Here we introduce Topolor, a social personalized adaptive elearning system aiming to improve social interaction in the

learning process as well as applying classical adaptation based on user modeling. Here, we focus on the system architecture and preliminary evaluation that showed high system usability

Al Qudah, Dana

Cristea, Alexandra I.

Shi, Lei

English

Lei Shi

Dana Al Qudah

Alexandra I. Cristea

Crossref

Designing social personalized adaptive e-learning

Warwick Research Archives Portal Repository

 http://go.warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications           Original citation: Shi, Lei, Al Qudah, Dana and Cristea, Alexandra I. (2013) Designing social personalized adaptive E-learning. In: ITiCSE 2013, the 18th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Canterbury, 1-3 Jul 2013   Permanent WRAP url: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/54270   Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes the work of researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions.  Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners.  To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.  Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.  Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.  A note on versions: The version presented here is a working paper or pre-print that may be later published elsewhere.  If a published version is known of, the above WRAP url will contain details on finding it.  For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: wrap@warwick.ac.uk  Designing Social Personalized Adaptive E-Learning Lei Shi Department of Computer Science University of Warwick CV4 7AL, Coventry, UK +44 24 7657 3797 lei.shi@dcs.warwick.ac.uk Dana Al Qudah Department of Computer Science University of Warwick CV4 7AL, Coventry, UK +44 24 7657 3797 d.al-quadh@dcs.warwick.ac.uk Alexandra I. Cristea Department of Computer Science University of Warwick CV4 7AL, Coventry, UK +44 24 765 73774 acristea@dcs.warwick.ac.uk  ABSTRACT Here we introduce Topolor, a social personalized adaptive e-learning system aiming to improve social interaction in the learning process as well as applying classical adaptation based on user modeling. Here, we focus on the system architecture and preliminary evaluation that showed high system usability. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education – Collaborative learning. General Terms Design, Human Factors. Keywords Social Learning, Adaptive E-Learning, Evaluation, Architecture. 1. INTRODUCTION Topolor is a social personalized adaptive e-learning system that has been used as an online learning environment for MSc level students in the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Warwick. It was designed based on the hypothesis that extensive social features, personalized recommendations and Facebook-like appearance of a system, would make the environment more familiar to the learners, positively affecting usability, as well as learning. This paper describes the system architecture and the primary evaluation of the system usability. 2. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Topolor (Figure 1) adopts a classical layered architecture (inspired by the Dexter model [1]), extended with a social flavor: a storage layer, a persistence infrastructure for physical entities; and a runtime layer, parsing adaptation strategies to present adaptive and/or adaptable learning materials, providing Web 2.0 tools for social interaction, and monitoring learners’ behavior. The main contribution is the combination of the Affiliate Model, Group Model and User Behavior Tracker Models, supporting adaptation and social interactions. Concept Model. This is a knowledge cell with the minimum granularity that contains metadata and concrete learning content. The metadata describes the basic information such as title and difficulty. The learning content can be stored as PDF or HTML. Course Model. This is a self-contain online course, which contains several Concept Models organized in a tree structure. Affiliate Model. This original wrapper model is affiliated to a Course Model or a Concept Model. It can be instantiated to be tag, like, share, comment, question, note and to-do, defining an infrastructure of simple interaction between learners. Adaptation ModelLearning Path Adaptation StrategyLearning Concept Adaptation StrategyLearning Peer Adaptation StrategyStorage Layer Rutime LayerUser BehaviorTrackerAdaptation Strategy Parser User InterfaceNavigationLayoutContentWeb 2.0ToolsMetadataCourse ModelConcept ModelContentMetadataStructueAffiliate ModelMetadataContentType§ Tag§ Like§ Share§ Comment§ Question§ Note§ To-doGroup ModelMetadataStructueUser ModelKnowledge SpaceCognitive PreferenceFigure 1. The System Architecture of Topolor User Model. This builds a learner’s preference and knowledge space, applying well-established mechanisms of overlay models. Group Model. This assembles a small set of learners who have the same learning goals, in order to strengthen their relationships and encourage social interaction. Adaptation Model. This contains the adaptation strategies that determine if and how to present entities such as courses, concepts and learning peers to the learners. Adaptation Strategy Parser. This combines and analyzes the adaptation strategies to provide the adaptive and adaptable user interface to learners. In particular, it determines if and how to present learning concepts, learning paths and expert peers. User Behavior Tracker. Explicitly modeled, it non-intrusively monitors the learners’ activities, analyzing their learning progress, and updating the user models in the storage layer according to the gained behavioral information of the learners. User Interface. This mainly consists of navigation menu, layout controller and presentation content. Its core components are the Web 2.0 tools that enable learners to create social annotation on learning contents as well as communicate with each other. 3. EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION Topolor was evaluated with the help of 21 4th year computer science students at the University of Warwick. We used the SUS [2] to obtain a global view of subjective assessments of usability. The SUS Score of Topolor is 75.75 (σ=12.36, median=76.25). Hence we claim that the usability of Topolor meets our initial expectation. A hands-on demonstration is planned to be shown next to the poster at the conference. 4. REFERENCES [1] Halasz, F., et al. 1994. The Dexter hypertext reference model. Communications of the ACM, 37, 2, 30-39. [2] Brooke, J. 1996. SUS – A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability Evaluation in Industry, Taylor and Francis. 

SUS – A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability Evaluation in Industry, Taylor and Francis.

The Dexter hypertext reference model.

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/54270/1/WRAP_Shi_sl-iticse2013.pdf

Designing social personalized adaptive e-learning

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