OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL: THE ADAPTIVE

SCHOOL BOOK APPROACH

Adaptivity Extends Conventional School Books with Digital Media

Andr

e Schulz and Merlin Becker

Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, Children’s Media, Hirschlachufer 7, 99084 Erfurt, Germany

Keywords:

Adaptivity, e-Learning, Educational media, Evaluation, School, School book, Teaching, Textbook.

Abstract:

The school book as the traditional learning medium is still going strong. The mere use of digital media is

no guarantee for the improvement of learning. In this paper, the project “Adaptive School Book” (ASB, for

short) is presented. The focus is on the combination of printed school books with digital media (media mix).

This approach is extended to the adaptive deployment of digital media. The overall objective is the optimal

support of the processes of teaching and learning. Therefore the authors developed an approach based on

the analysis of adaptivity and the detailed discussion of the conditions of the application domain (focussing

learning in school). The variety of the inﬂuencing factors, the open issues and the risks of uncertain decisions

in the adaptation process show the need of a well-considered procedure of development. Therefore, four major

steps of development have been proposed. The implementation of the ﬁrst step of development is shown in a

demonstrator. The evaluation of the demonstrator in the context of expert interviews and qualitative studies in

school lessons provides important criteria and requirements for the future development of the approach.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since decades the printed school book is the dominat-

ing media in school lessons. But, considering the fact

that digital media has a lot of advantages, is that still

contemporary?

Nearly all schools have access to the internet, are

equipped with computers for the lessons, or offer even

lessons in so-called notebook classes. Nevertheless, it

has shown itself that the introduction of digital teach-

ing media and learning media in the school lessons is

a very sensitive ﬁeld. The initial hype seems to fail

because of the real circumstances. A result from the

attempts to the mediasation of the schools is, that only

digital media does not guarantee an improvement of

the teaching and learning. Rather a mix of different

media and its meaningful didactic usage is looked as

successful-promissory.

1.1 State of the Art

For quite some time school book publishers offer var-

ious contents in digitally processed form.

These complementary or additional digital mate-

rials can be accessed by data carriers attached to the

school books or via internet (Wicke and Baumann,

2007; Brameier and Kreus, 2009; Diehl, 2008). Strik-

ing in these approaches is that they are tailored to only

one book, at best, to the offer of a publishing house.

In spite of the high relevance for pupils, teach-

ers and parents the scientiﬁc debate about the subject

“school book” is strongly neglected. General and ac-

tual considerations to school books as media and the

inﬂuence of the digital educational media appear ex-

tremely seldom. There is a clear need for research.

It is indisputable that the potential of digital or

computer-based media goes far beyond the potential

of traditional media. However, the numerous empiric

studies on learning with digital or computer-based

media (Wiggenhorn and Vorndran, 2003; Herzig and

Grafe, 2006; Schaumburg et al., 2007; Hoppe et al.,

2011) partly come to very contradictory results. Ac-

cording to Gerhard Tulodziecki (2004) the consider-

ation of learning-relevant conditions as well as the

choice of suitable teaching concepts are essential for

the use of digital media.

To sum up, is to be found out that the print me-

dia (printed school book) and the digital media (dig-

ital school book) shows in each case speciﬁc advan-

tages and disadvantages. This is reﬂected, inter alia,

130

Schulz A. and Becker M..

OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL: THE ADAPTIVE SCHOOL BOOK APPROACH - Adaptivity Extends Conventional School Books with Digital

Media.

DOI: 10.5220/0003346601300139

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 130-139

ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

in studies on the comparison of traditional print me-

dia and digital media (Eveland and Dunwoody, 2001).

The combination of both types of media, as in the

above introduced approaches, therefore has a high po-

tential.

1.2 Problems and Lacks

However, the usage in schools and the expected high

economic success of the media mix products is miss-

ing, at least in Germany. From the perspective of

the authors the essential problems lie in the fact that

the approaches are mostly only insular solutions. The

complementary digital media are offered just at book

level or publishing company level using a uniform

platform. These are often merely media collections

which are not tailored to speciﬁc learning-related con-

ditions such as exist for example in school lessons.

