Context-sensitive and Personalized Concept-based Access to Knowledge for Learning and Training Purposes

Educational objectives in the 21 century require efficient teaching and learning processes and enhanced learning environments. Focusing on knowledge-centered issues, an important aspect is, that learners need information that helps students developing an understanding. Our former experiences have shown that in addition to the simple provision of learning content further background information can support the learning process in school and university education as well as for vocational training. Therefore, in this paper we propose and describe a system, which allows teachers and trainers to manage background knowledge on a concept level for the learning process with less effort and enables learners to access effectively relevant additional information. In addition practical experiences and findings gained by two sample application are summarized. Introduction and Motivation It is well documented that the increasing amount of knowledge and its dynamic requires efficient and improved learning activities at any learning situation, such as in school, university and vocational education. According to (Bransford et al. 2000) over the last 100 years the objectives and expectations for the learning process have changed dramatically from repetitive learning to learning with understanding to become independent in the learning process, strengthen metacognitive skills and link knowledge acquired in cultural context. In order to meet the requirements of educational goals for the 21 century, aspects of learner-centered, knowledge-centered and assessment-centered environments have to be taken into account. To narrow down to knowledge-centered environments, one important aspect is, that learners need information that helps them developing an understanding (Bransford et al. 2000). According to our former experiences, nothing but knowledge transfer by face-to-face lectures and the provision of course content in elearning systems do not meet the requirements of modern learning activities. Learners are tending to use additional information in their learning process, as discussed in (García-Barrios et al. 2004). This former user survey, focused on learning activities at university level, has shown, that lecture notes and text books are most frequently used, but subjects also stated the usage of timely online information, web sites, Internet recherché, summaries of lecture notes, test examples, literature references, and lecture notes from other universities. It is obvious and may be backed by our daily-life experiences, that such a demand on additional information in the learning process is generally present in school and university education as well as in vocational training. In order to find relevant information within the learning process, learners might apply search services on the internet. However, a significant number of users are faced with problems, such as lacking skills to successfully operate the search services, finding proper keywords for search queries, and selecting documents form trustworthy information systems. (Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto 1999; Pollock & Hockle 1997; Beavers 1998) In addition, such search activities take the users’ attention off the actual learning process. To overcome that, technology-supported learning environments provide for each learning course or lecture access to mainly static repositories of physically copied and compiled background knowledge. However, such an approach causes continuous efforts to update relevant background documents, otherwise the repository becomes outdated. In addition the creation of such a repository is laborious and ties up human resources. (García-Barrios et al. 2004) Another important issue is, that learners’ needs for additional information vary significantly and they are influenced by facts, such as preknowledge, knowledge acquisition, learning task and context. (Kramer et al. 2000) Consequently, the selection and maintenance of proper background information for each learning situation and course content increases dramatically. Therefore, a new solution approach is required, which allows teachers and trainers to manage background knowledge on the concept level for the learning process with less effort and enables learners to access effectively relevant additional information. The situation stated so far motivated us to develop a running prototype which enables a context-sensitive and personalized concept-based access to knowledge for learning and training purposes. In the remainder of this paper, based on some illustrative application scenarios our solution approach and the system implementation is presented, followed by the description of two sample applications and the discussion of experiences and findings. Application Scenarios The objective of this section is to describe some application scenarios in different application domains to illustrate various user needs and to identify the specific requirements for context-sensitive and personalized conceptbased access to knowledge. Miriam is associated professor at university level and she has to give a course about a very specific topic for graduated students. The course includes face-to-face lectures, e-learning and group work activities. Her former experiences have shown that students’ pre-knowledge significantly varies and to overcome that, additional knowledge for different knowledge levels is helpful within the learning process. Therefore, Miriam decides to offer students personalized references on concept level to additional knowledge available in various knowledge repositories. Consequently, students can access them in the e-learning system. Nicholas is project manager of a new project which is very complex in terms of technology aspects. The project team members have diverse pre-knowledge in this new subject domain. Because of a tight timetable, project team members can not be educated and trained in advance. Thus, Nicholas made the decision to apply a learning-ondemand strategy. Therefore, he identifies relevant concepts of important subjects for the project and assigns various learning material and documents from the corporate memory (the intranet information system) and the selected internet resources. As a result project team members can access task-dependent and personalized information from the intranet information system. Mona is head of the quality management department and responsible for modeling the business processes of the company, which are made available for the employees by the process management system and instantiated for concrete projects. Her former experiences have shown that in addition to task descriptions further information supports the efficient processing by employees. Additional information needed depends on various facts, such as on the project role, process and domain knowledge and frequency of processing specifics tasks. This led Mona to specify task-dependent topics (concepts) and link them to relevant documents for different roles and skills, such as example documents from finished projects, detailed task descriptions, best practices documents and domain knowledge. Solution Approach and Implementation In the light of users’ needs discussed so far and illustrated by application scenarios in the previous section we have decided to develop a system which enables a context-sensitive and personalized concept-based information access applicable for knowledge transfer and learning activities. Our solution approach dates back to and is inspired by our former research work on the Dynamic Background Repository (see for further information García-Barrios et al. 2004) and its enhancements with a Concept Modeling System (see for details Safran et al. 2006). The main idea is to manage background knowledge and make it personalized accessible on the concepts level. Unlike most other solution approaches which statically link resources, we follow a flexible approach by dynamically linking topical resources by means of requesting or querying diverse information systems. As various information needs are caused by situations or activities of specific contexts, our system can cope with this requirement, which we call context sensitiveness. The main part of the solution approach is given by the Context-sensitive Concept Modeling System (CsCMS) with capabilities for personalization. The CsCMS and its integration in an overall architecture are outlined in the remainder of this section. In general, the Context-sensitive Concept Modeling System enables to manage various contexts, such as courses or projects. For the purpose of a more fine-grained structure, a specific context can be composed by various sub-contexts which are modeled by different context items. In order to assign sub-contexts to a given information structure, context items can be linked to one or more content pages, such as learning objects, knowledge assets or workflow tasks. To illustrate this, for example the context item ‘idea stage’ is part of the context ‘lecture project management’ and it is assigned to the first three pages of the learning content. In the next step, for each context item in a specific context the background knowledge can be modeled by a set of concepts and corresponding synonym phrases. Each of the concepts can link dynamically to topical resources of various information systems by applying specific requests or queries. For further simplicity we will for short name both terms (‘requests’ and ‘queries’) queries in the remainder of the paper. For the purpose of a flexible support of various information systems, the CsCMS allows to manage (add, edit and remove) arbitrary instances of information systems by creating corresponding sets of query templates. By query template we mean a kind of predefined query by applying a flexible placeholder mechanism. Placeholders can be defined to replace parts of the query, such as to fill in a query term by a concrete concept instance or to enrich the query with user group or