por evidências no domínio de e-learning, além de teorias e frameworks de gamificação aos conceitos de STI. Finalmente, desenvolvemos uma solução de autoria (chamada AGITS) que leva em consideração tais ontologias para auxiliar professores na personalização de funcionalidades de STIs gamificados. As contribuições deste trabalho são avaliadas por meio da condução de quatro estudos empíricos: (1) conduzimos um experimento controlado para comparar a OntoSPL com uma abordagem de modelagem de features bem conhecida na literatura. Os resultados sugerem que esta abordagem é mais flexível e requer menos tempo para mudar; (2) avaliamos o modelo ontológico integrado usando um método de avaliação de ontologias (FOCA) com especialistas tanto de contexto acadêmico quanto industrial. Os resultados sugerem que as ontologias estão atendendo adequadamente os papeis de representação do conhecimento; (3) avaliamos versões não-interativas da solução de autoria desenvolvida com 59 participantes. Os resultados indicam uma atitude favorável ao uso da solução de autoria projetada,nos quais os participantes concordaram que a solução é fácil de usar, usável, simples, esteticamente atraente,tem um suporte bem percebido e alta credibilidade; e (4) avaliamos, por fim,versões interativas (do zero e usando um modelo) da solução de autoria com 41 professores. Os resultados sugerem que professores podem usar e reusar, com um alto nível de aceitação, uma solução de autoria que inclui toda a complexidade de projetar STI gamificado.Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have been drawing the attention of academics and practitioners since early 70’s. There have been a number of recent studies in support of the effectiveness of ITSs. However, it is very common that students become disengaged or bored during the learning process by using ITSs. To explicitly consider students’ motivational aspects, researchers are increasingly interested in using gamification along with ITS.However, despite providing individualized tutoring to students and some kind of support for teachers, teachers have been not considered as first-class citizens in the development of these kinds of systems. In order to contribute to the active and customized use of gamified ITS by teachers, three technical problems should be considered. First, designing ITS is very complex (i.e., take into account different theories, components, and stahekolders) and including gamification may significantly increase such complexity and variability. Second, gamified ITS features can be used depending on several elements (e.g., educational level, knowledge domain, gamification and ITS theories, etc). Thus, it is imperative to take advantage of theories and practices from both topics to reduce the design space of these systems. Third, in order to effectively aid teachers to actively use such systems, it is needed to provide a simple and usable solution for them. To deal with these problems, the main objective of this thesis is to design an authoring computational solution to provide for teachers a way to customize gamified ITS features managing the high variability of these systems and considering gamification and ITS theories/practices. To achieve this objective, we identify the variability space and represent it using an ontology-based feature modeling approach (OntoSPL). We develop an integrated ontological model (Gamified tutoring ontology) that connects evidence-supported game design elements in the e-learning domain as well as gamification theories and frameworks to existing ITS concepts. Finally, we develop an authoring solution (named AGITS) that takes into account these ontologies to aid teachers in the customization of gamified ITS features. We evaluate our contributions by conducting four empirical studies: (1) we perform a controlled experiment to compare OntoSPL against a well-known ontology-based feature modeling approach. The results suggest that our approach is more flexible and requires less time to change; (2) we evaluate the ontological integrated model by using an ontology evaluation method (FOCA) with experts from academic and industrial settings. The results suggest that our ontologies are properly targeting the knowledge representation roles; (3) we evaluate non-interactive versions of the designed authoring solution with 59 participants. The results indicate a positive attitude towards the use of the designed authoring solutions, in which participants agreed that they are ease to use, usable, simple, aesthetically appealing, have a well-perceived system support and high credibility; and (4) we also evaluate interactive versions (scratch and template) of our authoring solution with 41 teachers. The results suggest that teachers can use and reuse, with a high acceptance level, an authoring solution that includes all the complexity to design gamified ITS

GaTO: An Ontological Model to Apply Gamification in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are concerned with the use of artificial intelligence techniques for performing adaptive tutoring to learners' according to what they know about the domain. Researchers are increasingly interested in applying gamification in e-learning systems to engage students and to drive desired learning behaviors. However, little attention has been drawn to the effective application of gamification in ITS, and how to connect theories of both concepts in a standard and formal way. Moreover, gamified ITS should manipulate a huge amount of knowledge regarding several models, i.e., gamification, domain, student and pedagogical models. Formally connecting such theories as well as representing system's knowledge relies on the use of ontologies. In this paper, we present an ontological model that connects gamification and ITS concepts. Our model takes advantage of ontologies to allow automated reasoning (e.g., on the domain, student, pedagogical or gamification models), to enable interoperability, and create awareness about theories and good practices for the designers of gamified ITS. To evaluate our model, we use an ontology evaluation method based on five knowledge representation roles. We also illustrate how it could support the development of an intelligent authoring tool to design gamified ITS

Wide-Scale Automatic Analysis of 20 Years of ITS Research

The analysis of literature within a research domain can provide significant value during preliminary research. While literature reviews may provide an in-depth understanding of current studies within an area, they are limited by the number of studies which they take into account. Importantly, whilst publications in hot areas abound, it is not feasible for an individual or team to analyse a large volume of publications within a reasonable amount of time. Additionally, major publications which have gained a large number of citations are more likely to be included in a review, with recent or fringe publications receiving less inclusion. We provide thus an automatic methodology for the large-scale analysis of literature within the Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) domain, with the aim of identifying trends and areas of research from a corpus of publications which is significantly larger than is typically presented in conventional literature reviews. We illustrate this by a novel analysis of 20 years of ITS research. The resulting analysis indicates a significant shift of the status quo of research in recent years with the advent of novel neural network architectures and the introduction of MOOCs

