ON-DEMAND HELP SYSTEMS BASED ON
WEBBLE TECHNOLOGY
Jun Fujima and Andrea Hofmann
Fraunhofer IDMT, Children’s Media Dept., Erfurt, Germany
Keywords:
Meme media, Webble technology, Interactive laboratories, Help systems, Help-seeking.
Abstract:
As many researchers pointed out, conventional help systems are not used or useless. In this paper, we introduce
new functionality into the conventional on-demand help systems to create an effective help system. Proposed
functionality is based on Webble technology. In the Webble technology, every part of application or compound
documents can be reusable components. We use this feature positively in the composition of help documents
to enrich functionality of help systems. By using this feature, the contents in help documents can be highly
interactive as well as reusable by users for other purposes. We have shown deferent types of help systems
and its usage in the Webble-based e-learning environment. Users can extract a part of the help documents and
reuse it on their own environment.
1 INTRODUCTION
Conventional help systems tend to be provided as a
document-based system contains texts and images.
Owing to the development of hyper media or Web
technology, sometimes help documents systems con-
tain audio, videos, and even interactive tools.
However, as many researchers pointed out, con-
ventional help systems are not used or useless. The
reasons for less-usefulness of help systems vary from
contents quality to users’ psychological problems, but
one main reason might be that current help systems
could not help users in reality. When a user opens a
help document, the user has to read or watch the doc-
ument, translate it, and understand it by the user self.
All these activities need to be done by users with their
motivation. Otherwise, help documents are just wait-
ing and do nothing.
A question here is how we could change this sit-
uation by new technologies. If help systems support
users in the activities, they could be really helpful.
What functionalities could make uses’ help-seeking
behavior more effective?
We have tried to apply the Meme Media
idea (Tanaka, 2003) to e-learning domain. Meme Me-
dia is an approach for realizing media on computers,
which works as Meme (Dawkins, 1976). The Webble
technology (Kuwahara and Tanaka, 2009) is the latest
Meme Media platform. In the Meme Media platform,
all computing resources such as texts, images, videos,
or tools are represented as visual components called
meme media objects. We have developed a Web-
based learning playground based on Webble technol-
ogy called the Solar Biker Laboratory (Fujima et al.,
2010). It is an educational playground which has a
construction kit. Users can construct a solar biker
powered by a solar cell by assembling a set of given
components in the laboratory.
In this paper, we introduce new functionality into
the conventional on-demand help systems. First, we
survey current research on help systems to find out
what the conventional approach for help systems is
and what kinds of help systems can be effective. Sec-
ond, based on the survey, we introduce prototypical
implementation of the help system in the Solar Biker
Laboratory. In the Webble technology, every part of
applications or compound documents can be reusable
components, which means the parts are decompos-
able and reusable by users in any situations. We
use this feature positively in the composition of help
documents to enrich functionality of help systems.
Proposed features allow help documents to contain
highly interactive contents such as working examples.
Users can not only interact with the embedded exam-
ples but also extract a part of the help documents and
reuse it on their own environment for applying given
examples to the real solution.
433
Fujima J. and Hofmann A..
ON-DEMAND HELP SYSTEMS BASED ON WEBBLE TECHNOLOGY.
DOI: 10.5220/0003347204330436
In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 433-436
ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 ELABORATION ON HELP
SYSTEMS
Help systems are commonly used to assist users in
the use of software programs. The research studies
on which deals with the design of assistance systems
show that many computer programs have a help func-
tion. Some of them demonstrate a certain correlation
between help-seeking and learning effect of learners,
which is effective help use is related to better learning
outcome (see (Aleven et al., 2003)). However, some
evidence suggests that help feature is often not used
appropriately.
Aleven et al. (2003) pointed out the many reasons
for the lack of effective help use separately in system-
related factors and learner-related factors. They de-
noted one of the reasons is that the user assumes to
get fewer points to a solution even if the user uses the
help function. In addition, as a learner-related factor,
they also suggested that some users might be afraid
to look stupid from other people, because they could
not solve some tasks without a help. Bartholom´e et
al. (2004) indicated also a clear tendency of the using
behavior that users with higher prior knowledge are
more likely to use a help than users with lower prior
knowledge.
Delisle and Moulin (2002) also described the im-
plementation of further research in the design of help
systems. Even in their opinion, help functions in
various software programs do not be helpful. They
mainly dealt with the human-computer interaction
problems and perceived the computer as a supporter
of users in solving tasks. In their opinion, major func-
tions of help systems are providing answers to the
questions of the user and information about the func-
tionality of the software. Certainly, they also come to
the conclusion that few little studies have been con-
ducted especially for how to detect users’ questions
to respond appropriately and how to motivate users to
use help systems.
In the studies of Aleven et al. (2003), different
help systems are closer looked. They come to the con-
clusion that on-demand help can lead to better learn-
ing results. Their system encourages the user to ask
some questions to the system at any time when the
system can respond with hints for finding a solution.
They state that abstract hints get the best effect for
users with high-cognitivedevelopmentwhile concrete
hints lead to the greatest effect for users with low-
cognitive development. They also pointed out that
overuse of hints brings low outcome in learning. In
the paper, it is pointed out repeatedly that most ap-
proaches to help systems are still too little explored,
and only guesses could be established.
However Bartholom´e et al. (2004) proposed a
context-sensitive help and a glossary function for
a computer-based interactive learning environment.