Besides, individual needs of teachers and learners of-

ten remain disregarded.

1.3 Motivation

The potential which lies in the combination of differ-

ent types of media should be used. Besides, an univer-

sally applicable solution to the connection of the ad-

vantages of print media and digital media offers many

farther ﬁelds of application.

Learning processes and learning strategies are in-

dividually and will usually be caused by a huge num-

ber of factors. The adaptation of teaching methods

and teaching contents to learning-relevant conditions

can indeed be regarded as a central component of suc-

cessful teaching and learning. The supply of digital

school book lessons by taking into account such adap-

tive methods would show not only an added value, but

could increase the efﬁciency and the effectiveness of

the learning as well as the practical suitability of the

digital media.

1.4 Purpose

The increase of the efﬁciency and effectiveness of

learning is regarded as a fundamental objective of the

proposed project. Besides, the investigation and de-

velopment of processes for the adaptive supply of dig-

ital school book contents as an extension of the media

mix approach forms the central purpose.

Within the scope of a generic process of develop-

ment a universal system which combines the advan-

tages of print media and digital media is realised. The

objective of the system development is the adapted

supply of digital media by taking into account indi-

vidual needs. Besides, the arrangement of methods

with the focus on the school environment stands in

the foreground of the considerations.

Beside the connection of printed school books and

digital media the essential objective of this work is

the development and implementation of models and

methods to support the decision-making ability of

a computer system - an adaptive system. But the

authors want to go beyond the common approaches

of adaptivity. The overall objective (considering the

adaptivity) is to implement reﬂective adaptivity which

was introduced by Klaus P. Jantke (2010).

2 THE UNDERSTANDING OF

ADAPTATION

In order to achieve increased efﬁciency and effective-

ness of learning, it is considered an art of the teacher

to adapt itself to the individual needs of its pupils. Al-

ready Burrhus F. Skinner (1954) emphasised the im-

portance of adaptation of the support offering pro-

vided by the teacher. In a narrower sense, the ex-

cessive demand or unterdemand of learners can be

counteracted by measures of individualisation (Heck-

hausen and Heckhausen, 2006; Heckhausen, 1968).

The associated extreme workload for teachers predes-

tines the use of software systems.

In the present paper the very different under-

standing of the term “Adaptation” is considered as

a functional property of a software system. Basi-

cally it is distinguished between adaptivity and adapt-

ability. While adaptability means the customisation

of system-parameters by the user itself, adaptivity

stands for an automatic, system-controlled adaptation

to users according to changing conditions. An adap-

tive computer system uses information about its users,

their tasks and their goals to adapt itself to the user

(Leutner, 1995; Blank, 1996).

2.1 Adaptive Systems

The basic functionality of adaptive software systems

follows a uniform structure. Figure 1 illustrates the

essential elements and relationships of adaptive sys-

tems. There are essentially three phases of the adap-

tation process to highlight: diagnosis, modeling and

adaptation. An adaptive system automatically initi-

ates an adaptation due to the diagnosed and modeled

data. Accordingly, the content or the User Interface is

ajusted.

Basically all dimensions of adaptive methods

must be considered. “To increase the quality of tech-

nology enhanced learning it is important to distin-

guish what should be adapted, to what features should

OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL: THE ADAPTIVE SCHOOL BOOK APPROACH - Adaptivity Extends

Conventional School Books with Digital Media

131

Figure 1: The Basic functionality of adaptive software sys-

tems modiﬁed according to (Brusilovsky, 1996).

it be adapted and how should it be adapted” (Specht,

1998). Besides, the diagnosis and the modeling earns

a central position in the functionality of adaptive sys-

tems. They put the points for the actual adaptation

process.

