Web Technology for Education and Training - IEEE Computer Society

Web Technology for Education and Training Sean W. M. Siqueira DI/PUC-Rio [email protected]

Maria Helena L. B. Braz DECivil/IST/UTL [email protected]

Abstract The Internet has enabled a great amount of information to be readily available and easily accessible. It has promoted several changes in the world, including in the education area. Nowadays, there is a great amount of educational and training systems, which provide different functionality according to specific administrative, pedagogical and technological approaches. Authoring tools, content repositories, evaluation and assessment, curriculum design and collaborative tools are some pieces of this educational “puzzle”. This paper describes a generic architecture for educational and training systems from the software development point of view. Then this architecture is discussed according to web technology, enabling a better understanding of the involved technological aspects of educational and training systems.

1. Introduction There are three main aspects that support education: administration, pedagogy and technology, which through a variety of combinations imply on different educational and training systems, with different approaches. Whenever there is a new strategy, method or technique in one of these aspects, it is expected its propagation to educational and training systems. In addition, the development of the web and its application on educational and training environments has led to the development of new learning theories and philosophies ([1], [2] and [3]). This “world of differences” makes difficult the cooperation of educational and training partners in order to allow reuse of e-learning content and services. To enable learning content reuse organizations such as IEEE, IMS Global Learning Consortium and ADL have worked to develop technical standards, recommended

Rubens Nascimento Melo DI/PUC-Rio [email protected]

practices and guides for learning technology. In general, the main focus is on describing learning content (e.g., [4], [5] and [6]). To deal with services interoperability, a draft standard proposal, IEEE Learning Technology Systems Architecture (LTSA) [7] specifies a “high level architecture for information technology-supported learning, education, and training systems”. However, its focus is to identify the objectives of human activities and computer processes and their involved categories of knowledge. It does not provide a generic view of software components and services of educational and training systems. In this paper we present a generic architecture for educational and training systems. Then this architecture is discussed according to web technology. With this discussion, we expect to help understanding and clarifying approaches of existing educational and training systems; assist researchers to develop more innovative web systems; and assist software and hardware developers to improve commercial educational and training products based on the web technology. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a generic architecture for education and training systems. Section 3 focuses on the use of web technology in the architecture. Then, Section 4 presents some final remarks.

2. A generic architecture In this section we present a generic architecture for educational and training systems (Figure 1). As stated earlier, education and training activities consider administrative, pedagogical and technological aspects. Therefore, there should be general guidelines for these three aspects in order to support learning. The three reference models represent metamodels and business rules that could assist the automation of several processes and could also guide the execution of most of the educational and training tasks.

Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA’03) 1529-4188/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE

Users Educational /Training System

Assessment

Security

Evaluation

Role Management Content Selection

Groupware

Audience identification Needs assessment

Communication

Visualization Interface

Coordination

Navigation

Cooperation

Personalization

Content Development

Administration Reference Model

Sequencing Media Selection Authoring Composition Metadata Edition

Pedagogy Reference Model Technology Reference Model

Interaction Learner External factors

Content material

Course

Figure 1: A generic architecture for educational and training systems Before starting the development of any educational or training program, the need for instruction should be clearly identified. In general it implies on conducting needs assessment. The users can perform needs assessment through the (read only) access to the database, finding information on which topics students need more material, what professional or academic goals need further/deeper support etc. Then, after choosing a new educational/training goal, it is necessary to acquire knowledge about the audience. It can be supported by a learner model and usually consists of inserting data into the learner’s database. This learner model can be as simple as personal identification data or as complex as the PAPI Learner model [8] including maintenance during learning process such as described in [9]. For the execution of the other activities there is a role manager that is responsible for identifying the user according to an educational/training role and managing his/her interactions with the system. After defining the overall goal of an educational/training program, the objectives should be defined. According to the course model and based on the pedagogy reference model, the system should support the definition of the sequence of learning content. This task could also imply on the definition of alternative learning/training paths based on different characteristics (skills, previous knowledge etc.) of the learners. Notice that it is not mandatory that a professor/teacher be the only responsible for defining the learning/training sequence paths. In some cases this could be up to the student to define his/her own objectives and sequences of learning content. Then, before developing content material, it is necessary to select media. In some cases the same content is developed in diverse media to accomplish different

