e- Oral: A Hypermedia Web Application for English Language Oral Exams within a Distance Education Environment Mª Eugenia López, Laura Alba-Juez, Mónica Aragonés & Beatriz Molina Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, SPAIN.
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[email protected] Abstract The present paper constitutes an attempt to describe, in a succinct manner, the objectives, methodology and implementation of the e-oral web application within the framework of the CODE (Computerized Oral Distance Exam) Project, carried out in the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. e-oral is initially a web application designed to carry out distance oral exams in the first English language course (Lengua Inglesa I) of the new English Studies program at the UNED.
1. Introduction The present paper constitutes an attempt to describe, in a succinct manner, the objectives, methodology and implementation of the e-oral web application within the framework of the CODE (Computerized Oral Distance Exam) Project, carried out in the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. Starting with the 2002-2003 academic year, oral exams were introduced as a mandatory requisite within the Department of Foreign Languages (in the English Studies Program) in four subjects, namely Lengua Inglesa I, Lengua Inglesa II, Comentario Lingüístico de Textos, and Fonética Inglesa. Given the characteristics of the UNED, a distance education university with students in different parts of the world, the oral examination process presented itself as a task which was difficult to materialize, with different obstacles emerging, such as the impossibility for students who are in some of the UNED Centros Asociados (different “branches” of the UNED around Spain and the world) of taking such exam, due to the fact that not all of these Centros have tutors in charge of the subjects in question. Because of the above-mentioned problem, the decision was made to set about working on the CODE project, whose first stage is already in an advanced phase of development, in a joint effort between the Department of Foreign Languages and the New Technologies Division of the UNED. During this first stage, all the
efforts have been focused on the instrumentation of e-oral in Lengua Inglesa I, the English language course taken by the students in the first year of the English Studies program, where we have an average of 900 students enrolled each year. This first attempt is intended to be taken as an example for other subjects with a mandatory oral exam, as well as for any other subject of the English Studies program, or of the other language programs at the UNED that could need such a tool. Previous computerized oral language exams exist in the market, such as the COPI (Computerized Oral Proficiency Instrument) from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington D.C. (Malabonga 1998 [1], 2000 [2]; Malabonga & Kenyon 1999) [3], an enterprise in which the researcher responsible for this project participated during 1998-2000. However, to our knowledge, neither COPI nor any of other similar projects have the technological characteristics of CODE’s e-oral, which we describe in more detail in the sections that follow. To be specific, in the first stage, we are working to create a computer program by means of which students will be able to carry out oral activities and oral tests online, equivalent to the traditional face-to-face oral exams which test the knowledge and language skills taught in the Lengua Inglesa I course, in accordance with the course materials (Aragonés & Medrano 2003 [4], Alba-Juez & Chacón 2003) [5]. This working system will allow students to carry out self-evaluation oral activities and final oral exams from their Centro Asociado or from their personal computer, through the software that will be published in CD-ROM and which will also be possible to download at the virtual course site. Tutors and Professors will subsequently be able to access the program from any UNED computer (both in the Centros Asociados and in the Headquarters (Sede Central) in Madrid) or from their own, in order to listen to each student’s exam and grade it. The linguistic level required from students in the final exam found in the web application is that corresponding to level B2 (“Independent user”), according to the parameters established
by the European Council in its European Language Portfolio, which have become the reference for the new European language studies of the 21st century. Therefore, all the learning material, from the textbooks and CDROMS to the partial or final exams, has been created with that level in mind.
