ABSTRACT
Delivering post-secondary education at a distance provides education to all interested parties regardless of age, location or educational background, learners can continue to learn throughout their lives. More students are finding on-going education is an integral part of their working years. This expanding emphasis on life-going education provides the impetus to expand distance education and to improve adopted techniques and delivery systems.
This paper discuses a new model and an implemented system for courses delivered on the WEB for distance education. The traditional method is printed textbooks and supported materials in printed form. As a response to new technology and to make advantag e of the widely accessible Internet, urgent research for possible techniques for delivering courses on the WEB is needed. Athabasca University, as a leader institute of distance education in Canada investigates different scenarios for electronic course de livery on the WEB (ECD-W). We, in Athabasca University, expect that electronic course delivery, specifically on the WEB, will make a significant contribution to education in general and distance education in specific over the next decade. As a result, th e Center of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics has a mandate to deliver all department courses on the WEB over the next two years.
However, the exact form of electronic courses is still evolving, but are expected to have a special flavor that distinguish them from printed material due to the different media. Learners do not expect to see course materials on the WEB that exactly ma tch what is in the printed form. An interesting electronic flavor is expected. ECD-W promises major improvements over the conventional course delivery, it promises to be interactive and intelligent.
This paper is designed with the objective of expanding our view of course delivery by presenting a new and untraditional model and structure of the course to be delivered. The system is unique in several aspects. First of all, it takes into considerat ion several teaching methods such as gradual increase in level of difficulty, verbal, animated and image protocols. Secondly, learners can ask for unlimited (practically, a limited large number) automatic generation of several learning material from libra ries. Thirdly, the interactive participation of the student and tutor. fourthly, the system is unique as it provide students at distance to share a common work place to discuss problems together interactively, and other features. This paper suggests what course coordinators and instructors can do to start delivering their courses on the WEB in an untraditional form.
Delivering post-secondary education at a distance provides education to all interested parties regardless of age, location or educational background, learners can continue to learn throughout their lives. More students are finding on-going education is an integral part of their working years. This expanding emphasis on life-going education provides the impetus to expand distance education and to improve adopted techniques and delivery systems.
This paper discuses a new model and an implemented system for courses delivered on the WEB for distance education. The traditional method is printed textbooks and supported materials in printed form. As a response to new technology and to make advantag e of the widely accessible Internet, urgent research for possible techniques for delivering courses on the WEB is needed. Athabasca University, as a leader institute of distance education in Canada investigates different scenarios for electronic course de livery on the WEB (ECD-W). We, in Athabasca University, expect that electronic course delivery, specifically on the WEB, will make a significant contribution to education in general and distance education in specific over the next decade. As a result, th e Center of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics has a mandate to deliver all department courses on the WEB over the next two years.
However, the exact form of electronic courses is still evolving, but are expected to have a special flavor that distinguish them from printed material due to the different media. Learners do not expect to see course materials on the WEB that exactly ma tch what is in the printed form. An interesting electronic flavor is expected. ECD-W promises major improvements over the conventional course delivery, it promises to be interactive and intelligent.
This paper is designed with the objective of expanding our view of course delivery by presenting a new and untraditional model and structure of the course to be delivered. The system is unique in several aspects. First of all, it takes into considerat ion several teaching methods such as gradual increase in level of difficulty, verbal, animated and image protocols. Secondly, learners can ask for unlimited (practically, a limited large number) automatic generation of several learning material from libra ries. Thirdly, the interactive participation of the student and tutor. fourthly, the system is unique as it provide students at distance to share a common work place to discuss problems together interactively, and other features. This paper suggests what course coordinators and instructors can do to start delivering their courses on the WEB in an untraditional form.
The expanding emphasis on life-going education provides the impetus to expand distance education and to improve adopted techniques and delivery systems. Since the learner and the instructor are physically separated in distance education, they need to c ommunicate. Currently, the most common media are print or written communication. Other forms of technology may be used such as audio and video tapes. Learners experience many aspects of information highway in many aspects of their lives, they expect their distance education to benefit from this information highway. Instructors are under pressure to contribute and make use of the new technology. The WEB is one of the most recent developed applications reflecting the information highway and which may be use d for ECD in distance education. It provides us with a media that is rich in its features. It includes text, sound, static and dynamic pictures. It is an ideal environment to replace the conventional course delivery. An Ideal WEB-designed course should be an interactive multi-media system that possess intelligence in all its components. Intelligence will appear through the ability of the course to tailor itself according to each learner's needs and from giving queries and providing model answers.
