A Framework For An Intelligent Online Education System

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 1520 A Framework for an Intelligent On-line Education System Michael V. Yudelson, I-Ling Yen, Evgeny Panteleev, Latifur Khan Abstract This paper addresses the issues of personalization in on-line education. It discusses problems of knowledge structuring, user modeling, and adapting educational material to individual learners. The primary focuses of the paper include: (1) employing knowledge domains structure for a more effective personalization, (2) presenting an integrated personalization design that aims at sharing information between different adaptation techniques to achieve a better adaptation results. The proposed architecture of the intellectual on-line education system consists of knowledge model, user model, and adaptation model. Knowledge model is composed of concepts ontology, sequencing relations, and media objects. Design of conceptual part of the knowledge model, visual part of the knowledge model and the sequencing relations is done independently, which provides a greater consistency and presents a better structuring decision. Adaptation model executes navigation and presentation navigation of the educational material. Sharing information between adaptation techniques enables more effective adaptation. Knowledge domains structure is also taken into account in the personalization process. Discussed approach to the personalization will provide an advanced adaptation capabilities for an on-line education system. Intellectualization of the personalization will make a distance learning environment more comfortable for a wide variety of learners and will contribute to a greater dissemination of the educational opportunities. 1 Introduction Recent advances of network technologies and multimedia capabilities have greatly enhanced education technologies. The amount of online educational resources is growing rapidly. Many web-based courses are being offered and a lot of lectures are being broadcast via the Internet. Distance education (DE) has many advantages, such as its geographical independence and schedule independence (though some deadlines are helpful). However, due to the lack of interaction between the instructor and students, distance education has not been widely accepted. Many online courses contain statically coined pages and rigidly formed course flow. This style of online courses lacks flexibility and fails to satisfy diverse groups of learners. Due to the impossibility to have a course designed to be “all things to all people”1, it is only feasible to have dynamic assembly of course material to fit the specific personal needs of the learners and adjust to various learning styles. Personalization techniques can be applied to distance education to provide flexible education material assembly and adaptive course flow. Recently a lot of research has been conducted in the field of adaptive hypermedia education systems 4,12. Generally, most of these systems can be modeled as consisting of four main components: user model, interactive component, personalization component, and knowledge model. User model captures learner’s personality “Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education”