2. Hypermedia as a teaching/learning transformation tool At the present time, the use of hypermedia in distance education methodology is already consolidated within the framework of collaborative learning. The use of multimedia material has spread within university studies, which have profited from technological advances in Internet communications through the generalized use of learning-training tools. To speak about the risks or drawbacks of this learning method is no longer relevant, nor does it stir up controversy as it used to during the first years of this century. It is no longer important or appropriate to debate whether distance education is a method with deficiencies as opposed to the face-to-face system of classes in traditional universities. The experience gained after several decades by the UNED and, in particular, the last five year’s trajectory of the Spanish university, prove that the face-to-face and the distance systems can co-exist separately, but can also complement each other, as occurs in the blended learning system (López 2003 [6], Anderson y Garrison 2005 [7]), consolidated in the majority of European universities today. In our country, great advances have been made with the implementation of computermediated communication in the postgraduate and continuous education programs of many of our universities (García 2003 [8]). From those initial experiences onwards, computer-mediated distance learning has been gradually gaining terrain into the official programs of traditional universities, and now they compete in means and methods with the UNED, which has been Spain’s one and only public distance education university since the 1970s. Multimedia technology is a powerful resource for distance education if we consider that, up to a very recent time, distance education had strong limitations concerning the interaction between teacher and student, especially within language subjects, where the oral exchange between teacher and student is fundamental. In spite of the advance of computer-mediated means, certain deficiencies still persist in the teaching of subjects in which a high rate of actual physical presence of both students and teachers has been traditionally necessary, as is the case with the teaching of languages.
Nevertheless, the viability of these cases within the new virtual environment lies precisely in accepting those limitations and establishing the limits of each technological resource, because only by acknowledging the current limitations shall we be able to make improvements that will eventually consolidate the virtual language class as an authentic teaching/learning scenario. It is already a well-known fact that distance education has come to a point where it shares certain characteristics with traditional, face-toface teaching/learning situations, and, at the same time, traditional education has been able to broaden its scope by integrating the computer-mediated distance education model (López 2003 [6]). As a result, a meeting point arises between both teaching disciplines, giving way to the current blended system, in which the concept of traditional classes has also changed. Simultaneous interaction in a video-conference, a multimedia service that allows several users to maintain a real-time distance conversation with visual, audio and verbal interaction, is now a normal practice within both distance and traditional learning environments.
3. The creation of multimedia instruction content The idea of multimedia learning implies the conjunction of both didactic and instructional criteria in the creation of course materials. The architecture of hypermedia implicitly carries along the integration of contents in different formats: text, images (drawings, photographs), audio (voice, music, sound effects), moving images (animation, video) or videoconferences, with the aim of generating educational products in which teaching is organized into a web-like structure (Coorough 2005 [9]). In order to produce educational multimedia, regardless of its final medium, it is necessary to previously define the educational objectives, create an index of contents, and outline adequate strategies (López, 2004a [10]) for the specific teaching area and academic level to which it will be destined. In such a task, it is also necessary to take user criteria into account, and thus trace paths within the material that will favor a global view of the program as well as a physical or mental diagram with the description of its different modules. Hypermedia navigation (linear, hierarchical or free) must be guided by the principles established for its educational purpose in each particular case, considering that all its components (menus, icons, buttons and hypertext) must help to provide a comprehensive navigation. The same occurs
with help systems, designed so that the student can carry out tasks without spending too much time in finding out the interactional logic behind each system. As a result, it becomes necessary to describe, in a synthetic but sufficient manner, the procedures that must be followed in each case. That way, the student will be able to receive final feedback that will facilitate her understanding of the performed task (López 2004b). These series of educational criteria have been applied to the design and development of the eoral environment, the multimedia software that is described in the following section, which stands as a necessary contribution, as well as an advance, in the study of second and/or foreign languages at the UNED.