An overview of the system is introduced next.
The presented model suggests that the student/tutor will receive only the URL of the home page of the department showing all the courses offered and ready on the WEB (fig1). The student selects the course s/he is interested in. This is the first part of the interface facing the student (and the tutor or any one else visiting the course). The home page of the course presents links to course author/coordinator, department, university, general information about the course and presents links to student's part/tutor's part of the system (fig 2). As figure 3 shows, the systems is composed of three main subsystems: Interface, teaching materials and tutoring subsystem.
The interface subsystem handles requests from students to:
The student's part of the system (teaching material subsystem) includes all the teaching material (e.g. lectures, guidebook,…). It is in the form of a hypermedia environment that takes care of student's requests asked through the interface.
The interface subsystem also handles requests from tutors to:
The tutor's part of the system (tutoring sub-system) takes care of requests asked by tutors through the interface.
Next, the architecture of the system will be discussed. Also, this discussion will include functional description and behavior of each component.
This module is the linkage between the user (student or tutor) and the system. The system offers three types of interfaces: graphical, menu-driven and semi-natural language. The user interface deals with the presentation of information, including such issues as what commands should be made available to the user, how to show nodes and links and whether to include overview diagrams or not.
Three different interfaces have been introduced to provide maximum flexibility to user. Feedback from users will determine whether the three interfaces should remain or a unified one is a better alternative.
The system cares for five main functions:
1. retrieving / presenting: students may retrieve course teaching material to study it including more examples, and the system presents these material.
2. requesting / solving: students may request quizzes, exercises, final examinations and examples from libraries and solve them. The students may ask for solutions for exercises.
3. adding / modifying / marking: tutors may add to libraries more quizzes, examples, exercises and final examinations or modify existing ones. The tutor also needs to mark these on-line quizzes, exercises and examinations.
4. communicating: the systems facilitates the communication between students, between students and tutors, between tutors themselves.
5. providing answer wizard: this function helps students to inquire about different information stored in the system and also about services provided by the system. Inquires are expressed in natural English language without the need to learn specific step s.The Graphical interface is associated with the retrieving function, while the menu-driven is associated with requesting and adding/modifying functions. The semi-natural language interface provides answer wizards to students.
This module starts by the graphical interface showing system main
page on the WEB which is the opening screen of the system. Particular
care has been given to the design of the user interface, where the
graphic facilities has been extensively used. The main page, as in
figure 1, is a diagram of all the courses offered
by the department (currently there are about six courses ready on the
WEB, but by the end of the two years period all the courses will be
available). The user clicks on the course he desires.
The most prominent graphic on a course page is the university's logo, the name of the course, name of the university and course author / coordinator on it to convey a general sense of the nature of the data in the information base. When the user click s on the option he desires, he activates a retrieving subsystem which links him to the page containing the information he is seeking for.
The first page of a course presents an animated moving picture for the author/tutor accompanied by his voice reading the general information listed in figure 4 and which appears a lso as written text on the corresponding page.
The facility is of help for two reasons, first, it gives the impression of an interactive and user friendly interface; secondly, since the instructor and students are apart, this helps students to locate their instructor by sight at meetings held by th e university (various photos for various tutors may be fed to the system in case the course has more than one tutor). This presentation module is available for any visitor to the system.
A Login boxes for students and authorized personnel are found on each course front page. Once the user logs in, he is faced with the subsequent screen. A student is faced with the teaching material subsystem (fig5) where as a tutor has the option of using the teaching material or tutoring subsystems.
This interface, as its name implies, takes the form of a menu with the options the student or the tutor may like to select. As shown in figure 5, a student may like to request a q uiz, an exercise, an examination, or requests more examples related to a particular topic.
A tutor may like to add to the existing libraries more quizzes, exercises, examples or examinations, or he may like to modify the existing ones.
