an intelligent learning portal for distance learning

International Conference on Engineering Education July 21–25, 2003, Valencia, Spain.1

An Intelligent Learning Portal for Distance Learning

Author:

Yong Lian, Department of Electrical and Computer Eingineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent RidgeCrescent, Singapore, [email protected] Hu, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore, [email protected]

Abstract In this paper, we present the architecture of the intelligent Educator-to-Learner portal, e-Learning Hub.Combining multimedia demonstrations, virtual simulations, virtual labs, and an intelligent tutorial system into thisarchitecture allows e-Learning Hub to support various learning activities involved in distance learning. The intelligenttutorial system is able to diagnose the students answer automatically and provides rapid feedback to the learner andeducator. With these features, e-Learning Hub brings a new experience in teaching and learning under a distance learningenvironment and greatly improves the learning efficiency.

Index Terms Communication and information technologies, Distance learning, Intelligent learning system, Web-based learning, .

INTRODUCTION

Today’s institutions of higher education face unprecedented challenges in attempting to provide effective learningenvironments for their students. The adoption of communication and information technologies ( C & IT) as a primary systemfor instructional delivery through both distance education and traditional classroom environments becomes an urgent task tomany universities due to the fast growing enrolment and increased diversity of the student population. With large studentenrolment, universities have to address overcrowded classrooms. Building more classrooms may not be a realistic solutiondue to economic constrains. Other effective solutions must be sought. Distance learning is one of solutions that may help tosolve some of the problems associated with overcrowded classrooms. It not only provides an opportunity for learner to accessan institute of higher learning without being bounded by time and location but also offers great flexibility to learner andallows learner to conduct learning in their own pace.

In today’s knowledge economy, knowledge is changing so fast that new academic programs, courses, and content willneed to be created, delivered, enriched, and modified at unprecedented speed. Incorporating distance learning into traditionaleducation environment will help the universities to adapt to changes much fast. It allows educators to conduct courses inother universities without travelling. By leveraging educators globally, universities will be able to offer new courses in a fastpace and at much lower cost. Besides, it brings opportunities for students to interact with other students from different social,cultural and economic backgrounds. This enhances students’ communication and collaborate skills with widely dispersedpeople.

To facilitate the distance learning, a distance learning environment must be setup. An idea distance learningenvironment should be built beyond the traditional boundaries of a particular location to reach a broad range of students andto involve them in a high interactive participation [1]-[8]. Such an environment must be in accordance with the newtechnology development; consistent with educator’s philosophy and style of teaching; convenient, accessible, and relevant tothe students. With the rapid development of the Internet, it has empowered any individual the ability to retrieve real-timeinformation anytime, anywhere to perform their tasks. Being such a powerful connectivity and reference tool, the Internet hasopened up a new paradigm that transcends both time and space in the education realm for educators. It not only providesextensive reach to a wider audience distributed all over the world, but also enhance the whole learning experience [9]-[13].Most of distance learning environment are built around the World Wide Web. They allow educational institutes to conductcourses over the Internet and are highly welcomed by learners. Although Internet is able to deliver the multimedia coursematerials to learner, one problem remains unsolved in distance learning, i.e., how to establish a timely feedback loop betweeneducator and learners. The role of feedback in any learning environment is very important. Over the years a variety of testingmechanisms have been employed to track individual learner’s performance and to enable educator to deliver well-balancedcourse content to learners. These feedback mechanisms range from quizzes to regular tests. Under on-campus environment,regular testing by class tests and mid-semester tests can be easily conducted and provides feedback to students. Under adistance learning environment, it is difficult to get a timely feedback from students. In this paper, we will present anintelligent Educator-to-Learner portal, e-Learning Hub, which gives both educators and learners a new experience in teaching


and learning in a distance learning environment. The e-Learning Hub not only makes it possible for keeping track of studentperformance, but also enhances the learning process through the use of multimedia demonstrations for visualization ofdifficult concepts, online simulation tools, and virtual laboratory. Other two features are a do-it-yourself web tutorialpublication system that has an interface similar to Microsoft Word Processor, and an intelligent tutorial diagnostic systemthat automates marking process using a machine generated diagnostic script and is capable of diagnosing symbolic, graphic,numerical answers, and MCQs on the fly when students submit their answers online. This paper covers the design of such anintelligent Educator-to-Learner portal, e-Learning Hub.

THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE EDUCATOR-TO-LEARNER POTAL

A successful integration of IT technology into a curriculum starts with understanding on what is a good teaching and learningpractice. Ramsden [14] identifies 13 important properties of good teaching as seen from the individual lecturer’s point ofview. Listed below are some of these points:

• Ability to make material being taught stimulating and interesting• A facility for engaging with students at their level of understanding• A commitment to making it absolutely clear what has to be understood, at what level, and why• A focus on key concepts, and students misunderstandings of them, rather than on covering the ground• Giving the highest quality feedback on student work• A desire to learn from students and other sources about the effects of teaching and how it might be improved.

To achieve the above, we form a three steps approach to increase the learning efficiency. The first important step is to sourcetechnologies that will enhance students understanding and to stimulate their interest on the subject. Multimediademonstrations and computer simulations are good candidates to achieve the goals. The second step is to establish a timelyfeedback loop between educator and learners. This can be done with the help of tutorials and assignments. The last step isthe knowledge transfer. The process of knowledge transfer is inherently interactive and dynamic. It is built upon the existingknowledge and it can be treated as an interaction between internal and external cognition. Learning-by-doing is a way topromote the knowledge transfer. Learning is a process to accumulate knowledge while doing allows learner to create linksbetween the existing knowledge. In a distance learning environment, doing must be presented to encourage the knowledgetransfer. Virtual simulation tools and virtual laboratory are useful tools to give learners more hands-on experience and helpthem to verify the concepts. This enhances the student’s comprehension on the subject. The last step is very important fortransfer of learning; it trains our students on how to apply their knowledge to solve the problem.

As a direct result of the above discussion, we can draw the following requirements for the Educator-to-Learner portal. Itshould contain the following functions:

• Multimedia demonstrations on difficult concepts.• Visualization tools for exploring the difficult concepts.• An intelligent tutorial system that is able to grade students’ answers automatically. It should support at least four

common question types, i.e. multiple choices question, numeric question, symbolic question, and question withsimple graphic answer, and provide immediate feedback to students. This is a very important component in adistance learning environment.

• Virtual simulation tools that allow students to carry on simulations at anytime from anywhere.• Virtual lab tools that allow students to conduct experiments using a web browser.

A WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT LEANING PORTAL: E-LEARNING HUB

With the given set of requirements, we are able to design the Educator-to-Learner portal. There are two availabletechnologies for developing such a portal, Java based technology from the Sun MicroSystems and Windows basedtechnology from Microsoft. Although Java based technology allows the software package to run on different platforms, itsperformance is limited. Windows based technology provides tight integration between operation system and applications thatboost the performance, and its development cycle is quite short. The e-Learning Hub is developed around the windowstechnology. It operates in Windows 2000 Advance Server environment running the following:• Internet Information Server 5.0• Microsoft SQL Server 2000• MatLab Web Server 1.2.1• WebEQ Viewer Control

The basic architecture of e-Learning Hub is shown in Fig. 1. It is divided into three tiers, namely, user services tier (UI),business services tier and data services tier. In this 3-tier approach, changes in business objects do not necessarily affect the


UI, unless the programming interface used by the UI and exposed by the business object changes. This approach also meansthat more intelligence can be built into the components, allowing them to connect to different back-end data sources ondifferent machines, without requiring any UI changes. Factoring an application using these tiers results in a much morerobust, scalable and maintainable application structure.

FIGURE 1. THE STRUCTURE OF THE E-LEARNING HUB

The user services (Presentation) tier renders user interfaces and deals with any user interactions. It supports a browser-enhanced interface to give users a much richer experience. All client inputs are interacted dynamically and verified usingClient-Side JavaScript before submitting to the server. One great feature about using browser-enhanced UI is that they tend torequire far fewer roundtrips back to the server, so the user experience is faster and more exciting with dynamic elementsmade possible by DHTML. The designing of the user interface for e-Learning Hub aims to ensure it is simple and intuitive touse. Upon logging into e-Learning Hub, all users are presented with a standard 4 sets of tools with different functionalitiesthat depend on their identity as an administrator, a lecturer or a student. This is done through the dynamic toolbar generationfunction. Figure 2 shows two interfaces for the educator and learner, respectively.

