Web-based Learning in Remedial Course of Science and Technology Hiroto Yamakawa Fumiko Watanabe Hiroshi Komatsugawa Chtose Institute of Science Chtose Institute of Science Chtose Institute of Science and Technology and Technology and Technology 758-65 Bibi, Chitose, 758-65 Bibi, Chitose, 758-65 Bibi, Chitose, Hokkaido Hokkaido Hokkaido 066-8655 JAPAN 066-8655 JAPAN 066-8655 JAPAN +81-123-40-2308 +81-123-40-2308 +81-123-27-6094 yamakawa@kklab.spub. fumiko@kklab.spub. hiroshi@kklab.spub. chitose.ac.jp chitose.ac.jp chitose.ac.jp ABSTRACT On the basis of this social background, we have studied We have been experimentally developing a web-based learn- the use of web-based education as a means to enhance the ing (e-learning) system for remedial courses of science and teaching and learning effectiveness of fundamental course of technology in higher education over last four years. We have mathematics and physics. We have been experimentally de- improved several functions of the LMS and created more veloping an e-learning system for mathematics since 1999 for than 3000 contents, for practical use in educational institu- recovering basic learning skills of students such as problem tions. In 2005, 12000 Japanese users including the learners solving skills. [1] To provide practical solutions for students in 80 secondary education institutions use our e-learning sys- in educational institutions, we have developed our project in tem. In the present paper, first, we report the outline of our collaboration with teachers of junior high schools and high project including the construction of system and the result schools.[2] In 2005, 12000 users including the learners in 80 of a case study in the remedial education. Second, we report secondary education institutions use our e-learning system. a challenge to extend to an agent-based personal assistant More than 20 higher education institutions also use our sys- application, aiming to effectively use educational resources tem. in our e-learning system. In this paper, we describe the e-learning system that is designed to support the self-learning process in remedial ed- ucation for science and technology. In particular, we ex- Categories and Subject Descriptors plain the construction of the system and the contents mak- K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education] ing to provide the practical use in educational institutions. In addition, we indicate the result of a case study and de- General Terms scribe the effective learning style using e-learning. In the last part of this paper, we report a challenge to extend our Design e-learning system to an agent-based personal assistant appli- cation, aiming to effectively use large amount of educational Keywords resources in our e-learning system. e-Learning, remedial education, agent 2. SYSTEM 1. INTRODUCTION 2.1 Overview of the System Recently, the decline of basic learning abilities of students as regards science and technology has become a serious prob- The implemented system is a WBT system that uses the lem in Japan. A representative of this is a college student function of problem solving, which consists of LMS and con- who cannot solve a fraction calculation. The Japanese gov- tents. Learners can study elementary courses of mathemat- ernment has begun supporting the efforts of elementary and ics and physics, using the educational resources stored in secondary education institutions to promote basics of edu- this system. cational skills. Higher education institutions have also im- Our study aims to realize the practical use of this system proved the elementary curriculum of science and have be- in educational institutions. The system developed in our gun to introduce remedial education for mathematics and study is characterized by: physics. To help the students acquire basic learning skills, • Educational resources consisting of multimedia materi- higher education institutions may consider establishing ad- als, exercises and tests that are created in collaboration ditional curriculum employing small-class/group teaching with teachers from secondary education institutions. techniques. • Systematic maintenance of educational resources through Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). WWW2005, May 10–14, 2005, Chiba, Japan. the knowledge database to support knowledge acqui- . sition of learners in remedial courses. • Application of the knowledge database to the e-learning image of the exercise is shown in Figure. 2. The numbers 1, system through an instruction policy that aims at learn- 2, and 3 in the figure correspond with the hints that appear ing corrected and repeated problem solving in remedial step by step. education. In our project, we prepared 1000 exercises for the funda- mental courses and 1000 exercises for the standard courses For the implementation on the server side, we use the Java of mathematics and physics (science), which cover academic Servlet Server and Tomcat which is a reference implementa- contents from junior high school to the fundamental courses tion of the Java Servlet. The Servlet server on the Linux OS of universities. Furthermore, we prepared tests for learn- manages the user session, answer check, and analysis of the ers to correct their own exercises in the section. There are users’ learning history. PostgreSQL is used as the database 10 problems per section in each test. The test format is the server in which user data required for LMS are stored. same as that of the exercises, except for the hint information frame. 