3.1.3. The Semi-Natural Language Interface
This interface takes the form of two windows
(figure 6), the upper windows consists of words
of the provided language. Words are divided into categories which a
student or a tuto r may use to form sentence expressing his/her
requirements. The Sentence is then parsed and understood by the
system and the appropriate action takes place. This mainly provides
an answer wizard to students. Inquires entered by students fall into
two cate gories:
As figure 5 shows, this subsystem includes all the material needed to support the teaching process. Each component of this subsystem is discussed next in more detail.
This library consists of a large number of examples on every section/topic in the course. Students need more explanation than can be found in textbooks and given in ordinary lectures. A book usually lists one or two example on certain points discussed. At the start, the library contains basic examples as those found in text books (could be more as the tutor may insert any number of examples he desires).
One of the features of this system is that its libraries are growing. When a student seeks many examples and he still did not understand he contacts his tutor, the tutor explains more examples which are then added to the examples library with an ident ification for each example to relate it to the appropriate section in the course. These new examples may be retrieved by other students also.
This growing facility of this library and all the other libraries is very helpful specially when a course has more than one tutor (the case occurs when many students enroll in the course and each tutor is assigned a number of students). Since the cours e has unified libraries, then any new examples added by a tutor are available to all other students supervised by other tutors. This enriches the explanation power of the system.
This library contains on line quizzes. It is a growing library since a tutor may add more and more quizzes. A student requests a quiz and he is given one at random (could be specified by the tutor).
Each quiz has an identification number to relate it to the appropriate part of the course it is concerned with.
When a tutor inserts a quiz in this library, he also inserts model answers that may be retrieved by authorized personnel only (e.g. other tutors) to help in the marking process.
This library contains tutor-marked exercises (TMEs). At certain points in the course, students are required to carry out TMEs. A student upon requesting an exercise he is given one at random (could be specified by the tutor).
Again this library is a growing one since tutors may add more exercises. When a tutor inserts an exercise in this library, he also inserts model answers that my be retrieved only by authorized personnel (e.g. other tutors) to help in the marking proces s.
This library contains final examinations with their answers. When a student request an examination, the system gives him one at random (could be specified by the tutor). When it is time that the tutor marks the examination, a copy of the model answers are also became available.
As the previous libraries, the final examinations library is a growing one since tutors may add more examinations with their model answers retrieved only by authorized personnel.
This library contains common bugs gathered from computer statistics and from tutor's observations of problem areas in quizzes, exercises (TMEs) and examinations. A Tutor uses these statistics and his observations of problem areas and add them to the bug library. When a student requests many examples on a point and the point is still un-understood, entries from the bug-library and which are related to that point are presented to the student.
A new feature here is that the reading is not one-to-one to the
text, it imitates what happens in an interactive lecture. To provide
an interactive environment that good instructors create to facilitate
the task of the learner. Such environment is what Leinhardt and
Ohlsson (1990) called "meta-communication", and it includes:
a- marking the beginning and end of a lesson segment:
b- relate new knowledge to previous knowledge
c- describe the type and content of the lecture that will be
given
d- associate different verbal labels with different knowledge
segments
e- mark different formats referring to the same piece of information
The library contains sentences and phrases representing the above points, sound images for them are also stored and retrieved at certain points in the lectures. Such examples are:
Examples of (a) :
Examples of (b) :
Examples of ( c) :
Examples of (d ) :
Examples of (e ) :
According to Schneiderman (1989), hypertext should be used when:
" - A large body of information is organized into numerous fragments
- The fragments relate to each other
- The user needs only a small fraction at any time"
This module consists (in its best case) of all material (found in textbooks and guide books) and being used by courses of the computer science curriculum. Since the department has a mandate to deliver all its courses on the WEB, then eventually all th e material will be in the form of pages on the WEB.
Figure 7 shows a global overview of the
contents of the curriculum hypertext structure. There is no order for
courses or chapters within a course or sections within a chapter. Ea
ch section is a separate page. Each section is connected to the part
of video tape corresponding to for voice and pictures.
So any course is formed from a combination of pages with their
related items from other libraries.
This proposed hypermedia system is based on the interlinking of nodes that contain different media such as hypertext, graphics, video and sound. This component module is responsible for synchronizing the work among these different media.
