Development of Educational Ontology for C-Programming

Development of educational ontologies is a step towards creation of sharable and reusable adaptive educational systems. Ontology as a conceptual courseware structure may work as a mind tool for effective teaching and as a visual navigation interface to the learning objects. The paper discusses an approach to the practical ontology development and presents the designed ontology for teaching/learning C programming

Ontology-Based Open-Corpus Personalization for E-Learning

Conventional closed-corpus adaptive information systems control limited sets of documents in predefined domains and cannot provide access to the external content. Such restrictions contradict the requirements of today, when most of the information systems are implemented in the open document space of the World Wide Web and are expected to operate on the open-corpus content. In order to provide personalized access to open-corpus documents, an adaptive system should be able to maintain modeling of new documents in terms of domain knowledge automatically and dynamically. This dissertation explores the problem of open-corpus personalization and semantic modeling of open-corpus content in the context of e-Learning. Information on the World Wide Web is not without structure. Many collections of online instructional material (tutorials, electronic books, digital libraries, etc.) have been provided with implicit knowledge models encoded in form of tables of content, indexes, headers of chapters, links between pages, and different styles of text fragments. The main dissertation approach tries to leverage this layer of hidden semantics by extracting and representing it as coarse-grained models of content collections. A central domain ontology is used to maintain overlay modeling of students’ knowledge and serves as a reference point for multiple collections of external instructional material. In order to establish the link between the ontology and the open-corpus content models a special ontology mapping algorithm has been developed. The proposed approach has been applied in the Ontology-based Open-corpus Personalization Service that recommends and adaptively annotates online reading material. The domain of Java programming has been chosen for the proof-of-concept implementation. A controlled experiment has been organized to evaluate the developed adaptive system and the proposed approach overall. The results of the evaluation have demonstrated several significant learning effects of the implemented open-corpus personalization. The analysis of log-based data has also shown that the open-corpus version of the system is capable of providing personalization of similar quality to the close-corpus one. Such results indicate that the proposed approach successfully supports open-corpus personalization for e-Learning. Further research is required to verify if the approach remains effective in other subject domains and with other types of instructional content

Providing Students With Mobile Access to an Assessment Platform: Lessons Learned

The growing ubiquity, rich functionality, and relative affordability of mobile devices have been seen as opportune factors for implementing mobile learning solutions that can be used in a variety of contexts and domains. Plenty of successful mobile educational applications have been built. This paper describes an attempt to build on this success. The authors have investigated the use of mobile devices by students accessing assessment and self-assessment quizzes in the context of a university course. Two experiments were conducted with undergraduate students. The results of the first experiment were not successful, and initially, very few students used mobile devices. After several adjustments, during the second experiment, the usage of the system increased. However, the numbers were still much lower when compared to desktop access. This paper reports an investigation into the lack of mobile usage of the developed platform despite the educational affordances brought by mobile devices

The return of intelligent textbooks

The advancement of computational Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the recent decade has been transformative for many domains, including AI in Education. One direction, where it has caused a noticeable increase in research activity, is application of AI technologies to enhance digital textbooks by making them more interactive, engaging, adaptive, and intelligent. For many researchers coming into this field, it would have seemed as if an intelligent textbook is a completely new idea. We would like to provide a historic outlook on this field and outline the important phases that it went through over the last three decades. We hope that such an account can inform interested readers and help them better understand the problems and the approaches of intelligent textbooks

Intelligent Textbooks: The Fifth International Workshop

Textbooks have evolved over the last several decades in many aspects. Most textbooks can be accessed online, many of them freely. They often come with libraries of supplementary educational resources or online educational services built on top of them. As a result of these enrichments, new research challenges and opportunities emerge that call for the application of AIED methods to enhance digital textbooks and learners’ interaction with them. Therefore, we ask: How can we use intelligent and adaptive technologies to facilitate the access to digital textbooks and improve the learning process? What new insights about knowledge and learning can be extracted from textbook content and data-mined from the logs of students interacting with it? How can these insights be leveraged to develop improved intelligent texts? How can we leverage new language technology to manage and augment textbooks? The Fifth International Workshop on Intelligent Textbooks features research contributions addressing these and other research questions related to intelligent textbooks. It brings together researchers working on different aspects of learning technologies to establish intelligent textbooks as a new, interdisciplinary research field

Addictive links: The motivational value of adaptive link annotation

Adaptive link annotation is a popular adaptive navigation support technology. Empirical studies of adaptive annotation in the educational context have demonstrated that it can help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigational overhead, and encourage non-sequential navigation. In this paper, we present our exploration of a lesser known effect of adaptive annotation, its ability to significantly increase students' motivation to work with non-mandatory educational content. We explored this effect and confirmed its significance in the context of two different adaptive hypermedia systems. The paper presents and discusses the results of our work

Harnessing Textbooks for High-Quality Labeled Data: An Approach to Automatic Keyword Extraction

As textbooks evolve into digital platforms, they open a world of opportunities for Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research. This paper delves into the novel use of textbooks as a source of high-quality labeled data for automatic keyword extraction, demonstrating an affordable and efficient alternative to traditional methods. By utilizing the wealth of structured information provided in textbooks, we propose a methodology for annotating corpora across diverse domains, circumventing the costly and time-consuming process of manual data annotation. Our research presents a deep learning model based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) fine-tuned on this newly labeled dataset. This model is applied to keyword extraction tasks, with the model’s performance surpassing established baselines. We further analyze the transformation of BERT’s embedding space before and after the fine-tuning phase, illuminating how the model adapts to specific domain goals. Our findings substantiate textbooks as a resource-rich, untapped well of high-quality labeled data, underpinning their significant role in the AIED research landscape

Enriching Intelligent Textbooks with Interactivity: When Smart Content Allocation Goes Wrong

One of the main directions of increasing the educational value of a digital textbook is its enrichment with interactive content. Such content can come from outside the textbooks - from multiple existing repositories of educational resources. However, finding the right place for such external resources is not always a trivial task. There exist multiple sources of potential problems: from mismatching metadata to mutually contradicting prerequisite-outcome structures of underlying resources, from differences in granularity and coverage to ontological conflicts. In this paper, we make an attempt to categorize these problems and give examples from our recent experiment on automated assignment of smart interactive learning content to the chapters of an intelligent textbook in a programming domain