This innovative practice WIP paper relates to the current age of advanced technology, characterized by innovations like 6G networks and multi-cloud environments, safeguarding cyberinfrastructure is of paramount importance. Simultaneously, the escalating cyber threats have exposed a significant shortfall in cybersecurity expertise. This research endeavors to develop an online intelligent training system known as “CyberSkiller.” The primary objective of CyberSkiller is to equip STEM undergraduates with the skills required to address the demands and opportunities within the cybersecurity domain. It seeks to empower individuals, leveraging their existing knowledge and backgrounds, through either augmenting their current skill set (up-skilling) or acquiring entirely new competencies (re-skilling). This work-in-progress paper presents the preliminary design of the CyberSkiller system.

Hybrid simulation in Health Care education is primarily focused on simulations designed to emulate a specific medical scenario. This paper presents a theoretical framework for the implementation of a configurable hybrid simulation approach using advanced technologies and human actors. This approach would provide higher education institutions with a flexible approach to hybrid simulations that could be used across multiple faculties for a variety of scenarios.

The literature reveals that the effectiveness of learning analytics (LA) tools is best evaluated with a mixed-method approach and not only with summative measurements such as grades. A recent study on the impact of an LA tool over academic performance did not substantiate its effect in improving grades for coding tasks despite qualitative comments of experimental group participants indicating that the tool was effective in improving coding competences in Java. In analyzing this viewpoint, this paper describes the impact of LA formative feedback on the growth of students' coding competences.

Designing an educational game can be a difficult task for individuals who do not have appropriate background towards game developments. Several game genres exist in the literature which can make beginners confused about which are the appropriate or required game elements and functionalities for a particular game genre. At the same time, many studies highlighted the effectiveness of mind-mapping techniques in enhancing learning and thinking task. Therefore, this study deploys the powerful graphical representation of Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram to present a mind-mapping guide for people who are developing educational role-playing games. A total of 1 13 students used the developed mind-mapping guide in a public Tunisian University, and the obtained results showed that the guide can: (1) significantly enhance beginner students’ level of knowledge regarding developing role-playing educational games; and, (2) promote the creative thinking when it comes to imagining educational role-playing game scenarios. Also, these results showed that students have a favorable attitude towards using the mind-mapping guide to learn and design their games.

Teachers frequently make errors when assessing music students. We propose a machine learning application that, given two performances of a piece of music, determines which performance is better, providing an objective and accurate assessment of progress. Several features are extracted from performances using music analysis algorithms, creating a vector of features for each performance. The vectors from two performances of a piece of music are subtracted from each other, and this vector of differences is input to a machine learning classifier which maps the vector to an assessment of progress. The implementation demonstrates that such a tool is feasible.

According to several researchers, games can be used successfully for learning mathematics. However, one of the major issues preventing games from being widely available is the difficulty in designing good educational games. In this paper, the authors address this problem by presenting a game designer's guide which incorporates suitable pedagogy for technology in the creation of mathematics learning games. This guide is based on a framework for integrating pedagogy with technology when developing content for learning mathematics. Several topics were chosen to be used with the guide when designing learning games. Some examples of using the guide are presented. The guide is used to improve the process of creating mathematics learning games by making the process of incorporating necessary pedagogy into the game easier.

This paper introduces a randomized study conducted among a group of 48 student Java programmers to assess the impact of learning analytics (LA) on their academic performance. The LA system design incorporated both cognitive and metacognitive tools to help learners take possession of their learning processes. Participation was voluntary and data about potential confounding factors were also collected to minimize bias by blocking on two or more factors (future work). This paper summarily explores the relationships between students' programming expertise, coding assignments, user experience and satisfaction, and academic performance. The results of this preliminary exploration are inconclusive as to whether the LA system made a difference in academic performance. Nevertheless, they seem to indicate that LA was beneficial to student programmers and that summative measures such as grades are not a proper metric to measure the usefulness of LA systems.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have recently received a great deal of attention from educational organizations. The benefit of MOOCs is that they provide free access to education that could lower down the cost of education. A MOOC have potential to provide much more advantage to the students than a traditional online course. Every student has diverse learning needs and it would be beneficial for students if they get chance to decide and take control of their learning. In this paper, we present a research to combine the potential of MOOC with the student-centered approach using a learning management system (LMS). Our preliminary study with students showed their acceptability and longingness for the above approach. In partnership with the project "My Moodle School", we developed courses that reflects the combination of MOOC perspective with that of student-centered approach. Our results of preliminary study suggested that the proposed approach could enhance students' learning recovery process.

Higher dropout and failure rates among computer science students in introductory programming courses tend to be a norm for many institutions. Years of evidence indicate that dropouts and failures persist in spite of advancements in pedagogy, technology, and teacher training. Most advancements have relied on summative assessments and of late formative assessments. This research explores assessments computed from real-time measures, based on observational data collected during student engagement with study and remedial activities. An experiment was conducted to measure the impact of real-time code assessment and dashboard-based feedback in the domain of Programming. Results indicate better course grades for a small percentage of students, and the need for task-level and meta-level interactions to guarantee significant and persistent academic performance and programming mastery.

Various research work have highlighted the importance of modeling learner's personality to provide a personalized computer based learning. In particular, questionnaire is the most used method to model personality which can be long and not motivating. This makes learners unwilling to take it. Therefore, this paper refers to Learning Analytics (LA) to implicitly model learners' personalities based on their traces generated during the learning-playing process. In this context, an LA system and an educational game were developed. Forty five participants (34 learners and 11 teachers) participated in an experiment to evaluate the accuracy level of the learners' modeling results and the teachers' satisfaction degree towards this LA system. The obtained results highlighted that the LA system has a high level of accuracy and a "good" agreement degree compared to the questionnaire paper. Besides, the teachers found the LA system easy to use, useful and they were willing to use it in the future.

Situation awareness is an emerging concept in ubiquitous environments, particularly the learning ones. Situation-aware systems aim to infer the user's situation from detected context. Given the fact that detected context information pieces are prone to sensors' quality, recent quality-awarecentred researches are basically interested in the evaluationof the quality of context (QoC). However, so far no attentionhas been paid to improve system awareness of the identifiedu-learning situation quality. In this paper, a new proposal for evaluating quality of situation (QoSi) is detailed. The proposition aims to compute QoSi by combining QoC of context elements used to describe the identified situation. QoC are weighted according to the weights attributed to the context elements on which the identified situation depends once all context elements do not have the same importance to describe the inferred situation. Illustrative example is given to show the applicability of the proposed solution in evaluating QoSi of Cooperative Data Collecting u-learning situation and its usage in learning resource recommendation.

