KAL

Presented at: Workshop on Architectures for Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS '96, Montreal, Canada, June, 1996

Keywords: Web-based architectures, Tools for Instructional Design, Course customization, Reusable components

Abstract

Ultimately, when such systems are refined, it will not matter whether the user is a learner/trainee or an instructor/trainer: Both groups are assembling courses (or documents) for their own use.

Although students and instructors/trainers may ultimately access these emerging world data bases of course "elements" [Agogino et al, 1993, 1994], their use of these customized courses may be quite different. Instructors often desire to modify existing courses - either to update material, to address a different audience or any one of a myriad of changes. Good courses tend to evolve over time as course material is reworked. Web ReCourse, the Web Retargetable Course Generation System facilitates this process.

In addition, the true course customization problem is an education in the large problem. It involves an astronomical number of files, options components, elements and "pieces". The problems of time and space complexity are just beginning to be addressed.

The Retargetable Course Generation System, however, involves a smaller number of files (often in the 100's or less), plus fewer options and pieces. It is an education in the small application. In fact, the retargeting problem may need to be understood to make steps towards real solutions of the larger customization problem.

Web ReCourse is a tool which enables instructors and trainers to create automatically customized courses from pre-existing course elements -HTML documents, graphics files, header files, etc.. In addition, the system offers advice on ways to create these elements initially to facilitate their reuse and retargeting.

1. Introduction

   The process of creating Web documents has evolved so that there are now numerous tools for creating and linking individual Web documents. Left to the overburdened course instructor is the task of modifying a course and developing it over time.

   As courses are taught and taught again, instructors modify content, use some information in more than one course, change the level and depth of the information, find or make new diagrams and examples, shorten the content, lengthen the content, and on and on.

   The problem of changing a course is one that course instructors and trainers address frequently - either because the potential student/learner group has evolved since the course was created or the course is being "ported" to a new educational environment or merely that the instructor wants to update the course.

   For Web courses, this includes simple tasks such as changing dates and titles, more complex tasks such as changing links and reassembling modules (groups of course elements) and document level tasks such as rewriting material and adding and changing examples and pictures. As more material becomes available on the Web, instructors have more sources from which to find better, more appropriate information and graphics.

   Recent projects in Europe [ARIADNE, 1995, Watabe et al, 1995] and in the US [Agogino et al, 1993, 1994], have been funded to develop electronic studios which can create, distribute and reassemble courseware electronically. Other projects such as Project CODE [Hämäläinen, 1996], have addressed a number of issues in customizing courses and documents.

   The larger issue addressed by these projects is to consider course customization for (potentially) a massive number of diverse course elements, and a multitude of courses. Web ReCourse operates on a smaller number of course elements (typically in the 100's or less). It aids instructors to recast an existing course for different audiences and potential students to retarget the course to fit their own background. For the larger problem, this is just one of the clients accessing the course server. For the smaller problem, it is a stand-alone system.

   Programming problems have been characterized as either programming in the large or programming in the small. The differences in scale of these two involve radically different approaches. Large programming projects are exponentially more complex than smaller ones and require entirely different approaches for their solution.

   The course customization problem is an education in the large problem. It involves massive time, space and management complexities. The Retargetable Course Generation problem described here is education in the small.

   Nevertheless, many of the issues here will also appear in large course customization projects.

2. Motivation and Background The author, as well as many of her colleagues, began teaching courses via the Web as browsers and tools became more user-friendly and available. We noticed that we were performing some of the same tasks with our Web courses that we had performed for years in more traditional settings: we change content, order, level, quantity of information plus more in each course - just like we had always done. In addition, we use some of the same material in more than one course. This latter activity is because we tend to have our own "specialty areas" and teach a number of courses relating to this specialty.

   When this material is moved to the Web, an automatic system for retargeting it for the various courses will improve both the courses and the teacher's sanity. Also, pointers should exist to reusable course elements which create a page using the basic information, but with the appropriate course titles and graphics. Such a system needs to create course pages dynamically, but from stsic information.

   At present, we record such information in the course pages using Course Tags.

   The actual motivation for the system arose from a number of related courses entitled Electronic Documents, Network Publishing, Multimedia, and Document Management. Although there are only four titles, each of these courses has been taught to a variety of audiences: undergraduate computer science students, graduate computer science students, computer engineers, printing technology majors, technical writing majors, information technology majors, plus a number of other students (fire protection technology, physics, math, etc.) that took it at the same time as one of the larger groups.

   The author found herself performing tasks that she knew could be performed faster and better by computer. By thinking about and watching the changes made, it became possible to identify information that is recorded in the Course Tags.

3. The Course Tags Course Tags describe such aspects as Audience, Technical Level, and Interest as well as more subtle tags such as pretopics and posttopics which arose from the manual retargeting process described in Section 2 which served as a background for the system creation.

   A few of the tags are described here. As the system is used, more tags are continually being added. In addition, the option exists for users to create their own Tag Names (and values).

   Audience

   A course is often taught to one or more groups of students. Tagging course elements with information about the audience allows different course elements to be included.

