Designing an Effective Semantic Web based eLearning System

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Journal of Computing, ISSN 2151-9617, http://www.journalofcomputing.org

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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Designing an Effective Semantic Web based eLearning System
1

Amna Khan, 2Imran Mir, and 2Amjad Farooq

Abstract— eLearning have tremendously improved the quality and delivery of knowledge to the learner in past few years with the advantage that the learner can continue the learning process around the clock. It is equally effective for such learners that lack in the basic knowledge about some course as it is to the intermediate or expert level learner tries to seek some knowledge from the course material. Integration of semantic web technology to the traditional eLearning system has enhanced its reusability and interoperability along with the adaptation and personalization of the learning content. This paper is an effort to propose a semantic web based eLearning system for the students of the college so that their learning process does not stop in the absence of the teacher.

Index Terms—eLearning, Semantic Web Technology, Teaching, reusability and interoperability.

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1 INTRODUCTION

T

he evolving technology has provided number of opportunities for the increased quality of education and learning. With advent of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), it had become easy for the users to search for resources to study, significance involvement in the paradigm of designing (user-centric designs), changed and improved methods in traditional teaching and learning processes and discovery of the new horizon for education opportunities. This facilitation of learning through electronic means or simply e-learning provides immense opportunities as well as challenges in its implementation and effectiveness.[1] E-Learning system is composed of several actors (Producer, Host and Learner) that perform different tasks and collectively they result in meeting the final objective i-e “Learning”. There are numerous solutions in practice today. One of the possible solutions is Content Management System that helps in delivery of academic courses and activities. The instructor is allowed to create a course web site where documents can be uploaded. It serves as a central repository for all the uploaded documents making their management, storage, access and sharing effective by checking for redundancy and availability of latest versions of the course contents. It allows collaboration between the tutor and students by discussion board.[3] Learning Management System is another way for deli————————————————

Amna Khan is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Engineering and Techology, Lahore, Pakistan. Imran Mir is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Engineering and Techology, Lahore, Pakistan. Amjad Farooq is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineerinr, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan.

very of academic courses as it integrates collections of softwares /programs that automates the administration, tracking and reporting of online courses/programs. The common feature of these systems is the dispersion on the information available.[2] It is widely used across the globe due to its ease of use and its centralized organizational approach to learning. Its limitation lies in the fact that it does not allows collaboration between the tutor and the student and it does not help to create and deploy the content of an eLearning system.[4] The effectiveness and relevance of an eLearning system is determined by its capability to deliver personalized learning material to the learner[6]. Moreover, reusability of the learning object is an important issue being discussed nowadays because knowledge is widely dispersed across the network and there is no means of integrating or sharing knowledge between the traditional in practice eLearning systems. Considering into account the flexibility, interoperability, dynamic content generation, sharing and integration of appropriate information, semantic web is the best choice in eLearning system because of its organizational unit around metadata. This paper proposes a semantic web based eLearning system for the students of Sharif College of Engineering and Technology. The main objective behind the model is the online delivery of the courses taught at the college to the students so that they could be able to meet the pace of the learning process. This paper is organized as follows. Setion 2 contains the domain study about eLearning systems, an introduction to Semantic Web technology and reasons of using semantic web technology as the choice. Section 3 contains the description of the proposed model and its modules. Section 4 contains the conclusion and future work .

2 AREA BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
2.1 eLearning Sytems
eLearning is widely in use by educational institu-

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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tions for the purpose of teaching, businesses for trainings and by individuals for learning. The eLearning is normally categorized into four types of variations individualized self-paced eLearning offline, individualized self-paced eLearning online, group-based eLearning synchronously and group-based eLearning asynchronously [1]. It is an attractive option for most of the students because there is no time limitation and restrictions for its usage moreover it is more flexible then the traditional teacher-student interaction. But on the contrary it had pitfalls as well. Mostly eLearning system are nothing more than a huge repository of documents stored that can be then later viewed in HTML format or any other popular format or if provided then in the form of downlodable documents. That creates repulsion towards the learning objects and hense the learning process. Futher, the traditional eLearning systems lacks the interoperability and referencing features along with the personalization and adaptivity.

3 PROPOSED MODEL FOR ELEARNING SYSTEM
The proposed model is divided into three layers. Layer1 comprises of the roles that drives the system. Layer2 consists of the typr of services or tasks performed by each role/agent and finally Layer3 is the central repository of data. In the proposed model there are four roles/agents that participates in the learning process; teacher/instructor, student, administrator and guest; distinguished by the type of services they can request to the cental data repository. The greatest advantage of using semantic web technology is that depite of the fact that data is highly distributed, it can be linked together by means of semantics, relationships and constraints to achieve the common goal that is learning. Teacher is the producer of the learning content. The main tasks carried out by the teacher are monitoring of the students performance, managing course components, making announcements, managing reference links, man-

2.2 Why to use Semantic Web Tehchnlogy?
The implementation of eLearning system by using semantic web technology enables the application to be reusable, integrated, shared and interoperable between different applications. Semantic Web Technology revolves around organizing information in such a way that computers can easily understand and use/reuse it for performing their tasks. The characteristic feature of this technology is the use of relationships between different things (web pages, documents, information etc) to describe their properties and their contents which makes them easier to understand for software agents thus enhancing interoperability between different applications. Semantic web applications are build on number of layers that participate in describing and giving semantics to the objects. Concept of data and meta data is very important feature that helps in portability of the application and enables it to be understood at semantic level. Data is the actual value of a particular instance and meta data describes relationship between those individual instances and other data items. Data and Meta Data forms the basic means for information sharing and integration because the relationship is independent of the data storage. Semantic web is divided into two major components: Statements and Relationships. Semantic statements enables sharing and integration whereas semantic relationships forms the semantic web and includes definitions, associations, aggregations and restrictions.[14] RDF : Resource Description Frame work represents information in the form of the statements. The basic organizational structure of RDF is a graph that makes information integration flexible. Moreover, the statements does not need to be translated when moving from one place to another, they are valid in every context. Another important concept is of ontology which is described as the formalization of the domain concepts, in which concepts are presented by classes. The relation between class and class attribute forms a taxonomic structure that helps to deduce information from the context