Situation identification has become a major issue for situation-aware ubiquitous learning environments. The identification process aims to infer learner's situation by aggregating detected context information pieces. Most recent situation identification approaches are basically focused on crisp ontological modelling and reasoning. Given the fact that crisp ontology is not able to deal with context information imperfection, a new approach for situation identification based on fuzzy ontology is proposed in this work. The proposition aims to evaluate for any observed runtime situation a certainty degree relative to the recognition of a typical u-learning situation, known as situation pattern. The pattern relative to the highest certainty degree is triggered as the most appropriate pattern to the observed learning situation. Experimental results are given to show the applicability of the proposed solution for u-learning situation identification under imperfection and to show to what extend fuzzy ontology out performs crisp one.

This paper proposes a competence analytics framework called SCALE (Smart Competence Analytics on LEarning) and highlights how it can be applied to track the formation and development of learners' competences in the English writing domain. SCALE is essentially a generic competence analytics solution designed for all learning domains. This paper shows in detail how SCALE collects in a timely manner evidences to track the development of English writing skills. As new evidences come in, every competence will be re-assessed quantitatively so that every change in competence level can be recorded over time. Using an experimental dataset, the paper concludes by exhibiting a subset of insights possible with SCALE.

Integrating e-learning personalization systems in cloud computing environment is a relatively recent trend in technology enhanced learning. Cloud computing is a new model that allows users to access applications through Internet. It is characterized by several advantages such as reducing the cost of development, high availability of information, scalability and so on. In literature, several works have taken into consideration these advantages for applying this model in learning systems. However, very little research is available that focuses on selecting and assembling the best personalization parameters according to the teachers' preferences. This paper proposes a solution based on the cloud for the composition of personalization parameters with minimal cost. Through this solution, teachers can easily access these parameters from anywhere and anytime.

In this paper, the authors present an investigative process which can be used to enhance the design of mathematics learning games. Several techniques such as mathematics pedagogy and game design lenses [12] were studied in the development of this investigative process. Game design lenses are tools developed for examining game designs. The game design lenses were analyzed and mapped to several mathematics-specific teaching and learning theories. The authors present a mapping of the lenses to the learning theories and the resultant process investigates and incorporates suitable theories into a mathematics game design. This paper presents a process for incorporating necessary teaching and learning theories into mathematics learning games.

Recently, educational games are gaining increasing attention from researchers and practitioners in the learning field. This is because they are fun, motivating and immersive. However, designing educational games can be difficult for people who do not have appropriate background towards game development. This is further complicated by the fact that there are many genres of games (role playing, action, puzzle, etc.) and each genre has its own game elements and functionalities. This makes the game design process confusing, especially for beginners. This paper deploys the powerful graphical representation of Unified Modeling Language class diagram to present a generic model of educational role playing games. This model uses knowledge representation (game elements, functionalities and features) to support designing educational role playing games. Fifty eight game developers participated in evaluating the model and they have revealed its high perceived usefulness while designing educational role playing games. In addition, they reported that they were willing to use this model again in the future in their context.

In this paper, we describe a scalable learning analytics platform which runs generalized analytics models on educational data in parallel. As a proof of concept, we use this platform as a base for an end-to-end automated writing feedback system. The system allows students to view feedback on their writing in near real-time, edit their writing based on the feedback provided, and observe the progression of their performance over time. Providing students with detailed feedback is an important part of improving writing skills and an essential component towards solving Bloom's "two sigma" problem in education. We evaluate the effectiveness of the feedback for students with an ongoing pilot study with 800 students who are using the learning analytics platform in a college English course.

Analytics is all about insights. Learning-oriented insights are the targets for Learning Analytics researchers. Insights could be detected, analysed, or created in the context of variables such as the quality of interactions with the content, study habits, engagement, competence growth, sentiments, learning efficiency, and instructional effectiveness. Clustering techniques offer an effective solution for grouping learners using observed patterns. For instance, learners could be clustered based on the effectiveness of learners' self-regulation initiatives in reaching the target learning outcomes. Each learner could belong to a number of clusters that target different types of insights. One could also analyse the distance between clusters as a means to guide learners towards better performance. Further, one could analyse the effectiveness of cohesive peer groups within and among clusters. Traditional clustering techniques only cope with numerical or categorical data and are not readily applicable in offering learning analytics solutions. In addressing this gap, this research aims to design a Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PPSO) algorithm for the purposes of learning analytics, where the arrival of data is continuous, the types of data is both structured and unstructured, and the volume of data can be significantly large. The research will also describe the application of the PPSO algorithm to detect, analyse, and generate learning-oriented insights.

While accurate computational models that embody learning efficiency remain a distant and elusive goal, big data learning analytics approaches this goal by recognizing competency growth of learners, at various levels of granularity, using a combination of continuous, formative, and summative assessments. Our earlier research employed the conventional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based clustering mechanism to cluster large numbers of learners based on their observed study habits and the consequent growth of subject knowledge competencies. This paper describes a Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PPSO) based clustering mechanism to cluster learners. Using a simulation study, performance measures of quality of clusters such as the Inter Cluster Distance, the Intra Cluster Distance, the processing time and the acceleration values are estimated and compared.

The learner model is a key component of any adaptive E-Learning system, including educational games, as it stores the information about the learner, which can then be used to provide personalized experience. Recently, there has been growing interest in creating learner models using educational games. This is due to the limitations of traditional E-Learning systems, since the learner interaction with the computer is rather restricted in such systems. Educational games, on the other hand, not only stimulate learners by increasing their motivation and engagement, but also facilitate a lot of learner interaction that could be observed to create learner models. This paper presents a survey of the field of learner modelling using educational games. In particular, it describes the main methods of learner modelling. This paper also lists several educational games that are suitable for experimentation. Compiling this information can be important to the researchers and developers working in this field, especially to new researchers.

An adaptive learning system is able to consider students' cognitive characteristics and then provide them with personalized content, presentation, and navigation supports. Working memory capacity (WMC) is one of the important cognitive characteristics to keep active a limited amount of information for a very brief period of time. Students might forget the important information or the learning guidelines from their limited working memory among all the information available in learning systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a mechanism to provide students with suitable and timely recommendations in learning systems based on individual student's WMC. Six types of adaptive recommendations are used to remind and suggest additional learning activities to students based on their WMC. In this mechanism, we also consider different types of objects in different situations to suit different learning scenarios.

In this study, a multimedia e-book system is built and its use monitored in an empirical study investigating various factors which effect learners' reading preferences. 69 fifth-grade students participated in this experiment, one student with an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was excluded. After three weeks of learning activities, we found that there are differences in browsing patterns, navigation facilities, and annotation patterns in terms of gender. In the cognitive style, holists use bookmarks (tags made by the learner) to navigate more than serialists. Also, regarding annotation patterns, there are statistically significant differences related to the degree of the user's prior knowledge. Parts of the results are similar to those found in previous research, as well as some interesting findings. The findings of this study contribute a deeper understanding of the relationship between human factors and the usage of e-books. This understanding can be applied to develop adaptive e-books that can accommodate learners' individual differences.