2.2 An Examination of Adaptivity

In practice, the illustrated theoretical aspects are asso-

ciated with many open questions, problems and even

dangers (Jameson and Schwarzkopf, 2002; Kobsa,

1990). The biggest difﬁculty arise in the necessary

diagnosis of valid data as well as the adequate mod-

eling. The inconsistent learning behaviour

, the per-

manently changing contexts and tasks are only some

of the effective interference. An incomplete and er-

roneous diagnosis of data is the result. The hy-

potheses based on these data (modeling process) ﬁ-

nally admits merly uncertain decisions. This may

be one reason why there are considerable disagree-

ments about the methods for diagnosis and model-

ing, in the research (Jameson, 1996; Brusilovsky and

Mill

an, 2007; Greer, 1994).

Especially the user-adaptive systems, where the

adaptation process is based on interests and prefer-

ences, are at risk to succumb the problem of “self-

fulﬁlling prophecy” named by Robert King Merton

(1948). The systems providing content adaptive alone

with the help of the history of the use, inﬂuence the

choice of the user. This creates a circuit of limited

provision, limited choice and therefore limited diag-

nosis of the contents chosen by the user.

Another problem arises by the reduction of the

control over the system. As long as the decisions of

the adaptive system are understandable for or hit re-

quirements of the user this is absolutely unproblem-

atic. But if the adaptations do not correspond to the

requirements this leads to problems, mistakes or irri-

tations with the user. These problems correlate with

Due to loss of concentration, tiredness, dynamic and

non-monotonic nature of human learning, ambiguity and

vagueness of answers.

the question of the balance between adaptivity and

adaptibility of a system which is often discussed the

literature (Lohman, 1986; Clark, 1987).

But why adaptivity in other systems has been so

successful? The answer to this question is relatively

simple: As much factors of inﬂuence as possible need

to be excluded. Speciﬁcally, this is expressed by the

very exact deﬁnition of the application domain.

However, the objective of the system development

treated here is not just aimed at a certain application

domain. The system should be universally applicable.

It must be clariﬁed, what factors are critical for the

optimal use of digital media at school.

2.3 Conditions of the Application

Domain

As mentioned (see chapter 1.1), the optimal use of

digital media is characterised by partially very differ-

ent approaches and results of the research. In general,

the situation and the task determine their suitability,

or how Gerhard Tulodziecki (2004) formulates it, the

consideration of learning-relevant conditions .

On account of the lack knowledge about the use

of software systems for the realisation of the combi-

nation of print media and digital media (media mix)

the basic factors of inﬂuence of learning at school are

to be considered. This opens an almost unmanageable

number of issues.

The school system of Germany is characterised by

a high degree of heterogeneity. This shows itself in

the varied country-speciﬁc arrangement in the numer-

ous types of schools and in the different possibilities

of courses of education. Besides, no teaching and

learning materials are prescribed in Germany. As a re-

sult, a wide variety of different teaching and learning

materials (including school books) are used. Conse-

quently, software systems for educational use (espe-

cially at school) should have a correspondingly high

degree of ﬂexibility and universality.

The design of the school curriculum and lesson is

customised depending on the school and the teacher.

A consideration of the respective situation becomes

clear once more. Considering a school lesson, the fol-

lowing key dimensions can be identiﬁed: class level,

duration, content, teaching method and location.

While the content is given by the appropriate sub-

ject of a lesson, the lesson goes through different

phases of education, which in turn are inﬂuenced by

the use of different teaching methods, social forms,

instructional materials and so on. It is again clear, that

software systems must have a high degree of ﬂexibil-

ity and universal applicability.

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

132

Besides, the very differently distinctive media liter-

acy of pupils and teachers plays an essential role for

the use of software. In the consequence the usability

should be marked by simplicity, faithful to the princi-

ple “Less is more”.

To sum up, digital media must show a high degree

of universality, ﬂexibility and simplicity of use. These

three key aspects are essential to guarantee the prac-

tical suitability of digital media for educational use

(especially at school).

