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An authoring tool for building flexible on-line courses using XML

Farinetti, Laura
 
 Laura  Farinetti
 Researcher
 Dip. Automatica e Informatica - Politecnico di Torino
 Italy 
Torino
Dip. Automatica e Informatica - Politecnico di Torino,  corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24
Torino   10129 Italy
Phone: +39 011 564 7044 Fax: +39 011 564 7099 email: farinetti@polito.it
 Biography
 Laura Farinetti - is a research engineer at the Computer Science and Automation Department of Politecnico di Torino. She holds a Dr. Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering since 1990 and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science since 1995, both from Politecnico di Torino.
 In 1991 she was with Digital Equipment Corporation in Marlborough, MA. Since 1992 he has been with the Computer Science and Automation Department of Politecnico di Torino, working in co-operation with Ce.Te.M. (Centre for Open and Distance Education of Politecnico di Torino) since 1997. She is member of the steering committee of Multimedia Laboratory of Politecnico di Torino (LAMP).
 Her research interests include computer-based tools for education, hypertexts, multimedia and hypermedia systems, distance education and human-computer interfaces.
 Laura Farinetti is the author of many scientific papers in these areas, which have appeared on Journals and have been presented at International Conferences.
 She has also experience in the management of European projects, both as a researcher and as the local project co-ordinator.
Bota, Florin
 
 Florin  Bota
 Teaching assistant
  Cluj-Napoca 
Computer Science Dep., Faculty of European Studies - "Babes-Bolyai" University
 Romania 
Computer Science Dep., Faculty of European Studies - "Babes-Bolyai" University,  Str. E. de Martonne nr. 1
Cluj-Napoca   3400 Romania
Phone: +40 64 405300 Fax: +40 64 190251 email: fbota@euro.ubbcluj.ro
 Biography
 Florin Bota - holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the "Babes-Bolyai" University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, since 1998, with a thesis on "Client/Server Programming in Windows", and a M.A. in Computer Science (Distributed Computing) from the same University since 1999, with a thesis on "Intranet Programming". Currently he is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
 Since October 1998 he is Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of European Studies of the "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, teaching "Communication systems" and "Basics of Internet".
 In March of 1999 he was at the "Joszef Attila" University of Szeged, Hungary, for studying "Client/Server Programming in Internet", in the ambit of a CEEPUS project mobility.
 In October 1999 Florin Bota was at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, for studying "Distance Learning Using the Internet", in the ambit of a TEMPUS project mobility. During this period he worked on new technologies for distance education, and in particular on Internet applications using XML, contributing to the design and the implementation of the authoring tool described in the paper.
Rarau, Anca
 
 Anca  Rarau
 PhD student
  Cluj-Napoca 
Computer Science Department - Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
 Romania 
Computer Science Department - Technical University of Cluj-Napoca,  26-28 G. Baritiu St.
Cluj-Napoca   3400 Romania
Phone: +40 64 194834 Fax: +40 64 194491 email: Anca.Rarau@cs.utcluj.ro
 Biography
 Anca Rarau - was born on September 30, 1971 in Romania. She received her BS and MS in computer science from Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 1995 and 1996. She is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
 Her interests: distributed systems, mobile agents and Web-based distance learning.
 She is partaking of a TEMPUS project that concerns development of a distance learning center to Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. In October 1999 Anca Rarau was at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, for studying "Distance Learning Using the Internet", in the ambit of the TEMPUS project mobility.
 Abstract
 The paper describes the use of XML for creating an application oriented to the design and the implementation of Internet courses, that is an authoring tool whose main characteristic is the capability of producing on-line courses with a structure and an organisation of the contents that reflects a previously defined educational methodology.
 The main requirements of such an authoring tool are the ease of use (for the teacher-author, whose competencies in general do not include professional computer skills), the ease of maintenance (for the site administrator) and, most of all, the flexibility and the adaptability of the contents (for the student-user).
 We believe that on-line courses should be flexible enough to adapt to a number of different user profiles, that have different entry levels in terms of already acquired knowledge, and different learning goals. The course is a collection of different, self-consistent modules, and each module is composed of many sub-modules, that follow a different approach toward the contents to be taught, and offer different presentation formats. The main idea is to offer the students different views of the same contents, according to their profile.
 

