Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper presents the initial stages of the design of a National Learning Objects Repository for Cyprus (NLORC). It examines the views of the faculty members of Intrecollege, a College of Higher Education in Cyprus, with regards to the need of such a repository. These views were collected through a questionnaire. The NLORC will provide a web-based application allowing indexing, uploading and downloading of e-learning resources in Cyprus and the creation, modification and querying of Learning Objects (LOs). This paper presents a simple model that will underpin the development of the NLORC. After careful consideration and studying of the existing Learning Objects Metadata Standards, it has been decided that the NLORC application should be developed using a database system supporting object-orientation and temporal database features. As a result of this, the model presented herein suggests an object-oriented database structure to form a basis for the application and to cater for the storage of the LOs, keeping a record of the relations between them and allowing their retrieval and manipulation.

E-learners always finds it is difficult to make a decision about which of learning materials best meet their situation and need to read, whilst instructors are finding it is almost impossible to reorganize different materials corresponding to individuals. Based on the investigation on real learners in the Network Education College of Shanghai Jiaotong University, we found that many learners share common need of learning resources if they have similar learning preferences and status during learning process. This paper proposes a novel E-Learning resource recommendation system based on connecting to similar E-Learners, which can find and reorganize the learners share similar learning status into smaller communities. Furthermore a recommendation platform is developed to enable the learner to share filtered resources.

Even with a large number of course management systems at the market and already established in some universities, impact of these systems on the curricula design in the humanities and the cultural sciences is still marginal. Instead of complaining about the reluctance against technology in the non-technical disciplines we try to contribute to establishing an e-learning culture in these faculties. First we introduce on the one hand existing theories on knowledge creation and social learning in information systems research and on the other hand media-specific theories developed in the humanities. By combining these both approaches we achieve a deeper understanding of the underlying scientific methodologies and information systems’ needs. Then we analyze the existing course management systems in the humanities and the cultural sciences with respect to these requirements. Our study indicates that no course management system covers all of these needs. Thus, we introduce MECCA-learn on top of the Movie E-learning Combination and Categorization Application (MECCA) as a basic course management system. It is deployed for a web based community of learners in a media-rich curriculum that allows a tight interaction between multimedia artifacts, their situational context and discourses on them.

Among the existing web-based (LMSs), there is an exponentially increasing need of content interoperability. This has caused the apparition of different standardization initiatives. In this paper we describe our approach to the design of <e-Aula>, a new LMS which adheres closely to IMS standards in an attempt to evaluate the practical viability of those standards. The architecture of our system, focused on the IMS , has yielded a powerful and modular system that goes beyond the initial intention of evaluating the proposed standard and can be used as a robust production system in a real environment. We describe our IMS driven approach, as well as an architecture based on this approach that has been implemented using well-known and robust Java based web technologies.

Developing a pedagogical learning content that can be delivered among different Learning Management Systems (LMSs) is a critical task for most instructors. Although the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) has proposed a mechanism allowing the exchange of learning contents between LMSs, to embed learning strategies to SCORM-compliant learning content is still an open issue. This paper proposes a mechanism to construct a SCORM-compliant strategy repository which contains learning strategies. The strategy repository can be adapted to satisfy the requirement of instructor for designing learning content with strategies embedded. The strategy repository presented in this paper is with the following advantages: (a) the strategies stored are domain independent; (b) the strategies offered are adaptable; (c) the strategies saved can be continuously evolved; (d) the strategies stored can be reusable.

We describe an extension of a programming environment to generate web-based program animations. Emphasis is put on requiring little effort from the instructor that handles the system. User interaction is reduced to a minimum, mostly for customizing the animations. Both construction and maintenance are considered in order to guarantee low effort in an actual educational scenario. We describe several aspects of a program animation: the different kinds of information that compose it, its construction process, alternative graphical designs for web publishing, and its implementation as a package. In general, the instructor will wish to use the system to construct and handle a collection of animations for one or several courses. Therefore, we also consider the creation and management of collections of animations in a effortless way. Finally, we describe our experience as well as related work.

There are many different designs for eLearning on the Internet. The static webpage design can only provide fixed learning materials. The dynamic webpage design can change the page data depending on the students’ input. The intelligent webpage design records students ’learning results for their knowledge level analysis and provides sequence and format to test the students for practicing and training accordingly. A student centered model enables the system to provide customized course contents and study guidance to individual student. The web-based application helps students of all levels with different educational background to achieve their learning goals effectively. This paper provides an eLearning system with intelligent dynamic web pages customized to each student’s effective learning style in SQL (Structural Query Language) as a practical relational database language in the syllabus of an undergraduate Database Systems course.

Chinese calligraphy is a valuable civilization legacy and there are some web sites trying to help people enjoy and learn calligraphy. However, besides metadata-base searching, it is very difficult to find advanced services such as content-based retrieval or vivid writing process simulating for Chinese calligraphy. In this paper, a novel Chinese calligraphy retrieval and learning system is proposed: First, the scanned calligraphy pages were segmented into individual calligraphy characters using minimum-bounding box. Second, individual character’s feature information was extracted and kept. Then, corresponding database was built to serve as a map between the feature data and the original data of individual character image. Finally, a retrieval engine was constructed and dynamic writing process was simulated to help learners get the calligraphy character they are interested in and watch how it was written.

We take advantages of abundant text resource on the Internet and information about English phonetics for assisting human teachers to prepare test items for listening and dictation in English. In this preliminary exploration, we built an environment in which teachers choose words that they want to have test items for, and teachers compose the final test items based on the test items that are algorithmically generated by our system. The output of the current system indicates that computers can play active roles in assisting the composition of test items, though we have not done a field test over the usability issues.

This paper introduces the Gong system, an Internet-based voice board system designed primarily for language learners which includes special support for Cantonese. The Gong system is a client/server design which may be used to complement or, in some contexts, to replace face to face learning. The system supports Unicode input, storage and display of multiple character sets. Furthermore, we have developed a unique storage and display method for the Yale romanized representation of Cantonese, which is the most popular written method used for teaching Cantonese.