This help provides the user a possibility for using the
help whenever any decision must be taken. The help
is also linked to a glossary which contains definitions
of terms and procedures. An advantage of this ap-
proach is that the user is always made aware of access
to help if he cannot solve a task alone. However, some
users might feel disturbed by this if they have ever re-
ceived the same hint or if they do not need any help.
Moreover, evenwith the aid of the glossary, some spe-
cific questions of users would not be answered but be
only obtained definitions and declarations. Neverthe-
less, they recommended the context-sensitive help as
a support in the process of decision-making tasks, al-
though it does not contribute to a deeper learning.
The analysis of various studies and papers shows
that still no general solution has been found for devel-
oping a help system. All mentioned approaches have
their advantages and disadvantages. However, we
could also indicate that, for general interactive learn-
ing environments, a combination of an on-demand
help and a glossary function could be a valuable help
system. Presumably the main problem is that there are
still no results, how to animate user for using a help
function more effectively. To enhance users’ motiva-
tion for using helps, help systems should be highly
useful, and users should have no disadvantages in us-
ing help functions. There are still some open prob-
lems such as how to detect appropriate timing for ef-
fective help use.
3 HELP SYSTEM IN THE SOLAR
BIKER LABORATORY
The Solar Biker Laboratory has multiple panels in-
cluding a workspace and a repository. Users can in-
stantiate a component by picking up an icon from
the repository and dropping it at the workspace. In
the workspace, users can freely operate components
like moving, copying, deleting, and combining com-
ponents for contracting a solar biker.
Based on the discussion on section 2, we decided
to implement an on-demand help system in the Solar
Biker Laboratory. We introduce the help system im-
plemented in the Solar Biker Laboratory. In the early
work (Fujima et al., 2010), we showed a basic idea of
help documents using Webble technology. In (Jantke
and Fujima, 2010), we discussed advanced use and
possible variance of help documents’ settings. Fol-
lowing those ideas, we implemented multiple types
of help documents. Users can access each help docu-
CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education
434
ment through a help search panel where users can en-
ter a keyword to retrieve a necessary help document.
3.1 Basic Idea of Help Documents
The basic idea of help documents in the solar biker
laboratory is based on the structure and reusability of
components on the Webble technology. In a Webble-
based system, all parts can be reusable at runtime just
by copying, dragging and dropping objects. Even
help documents may be operational by users or learn-
ers.
copying
pasting
A learner’s playground
Help document
Figure 1: The basic idea of help documents in the Solar
Biker Laboratory.
Figure 1 shows the basic concept of users’ interac-
tion with help documents. Besides some instruction
descriptions, the help document contains a working
construction of a solar biker. The user can copy a part
of the construction, and drag-and-drop it on his work-
place for combining his construction.
3.2 Help for Each Component
Figure 2 shows examples of glossary-type help docu-
ments. Each document consists of a name of a compo-
nent, its description, and an actual component. A de-
scription explains only about the corresponding com-
ponent, what the component is or what kinds of slots
the component has. Since users can take the embed-
ded component and use it in their workplace, these
documents work not only as help documents but also
as cabinets for taking out a component.
3.3 Instructional Help
Figure 3 shows a help document contains an instruc-
tion about how to use a Cloud component. It in-
cludes an experimental construction that users can
Figure 2: Help documents for Sun and Motor.
A learner’s playground
Help document
Figure 3: The instructional help document.
play around in the help document. A user can put the
cloud component on the experimental construction to
see how it works. In addition, the user can also put
the cloud on his or her playground to apply it on his
intermediate construction.
In section 2, it is pointed out that some users
might overuse help systems and then learning effect
would be restrictive. In the instructional help case,
it also would occur if uses always reuse composite
parts without considering. As discussed in (Jantke
and Fujima, 2010), we can consider setting up some
constraints for user operations in help documents to
realize different types of user guidance. This type of
help documents is considered having much possibil-
ity to user guidance or user assistance applicable for
different learning styles or didactic methods.
ON-DEMAND HELP SYSTEMS BASED ON WEBBLE TECHNOLOGY
435
3.4 Context-sensitive Help
Novice users tend to lost what to do next because the
lack of the domain knowledge or the lack of skills. To
help such users in the construction process of a solar
biker, we established a context-sensitive help system.
When a user need a help, the user may click the
“help” button on the workplace. Then, the system au-
tomatically detects the structure of the user’s interme-
diate construction, compare it with the structure of the
complete solar biker, and finally pop up some instruc-
tion messages
Figure 4: The solar biker laboratory snapshot.
Figure 4 shows a snapshot of a displayed instruc-
tional message. Because the user’s construction has
no sun and clouds, the system tells the user to add a
sun and a cloud on the environment.
Current implementation of instructional help only
supports text-based messages. However, to make it
more effective for the novice users, it would be possi-
ble to utilize compound documents containing work-
ing constructions.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, first, we elaborated the current research
on help systems and pointed out that this domain of
development of effective help systems is still worth
tackled. There are lots of remaining research ques-
tions in both didactically and technologically.
Then, we introduced the current implementation
of help systems in the Solar Biker Laboratory. By
applying the Webble technologically to the help sys-
tems, uses can reuse contents in help documents with
their functionality. Contents providers or teachers can
easily provide users help documents with working ex-
amples.
This is still ongoing work, so we need lots of em-
pirical studies for evaluating the effectiveness and
usefulness. In addition, we would like to explore
how those new features effects or changes users help-
seeking behavior.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present research and development has been par-
tially supported by the Thuringian Ministry for Cul-
ture (TKM) within the project iCycle under contract
PE-004-2-1.
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