designing an effective semantic web based elearning system

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617

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Designing an Effective Semantic Web basedeLearning System

1Amna 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 ad-vantage 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 TermseLearning, Semantic Web Technology, Teaching, reusability and interoperability.

1 INTRODUCTION

he evolving technology has provided number of op-portunities for the increased quality of education and

learning. With advent of Information and Communica-tion Technologies (ICT), it had become easy for the usersto search for resources to study, significance involvementin the paradigm of designing (user-centric designs),changed and improved methods in traditional teachingand learning processes and discovery of the new horizonfor education opportunities. This facilitation of learningthrough electronic means or simply e-learning providesimmense opportunities as well as challenges in its im-plementation and effectiveness.[1]

E-Learning system is composed of several actors(Producer, Host and Learner) that perform different tasksand collectively they result in meeting the final objectivei-e Learning. There are numerous solutions in practicetoday.

One of the possible solutions is Content Man-agement System that helps in delivery of academiccourses and activities. The instructor is allowed to create acourse web site where documents can be uploaded. Itserves as a central repository for all the uploaded docu-ments making their management, storage, access andsharing effective by checking for redundancy and availa-bility of latest versions of the course contents. It allows

collaboration between the tutor and students by discus-sion board.[3]Learning Management System is another way for deli-

very of academic courses as it integrates collections ofsoftwares /programs that automates the administration,tracking and reporting of online courses/programs. Thecommon feature of these systems is the dispersion on theinformation available.[2] It is widely used across theglobe due to its ease of use and its centralized organiza-tional approach to learning. Its limitation lies in the factthat it does not allows collaboration between the tutorand the student and it does not help to create and deploythe content of an eLearning system.[4] The effectivenessand relevance of an eLearning system is determined by itscapability to deliver personalized learning material to thelearner[6]. Moreover, reusability of the learning object isan important issue being discussed nowadays because

knowledge is widely dispersed across the network andthere is no means of integrating or sharing knowledgebetween the traditional in practice eLearning systems.

Considering into account the flexibility, interoperabil-ity, dynamic content generation, sharing and integrationof appropriate information, semantic web is the bestchoice in eLearning system because of its organizationalunit around metadata.

This paper proposes a semantic web based eLearningsystem for the students of Sharif College of Engineeringand Technology. The main objective behind the model isthe online delivery of the courses taught at the college tothe 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 introduc-tion to Semantic Web technology and reasons of usingsemantic web technology as the choice. Section 3 containsthe 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-

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.

mjad Farooq is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineerinr,University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan.

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tions for the purpose of teaching, businesses for trainingsand by individuals for learning. The eLearning is normal-ly categorized into four types of variations individualizedself-paced eLearning offline, individualized self-pacedeLearning online, group-based eLearning synchronouslyand group-based eLearning asynchronously [1]. It is anattractive option for most of the students because there isno time limitation and restrictions for its usage moreoverit is more flexible then the traditional teacher-student in-teraction.

But on the contrary it had pitfalls as well. MostlyeLearning system are nothing more than a huge reposito-ry of documents stored that can be then later viewed inHTML format or any other popular format or if providedthen in the form of downlodable documents. That createsrepulsion towards the learning objects and hense thelearning process. Futher, the traditional eLearning sys-tems lacks the interoperability and referencing featuresalong with the personalization and adaptivity.

2.2 Why to use Semantic Web Tehchnlogy?

The implementation of eLearning system by us-ing semantic web technology enables the application to bereusable, integrated, shared and interoperable betweendifferent applications. Semantic Web Technologyrevolves around organizing information in such a waythat computers can easily understand and use/reuse it forperforming their tasks. The characteristic feature of thistechnology is the use of relationships between differentthings (web pages, documents, information etc) to de-scribe their properties and their contents which makesthem easier to understand for software agents thus en-hancing interoperability between different applications.

Semantic web applications are build on numberof layers that participate in describing and giving seman-tics to the objects. Concept of data and meta data is veryimportant feature that helps in portability of the applica-tion and enables it to be understood at semantic level.Data is the actual value of a particular instance and metadata describes relationship between those individual in-stances and other data items. Data and Meta Data formsthe basic means for information sharing and integrationbecause the relationship is independent of the data sto-rage. Semantic web is divided into two major compo-nents: Statements and Relationships. Semantic state-ments enables sharing and integration whereas semanticrelationships forms the semantic web and includes defini-tions, associations, aggregations and restrictions.[14]RDF : Resource Description Frame work represents in-formation in the form of the statements. The basic organi-zational structure of RDF is a graph that makes informa-tion integration flexible. Moreover, the statements doesnot need to be translated when moving from one place toanother, they are valid in every context.Another important concept is of ontology which is de-scribed as the formalization of the domain concepts, inwhich concepts are presented by classes. The relation be-tween class and class attribute forms a taxonomic struc-ture that helps to deduce information from the context

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 performedby each role/agent and finally Layer3 is the central repo-sitory of data.

In the proposed model there are four roles/agents

that participates in the learning process; teach-er/instructor, student, administrator and guest; distin-guished by the type of services they can request to thecental data repository. The greatest advantage of usingsemantic web technology is that depite of the fact thatdata is highly distributed, it can be linked together bymeans of semantics, relationships and constraints toachieve the common goal that is learning.

Teacher is the producer of the learning content. Themain tasks carried out by the teacher are monitoring ofthe students performance, managing course components,making announcements, managing reference links, man-

aging students online assignment submission and com-posing exercises and quizzes.

Studentis the consumer of this learning process.The main tasks performed by the students includes regis-tration for the course, announcements, reading coursedocuments, usage of the reference links, submission ofassignments, exercises and quizzes.

Administrator is the actor that manages all theactivities at the backend. He is responsible for activa-tion/inactivation of the users, management of the usersaccounts and controlling the access of the user dependingupon his role as a student or the guest.

The guestcan be a software agent or a human be-

ing trying to retrieve information from the eLearning sys-tem.The service layer comprises the second layer of

the eLearning system. It mainly lighlights the type ofservices provided by the system architecture to theagents or roles using it. Each agent and service is con-ceptualized by their respective ontology.

The overall architecture of the eLearning system isshown in fig2.

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

Teacher Student

Administrator Guest

eLearningSystem


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

System

The user identification is done by the user login to deter-mine whether the user is a student , teacher or an admi-nistartor. There are various methodolodies to develop the

ontology for the semantic web based applications.We will be following SW-OODM methodology.[2] Thefirst phase is the analysis phase which is further dividedinto four steps. The domain vocabulary, list of all learningresources, the relationship between the resources, con-straints and data characteristics will be explored in thefirst step. In the second step, the information model forthe ontology will be developed that constitutes pageclasses, multimedia attributes and associations amongpage-classes. In the third step the user model will be con-structed and finally the operation model of the domainwill be constructed. In the Second Stage of SW-OODM theinputs from the first phase are used and the output com-

prises of the web-ontology schema, components andcomponents access sequence, navigational paths and userinterface model.

4 CONCLUSION

The proposed architecture of the semantic web basedeLearning system provides an opportunity to help thestudents in building concepts and at the same time eva-luating their concepts to improve their learning process.Ontologies in the system helps to integrate and sharelearning objects and resources among different users and

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

REFERENCES

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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 Engi-neering and Technology. Current Research Interests includes Semantic Web Applications, Software Engineering andHuman 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 Pro-gramming, 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 inter-ests include Computer Programming, Semantic Web and Databases.

designing an effective semantic web based elearning system

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