Learning vocabulary is a very important part of learning a new language. It is vitally important for beginners and children to learn the keywords needed to understand what they hear and read, and to express their own ideas. Despite this importance, vocabulary acquisition stills the hardest part of the language and faces the problem of low motivation of learners. One of the effective ways of raising motivation and increase learners' desire to learn is to use learning games. This paper describes a learning version of memory match game specifically designed for second language acquisition. The objective of this learning game is to render the learning experience with more fun, to engage learners and to keep them motivated.

Recently, many works have investigated the identification of learner's working memory capacity (WMC) from his/her behavior in learning systems. These works used a mechanism, called dichotomic node network, able to create representation of the learner's WMC taking into account different theories from the literature. However, this mechanism could only provide a binary representation of learner's WMC (High or Low), whereas the WMC is estimated by 7 (plus or minus two) items. This paper presents an alternative based on fuzzy logic for precisely estimate the WMC of the learner while using learning system or playing educational games. The proposed approach can improve the accuracy of learner model and then enable the fine grained recommendations that positively affect the learners' learning.

In this paper, we analyze the co-authorship network of researchers who have published their joint work in Educational Technology & Society (ETS) Journal. The results of our analysis provided us with evidence that the ETS Journal co-authorship network is highly fragmented with a large number of non-connected subgroups of authors. Additionally, authors and collaborations of the ETS network have been polynomially increasing during the past 15 years.

Working memory capacity (WMC) is a cognitive trait that affects students' learning behaviors while performing complex cognitive tasks. Knowing students' WMC can positively enhance students' learning in many ways, for example, by providing them with adaptive content and activities to suit their individual WMC. This paper presents an approach for identifying students' WMC from their learning behaviors in learning systems. The approach as well as its implementation into an existing detection tool are introduced in this paper. The following six learning behaviors, extracted from the literature, are modeled to infer students' WMC: linear navigation, constant reverse navigation, performing simultaneous tasks, recalling learned material, revisiting passed learning objects, and corresponding learning styles.

Students' learning performances are susceptible to their cognitive abilities, such as working memory capacity (WMC). WMC is very limited and can be easily overloaded in learning activities that require complex cognitive tasks. This study aims to provide teachers with meaningful recommendations for designing and improving learning contents and learning presentation based on students' WMC. Our previous research successfully detects students' WMC from their learning behaviours in learning systems. This paper proposes the next step of providing meaningful recommendations to the teachers based on different levels of students' WMC. The recommendations are based on the guidelines of cognitive load theory that are intended to assist in presentation of information in order to reduce working memory overload.

Virtual Learning is a key enabler for giving equal opportunity to all throughout the globe. However, the pedagogical approach preferred by a group of learners may differ from another set of learners. By providing different pedagogical approaches through virtual learning, it is possible to satisfy the need of the learners, thereby improving the quality of learning. To identify the preference or choice of the pedagogy, the behavior of the learners is captured and analyzed. According to the understanding capability, the appropriate pedagogy is adopted for that learner. The conventional Learning Management System (LMS) plays a major role for achieving effective teaching and learning process. However, the conventional LMS fails to address the effective teaching and learning process by not providing the contents based on individual user's ability. The proposed work mainly intends to capture the data from students, analyze and cluster the data based on their individual performances in terms of accuracy, efficiency and quality. The clustering process is carried out by employing the population-based metaheuristic algorithm of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The simulation process is carried out by generating the data. The generated data is based on the real data collected from engineering undergraduate students. The proposed PSO-based clustering is compared with existing K-means algorithm for analyze the performance of inter cluster and intra cluster distances. Finally, the processed data is effectively stored in the Cloud resources using Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

In this paper, we describe a fully automatic learner modeling approach in learning management systems, taking into account learners' educational preferences including learning styles. We propose a learner model with three components: the learner's profile, learner's knowledge, and learner's educational preferences. The learner's profile represents the learner's general information such as identification data, the learner's knowledge implies the learner's interests on visited learning objects, and the learner's educational preferences are composed of the learner's preferences among visited learning objects and his/her learning style. In the proposed approach, all learner model components are automatically detected, without requiring explicit feedback. Indeed, all the basic learners' information is inferred from the learners' online activities and usage data, based on web usage mining techniques and a literature-based approach for the automatic detection of learning styles in learning management systems. Once learner models are built, we apply a hierarchical multi-level model based collaborative filtering approach, in order to gather learners with similar preferences and interests in the same groups.

The research team has leveraged the research conducted in recent Natural Language Processing studies and designed a computerized marking mechanism for marking students' short-answers based on the semantic meaning of those answers. An open access Auto marking web service has been developed to provide short-answer marking service for everyone. Auto marking service is also a self-sustainable complete online exam system which schools and teachers can use it to create their own item bank and tests, to manual and to auto mark students' answer sheets, and to review the results from various perspectives such as test, item, and individual student.

The ability for teachers to support students in an online learning environment has proven to be very challenging due to the limitations caused by physical distance and asynchronous communication methods. To this end, an educational decision support system is proposed in the form of an interactive dashboard to empower teachers with the ability to access student learning process information along with system's recommendations, in order for them to undertake well-informed educational decisions. This research focuses on a potential design and the tools available to construct such a dashboard.

This study presents a conceptual framework of applying mobile augmented reality technology on peer assessment to reduce the bounds of work reviews and assessment. According to mobile technology and augmented reality, students can show their design in various ways at di fferent places or in different situations. This paper proposes a novel mobile peer-assessment system which combines augmented reality with the reviewing and assessing processes. This framework enable s students to enhance work interpretation, frequently interact with peers, represent their thinking and reflect upon their own works. Furthermore, the mobile AR technique provides personalized and location-based adaptive contents that enable individual students to interact with the mixed reality environment and to observe how works are possibly applied to the real world in the future. The whole process assists students in reviewing works based on various dimensions, gaining proper knowledge, cultivating critical thinking skills and reflection as well as promoting meaningful learning.

Research in ubiquitous learning (U-learning) has gained attention of a large number of researchers and a number of ubiquitous learning systems are now available in the literature. Majority of these systems have been developed to resolve a specific problem in a given context; their development approaches do not dictate ubiquitous context usage requirements to fill in. U-learning systems developers need to have a clear and a general view of how their intended systems make use of the ubiquitous context. This paper introduces a comprehensive view of context usage through three different view-points inspired from Dowson’s work (Dowson, 1993) each one capturing a particular aspect of context handling. Then a set of facets is associated to each given aspect in order to study, understand and appropriately describe it. The findings of this research are aimed to provide context-aware u-learning system developers a clear understanding of the context usage in such systems and help in underlining the requirements of the u-learning environment. This research is also aimed to help in comparing and evaluating context-aware u-learning systems according to the descriptive system views.

Indigenous knowledge is the basis for many remote, rural, and marginalized communities in society and as such, is an important component in the educational development of members within these communities. Due to many reasons, including colonization and a lack of understanding by hegemonic societies, there is a risk of this knowledge disappearing from many communities. Additionally, many of these communities have different (for example, orally based) knowledge systems that are rapidly disappearing. There is a need for technological innovation to support the preservation and integration of this valuable knowledge into the educational model of these communities. This paper proposes a model for leveraging information and communications technology to assist in the gathering, storage, retrieval and inclusion of indigenous knowledge in culturally inclusive education.

