Apple W. P. Fok

PeRES: a personalized recommendation education system based on multi-agents & SCORM

Most E-Learning models proposed recently can offer personalized learning services for learners or make courseware reusable or portable. However, there are few models that can serve both purpose and none of them is designed to provide personalized services for both learners and instructors. This paper introduces an architecture of school-based personalized recommendation education system which can provide personalized services not only for diverse learners but also for instructors. In addition, it offers reusability and interoperability of courseware that is conformant with SCORM 2004 3rd Edition specifications. The architecture adopts multi-agents technology and consists of SIX software agents, which coordinate work hierarchy with each other to offer a range of primary functions that include static and dynamic users modeling, learning plan generation and adjustment, personalized content search, personalized recommendation, as well as real-time evaluation of learning progress. We provide the detail functional specification of these agents as well as a scenario walk-through of the architecture.

Educational Ontologies Construction for Personalized Learning on the Web

Educational resources available on the Web are invaluable learning objects that should not only be accessible, sharable and informative, but also reusable, constructive, and responsive to various pedagogical aspects. Using “Ontology”, the knowledge representation core of the Semantic Web, to organize, personalize, and publish learning resources and to discover, generate and compose learning objects has been widely proposed. In response to the diverse education needs, especially learning on the Web, this chapter addresses the issues and methodologies in the design and construction of education ontology and discusses the necessities of such an education ontology that can help retrieving, organizing, and recommending educational resources for personalized learning. Follow a systematic ontology construction approach, the design and implementation of a Personalized Education Ontology (PEOnto) will demonstrate the flexibilities of ontology usages in performing different education tasks as well as enhancing system extensibilities and exchangeabilities.

Personalized education: An exploratory study of learning pedagogies in relation to personalization technologies

High potential values drive the commercial sectors towards the rapid development of Personalization Technology. In response to individual needs, personalization in education not only facilitates students to learn better by using different strategies to create various learning experiences, but also caters teacher’s teaching needs in preparing/designing varied teaching/instructional packages. Empirical results show that using the technologies without regarding pedagogical concepts frequently lead to failure. This paper provides a detailed examination of the opportunities and necessities of Personalized Education (PE) from the perspective of different learning pedagogies. To optimize the benefits of meaningful personalization technologies, we also propose a Personalized Education System (PES) Framework and introduce several PES features that can support personalized teaching and learning under pervasive computing.

An Agent-Based Framework for Personalized Learning in Continuing Professional Development

In order to stay competent and update in the fast changing landscape of technological advances, professionals nowadays are expected to continuously upgrade themselves of professional knowledge and expertise in their respective fields. Many professional organizations stipulate that their members should take part in a minimum number of hours or training units of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) activities in order to stay qualified for their membership. The requirements of CPD for modern day professionals who are very much mobile and work within tight schedules point to the need of an asynchronous learning environment that provides a learner-centered approach and offers learners greater flexibility and choices. In this article we argue that “Personalization Learning” (PL) that exploits the abundance of information and elearning materials on the Web can be harnessed effectively to serve the diversity of CPD training needs. Moreover, we specialize in the concept of PL to Personalized CPD Learning and highlight the emerging technologies that are relevant to the development of personalized learning for CPD. We further proposed an agent-based architectural and conceptual framework for a Personalized CPD Learning Portal (Personalized-CPD) which integrates these technologies to provide supportive functions for professionals to conduct CPD activities in a personalized manner.