2.2 Contents In mathematical education, expansion of logic is impor- tant and it is difficult to visualize its process. However, teachers in educational institutions, in their lectures, usually instruct on the logical steps, using images drawn on black- boards. In our study, this educational method is adopted in contents making. To promote the learners’ interest and to encourage understanding, we design multimedia materi- als based on the blackboard image drawn by teachers during the actual lectures. Each material includes moving figures, expressions and characters. Users can read stories in the ma- terial at their own pace by clicking the control button and confirming expressions or figures step by step. The sequence of elements is based on the scenario designated by the actual teachers (experts) participating in our project. We prepared 1000 materials for mathematics and physics (science), which cover academic content from junior high school to the fun- damental courses of universities. The series of multimedia Figure 2: Image of exercises. materials adopted in our e-learning system is created in the SWF (Shock Wave Flash) format and viewed using a Flash plug in. 2.3 Knowledge Database In remedial education, acquiring basic knowledge through training is one of the most important factors. In the present study, using original IDs, we reviewed and classified mathe- matics knowledge related to our materials and exercises. We categorized knowledge in order to support the learners edu- cated through remedial study and defined 160 categories of knowledge. We rearranged the knowledge in the knowledge database whose data frame consisted of the name of the knowledge, its identification (knowledge ID), and its con- texts. Our final goal is to develop an effective e-learning system to support the knowledge acquisition of learners, using this knowledge database. Using the relation between the knowl- Figure 1: Sample image of multimedia materials. edge database and the exercises, we can provide appropriate materials for learners who attempt to solve a problem but do Figure. 1 represents the mathematics material and indi- not understand its meaning. Learners can also identify their cates a problem and solution for calculating the maximum lack of knowledge through the knowledge names obtained on and minimum of a quadratic function with a variable. When the basis of an analysis of the users’ learning history. a user clicks the control button on the material, explanations that use characters and mathematical expressions appear. 2.4 LMS Mathematical expressions, in particular, gradually appear, It becomes particular important for the educational in- in the actual order that a teacher writes them in on a black- stitutions to understand the learners’ learning process in a board. time series. Therefore, our system provides three statuses Exercises are also created using the Flash format. Each of right, wrong, and hint information in time series, such as exercise consists of three frames; problem description, hint one day, one week, and one month. The user interface of the information, and answer box. The problem description frame time series through graphics is shown in Figure. 3. Teachers allows users to create a problem using characters, math- can select a date from the calendar and view a learner’s sta- ematical expressions, and graphics. The hint information tus through the graphics and table. This function is mainly frame allows users to create hints at three levels, which ap- used when teachers perform individual instruction as sup- pear step by step, according to the users’ requests. A sample port for the learners’ homework. Table 2: Comparison of both classes; without using e-learning (class A) and with e-learning (class B). self-check 1st test 2st 3st 4st 5st Month 4 5 6 7 8 Average (classA) 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 Average (classB) -6.5 7.1 15.0 10.7 1.8 the mathematics lecture and provides several exercises to the learners. The homework is handed to learners on paper at the end of every remedial class and the results are returned two weeks later. In class B, the e-learning system is applied to the remedial class and learners can spontaneously study the subjects through the e-learning system. Homework is also assigned through the e-learning system, and the results are checked through the LMS by the learners. We investigated the results of tests administered four times Figure 3: Time series of learners’ history. in the spring term. The comparison between classes A and B is presented in Table 2. Note that the results of class A are set to 0 in comparison with that of class B. Each set Table 1: Sample messages provided through the as- of data is an average of the learners’ numbers. The ”self- signment system. check” data in the table presents the results of the self-check You should practice solving problems repeatedly. test, which indicates that learners of class A have more skills You may solve questions correctly. than those of class B, before the beginning of the remedial You should solve problems correctly without getting hints course. The other four set of data indicate the results of and making mistakes. examinations held after the start of the lecture and exercise You make a lot of mistakes. in the spring term, which indicates that the results of class You refer to too many hints. B always acquires more skills than those of class A. You should refer to textbooks positively. To consider the skill of the teachers in the lecture and You can solve problems. Referring to textbooks is good exercise class, we exchanged the teachers of the two remedial approach. classes in the autumn term. The e-learning system was then You can achieve the assignment. It’s perfect. applied to class A. Consequently, the averaged score of class A was always higher than that of class B. A series of results indicates that the utilization of the e-learning system in the The main targets for our system are learners doing home- remedial class is effective for an increase in basic learning work and exercises related to subjects or lectures. To sup- ability. port these learning processes, we implemented the assign- The reason for this effectiveness is simple. The character- ment function that teachers could designate previously for istics of using the e-learning system are; their lectures’ homework or exercise. Through the interface of LMS, teachers can select not only names of students par- • The learner’s choice of subjects soon after the face-to- ticipating in the class but also types of exercises required in face lecture. the assignment. Furthermore, in our study, we prepared typ- • Homework that is accompanied by answer check in real ical instructional messages for learners in the database, that time. were provided automatically when the duration of assign- • Development of individual instruction according to the ment expired. These messages are determined in advance information of LMS based on the time series of the on basis of teachers’ instructional policy, and the choice of learners’ learning history. messages is determined by if-then rules based on learners’ click information for the assignment. The sample messages provided from the assignment function are shown in Tab. 1. 