EduNuggets: an intelligent repository for multimedia ...stroulia/EduNuggets/EduNuggets...EduNuggets: an intelligent repository for multimedia education content ... ... • A nugget

November 12, 2002 Hybrid Learning Conference 1

EduNuggets:an intelligent repository

for multimedia education content

Eleni StrouliaDept. of Computing Science

259 Computing Science CenterUniversity of Alberta

Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E8, Canada


Team Members

• The development team has included (at differenttimes) the following:– Paul Iglinski– Babita Rana– Douglas Hurst– Bin Cheng– Kavita Jari– Curtis Schofield

• Development was supported by a LEE4 grant


Outline

• Motivation– Why EduNuggets?

• EduNuggets– The objectives– The architecture– A few details

• What next?• Closing remarks


My story…

• I am teaching senior-year and graduate courses– These courses are not about “learning facts”– There are no “perfect” textbooks– There is a lot of content on the web

• I maintain a set of bookmarks

• In the beginning of every term– I look at the material of my co-instructors

• In a lot of different formats– I update and extend my own set of lectures

• As we change textbooks the order of subjects changes, and I have toremember “which lecture contains what material” if I want to reuse it

– I “clean up” my bookmarks• I discover new pointers and a lot of dead links

WebCT (and similar systems…) offer•Great support for course administration•Poor support for content management


Motivation

• Teaching and learning practices increasingly leverage the web– Instructors

• Use on-line information sources to collect multimedia content• Produce on-line presentations

– Students• Use the web to find more information on the subject matter that they

study

• But several issues arise:– Accessing content on the web often implies becoming an administrator– On-line information may be stale or wrong– Different sources use different terminology

EduNuggets is an intelligent repository for multimedia educational materials, designed to support the semantic integration of a multimedia collection of content distributed over the web.


EduNuggets Objectives

With EduNuggets, we aim at the following objectives:1. Maintain a collection of materials, one’s own and

published on the web

2. Provide a coherent semantic context for the availableinformation

3. Authoritatively evaluate and annotate the availableinformation

4. Enable access of this material through various mechanismsappropriate for different learning styles


The EduNuggets Architecture

• The RepositoryContains

• Original materials• Pointers to on-line materials• Topic maps of the subject domains

• The EduNuggets Student– Enables students to access the content in the repository

• In an exploratory manner, through a visualization of the topic map• Through focused queries

• The EduNuggets Developer– Enables instructors to manage the repository

• Define subject domains• Maintain the domain topic maps• Add materials, original or pointers


The Repository


The Repository

• Requirements– Must contain multimedia files

• ASCII, HTML, PPT, audio/video, …– Must provide an overall organization over the

source materials• Semantic integration

– To eliminate discrepancies due to terminology differences• Authoritative editing

– Not everything published on the web is correct

• Approach– Semantic modeling with topic maps


Topic MapsTopics

Fromhttp://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html

Topics and their names

Occurrences of topics

Topics associations and their types


Topic Maps: An Example<topicMap xmlns="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/"

xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">

<topic id="ct-cognitive"> <baseName> <baseNameString>cognitive</baseNameString> <variant> <variantName><resourceData id="index terms">cognit</resourceData></variantName> </variant> </baseName></topic>

<topic id="ng-7204"> <baseName> <baseNameString>ct-cmput301.16</baseNameString> … </baseName></topic>

<association id="146"> <instanceOf><topicRef xlink:href="#at-nugget"/></instanceOf> <member><roleSpec><topicRef xlink:href="#ct-cognitive"/></roleSpec></member> <member><roleSpec><topicRef xlink:href="#ng-7205"/></roleSpec></member></association></topicMap>


The Student Application


The Student Application

• Requirements– Support rendering of multiple media types– Enable multiple access methods to the collection

material

• Approach– A plugin architecture, integrating components for

rendering


A typical “student” usage scenario


The Query panel

The Nugget-Browser panelThe graphical topic-mapview panel

The TopicTree view panel


Searching for “Memory”

301 UI design

Course: Select the Domain in which the keyword belongs

memory

Topic Search: Enter a keyword, for which you need to retrieve information


Retrieving “Memory”-related materials

The children of thefocused Topic aredisplayed in a tree in theTopicTree view.