Innovative Education Environment and Open Data Initiative : Steps t owards User - P owered Society - O riented Systems

The economy is not keeping pace with the increasing speed of technological evolution. The inadequacy of the current system of education is a possible reason for this. Evolution forces us to produce experts for tasks and businesses which do not yet exist, to teach them technologies which have not yet been devised. The best way to produce experts is to accentuate the learner’s best abilities and skills, assess the learner’s potential and develop it further. We badly need revolutionary methods to facilitate intelligent personalization of study processes and approaches to make innovative education content more attractive and motivational for the learner. Advanced information management services and platforms play a valuable role in education process development, enabling new generations of students and education-related content providers to create, share, search, combine and deliver reliable and competent information. Earlier learner involvement in study content co-creation or personalization processes might dramatically increase student motivation and speed up the study process. Like any other products or services, e-Learning services need marketing to attract customers and make them a valuable source. To achieve a vision of ubiquitous knowledge, the next generation of innovative education environments will apply the achievements of the Open Data initiative and move towards learner-driven society-oriented systems. Therefore, this paper touches on different aspects of co-creative innovative education environment and correspondent e-Learning marketing strategies

Loki : the semantic wiki for collaborative knowledge engineering

We present Loki, a semantic wiki designed to support the collaborative knowledge engineering process with the use of software engineering methods. Designed as a set of DokuWiki plug-ins, it provides a variety of knowledge representation methods, including semantic annotations, Prolog clauses, and business processes and rules oriented to specific tasks. Knowledge stored in Loki can be retrieved via SPARQL queries, in-line Semantic MediaWiki-like queries, or Prolog goals. Loki includes a number of useful features for a group of experts and knowledge engineers developing the wiki, such as knowledge visualization, ontology storage, or code hint and completion mechanism. Reasoning unit tests are also introduced to validate knowledge quality. The paper is complemented by the formulation of the collaborative knowledge engineering process and the description of experiments performed during Loki development to evaluate its functionality. Loki is available as free software at https://loki.re

The Effect of the Kahoot Quiz on the Student's Results in the Exam

Students taking low-stake quizzes in a gamified environment shows improvement on their studies, thus has the potential to be an effective part in an improved learning experience. Previous researches show that implementing gamification into the educational system has positive outcome on the student's engagement, motivation and the overall experience of learning. In this study is a field experiment, where quizzes were created with the Kahoot application, to bring action and visual triggers into the classroom. The aim of this paper to measure the long-term learning effect of the Kahoot quiz in the exams. Several of the quiz questions during the class were purposefully blended into the exam's question bank as a multiple choice or a true or false question. In this research 200 bachelor students participated in a 14-week long elective course. The data was collected weekly from the Kahoot quizzes and from the two mandatory exams. All the results from the Kahoot quiz and the exams provided the base of the analysis. Furthermore, the exam results were analyzed based on number of Kahoot quizzes they took part, a comparison of the results of each question based. The results show that students who took part in more Kahoot quizzes tend to reach higher exam mark. Moreover, they marked more correct answers and less incorrect ones. As a conclusion, using some level of game-based learning has a positive effect on the student's results and perception of learning

DESIGN AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MODELS FOR SECURITY AND PRIVACY-SENSITIVE COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

Collaboration has been an area of interest in many domains including education, research, healthcare supply chain, Internet of things, and music etc. It enhances problem solving through expertise sharing, ideas sharing, learning and resource sharing, and improved decision making. To address the limitations in the existing literature, this dissertation presents a design science artifact and a conceptual model for collaborative environment. The first artifact is a blockchain based collaborative information exchange system that utilizes blockchain technology and semi-automated ontology mappings to enable secure and interoperable health information exchange among different health care institutions. The conceptual model proposed in this dissertation explores the factors that influences professionals continued use of video- conferencing applications. The conceptual model investigates the role the perceived risks and benefits play in influencing professionals’ attitude towards VC apps and consequently its active and automatic use

Adaptive Gamification in Collaborative systems, a Systematic Mapping Study

Mass collaboration mediated by technology is now commonplace (Wikipedia, Quora, TripAdvisor). Online, mass collaboration is also present in science in the form of Citizen Science. These collaboration models, which have a large community of contributors coordinated to pursue a common goal, are known as Collaborative systems. This article introduces a study of the published research on the application of adaptive gamification to collaborative systems. The study focuses on works that explicitly discuss an approach of personalization or adaptation of the gamification elements in this type of system. It employs a systematic mapping design in which a categorical structure for classifying the research results is proposed based on the topics that emerged from the papers review. The main contributions of this paper are a formalization of the adaptation strategies and the proposal of a new taxonomy for gamification elements adaptation. The results evidence the lack of research literature in the study of adapting gamification in the field of collaborative systems. Considering the underlying cultural diversity in those projects, the adaptability of gamification design and strategies is a promissory research field

Adaptive gamification in Collaborative systems, a systematic mapping study

Mass collaboration mediated by technology is now commonplace (Wikipedia, Quora, TripAdvisor). Online, mass collaboration is also present in science in the form of Citizen Science. These collaboration models, which have a large community of contributors coordinated to pursue a common goal, are known as Collaborative systems. This article introduces a study of the published research on the application of adaptive gamification to collaborative systems. The study focuses on works that explicitly discuss an approach of personalization or adaptation of the gamification elements in this type of system. It employs a systematic mapping design in which a categorical structure for classifying the research results is proposed based on the topics that emerged from the papers review. The main contributions of this paper are a formalization of the adaptation strategies and the proposal of a new taxonomy for gamification elements adaptation. The results evidence the lack of research literature in the study of adapting gamification in the field of collaborative systems. Considering the underlying cultural diversity in those projects, the adaptability of gamification design and strategies is a promissory research field.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad