Project Proposal Document

For

Learning Assistant for Stamford University

Prepared by: Samir Hamisu Shira Supervisor: Ms. Thamil Vani

ABSTRACT

The learning assistant is a web-based application that will serve as an educational tool for students as well as the educators in aspect of learning. This system will enhance the already existing features for learning that most people are familiar with. There are some applets that will be used for the software designed for this project. A user-friendly interface will be created that comprises of other newly features that are not common that will massively aid users academically. Ultimately, this system will provide students and educators the tools or features they need academically apart from the existing ones, thereby promoting field of learning to a new level. After the completion of this system, it is hoped to fix all the current difficulties with regards to learning by using this system that allows users to carry out almost all their academic activities successfully and satisfactory,

Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction.............1 2.0 Goals & Objectives..........1 2.1 Overall Goal ................2 2.2 Specific Objectives.......2 2.3 Significance.......2

3.0 Project Background ......7 3.1. Member Roles ...7 3.2. Relationship of Proposed Project to Current Research In Field...8 4.0 Proposed Solution....9 4.1 Proposed System ...9 5.0 Bibliography..10

1.0 Introduction

This particular proposal is mainly meant for a project for the development in the field of Learning. This is a web-based application to help students learn course material and teachers track student progress. It includes online tutorial and testing features. Students can browse the online tutorials or even take online tests according to their study schedules. Educators will upload many test questions and tutorial materials into the system and keep track of students progress based on the feedback they receive from the application. This Learning assistant system is different from most other online tutorial or online testing products because of its adaptive learning features. While students are taking a test, the system is able to generate a series of questions that will get progressively easier or more difficult depending upon the answers given by the student. Also, it is able to detect specific weaknesses of a particular student after a test. This allows providing more help to students who are weak in a particular area while challenging students with stronger skills. The system will generate feedback to teachers depending upon the overall performance of the students. If most students have difficulty answering a question related to a certain subject, the system can report this to the educator, who may decide to give more detailed instructions on this subject in class lectures or add more detailed tutorials on the subject. Apart from the adaptive learning features, traditional testing and tutorial functionalities will also be implemented. A traditional test includes a set of questions selected by the educator. Traditional tutorials offer static help for a particular topic. Educators can choose in advance whether a particular test will be traditional or adaptive. All users have personal profiles and ID that will log them on the system i.e (teacher, student, teaching assistant). The teacher profile allows him/her to configure testing, grading, and reporting features. The teaching assistant profile allows viewing of all student information, including test results and answers. The system includes reporting and grade book features that will track students result. A report is generated after a student finishes a test, which allows the educators to view scores and rankings in their respective classes. Both educators and students can modify the reports.

Project Goal & Objectives

2.1 Overall Goal The overall goal of this project is mainly to create a web-based tutorial and testing application with adaptive learning features. 2.2 Specific Objectives The following are the problems outline of the users i.e students, teachers; Users use their personal sign-on ID to log into the system. The system should support the uploading of test questions and tutorials online. There should be as many questions as possible for a particular test. Educators are expected to categorize the subject of a test question and change the subject when necessary. Tutorials are to be categorized by their respective subject(s). Educators should be able to configure whether the testing features should be adaptive or traditional. Educators can apply different grading mechanisms on the grade book. Educators can also view students individual scores or as a whole. The students can keep track of all tests with their grade book. The level of difficulty of questions in an adaptive test should either decrease or increase depending on the students performance. Questions with standard answers should be graded by the system including descriptive questions with definite answer. The system is expected to detect problem areas in common and provide feedback report to the educator(s) if any. The system should keep track of individual profile for each user. The students can keep track of their individual scores or the whole class. The report for students includes test scores and class rankings. Both educators and students may modify the reports also.

2.3 Significance

The systems adaptive features differ from other test and tutorial products. Students can get more practice in their weakness areas. The adaptive tutorial is mainly focused on the weakness areas of a student, which is exposed by testing. We can say this system is an individualized learning assistant for each student. The system also encourages interaction between educators and the students by its intelligent feedback features. This allows the educator to understand common weakness areas of the class or student. This quality brings the interaction between the educator and student to a new level. The expected outcome of this project is that students utilizing our testing/tutorial system will be better equipped for exams and will have a better understanding of the course material. The system would be of help to the instructors also.

