SRECMATs - an intelligent tutoring system to deliver online materials for student revision

Abstract

The use of online course material is the approach adopted by most universities to support students’ revision, and teachers usually have the responsibility for designing or uploading online materials on their own course websites. However, some teachers might lack programming skills or motivation, and most current online materials are just uploaded in a static format (such as PDF) which is not suitable for all students. Moreover, during revision periods students may be faced with a lot of unorganised materials to be revised in a short period of time, and this can lead to an ineffective revision process. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a software framework that aims to maximise the benefit of current online materials when used to support student revision. This framework is called SRECMATs (Self-Revision E-Course MATerials) and has been deployed as a tool that allows teachers to automatically create an intelligent tutoring system to manage online materials without any programming knowledge, and to support students to navigate easily through these online materials during their revision. This paper evaluates the proposed framework in order to understand students’ perceptions with regard to the use of the system prototype, and the results indicate which features are suitable for providing online revision materials as well as confirming the benefit of the revision framework