Advances in Web-Based Learning – ICWL 2013

Publications are a crucially important factor in our research. In recent months the traditional model of scholarly publishing has started to change with low-cost online publishing, open access and – most recently – data-sharing or open data. This keynote examines these changes and looks at the approaches that are being taken to optimise the new arrangements and some of the as yet unforeseen, and possibly undesirable, consequences.

A dynamic student-teacher interaction during class is an important part of the learning experience. However, in regular class settings and especially in large classrooms, it is a challenging task to encourage students to participate as they tend to be intimidated by the size of the audience. In this paper, in order to overcome this issue, we present SpeakUp, a novel context-aware mobile application supporting the social interactions between speakers and audiences through anonymous messaging and a peer rating mechanism. Context-awarness is achieved by bounding interactions in space and time using location-based authorization and message boards with limited lifetime. Anonymity is used as an icebreaker, so students dare writing down any question that pops in their heads. Peer rating is used to make it easy for teachers to access the most relevant ones and address them. We performed an evaluation with 140 students over five four-hour lessons that indicate that SpeakUp is easy to use and is perceived as useful.

By introducing computer-assisted identification technique into the evaluation system design for elementary and junior high schools, the users gestures, acquired through cameras, are transformed into effective interactive information, which is further applied to the digital evaluation system. Such a new-styled interactive method is expected to enhance the communication model between the learners and the information system. Without touching any interactive devices, the users can communicate with the system through gestures, from which the messages are determined and compared through image processing to further control the system interaction. The integration with an evaluation system could promote the education popularity.

The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate the effects of multi-image presentation system (MIPS) on student learning achievement and satisfaction in the college English as second language (ESL) course. This paper utilizes the MIPS, based on Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML), to present the recording/recorded facial movements of both teacher and practitioner on the same screen. This means to improve the vocabulary learning by effective pronunciation practice. The instruction supported by MIPS was compared with a traditional English teaching using whiteboard. An experimental research design was employed and 59 freshmen from an institute of technology in Taiwan were involved in this study. Evaluation of the instruction was based upon data from test scores and questionnaire related to student learning satisfaction. The results revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the students in experimental group and control group on measures of learning achievement and satisfaction.

“Holodeck” was appeared in the fictional StarTrek universe and show up in a movie name “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” It is depicted as enclosed room simulates objects and people as the interactive virtual environment look like a real world such as a living room, an outdoor environment and etc. This study applied this concept to enhance smart classroom into an interactive learning environment classroom name “Holodeck classroom”. This paper presents a framework for presentation and assessment in Holodeck classroom. We designed an interactive framework using Microsoft Kinect Sensor for e-Learning, created new items of gesture-based questions in supporting QTI-based assessment, and created a rich set of gesture commands for practical usage in classroom. Proposed system was experimented with teachers and students then collected users’ satisfactory feedbacks by usability questionnaire. And also evaluate the system functionality by comparing the proposed system with other related studies. The results shown the significantly participants’ satisfaction indicate that the system is simple to use better functionality and motivate student learning by assessment.

This paper presents the findings derived from a series of EC-financed projects aimed at supporting web-based learning in rural communities and other remote areas of Europe. The findings are mainly based on the case studies of ten pilot local learning hubs in the Beskidy Mountains, Poland. The results of four subsequent projects supported by different EU programs and conducted from 2006 to 2013 contributed to this study. These projects were conducted in Poland and 16 other countries of European Research Area (ERA). We will present the learning and research goals as well as the predominant learning scenarios. We will also show how innovative local social networks emerged to foster web-based and blended learning. A common feature of all the learning hubs was the need to use DVB-RCS bidirectional satellite internet technology for learning. We will present a multicriteria performance evaluation of the learning hubs in connection with their learning goals, adopted scenarios, and future development prospects.

Educational scenarios and learning objects are growing in scale and functionality. Because of this increase in complexity, the likelihood of subtle errors is much greater. One-way to achieving this proposed goal is by evaluation of these course-wares. In this paper, we propose a formal method which is mathematically based languages, techniques and tools for specifying and verifying. Using the automata theory do not a priori guarantee correctness and success. However, they can greatly increase our understanding of the learner’s behaviour with the existing scenario by revealing inconsistencies, ambiguities and incompleteness that might otherwise go undetected. Our goal, in this study, is to prove how this formal definition helps designer in his evaluation’s task.

