ABSTRACT
Delivering post-secondary education at a distance provides education to all interested parties regardless of age, location or educational background, learners can continue to learn throughout their lives. More students are finding on-going education is an integral part of their working years. This expanding emphasis on life-going education provides the impetus to expand distance education and to improve adopted techniques and delivery systems.
This paper discuses a new model and an implemented system for courses delivered on the WEB for distance education. The traditional method is printed textbooks and supported materials in printed form. As a response to new technology and to make advantag e of the widely accessible Internet, urgent research for possible techniques for delivering courses on the WEB is needed. Athabasca University, as a leader institute of distance education in Canada investigates different scenarios for electronic course de livery on the WEB (ECD-W). We, in Athabasca University, expect that electronic course delivery, specifically on the WEB, will make a significant contribution to education in general and distance education in specific over the next decade. As a result, th e Center of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics has a mandate to deliver all department courses on the WEB over the next two years.
However, the exact form of electronic courses is still evolving, but are expected to have a special flavor that distinguish them from printed material due to the different media. Learners do not expect to see course materials on the WEB that exactly ma tch what is in the printed form. An interesting electronic flavor is expected. ECD-W promises major improvements over the conventional course delivery, it promises to be interactive and intelligent.
This paper is designed with the objective of expanding our view of course delivery by presenting a new and untraditional model and structure of the course to be delivered. The system is unique in several aspects. First of all, it takes into considerat ion several teaching methods such as gradual increase in level of difficulty, verbal, animated and image protocols. Secondly, learners can ask for unlimited (practically, a limited large number) automatic generation of several learning material from libra ries. Thirdly, the interactive participation of the student and tutor. fourthly, the system is unique as it provide students at distance to share a common work place to discuss problems together interactively, and other features. This paper suggests what course coordinators and instructors can do to start delivering their courses on the WEB in an untraditional form.
Delivering post-secondary education at a distance provides education to all interested parties regardless of age, location or educational background, learners can continue to learn throughout their lives. More students are finding on-going education is an integral part of their working years. This expanding emphasis on life-going education provides the impetus to expand distance education and to improve adopted techniques and delivery systems.
This paper discuses a new model and an implemented system for courses delivered on the WEB for distance education. The traditional method is printed textbooks and supported materials in printed form. As a response to new technology and to make advantag e of the widely accessible Internet, urgent research for possible techniques for delivering courses on the WEB is needed. Athabasca University, as a leader institute of distance education in Canada investigates different scenarios for electronic course de livery on the WEB (ECD-W). We, in Athabasca University, expect that electronic course delivery, specifically on the WEB, will make a significant contribution to education in general and distance education in specific over the next decade. As a result, th e Center of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics has a mandate to deliver all department courses on the WEB over the next two years.
However, the exact form of electronic courses is still evolving, but are expected to have a special flavor that distinguish them from printed material due to the different media. Learners do not expect to see course materials on the WEB that exactly ma tch what is in the printed form. An interesting electronic flavor is expected. ECD-W promises major improvements over the conventional course delivery, it promises to be interactive and intelligent.
This paper is designed with the objective of expanding our view of course delivery by presenting a new and untraditional model and structure of the course to be delivered. The system is unique in several aspects. First of all, it takes into considerat ion several teaching methods such as gradual increase in level of difficulty, verbal, animated and image protocols. Secondly, learners can ask for unlimited (practically, a limited large number) automatic generation of several learning material from libra ries. Thirdly, the interactive participation of the student and tutor. fourthly, the system is unique as it provide students at distance to share a common work place to discuss problems together interactively, and other features. This paper suggests what course coordinators and instructors can do to start delivering their courses on the WEB in an untraditional form.
An overview of the system is introduced next.
The interface subsystem handles requests from students to:
The interface subsystem also handles requests from tutors to:
Next, the architecture of the system will be discussed. Also, this discussion will include functional description and behavior of each component.
Three different interfaces have been introduced to provide maximum flexibility to user. Feedback from users will determine whether the three interfaces should remain or a unified one is a better alternative.
The system cares for five main functions:This module starts by the graphical interface showing system main page on the WEB which is the opening screen of the system. Particular care has been given to the design of the user interface, where the graphic facilities has been extensively used. The main page, as in figure 1, is a diagram of all the courses offered by the department (currently there are about six courses ready on the WEB, but by the end of the two years period all the courses will be available). The user clicks on the course he desires.
1. retrieving / presenting: students may retrieve course teaching material to study it including more examples, and the system presents these material.
2. requesting / solving: students may request quizzes, exercises, final examinations and examples from libraries and solve them. The students may ask for solutions for exercises.