learning abilities (visual, auditory, sensitive etc.). On content development it is possible to perform media selection, authoring and/or composition and respective metadata edition, inserting data and metadata on the content material repositories as well as possibly on the course repository (when it is related to a specific course). Developing learning content is in most cases an authoring task that can involve several different tools such as html authoring tools, word processing, presentation tools, video recording and edition, simulation development etc. Other authoring method is related to grouping together pieces of information objects [10]. It is even more common when thinking on reusable learning objects. There is also the description of essential metadata related to learning content in order to allow faster search and easier access. Notice that authoring and composing tasks could be automated according to some special rules, allowing on-demand learning. In addition it could be possible to generate automatically metadata from the learning material. In the traditional model to teaching, information processing or symbol-processing approach ([11] and [12]) the key concept is that a teacher transmits a fixed group of information to the learners through an external representation or medium. The learners develop their own image and use it to construct new knowledge based on their own previous knowledge and abilities. Educational and training systems based on this approach (traditional model), usually focuses on the access to content material in a previously specified sequence. Therefore it involves the access to the content and visualization procedures. It is possible to visualize learning content through the (read only) access to the course database. However the answer must follow


visualization steps before presenting the content. At the visualization steps it is important to consider aspects such as user interface usability and information presentation, content hypermedia navigation and education personalization and adaptation. Nowadays, there is a great movement towards personalization and adaptive aspects. Brusilovsky [13] cites the following adaptation technologies in web-based educational systems: hypertext components, adaptive sequencing, and adaptive navigation support, problem solving support, intelligent solution analysis and adaptive presentation. The goal of adaptation and personalization is to provide content according to the users’ background and abilities. The other main approach to teaching ([1], [2] and [3]) is based on constructivist principles, in which learners actively construct an internal representation of knowledge by interacting with the material to be learned. There is a high degree of interactivity among all the participants. Educational and training systems based on this second approach usually focuses on interactivity and, therefore on groupware concepts. According to [14], “a group support system needs to provide support for Communication (i.e., information exchange), Coordination (i.e., process definition and scheduling) and Cooperation (i.e., working on shared tasks and accessing/manipulating shared data).” Groupware activities result on insertions in the course and interaction databases. In addition, there are the assessment tools that can be incorporated in the educational/training system in order to evaluate the students. Although assessment activities could be supported by groupware infrastructure, it is interesting to consider assessment tools that could help teachers and students in the learning process. These systems could provide automatic feedback or triggering message or even adaptive assessment. In the generic architecture, assessment results on storing data on the course database. Finally, security tasks and overall evaluation are present on all the activities of the architecture. Course evaluation should lead to a revision on new iterations of the course while the evaluation of the educational and training system should lead to its development and improvement. This generic architecture (Figure 1) should provide the necessary functionality to deal with educational and training requirements. However, each environment is different in the sense that it can adopt different administrative, pedagogical and/or technological strategies, methods and techniques. Therefore, each instance of the generic architecture can use a different set of components that can by themselves incorporate different learning approaches.

Furthermore, as new administrative, pedagogical and technological strategies, methods and techniques become available, other components can be added to or removed from the generic architecture.

3. Web technology applied to the architecture Since we are interested on web technology in education and training, in this section we discuss the components and services of the generic architecture according to web technology. In a real-world deployment of an architecture for education and training systems based on the web technology it is important to provide loosely coupled, component-oriented and cross-technology implementations. According to [15], web services-based applications provide such characteristics. Manes [16] says that a Web service represents a unit of business, application, or system functionality that can be accessed over the Web. Web services fulfill a specific task or a set of tasks. They can be used alone or with other Web services to carry out a complex aggregation or a business transaction. However, bringing semantics to web services is an essential step. Therefore, in the development of webbased education and training systems it would be interesting to consider architectures such as those proposed at [17] and [18]. Considering [17] as example, a web service conceptual architecture is composed of data and applications (containing customer database, legacy database, application database, and ontology server with a repository and workflow engine), web services components (centralized coordinator and manager, B2B protocol engine, discovery, negotiation, deployment, transport, security, audit/tracking, trading partner manager, semantic transformation, adaptors and web service, goal, ontology and workflow manager), and front-end tools (modeling and deployment environment, simulation, and administration, management and configuration). The learner database of the generic architecture would be equivalent to the customer database. However, it should be based on a learner model such as [8] that can be based on XML and would structure the learner database. Notice that learner data can be found distributed over the web (and institution/enterprise systems) and therefore an integrated view of structured information is not so straightforward. The content material is multimedia so its database should allow the storage of multimedia objects. In addition, content material can be highly distributed and heterogeneous although it is desirable a common metadata definition/structure based on some standard