The topic that mostclosely corresponds tothe search keyword isfocused in the Topic-Map view.

topic

nugget


Viewing a Nugget

• Clicking on a topic nodeof the TopicTree refocusesthe Topic-Map viewaround this topic.

• Clicking on a nugget nodeof the TopicTree refocusesthe Topic-Map view anddisplays the nugget in theNugget Browser.

• Clicking on the focuseddisplays the nugget in theNugget Browser.


Rendering the Nugget’s content

• Nugget content is rendered in the Nugget-BrowserPanel.– This panel contains a SMIL browser that is able to render

HTML, SMIL translations of PPT presentations, audio andvideo


More “Student” Functionalities

• Monitoring– Student interactions with the application are

recorded• We hope to discover navigation patterns

– Characteristic of learner types– Useful for supporting adaptation of the application behavior

• Student Feedback– Students’ opinions on the quality of the nuggets they

view are recorded• They could be used to adapt retrieval

• Personal repositories?


The Instructor Application


The Instructor Application

• Requirements– Enable the conceptual modeling of domains

• in terms of topics and relations among them– Support the editing of source materials in terms of

the domain conceptual model

• Approach– Domain administration– HTML annotation– SMIL annotation


Domain Administration


Topic Administration


Nugget Administration


The Annotation Guide

The AnnotationGuide application supports the annotation of HTMLdocuments with Topics from the conceptual domain, thus creating Nuggets.


Annotating: Selecting a source document

• The Annotation beginsby opening a URL andspecifying the subjectmatter domain in whichthis Annotation willbelong.


Annotating: selecting the segment

• Assuming an HTML document is being annotated,double clicking on a paragraph/point will highlight it.

• Clicking and Dragging a Selection may also be used toto make a selection that spans multipleparagraphs/points


Annotating: selecting the topic

1. Initiate topic selection for the created nugget

2. The Topic-Map view is used to visually navigate the Topic Map to find the correct Topic to associate with the nugget


Annotating: saving the nuggets

The constructed Nuggets are previewed before beingsaved to the Repository


Handling Other Media

• ASCII, Audio/Video– “Natively” by the SMIL browser in the Nugget-

Browser panel

• PPT: By translation to SMIL– The “translation” application will be added as a

plugin to the instructor


A few implementation details


Information Retrieval

• Lexical– The “names” of the topic maps can be matched against the

input query• Statistical

– Latent semantic indexing -http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/lsi/

• uncovers semantic associations among terms in a text collection; LSIwill learn that "laptop" and "portable" occur in many of the samecontexts, and that queries about one should probably retrievedocuments about the other.

– Naïve Bayes classifier• given a set of documents assigned to a class, the probability of the

words contained in these documents being indicators of this classlabel can be calculated using a naive Bayes assumption.

• The results are combined and ordered

How do we return relevant documents?


Bootstrapping of the Topic Map

1. Identify nuggets• Segments of a certain (configurable) size

2. Identify topics• Frequently occurring terms• Terms occurring in “weighted” phrases

3. Identify associations• A nugget is an occurrence of a topic if it contains

the topic name• Two nuggets are associated if they are occurrences

of the same topic

Domain modeling is a lot of work!


Software

• Java 1.3– Two standalone applications– “student” soon to be deployed as an applet

• Postgresql for the repository

• Touchgraph for the Topic-Map view

• XSLT for XML manipulation


What next?

• Evaluation– Usability testing

• Deployment– As is, next term– Investigation of making it a plugin for another tool

• Extensions– More formats,– more detailed annotations– Towards the “education semantic web”


Summary Remarks

• We have a “smart” tool– Supports the construction of a domain model– Supports the maintenance of the domain and its model– Enable multiple access methods

• “Knowledge engineering” is still a bottleneck– Authoritative review is still necessary to deliver high-quality

content

• We are looking forward to applications

• The project home pagehttp://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~stroulia/EduNuggets/

Documents

EduNuggets: an intelligent repository for multimedia ...stroulia/EduNuggets/EduNuggets...EduNuggets: an intelligent repository for multimedia education content ... ... • A nugget