4. Didactic and functional description of the application e-oral is initially a web application designed to carry out distance oral exams in the first English language course (Lengua Inglesa I) of the new English Studies program at the UNED. A multidisciplinary team specialized in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Educational Software Development has participated in the design and development of the software. The creation of such a tool implies the elimination of the impossibility of carrying out long-distance oral evaluations, one of the main drawbacks that have affected the teaching of foreign languages at the UNED. As stated above, in its first phase or Version 1, the application is oriented towards the Lengua Inglesa I student-users, who will be able to take the oral exams at the computer room of their Centro Asociado. This will be possible either within national territory or at any of the UNED foreign centers, as long as these have the necessary computer equipment (multimedia and a broadband connection). Furthermore, students may also use this application and take the oral exams using their personal computer with an internet connection, a possibility that grants students a great autonomy, besides providing them with an ample calendar to carry out these tests. They will only be restricted by the number of times allowed by the system for each authorized user to conduct them. The use of this application only requires basic hardware: an integrated sound card (a basic component of any CPU), input and output audio devices (speakers and microphone), as well as a broadband internet connection. In terms of software requirements, the user only needs to have the latest web browser or, if this isn’t the case, one that has been updated with
the program plug-ins. In this case, the only plug-in necessary is Flash Player —created and distributed by Macromedia—, which allows the reproduction of vector graphics, sound, program codes, stream video and bidirectional audio, etc. Flash Player is the program used to execute Flash files, already present in about 98% of personal computers. Since it is not associated with any system or software requirements, the use of this application does not carry any additional costs for the student, nor does it require anything else that could become an obstacle for any user with an ordinary personal computer (PC or Mac). In addition, the use of the oral exam application is very intuitive, apart from the fact that a help system is included, and that internal navigation takes place in a graphically-designed user-friendly learning environment. As can be seen, the design of the interface of a multimedia application and the architecture of information are two dependent and inseparable planes. Both the categorization of information and the usability of the application are factors that determine whether an interface is intuitive and friendly or not. In the design and organization of the interface, the interactivity standards to which Internet users are used (hyperlinks, action buttons, data registers, password authentication, etc.), necessarily have to be considered. In the design of e-oral, standard navigation conventions predominate, combined with a certain degree of innovation in the physical design and distribution of the elements within the different evaluation scenarios (screens). When non-intuitive elements are incorporated, the student is provided with help support containing the necessary information, following the conversational maxims of quantity, quality, relevance and manner appropriate for each case. Even though e-oral is a multimedia system, the first stage of the project (which involves the development, testing and implementation of the application for the 2006-2007 academic year) only allows the oral exams to be carried out by means of audio listening and recording. Later on, in the second phase, video will be implemented for both exercise presentations and tests. The application is functionally prepared for such types of evaluation, but it is still in the process of developing the necessary audiovisual repertoire (video script elaboration, recording, editing and multimedia creation, etc.). As of today, the available learning material is the audio and text reference needed for carrying out final exams (Figure 1).
remarked that it consists of a very fast multiuser relational database server (Figure 2), robust and adequate for the use of web applications and PHP. Both MySQL and PHP are part of the open source software category, which implies lower costs and higher possibilities of development to meet the demand.
Figure 1 Another of the objectives of the first phase is to integrate e-oral into a Learning Management System (LMS) which is compatible with the technology used to develop the application. In order to do that, proprietary (commercial software) and open source solutions are being analyzed, especially the learning platforms with which the UNED currently works (WebCT y Alf).
5. Technology used in the first stage of the project The oral exam application has been developed using MySQL and PHP, and it incorporates Macromedia Flash Server Communicator 1.5 technology within the exam recording tool. e-oral runs on Windows XP with an Apache server, and can also be integrated within web and data services. Because of its extensibility, it allows for the administration of XML metadata, the access to local system resources and the control of the access and reports for a better and greater integration within existing data management systems. PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) is one of most widespread server languages, which has the advantage of being able to be used in different platforms (Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac). It is a versatile server-side language (all the actions it conducts have their effect on the server’s side) for the creation of multimedia projects. Besides, it is a very advisable code for developing applications and dynamic websites. The integration of ActionScript (Macromedia language) and PHP is an option that provides great advantages in the connection of Macromedia Flash MX interfaces with MySQL databases (De la Cruz & Zumbado 2005 [12]). PHP and MySQL are very much related and many PHP extensions to support MySQL exist. In addition, PHP is able to compile its code in a multitude of platforms and operational systems, something highly useful for programming web applications. Regarding MySQL, it must be
Figure 2 Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX is a type of software that allows communication to take place, combining the reproduction of audio and video with moving Flash graphics in player customizable environments. Flash Communication Server is a server that supports real-time applications. It allows for the use of audio and video multi-channels, as well as for data retrieval and remote functions. The application automatically recognizes installed standard USB microphones and webcams, and it also authorizes the user’s access (Lesser 2005 [13]). This platform operates in different environments such as the Internet, PDA’s or interactive TV, allowing for communication between Flash applications that can alternate text, audio or streaming video, which favors access to audiovisual data even if the user does not have a broadband internet connection. The architecture of e-oral is, broadly speaking, that of a standard web application, distributed throughout three levels or layers. The application gathers the user’s data (first level navigator) and sends it to the server that executes the oral exam program, linked to a database and to documents marked with metadata (second and third levels). On the third level, the data that manages the data base and XML document application can be found. Finally, the system returns to the user the result of his interaction by means of the navigator (client). The presentation layer (first level) receives the data and formats them so that they can be displayed adequately (Figure 3).