proposal such as [4], [5] or [6]. The course and interaction databases should also follow a well-defined standardized conceptual framework, but since they are part of course implementation processes they are usually embedded in education and training systems according to proprietary solutions. The three reference models as well as the other database models could be implemented / managed through the use of the ontology technology. Since we are considering the web-based education and training, besides authoring content it is also necessary to publish it according to predefined access’ rights. If the content development is based on composition, it will be necessary to discover already published content, compose new content and then publish it. Notice that course definitions are also part of the services’ functionality, such as defining a new course according to the available content, structuring and managing enrolling procedures etc. The course implementation focuses on content access and visualization, groupware activities and assessment. Content access is already considered in the web-services architecture. For enabling content visualization, several services such as those related to personalization and contextual navigation throughout the content should be provided. Content hypermedia navigation could be based on guidelines or patterns such as those cited in [19]. Therefore, it is important to define node units and navigational contexts, to provide background information to the participant without distracting his/her attention, to provide active reference in order to keep the reader informed in which concept he/she is, what concepts have been explored and those that are still missing. Other services for enabling the real presentation of the content, such as video and sound plugging as well as video synchronization and simulation procedures must also be considered. Content visualization is tightly related to the content development procedures and content characteristics, especially content media. At the groupware functionality, for the communication tasks one can observe asynchronous and synchronous events, such as email, mail list, newsgroup, chat, instant message (peer contact), phone talk (voice over ip), teleconferencing, etc. Coordination events include lesson plan, calendar, agenda, scheduling, workflow, contribution-track, followup reports etc. Cooperation events include co-authorship, group definition and related management accessibility, web reference, bibliography, documentation, download, etc. Assessment includes task assessment, multiple choice, true/false, fill in questions etc. According to [20], teachers who are content-oriented (i.e., they think it is important to

cover the syllabus and to ensure that students acquire the correct information and ideas) are likely to see assessment as designed to demonstrate detailed factual knowledge of the syllabus. They also tend to consider the outcomes of learning as being almost entirely the responsibility of the students themselves, depending on their ability and motivation. By the other hand, teachers who are student-oriented (i.e., they are more concerned with helping students to develop personal understanding and more sophisticated conceptions, and design their teaching and assessment accordingly) tend to use more varied methods of assessment and to be aware of their own responsibility for encouraging students to develop deep levels of understanding. According to [21], “assessment which encourages students to think for themselves – such as essay question, applications to new contexts, and problem-based questions – shifts students in a class towards a deep approach. In contrast, procedures perceived by students as requiring no more than the accurate reproduction of information lead to a predominance of surface approaches”. Security is already considered in the web-services architecture, although some issues such as authorship can be more complex. Needs assessment and audience identification can be seen as common marketing activities. Evaluation and role management are also general functions / services.

4. Conclusion This paper presented a generic architecture for educational and training systems and discussed it according to web technology. The web-based education and training architecture enables a better understanding of the involved technological aspects of educational and training systems, allowing the identification of possible components that may be object of a standardization process and thus facilitates e-learning software development and use. Through the work presented in this paper we expect to assist researchers to develop more innovative web-based educational systems; and assist software and hardware developers to improve commercial educational and training products based on the web technology. From the generic architecture we are specializing an elearning environment. However, much work remains to be done such as in the context of the web services architecture, in the definition of learning related ontologies and services, and in the automatic coordination of the services throughout learning stages. We are trying to start with a simple example, but there are several issues still under research. We are working on


different issues such as web services architecture and implementation, defining a groupware metadata proposal for e-learning, defining ontologies for the reference models and other database models, working on course definitions, defining hypermedia characteristics in elearning, working on a methodology for developing learning objects and making groupware considering users’ perception.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank professionals and researchers of several different knowledge areas that have helped us in our work, specially the database technology group from PUC-Rio (TecBD) and the e-learning technology research group from ICIST/DECivil who actively participated on the definition of the generic architecture and on the discussions about web related technology to be applied to the architecture. This paper was partially supported by CNPq Brazil – Brazilian National Research Council, through a PhD bursary, and FCT Portugal – Foundation for Science and Technology, through the Multi-annual and Programmatic funds of ICIST.

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