In recent years, the term Open Educational Resources (OER) has emerged, aiming to promote open access to digital educational resources that are available online for everyone at a global level. This panel presents views from different countries on the development of open educational resource initiatives.

E-book readers have the inherent advantage of affording learners both mobility and convenience. They can be considered ideal pedagogical tools for supporting learners' reading activities. In this study, the reading strategies SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review) with the guidance mechanism were integrated into the e-book reading environment for assisting learners in their reading processes. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of the reading guidance mechanism on the performance of English reading comprehension. The results show that learners who received reading guidance achieved better reading comprehension than those who didn't. Learners can get real benefits from the reading strategies only when they do carry through the strategies.

Millions of text contents and multimedia published on the Web have potential to be shared as the learning contents. However, mobile learners often feel it difficult to extract useful contents for learning. Manually creating content not only requires a huge effort on the part of the teachers but also creates barriers towards reuse of the content that has already been created for e-Learning. In this paper, a text-based content summarizer is introduced to address an approach to help mobile learners to retrieve and process information more quickly by aligning text-based content size to various mobile characteristics. In this work, probabilistic language modeling techniques are integrated into an extractive text summarization system to fulfill the automatic summary generation for mobile learning. Experimental results have shown that our solution is a proper and efficient approach to help mobile learners to summarize important content quickly.

Working memory capacity (WMC) is a cognitive trait that affects students’ learning behaviors to perform complex cognitive tasks such as reading comprehension, problem solving, and making decision. Considering students’ WMC when providing them with course materials and activities helps in avoiding cognitive overload and therefore positively affects students’ learning. However, in order to consider students’ WMC in the learning process, an approach is needed to identify students’ WMC. To address this problem, we introduce a general framework to automatically identify WMC from students’ behavior in a learning system. Our approach is generic and designed to work with different learning systems. It connects to the learning systems’ database and extracts students’ behavior data to analyze them for indications about their WMC. The proposed approach has been implemented as an extension to a tool for detecting learning styles, enabling this tool to additionally identify students’ WMC. By knowing students’ WMC, teachers can provide meaningful recommendations to support students with low and high WMC. Furthermore, such information is the basis for designing adaptive systems that can automatically provide students with individualized support based on their WMC.

The harmony between the learning styles that a course supports and the actual learning styles of learners helps to magnify the efficiency of the learning process. The aim of this research is to present a framework for analyzing existing course contents in learning management systems and providing the teacher with information regarding how well the course supports different learning styles of students based on the Felder and Silverman’s learning style model. This allows the teachers to be aware of the suitability of their courses for students with different learning styles and to improve their courses to support more learners. This paper introduces the design and the implementation of the framework.

The growth of mobile technologies and devices has penetrated the world substantially over the last 5 years, and a large percentage of these users are young users. This introduces profound changes to traditional teaching practices which may initially be seen as low-key, but it will eventually create visible side effects in the education domain that cannot be ignored. As we push for effective instruction to be differentiated, we can use mobile technologies to enhance learning. This research will present the mobile device functions suitable for mobile learning and map it to learning topics of Ontario's K-6 Numeracy Curriculum.

Due to the geographical distribution, different cognitive capacity, and different domain competency of workers or learners, many misunderstandings can occur during distributed remote collaboration, leading to inefficient discussions and undesired results. To make remote collaboration more efficient and dependable, enriching cyberspace through adaptively utilizing multimedia information is proposed and evaluated. This assesses situations of remote users through information fusion of multiple biomedical sensors and the related contexts such as user profiles. Transmitting and using such information, the system adaptively supports the distributed remote collaboration by stressing, warning, and presenting keywords/summaries in multimedia. Effects of presenting keywords/summaries adaptively depending on situations and cognitive profiles of remote members are evaluated as to the decrease of not-/misunderstanding possibilities during the explanation on the Cyberspace. The evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed method.

Interactive whiteboard technologies (IWBs) are becoming pervasive in the school instruction in many parts of the world. The use of single screen based IWB environments are typically used by the teachers to attract interests of students and to interact with them. However, the available display space in such environments is a problematic issue for effective instruction. The research presented in this study looks into the use of IWB with an additional screen in order to extend the display space with the aim to increase the interests of students and interactions between teachers and students. Two investigations were undertaken to analyze the experiences of the teachers in the use of IWB. Based on the findings, this study presents a teaching assistance tool and suggests two teaching scenarios for teachers to support their teaching activities in a dual screen environment using IWBs.

Understanding the development of students' competence in writing poses significant challenges, given the complexity of the writing process, the skill levels of students, the types of writing activities offered to students, and the volume of data concerning writing as a whole. While language is taught from elementary school up to university courses and even beyond, the pattern of learning a language has remained much the same for decades. This proposal advocates that distributed social environments may provide a new paradigm for students to learn the discipline. Students need not be confined to just classrooms, they can engage in authentic learning in real-world or virtual-world scenarios. Further, whether real or virtual, the writing software itself can assume a proactive role in supporting not only the students but also the instructor. We emphasize the need for ubiquitous, situated, mixed-initiative writing support for students where underlying technology platforms can be extended to measure individual competencies, identify writing competency-gaps, and promote means to address these gaps. This proposal discusses several ideas, including peer feedback, collaborative writing, book annotation, integrated instructor interfaces for grading, and the effects of mixed-initiative, immersive, social and agent-oriented assessment on writing competence.

Teachers and course authors need to apply various instructional strategies in order to personalize their courses. It is not a trivial task and the time, the efforts and the learning objects needed for preparing personalized learning scenarios depend on the personalization strategy to be applied. This paper presents an approach for selecting appropriate personalization strategies according to the feasibility of generating personalized learning scenarios with minimal burden on the author. Two metrics are proposed for putting in order and selecting useful personalization strategies. The calculation of these metrics is automated based on the analyses of the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard according to the semantic relations between data elements and learners' characteristics.

The use of Open Sim as a platform for enhanced learning concepts incorporates a variety of desirable attributes. The platform supports mixed-initiative functions, may incorporate social networking like aspects and does so in an immersive engaging 3D environment appealing to game players. The ability to communicate with outside applications and the ability to connect virtual worlds through a Hyper grid offer exciting possibilities.

While today's learning management systems (LMSs) provide lot of support for teachers to assist them in holding online courses, they typically do not consider students' individual differences in the composition and structure of courses. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism for extending LMSs' functionality to provide learners with courses that fit their individual learning styles, using adaptive sorting and adaptive annotation in order to highlight the learning objects (LOs) that support students' learning process the best. The mechanism enables teachers to add adaptivity to their already existing courses, using a flexible course structure in order to avoid limiting the richness of the learning resources and materials. Besides being flexible to teachers' needs, the adaptive mechanism aims at asking teachers for as little as possible additional effort when using it, requiring teachers only to choose the corresponding type of LO when creating an LO in the authoring tool of the LMS.