Depending on the students selection of the course this module selects the appropriate pages from the curriculum, links them with appropriate of the video clip, sounding and examples from libraries to form a virtual course as discussed in the Lecture module presented in section 3.2.9.
Also, requests for more examples, quizzes, exercises and
examinations are done through this module.
Statistics about each student and blocks of students are presented to
tutors.
This module performs many activities such as:
This module is designed virtually with special care. It is designed to imitate (hence, replace) both material found in textbook and material covered in lectures theaters. Virtually means that it does not exist physically but is formed from some physica l components to suit each users learning needs.
One of the major new features of this component is that it is interactive. By interactive we mean that text is combined by sound and meta-communication sentences and phrases and that it tailors itself, to some extent by asking questions and matching an swers, to each user's learning needs. Also, in contrast to textbooks and guide books which list an example or two on a certain point, the system retrieves an example and demonstrate it to the student, if the student needs more examples, the systems retrie ves more examples and repeats this process until the student is satisfied or a reasonable maximum of examples has been demonstrated.
Once a user logs in a particular course, the main page of that course opens a digitized acting photo of the tutor appears combined with his voice reading the material being written.
The lectures main page has a box named STATE. This refers to what point this specific student with current Login has reached in his previous visits, and it is updated each time the student visits the course. If the student with current login has STATE = "empty" (when it is his first time to login), then the materials start automatically from the very beginning. As a feature of hypertext, which puts no restrictions on users to enforce reading a section before another, the student may start an y part of the material by clicking on the box representing it.
Although the material covered in Lectures is logical in sequence, but its physical structure is non linear (by definition of hypertext which is a major component of multimedia). However, the layout of the elements (e.g. chapters and sections) as a diag rams in Lecture's main page, intends to establish relation between them.
Also, the presentation of lectures is not the same for all students. In certain points where examples are to be presented, after each example the student is asked if s/he requires more examples, if so, more examples are retrieved from the examples libr ary. Retrieving of meta-communication sentences and phrases is triggered automatically to suit the current situation which varies from a student to another.
Also, at certain points in the lectures re-fresh questions are being asked. Re-fresh questions are inserted in the text, and aimed to keeps learners attention. Such questions as: "…..from the last two paragraphs, we conclude that there are tw o data types can do the job, aren't they ( Y/N)". If the students answered "Y" and "Y" is expected, then lecture continue. If "N" is expected, the student is presented with a justification to the right answer.
In addition, a new feature of the system and which facilitates the ability of the course to tailor it self to each user's learning needs is that when concepts or material covered in previous or pre-requisite courses are mentioned, the learner is asked whether s/he more information. If the answer is 'yes', then the page covering that piece of information is presented. Links to pages can be established easily since the whole curriculum is available in the form of pages. The learner may even be switched t o the pre-requisite course to make use of the examples available.
Communication between this module and other components such as the examples library is achieved through the hypermedia engine/controller.
Each page is footed by several suitable icons that facilitates computer-mediated-communication (e.g. e-mail), fax and telephone. These icons may differ or lead to different addresses depending on the page type. For example, icons at the foot of a cove r page facilitate communication with course co-ordinator, department, and university, whereas icons at the foot of a lecture page facilitate communication with tutor, other students and course co-ordinator.
One of the major goals of the system is to reduce student's
dependence on tutors. However, this sub-system was not designed with
intention of being an expert system for students. This module is
mainly used by tutors to help them accomplish their tasks and help
them to provide a better teaching material environment to students.
Reduction of dependence is achieved through the following:
Components of the tutoring sub-system are introduced next.
The subsystem personalizes the teaching dialogue to each student,
in addition, it requires the capacity to allow the student to take
the initiative by asking questions, offering explanations , or
processing new problems to the system.
It consists of the following modules :
a- a module capable of building an explicit representation of the
learning status of the student which allows the system to
personalize the teaching dialogue.
b- a list of possible teaching operations.
c- a set of means-ends guidance rules that execute teaching
actions on the basis of the student model.
d- a problem generator to select problems depending on the current
status of the student's knowledge. The problem is retrieved from a
set of problems that was created by the instructor. At the time of
creation of a problem, the instructor associates a de gree of
difficulty with each problem.
e- an advisory and explanation module that is a source of
explanation, suggestions and hints which the tutor supplies to the
student.
f- a watcher that monitors the activities of the student and
thereby provides useful information for student evaluation and
remediation.