National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) has implemented Moodle as the official, campus-wide Learning Management Systems (LMS) since 2009. In order to understand and investigate the level of acceptance of Moodle by students, we conducted surveys across the campus in January of 2012. This research will analyze the relationships between the students perceived of Moodle as well as the relationships in regard to its frequency of use. Data on the frequently used functions of the system by the students will also be analyzed. In order to explore further factors such as teaching method, department, and school policies that may influence the students’ sense of utilization on the system, a case analyzing a contrasting student body from University of Minho, Portugal (UM), will be utilized to compare with NTNU’s case. The results could act as a reference point for universities around the world that are trying to assess and promote LMS.

One of the major challenges in tertiary education is to design the lectures such that students will be motivated to attend and get really interested which will ignite their passion for knowledge. For this regard, City University of Hong Kong has proposed to apply a discovery enriched curriculum (DEC) in developing teaching and learning activities to encourage students discover knowledge that is new to the students themselves. In this paper, we shared our experience about how the DEC was adopted in an introductory course on webpage programming to some freshmen students who had diverse technical backgrounds. Some webpage examples made by the instructor were used to stimulate students’ interest. These examples were designed so that they were related to students’ daily life to illustrate how things around them could be implemented in practice. The class has recorded a relative high attendance rate of around 75%. The relation between the average quiz marks and the number of lectures attended by the students was examined and the result indicated that the students who attended more lectures tended to obtain higher average quiz marks.

E-Learning systems should be based on systematic pedagogical approaches and well-designed procedures and techniques. However, current literature on several areas of technology-enhanced learning environments, such as online information security (InfoSec) laboratories still lack well-specified pedagogical approaches and concrete design principles. In information security education, hands-on lab exercises play a major role in learning. Distance education brings in new challenges as the hands-on exercises require now virtual labs, which need to be accessible anywhere and often also anytime. This creates technological and pedagogical challenges, which are not fully understood in terms of explicit design principles that would enhance implementation and use of on-line educational labs. To contribute to this knowledge gap the paper describes five initial design principles:

contextualization, collaboration, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability

. The principles are based on a literature review, contextual interviews and observations at a European University. The initial concretization of the principles adopts the pedagogical approach of Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), which is deemed to represent a good fit to the contextual goals for developing on-line security labs in the context of the target university. Further research for actual design of virtual InfoSec labs, adopting the action design-based research tradition to develop learning environments, is needed in order to concretize, to test and to elaborate these design principles.

Virtual learning environments (VLE) provide up-to-date education and training for individuals, and in some cases they can generate personalized feedback based on the learner’s performance. Unlike other VLE’s available to-date, the learning system developed in this work extends the basic instructional and assessment capabilities of a typical VLE by dynamically creating a cloud-based computer laboratory that is needed by Computer Science students. Specifically, the basic capabilities of Moodle are enhanced by developing two new modules: a virtual lab module (VLM) and a study progress module (SPM). VLM utilizes Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based web services technology in order to create a personalized experimental environment especially suited for Computer Science students although the same concept can easily be applied to other disciplines. SPM, on the other hand, evaluates student progress in terms of specific learning objectives and offers personalized guidance using the Apriori data mining technique. An implemented cloud-based Internet Application Development laboratory highlights the advantages of the proposed approach.

Development of conceptual knowledge is an important part of education. In individualized instruction this aim can be facilitated by concept maps interconnected with learning materials. Traditional adaptive web-based e-learning systems use a closed and static corpus, which is predefined in the design time. But there is plenty of learning resources publicly available on the Web, which provide a huge potential for learners. Obviously, it would be very useful to have an opportunity to choose for a particular context a suitable concept map that could dynamically access selected learning repositories and enable an intuitive navigation in both the concept and document layers, as well as between them. We have attempted to develop a solution that is based on the principles of open corpus adaptive educational hypermedia and at the same time can be part of a personal learning environment. The outcomes show that this may be a promising approach, but its usefulness is highly dependent on the usability and flexibility of the e-learning application.

In this study, in order to support and facilitate the web-based learning, we concentrate on user learning behavior pattern discovery in a task-oriented learning process. Based on a hierarchical graph model which can describe relations among learning actions, learning activities, learning sub-tasks and learning tasks, we introduce the formal definitions for Learning Action Pattern and Goal-driven Learning Group to discover and represent users’ learning behavior patterns within a learning task process. Two integrated algorithms are developed to calculate and generate the Learning Action Patterns for an individual user and the Goal-driven Learning Groups for a number of users, which can benefit sharing of learning activities and improve learning efficiency in e-learning environments. Finally, the design of a prototype system with experiment results is discussed.

