Jun-Ming Su

Learning portfolio analysis and mining in SCORM compliant environment

With vigorous development of the Internet, e-learning system has become more and more popular. Sharable content object reference model (SCORM) 1.3 provides the sequencing and navigation to define the course sequencing behavior, control the sequencing, select and deliver of course, and organize the content into a hierarchical structure, namely activity tree. Therefore, how to provide customized course according to individual learning characteristics and capability, and how to create, represent and maintain the activity tree with appropriate associated sequencing definition for different learners become two important issues. However, it is almost impossible to design personalized learning activities trees for each learner manually. The information of learning behavior, called learning portfolio, can help teacher understand the reason why a learner got high or low grade. Thus, in this paper, we propose a learning portfolio mining (LPM) Approach including four phase: 1) user model definition phase: define the learner profile based upon pedagogical theory. 2) Learning pattern extraction phase: apply sequential pattern mining technique to extract the maximal frequent learning patterns from the learning sequence, transform original learning sequence into a bit vector, and then use distance based clustering approach to group learners with good learning performance into several clusters. 3) Decision tree construction phase: use two third of the learner profiles with corresponding cluster labels as training data to create a decision tree, and the remaining are the testing data. 4) Activity tree generation phase: use each created cluster including several learning patterns as sequencing rules to generate personalized activity tree with associated sequencing rules of SN. Finally, for evaluating our proposed approach of learning portfolio analysis, several experiments have been done and the results show that generated personalized activity trees with sequencing rules are workable for learners.

Constructing SCORM compliant course based on High-Level Petri Nets

With rapid development of the Internet, e-learning system has become more and more popular. Currently, to solve the issue of sharing and reusing of teaching materials in different e-learning system, Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is the most popular standard among existing international standards. In SCORM standard, the Sequencing and Navigation (SN) defines the course sequencing behavior, which controls the sequencing, selecting and delivering of a course, and organizes the content into a hierarchical structure, namely Activity Tree (AT). However, the structures with complicated sequencing rules of Activity Tree (AT) in SCORM make the design and creation of course sequences hard. Therefore, how to provide a user-friendly authoring tool to efficiently construct SCORM compliant course becomes an important issue. However, before developing the authoring tool, how to provide a systematic approach to analyze the sequencing rules and to transform the created course into SCORM compliant are our concerns. Therefore, in this paper, based upon the concept of Object Oriented Methodology (OOM), we propose a systematic approach, called Object Oriented Course Modeling (OOCM), to construct the SCORM compliant course. High-Level Petri Nets (HLPN), which is a powerful language for system modeling and validation, are applied to model the basic sequencing components, called Object-Oriented Activity Tree (OOAT), for constructing the SCORM course with complex sequencing behaviors. Every OOAT as a middleware represents a specific sequencing behavior in learning activity and corresponding structure with associated sequencing rules of AT in SCORM. Thus, these OOATs can be efficiently used to model and construct the course with complex sequencing behaviors for different learning guidance. Moreover, two algorithms, called PN2AT and AT2CP, are also proposed to transform HLPN modeled by OOATs into a tree-like structure with related sequencing rules in Activity Tree (AT) and package the AT and related physical learning resources into a SCORM compliant course file described by XML language, respectively. Finally, based upon the OOCM scheme, a prototypical authoring tool with graphical user interface (GUI) is developed. For evaluating the efficiency of the OOCM approach compared with existing authoring tools, an experiment has been done. The experimental results show that the OOCM approach is workable and beneficial for teachers/instructional designers.

An Iterative, Collaborative Ontology Construction Scheme

Nowadays, ontology of subject knowledge is applied for intelligent e-learning to provide learners with adaptive learning guidance and efficient learning content management. However, it is difficult and costly to construct an ontology for a given domain even though using the GUI tools. Therefore, how to propose an easy way to acquire the knowledge of experts, how to integrate these diverse opinions of experts into the consensus, and how to incrementally refine and converge the ontology to maintain the most suitable one have been paid attention recently. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose an Iterative, Collaborative Ontology Construction (ICOC) scheme. In each iteration, our proposed wild-like online ontology editor can help users collaboratively contribute their knowledge. Next, it automatically generates an appropriate questionnaire to converge the opinions of users to a new version of ontology using a Delphi-like method. The convergence process stops when all the relations are converged or eliminated by the questionnaire analysis. According to this ICOC scheme, the created ontology can be more acceptable.

