Also finally finished writing another piece called ‘Moonlit Wander’, video here:

First up is the main menu, where you can select the course to study.

Next is a layout based on Craig Stewart’s work on culture based user interface adaptation, this one is the Romanian layout displaying a PHP course.

And a Perl course using a UK layout…

The default layout in the latest version of ADE is shown below displaying a MySQL.

The MySQL course is using an adaptation strategy called BegIntAdv which hides more advanced concepts until the student has accessed the simpler ones. The screenshot below is the same course after the user has progressed to the “Intermediate” level.

Finally, the most basic layout for the same MySQL course.

However to do e-learning experiments we need students and apparently there are plenty of students in Romania, which is why I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a Web Application Development course in at Bucharest University.

I’m also here to (hopefully) confirm some hypotheses made by Craig Stewart in his PhD thesis on cultural based adaptation. The main thrust of Craig’s idea is that different cultural backgrounds can influence user preferences in relation to user interfaces. To confirm this we are splitting the students into two groups to undertake an online revision course on PHP and then giving group 1 the ‘Romanian’ interface and group 2 an opposite interface, in this case the ‘UK’ interface. We switch the interfaces round for the second course on Perl and as the students are taking pre/post tests we hope to see more improvement in students who use the ‘Romanian’ layout.

None of the cultural adaptation theory is my research. However the benefit to me is a perfect opportunity to test the layout adaptation research I’ve been working on and then writing up over christmas and January. Also we’ve been testing my system on it’s own using a MySQL revision course to see if student’s learn faster using my the adaptive learning environment that I’ve developed, called ADE.

As I’ve spent much blood, sweat and all the small hours in creating my lessons and example web application (QuizMaster!) to go with them, I thought I’d make them available to the world in general, so here they are:

Java MVC

Session Handling

Data Web Access

Persistent Storage

Web Development Examples

Bear in mind that if you think Java is a nice cup of coffee these slides and examples will definitely not be for you!

ADE is a delivery platform for adaptive educational hypermedia (adaptive e-learning) which I’ve been developing as part of my PhD at the Intelligent and Adaptive Systems group at the University of Warwick.

Show All

Basic strategy that makes all concepts visible.

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

RollOut

The roll-out strategy does two things: the more times you visit a (sub)lesson, the more of its contents (attributes) become visible. At the same time the opposite is also possible: the more times you visit a (sub)lesson, the more of its contents become invisible. This is governed by weight (number of visits) and label (either showafter or showatmost for content that needs to appear or disappear respectively). The keywords strategy is a special version of the same principle, which only uses labels (number of visits is always 1, and the content is always revealed, never hidden)

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

Visual / Verbal

Concepts are either unlabeled (general) or have label ‘visverb’ with a weight indicating where on the vis/verb axis they lie. Visual concepts have weight nearer 0 and verbal concepts have weight nearer 100. The user has a stereotype ‘visverb’ which is also a number between 0 and 100, with the same meaning (0=visual, 100=verbal user). The user selects a stereotype by visiting special ‘settings’ concepts; the weight of the concept becomes their new visverb number.

A variable in the UM defines a threshold. visverb concepts are visible if and only if abs(weight-stereotype)<=threshold. So it’s like a band filter (this makes it more appropriate to knowledge levels, I guess). General concepts are always visible and have no effect on the adaptation.

LAG File | CAF File | AHA! Demo

Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

This is an attempt at combining all four of the above strategies, without resorting to labels that are cartesian products. Using Cartesian products a label A-B-C is treated as three labels A, B and C respectively… which one the weight applies to is harder to define, although I guess one could split the weight into component numbers (like units vs tens) that can be separated out again. I don’t really think that’s very elegant or robust though.

So the idea was to have labels/weights be inherited by child lessons unless explicitly overruled by their own label/weight. (This way a concept can indirectly get multiple labels). These labels are all stored in an overlay that is then used instead of the GM labels for the adaptation rules. This is basically a workaround for a MOT shortcoming. Unfortunately the inheritance idea doesn’t work because of the way group lessons are handled by LAG (their labels and weights can’t be inspected). The strategy is included for ‘educational’ purposes, since the principle itself is sound.

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

Type Based

This strategy shows concepts based on their type. This particular implementation only shows concepts of the type text and doesn’t show the other concepts.

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

Relation Based

After seeing all beginner concepts sets the user to intermediate and shows the related concepts

LAG File | CAF File | AHA! Demo

Depth First

This strategy shows the concept labelled as start first, then the rest of the content in a depth first manner using the child-parent relations

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

Breadth First

This strategy shows the concepts in a breadth first manner. It uses a user model variable called level which determines which level in the hierarchy gets shown.

LAG File | CAF File | ADE Demo

It’s called OSOLCaptcha and is a captcha plugin for the user registration, login, reset password, contact us and remind username forms. You only need to install and then publish the plugin for it to work and you can download it for free from here.

That’s the last of the University Society websites I’ve been working on this summer.

The default theme is fine for my needs and since installing it and doing the initial configuration I haven’t needed to touch it for months. The plugin page is here but you can also click on ‘Add New’ from the Dashboard Plugins menu and install it from there. I’d highly recommend using it if your blog is on WordPress.

I’m now looking into a similar plugin which works with Joomla for some other websites I’m currently working on. It’s called Mobile Joomla and looks pretty good as well.