2.4 Development Steps of the Adaptivity

The huge number of external factors of inﬂuence, the

high relevance of the applicability or practical suit-

ability and, ﬁnally, the lack of valid requirements

for the application domains considered here compli-

cates the priorisation of suitable adaptive methods. To

counteract against the raised risk of wrong decisions

of the adaptive system, the development of the system

should, according to the authors point of view, run

through the following four stages of development:

1. Implementation of the base system and ensure the

practicality of access to the digital media and their

deployment.

2. Implementation of models and methods of situa-

tional adaptive supply of digital media.

3. Implementation of models and methods for the

task-based adaptive supply of digital media.

4. Implementation of models and methods for the

user-adaptive supply of digital media.

Figure 2: Development steps of the adaptivity.

In other words a gradual realisation of the adap-

tivity is proposed (see ﬁgure 2). In addition, suitable

decisions are to be made in each of the phases to the

possible or necessary implementation of adaptable el-

ements. Besides, an accompanying evaluation of the

results of the developments serves the iterative adap-

tation and optimisation of the system.

3 THE CONCEPT

Based on the results of the previous chapters, and by

taking into account the approaches from (Vogler et al.,

2010) the concept for the ﬁrst stage of development,

is presented in the following. The scenario (Figure 3)

illustrates the underlying idea.

Figure 3: The Concept of the ASB-Approach.

The school book (A) serves the pupil (B) as a guide-

line through the lesson (1). Under use of a suitable

terminal equipment, for example, a notebook (C), the

complementary digital media (D) are available. De-

ﬁned references allow the unequivocal access (2) on

the school book lessons.

A software system, in the following designated

as “ASB-System”, serves as a interface between the

printed school book (A) and the digital media (D). By

input the references using the integrated user interface

(3), the ASB-System can provide the information that

is requested.

This requires a system-understandable representa-

tion (4) of the digital media and (the structure) of the

printed school book in digital form.

The ASB-System selects the digital media with

the help of deﬁned criteria (situation, duties, user’s

signs, etc.), ensures an accordingly adapted adaptive

provision (5) and displays this to the pupils in the

form of a suitable presentation (6).

The proposed approach is based on a software tool

to support the learning process. The combination

of the printed school book and digital media should

produce a balance between the solid structure of the

printed school book and the free, ﬂexible, adaptable

and adaptive information variety of digital media.

The outlined concept raises many questions. In

the following chapters approaches to access, user in-

terface, representation, delivery and presentation are

discussed.

3.1 Access

The combination of print media with digital media re-

quires interfaces deﬁned in terms of unequivocal ref-

erences. The possible detail of a reference is deter-

mined by the granularity of the book to be described.

A present key aspect is that the book content can

not be considered or referenced without the book it-

self. Therefore the reference of a book element, in the

following designated as MediaID, consists of at least

two components: a book identiﬁcator (BookID) and a

identiﬁcator for the suitable element (ObjectID).

The objective is to create a referencing that is suit-

OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL: THE ADAPTIVE SCHOOL BOOK APPROACH - Adaptivity Extends

Conventional School Books with Digital Media

133

able for practical use (short, intuitive, easy to remem-

Figure 4: An exemplary MediaID.

ber, etc.) and universally usable (also books without

specially printed identiﬁcation). Figure 4 illustrates

the structure used in the present work. As BookID a

combination of initials for the suitable school subject

(e.g. PH for physics) and class layer (e.g. 08 for class

layer 8) is used. The ObjectID consists of a marking

for the respective chapter (e.g. K01 for chapter 1) and

a page number (e.g. S08 for page 8).

The use of unambiguous identiﬁers such as the

International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or the

Digital Object Identiﬁer (DOI) are not suitable for the

input. Alternatively, the input of textual issues is con-

ceivable to access Media. However, on this occasion,

the relation to the book structure would get lost.

The suitability, universality and practical suitabil-

ity of the proposed MediaID should be checked in an

evaluation accompanying the process of development.

There may be other options prove to be suitable in ev-

eryday use.

3.2 User-interface

The graphical user interface (GUI) is the interface be-

tween the user and the system. The design of dialog

orientates itself by ergonomic points of view and the

principle “Less is more”.