3. adding / modifying / marking: tutors may add to libraries more quizzes, examples, exercises and final examinations or modify existing ones. The tutor also needs to mark these on-line quizzes, exercises and examinations.
4. communicating: the systems facilitates the communication between students, between students and tutors, between tutors themselves.
5. providing answer wizard: this function helps students to inquire about different information stored in the system and also about services provided by the system. Inquires are expressed in natural English language without the need to learn specific step s.The Graphical interface is associated with the retrieving function, while the menu-driven is associated with requesting and adding/modifying functions. The semi-natural language interface provides answer wizards to students.
The first page of a course presents an animated moving picture for the author/tutor accompanied by his voice reading the general information listed in figure 4 and which appears a lso as written text on the corresponding page.
The facility is of help for two reasons, first, it gives the impression of an interactive and user friendly interface; secondly, since the instructor and students are apart, this helps students to locate their instructor by sight at meetings held by th e university (various photos for various tutors may be fed to the system in case the course has more than one tutor). This presentation module is available for any visitor to the system.
A Login boxes for students and authorized personnel are found on each course front page. Once the user logs in, he is faced with the subsequent screen. A student is faced with the teaching material subsystem (fig5) where as a tutor has the option of using the teaching material or tutoring subsystems.
A tutor may like to add to the existing libraries more quizzes, exercises,
examples or examinations, or he may like to modify the existing ones.
3.1.3. The Semi-Natural Language Interface
This interface takes the form of two windows (figure 6), the upper windows consists of words of the provided language. Words are divided into categories which a student or a tuto r may use to form sentence expressing his/her requirements. The Sentence is then parsed and understood by the system and the appropriate action takes place. This mainly provides an answer wizard to students. Inquires entered by students fall into two cate gories:
One of the features of this system is that its libraries are growing. When a student seeks many examples and he still did not understand he contacts his tutor, the tutor explains more examples which are then added to the examples library with an ident ification for each example to relate it to the appropriate section in the course. These new examples may be retrieved by other students also.
This growing facility of this library and all the other libraries is very helpful specially when a course has more than one tutor (the case occurs when many students enroll in the course and each tutor is assigned a number of students). Since the cours e has unified libraries, then any new examples added by a tutor are available to all other students supervised by other tutors. This enriches the explanation power of the system.
Each quiz has an identification number to relate it to the appropriate part of the course it is concerned with.
When a tutor inserts a quiz in this library, he also inserts model answers that may be retrieved by authorized personnel only (e.g. other tutors) to help in the marking process.
Again this library is a growing one since tutors may add more exercises. When a tutor inserts an exercise in this library, he also inserts model answers that my be retrieved only by authorized personnel (e.g. other tutors) to help in the marking proces s.
As the previous libraries, the final examinations library is a growing one since tutors may add more examinations with their model answers retrieved only by authorized personnel.
This library contains common bugs gathered from computer statistics and from tutor's observations of problem areas in quizzes, exercises (TMEs) and examinations. A Tutor uses these statistics and his observations of problem areas and add them to the bug library. When a student requests many examples on a point and the point is still un-understood, entries from the bug-library and which are related to that point are presented to the student.
The library contains sentences and phrases representing the above points, sound images for them are also stored and retrieved at certain points in the lectures. Such examples are:
Examples of (a) :
According to Schneiderman (1989), hypertext should be used when:This module consists (in its best case) of all material (found in textbooks and guide books) and being used by courses of the computer science curriculum. Since the department has a mandate to deliver all its courses on the WEB, then eventually all th e material will be in the form of pages on the WEB.
" - A large body of information is organized into numerous fragments
- The fragments relate to each other
- The user needs only a small fraction at any time"
Figure 7 shows a global overview of the contents
of the curriculum hypertext structure. There is no order for courses or
chapters within a course or sections within a chapter. Ea ch section is
a separate page. Each section is connected to the part of video tape corresponding
to for voice and pictures.
So any course is formed from a combination of pages with their related
items from other libraries.
Depending on the students selection of the course this module selects the appropriate pages from the curriculum, links them with appropriate of the video clip, sounding and examples from libraries to form a virtual course as discussed in the Lecture module presented in section 3.2.9.
Also, requests for more examples, quizzes, exercises and examinations
are done through this module.
Statistics about each student and blocks of students are presented
to tutors.
This module performs many activities such as:
One of the major new features of this component is that it is interactive. By interactive we mean that text is combined by sound and meta-communication sentences and phrases and that it tailors itself, to some extent by asking questions and matching an swers, to each user's learning needs. Also, in contrast to textbooks and guide books which list an example or two on a certain point, the system retrieves an example and demonstrate it to the student, if the student needs more examples, the systems retrie ves more examples and repeats this process until the student is satisfied or a reasonable maximum of examples has been demonstrated.
