ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

Architecture of HEZINET
The system has six main modules, namely, the Interface, the Auditor, the Course, the Student
Model, the Intelligent Module, the Human Teacher Module and the Communication Module. In (Fig. 3) a
view of the interaction between these modules is provided. There are two well-differentiated parts: the hypermedia
and the adaptive part. The Interface module controls the hypermedia part. The other modules
form the adaptive part, which is the one that is in charge of decision making and storing the evolution of the
student evolution with the system. The modules have been implemented using Java, Orbixweb and SQL
Server.
Figure 3: General architecture of HEZINET
The interface module consists of a series of screens developed specially for each part of the system.
The screen design has been taken seriously so that the student motivation gets promoted and he does
not get bored, as stated in (Landow, 1997) "if the user gets lost or bored, the system is bound to fail". The
screens contain very intuitive buttons and are very easy to use (Baker, 1993): "the interface should be
structured such that the student is learning the subject domain, not the program interface". The Interface
interacts directly with the student. It obtains user reactions and sends relevant ones to the Auditor. The latter
processes that information and returns back to the former new data to be displayed. The interface has
been divided into five functional spaces (Fig. 4). Area 1 contains buttons offering functionality always
available during the student interaction with the system. It basically contains contextual help for new users;
a grammar book; a dictionary; tools to contact a human teacher or to talk with other students working with
the system at that moment; and a tool to review the steps followed previously. Area 2 contains buttons that
will not always be active. Some of them depend on the type of activity the student works on. Area 3 is a
navigation area that offers the possibility to go back through previous steps of navigation. Area 4 is only
informative and provides information about the task being done by the student and the location in the hypermedia
where is the user. Finally, area 5 is the workspace. It shows the activities and provides places to
write or construct answers to questions.
Figure 4: The interface is divided into five functional areas