Introduction

Internet courseware
learning environments
on-line learning
 		 Most educational institutions today invest in the design and implementation of Internet learning environments, that represent potentially effective platforms for distance education. These environments can help in any of the educational process related tasks, from the definition of curricula to the collection of educational material, from the delivery of this material to the interaction among the involved actors . On-line courses are becoming the main tool for knowledge delivery in distance education scenarios, and the possibility of integrating face-to-face education with these environments makes their use possible also in traditional education to support students' learning.
 The design of on-line courses involves different actors, that have different requirements: the teacher-author needs a tool easy to use in order to create the educational material; the student-user needs something more than a mere translation of a book in electronic format, that is some sort of guidance, a high level of interactivity and a tool for assessing the learning process; the site administrator, finally, needs an easy-to-maintain system for updating the content and the information about users.
 flexibility 
 		The implementation of effective educational platforms needs to carefully take into account all of the previous requirements. The application presented in this paper is an educational-oriented authoring tool capable of producing on-line courses with a structure and organisation of the contents already defined according to a given educational methodology. The application framework allows teachers with no specific computer science skills to easily create courses that may contain different content formats: simple text and pictures, but also audio/video streams, Java applets or animations. The main characteristic of the tool is flexibility, in the sense that contents are presented to the students in different ways, depending on their previous knowledge, on their learning goals, on the kind of hardware used to access the content, and on some preferences of the user (due to special educational needs, for example). In order to acquire new knowledge, students are supposed to study, to practice new concepts, to solve problems and, very importantly, to assess their knowledge level with self-evaluation mechanisms. Besides that, the system is designed to be simple enough for the site administrator, since it maintains all the course information in one file only, and most of the processing is done on the student's computer; in this way one small server can provide content relative to a large number of courses to hundreds of students.
 XML 
 		The developed application usesXML for the organisation of the contents, assuring a simple way to modify the presentation of the modules. The contents can be created either by using a simple text editor, or by using anXML editor, or by using a dedicated content-creation application at present under development. TheXML standard, which uses text files to maintain database-alike content, was the key for obtaining the desired flexibility. We identified and implemented one of the possible content organisations that meet the educational requirements we described above, reported here as an example, but the framework we designed is more general, and can easily adapt to other structures.
 XML 
 

Content organisation

modular organisation of contents
 		 Each course is designed and implemented as a collection of modules; each module has clearly stated pre-requisites for the fruition and well defined learning objectives. The entrance and exit levels of knowledge associated to each module permit the dynamical building of the educational path according to the student profile. Each module consists of a collection of sub-modules, that follow a different approach toward the contents to be taught, offering different presentation formats:
 
  • theintroduction sub-module, where the main goal of the module is stated, together with the list of the contents and of the pre-requisites;
    •  
  • themain content sub-module, which is the real body of the course, containing the explanation of all the concepts and procedures;
    •  
  • theconclusion sub-module, which consists in the summary of the module, i. e. a list of the fundamental concepts the student should have acquired after studying the main content;
    •  
  • theexample sub-module, which is a collection of examples that help the student understand the concepts better;
    •  
  • theexercise sub-module, which contains a collection of exercises with their solutions so that the student can check the knowledge of the presented concepts;
    •  
  • thetest sub-module, which provides self-evaluation under the form of a test with automatic feedback; it consists of a set of questions with predefined answers, and the result obtained by the student influences the presentation of the subsequent modules.
    •  self-evaluation 
         		 The self-evaluation mechanism allows the student to test his or her level of knowledge and understanding of the concepts, permitting as well the dynamical building of the educational paths among the modules of the courses. Two types of tests are proposed: a preliminary test, used for determining the student's level of knowledge when he uses the course for the first time, and a final test for each module, used to determine whether or not the student has acquired the required exit level of knowledge for the module, and to choose the level of presentation of the following module. According to the results of the final test, the profile of the student is modified, and the choice of the following module is based on this profile. The main idea is that the better the student performs, the less content he needs. In an extreme situation, the student that has not acquired the desired level of knowledge could be forced to study once more the same module.
     flexibility 
         		 A course structure like this has two degrees of flexibility in building the educational paths: on one hand it allows the combination of different modules, and on the other the amount and the type of information presented in each module vary.
     DTD, Document Type Definition 
         		This course structure is implemented in aDTD file, which defines the course logical organisation and allows the verification of its validity.
     

    The data flow

     XML 
     XSL 
         		The students have to use Internet Explorer or higher, which can displayXML files, based on the transformation performed by aXSL stylesheet. The first Web page presented to the student requires username and password, used for identifying an existing user or for creating a new profile. The student then chooses the course he wishes to study, and the application automatically determines the educational path related to his profile, and displays the module he is supposed to study next. TheXML content of that module is sent back to the student browser, containing as well a special processing instruction that identifies theXSL file that will control the display of the module on the student's computer.
     XML 
     XSL 
    multiple views
     self-evaluation 
         		 The first page of the module contains the preliminary test used for assessing the student's knowledge on the specific subject. This first test is not compulsory, and the student can decide to skip it; in this case the main content sub-module is displayed, that is the most complete view of the contents. The purpose of this preliminary test is to determine whether a more specific or reduced view of the contents is suitable for the student, for example the conclusion sub-module that contains the list of the fundamental concepts he should know. If the student decides to take the test, the application automatically changes both his profile and the view of the module, choosing to display the most suitable sub-module. The questions contained in the test aim at understanding both the knowledge level of the student and the balance of his theoretical and practical skills; for example, the student could have a very good performance on theoretical questions, but at the same time he could have problems on the questions regarding the practical application of the concepts. The learning environment in this case displays the example and the exercise sub-modules, to help the student in practising his skills.
     After the preliminary test, the student can start the fruition of the course; he can decide to stop at any moment, since the application maintains his profile.
     After the completion of the module, the student has to take a compulsory test, which will determine whether or not he acquired the minimum level of knowledge required for going on, and that will identify the next module to be presented. In case the student does not satisfy this requirement, he is forced to go back and study the same module one more time.
     