Many students find mathematics a difficult subject. In the context of Caribbean countries, the failure rate in mathematics has been very high. This paper discusses the creation of a personalized game-based mobile learning application to assist secondary school students in improving their mathematical skills. The aim of this application is to motivate and encourage students to practise mathematics. The personalization part of the system helps students to navigate the system easily and recommends specific features of the application that may best suit them. The game aspect of the system aims at making learning fun.

This paper presents a collaborative mobile learning system: Mobile Virtual Campus (MVC) powered by the loction-based dynamic grouping algorithm. The MVC system has been developed to provide an innovative and interactive platform for online mobile learners by utilizing the location awareness and other built-in sensory compoments in mobile devices. On the platform, the mobile learners can learn collaboratively and interactively either at a distance or face-to-face in the mobile learning environment.

Lack of overall ecological knowledge structure is a critical reason for learners' failure in keyword-based search. To address this issue, this paper firstly presents the dynamic location-aware and semantic hierarchy (DLASH) designed for the learners to browse images, which aims to identify learners' current interesting sights and provide adaptive assistance accordingly in ecological learning. The main idea is based on the observation that the species of plants and animals are discontinuously distributed around the planet, and hence their semantic hierarchy, besides its structural similarity with WordNet, is related to location information. This study then investigates how different cognitive styles of the learners influence the use of DLASH in their image browsing. The preliminary results show that the learners perform better when using DLASH based image browsing than using the Flickr one. In addition, cognitive styles have more effects on image browsing in the DLASH version than in the Flickr one.

In order to better facilitate the social presence in an online classroom, this study attempted to build a model for measuring social presence and its relationships with other factors in online learning based on the social cognitive theory. A total of 535 valid samples were collected and analyzed from three schools in Taiwan. The results show that user interface and mediated communication have significant influences on social presence. User interface also has positive impact on mediated communication. Moreover, this study provided evidence that social presence has significant effects on interaction performance, and then interaction performance has significant effects on learning performance.

Social presence is considered as an essential element to promote social interaction. With the development of online synchronous learning, learners can conduct cyber face-to-face communication with other participants. When social cues are delivered by computer devices in real-time, it becomes a real possibility for students to experience actual learning atmosphere while still retaining the flexibility and convenience of online learning. However, the perceived social presence among learners is not the same for everyone. In order to better facilitate social interaction in a synchronous cyber classroom, this study explored what factors would affect social presence and verified if social presence has positive effects on learner participation and interactivity satisfaction. The results revealed that the major factors affecting social presence are intimacy, user friendliness, responsiveness, extroversion, and cue richness in a synchronous cyber classroom. Moreover, social presence was found to have positive effects on both learner participation and interactivity satisfaction.

Considering learning styles in technology enhanced learning seems to be a promising concept for making learning easier for students. However, contradictory opinions exist on this issue. In this paper, we aim at investigating the possible benefits of providing students with courses that fit their learning styles based on the Felder-Silverman learning style model, showing whether and for whom adaptivity can be helpful, how it can support students, and how effective adaptivity can be for students with particular learning styles. The results of the analysis, conducted with data from 147 students, showed that students with different learning styles benefit from adaptivity in different ways and extents. The findings provide deeper insights and help in understanding the effects and effectiveness of adaptive courses, considering different learning styles.

Most of the online courses nowadays are offered mainly in asynchronous mode, enabling students with the freedom of time and distance. Nonetheless, the drop-out rate for online courses is high. With online synchronous instruction students have both freedom of distance and punctuality of regular progress and the drop-out rate is found to be greatly reduced. However, there is a lack of online synchronous teaching pedagogies in the literature for teachers. This study aims to identify major issues that need to be considered in online synchronous instruction environments using observations of real online synchronous instruction in a physical setup. This paper then recommends some pedagogical guidelines for effective online synchronous teaching.

Remote collaboration has many benefits; however, due to the geographical distribution of learners, many misunderstandings can occur during interaction. For example, learners may miss the context of the discussion or do not hear parts of it, leading to inefficient discussions. In this paper, we propose an ldquoEnriched Cyberspacerdquo approach for dependable web based computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to overcome these problems. The system based on the approach assesses the situations of remote users through fusing information of multiple biological sensors and the related general contexts to enrich the cyberspace. A formative scenario evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of the approach for developing effective web-based CSCL systems.

Many misunderstandings can occur during remote interaction due to different user domain competency levels, different cognitive capacity of users as well as different user backgrounds. In this paper, we propose an adaptive keyword/summary presentation approach that aims at identifying potential misunderstandings of individual users and provide these users with effective and personalized content of the current discussion. Our approach is developed for virtual worlds and tested and implemented based on the Wonderland Project. In order to evaluate our approach, a practical scenario has been designed and tested, which demonstrates how the system enriches the cyberspace for collaboration by making adaptive use of keyword/summary presentation.

Several researches have demonstrated the effectiveness of graphical languages in knowledge representation and the numerous advantages of using graphs in the context of learning. On the other hand, many researches in the e-learning domain have focused on the personalization of learning materials by using adaptive educational hypermedia. However, most adaptive educational hypermedia systems do not benefit from the power of graphics because they do not use an expressive graphical language for presenting educational hypermedia to the learners. Our approach fills the existing gap between current educational hypermedia languages with the learnerspsila requirement of a standard graphical language for the visualization of adaptive hypermedia and the navigation through it. In this way, new possibilities are added to adaptive hypermedia expressiveness such as the presentation of the relations between concepts and the organization of these concepts in compartment allowing the arrangement of their semantics.

Making students aware of their learning styles and presenting them with learning material that incorporates their individual learning styles has potential to make learning easier for students and increase their learning progress. This paper proposes an automatic approach for identifying learning styles with respect to the Felder-Silverman learning style model by inferring their learning styles from their behaviour during they are learning in an online course. The approach was developed for learning management systems, which are commonly used in e-learning. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, a study with 127 students was performed, comparing the results of the automatic approach with those of a learning style questionnaire. The evaluation yielded good results and demonstrated that the proposed approach is suitable for identifying learning styles. By using the proposed approach, studentspsila learning styles can be identified automatically and be used for supporting students by considering their individual learning styles.

In order to explore why some learners have better learning effects with the simulation tool, and the others do not, the researchers used the quasi-experimental design and think-aloud method to investigate the relations between individual differences and learning effects from students’ learning processes with the simulation tool, Dynamic Simulation Assisted Statistical Learning (DSASL). The results show that the DSASL can correct the students’ misconceptions and enhance their concept understandings. However, there are individual differences in students’ learning effects when learning with DSASL. Finally, the researchers analyze the transcripts of think-aloud and find that the learning process may influence the students' learning effects.

This panel focuses on the development of specifications for new curricula for advanced learning technologies. A competency-based approach is used to specify curriculum at several levels, with initial attempts being made at the undergraduate curriculum.

