Paul Libbrecht

Methods to access and retrieve mathematical content in ACTIVEMATH

This article describes how mathematical content items and formulae are processed, retrieved, and accessed in ActiveMath. Central to the retrieval and access is a search tool which allows for searching text, attributes, relations and formulae, and presenting items. The search tool has been evaluated according to the standard measures of precision and recall as well as for usability. We report results of these evaluations.

A flexible and efficient presentation-architecture for adaptive hypermedia: description and technical evaluation

Means of achieving personalization in the Web are adaptive hypermedia techniques and the flexible composition of learning content from individual learning objects. If the objects are represented in a format different from the presentation format (e.g. as XML as opposed to HTML), a potentially expensive transformation process is required. Furthermore, caching becomes impractical depending on the degree of personalization, as the dynamic information is available at presentation time only and varies for each user. In this paper we present a flexible and efficient presentation pipeline based on a model-view-controller architecture, which overcomes performance problems and couples caching and personalization. It transforms single learning objects and uses a view-layer for adaptive presentation and navigation support that provides additional advantages such as incremental rendering and the easy adaption to different layout styles. Both theoretical and simulation results prove the efficiency of this architecture.

Culturally adapted mathematics education with A ctive M ath

Although it may seem that mathematics education material does not need any enculturation, the opposite is true. We report the results of a case study in several European countries and describe the different dimensions in which mathematics educational material has to be adapted to the cultural context of the learner. We describe the knowledge representation and mechanisms through which the user-adaptive learning platform ActiveMath realizes those adaptations to the language, countries, and communities of practice.

What You Check is What You Get: Authoring with jEditOQMath

jEditOQMath is an authoring tool for the intelligent learning environment Active Math. Its editing interface is a simple source editor. However the wealth and power of the authoring tool lies elsewhere, namely in its integration into the learning platform, so that authors design a great learning experience and not simply a great content editing view. In this paper, we describe the tool and propose to name its paradigm WYCIWYG: What you Check is What You Get. The instrumental approach of human computer interaction is applied to analyze the practice and to explain how the edited source becomes the instrument to communicate with the learning environment.

Automatic Inspection of E-Portfolios for Improving Formative and Summative Assessment

The concept of e-portfolio is finding an ever-growing uptake in secondary and post-secondary education as a tool to measure holistically the effects of learning. Learners document their development process in form of a collection of documents. In this research, we propose an automated method to support teachers in their assessment of e-portfolios by evaluating e-portfolios using automated analysis tools, which operate descriptively and semantically. A first formative evaluation of the system has been performed, to assess how much the quality portfolios are detected by descriptive indicators, which have proven to be already partially expressive. Delivered insights on e-portfolios were considered valuable by lecturers.

Let Me Do It: Towards the Implementation of Sustainable Instructional Patterns

We present the design of an online environment providing mechanisms for the exploitation of school ICT infrastructure by empowering teachers to discover and comment on educational activities (patterns, scenarios, experience reports) that can be implemented in their schools. To this end, our design approach will make explicit the linking between the patterns, the learning scenarios and other contextual information. The online environment will not only serve as a repository of educational activities but will help schools to analyze their infrastructure, to select proper scenarios that effectively exploit it and, potentially, to enrich these scenarios by commenting on them.