Competence Web-based System for Suggesting Study Materials Links: Approach & Experimental Design

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Description/Abstract

Web-based education is used for enhancing learning and teaching activities by allowing the learner to have more opportunities for exploration. However, most e-learning and web-based educational systems could incur the problem of high development costs and the need to have the study materials well constructed. If the content or any information of knowledge changes, then the system is required to be updated. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach to designing a system, so that a learner can find appropriate study materials on the Web without any interaction from the teacher. The system generates different learning paths from the learner’s competence. This process uses a competence structure, to identify a range and relationship of competence elements/nodes for a particular knowledge domain. By embedding a structure of competence in our system, it allows many learners to learn from the same knowledge domain without requiring the knowledge content to be updated. The system uses the learner’s competences to generate different learning paths and from the chosen learning path, it is produced appropriate keywords to be used by a search engine in order to suggest appropriate study materials from the Web. We have designed an experimental study to test whether a learning mode provided by our system is better than a learning mode by freely browsing. More improvement in learning of participants is expected to be seen in the competence-based learning mode. The paper explores what this means for students and teachers and suggests some further work.