Authoring Web Content in ActiveMath: From Developer Tools and Further
Paul Libbrecht · 2004
Abstract. In the ActiveMath learning environment, authoring is cur-rently based on source editing following a build-practice similar to soft-ware development cycles. In this article we explain the characteristics of a build-cycle that are important to the creation of content for an adaptive educational hyper-media such as ActiveMath. The trust of an author into the behaviour of the system is one of the important goals that is aimed at. We then describe what, we expect, would further help the author’s trust, namely, usable tools to input and play simulations of the learning process. 1 ActiveMath as an adaptive educational hypermedia ActiveMath is an intelligent web-based learning environment. It presents content and lets learners perform interactive exercises. Content, in ActiveMath is organized in knowledge units called items which roughly correspond to paragraphs in a text-book. The content of items is made of text and mathematical formulæ encoded semantically using OpenMath [2]. Items are given a type (for example, a definition or exercise), and are comple-mented with metadata, the latter is made of slot-values (e.g., the difficulty or learning-context) as well as relations (e.g., the statement that a proof proves a given assertion, or for a concept to depends-on another concept). A subset of items, named concepts, along with their metadata make the domain-model. Please see [6] for a more detailed coverage of ActiveMath knowledge handling. The adaptivity in ActiveMath is based on an overlay user-model based on this domain-model. The user-model is permanently updated using information such as reading of items and exercise results. Based on this user-model the following adaptivity features are provided in ActiveMath: – Using preferences, the presentation is given an appearance or theme – In ActiveMath the learner mostly accesses content through the familiar metaphor of books which are presented as a sequence of pages with a table-of-contents. The latter is presented with visual hints (little red, yellow, or green bullets) indicating which page refers to concepts with low, medium, or high user-model values. This can be seen as an elementary link-annotation adaptivity.