Srinivasan Ramani

A student's assistant for open e-Learning

Students often need to go beyond the canned content provided by an e-Learning systems designer. A teacher usually suggests a supplementary corpus, traditionally in the form of books for optional reading and consultation. In an e-Learning context the supplementary corpus would consist of resources which are accessible over the Web, some specified by a teacher and some identified with the help of a search engine. The location of the resources is irrelevant as long as they are accessible over the Web. The paper offers a structured description of a students assistant designed to identify relevant information from the supplementary corpus. The users are students who indicate a need for help in specific e-Learning situations. Students learning styles and personalization issues are discussed in this context.

An Educational Resources Broker System for Collaborative Sharing of Knowledge-Centric Content

Widespread connectivity of the internet over PCs and Laptops has increased the use of the World Wide Web for educational purposes. There are educational resources broker systems based on educational meta-data standards, which search, locate and deliver educational resources. In this paper, we justify the need of a broker system that can also provide collaborative sharing of educational resources, along with knowledge representation behind those educational resources among and within educational institutions. This system especially caters to two usage scenarios: (a) one where it will assist students in locating resources and (b) one where it will assist students in exploring the concepts behind a given educational resource. We have described the systems functional and process architecture and provided some screens of the implemented system for both contributors and users. Finally, the systems educational implications are stated as summery of benefits along with future directions.