Figure 3
6. Technology to be used for the execution of the second phase of eoral The second stage of the CODE e-oral project (2007-08) will focus on the generation of natural language processing computer tools that will be incorporated in the current application (Moreno 1998 [14], Rodríguez, Martí y Castellón 1999 [15]). In particular, our research will focus on technologies having to do with speech and information extraction. The aim of this second phase is the research and development of the necessary technology to implement a voice recognition and verification system (Rodríguez 1997 [16], Furui 2001 [17]) by means of speech patterns that will allow for student identification when distance oral exams are carried out. The speech recognition system will focus on the use of isolated words. The treatment of continuous speech (Martí y Llisterri 2004 [18]) is not, in principle, a necessity for the type of software required by e-oral. Consequently, a previously defined and restricted vocabulary will be used for the recognition software (Berstein y Franco 1996 [19]). The system will not be limited to a restricted number of users; it will be independent of the speaker. Thus, a multi-user voice recognition and verification software will be generated. In that manner, the tool will be available for all students registered within the authentication system provided by eoral. Another objective for this stage is to develop data extraction software for the stored and labeled tests in the application. These systems are designed and constructed specifically to carry out a certain task, and, as a result, a different system will be employed depending on the type of information that we wish to extract. In this case, the information has to do with test results. Having that in mind, the templates
within the necessary fields will be defined, in order to gather information uniformly. The basic criteria that will be applied are 1) precision, which is equivalent to the quality of the extracted information, and 2) coverage, which refers to the real amount of extracted information, regardless of previous predictions (Gonzalo y Verdejo 2003 [20]). The goal of this system is to detect, extract and present information in a format that can be processed automatically later on. The architecture for the design of the informationextraction tool will be standard, consisting of the two phases typical of these systems: 1) analysis of instructions and 2) extraction of information. Three modules will be included in each phase, as shown in figure 41. In the filtering module, the filtering of text takes place, which consists in identifying the instructions and the words that characterize them. In the lexical and syntactic analysis, as well as in the extraction modules, sentence analysis of the texts resulting from the tests will take place. The two last modules are oriented towards the processing of instructions, and they therefore possess a more discursive nature. The morphological and lexical analysis component is the one that carries out the syntactic labeling and that also assigns semantic features to some open category words (type of user, exam model, date, question number). This module includes the recognition of proper names, identification documents, grades, etc. The syntactic analysis is partial; basic components are singled out and identified, such as noun phrases, verb phrases or relational elements (prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns).
Figure 4
In the extraction module, relevant elements that have previously been isolated will be identified. In the following modules that make up this extraction phase (in which results will be 1
Modified from Gonzalo & Verdejo, 2003: 186.
combined), the co-reference of terms will be solved, establishing relationships between the vocabulary. The last procedure consists in the recombination of the partial descriptions obtained in the extraction process (Gonzalo & Verdejo 2003 [20]). The field descriptors that will make up the templates will be filled. As can be seen, these systems need to apply complex natural language processing (NLP) techniques due to the great amount of precision that is required in the processes of extraction and detection of the relevant type of information (Cinchor 1998 [21]). In this sense, the final goal of the project is to develop solid and comprehensive software that will eliminate the obstacles resulting from the absence of such a tool in the field of oral evaluation within language studies. At the same time, a linked information management system will be created, that we expect to be of great use for future teaching and investigation in language learning. In conclusion, we can say that the implementation of the previously-described application will soon put an end to the difficult task of conducting oral language exams within a distance education environment. The possibility of carrying out oral exams by means of a web application with the characteristics described herein presents interesting innovations that shed light on a new dimension of communication, unknown in the language teaching field to date.
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