    The architecture of the application

     CGI, Common Gateway Interface 
         		To implement the application we usedCGI programs, which can generate on the fly theXML andXSL documents that are delivered to the clients. In fact we need customisedXSL files for each user of the system, that contain some data from a user profile maintained on the server. In order to achieve this goal, we could make the browser either to request a differentXSL file for each user, or to generate theXSL files for each student on the fly. Since maintaining for each student a separateXSL file for each module would require a large amount of disk space, we choose the second option. A smallCGI program (xsl.cgi) does that, generatingXSL documents based on the username, the course and the module number. It considers the student's profile for that specific module, gets the profile variables and places them in a genericXSL file.
     CGI, Common Gateway Interface 
     XML 
     XSL 
         		The technology implemented by Internet Explorer requires a processing instruction inside the XML file that points to the XSL file used to display the XML document. That instruction has to pass the username, course and module number to the xsl.cgi program. This is the reason why the XML source is generated by another small CGI program, xml.cgi, whose aim simply consists in placing this processing instruction in the XML document and in sending the content of the course module previously selected by the student.
     XML 
         		To summarise (see ), the form containing the username, the password and the module number are processed by the xml.cgi program, which generates anXML document; this file contains the processing instruction to point to xsl.cgi, and uses the username, course and module as parameters. The browser parses theXML file and executes the processing instruction.
     
    The xml.cgi program
     All the tests are evaluated by a program, test.cgi (see ). According the student's level of knowledge on the specific content of the module, the program automatically updates the user profile. We used a code for the scores of the student, so that after the evaluation process the program can decide which parts are to be displayed to the student: each of the digit of the final score contains information about a specific sub-module. The test.cgi program has two different modes: one for the introductory test and another one for the self-evaluation test.
     
    The test.cgi program
     The user profile contains information about the presentation of the contents, relying on a number of switches:
     
    1. themultimedia switch determines whether or not the audio and video contents is to be shown, according to the speed of the connection;
    2. thetest switch represents the stage of fruition of the module (first time view, preliminary test passed, or self-evaluation test passed);
    3. theintroduction switch determines whether or not to show the introduction sub-module;
    4. thecontent switch determines whether or not to show the main content sub-module;
    5. theconclusion switch determines whether or not to show the conclusion sub-module;
    6. theexamples switch determines whether or not to show the example sub-module;
    According to the values of these switches, the XSL file generates HTML code out of the XML document.
     

    Conclusions

     The designed application is an adaptable Web-based distance learning environment, which can meet the needs of the individual student. We used the designed framework to build a small course on object-oriented programming, at present under students' evaluation, to check the effectiveness of the educational approach and the friendliness of the tool from the student's point of view, and we are now implementing a more complex course on database systems and applications.
     DTD, Document Type Definition 
     XML 
     XSL 
         		The Web-based feature of our prototype does not require the teacher to have knowledge of Web techniques. From the teacher's point of view our prototype is an authoring tool which allows him or her to build courses that contains texts, images, audio, video, hyperlinks. All these components are combined together based upon theDTD rules and are displayed according toXSL files, but writingDTD s andXSL documents is not a teacher's concern. Teacher's activity is composed of two steps: (1) buildingXML documents that represent the course - this stage implies the use of aXML editor, and (2) building score files that contain the score associated to each question. After these two steps the teacher should interact with the network administrator, who receives theXML documents and the score files and put them on the server.
     Bibliography
     
    1 T. Boyle, "Design for Multimedia Learning," Prentice Hall Europe, 1997.
     
    2 L. Farinetti, G. Malnati, M. Mezzalama, "Le nuove esigenze didattiche nella società tecnologica," in P. Terna (ed.), La formazione e il lavoro al tempo delle reti telematiche, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino, 1997, pp.149-168.
     
    3 D. Megginson, "Structuring XML documents," Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998.
     
    4 M. Leventhal, D. Lewis, M. Fuchs, "Designing XML Internet applications," Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998.
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