SUMA & T-Maestro: Integrating personalized t-learning through standards

Silvia Bastos Laboratorio de TVDI, Universidad de Vigo

Campus Universitario s/n 36300 Vigo, Spain +34 986 813901

sbastos@det.uvigo.es

Rebeca P. Diaz Laboratorio de TVDI, Universidad de Vigo

Campus Universitario s/n 36300 Vigo, Spain +34 986 813469

rebeca@det.uvigo.es

Ana Fernández Laboratorio de TVDI, Universidad de Vigo

Campus Universitario s/n 36300 Vigo, Spain +34 986 813868

avilas@det.uvigo.es

Gonzalo Jiménez Laboratorio de TVDI, Universidad de Vigo

Campus Universitario s/n 36300 Vigo, Spain +34 986 813901

gonzalo@det.uvigo.es

ABSTRACT The SUMA1 project is part of the INES technological platform eLearning working group and has been subsidized by the Ministry for Tourism, Industry and Trade, as part of PROFIT-the Avanza Plan's Industrial ICT Policy.

This project has developed a system for integrating eLearning services based on standards, which allows the incorporation of tools and services into a platform, in order to respond to the training needs of both the business and academic spheres, and to facilitate the integration of existing structures into the many fields that require the implementation of eLearning solutions. The basic aim of the project is creating a services layer that enables the separation of the eLearning base platform (Moodle or Sakai)2 from the new applications and functions to be incorporated.

One of these new features aims the multimodal access to the eLearning platform through different devices (IDTV, Web, mobile…). IDTV’s laboratory at the University of Vigo has focused in these services, providing multimodal access and designing contents adapted to user’s profile and reception device. The demo presented in this paper shows the SUMA services for multimodal access trough Web and IDTV.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computer and Education]: Computer Uses in Education – distance learning, collaborative learning.

H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation (I.7)]: Multimedia Information Systems – Video (e.g., tape, disk, DVI)

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Standardization.

Keywords T-learning, adaptation, personalization, IDTV, learning systems.

1 http://www.ines.org.es/suma 2 http://moodle.org and http://sakaiproject.org

1. INTRODUCTION The arrival of Interactive Digital TV makes the access to distance education easier, practically all European homes have at least one television set, whereas the penetration of Internet enabled computers is lower than TV. Apart from wide-world usage, TV is considered by the viewer trustworthy in reference to broadcast content and easy to operate. These conditions are an ideal starting point for TV-based interactive learning, referred to as t-learning.

Through personalization, it is possible to attract users towards education, choosing the most appropriate contents for them and adapting learning contents to their preferences and learning background. Through the combination of education and entertainment, it is possible to approach education to viewers.

2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI)3 develops specifications that describe how the components of a software environment communicate with each other, OKI specifications enable sustainable interoperability and integration by defining standards for Service Oriented Architecture. The OKI project has developed the Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), that defines important components of a SOA as they provide general software contracts between service consumers and service providers. This enables applications to be constructed independently of any particular service environment, and eases integration.

SUMA consists in three levels: the base LMS (Moodle or Sakai), SUMA OKI bus and applications that access to OSID services (see Figure 1). SUMA OKI bus offers an eLearning integration service layer of the OKI specification that provides a common standard interface for connecting applications regardless of the underlying LMS. This enables application integration paradigm using APIs that allows integrating implementations for different programming languages and adding different protocols. Our applications have been built over this integration layer.

One of the SUMA project aims is to provide multimodal access to adaptable content, to achieve this, the IDTV’s laboratory have developed three fundamental entities:

3 http://www.okiproject.org

ReloadTotal: the authoring tool. The courses created are defined in XML language that allows them to be independent of underlying technology.

T-Maestro Intelligent Tutoring System: responsible for the component adaptation to the user profile.

T-Maestro Interpreter: responsible for the adaptation to the reception device.

Figure 1: SUMA Architecture

2.1 ReloadTotal The ReloadTotal is a tool to create adaptive learning elements based on SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), this tool adds new functionality to RELOAD Editor4, that allows specifying different organizations for SCORM course. This authoring tool includes the submodule SCOCreator Tool which allows creating self-adaptive SCOs (Sharable Content Object).

With this tool we hide technical details to pedagogy experts and allow defining adaptive courses based on multimedia and using a media-driven strategy.

2.2 T-Maestro The platform T-Maestro adapts at reception the eLearning contents to the user’s preferences and reception device by combining the ITS and the interpreter. The interpreter is the responsible for the proper display according the access device and access to the eLearning platform to obtain the adaptable content. The ITS, performs the adaptation of the course according to user’s profile. Thus, T-Maestro shows the user a course in which the content is adapted to his profile and his reception device.

3. DEMO SCENARIO In the demonstration scenario (Figure 2) two roles are distinguished: course creators and students. 4 http://www.reload.ac.uk/

Course creators are in charge of designing adaptive t-learning elements (pedagogical units or whole courses) by using the authoring tool we have developed, ReloadTotal.

The student has to ways to interact with the course, he can access to the adaptive courses through a web interface or an IDTV interface.

Figure 2: Demo Scenarios

A demo video is available at: http://idtv.det.uvigo.es/proyectos/t-learning/en/index.html

4. CONCLUSIONS We have developed a pilot course about cooking, we have chosen because it is an appropriate subject for this type of training: very close to entertainment. They have participated a group of 40 heterogeneous users (both genres, different ages and educational levels), and we have obtained some conclusions by observing their reactions and by some questions results.

Overall, the study has identified that there is a big potential for utilizing the interactive digital TV solution for increasing learning opportunities in the home, particularly as an alternative solution to utilizing an Internet-enabled computer, 95% of respondents said they would use this application in their homes. This is interesting to obtain a broad participation in sectors of the population not familiar with the PC environment because 85% of respondents said they found easy to use the remote control, this is an important aspect for overcoming the digital divide.

A 60% of respondents said they would use this service on weekends, at night or in their leisure time, therefore, it should be used the playful nature of TV to make learning more attractive and to engage TV viewers in learning.

As a future line of work we are going to guide further studies on adaptable t-learning for elderly and we are developing the access to the adaptive courses trough mobile devices.

5. REFERENCES [1] Rey-López, M., Díaz-Redondo, R. P., Fernández-Vilas, A.,

Pazos-Arias, J. J., López-Nores, M., García-Duque, J., Gil-Solla, A., and Ramos-Cabrer, M. 2008. T-MAESTRO and its authoring tool: using adaptation to integrate entertainment into personalized t-learning. Multimedia Tools Appl. 40, 3 (Dec. 2008), 409-451. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-008-0213-4