Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 51, Issue 3, November 2008, Pages 1037-1057
Computers & Education

Wiki-based rapid prototyping for teaching-material design in e-Learning grids

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2007.10.007Get rights and content

Abstract

Grid computing environments with abundant resources can support innovative e-Learning applications, and are promising platforms for e-Learning. To support individualized and adaptive learning, teachers are encouraged to develop various teaching materials according to different requirements. However, traditional methodologies for designing teaching materials are time-consuming. To speed up the development process of teaching materials, our idea is to use a rapid prototyping approach which is based on automatic draft generation and Wiki-based revision. This paper presents the approach named WARP (Wiki-based Authoring by Rapid Prototyping), which is composed of five phases: (1) requirement verification, (2) query expansion, (3) teaching-material retrieval, (4) draft generation and (5) Wiki-based revision. A prototype system was implemented in grid environments. The evaluation was conducted using a two-group t-test design. Experimental results indicate that teaching materials can be rapidly generated with the proposed approach.

Introduction

During the past decade, information technologies have advanced at an amazing pace. Web 2.0, characterized by the techniques of blog, Wiki, RSS, mashup, etc., has been widely discussed and referred to as the second generation of web-based services (O’Reilly, 2005). Another representative is Grid computing (Foster, 2002, Foster and Kesselman, 1997), which supports resource-sharing and can overcome the limitations in traditional platforms. Therefore, grid computing technologies provide possibilities for supporting innovative applications, such as e-Learning. In fact, more and more effort has gone into the field of e-Learning grid, using grid technologies in the context of e-Learning. Among these, ELeGI (European Learning Grid Infrastructure, 2004–2008) is the most representative project (Gaeta, Ritrovato, & Salerno, 2003).

With the trend of individualized and adaptive learning, there will be a great demand to various teaching-materials. A typical approach to content design is ADDIE (2004), which consists of five stages: Analysis, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. The primary disadvantage is its time-consuming development process. In addition, it requires expensive human resources. Furthermore, redundant efforts could happen when different sites develop teaching materials for the same course units simultaneously. To solve the problem, a new method is needed for teachers to rapidly develop their own course materials.

Our idea is to design teaching materials by a rapid prototyping approach based on automatic draft generation and Wiki-based revision. Rapid prototyping is the process of quickly building and evaluating a series of prototypes of a system, which has been widely applied to manufacturing, software engineering, etc. (Luqi, 1989). First, a draft is automatically generated by combining relevant teaching materials in e-Learning grid. However, the main challenges result from verification of user intention and finding useful teaching materials from existing ones. To address this issue, we plan to enhance searching performance by using expertise acquired by a powerful knowledge acquisition tool to speed up the development process. Next, we adopt a Wiki-based authoring environment to revise the automatically generated draft. Wiki is an accessible markup language for people to edit a site together (Louridas, 2006). Wikipedia is the most successful Wiki-based project (Wikipedia, 2004). Our method is to utilize the collaborative intelligence and labor to accelerate the revision process. The primary difficulties are the storage requirements and overheads of maintaining historical revisions. This issue is alleviated in grid computing environments because of its abundant resources of storage and computation.

Based on the aforementioned ideas, we propose an approach named WARP (Wiki-based Authoring by Rapid Prototyping), which is composed of five phases: (1) requirement verification, (2) query expansion, (3) teaching-material retrieval, (4) draft generation and (5) Wiki-based revision. The goal is to reduce the development time of teaching materials. Firstly, the system attempts to clarify users’ intention by interactive ways, such as asking questions, requesting more query terms, etc. In the second phase, users’ queries are expanded by using domain expertise to retrieve more relevant documents. Next, the system searches for existing teaching-materials related to the expanded query in the grid. Then, the retrieved documents are combined into a draft automatically in the fourth phase. Finally, the draft is placed in a Wiki-based authoring environment for collaborative revision.

The advantages of WARP are twofold: time-saving and low-cost, which result from effective sharing and reusing of resources. Meanwhile, our primary contribution is the idea of a rapid prototyping approach to teaching-material design for e-Learning grids. In addition, we deployed a prototype system in a grid environment, implementing each phase of the WARP approach. Twenty four randomly selected teachers from elementary schools participated in an experiment based on a two-group t-test design. Experimental results show that teachers in the experiment group can generate high-quality teaching materials more rapidly than those in the control group.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review background knowledge and related work on this research. Then, the problem and the proposed approach are presented in Section 3. Next, implementation and experimental results are discussed in Section 4. Finally, the concluding remarks are given in Section 5.

Section snippets

Preliminaries and related work

This section briefly introduces the preliminaries of e-Learning grids, Wiki and rapid prototyping, which are essential to this work. Next, previous researches related to this paper are also described.

Approach

To speed up the development process of teaching materials, our idea is to use a rapid prototyping approach which is based on automatic draft generation and Wiki-based revision. In this section, the teaching material design problem is presented first. Then, the proposed approach and its components are described.

Experimental results

In this section, the implementation and evaluation design are described. Then, experimental results are presented and discussed.

Conclusions and future work

This paper describes a Wiki-based rapid prototyping approach to designing teaching materials for e-Learning grids. It is characterized by a time-saving development process, minimal human involvement, reducing redundant effort and high-quality teaching materials. The evaluation was carried out using a two-group t-test design. Experimental results indicate that teaching materials can be rapidly generated with the proposed approach. In the near future, we will conduct experiments to evaluate the

Acknowledgement

This research was partially supported by National Science Council of Republic of China under the number of NSC95-2520-S009-007-MY3 and NSC95-2520-S009-008-MY3.

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