Technology Enhancing Learning: Past, Present and Future

Every year the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL) gathers state-of-the-art research in the TEL field. Eight years have passed since the first edition of this conference, resulting in over 500 research papers published and more than 1000 researchers involved. However, bringing together two different fields of study (Technology and Learning), does not necessarily imply interdisciplinary research. To inspect ECTEL’s interdisciplinarity and related facts, we dedicate this paper to study the evolution of the conference over time. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the evolution of papers, authors and topics explored over the years. Our analysis provides an understanding of the origin of the conference and the direction that future research in TEL is moving towards. In addition to this, we built interactive online interfaces to enable researches to explore all the information pertaining to past ECTEL research. These interfaces enable users to easily browse through ECTEL papers, authors, knowledge and connections, possibly leveraging the discovery of related work and future collaborations.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel and Ujwal Gadiraju

PDF: kawase-ectel2014

Slides: kawase-ectel2014

Answering Confucius: The Reason Why We Complicate

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ECTEL2013

Learning is a level-progressing process. In any field of study, one must master basic concepts to understand more complex ones. Thus, it is important that during the learning process learners are presented and challenged with knowledge which they are able to comprehend (not a level below, not a level too high). In this work we focus on language learners. By gradually improving (complicating) texts, readers are challenged to learn new vocabulary. To achieve such goals, in this paper we propose and evaluate the ‘complicator’ that translates given sentences to a chosen level of higher degree of difficulty. The ‘complicator’ is based on natural language processing and information retrieval approaches that perform lexical replacements. 30 native English speakers participated in a user study evaluating our methods on an expert-tailored dataset of children books. Results show that our tool can be of great utility for language learners who are willing to improve their vocabulary.

Authors: Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Stella Pedrosa, Ricardo Kawase, Mohammad Alrifai, Ivana Marenzi, Stefan Dietze and Marco Antonio Casanova

PDF: nunes-ectel2013

Towards Automatic Competence Assignment of Learning Objects

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ECTEL2012. (picture taken by Maren Scheffel)

Competence-annotations assist learners to retrieve and better understand the level of skills required to comprehend learning objects. However, the process of annotating learning objects with competence levels is a very time consuming task; ideally, this task should be performed by experts on the subjects of the educational resources. Due to this, most educational resources available online do not enclose competence information. In this paper, we present a method to tackle the problem of automatically assigning an educational resource with competence topics. To solve this problem, we exploit information extracted from external repositories available on the Web, which lead us to a domain independent approach. Results show that automatically assigned competences are coherent and may be applied to automatically enhance learning objects metadata.

Ricardo Kawase, Peter Brusilovsky and Mikhail Fominykh. (picture taken by Maren Scheffel)

Venue: ECTEL2012

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Marco Fisichella and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-ectel2012

Best Paper Award: Unsupervised Auto-Tagging for Learning Object Enrichment

ECTEL2010 Award Cerimony (Katherine Maillet, Ricardo Kawase and Wolfgang Nejdl)

Best paper AWARD (Sponsored by EATEL): Unsupervised Auto-Tagging for Learning Object Enrichment. Ernesto Diaz-Aviles, Marco Fisichella, Ricardo Kawase, Wolfgang Nejdl, and Avaré Stewart.

ECTEL2011 Awards Website

Unsupervised Auto-tagging for Learning Object Enrichment

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ECTEL2011

An online presence is gradually becoming an essential part of every learning institute. As such, a large portion of learning material is becoming available online. Incongruently, it is still a challenge for authors and publishers to guarantee accessibility, support effective retrieval and the consumption of learning objects. One reason for this is that non-annotated learning objects pose a major problem with respect to their accessibility. Non-annotated objects not only prevent learners from finding new information; but also hinder a system’s ability to recommend useful resources. To address this problem, commonly known as the cold-start problem, we automatically annotate specific learning resources using a state-of-the-art automatic tag annotation method: α-TaggingLDA, which is based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation probabilistic topic model. We performed a user evaluation with 115 participants to measure the usability and effectiveness of α-TaggingLDA in a collaborative learning environment. The results show that automatically generated tags were preferred 35% more than the original authors’ annotations. Further, they were 17.7% more relevant in terms of recall for users. The implications of these results is that automatic tagging can facilitate effective information access to relevant learning objects.

Venue: ECTEL2011

Authors:  Ernesto Diaz-Aviles, Marco Fisichella, Ricardo Kawase, Wolfgang Nejdl, Avaré Stewart

Award: ECTEL2011 Best Paper

PDF:  diaz-ectel2011

Skill-Based Scouting of Open Management Content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

Venue: ECTEL2010

Authors: Katja Niemann, Uta Schwertel, Marco Kalz, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Marco Fisichella, Martin Friedrich, Michele Dicerto, Kyung-Hun Ha, Philipp Holtkamp and Ricardo Kawase

PDF: niemann-ectel2010

A Comparison of Paper-Based and Online Annotations in the Workplace

Example of annotations in research papers.

While reading documents, people commonly make annotations: they underline or highlight text and write comments in the margin. Making annotations during reading activities has been shown to be an efficient method for aiding understanding and interpretation. In this paper we present a comparison of paper-based and online annotations in the workplace. Online annotations were collected in a laboratory study, making use of the Web-based annotation tool SpreadCrumbs. A field study was out to gather paper-based annotations. The results validate the benefits of Web annotations. A comparison of the online annotations with paper-based annotations provides several insights in user needs for enhanced online annotation tools, from which design guidelines can be drawn.

Venue: ECTEL2009

Authors:  Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-ectel209