=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-153/paper-8
|storemode=property
|title=Developing an Alarm Manager Based on Web Services
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-153/paper8.pdf
|volume=Vol-153
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/MusaWO05
}}
==Developing an Alarm Manager Based on Web Services==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-153/paper8.pdf
Developing an Alarm Manager Based on Web Services 1
Daniela Leal Musa, Marcel Weschenfelder, José Palazzo Moreira de Oliveira
Instituto de Informática - UFRGS
{musa, mweschenfelder, palazzo@inf.ufrgs.br}
Abstract another worry, as in distance learning the teacher is not
present to evaluate this aspect.
This paper describes an alarm manager aimed Usually, the process of student’s evaluation in web-
at monitoring students’ activities in online based courses is performed only through the analysis of
courses over the Internet. The goal is to show information collected through tests, exercises or extensive
an alarm manager to give more support to reports that contain the log of pages accessed during the
distance teaching, and help the teacher to course. That is the reason why counting on appropriate
have a thorough follow-up of distance tools to monitor what each student is performing is very
students, thus minimizing the teacher’s task of important: problematic situations can be detected and the
looking for information in long reports or teacher is warned about each student’s behavior. The
complex graphs. Besides, the alarm manager teacher would have access to the particular features of
also helps students during their study sessions, each student, and would be able to customize classes to
sending extra material, help when it considers each one, making a closer follow-up and guiding the
necessary. The alarm manager proposed here student during study sessions.
was incorporated into the distance-teaching
environment known as Claroline. The In some web-based teaching environments, Artificial
propodsed solution is an approach to identify Intelligence agents assess the student’s behavior. An
the necessary requirements for alarms agent monitors the processes of interaction between
integration with web-based distance teaching students and the e-learning system, aiming at identifying
environments situations. the learning process of each student [1]. The higher the
amount of information about each student, more suitable
1. Introduction will be the agents’ help. In the majority of teaching
environments that use student’s behavior monitoring
techniques, the required data about student’s data are
Today, most of the web-based distance learning extracted from an analysis of the distance learning server
environments have a great concern with the management logs. Such records can provide the behavior of each
of their courses, the display of instructional material and student in what concerns files access (pages), which are
the availability of communication tools that foster the stored in the server. However, it is necessary to perform
interaction between students and teachers. These several searches in these records to obtain information
environments lack mechanisms that would enable the that are important and that can help to discover the
teacher to perform a more complete and comprehensive student’s behavior. A system of alarms can be used to
follow-up of student’s activities during courses. This perform such searches and warn the teacher about what is
could happen by the identification of the students’ going on with some of them.
knowledge level and their learning pace.
The goal of the present article is to show an alarm
In distance learning courses, the teacher’s presence is manager to give more support to distance teaching, and
not as effective as it is in presential courses. The help the teacher to have a thorough follow-up of distance
evaluation of students’ individual efforts is a great reason students, thus minimizing the teacher’s task of looking for
of teacher’s concerns, especially when a great number of information in long reports or complex graphs. Besides,
participants are involved in the course. Obtaining results the alarm manager also helps students during their study
that enable the assessment of the class as a whole is sessions, sending extra material, notes or help when it
considers necessary.
1
The work described in this paper was partially supported by grants from CAPES.
The alarm manager proposed here was incorporated Some environments propose the use of web-server log
into the distance-teaching environment known as files to collect students’ and course’s information.
Claroline[2]. It was a way of identifying the necessary Niegemann [5] presents the EDASEQ tool (Exploratory
requirements for its integration with web-based distance Data Analysis for Sequential Data) to help in the analysis
teaching environments. of student’s navigation history. The tool tracks the web-
server log file, converts data to an Excel file and
The present paper is organized as follows. Section 2
generates graphs about the student’s navigation.
shows some studies that have been developed for students
However, a human analysis is necessary to retrieve
follow-up in web-based distance learning environments.
important information from these graphics. According to
Section 3 shows the alarm manager proposed, and Section
Niegemann, the tools were not used with real navigation
4 describes the integration with the distance-teaching
data; fictitious data were produced to test the tool’s
environment named Claroline and the alarm manager.
functionality.
Section 5 brings some conclusions and future works.