Constructing an Immersive Poetry Learning multimedia environment using ontology-based approach

Chinese has a rise in popularity due to the spring up of the Chinese language education. In the poetry of the Tang Dynasty, there is a lot of information in the limited number of Chinese characters. Therefore, how to assist learners in understanding of the background story and emotional feature of poetry is a challenging issue. In this paper, to support the poetry appreciation learning, our idea is to provide the Immersive Poetry Learning with multimedia properties: the Vision such as scenic spot, the Reading with occasional poetry, and the Emotional Reinforcement such as background music. To construct the immersive poetry learning with multimedia environment, the Learning Context ontology, the Poetry Noun Ontology and the Music Emotion ontology are defined to annotate the context information poetry contents and music emotional properties. Thus, the Ontology-based Immersive Poetry Learning system can base on the learner contexts to generate the coherent poetry and music by the ontology mapping.

Adaptively Learning and Assessing SPSS Operating Skills Using Online SPSS Simulator

Online questionnaire is an emerging method for social science researchers to perform their survey. Although there are many data analysis software tools nowadays, such as SPSS, SAS, and Excel etc., to assist the students in analyzing the data of their surveys. However, the intentions of users for using the software tools cannot be probed and utilized to help the users operating them, so it will cause many errors on the students’ analysis results due to the misusage of software and result in that learning how to use the data analysis software tools based upon the students’ intentions becomes very time-consuming. Moreover, because the software operating procedures of the students are not recorded, the teachers cannot find out the students’ misconceptions. In this paper, we acquire the knowledge of using SPSS software and then apply the Simulator Generator concept proposed in previous research to build an online web-based SPSS software simulator for the students to emulate the operating process of SPSS software. Based upon the acquired frequent patterns of misuse, the teacher can design action routines embedded in the simulator to instantly detect the frequent error action patterns and help the students to rectify their misconceptions. Moreover, the teacher can trace and analyze the students’ learning statuses according to the logs generated from online SPSS Simulator. Using Simulator Generator, writing grammar rules is essential, but it is not easy for teachers. The knowledge of using SPSS software are largely identical but with minor differences. Thus, an SPSS Functional Ontology is proposed according to the features of SPSS software and the corresponding grammar rules are constructed in this research. Teachers just need to do some minor adjustments on the differences and the action routines, and then the new simulator will be generated automatically.

Collaborative Interpretative Service Assisted Design System Based on Hierarchical Case Based Approach

Museum is the important learning environment, which assists learners to learn directly from objects and living, and its interpretative services play an important role in museums to help learners learn more about the exhibitions. However, the development of intelligent interpretative services is costly, time consuming, and needs many kinds of domain knowledge. How to provide a platform to help experts of different domain work collaboratively to reduce the construction cost of designing an intelligent interpretative service for new requirements is an important issue. Thus, we propose a Collaborative interpretative service assisted design system (CISAD), containing requirement integration process to assist designers to collaboratively determine the requirements of the new service, and intelligent query processor to reuse previous successful application from coarse-grained to fine-grained to improve the reliability and reduce the construction cost of the solution application. Finally, we show an example to describe the construction process of an interpretative service for elder people by CISAD.

Collaborative Production Machine Choice System Based on Hierarchical Case Based Reasoning

New cell phone styles and technologies developments are changing quickly. To improve the ability of competition for a company, a new designed cell phone has to be available in the market in the short time. Therefore, production processes including manufacturing machine choice for a new cell phone product have to be determined quickly. Facing the lack of information, it is difficult to choose manufacturing machines for a production process for a new product. Thus, this study proposed a Collaborative Production Machine Choice System (CPMCS) based on a hierarchical case based reasoning approach to solve the problem of machine choice for new cell phone production. A real interaction system is built up also to help users for machine choice in this study. Using non-fixed number of new product features, this system can advise suitable machines for users by case based reasoning approach and help users to find out the right machines for production in the short time.

An Ontology Crystallization Approach to Designing Performance-Based Testing Scenario

The design of Performance-Based Testing is an interesting and important issue for the assessment of the students’ problem solving or inquiry process capabilities. In this paper, we aim to design a wiki-like authoring environment based upon the Performance Assessment Ontology to support the collaborative design. However, the ontology inconsistency and incompleteness issues become more serious when constructing the ontology collaboratively. Therefore, the Ontology Crystallization scheme is proposed to support the scenario design with collaborative brainstorming and social agreement evaluation. There are three phases which are concept boundary extension phase, ontology integration phase, and conflict resolution phase. The collaborative brainstorming is based on the sharing of designed ontology, and the conflict resolution is based on the modified Delphi Method with questionnaire based voting. To demonstrate our scheme, it is applied to the designing of the “Banana Farm” assessment scenario. Finally, the experiment and evaluation shows the effectiveness of the designed result.