Papers in PDF format

1. Introduction
Feedback and Adaptive Interaction for WWW-based courses
Yury Tsybenko
Department of Dialogue and Tutoring Systems
Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics
40, Prospect Academica Glushkova
Kiev, 252 022 Ukraine
Email: yury@tel.dlab.kiev.ua
In educational settings Web serves as organised recourse for a collection of structured learning materials with a
set of hyperlinks (local and remote) in it. These features are educationally useful, but appear to be so routing
now. It is necessary to do a research of use WWW beyond this standard features. During the last years WWW
has been extensively studied to determine its learning-support possibilities beyond that of offering a home
page. [Schneider and Block 1995] distinguished four main levels of WWW use in Education: (1) the Web as
information tool; (2) distribution of learning materials; (3) collaboration tools; (4) interactive educational
applications. This paper concerns levels 3 and 4 of the Web use in Education.
2. Two ways of interaction within the WWW-based course
Like it or not, but assessment of a student's knowledge and tutor's feedback are necessary elements of education
and training. Students cannot learn much by only browsing a hypertext. Learning must be active. There are
two different approaches in providing a feedback in distant education. The first approach is based on a role of a
teacher. In some forms of distant education the teacher remains the central component in the course [B. Collis,
1995]. The difference from a face-to-face form is that the students are at a distance of a teacher. A teacher
presents learning materials via Web and communicates with his students asynchronously via email, computer
conference or by publishing teacher's instructions on the Web. Such an approach requires an additional tutors
efforts on answering student's questions and evaluating student's work.
The another approach [E. Schwartz et al., 1996], [F Linn, et al., 1996] is integrating distant educational power
of WWW with interactivity and intelligence of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). Traditional ITS technique
aims to develop some ITS features that usually performed by human teacher in the classroom. This technique
is based on a model of a student. Student model was developed to help intelligent tutor decide which exercise
to give to a student, when to interrupt, what level of explanation to give, and so on. This technology is also
may be useful for distance education, when teacher cannot interact with a student directly.
However, it is difficult to transfer directly the ITS technology in the Web. The ITS teaching strategies impose
some constraints on student behaviour in learning, typically, the system leads a student through the learning
materials. In contrast, a Web student can freely browse through the materials available, the system never
knows the path by which the student has arrived in a hypermedia document.
3. Studying at the WWW learning environment.
The WWW-based course on basic Internet technologies consisting of 30 lessons is currently developed at
Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, Kiev, Ukraine. Each lesson contains on-line tests, exercises and other
activities that form interactive learning environment of the lesson. The two different types of interaction are
implemented for the course. The first is asynchronous interaction in which tutor communicate with students by
email. This form of interaction is used for sending tutor's instructions, answering student's questions and
monitoring collaborative work within a group of students. The second is adaptive on-line interaction provided
by the server-side software. This form of interaction is used for evaluating the results of student's studying. The
interactive forms allow to offer a variety of assessment methods such as true/false questions multiple-choice
questions, short-answer and simple essay questions. The forms are spread through the course materials on the