3. Project Background 3.1 Work done by others

Adaptive learning Environment (ALE) provides supplementary function for an ongoing European project: Web-based Intelligent Design and Tutoring System (WINDS). ALE can produce individualized courseware for the students depending on their current state of knowledge, their preference and learning styles. The author specifies the metadata according to which various adaptation methods can be applied. In this way, the system can adapt the sequence of learning objects according to the chosen learning strategy. Multi-tiered Internet Computing using Java Technologies This paper discussed the development and performance issues of client/server computing projects when implemented with IBM software such as VisualAge for Java, WebSphere Studio, and Application server. The paper gave some interesting points on the advantages and disadvantages of different Java technologies when it comes to three-tiered systems.

The paper also talked about the advantage of thin client that is the middle tier can be easily updated and scaled. This paper did a good job at comparing the different Java technologies. Adaptive and Intelligent technologies for Web-based Education The reason adaptive is important for Web-based courseware because it has to be used by a much wider variety of students than any standalone educational application. The challenging is the development of advanced Web-based educational applications that can offer some amount of adaptive and intelligence. Intelligent system includes: Curriculum sequence and problem solving support technology. Curriculum Sequence technology is to provide the student with the most suitable individual planned sequence of knowledge units to learn and sequence of learning tasks to work with. Problem solving support technology can provide a student with intelligent help on each step of problem solving. Adaptive navigation support technology is to support the student in hyperspace orientation and navigation by changing the appearance of visible links. It helps students to find an optimal path through the learning material. Design and Performance Evaluation of a Web-Based Multi-Tier Federated System for a Catalogue of Life This paper introduced an approach to build an on-line catalogue, which comprises over 200 geographically distributed autonomous databases. To enable the interoperability of these databases, this project adopted a multi-tier approach based on a CORBA infrastructure. Multitier distributed systems usually suffer delay at many levels. To solve this problem, the research team proposed a five-tier system, which includes an adaptive caching tier and a load- balancing tier that will localize remote data and evenly distribute workloads. Teaching Tasks in an Adaptive Learning Environment This paper describes an alternative approach to the construction of tutoring systems to be deployed through Internet. The approach is based on the use of Teaching Tasks in order to guide the student towards the desired goals during the learning process. Student profiles and actions, as well as different teaching strategies, are taken into account to decide the next set of achievable tasks, so that courses are dynamically adapted to each student.

3.2 Relationship of proposed project to current research in the field Current research in the field focuses on adaptive tutoring features supported by Adaptive Navigation. In such a tutoring system, each student has an individual courses module that is dynamically adapted to students need. The system can navigate a student to find an optimal sequence to learn a particular course. By doing so, the curriculum sequences that students learn from a course can be different for each person based on their own background knowledge. The main benefit is the learning process of each individual student is more goal-oriented and also more efficient. To achieve this goal, various methods are proposed, such as link annotation, intelligent sequence module, intelligent help on each step of problem solving, and error diagnosis. The tutoring system mentioned above share some similarities with the adaptive tutorial features of our project. The above methods give us very good insights on how to implement our project. As to the adaptive test, relatively few research works has been done so far. The last three research papers talks about system architecture. For the front-end client GUI development, we should consider whether implement the client as a fat client or thin client. The advantage of thin client is that the middle tier can be easily updated and scaled. For interoperability purpose, a multi-tier approach based on a CORBA infrastructure can be a good solution. To address delays caused by multi-layers, we can add a caching tier in our project to cache some remote data locally for better performance. Also, the use of a framework in our project will make incorporation of plug-in modules and add-on new components much easier.

4.0 Proposed Solution The proposed solution makes use of several popular technologies. A background database accessed via middleware. A client-side UI that interacts with the server and modules used to add functionality to the system as a whole.