Figure 5: The Basic Design of the Graphical User Interface.

Figure 5 shows the basic design of the graphical

user interface of the ASB system. This GUI forms

the primary dialog to the access to digital school book

elements. The minimalistic design ensures a function-

oriented, easy and intuitive usability.

In addition to design aspects the GUI includes

three dialog elements. An input ﬁeld (2) allows the

entry of MediaID. By triggering the ok-button (3) the

request is executed. In addition, window controls and

help functions (1) are available.

3.3 Digital Representation

There is a need for a system-understandable (digital)

representation of the book structure. This allows the

allocation of digital media to the content structure of

the printed school book.

The IMS Content Packaging Speciﬁcation is well

established in the ﬁeld of e-Learning and offers a

very good basis. This speciﬁcation enables the in-

teroperable exchange of multimedia (learning) con-

tent, by providing standardised data structures. As it

is shown in ﬁgure 6 it consists of a special XML ﬁle,

called IMS manifest ﬁle (imsmanifest.xml), and the

corresponding learning object ﬁles (resources). The

manifest ﬁle consists in the essentials of four XML

elements: Meta-Data, Organizations, Resources and

(sub)Manifest(s). At this point the Organizations- and

the Resources-container are particularly interesting.

Figure 6: The general structure of the IMS CP.

The Organizations-container is suitable for rep-

resenting the content structure (chapter, subchapter,

et cetera) of the printed school book. The <item>-

elements can be used to build a tree-like structure of

the printed book (see Figure 6). Each element can be

extended with metadata and references to resources.

The Resources-container contains references to

all resources and media elements required for the

manifesto. This encloses their description by means

of meta-data and references to other external ﬁles.

Therefore the complementary digital media can be de-

scribed in an adequate data structure.

The Meta-Data set is based on the IMS Meta-Data

(IMS MD) speciﬁcation, which is in turn based on

the IEEE standard 1484.12.1 - 2002 IEEE Standard

for Learning Object Metadata (LOM). So described

data offer a high potential for the automated analy-

sis and processing. Especially for adaptive processes

they provide a determining basis.

The IMS CP serves as the basis of numerous

other speciﬁcations, such as the Content Aggregation

Model of the ADL Sharable Content Object Refer-

ence Model (ADL SCORM), which is considered by a

huge number of actual e-Learning systems. The IMS

CP provides therefore an excellent basis for the coop-

eration with LMS/LCMS as for example Moodle

3.4 LCMS Cooperation

The ASB system was designed to act as an interface

between users and existing e-learning platforms. The

See http://www.moodle.org.

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134

user can login the LCMS by using the ASB-System

and interact with it. Thus, for example, a LCMS like

Moodle can serve as a digital repository.

Figure 7: The ASB system to interface with the LCMS

Moodle.

3.5 Provision and Presentation

The process of the provision can be initialised, for ex-

ample, by selecting a certain page of a school book

(e.g. entering a MediaID). In the simplest case a

suitable search algorithm determines the manifest ﬁle

belonging to the contained BookID and the suitable

<organization>-Container. Using the Object ID,

the concerning <item>-element can be determined,

its (meta-) data can be read and referenced resources

can be identiﬁed.

Figure 8: Advanced user interface for selection and presen-

tation of digital media.

The presentation of the provided digital media

needs the extension of a secondary GUI dialog. In

general, more than one digital asset is provided. This

requires a speciﬁc (user-controlled) choice. Therefore

a Media list (secondary dialog) as is shown in ﬁgure

8 is proposed.

To promote the pupils media literacy and involv-

ing the individual work environment the standard ap-

plication of the student will be used for the represen-

tation.

4 THE IMPLEMENTATION

A ﬁrst demonstrator of the ASB System was devel-

oped for illustration and evaluation purposes.

To guarantee platform independency and maxi-

mum ﬂexibility during the development process, the

system was written in the Java programming lan-

guage. The access and processing of the XML struc-

ture was implemented using the Document Object

Model (DOM) techniques.