Hidden Markov Model Based Characterization of Content Access Patterns in an e-Learning Environment

Personalized education (PE) emphasizes the importance of individual differences in learning. To deliver personalized e-learning services and content, PE encompasses the abilities of identifying and understanding individual learners needs and competence so as to deploy appropriate learning pedagogy and content to enhance learning. In this paper, we introduce a hidden Markov model based classification approach to enable a multimedia e-learning system to characterize different types of users through their navigation or content access patterns. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is capable of assigning student users to their corresponding categories with high accuracies. The results of such classifications would find applications in adaptive user interface design, user profiling and as supportive tools in personalized e-learning

ENGOnto: Integrated Multiple English Learning Ontology for Personalized Education

In order to improve the performance of learners and instructors for exploring Web resources to meet the requirement of individuals English language development, we raise an ontology, which we called ENGOnto, that integrates multiple relevant ontologies for personalized agents to deal with dynamic changes of learners learning process, interaction between instructor and learner and learning resources in the environment of English language education. For this work, ENGOnto is a specification and description of the concepts and relationships in English language learning and teaching and it is the fundamental element which can facilitate to deliver information within agents and provide personalized services in PeRES which we have presented before. Moreover, we describe the process of generating dependency of knowledge points in the knowledge-point ontology and enable knowledge points forming a knowledge point network finally. ENGOnto can be used in the future for further research on personalized services provided by agents in PeRES such as personalized search, learning planning, learning activity sequencing, etc.

The realization and evaluation of a web-based e-pedagogy approach for english second language (ESL) learning in elementary schools

With the fast pace of innovations and development in Internet technologies, Web-based learning has become a major mode of dissemination of knowledge within modern educational setting. However, the effectiveness of using new technologies in education is increasingly controversial in the absence of a flexible E-pedagogical model that underpins the learning process. Addressing the pedagogical principles with formal classroom teaching practices, this paper presents the results of applying our proposed E-pedagogical model that has been incorporated into a Web-based English Learning System (WELS) for elementary English Second Language (ESL). Particularly, we compare the effects of guided and unguided learning through a web-based learning platform as well as demonstrate the effects on students’ participation and learning patterns through the design of suitable motivating schemes. Teachers’ feedbacks on crisscrossing pedagogy and students’ experiences on multi-dimensional learning opportunities with WELS will be explored and the potential values of a flexible E-pedagogical approach for web-based learning will be discussed.

Examining Teachers’ TPACK in Using e-Learning Resources in Primary Science Lessons

The advocates of technology in education have dramatically stirred up the life of teachers, requiring substantial changes to their practices and processes of teaching and learning. Yet, there are tendencies to merely introduce technology to teaching and learning without much understanding of the knowledge required for teachers to use the technology effectively and efficiently. This study refers to the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework to better understand the phenomenon of teachers’ integration of content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology in their teaching. In this study, e-learning resources of four science topics in Key Stage 2 of the Hong Kong primary curriculum have been designed and developed based on the resource-based e-learning environments (RBeLEs). A total of 19 teachers from six primary schools were invited to use these e-learning resources in their classrooms. Analysis of the teachers’ use of the e-learning resources can help to provide tangible understanding of how technology supports teaching and learning. The data collected included students’ pre/post lesson tests, lesson observations of teachers’ use of the e-learning resources, and teachers’ interview responses that provided useful information to enhance our understanding of how e-learning resources are used in primary classrooms.

Personalized Search of Educational Content Based on Multiple Ontologies

In this paper, we introduce the design of a personalized education (PE) search approach that employs multiple ontologies to automatically generate queries for educational resources retrieval based on a high level specification of the teaching/learning needs of a user. Central to this approach is the design of PEOnto which is an educational ontology that consists of FIVE interrelated ontologies that supports the delivery of various services in a personalized education system. We illustrate the feasibility of PEOnto design through a scenario walkthrough in the context of grade 4 English language learning

Ontology-driven content search for personalized education

Striving towards our education vision, Personalized Education, a Personalized Education System (PES) framework has been proposed [3] to exploit the vast amount of multimedia learning content on the Web. PEOnto, a fundamental component of PE, composes of multiple education ontologies to support communications among personalized education agents that provide a variety of PE services. Our research in PEOnto focuses on investigating techniques and a computation framework for supporting ontology-driven search and retrieval of multimedia learning content to meet various learning objectives.