   Level

   Certain expertise and deficiencies can often be assumed based on the student's level. While values for level may vary (values for any of the tag names can be chosen from a default list or created), we use a value indicating that the students are fourth-year etc. students.

   Depth

   Although depth may mean different things to different users, to us, it means how deep technically do we want to go. For example, the Electronic Documents course and the Network Publishing course both discuss the JPEG compression algorithm. We want to discuss the details of the three-step algorithm including the Discrete Cosine Transform for the Electronic Documents course, but don't feel it is appropriate for the Network Publishing course. Thus we give different values to the depth tag for these topics.

   Pretopics and Posttopics

   When course instructors prepare courses, they often introduce a topic to ease the transition to a more complicated topic. It is the complicated topic which is more important; the pretopic exists for pedagogical reasons. Thus, if the pretopic is chosen by the user of Web ReCourse, the user must be reminded that there is a posttopic which should be included also. Similarly, some course material doesn't make sense without prerequisite or background topics. Since the course is being retargeted for a particular audience, the user needs to be prompted on whether the students need the background topics or not. There are many other tag names "built-in" with suggested values. We continue to add more tags as the system is used. The system is extensible is the sense that, once new tags are defined by a user, they can appear in the list of suggested tags.

4. The System

   Web Recourse runs in two modes: (1) Initialization and (2) Retargeting

   When the user logs in, Web ReCourse begins the following dialog:

   Web Recourse: Are you using ReCourse to:

   (a) Create a course for the first time

   (b) to change a pre-exisiting course

   There are different questions depending on the answer to the above. Selecting (a) invokes an Initialization process, while selecting (b) invokes the Retargeting process which first asks if the user wishes to change existing tags (re-invoking the Initialization process)

5. Initialization

   Currently, Web ReCourse assumes that course elements exist as a number of Web pages, although future plans include add-ons to facilitate this process also. The Initialization phase places the tags into the documents. Users are shown a list of Tag Names and possible Values. As users select the tags, they are shown a list of their course elements (titles and initial words or the whole document on request). The tags are then added to the appropriate pages. Users can run the Initialization phase at any time to change the tags.

6. Retargeting

   Once the user has run the Initialization procedure, the inserted tags may be used to retarget courses, thus performing automatically, tasks that used to involve much editing.

7. Implementation

   Currently, Web ReCourse is an interactive Web document, executing Perl Scripts. The Tags are added to the Web pages using the HTML constructs.

   As more and better software for creating Web interactive systems becomes available, the system will continue to evolve. Other implementations are currently in the planning stages.

8. Future Work

   Web ReCourse arose out of a real need. It is designed to be extensible, by allowing the user to define new Values for built-in Tag Names as well as new Tag Names and the Values, themselves.

   Because the developers are now the users, no front-end tutorial exists. This will soon be added. Other enhancements include linking to an existing system called WebQuiz which allows instructor to create and change questions - either for homework's or tests.

   Currently, we are writing the software that will allow the individual course elements to be reused in more than one course by creating pointers to course elements rather than course elements themselves.

   As the system continues to be used, enhancements will continue to the present HTML constructs implementation. In addition, we plan to write an SGML DTD for our tags. This will allow us to move from the HTML world to the emerging SGML world. At this point an integrated system can be developed with more power than that current possible. A true Retargetable system will then become a reality.

   Acknowledgements

   Much of the implementation has been carried out by students at EVITech, as well as exchange students from Middlesex University and South Bank University (London), and the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

   Bibliography

   Agogino, A.M., S. Sheppard, J. Harris, L. Genalo, K. Mink, J. Krishnagopalan, L. Genalo, D. Martin, and Saylor, J. (1993). "National Engineering Education Delivery System." Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education `93 Conference, IEEE and ASEE (Ed. Lawrence P. Grayson), pp. 592-600.

   Agogino, A.M. and W. H. Wood III (1994). "The Synthesis Coalition: Information Technologies Enabling a Paradigm Shift in Engineering Education," keynote talk, in Hyper-Media in Vaasa'94. Proceedings of the Conference on Computers and Hypermedia in Engineering Education (Ed., M. Linna and P. Ruotsala, Vaasa Institute of Technology), pp. 3-10.

   ARIADNE - Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring & Distribution Networks for Europe, Project Overview, EU Framework 4 Project, Telematics Applications, Education and Training, 1995.

   Gay, G. and Lentini, M.. (1995). "Use of Communication Resources in a Networked Collaborative Design Environment." [HTML Document]. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(1). http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/annenberg/vol1/issue1/contents.html. Los Angeles: Annenberg School for Communication(Distributor).

   Hämäläinen, Matti, "A Model for Delivering Customized On-Demand Education on the Internet, in Training in the Information Society, Dumort, A., Paprotte, W. (eds), Europeon Commission (DG XIII) (1996 forthcoming).

   Watabe, K., M. Hämäläinen, A. Whinston, "An Internet Based Collaborative Distance Learning System: CODILESS, Computers in Education, Vol.24, No.3, pp 141-155, 1995.

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   Send questions and comments to: Karen Lemone