Teacher

Student

eLearning  System Administrator Guest

Fig. 1. Participation of agents/roles in the eLearning System.

aging student’s online assignment submission and composing exercises and quizzes. Student is the consumer of this learning process. The main tasks performed by the students includes registration for the course, announcements, reading course documents, usage of the reference links, submission of assignments, exercises and quizzes. Administrator is the actor that manages all the activities at the backend. He is responsible for activation/inactivation of the users, management of the user’s accounts and controlling the access of the user depending upon his role as a student or the guest. The guest can be a software agent or a human being trying to retrieve information from the eLearning system.

The service layer comprises the second layer of the eLearning system. It mainly lighlights the type of services provided by the system architecture to the agents or roles using it. Each agent and service is conceptualized by their respective ontology. The overall architecture of the eLearning system is shown in fig2.

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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Fig. 2.Layered Architecture of the Semantic Web Based eLearning

applications. However, the proposed architecture is yet to be implemented and tested for the real life situations.

REFERENCES
[1] Imran Sarwar,Amjad Farooq, Amna Khan, “An Effective eLearning System for teaching the fundamentals of Computing and Programming,” International Journal of Multidisciplinary Sciences and Engineering, Vol 1, Issue 1, September 2010. pp. 10-14. Amjad Farooq, Syed Ahsan and Abad Shah, “Engineering Semantic Web Applications byUsing Object-Oriented Paradigm”, Journal of Computing, Vol2, Issue 6, June 2010. pp156-165. S.Ninoriya, P.M.Chawan, B.B.Meshram, “CMS, LMS and LCMS for eLearning”, International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol8, Issue2, March 2011.pp644-647 M.S.Hathem, H.A.Ramadan and D.C.Neagu, “eLearning Based on Context Oriented Semantic Web”, Journal of Coputer Science, Vol1, Issue4, 2005.pp.500-504 Sheung-On Choy, Sin-Chun Ng (2004), “An interactive learning environment for teaching and learning of computer programming”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’04) K.Sathiyamurthy, T.V.Geetha, “Association of Domain Concepts with Educational Objectives for E-Learning”, ACM-2010. Hosam, Jaidah, Ibrahim, Kubaisi. (2009), “Web-based “Question-Bank” System to improve E-learning Education in Qatari School”, published at Journal of Computer Science 5(2):97108,2009. ISSN 1549-3636 Henry L.Steen (2008), “Effective eLearning Design”, MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Training, Vol4., No4., December 2008. Ghassan Omar Shahin, Diljit Singh, The Ying Wah( 2007), “An Activity Level Internet Based eLearning Model for University Level Courses”, Proceedings of the 24th South East Asia Regional Computer Conference, November 18-19, 2007, Bangkok, Thailand. Tzu Chen Hung,(2007), “The establishment of an interactive eLearning system for Engineering and Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer”, International Conference on Engineering EducationICEE 2007. Coimbra, Portugal S.Shivkumar, September 15-17, 2006, “Strategies for improving e-learning effectiveness” presented at International Conference in e-Learning for Adult Continuing Education, Cochin University of Science and Technology. AngelikI P., Asimini M.,Eleni B.(2005) “When instruction meets Design” presented at the International Association for Education and Training, Rome, Italy. Brown A.R, Voltz, B.D, (2005) , Elements of Effective eLearning Design presented at The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 6(1) 217-226 J.Hebeler, M.Fisher, R.Blace, A.P.Lopez, “Semantic Web Programming”,”Preparing to Program a Semantic Web Ontology”, Wiley Sons. Pp. 3-60.

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The user identification is done by the user login to determine whether the user is a student , teacher or an administartor. There are various methodolodies to develop the ontology for the semantic web based applications. We will be following SW-OODM methodology.[2] The first phase is the analysis phase which is further divided into four steps. The domain vocabulary, list of all learning resources, the relationship between the resources, constraints and data characteristics will be explored in the first step. In the second step, the information model for the ontology will be developed that constitutes page classes, multimedia attributes and associations among page-classes. In the third step the user model will be constructed and finally the operation model of the domain will be constructed. In the Second Stage of SW-OODM the inputs from the first phase are used and the output comprises of the web-ontology schema, components and components access sequence, navigational paths and user interface model.

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CONCLUSION

The proposed architecture of the semantic web based eLearning system provides an opportunity to help the students in building concepts and at the same time evaluating their concepts to improve their learning process. Ontologies in the system helps to integrate and share learning objects and resources among different users and

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Amna Khan is currently doing Masters in Computer Sciences from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. She is currently employed as a Lecturer in Department of Computer Sciences, Sharif College of Engineering and Technology. Current Research Interests includes Semantic Web Applications, Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction. Imran Mir is a student of MS in department of Computer Science and Engineering, UET, Lahore. He is currently doing job in Systems Limited (Software House) as a Senior Software Engineer. His major interests include Computer Programming, Software Engineering, Semantic Web and Intelligent Information Retrieval Systems. Dr. Amjad Farooq is currently doing job as Professor in University of Engineering and Technology Lahore. His interests include Computer Programming, Semantic Web and Databases.

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