This section briefly describes a number of implementation issues. The development of ECD-W is part of a longer term programme of research into integration of department's curriculum and services for computer mediated communication. This paper deals wit h those aspects of electronic course delivery on the WEB. The system is designed and being implemented on an IBM PC (or compatible) with Pentium processor of 120 MH, hard disk 1.3 GM, 24 MB RAM. It is composed of several components: The interface, the tea ching material and the tutoring. Implementation of the systems consists of developing WEB pages and linking those having forms or needing processing to application programs developed in a programming languages. Those involving fill-out forms, counters, in corporating relational databases, passing data between forms, mail and search gateway, communicating with other applications in programming languages are done using the Common Gateway Interface, commonly known as (CGI). All CGI programs in this system are written in C++. Hypertext is being used to enhance the explanation facility of the system. This makes it possible to add topics easily about other course elements, other courses, and other administrative information, so that the program can be extended and used for other complicated or similar courses. Hypertext is being used as the knowledge acquisition method in the present system. Hypertext is also used to gather information which is organized as a network of nodes connected by links. Nodes contain t ext and graphical information. The knowledge engineer can create new nodes and move these nodes to other places. The links between nodes resemble the relationships between the nodes of information. These links describe these relationships in further detai l. The main advantage of hypertext is that linking is machine-supported. The source code for example, exercises, problems and examinations are stored in separate databases which can be accessed at any time.
The systems is Implementation of the system has started already. Due to the complexity nature of the system and to budget constraints, two features of the system (integrated recording of lectures and providing an integrated common workplace shared betw een students and tutors) have been left to a second phase. But un-integrated alternatives to these two features from market have been temporarily suggested as we shall see in section 5.
This paper presented the design and implementation considerations
for an electronic system for course delivery on the WEB. The system
is a more natural method than the traditional printed one. By
providing interactive features, the system bei ng developed in this
paper, is expected to enhance the ability of delivering courses on
the WEB. The need for information and learning by individuals
increase by the day. However, classical course delivery systems are
inadequate to handle the increasing d emands of end-users in
satisfying their needs. This paper demonstrates the possibility of
incorporating and integrating many various elements and components of
the learning environment. The major advantage of the system is
interactivity .
Currently the work is being extended by implementing an integrated
recording facility for the lectures and by implementing an
interactive workspace that is shared between students and tutors and
between students themselves. The system is undergoing a fiel d trial
for several months. During the field trial, any observations,
comments or recommendations are recorded, which include design logic,
screen layout and access availability. The response for the trial is
very encouraging. The system is very easy to understand and to use.
It has intelligent capabilities such as tailoring itself to student's
needs for examples.
The implementation of these two features as integrated components of
the systems has been considered for a subsequent phase for budget -
but currently, users may use software from the market although they
do not form an integrated part of the system:
Literature
Schneiderman, B. (1989) "Reflections on authoring, editing, and managing hypertext", in Barrett, E. (ed.): The Society of Text, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 115-131.
Leinhardt, Gaea and Ohlsson, Stellan (1990) "Tutorials on the Structure of Tutoring from Teachers" In "Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education" Vol. 2 (1) Fall 1990. pages 21-46
Nielsen, J. (1990) "Hypertext & Hypermedia". Academic Press, INC. USA.
December, J & Randall, N (1995) "The World Wide WEB 1996
Unleashed' , 3ed. USA.
LeMay, Laura (1995). How to Create HTML in 14 days. Indianapolis, IN:
SAMS Publishing, 1994.
The WEB for course delivery?
http://web.cs.mun.ca/~rod/webcourse.html
World-Wide-Web Delivery of Educational Hypermedia
http://www.chem.vt.edu/archive/bcce96/1title.htm
(Size 1.0K)
Monologue - a text to speech synthesizer engine
http://www.firstbyte.davd.com/)
WEB - POWWOW
http://tribal.com/powwow/
Osama Shata
Assistant Professor, Dr.
Athabasca University
1 University Drive
Athabasca, Ab. T9S-3A3
osamas@cs.athabascau.ca
©, 1997. The author, Osama Shata, assigns to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
