Craig Stewart

Interoperability between AEH user models

Creating a good quality Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) system involves a great expenditure of time, effort and money, especially to author the materials in order to implement adaptivity. Moreover, authoring AEH systems is as hard as maintaining them. Furthermore, with the new advances in AEH development, the authored content in a given system can become outdated very rapidly. When the massive overhead in authoring is combined with the possibility of the current AEH system becoming unavailable due to lack of maintenance, providing interoperability of adaptive systems becomes necessary. This paper describes our research on providing interoperability of user models between different AEH systems via a one-to-one conversion between two AEH systems, MOT and WHURLE. Here, we identify the differences and commonalities and address how these influence the efficiency of the conversion of the two systems user models. Although this conversion is done via simple peer-to-peer interaction, it can be easily extended to make use of semantic web technologies, as for example RDF or XML conversion formats, or web services for user model exchange. Therefore, we consider that our work on feature extractions sets the basis for such conversions for the Web and Semantic Web.

Adapting for Visual and Verbal Learning Styles in AEH

This paper describes how visual and verbal learning styles have been successfully integrated into an adaptive educational environment. User trials of this system were carried out, to determine the effect of the adaptation, and although these user trials do not indicate any statistically significant differences, the qualitative information gleaned from the study indicated that students preferred using this environment over other traditional revision methods, and that they perceived personalized tuition to be better than a x91one size fits allx92 approach.

CAE-L: An Ontology Modelling Cultural Behaviour in Adaptive Education

The presentation of learning materials in Adaptive Education Hypermedia is influenced by several factors such as learning style, background knowledge and cultural background, to name a few. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the CAE-L Ontology for modelling stereotype cultural artefacts in adaptive education. The Ontology design is based on the user study gathered from the respondents to the CAE questionnaire which determines the cultural artefacts that influence a learner¿s behaviour within an educational environment. We present a brief overview of the implementation and discuss the stereotype presentation styles from three different countries, namely China, Ireland and UK.

Specification, authoring and prototyping of personalised workplace learning solutions

The main goal of this document is to survey the existing approaches for the authoring and engineering of personalisation and adaptation in e-learning systems. This document enables the comparison of various methods and techniques, and facilitates their integration or reuse. It offers a cohesive reference for people dealing with areas which rely on adaptive solutions.

Adaptation Languages for Learning: The CAM Meta-model

Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) can offer a richer learning experience, tailored to students’ needs. However, authoring of AH is complex. Several models and systems have been developed. However the adaptation that can be defined, is limited in terms of(re)-usability by educational authors. To simplify adaptive behaviour authoring, the solution considered most intuitive [7] is a visual environment. In this paper we specify the design of a visual authoring tool. We describe the implications this visual aspect has for the adaptation languages. This reflects lessons learnt from the experience of authoring project partners of the EUGRAPPLE project, hence is of interest to any designer or developer of reusable, general purpose adaptive e-learning system.

Adaptive educational hypermedia interoperability and content creation with a web service-based architecture

The take-up of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) by the educators has been slow, in part due to the complexity of authoring and the often short lifetime of the AEH software. AEH system interoperability can address these problems. This paper reports on a web services architecture for AEH interoperability that builds upon prior translation-based conversion processes between AEH systems. We describe a case study in the development of a web service using Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP that is capable of converting My Online Teacher (MOT) materials to Web-based, Hierarchical, Universal, Reactive Learning Environment (WHURLE). This web service is flexible and easily extensible, and represents the first step in developing an interoperable middleware for AEH conversions.

Cultural Artefacts in Education: Analysis, Ontologies and Implementation

Adaptive Web technologies are often used in distance learning scenarios with little regard for learnerspsila cultural background. The CAE questionnaire determines the cultural artefacts that influence a learners behaviour within an educational environment. This paper presents the CAE-L cultural ontology along with an analysis of three countries (China, Ireland and UK). This ontology is instantiated to determine their dasiacultural stereotypepsila which can then be used to define a layer of adaptation that traditional systems ignore.

Adaptivity, personalization, and the semantic web

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the fields of web engineering, adaptive hypermedia, semantic web technologies, knowledge management, information retrieval, user modelling, and other related disciplines which provide enabling technologies for personalization and adaptation on the World Wide Web. The workshop will consist of 6 papers (4 full, and 2 short), followed by a panel discussion.

Interoperable Adaptive Educational Hypermedia: A Web Service Definition

This paper presents an approach to resolve the problem of authoring and interchanging educational material, based on Web services. Here we describe the ultimate goal, of reusing and interchanging freely adaptive e-learning material, shortly sketch previous solutions, showing their benefits but also limitations and then introduce our Web-service based approach. Finally, we discuss the gains brought by our proposed solution