Description of methods and procedures Figure 1 below illustrates the components envisioned to make the system a reality. These components are: Database The database stores all persistent information that the system uses to customize itself to each user. Each user will have their own database of information pertaining to their test questions, test scores, test grades, tutorial materials and user preferences. In addition, there will be a database of test questions, answers, and general preference. Server The server handles all client interaction and routes it based on the extensibility it is given with the use of modules. It also has all the logic and processing modules as well as the database connection code. Modules The server-side modules will allow for easily upgrading and adding new features to the system. This is where both the traditional and adaptive features will be housed. Teacher UI The Teacher UI allows for overall configuration of the system. Teaching Assistant UI The Teachers Assistant UI allows, at the teachers discretion, viewing of all student information, including test scores and answers. Student UI The Student UI allows students to change basic configuration of the system, such as appearance and reporting options (when they log in, by email, etc). Expected Outcomes Adaptive Learning has shown great promise. The system hopes to be yet another proof of its power. The system will give the teacher many options with respect to configuration and reporting. In addition, it will also give the teachers assistant the ability to retrieve test score information in order to manually grade submissions when necessary. The student will be given options about when and how they are notified about test scores and specialized tutorials. The system will also provide traditional testing and tutorial schemes for convenience and allow for reporting on these schemes as well.

4.2 Proposed System Domain Analysis The Adaptive Learning Class Assistant is an academic web-based learning tool that can be used with any course. It will have a tutoring module that students would use to read online lectures, a question-bank, and a testing module that selects the questions to be presented to the student. In addition, there would be student, teacher and teacher assistant interfaces. The application would also process the student responses to provide them with customized tutorials. Requirements The functional requirements of the application include performance, availability, easy access, authentication and security, ease of use, scalability. The application should meet the requirements of all the three classes of users-students, teachers and teaching assistants. The system should be user-configurable in the functional domain; the faculty should be able to add and update the test and tutorial contents. The modular architecture should allow for easy additions of new features. The system should provide the following services to the users: Allow login to access the system. Select from a variety of online tutorial offerings Maintain score reports

Allow users to customize the system within certain limits.

Following is the analysis of different high-level functional requirements of the system. Data Access and Processing The application would store the tutorial and test content in a database which would have different tables that store user information and tutorials with relationships defined between them. The application should have querying modules that query the database for information to be presented to the user. User Interface Design User interface should be intuitive. It should allow for easy navigation, provide context-sensitive help and be meet the User Interface Guidelines and Human-Computer Interaction Standards. Scalability and Extensibility The system should be able to provide services to a growing population of users, simultaneous access to students reading the same online tutorial and/or students accessing the system for tutorials on different courses. The system should be extensible so that it is possible to add new tutorials and tests with minimal effort. Adding such new features should require only addition of new components to the existing system and no changes to the existing components. The system should be scalable with respect to the number of clients using the system and the amount of processing required over the server and the data traffic between the clients and the server. Also, the system design should take into account future enhancements like adding audio/video tutorials and etc. Modularity The application should be modular enough so as to allow easy integration into a campus- wide learning environment. The application should provide customized tutorials to the users. It should be able to determine the deficiencies of the students based upon their current knowledge of the subject by giving pre-tests. Furthermore, the Security of student personal data cannot be compromised at any moment. The system should store all the grade information and student progress reports in a secure domain that can be accessed only by users having the required privileges. Users should be able to log in to the system with their campus-wide single sign on ID and passwords. Performance

The application relies on a stable and fast network connection between the users computer and the web server. The application-hosting environment should support a fairly large student population signed-on with the application at any point of time. The performance of the system should not degrade as the number of users and the amount of data transfer increases. Stakeholders Students Students are the primary beneficiaries from the proposed system. The ALCA could be good help to them in their academic learning.

Teachers The Teachers are the controlling stakeholders for the ALCA system. They would have full access to all the modules of the application. Since the faculty is responsible for populating the application with tutorials and test questions, it is imperative that the system meets their expectations. Teaching Assistants (TAs) Teaching assistants have a similar stake as the faculty in the system. The Teachers might want to delegate to the TAs the task of updating the tests and tutorials. Time Table for Project Completion A project schedule has been drawn to be in accordance with critical submission deadlines.