Once a user logs in a particular course, the main page of that course opens a digitized acting photo of the tutor appears combined with his voice reading the material being written.
The lectures main page has a box named STATE. This refers to what point this specific student with current Login has reached in his previous visits, and it is updated each time the student visits the course. If the student with current login has STATE = "empty" (when it is his first time to login), then the materials start automatically from the very beginning. As a feature of hypertext, which puts no restrictions on users to enforce reading a section before another, the student may start an y part of the material by clicking on the box representing it.
Although the material covered in Lectures is logical in sequence, but its physical structure is non linear (by definition of hypertext which is a major component of multimedia). However, the layout of the elements (e.g. chapters and sections) as a diag rams in Lecture's main page, intends to establish relation between them.
Also, the presentation of lectures is not the same for all students. In certain points where examples are to be presented, after each example the student is asked if s/he requires more examples, if so, more examples are retrieved from the examples libr ary. Retrieving of meta-communication sentences and phrases is triggered automatically to suit the current situation which varies from a student to another.
Also, at certain points in the lectures re-fresh questions are being asked. Re-fresh questions are inserted in the text, and aimed to keeps learners attention. Such questions as: "…..from the last two paragraphs, we conclude that there are tw o data types can do the job, aren't they ( Y/N)". If the students answered "Y" and "Y" is expected, then lecture continue. If "N" is expected, the student is presented with a justification to the right answer.
In addition, a new feature of the system and which facilitates the ability of the course to tailor it self to each user's learning needs is that when concepts or material covered in previous or pre-requisite courses are mentioned, the learner is asked whether s/he more information. If the answer is 'yes', then the page covering that piece of information is presented. Links to pages can be established easily since the whole curriculum is available in the form of pages. The learner may even be switched t o the pre-requisite course to make use of the examples available.
Communication between this module and other components such as the examples library is achieved through the hypermedia engine/controller.
Components of the tutoring sub-system are introduced next.
The subsystem personalizes the teaching dialogue to each student, in
addition, it requires the capacity to allow the student to take the initiative
by asking questions, offering explanations , or processing new problems
to the system.
It consists of the following modules :
a- a module capable of building an explicit representation of the learning
status of the student which allows the system to personalize the teaching
dialogue.
b- a list of possible teaching operations.
c- a set of means-ends guidance rules that execute teaching actions
on the basis of the student model.
d- a problem generator to select problems depending on the current
status of the student's knowledge. The problem is retrieved from a set
of problems that was created by the instructor. At the time of creation
of a problem, the instructor associates a de gree of difficulty with each
problem.
e- an advisory and explanation module that is a source of explanation,
suggestions and hints which the tutor supplies to the student.
f- a watcher that monitors the activities of the student and thereby
provides useful information for student evaluation and remediation.
The systems is Implementation of the system has started already. Due to the complexity nature of the system and to budget constraints, two features of the system (integrated recording of lectures and providing an integrated common workplace shared betw een students and tutors) have been left to a second phase. But un-integrated alternatives to these two features from market have been temporarily suggested as we shall see in section 5.
The implementation of these two features as integrated components of the systems has been considered for a subsequent phase for budget - but currently, users may use software from the market although they do not form an integrated part of the system:
Literature
Schneiderman, B. (1989) "Reflections on authoring, editing, and managing hypertext", in Barrett, E. (ed.): The Society of Text, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 115-131.
Leinhardt, Gaea and Ohlsson, Stellan (1990) "Tutorials on the Structure of Tutoring from Teachers" In "Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education" Vol. 2 (1) Fall 1990. pages 21-46
Nielsen, J. (1990) "Hypertext & Hypermedia". Academic Press, INC. USA.
December, J & Randall, N (1995) "The World Wide WEB 1996 Unleashed'
, 3ed. USA.
LeMay, Laura (1995). How to Create HTML in 14 days. Indianapolis, IN:
SAMS Publishing, 1994.
The WEB for course delivery?
http://web.cs.mun.ca/~rod/webcourse.html
World-Wide-Web Delivery of Educational Hypermedia
http://www.chem.vt.edu/archive/bcce96/1title.htm
(Size 1.0K)
Monologue - a text to speech synthesizer engine
http://www.firstbyte.davd.com/)
WEB - POWWOW
http://tribal.com/powwow/
Osama Shata
Assistant Professor, Dr.
Athabasca University
1 University Drive
Athabasca, Ab. T9S-3A3
osamas@cs.athabascau.ca
©, 1997. The author, Osama Shata, assigns to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
