learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Gert Faustmann
The learner her/himself formulates a constraint, e.g. for the source code in the system. This could
be, for example, a hint how to use the different classes of the menu system in another software
application.
Finally, it may be necessary to adapt a constraint to a specific learning situation by providing an
annotation.
Figure 8: Options to provide documents different from results
There are other alternatives, but they all follow the same structure: the teacher may ask for a new
document or the student may her/himself provide a new document without being asked to. When
asked for a document, the teacher can provide a set of possible documents or encourage the student
to search for appropriate documents on his/her own.
5. Arguments and constraints in the WeCoLAr system
Implementing the described conceptual approach is difficult because one of the core requirements is
the use of arbitrary digital documents for results and supporting documents. Additionally, these
documents have to be visualized in the system (also as links with the possibility to use a third party
application for opening) and they must be loadable in a native document format so that the learner
can work on them. If a document is repeatedly used in a learning project, it should nevertheless not
be multiply stored in the system.
The web-based learning platform WeCoLAr (Web-based Collaborative Learning by Arguments)
implements these requirements by using markings in picture documents (see figure 9). All documents
are stored in their native document format (e.g. pdf or html), as well as in a universal picture format
(here jpg). The graphical user interface only shows the pictures of the documents. But pictures of
bigger documents (e.g. pdf files with many pages) would be too bulky to be handled and viewed on a
graphical desktop. Furthermore, only parts of the documents are needed for referencing. So
WeCoLAr uses markings defining a specific area in a document. A marking is stored when a learner
loads a new document into WeCoLAr. This marking can be defined interactively and is specific for
every context.
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