The monitoring model presented by Peled [6] is
2. Related works composed of a filter that extracts information from the
In general, the student’s behavior is assessed by using information log considered not necessary, like the
the agents’ technology developed by Artificial navigator used, the accesses generated with double clicks,
Intelligence. Otsuka et al’s [3] model is composed of accesses of teachers or course administrative personnel,
interface agents. These agents learn through observation administrative tasks, login, etc. Data resulting from these
and monitoring of user’s actions, they work as personal filters remain in text type files. This system was tested in
assistants, collaborating with the user and with other a course with 200 students, however no tool had been
agents in the accomplishment of certain tasks. The model developed to make visualization of these information
proposed by Otsuka is composed of three modules: (1) easier. An exhaustive analysis in texts generated is
follow-up module, which tracks the student’s interaction necessary, making the process unfeasible.
within the environment and generates reports about their
participation; (2) module of behaviour analysis, which Current studies have showed that the majority of
selects and presents data that can help in the analysis of techniques used offer final reports with access data and,
student’s performance in a specific activity; (3) validation in general, a human analysis is performed to collect
module, which is responsible for the construction of the important information from these reports. The teacher
student’s profile. Up to the present moment, no result has should search each student’s data but is not aware of what
been shown about the efficacy of the model proposed, or is happening during the learning process. There is a need
if it has already been implemented or if it is under use. for other alternatives that would allow obtaining
information about the student and the use of this
The conBa system (CONcept Based) [4] is composed of information in the evaluation process.
interface agents able of monitoring and advising students
during navigation in the instructional material. The
system is composed of two main agents, the professor and
3. Alarm system
the tutor. The professor agent offers the interface to the A solution for the problem presented in section 2 is the
human-professors, who perform the following activities: use of an alarm system that monitors the processes of
(1) manages the course instructional material; (2) student’s interaction with the course environment and
discovers, through the tutor agent, which topics the generates a navigation history. The alarm system makes
students are learning; (3) modifies the student’s profile, an analysis of this history. When certain situations are
informing the tutor agent that a given topic can be detected, the teacher is warned about what is going on
considered as acquired. The tutor agent keeps a with some students. Thus, the system is able to discover
description of the pages the student accessed, which are when a student stops at a certain point of the course,
considered studied topics. These agents do not take meaning he may not have understood the topic
decisions, and do not act in the student’s favor. They only approached. Data from this analysis can also be used to
generate suggestions based on pages already visited by help students in their study sessions, by stimulating and
students and on the structure of the online course. Agents indicating extra material, exercises, etc. The coordinator
do not take into consideration the student’s previous of the instructional material can also benefit from an
knowledge nor their style and learning pace. It would be alarm system, because information of pages accessed and
interesting if the agent could indicate extra material when other about possible problems in the site structure may be
student’s needs were identified, and not simply when the sent to the coordinator. Figure 1 shows the architecture of
student reaches the module’s end or accesses a specific the Alarm manager.
page.
chooses the events from a list of elements pre-defined by
the alarm system.
professor
teacher Another information that must be informed at the
SistemaAlert
de System
Alertas
alert
alerta
aluno
moment of an alarm creation is the condition that will be
learner
tested at the moment the event is triggered. Today, the
Alarm editor
Editor
Editor de
de alertas
alertas Servidor
Servidor
Alarm managerr
Sistema
Sistema de
E-learning EAD
system
de EAD condition is informed to the system in the form of SQL
de
de alertas
alertas
administrador
queries, thus requiring the teacher has notions on the
administrator
language and on the structure of the environment’s data
Base
Base de
de
database
Monitor
Monitor de
de
event monitor
Base
Base Dados
Dados
Sistema
Sistema
database
model. A solution that exports the teaching environment
Dados Eventos
Eventos
Dados EAD
EAD
logic structure to the teacher and another form of the
conditions representation is under study, so that the
Fig.1. Alarm system architecture teacher can create his or her own alarms with no
knowledge on SQL language.
The alarm system is composed of the following
modules: alarm editor, events monitor, monitoring The alarm action must be informed at the moment the
module, database, Log and alarm manager, which we alarm is created, and it can be a message in the navigator
present in details in the following sections. or in the e-mail. The message receiver, who can be the
teacher, the student or the course administrator, must be
informed. The type of action and the receiver are selected
3.1 Alarms creation and edition from a list previously defined, and it is not possible to
Teachers or administrators use the alarm editor to insert a new action or receiver.
define alarms used in the follow-up of student’s activities.