Educational robotics has long been proved an effective tool to enhance teaching effectiveness in scientific fields such as mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. Teachers working in a robotics classroom, however, face difficulty in the identification of the needs for proper interventions to the students’ learning processes. To tackle this problem, we proposed and implemented an agency architecture which uses software agents to monitor the student activities and robot movements. The implementation is multi-agent based and distributed across a network of student terminals as well as the teacher terminal. As a result, both promising prospects and limitations are revealed in this implementation.

This paper presents an infrastructure for developing problem-based pervasive learning environments. Building such environments necessitates having many autonomous components dealing with various tasks and heterogeneous distributed resources. Our proposed infrastructure is based on a multi-agent system architecture to integrate various components of the environments. The infrastructure includes a location- and context-awareness service, a question and answer service, an adaptive mechanism; problem based ubiquitous learning models, social networking issues, and the evaluation of multimedia inputs. Furthermore, student modeling issues among components are considered. The design of the infrastructure as well as its components is discussed. This paves the way towards the development of pervasive learning applications.

A holistic-blended learning environment has been developed in which physical face-to-face, cyber face-to-face and cyber asynchronous blended models are synthesized into one holistic-blended learning model. Such a model enables teachers and learners to do two-way interaction asynchronously and synchronously no matter whether they are in physical space or cyber space. The aim of this research is to explore whether significant differences exist in terms of effects on classroom climate and learning effectiveness between physical face-to-face group and cyber face-to-face group. The research methodology includes surveys, interviews, and content analyses. The results show that although cyber face-to-face group has a larger change on classroom climate and learning effectiveness before mid-term and after final exam than physical face-to-face group there was no significant difference in learning effectiveness between the cyber face-to-face and physical face-to-face student groups. Furthermore, results show a positive correlation between classroom climate and learning satisfaction. This study validates the positive potential of implementing holistic-blended learning for higher education.

The purpose of this research is to develop a Web-based learning environment where teachers can provide subject content using SCORM simple sequence specification (SSS) mechanism with guided learning paths to cultivate learners' goal setting skills. This research investigates the difference in learning performance between the process goal and the outcome goal. The subject of the study is "division of decimals" in elementary school curriculum. The results show that there are no significantly difference in the aspects of learning scores and satisfaction between the process goal group and outcome goal group. Furthermore, the process goal group is more efficient than the outcome goal group in time spent for completing the learning objectives. Moreover, the learners who had a higher post-test score in the process goal group spent significantly less time to achieve the learning objectives than those who had a lower post-test score. However, there is no such finding for the outcome goal group.

The need to provide more holistic adaptivity to students has brought us to investigate the relationship between learning styles and working memory capacity (WMC). The aim of this investigation is to study the relationship between learning styles and WMC in order to get additional information about the students. This information can be used to make more holistic adaptivity possible by improving the student modelling process of both learning styles and WMC. An experiment with 297 participants was conducted. Findings suggest that relationships from WMC to the active/reflective, the sensing/intuitive, and the visual/verbal learning styles exist, whereas the suggested relationship from WMC to sequential/global learning styles could not be found.

Rapid developments in technology are presenting challenges to educational systems and programs in both their curricular content and pedagogies. As a consequence, programs for preparing educational technologists have to address a wide range of objectives and engage students who may have diverse backgrounds and subject interests. Drawing on our experience in developing such curricular themes and systems, the panel will raise issues for discussion which can include: (i) What curricular structures are needed? (ii) How does one get from new curriculum topics to programmatic learning activities? (iii) How can curricula accommodate flexibility in approaches to learning and teaching? (iv) What are appropriate models of assessment of student competencies? And (v) How might curricular changes affect support environments, institutions, and accreditation schemes?

In peer assessment, the awarding grades might not accurately reflect the students' achievement due to potential rating bias or individual abilities. The proposed methodology aims at aggregating students' ratings to reduce personal bias using agent negotiation. We consider individual learning styles of assessors into the negotiation process and show by an illustrative example and an experiment how the accuracy of assessment results can be improved through incorporating learning styles. The more accurate feedback provides students a better quality of assessment which enables them to reflect their effort and abilities.

Cognitive trait model (CTM) is a student model that aims to create profiles of learners' cognitive traits. Divergent associative learning (DAL) denotes the characteristic of learning that develops links between new and existing concepts. Relationships of DAL to divergent thinking and associative learning are examined in this paper. Manifestations of DAL are extracted from literature and used in CTM to create approximations of learners' DAL. A Web-based tool called Web-DAL was developed to measure DAL psychometrically in an empirical study. In this study, the comparison of the approximations of DAL and the psychometric data shows a promising sign of using the proposed CTM to profile learners' DAL.

Semantic web is an emerging paradigm that has great potential for the management of web content in a meaningful manner. With more and more semantic information appended to web, the web logs can be used to find valuable information about users. Their preferences, characteristics, cognitive capacity, or goals can be interpreted from the patterns of relations between traversed web nodes. A novel approach called semantic relation analysis (SRA) is proposed in this paper to harvest the new opportunities created by semantic web. In this paper, literature about navigational pattern analysis is presented. Example of using SRA in a learning system is also given. Empirical study about SRA showed promising results.

Web-based assessment is used in different contexts with the aim to support students and help to make learning easier and more effective for them. Typically, the individual characteristics and needs of students are used to personalize and customize existing approaches to assessment. In this paper, we show the potential of adaptive web-based assessment in different learning applications. We introduce adaptive systems in the area of readiness self-assessment, performance self-assessment, and peer assessment. We show how they incorporate individual differences and create adaptive applications.

Due to the rapid advancement of mobile communication technologies, many educators believed that these new technologies will have a great impact on the way of learning. By effectively applying shortmessage services as Learning Content Delivery (LCD) methods provided by mobile phone system to deliver content using different Learning Content Representation (LCR) types, M-learning can be implemented accordingly. However, the most important issue is whether this way can really achieve good Learning Outcomes (LOs) and be accepted by learners. This paper will explore the restraint of Short- Term Memory (STM) of psychological learning process through technology-mediated learning theory on assessing LOs. The finding of this study is to match different LCR types with different LCD methods to fit with learners’ different STM abilities would result higher LOs in M-learning environment.

Blended learning (BL) is a hybrid of classroom learning and online learning that includes the conveniences of online courses without the complete loss of face-to-face (F2F) contact. Advancements in communication technologies now allow us to have synchronous distributed interactions that occur in realtime with close to the same levels of fidelity as in the F2F environment. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand how to create effective BL experiences that incorporate both traditional instruction and online instruction. This article uses mathematics model to formulate the transactional distance to compare the interaction distance of traditional centralized F2F and synchronous distributed F2F. Transactional distance is then used to know about the communication gap between learner and instructor, content, and other learners. Finally, the paper verifies the validity of the transactional distance calculated through the mathematical model with the help of survey that elicits students’ perception towards those two environments.