(A)

User Services BusinessServices

Data Services

ClientWeb

Browser

IIS 5.0

ASP

COM+Application

BusinessObjectsMatLab Web

Server

M-File

MSSQLServer


(B)

FIGURE 2. (A) AN INTERFACE FOR EDUCATOR; (B) AN INTERFACE FOR LEARNER

Each user interface provides four sets of tools, namely, course tools, tutorial tools, lab tools, and user tools. These tools servethe following purposes.• Course Tools

For the educators, they are presented with options to create, edit or delete courses, open or close the course forregistration, view the course roster and organize course materials, and manage course forums. For the students, theyare presented with options to register for the courses and download course materials.

• Tutorial ToolsFor the educators, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editing interface is provided for them to createdifferent types of tutorials and quizzes online. Option is also provided to create tutorials by copying questions fromexisting database. They are also given the tools to upload and manage tutorial solutions. Statistical tools are alsoprovided to allow the educator to keep track of the students’ progress and monitor their performances. For thestudents, they are given the options to view and attempt the tutorials online and download the necessary tutorialsolutions.

• Lab ToolsFor the educators, useful multimedia demonstrations and computer simulations are provided to make the teachingmore effective. They can use these tools to explain the difficult concepts to students and to show students live demosto illustrate it. Other tools are presented to schedule online submission of students’ reports or assignments. They arealso given the options to view and grade the reports online. For the students, they are able to carry out computersimulations from anywhere and at anytime. Virtual Labs are available for them to verify the concepts. They can submittheir reports or assignments and view their achieved grade online.

• User ToolsIn this category, all users are able to update their personal profile and change their password. For the administratoronly, user administration tools are provided to manage user accounts and to update announcements that are reflected atthe log-in page.

In the tutorial creation tools, it is important to make the tutorial creation process as simplistic as possible. One importantconsideration in creating the interface for the tutorial input is to ensure it is user-friendly, simple to use and providesWYSIWYG effect. This ensures that the tutorial created is presented in the same way that educator desires the student toview. The editor interface is shown in Figure 3. The educator will enter the tutorial question in the editing panel and formatthe text using the function provided in the toolbar above the panel. Available features include:• Formatting font face and font size• Font style and decoration such as bold, italic, underline, superscript and subscript• Ordered and unordered listing• Input equations using WebEQ Java applet that functions as an easy-to-use graphical equation editor in a Web page.• Input Greek symbols• Insert images


The editor interface is created using the MSHTML Editing Platform in Internet Explorer 5.5. In addition to its HTMLrendering and parsing capabilities, MSHTML exposes a WYSIWYG HTML editing functionality. Applications hostingMSHTML can exploit these editing features to enable editing of HTML content in a manner similar to text editing inMicrosoft word processors. Applying WYSIWYG editing to HTML authoring not only improves the control over the formatand appearance, but also help the lecturer work effectively without knowing HTML.

FIGURE 3. A SNAPSHOT OF TUTORIAL CREATION SCREEN

In addition, DHTML is employed to enhance the interactivity between the educator and editor interface. As theeducator adds equations to the tutorial question, equation containers will appear dynamically under the [Edit Equation]section to allow him to edit the entered equations as desired. If the equation is deleted, the associated equation container willbe hidden from sight. Similarly, when the lecturer enters the number of solutions required in the tutorial question, the solutiontype selection panel will display the number of selections dynamically as required by the educator. This helps to save thedisplay area and prevent over cluttering of the entire interface.