In this environment, each teacher can create alarms for Data informed for the creation of an alarm are stored in
their courses or select alarms that were already defined by the database shown in Figure 1. It is possible to make
other teachers. Figure 2 shows the user’s interface for the new searches, insertion and deletion of alarms through the
definition of alarms in the current implementation of the Alarm editor. Any other teacher who participates in the
system. system can use an alarm that has already been defined by
a teacher.
An alarm is composed of: (a) a triggering event, (b)
one or more conditions that must be verified, and (c) an 3.2 Monitoring
action that must be performed. Events are indicators of
different situations, they can be two types: (a) The alarm system has a monitor of events that happen
environment’s events, which are events the teacher or the in the teaching environment database. The monitor
student generates during their interaction with the consists basically of an interpreter of SQL commands. It
teaching environment. Examples of this type of event are receives an SQL command as parameter (Insert, Delete,
the student’s logon, the end of some exercise or access to Update) that will be performed in the teaching
a certain page; (b) temporal events: some situations must environment. The alarm server receives a warning from
be checked in a certain period of time, once a week, for the monitor of events informing that some important
example. This type of event depends on time and not on event has taken place. After the warning, the alarm server
some situation that happened because of an interaction verifies the conditions associated to that event. If the
between the user and the environment. condition is true, the action indicated in the database of
the alarm system is performed.
An alarm is represented by ECA (event-condition-
action) rules, that is, when an event takes place, a The alarm manager also stores the history of all alarms
condition is checked and if it is true the action is generated so that it is possible to perform statistics about
performed. Rules are expressed as follows: the student’s performance during the course.
On event IF THEN
4 Integration of the alarm system into the
Claroline system
When the alarm is created, the teacher selects the
alarm-triggering event. In the current version of the The alarm system we presented in the previous section
system, the teacher cannot include a new event, and only was integrated into a distance-teaching environment so
that the main requirements of integration of alarm
systems into distance teaching environments could be
identified. This section describes this integration in The communication between Claroline and the
further detail. The alarm system was integrated into the monitoring web service is carried out through SOAP
Claroline environment, which is distance-teaching (Simple Object Access Protocol); a protocol based on
software developed at the UCL (Université Catholique de XML (Extensible Markup Language) and establishes a
Louvain) and is open code. Currently, 500 students and communication path among applications in different
20 professors of the Computer Science Institute of domains [7]. In the present study, SOAP uses an HTTP
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul are using the transfer protocol to send messages of remote functions
software. Professors use the environment to make request. HTTP facilitates the transportation of SOAP
instructional material, exercises, and tasks schedules messages among systems because firewalls usually do not
available, as a complement to presential classes. block the access to the HTTP port. The fact that XML
messages are text-based justifies the possibility of
Claroline was chosen for special reasons. First,
communication among different platforms.
because the environment adopts the policy of GPL open
code software, a very important requirement in our work. The Claroline system underwent small changes in
Second, Claroline was developed in PHP language and order to call the monitoring web service. We highlight
MySQL database, the same used in the implementation of that the performance of the SQL command by Claroline
the alarm system, what made the integration between remains the same. The monitoring web service only
systems easier. The environment’s source code is easy to determines the action to be taken in case there is an ECA
understand its structure has environment variables and rule defined.
functions libraries, what helps the addition of other
software modules. 4.2 Implementation tests
In order to validate the alarm system integration with
4.1 Monitoring
the Claroline environment, some alarms were defined and
activated in the environment. Two types of actions were
There is a monitor of events that occur in the
implemented: sending e-mails and calling of remote
teaching environment’s database (Claroline). The monitor
functions through a web service.
performs actions in the occurrence of a critical event.
Figure 2 represents the Claroline structure integrated with The first action consists basically of sending e-mail to
the event’s monitoring system. all students of the same class about the scheduling of a
new task. In Claroline, scheduling works as follows: the
teacher accesses the system and schedules a test or
Eca rule
homework. Scheduling data are stored in the Claroline
DB
interface database and can be seen when the student accesses the
server
course’s page. To make the teacher’s work easier and
help the student, the monitor of events identifies the
claroline
database
addition of a new task in the scheduling table and sends e-
Learner mail to all students with the new item. This happens in a
interface
transparent mode to the teacher, who does not need to
Teacher
professor
file
interfere in the process. The administrator registers the
message that will be sent.