Learning comments are valuable sources of interpreting student status of understanding. The PCN method introduced in [Gouda2011] analyzes the attitudes of a student from a view point of time series. Each sentence of a comment is manually classified as one of P,C,N or O sentence. P(previous) indicates learning activities before the classtime, C(current) represents understanding or achievements during the classtime, and N(next) means a learning activity plan or goal until next class. The present paper applies SVM(Support Vecotor Machine) to predict the category to which a given sentence belongs. Empirical evaluation using 4,086 sentences was conducted. By selecting feature words of each category, the prediction performance was satisfactory with F-measures 0.8203, 0.7352, 0.8416 and 0.8612 for P,C,N and O respectively.

This research is to provide the tools for novice IT users to develop immersive games for teaching. The tools were developed in the context of a project in which Aboriginal Australian people, who are members of university or general communities, describe and explain their culture to non-Aboriginal students. Learning from Aboriginal cultural ways of teaching, these tools can be applied to other domains.

The teaching environment includes recorded narratives in an interactive cross-cultural training game which is to be used as part of the professional preparation of students working in health.

The paper focuses on the tools used to generate learning environment from the stories. This includes authoring the rules for the agent’s emergent narrative in the teaching games, learning paths to link individual contribution into a coherent story, and scenarios generated using visual tools to support contributors.

The tools have been used to generate prototypes from a previously collected set of stories stories, constructing scenarios by compiling them from simpler interactions and this process will be used in future story collection workshops to provide story providers with better control of how they will contribute to the teaching framework.

With the development of Web 2.0 and location-based technologies, location- based image retrieval and indexing is now possible. This can provide high-quality support for field visits and teaching, which is an integral part for culture and tourism education. In the state-of-the-art retrieval methods, geo-tag and visual feature-based image retrieval has not been considered together so far. In this paper, we present an efficient location-based image retrieval method by conducting the search over combined

geo-tag

and

visual-feature

spaces. In this retrieval method, a cost-based query optimization scheme is proposed to optimize the query processing. Different from conventional image retrieval methods, our proposed retrieval algorithm combines the above two functions as uniform measure. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to testify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed retrieval and indexing methods respectively.

3D model construction is one of the most important courses in digital media design. It provides the direct way for learners in creating real geometry in digital classroom. It has also been included as the required course in higher education. In this paper, we design a novel teaching strategy that combines social activity (facebook) and project-based learning as gaming in presentation. The social activity gives a strong motivation that activates students to self-study, while the project goal enhances the intensity of learning effect. In the social activity, students are required to promote the final product and try to demonstrate to people online. In teaching project goal, learners work together and learn to establish big project as team work. In the final stage, the proposed richman-like gamming competition is taken into place. We had applied the novel teaching approach in real university course. The empirical result showed that learners not only immersive in doing project, but also substantially improves the 3D modeling capability in course. Furthermore, some learners clearly indicated that the teaching method help to be learning much more actively.

This study intends to integrate Facebook-based learning platform with blended learning model and flip learning strategies for sophomores, juniors and seniors. This study implemented the blended learning where Facebook-based online learning was integrated with classroom learning. In terms of teaching procedures, this study implemented flip learning strategies in the hope that learners can implement active learning to acquire better learning effectiveness and perception. The research results showed that: (1) the use of the platform that learners are accustomed to using as the basic learning platform can help promote online learning; (2) learners’ participation in blended learning and flip learning is higher than that in traditional learning; (3) Facebook-based blended learning model and flip learning can both extend the width and depth of learning.

Social media tools are increasingly being used in education, providing students with a medium in which they can actively engage with each other and with their teachers, co-create knowledge, share experiences, work and learn collaboratively. Learning implies not only access to information but also access to other people; in this context, social networking services (SNS) appear well suited for educational use, since they offer social space for people to gather online and make connections. The paper provides an overview on the use of these SNS to support learning. Two approaches are summarized: i) the pedagogical repurposing of existing popular SNS (i.e., Facebook); ii) the design of dedicated educational SNS. The latter is illustrated in more detail with the Lintend platform, a system conceived and implemented by the authors. A critical perspective is also included, and future research directions are drawn from it.

Use of blogging activities in university courses has been showed to improve the primary learning outcomes while additionally reinforcing important professional communication skills. In order to fully use the potential of blogging lack of students’ motivation to fully engage in the process may pose a major obstacle. It is not sufficient just to publish a few blog articles; instead, following the classmates’ blogs and active participation in the discussions is vital to achieve desired results. In this paper we show that incorporating well organized peer review rounds into the process significantly increased students’ participation, and in addition the benefits of such an exercise were perceived positively by the students.

