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Enter your email address to subscribe to the newsletter.6.1 – The LTfLL Formal Learning Support System Course Editing Service
Download: LTfLL-Service-Description
Problem: Teachers who develop or adapt courses have insufficient tools to help them locate learning material that is appropriate for the intended learners.
Solution: The Formal Learning Support System (FLSS) as part of the Common Semantic Framework (CSF) offers various browsing and searching functionalities (for more details see D6.2). A simple text search returns documents with a varying degree of relevance. Semantic search makes the results more relevant, by using different wordings of a concept and exploiting implicit semantic relations in the text. Browsing the domain ontology helps the teacher to organize taxonomically his/her curriculum.
The learning materials in FLSS are annotated automatically. Users can browse these texts with annotated concepts and contexts, and thus can compile manually a curriculum, a glossary and a test for the learners that will take into account the learner’s profile (as a group and individually).
Story: FLSS offers a repository of learning objects (tutorials, courses, papers, tests, etc.) as well as facilities for search, concept browsing and document similarity measuring over the information stored in Common Semantic Framework. This information comprises the repository of learning objects, comments from peers, other materials provided by external services. A teacher may begin searching for materials, or (alternatively) may want to get some insights on the topic starting with browsing over the domain ontology to get an appropriate set of concepts. The ontology is accessible as a whole as well as in specific thematic parts for this purpose. In both cases, through the use of various searches – mainly text and semantic, and through the browsing of the domain ontology the teacher can choose materials to be included in the course. The teacher can additionally get results, based on similarity among the learning objects. The teacher may also add documents to the repository. Such documents will be automatically annotated. The automatic pipe annotation includes: word level segmenting; linguistic NLP analysis; concept annotation grammar, coreference relations. The annotated documents and the ontology might be used for semantic and contextualized search, structuring the content, making glossaries and tests for the learners. The coreference annotation improves the coverage and precision of the concept annotation, thus making the retrieved results more informative and to the point. For example, if the concept grammar returns the concept ‘Web page’ and its immediate context, then through the coreference also non-adjacent contexts would be returned, which refer to HTML with ‘It’ or ‘page’.
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Key functionalities 0. Preparation - Common Semantic Framework running as a background service for FLSS; - Document annotation service; - Search service; - Stakeholder-oriented interface.
FLSS might be installed as a stand-alone application, or on a web server.
Resources: Domain ontology Concept grammar for the target language(s) Repository of Learning objects
1. Add and process a new document to the repository - Automatic document annotation with concepts and coreferences - Semi-automatic support for annotation of images - Semi-automatic support for discourse annotations
2. Search within the repository of learning materials - Text based search - Semantic search - Combination of both searches - Ontology navigation and browsing: - Tree view - Concept map view - Concept list view - Document ranking
3. Retrieval results - Concepts or text excerpts with contexts - Documents, retrieved by their similarity
4. Commenting and manipulation on learning material - manual addition of comments - manual editing, deletion, addition or combination of text excerpts
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Required techniques and data: Domain Ontology (used for browsing; semantic search, semantic text and image annotation) NLP annotation pipe (used for detecting the domain concepts and coreference relations in the texts) Search modes (used for conducting text, semantic, contextualized searches) Image annotator (supports the manual semantic annotation of images) Annotation editor (provides possibilities for adding manually tags, links, notes) Concept map editor (a visualization that represents the document and search results in a comprehensive way)
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Validation Our validation goals are to investigate to which extent the FLSS offers:
We will validate the FLSS software in the domain of IT in English .The service uses a structured specialized repository, initial interface, document annotation and to enable search, annotation and browsing activities. We will run a pilot with 5 teachers and 3 vice-Deans in Humantities. Instruments used are think-alouds with teachers and interviews with vice-Deans. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis will be undertaken. |
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