Besides, an action that calls a remote procedure, a web
service, was also implemented. In order to test this
Figure 2 - Claroline integrated to the module functionality we used the model described in [8], which
of events monitoring defines a central data repository that contains information
about students from different distance teaching
The monitor consists basically of an interpreter of SQL environments. It was necessary to develop an action that
commands. It receives as parameters: an SQL command enabled Claroline to send its student’s data to the
from Claroline, the user’s ID and the course ID. With repository, so a web service was created and named
these parameters it is possible to identify the event Notify_Data. The function implemented to perform this
(INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE) and the table where it is action is specific for events in the Claroline’s table that
taking place. The monitor of events was implemented as a stores the student’s registers. Its main goal is to call the
web service, offering a practical and efficient way for remote procedure named Notify_PersonalData from the
applications communication and data exchange over the Web-service defined by Musa. This procedure warns the
Internet [7]. repository that new data have been inserted in the
Claroline database and requests authorization to insert teatched at II-UFRGS to gather a big amount of real
them in the repository. experimental data. We hope this experience can give a
step further on the contributions to make Distance
During informal conversation with some students and
Education a feasible alternative in the educational
teachers who used the system and received alarms, we
process.
noticed they found some alarms interesting and some
inconvenient. Alarms that suggest content to be studied or
exercises were considered positive. Alarms that send the 6. References
students an e-mail reminding them to access the course
after an idle period were considered inopportune. [1] Viccari, Rosa. (1998) Artificial Intelligence and
The teachers suggested an alarm should be sent after a Educacional Systems. Journal of School n.2, Olivais,
certain period of time, i.e., the alarms generated should be vol I, 1998.
sent to the user gathered in a batch. This suggestion can
be applied to some kinds of alerts. [2] Claroline System. Available at:
http://www.claroline.net
5 Conclusions and Future work [3] Joice Lee Otsuka, Heloisa Viera da Rocha: An Agent-
Based Approach to Support Formative Assessment.
The alarm system presented in this article was ICCE 2002: 1486-1487
implemented as a generic module, so that it can be
attached to other web-based teaching environments. [4] Roda, C. A multi-agent system for advising and
Aiming at validating the use of this system in a e-learning monitoring students navigating instructional Web
system, it was integrated into the Claroline environment, sites." In 6th International Conference on Information
which is being tested by a great number of users, students Systems Analysis and Synthesis (ISAS 2000), Special
and professors, of the Computer Science Institute of session on Cooperative and Distance Learning.
UFRGS. An advantage was the choice for an environment Orlando, Florida. July 2000. 505-509
developed within the policy of open code software. The [5] Niegemann, H. (2002) EDASEQ – A log file analysis
entire source-code and the database could be fully program for assessing navigation processes –
accessed and changed whenever required. One of the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on
main difficulties found during the integration was the fact Computers in Education / International Conference on
that the alarm system needed the e-learning system to Computer-Assisted Instruction 2000. Taipei, Taiwan.
inform data about the teaching environment database.
Besides, the alarm conditions are expressed as SQL [6] Peled, A. (1999) Logging for Sucess - Advancing the
queries, what constrains the use of the environment. A Use to Improve Computer Mediated Distance
different way of solving these drawbacks is under Learning - Journal of Educational Computing
investigation. The information of data regardless of the Research. v. 21, n. 3, 1999.
administrator’s presence is under study too, as well as a [7] Tsalgatidou, A. and Pilioura, T., An Overview of
language or editor that has conditions already defined to Standards and Related Technology in Web Service.
be used at moment of the alarms edition. In Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 12, p. 135
As the alarms are being generated in the Claroline – 162, ISSN:0926-8782, 2002.
environment, it is possible to capture data that are [8] Musa, D.; Palazzo, J. M.O.; Sharing Learner
essential for the validation of this model both for Information through a Web services based Learning
student’s activities follow-up and as a way of keeping Architecture. IN WEB INFORMATION SYSTEMS
them motivated in the course they are taking. Some MODELING, WISM, 2004, Riga, Latvia. CAiSE
results have already been obtained and were shown to be Workshops , Riga, 2004. p.122–131.
quite promising, being important indicators of the
system’s success. Now we are offering the possibility of
alarms management for the full set of courses being