Development of web-compatible graphical portal for presenting learning hypermedia

• Main Author: Li, Jianmin.
• Other Authors: Kevin Anthony Jones
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information interfaces and presentation
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48495
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the exploding web and advancement of web technologies, information exchange has become dynamic, instantaneous and also, enriching. E-Learning has also seen rising popularity and is becoming a common place in every student’s life. Traditionally, e-Learning systems are just a “one size fits all” entity regardless of how one learns. Everyone has a learning style that might be unique to one-self. Also, the learning contents provided by these systems are also lacking in dynamism. The purpose of this project is to improve the usefulness of such system by allowing it to adjust information according to each user’s characteristics, knowledge and learning style through the use of adaptive technology. A prototype e-Learning portal workbench was developed to illustrate the use of adaptive technology in e-Learning. Thereafter, a 17-questions survey was conducted to test the response of using such a system as part of their learning experience. From the survey, the general consensus on e-Learning was found to be boring with most spending less than an hour on it. This might be because these systems lack activities (prepared by the school) that actually engage the students. However, 78% of the respondents do agree that e-Learning is necessary and important towards their learning process and would like it to do more for them. A majority of the respondents will be more motivated to do e-Learning if the system could adjust/adapt learning materials according to their style and difficulty, manage their learning processes and value-add their learning materials with additional information obtained from the world wide web (WWW). They would like to be able customize the portal, add other courses of interest freely and conduct real time discussion with their peers and instructors. Creating an adaptive learning portal that is highly interactive, engaging and is able to dynamically adapt information and contents to the user’s characteristics, interests, knowledge and learning style can be challenging. Although the results and responses can be positive and promising, further research still has to be conducted to test and confirm the success of such systems.