4. EXTENSION A series of our e-learning project has a feature of blended learning through web-based education. Actually, to recover 3. CASE STUDY basic skills or knowledge acquisitions of learners in the re- We investigated effectiveness of e-learning through its uti- medial class, we adopt not only the e-learning system but lization in the actual lectures of a university. In the present also teaching assistants to support the class. paper, we present the results of a case study performed in a Then, we started a new challenge to extend our e-learning remedial course of mathematics at Chitose Instiute of Sci- system to a personal assistant application that imitated roles ence and Technology (CIST). There were 120 learners and of teaching assistants in the blended learning and planned investigated terms were spring and autumn of 2002. On the to instruct, using these educational resources. basis of these results, learners at lower results could partic- To implement a series of adaptive personal assistant sys- ipate in the remedial course. tem, we utilized multi agent platform of JADE(Java Agent We divided this remedial class into two classes referred to Development Framework).[3] Basic concept of the agent plat- as classes A and B. In class A, the same style as the exercise form is as follows. The agent platform can be accessed from class was employed; a teacher chooses the subjects related to the server-side application. Under the initialized platform, each agent is activated and every request among agents is launched through multithreading. The agent works with serialized objects that are encapsulated as content of the ACL messages. Recently, implementation of adaptive Web application using multi agent framework with JADE be- comes widely reported in researchers. As for adaptive e- Learning, several types of architectures are modelled and constructed.[4] In addition, practical development of the sys- tem assuming course management is also reported. [5] In the present case, we defined four types of agents re- ferred to as Adapter agent, User agent, Inference agent, and Subject agent. The User agent and Inference agent corre- spond with modules of a personal assistant agent. This per- sonal assistant agent is designed to invoke to each learner and to be active only when the learner is in on-line status. The Subject agent is a single agent to share information among all personal assistant agents. The Adapter agent is a wrapper agent to listen to all messages as event from server-side. It is instantiated inside application-context on server-side and runs as session bean but it is started on the JADE platform by the server-side component. The agent architecture in our study is shown in Figure. 4. Figure 4: Agent architecture. From the autumn in 2004, we started to employ the agent- based system in the exercise time of remedial course using the assignment functions mentioned in sec.2.4. To operate the system in the practical use, we adopted distributed en- vironment using network agent framework where the User agent and the Inference agent were separately coordinated in the physical environment. The averaged on-line users in the remedial class were 160. The message type and the instruc- tional policy were designated to match the exercise course using assignment function. The Subject agent was also des- ignated to manage the subject related to the context of the assignment. In this educational situation, a learner could usually obtain his/her personal learning degree for problem solving, but could sometimes get information of his/her de- gree among other learners in the class. For instance, when the learning degree of the learner was not good, agents rec- Figure 5: Examples of messages from agents. ommended him/her to solve problems using hint informa- tion and related materials. However, if the Inference agent judged that total learning situation in the class was not good 7. REFERENCES and his/her learner was in worse situation, agents recom- [1] Komatsugawa, H., Sugiyama, H., Ohata, W., and mended the learner to change the learning course. We show Kwai, T.. Implementation of Web-based Training the user interface displayed by agents in Figure. 5. System ... in Proceedings of ITHE2001 (Kumamoto, Nov 2001),112-116. [2] Komatsugawa, H., Development of e-Learning System 5. SUMMARY Using Mathematical... in Proceedings of In the present paper, we reported the implementation CATE2004(Hawaii, Aug 2004), 140-146. of our e-learning system and effectiveness through the case [3] Java Agent DEvelopment (JADE), study. Furthermore, we reported a challenge for extension http://jade.tilab.com/ to the personal assistant system through instructional mes- [4] A. Garronek J. A Multi-Agent System for e-Learning sages, using multi agent framework. In consequence, we and Skill Management. EXP in search of innovation, confirmed that agents collaborated and provided the adap- Special Issue on JADE. Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 126-135, tive messages to our legacy e-learning system, corresponding 2003, (2003). with the learning degree of on-line learners. In the future work, our educational resources should extensively apply to [5] C.I. Pena, J.L. Marzo and J.L Rosa. Curriculum the adaptive system further more and consider the practical Sequencing for an e-Learning System based on use of adaptive e-Learning system through a case study. Learning Styles... in Proceedings of ITHET 2004 (Istanbul, Turkey, May 2004). 6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Our project is selected as Good Practice of Learning (GP) in Japan and supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.