4.1 Simple Use Case

From a user’s point of view, the demonstrator offers

access to and representation of digital school book

lessons. Besides, teachers can extend the already de-

posited contents by own, individual content.

Figure 9: Simple Use Case for the ASB demonstrator.

4.2 Speciﬁcation

In the ﬁrst version, the demonstrator is limited to the

following basic functionalities:

1. Access to digital media (for example, as a supple-

ment to a textbook) by entering the MediaID or

by navigating through a structured list.

2. Presentation of selected digital media assets with

applications that are already installed on the sys-

tem of the user.

3. Drag&Drop Authoring functionalities for the easy

extension of existing content with individual dig-

ital materials.

4. Adjustment of system parameters, such as the in-

dividualization of the user interface.

5. Tracking the usage, so that the system store inputs

(such as the MediaID) and system settings, to be

quickly available again after a restart.

6. Support the usage by, for example, auto-

completion, feedback dialogues and ofﬂine help.

4.3 Architecture

Due to the fact that the demonstrator is the basis for

further development, the architecture of the system

OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL: THE ADAPTIVE SCHOOL BOOK APPROACH - Adaptivity Extends

Conventional School Books with Digital Media

135

was strictly designed with the help of the Model-

View-Controller Pattern.

Figure 10: Class diagram of the demonstrator.

This may appear overdimensioned for the de-

scribed use case, but it offers the essentiel ﬂexibility

and extensibility for future functionalities.

Because of the modularisation and the strict sep-

aration of the components (user interface, data ac-

cess and data processing) future requirements like

LCMS connection and providing the ASB System as

ofﬂine and webbased application can be realised sub-

sequently.

With regard to the implementation of adaptive

methods and taking into account a maximum interop-

erability, make appropriate frameworks and reference

models a good basis. According to the authors of the

present paper, the Adaptive Hypermedia Application

Model (AHAM) by Paul de Bra et al. (1999) and the

Munich Reference Model (MRM) developed by Nora

Parcus Koch (2000) form an appropriate basis for the

presented approach.

4.4 Interim Conclusion

To achieve the global objectives, the feasibility and

functionality of the ﬁrst stage of development of the

concept, raised in a demonstrator to prove. It is char-

acterised by a high degree of universality and ﬂexibil-

ity. For example, it is not bound to a speciﬁc school

book and can be linked with different books. Besides,

it was taken care of platform independence, as well as

adaptable changeability and extensibility of the con-

tents. The simplicity of the user interface guarantees

an intuitive use and requires a minimum of media lit-

eracy.

To sum up, this Demonstrator is able to clear the

open questions. It can be used as a basis for evalua-

tions, to gather empiric results.

5 EVALUATION

As a matter of fact, practical suitability of a system

is highly important in an enviroment of learning and

teaching in school. For that purpose, feedback given

by experts and users was included quite early in the

concept phase and development stage of the ASB Sys-

tem. The tool and his respective level of development

was introduced and discussed in numerous expert’s

rounds. In addition, the described demonstrator was

used and evaluated in two lessons by pupils and teach-

ers of a ninth grade in college. The results of the eval-

uation can be used to shape clearly deﬁned technical

situations and requirements, which are all-important

for the further development of the system.

5.1 Evaluation Setup

It was extremely important to get a ﬁrst impression of

realistic and sensible application scenarios while de-

veloping the system. For that purpose the draught of

the adaptive school book and the existing demonstra-

tor was introduced to experts of a thuringian institu-

tion for teacher advanced training and new media.

In four successive meetings the system was pre-

sented and discussed in different focus groups. These

groups consisted in each case of up to ten teachers,

who besides, act as multipliers for new technologies

in politics and their own schools. Because of the dif-

ferent technical alignment of the experts (content de-

velopment, digital whiteboards, eLearning and Moo-

dle integration at schools) a huge number of require-

ments were determined for a system to ﬁt into a real

teaching and learning environment. These require-

ments reach from aspects of privacy, copyright and

security issues, to the authoring of content and ﬁnally

to the direct application in lessons.