The interfaces presented above make sure that the educators are able to use them from anywhere at anytime. They donot require any programming knowledge for construction tutorials and creation of diagnostic scripts. The next important partof the portal is the business services tier (middle tier). This tier contains application functionality for carrying out theapplication core processing. The primary programming language used here to develop e-Learning Hub is Active ServerPages VB Scripting, VB Components, JavaScript and MatLab M-File Programming language. It provides all functions in theportal including the tutorial auto-diagnosis which will be discussed late. The MatLab server is employed to allow students tocarry out online simulation and experiments. Currently there are 12 multimedia demonstrations, 9 virtual simulations, and 7virtual labs for the course of digital signal processing. All simulations and virtual labs are developed using MatLab M-filterprogramming language. A MatLab server acts as a bridge between the web interfaces and MatLab simulation engine andsends the simulation results back to web interfaces for displaying. Utilizing MatLab greatly reduces the programmingworkload as MatLab provides full ranges of build-in functions to accelerate the program development. Figures 4-6 showsome of the snapshots of tools available under Lab Tools.


FIGURE 4. A SNAPSHOT OF A MULTIMEDIA DEMONSTRATION IN LAB TOOLS.

FIGURE 5. A SPECTROGRAM SIMULATION PROVIDED BY VIRTUAL SIMULATION TOOLS

FIGURE 6. A GUIDED VIRTUAL EXPERIMENT PROVIDED BY VIRTUAL LAB.

Data service tier (data tier) is where the most important and valuable aspects of the application live, the back-end datasources and data. The back-end database is implemented using Microsoft SQL Server 2000. In order for the web applications


to communicate directly with the database, ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) together with Open DataBase Connectivity(ODBC), which acts as the Application Programming Interface (API), is employed. The database structure consists of 11tables and can be grouped to serve four main functionalities:• User Authentication. All users must register in order to access e-Learning Hub and their information is stored in the

Users table. In particular, the password is encrypted prior to submission and stored as encrypted data in the table.• Course Registration and Administration. The Course table stores the information of all the courses created. The Course

Registration table maps the courses registered by individual student.• Course Materials Management. The Course Materials table stores all the course materials uploaded for the student. The

Student Submission table handles all the reports and assignments submitted by the students for their registered courses.The Submission table stores information on the scheduling of all permitted submission by the students.

• Tutorial Management. The Tutorial table stores all the tutorial questions created, together with all information on therelated symbolic equations and images inserted in the questions. The Tutorial Solutions table handles information onthe soft copy of the tutorial solutions uploaded. The Students’ Attempt table stores all information on the solutionssubmitted by the students.

The tutorial solution diagnostic functionality is implemented through two stages. The first stage involves formulatingthe diagnostic templates for the various types of solution, namely numerical solution, multiple choices, discrete graphicalsolution and symbolical solution. During the second stage, these templates serve as the reference point for dynamiccustomization of the tutorial solutions created by the educators on demand. Customized diagnostic files, which are lateremployed to diagnose the students’ attempts in the tutorial questions, are created in the background process as the educatorsformulate the tutorial questions. The process of generating the diagnostic files is similar to that of filling up a well-designedform with blank fields in it. For example, if the educator submits a numerical solution, the process will involve retrieving thediagnostic template for numerical solution, make a duplicate of this template and fill up the blank field in it that is reservedfor the submitted solution. Except those for symbolic solutions diagnostic files, all the diagnostic files generated on demandby the educators are simply ASP scripts. For diagnosing symbolic solutions, the diagnostic files are generated based on thesymbolic question solver which is capable to match the student’s input with the standard solution.

FIGURE 7. THE TUTORIAL WITH AUTO-DIAGNOSIS FUNCTION(THE RIGHT FIGURE SHOWS THE AUTO-CHECK RESULT).

CONCLUSION

An intelligent learning portal has been presented in this paper to support distance learning. The portal integrates various toolsto enhance the learning process. It does so by address problems in different learning levels range from knowledge acquiringand comprehension to analysis skills and knowledge transfer. The intelligent tutorial with auto-diagnosis helps educators to


identify students’ difficulties in their learning and provides learners with immediate feedback on their weakness. This helpsto improve the knowledge acquiring and comprehension. The multimedia demonstrations together with hands-on experiencenot only enhance learners’ comprehension and their analysis skills but also promote knowledge transfer which makeslearning much effective than the traditional learning methods.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions made by Y.H. Tan, K.S. Chua, C.L. Boh, and X.Q. Zhang. This work wassupported by the National University of Singapore Academic Research Fund R263-000-227-112.

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an intelligent learning portal for distance learning

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