Recent research has demonstrated the important of ontology and its applications. For example, while designing adaptive learning materials, designers need to refer to the ontology of a subject domain. Moreover, ontology can show the whole picture and core knowledge about a subject domain. Research from literature also suggested that graphical representation of ontology can reduce the problems of information overload and learning disorientation for learners. However, ontology constructions used to rely on domain experts in the past; it is a time consuming and high cost task. Ontology creation for emerging new domains like e-Learning is even more challenging. The aim of this paper is to construct e-Learning domain concept maps, an alternative form of ontology, from academic articles. We adopt some relevant journal articles and conferences papers in e-Learning domain as data sources, and apply text-mining techniques to automatically construct concept maps for e-Learning domain. The constructed concept maps can provide a useful reference for researchers, who are new to e- Leaning field, to study related issues, for teachers to design adaptive courses, and for learners to understand the whole picture of e-Learning domain knowledge.

Detecting the needs of learners is a challenging but essential task to be able to provide adaptivity. In this paper we present a tool that enables learning management systems (LMS) to detect learning styles based on the behavior of learners during an online course. By calculating the learning styles and filling the student model of LMS with such personal data, a basis for adaptivity is provided.

The IMS Learning Design Specification creates a standard XML format for modeling units of learning, which allows sharing of learning plans between educators using different learning management systems. This paper describes the implementation and formative evaluation of a prototype learning management system Voyager, which implements the data model and workflow of the IMS Learning Design Specification as closely as possible. Perceived benefits of such a system include the pedagogical benefit of a focus on learner activities rather than knowledge transfer, the ability for interaction between multiple learners and educators, and the flexibility of the IMS Learning Design model for different pedagogical approaches and differing levels of use. Problems encountered include the lack of specification and difficulty designing runtime functionality, the increased cognitive load of the unfamiliar theatre model for both educators and learners, and the complexity of the data model which lead to data redundancy and large amounts of data being created for even simple learning designs.

Teachers working in robotics classes face a major problem: how to keep track on individual students' or even small groups' progress in a class of 30-40 students. An agency approach to this problem is based on having sensors to monitor students' interaction, robots' movements, and the construction and programming process of robots. The design can be implemented with the Lego Mindstorms set using the IPPE programming environment. The designed architecture works well for monitoring small groups, but needs further work to support teacher's intervention to an individual student's learning process

The purpose of this workshop is to identify various issues that are pertinent to the development and delivery of content in the context of mobile devices. The workshop will focus on identifying ways to achieve reusability, interoperability, adaptivity of content delivery to the user and to the devices, and user friendliness while still focusing on pedagogical requirements and enhanced learning experiences.

Distance education involves providing formal education in a distance. Distance education is provided using different media and using different models. This paper outlines a distance education model that was developed to deliver distance education to island communities in Maldives. The distance education model described in this paper was designed for Maldives. The model is based on a three layered approach which does not require students Internet connectivity. This paper introduces an enhancement to this model using mobile technology. The enhancement will reduce the amount time taken to receive feedback from teachers. In addition, it removes an additional layer in the model.

We describe an approach that attempts to improve the quality of discussion forum discussions and to reduce the cost of discussion forum support by prioritizing and structuring messages. Learners prioritize and structure their own messages and evaluate the structure of messages posted by others, with an internal market in question priorities providing the driving force.

As a person learns, a significant amount of information and knowledge is accumulated, and a challenge faced by both instructors and learners is the ability to maintain a personal portfolio that manages this. Traditionally a variety of physical media such as, photocopies, images, and books were collected and personal observations and annotations were added. As electronic technology has advanced particularly on the internet, this has created some interesting opportunities. Web based portfolio systems fulfill some of the requirements and allow for the acquisition, management and retrieval of the information and knowledge. Once the portfolio has been captured, how can the information and knowledge contained within be extended and updated? This paper describes a framework that can be used to enhance a portfolio that allows both the owner and users to add annotations both in and out of context. A prototype system is described that has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of such a framework.

In this paper a data driven analysis of Felder-Silverman index of learning styles (ILS) is given. Results, obtained by multiple correspondence analysis and cross-validated by correlation analysis, show the consistent dependencies between some styles; some latent dimensions present in data, that are unexpected, are discussed. Results are then compared with the ones given by literature concerning validity and reliability of ILS questionnaire. Both the results and the comparisons show the effectiveness of data driven methods for patterns extraction even when unexpected dependencies are found and the importance of coherence and consistency of mathematical representation of data with respect to the methods selected for an effective, precise and accurate modeling

With increasing use of Internet in interacting with e-learning resources anytime and anywhere, and interaction possibilities among teachers and students from different parts of the world, it is becoming increasingly important that we exploit the Internet technologies to achieve the most benefits in the education. This paper describes the Cyber Schooling framework that has been created to identify different scenarios in which the technology is able to serve the learning process. The framework takes the much-familiar traditional school structure as the basis and attempts to enhance it by the use of technology to overcome shortcomings of traditional education and study without time and space restriction. The Cyber Schooling framework includes four elements: Cyber School, Cyber Classroom, Cyber Teacher Desk and Cyber Student Desk. This framework provides scenarios to overcome shortcomings of traditional education and enables learners to study in a familiar school-oriented environment.

Formal logic has been considered as one of the advanced topics in computing that students do not grasp easily. But the inherent nature of formal logic makes itself a natural choice for forming an overbearing organizing structure, which can be utilized in providing scaffolding during instructional process. This paper discusses the role of formal logic in teaching information science and information systems. We claim that formal logic can be used to realize the modern instruction design principles by ensuring activation of relevant prior knowledge and experiences when learner moves from one topic to another. The paper also describes the successful implementation and evaluation of an on-line teaching tool utilizing predicate logic notation to assist learners in mastering a difficult to learn Unix/Linux system administration command.

The increasing student-to-teacher ratio in university sector not only resulted in increased demand for automation of assignment marking and feedback but also raised concerns of increase in copying of assignments and cheating. This paper considers a solution to this problem and offers an assignment individualization model and an assignment allocation model taking into account the risks and the costs involved. The models open way for minimizing teacher workload required to achieve a given acceptable level of plagiarism risk.

In tertiary education some students find it hard to learn database design theory, in particular, database normalization. To address this learning dilemma, a prototype system was implemented to aid in exploring the potentials of knowledge management in teaching database normalization. This paper presents our findings based on the educational knowledge management (KM) system analysis, design, prototype implementation and evaluation.

With the improvement in technology and increasing bandwidth, synchronous solutions for instruction are becoming popular. They do not only provide savings in terms of time and cost, but also outperform asynchronous on-line instruction and even traditional face-to-face education in many circumstances. But the lack of pedagogical framework for synchronous instruction has till now affected the effective use of this medium. This paper describes an on-line synchronous learning model that aims to provide guidelines for teachers and students to conduct synchronous instruction. The model provides a broad range of scenarios to suit individual requirements and covers both synchronous lecturing and 'office hours' modes.