To get a detailed impression of practical use cases

in lessons, the system was tested in cooperation with

a Thuringian media school. Therefore, a ninth grade

was chosen consisting of 25 pupils. Each of them was

equipped with a notebook on which they started the

ASB system from an USB stick. The teacher demon-

strated media access on a digital whiteboard, where

the system was also running.

During the lessons, the teacher used the ASB sys-

tem as a media container to show short movies and

illustrations. Later, the pupils retrieved media from

ASB with which they completed given tasks. They

worked with the system in two lessons on a single

day. The lessons were geography (topic: continen-

tal drift) and history (french revolution). The contents

were taken over in cooperation with the teacher from

an already available course in moodle.

5.2 Technical Parameters

Embedding the ASB System into the already exist-

ing technical infrastructure of school is mandatory for

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

136

ensuring practical suitability. During the discussion

with experts the following technical parameters were

determined:

1. Already available e-learning systems still require

a very high training and administration expendi-

ture which stands in no relation to the beneﬁt of

the use of digital media.

2. Missing education and experience in newer tech-

nologies deter many teachers from using digital

media. The introduction and use of an LCMS

proceeds mostly slowly and is dependent from the

motivation of the teacher.

3. Digital content, as it is offered at the moment

by publishing companies for teaching, is mostly

packed into isolated applications and can only

heavily be integrated in a school course.

4. Although most schools are equipped with a good

connection to the Internet, mostly administrative

security issues prevent the unlimited access to all

functionalities which the network can offer.

5. It can not always be ensured that pupils and teach-

ers ﬁt the nessessary technical requirements when

they want to work with digital material at home.

The experts see the main advantage of the ASB Sys-

tem in its simplicity and clarity. From their point of

view the system could serve as an interface between

users and a complicated LCMS. It can simply be inte-

grated into the school courses and also can take care

of technical processes running in the background, hid-

den from the pupils and teachers.

As a result of the discussions and the evaluation,

several application scenarios were deﬁned. They will

be brieﬂy described in the following.

5.3 Use Cases

The system’s ability to let the user extend the existing

content with own, new digital content via drag&drop

authoring seems to be an optimal solution for teach-

ers in the eyes of the experts. So they are able to eas-

ily deposit content for pupils and to prepare and give

the lessons. Connected to a LCMS, which contains

a rights management for every user, the teacher can

systematical provide content, which he would like to

show to the pupils in the respective phase of a lesson.

The compact and simple graphical user interface can

be used as a container for media to present it on a dig-

ital whiteboard.

Structuring the content with the help of speciﬁc

Media Ids allows the teacher to granulary organize

digital material. The ASB System can also be used

to divide the class into workgroups or to assign indi-

vidual content to speciﬁc pupils.

Figure 11: Usage of the ASB System during a lesson.

Because of the permanent synchronsiation of ev-

ery instance of the ASB system with the LCMS, the

teacher can toggle the visibility of every single media

for the pupils.

The platform independency of the java-based

application makes the ASB System suitable as a

portable application, which can be stored on an USB

sticks for the use at home or on private laptops. The

experts see here the imbedding in a so-called ”digi-

tal schoolbag”, a collection of portable applications

which can perform the most common tasks on a USB

stick as very sensible.

Figure 12: ASB System as a portable application.

The functionality of the system to hold data in a

temporary local repository enable the ofﬂine usage of

the application. A synchronisation with the LCMS

can then be done, whenever a connection to the net-

work is re-established.

5.4 Interim Conclusion

The results of the discussions in the expert’s rounds,

as well as the evaluation of the demonstrator in the

lessons permit the formulation of a requirement cata-

logue for the integration of the ASB Sytems in the en-

vironment of school. Additionally, technical param-

eters were deﬁned, which can describe the different

situations where the system is used in. These input

parameters can now be used to design a model for the

implementation of situation adaptiveness.