In the last decade e-lecturing has become more and more popular. The amount of lecture video data on the

World Wide Web

(WWW) is growing rapidly. Therefore, a more efficient method for video retrieval in WWW or within large lecture video archives is urgently needed. This paper presents an approach for automated video indexing and video search in large lecture video archives. First of all, we apply automatic video segmentation and key-frame detection to offer a visual guideline for the video content navigation. Subsequently, we extract textual metadata by applying video

Optical Character Recognition

(OCR) technology on key-frames and by performing

Automatic Speech Recognition

(ASR) on lecture audio tracks. The OCR and ASR transcript as well as detected slide text line types are adopted for keyword extraction, by which both video- and segment-level keywords are extracted respectively. Furthermore, we developed a content-based video search function and conducted a user study for evaluating the performance and the effectiveness of proposed indexing methods in our lecture video archive.

In current tele-teaching platforms the main challenges for learners are searching and filtering through the content and staying focused on learning with the help of the e-lectures. Video annotation and video indexing features may provide support for learners in this situation. In this paper we will introduce one solution for a lecture video annotation feature called the digital manuscript. Digital notes can be written synchronously or asynchronously to the time of the actual lecture. Different features such as instant time markers and formatting options are available. In order to prove our hypothesis that the digital manuscript feature enables students to better concentrate on watching the video lecture and thus results in an improved learning effectiveness, we conducted a user study. The results include insights into the perceived usefulness of the annotation functionality as well as a quantitative comparison of assessment results with and without the manuscript feature and the indexing features as comparison. An outlook to group functionalities as well as a semantic extension of the video annotation feature is finally given.

Scratch, a visual programming language, was used in many studies in computer science education. Most of them reported positive results by integrating Scratch into K-12 computer courses. However, the object-oriented concept, one of the important computational thinking skills, is not represented well in Scratch. Alice, another visual programming language, seems to have better illustration of the object-oriented concept for programming novices. To demonstrate effects of Alice and Scratch, we compared students’ responses to both visual programming languages, especially for students with low performances, in an introductory programming course. The relationships among learning engagement, learning anxiety, and learning playfulness were explored. The results could be referred by computer science instructors to select proper visual programming language for remedial instruction.

The paper presents an overview of methods of providing an effective web-based education in the field of automatic control. To facilitate education in process dynamics and basic control problems, methods for web-based access to process simulators and controllers coupled with process simulators are discussed. Teaching the specifics of real processes is especially important, hence methods allowing a safe and appropriately abstracted access to real processes are discussed. Additionally, cooperation between students for control algorithms synthesis in web-based environment is discussed along with visualization methods.

Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.

In this paper, we propose the problem of generating temporal faceted learning of concepts. The goal of the proposed problemisto annotate a concept with semantic, temporal, faceted, concise, andstructured information, which can release the cognitive burden of learning new concepts for users. The temporal faceted annotations can help users to learn and understand the unfamiliar or new emerged concepts. We propose a general method togenerate temporal faceted annotationof a concept by constructing its learning words, learning sentences, learning graph, and learning communities. Empirical experiments on LinkedIn dataset show that the proposed algorithm is effective and accurate. Different from the manually generated annotation repository such as LinkedIn and Wikipedia, the proposed method can automatically generated the annotations and does not need any prior knowledge such as ontology or the hierarchical knowledge base such as WordNet. The proposed method usesWeb search engines as a temporal faceted learning platform, which can add the new meaning and update the old meaning of concepts.

Scenarios of serious games become more complex, highly interactive and hard to validate by humans due to the number of possible paths. Increasingly, authoring systems are proposed to support the designers in the scenario’s elaboration. These systems need tools to model and validate the interactive scenarios. But often, only testing activities with beta testers attempt to ensure the reliability of games’ scenarios, once the serious game is developped. Indeed, testing activities could reveal errors and bugs in the interactive scenario but they are not sufficient and not adapted to validate scenario in the design stage.

To be of any real value, for any learning system, a scenario must verify properties. This paper addresses both the modeling and the validation of Interactive scenarios in the design stage of serious games. We aim to support authoring systems for scenarios, to verify serious game’s properties and thus to increase the design quality of serious game.

We propose a formal framework to scenario’s modeling and validation in the design stage. First, we use Coloured Petri nets (CPN) as a modeling language. Then, the formal validation of the interactive scenario is performed by means of CPN Tools, an industrial-strength computer tool for analysing CPN models. Using CPN Tools, it is possible to investigate the behaviour of the modelled serious game using simulation and to verify properties by means of model checking.

