Dynamic Conceptual Network Mechanism for a Web-Based Authoring System

To cope with the increasing demand of continued or distance learning, most universities are taking advantages of technology for their Web-based education. Since the target users who have the self-learning expectation and individual academic background are normally different from traditional classroom, student-centered course materials become critical. In fact, preparing Web-based course materials are very complicated and time consuming as the target users normally are in a very wide range. To the best knowledge of our understanding, most of existing course material editing facilities are quite primitive. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework for building of reusable student-centered course materials through 1) dynamic conceptual network mechanism for capturing the relationships among learning concepts to facilitate the author for reusing and interoperation with the course materials, and 2) intelligent knowledge base facilities, such as personal profiles, to help understand students’ behavior so as to provide studentcentered results to different learning groups.