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137

6 FUTURE WORK

The results from the expert’s discussions and the eval-

uations justify the suggested iterative realisation of

adaptivity as described in 2.4. It is mandatory to em-

bed the system into an existing situation in the envi-

ronment of school in order to ensure practical suitabil-

ity and a real beneﬁt in the use. This realisation can

only be achieved with appropriate adaptive methods.

6.1 Modeling and Implementation of

Situational Adaptivity

The next work package in the ASB project is about

implementing the deﬁned use cases, as well as model-

ing and realising methods for situation adaptivity. Re-

alising the Use Cases implements the technical con-

nection and communication with the LCMS Moodle

and the realisation of a suitable synchronisation strat-

egy for the off-line use of the ASB System.

Furthermore, the deﬁned input parameters can be

used to model technical situations, to which the sys-

tem has to adapt automatically. An adaptation con-

troler module will be developed for the ASB System.

It will be embedded between the modules data access

and processing data, to control the data transfer be-

tween the repository and the user interface.

Figure 13: Roadmap for future development.

The goal is to realise a demonstrator, which en-

sures practical suitability and can directly be used in

school lessons. Then this demonstrator can be used

in further evaluations to determine results, which can

deﬁne requirements for modeling and implementing

of further adaptive methods.

7 RELATED WORK

The fundamental concept and the theoretical basis of

the present contribution was developed in the diploma

thesis of Andr

e Schulz (2010). The thorough devel-

opment based on the results and experiences of the re-

search project of our colleagues Hoppe et al. (2011).

Their research focused, among other priorities, the

impact of the processes of digitisation on the exam-

ple of a laptop class. This was essential to get im-

portant requirements and conditions of the application

domain.

Previous work like (Vogler et al., 2010) stated

main approaches to the use and combination of exist-

ing software systems in the school environment. Fo-

cussing the development and implementation of the

adaptivity in the presented project, the contribution

about reﬂective adaptivity of our colleague and friend

Klaus P. Jantke (2010) provides the mainly forward-

looking goal. The developments of adaptivity in

LCMS, as presented in (Jantke and Schulz, 2011) of-

fer important insights for the implementation.

The entire related work, however, combines the

importance of a differentiated and interdisciplinary

perspective on the methods and approaches to make

a truly useful solution possible.

8 CONCLUSIONS

The conventional school book is not lost. In this paper

it was shown that there is still big potential in printed

media when it is mixed with the new opportunities

that digital media can bring into the classrooms. In

bringing these worlds together teachers and pupils can

beneﬁt from the advantages of both kinds of media.

The adaptive provision of digital media guarantees

an optimal support of the teaching trials and learning

processes. To be able to realize the necessary limita-

tions in the application domain speciﬁc requirements

must be deﬁned. The huge number of inﬂuence fac-

tors, the high importance of practical suitability and

the lack of valid requirements are complicating the

deﬁnition of adequate choice of adaptive methods.

For that purpose a gradual development of adap-

tive methods and deﬁnition of inﬂuence-taking crite-

ria was developed . Accordingly a concept for the ﬁrst

stage of development was designed. The basis system

described in it was implemented in a demonstrator.

The approach introduced in this paper was ap-

proved with positive feedback in several evaluations,

interviews and discussions with experts. As an essen-

tial result well deﬁned Use Cases could be developed.

Besides, the high relevance of the practical suitability

of digital media was conﬁrmed.

A system used by teachers and pupils can only be

a beneﬁt, if it is embedded into the existing techni-

cal and social situation of the environment of school.

This goal can only be achieved if the system ﬁts ex-

actly the requirements teachers and pupils have in

their daily work. The system is confronted with dif-

ferent technical situations when fulﬁlling the desired

tasks. So it is mandatory that this system is able to

adapt these situations. The further development of the

ASB System designates the consecutive implementa-

tion of these adaptive mechanisms.

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

138

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by the Thuringian Min-

istry for Education, Science, and Culture within the

project iCycle under contract PE-004-2-1 and partly

by the European Project N

◦

216746 PReservation

Organizations using Tools in Agent Environments

(PROTAGE).

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