In the search of creating a representation, such as a cognitive trait model, of cognitive traits, such as working memory capacity or inductive reasoning ability, of a learner, it is hard to find a consensus model of the cognitive trait among different perspectives of cognitive science. Dichotomic node network (DNN) is developed to provide a viable solution to this problem. DNN is a network representation of an entity of which the constituents are nodes that is consisted of a pair of dichotomic attributes. Through the contradiction detection mechanism and inclusion resolution mechanism, DNN is able to: (1) represents of an entity contains multiple portrayals/perspectives; (2) select appropriate portrayals for any particular entity is very difficult or impossible; (3) handle nonlinear aggregation of portrayals in which combinations does not render result linearly, and therefore very suitable for cognitive trait model, and is potential for other applications.

Systematic approach to managing knowledge is an essential pre-requisite to enabling learners and knowledge seekers to access relevant material as and when it is required. Standard information retrieval mechanisms applied in on-line learning environments do not offer access to semantic relationships between knowledge items, and thus are unable to put query results in context. While ontology and semantic Web, which provide for semantic links, are increasingly used in business and research, their acceptance in e-learning is still at the preliminary stages. In this background, this paper develops a framework for a knowledge management system which uses ontology to enable efficient reuse and sharing of knowledge in a Web based learning environment.

We formulate an approach to adaptively structuring content for access via mobile devices, accounting for variations in communication channels, end-user device capabilities and user profiles. We apply it to automatically enforce the MRA recommendations for educational content delivery.

Metaphors play an important role in learning, and are understood in context of the learner's prior knowledge and culture. Therefore, there is a need to include metaphors adaptively. We introduce a conceptual model for metaphor adaptivity, and suggest an architecture allowing to enable metaphor adaptivity both in existing and in the future e-learning Web sites.

No matter which pedagogical method of delivery is selected by an instructor, there is a need to develop appropriate content for the learner. The content may be original, published or a combination of both. Published material may take many forms, and one form that is rapidly growing in popularity is that of a sharable learning object. Many repositories are being built where learning objects are stored for sharable access, and meta-data is added to give each learning object a context. Crafting a course of study may require a combination of sharable and personal learning objects. In many instances an instructor/facilitator may only require part of a learning object, such as an image, rather that the entire learning object. This paper describes a meta-data model that would standardize the description of a media resource, by tagging the resource with derived and annotated metadata. Further, this would allow the resources to be given-a context for efficient inclusion into a course.

Reusable active learning system for improving the knowledge retention and better knowledge management

To support the creation of quality online teaching material by nontechnical domain experts, the availability of intelligent specialized user interfaces is of an essence. We introduce a filtering algorithm allowing to constructively apply the multiple representation approach (MRA) best practice guidelines for media object combinations, so that educational content units are brought in compliance without any effort on the part of the user. Content enrichment based on MRA filtering is illustrated by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype.

Situated learning is known to be an effective didactic approach, yet, multimedia systems with built-in support for it are uncommon. We analyze the domain-independent requirements for such a system, formulate a high-level architecture, apply it for the domains strongly relying on the use of mathematical formulae involving dimensioned quantities, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype. The results of our work will be of benefit for the future development of multimedia systems supporting situated learning.

Reuse of teaching resources is recognized to be essential for cost-effective development and maintenance of online teaching environments. We offer a novel approach to the reuse and sharing of online teaching unit designs, based on serving unit templates in a distributed environment. The approach suggested will increase the level of reuse, simplify and speed up material creation by nontechnical domain experts, and promote the availability of teaching materials in a variety of formats.

Knowledge management (KM), as one of the means to obtain better knowledge acquisition, is not new to educational organization. The existing KM applications play a role in student learning, however they are not consistently targeting the mission of efficient and effective learning needs. The purpose is to present an integrated view of "smooth and pleasant" combination of the KM and search engine in terms of online usability both in technical and functional aspects.

Currently there is no ITS application tailored to the need of mobile users. This paper provides a pioneering work in mobile ITS which intends to address the competency framework of a mobile ITS. The competency framework includes the mobile device identification, users device preference adaptation, content adaptation, and user model adaptation.

This paper discusses the limitations of PBL environments and introduces the student adaptivity technology into PBL environments to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the learning process. A web-based prototype is implemented by using PHP, MySQL and Apache, and uses the accounting as subject domain. With the system, students work on the real world costing calculation problems, and the system evaluates students' performance results on the problems to provide adaptation to the students.

Decades of intelligent tutoring systems research has only produced hopes and potential prototypes; in reality, such systems have failed to prove their usefulness in wider academic environment. There seems to be a gap between the delivered research output and the needs of actual educational process. This discussion recommends that a paradigm shift is required in the research and design process of intelligent tutoring systems to involve implementing teachers, and to design these systems as tools for teachers rather than as replacements.

This research looks into developing a distance education model for Maldives. This paper gives an overview of the literature that leads to the model and a brief discussion on the design of the model at its current phase.

The unparalleled advancement in information and communication technology has led to extensive use of the Internet in the learning environment. Creation and distribution of knowledge on such a phenomenal basis has in fact trapped the learner's ability to digest and filter the superabundance of knowledge. In this background, this paper looks at the applicability of knowledge management in learning environment to enhance the learning systems and efficient use and reuse of available information.

This research is focused on the use of knowledge management techniques to develop reusable web-based intellectual assets to leverage the learning process for individual learners. The literature review reveals that corporate solutions of knowledge management are not directly applicable due to the lack of adaptivity needed to provide individualized feedback to the learner, and their localized nature that does not directly deal with authentication and verification of distributed information. Architecture has therefore been formulated for the knowledge management system that specifically supports web-based learning.

Presents a client-server approach to student modelling that is implemented using agent technology. The student model is divided into client and server parts to facilitate adaptivity in various configurations, such as online, offline and mobile scenarios. The implementation of this approach to student modelling is discussed in the TILE (Technology-Integrated Learning Environment) project, which is researching, evaluating and developing an integrated system for education at a distance, with powerful adaptivity for the management, authoring, delivery and monitoring of such material.

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have not yet proved very successful and one major reason seems to be that research on ITSs has largely failed to recognize the role of the teacher in the ITS design process. The paper discusses an ongoing project at Massey University, which is incorporating a 'Human Teacher Model' in an ITS prototype to teach Japanese. The project identifies the teacher attributes and formulates them into a coherent teacher model. They are then applied in the prototype, which offers adaptivity to the teacher at two levels: presentation based adaptivity and navigation based adaptivity. We believe this work will substantially improve the applicability of ITSs in real academic environments.

This tutorial deals with the cognitive skills based adaptive educational environments - an approach to designing tutoring systems that has been very effective, especially within applied domains where the learning is predominantly concerned with acquiring operational knowledge. Since such environments can accommodate both the 'instruction' and 'construction' of knowledge and actively engage the learner, they have been successful. This is evident from the popularity and wide acceptance of simulation based tutoring systems. This tutorial aims to demonstrate and discuss various aspects of actually implemented systems, with a view to provide intelligent educational system developers and implementers with the knowledge they need in order to make informed decisions about such environments.