E-learning plays vital role in education and its importance is constantly increasing. The key challenge in the teaching learning process of e-learning is assessing the students’ learning. Learning means the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught. Assessing the students learning on the topics being taught is very important in e-learning environment. Based on the student’s learning, the system can change / update the pedagogy, recommendations can be made for further study, and the students’ performance can be evaluated. Many e-learning systems assess student learning by conducting tests, quizzes or assignments. In this paper, we propose concept map based on assessment from students’ learning using ontology mapping. Concept map is an effective tool for determining what a student knows in the topic covered. The concept map created by the student is converted into ontology and is then mapped with the reference ontology created by the expert. The experimental evaluation is presented and discussed.

Learning Analytics has become a major research area recently. In particular learning institutions seek ways to collect, manage, analyze and exploit data from learners and instructors for the facilitation of formal learning processes. However, in the world of informal learning at the workplace, knowledge gained from formal learning analytics is only applicable on a commodity level. Since professional communities need learning support beyond this level, we need a deep understanding of interactions between learners and other entities in community-regulated learning processes - a conceptual extension of self-regulated learning processes. In this paper, we discuss scaling challenges for community learning analytics, give both conceptual and technical solutions, and report experiences from ongoing research in this area.

The emergence of information and communication technologies (ICT) and web 2.0 has fostered the domain of learning platforms with a variety of learning tools. As a result, many open-source and commercial learning management systems (LMS) were developed. The variety of platforms and approaches provided by these LMSs makes it difficult to deliver learning content to end users in a consistent manner. Learning tools interoperability, content reusability, learner’s information accessibility and share ability are main matters of quality for any LMS. However, learning interoperability standards lack to some extent common semantics on the level of the user interface. This paper discusses this problem in more details and proposes an enhanced approach based on semantics, accessibility standards, and responsive web design practices.

The study constructs and evaluates an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based system with multiple levels of corrective feedback to support adult learners with opportunities of practicing English speaking with immediate diagnosis. The corrective feedback includes three levels: the first level shows the learner’s pronunciation score and audio waveform, the second level provides learners with a comment, a list of words that are pronounced accurately and inaccurately, and an audio toolbar for replaying the learner’s utterance, and the third level shows a demonstration of the accurate utterances with both full sentence and single-word form at normal and slow speed. A total of 38 adults from Taiwan participated in this experiment, divided into an experimental and a control group. The control group practiced English speaking using the single-level-feedback system while the experimental group was given the three-level-feedback system. The results of the study indicate that the ASR-based system serves as a helpful tool for Taiwanese learners and the learners were satisfied with the system for self-paced learning. Besides, the learners in the experimental group with three-level feedback made significant progress in English speaking. Some research issues and suggestions are also presented for future reference.

Social networking services (SNS) have gained its popularity and utility in the past years, and there is an increasing interest in using SNS as an educational tool. Skype in particular provides teachers with a suitable platform to enhance students’ language abilities and it is ideal for role-playing based learning activities. Role-playing has been proved to be an effective English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching tool. This pilot study was conducted on 42 students attending an English conversation course. Students’ speaking errors during a role-playing Skype-based activity were being investigated with both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings of this pilot study indicated that Skype in combination with role-playing activities could gradually reduce the number of speaking errors and help improve speaking skills of EFL learners.

In the paper, we analyzed students’ learning log data obtained in a word listening learning system to estimate phonemic perception confusion of students. We had two student groups take a word dictation test and a word choice test. English words in the word dictation test were resolved into phonemes and the abilities of both groups on phonemic perception were inferred by Bayes’ rule. By comparing the results estimated by Bayes’ rule with those obtained in the word choice test, we suggested that the estimation is valid and helpful to build adaptive word recognition training systems.

In this paper we present a concept as well as a prototype of a tool pipeline to utilize the abundant information available on the World Wide Web for contextual, user driven creation and display of language learning material. The approach is to capture Wikipedia articles of the user’s choice by crawling, to analyze the linguistic aspects of the text via natural language processing and to compile the gathered information into a visually appealing presentation of enriched language information. The tool is designed to address the Japanese language, with a focus on kanji, the pictographic characters used in Japanese scripture.

With analyzing the learning log-data, personalized learning patterns of different students could be detected, and the personalized materials could be automatically created and offered to learners for guiding their specific learning processes and solving weak points. In this paper, we propose a new approach to develop a CALL system including an error-detecting algorithm and a material-creating module. And in our approach, we pay much of our attention on the detection of phonemic errors. The system can detect the phonemic errors of Japanese learners’ in English vocabulary listening by analyzing the relative learning log data, and automatically create multiple-choice question materials to help students take practices to enhance perception on the phonemes that they distinguish difficultly.