1. Rebuilding Virtual Study Environments Using Topic Maps Kamila Olsevicova TMRA'05 7th October 2005 Faculty of Informatics and Management University of Hradec Kralove

2. 2 Objectives of presentation Describe disadvantages and missed opportunities of current virtual study environments Propose a new solution based on principles of knowledge management and built using Topic Maps Present a pilot application

3. 3 Introduction E-learning  “transport of knowledge and skills enabled by electronic means/computer network”  transforms educational processes with the aim to customize learning to student’s needs in terms of study style, time and space  accent on student’s activity in development of knowledge structures in his mind  the most common solution: e-courses delivered in… …Virtual study environments = courseware  used both in commercial area (training of employees) and at academic institutions (support of study programmes)  a piece in puzzle of different information systems at university (together with scheduling applications, document repositories, students’ agenda systems, digital and non-digital libraries etc. )  tens of products, the most famous are WebCT, LearningSpace, Blackboard,…

4. 4 Tools and functionalities of virtual study environments Educational content delivery  documents, presentations, e-books, programs, databases, bookmarks, glossaries,… Synchronous and asynchronous communication  mail, discussion, whiteboard, videoconferences, PDA integration, e-commerce,… E-course management  calendar, schedule, notice board, tests, self tests, assignments, groups, users, evaluation,… Individual student’s utilities  portfolio, homepage, progress, statistics, private folders… General functionalities  syllabus, e-course info, table of contents, index, searching, printing,…

5. 5 Example: WebCT (1)

6. 6 Example: WebCT (2)

7. 7 Example: WebCT (3)

8. 8 Courseware limitations (when used at academic institution) Content of related e-courses in completely independent and unconnected -> no subject categorization of study materials Hard to locate particular study resource -> ineffective browsing in different e-courses, full text searching available only inside one e-course No intelligent support of educational processes and no customization to students needs (although the idea of intelligent tutoring systems is not new!) No connection to other IS of the faculty Content presentation does not respect the specifics of the web media -> classical textbooks rewritten to html, linear organization of content

9. 9 Our proposed solution understand virtual study environments from the point of view of knowledge management and semantic web… …and integrate… a)Contents of particular e-courses b)Virtual study environment with other information and knowledge resources and repositories available at the university …using ontologies and Topic Maps

10. 10 Pilot study (1) Developed for demonstration of the proposed solution Courses of Logic programming and Knowledge- based technologies that are taught at FIM UHK:  All courses are related to the same discipline (AI)  Traditional e-courses in WebCT are already prepared  Different information and knowledge resources are available (university library, digital library of the faculty, university website, IS of student agenda department, shared folders on university network, teachers as domain experts,…)

11. 11 Three kinds of Topic Maps  General map of information and knowledge resources of the university -> domain independent KM solution for university  Maps of particular e-courses  Domain map (for Artificial intelligence) Maps are supposed to be merged + scopes are defined for different user groups Built in Ontopia Omnigator Pilot study (2)

12. 12 Pilot study (3) Ontology of the general map of educational institution  Topics: Address, Article, Bachelor programme, Bachelor thesis, Conference, Consultation, Course, Credit, Database, Department, Email, Entrance test, Examination, Faculty, etc.  Associations: person – is-guarantee-of – course, person – offers-topic-of – bachelor thesis/master thesis etc., person – participates-on – project/conference/workshop etc., course – is-recommended-to – study programme/semester, (lesson/assignment etc.) – is-stored-in – (library/folder etc.), etc. Ontology of the course map  Topics: Assignment, Exercise, Lesson, Test question, etc.  Associations: lecture – previous/next to – lecture, lesson – requires – prerequisites, etc. Ontology of Artificial intelligence  Simple taxonomy, part of ACM Computer Classification Schema + term explanations from WordNet and from classic Ai textbooks

13. 13 Pilot study (4)

14. 14 Pilot study (5)

15. 15 Pilot study (6)

16. 16 Pilot study (7)

17. 17 Pilot study (8)

18. 18 Conclusion Virtual study environments can be understood as knowledge management tools Topic Maps can help to integrate information and knowledge resources available at the university Next research can be focused on  Development of suitable ontologies for description of educational reality  Design of detail architecture of e-learning application based on Topic Maps  Automatic construction of educational TM from available amount of educational content, e.g. repositories of learning objects  Merging TM of different educational institutions to share study materials…

19. 19 Thank you for your attention! Kamila Olsevicova Dept. of Information Technologies Faculty of Informatics and Management University of Hradec Kralove Rokitanskeho 62 Hradec Kralove 500 03 Czech Republic kamila.olsevicova@uhk.cz