INTERFACING TASK SCHEDULING FOR

A B-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Roberto F. Arroyo

, José L. Garrido

, Miguel Gea

, Pablo A. Haya

and Rosa M. Carro

E.T.S.I. Informática y de Telecomunicación, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,Madrid, Spain

Keywords: Task scheduling, b-learning, mobility, multi-view interfaces, ubiquity.

Abstract: Computer aided learning envir

onments is one of the main interests for computer scientists. Ambient

Intelligence represents a novel and promising paradigm to be applied to blended-learning systems. These

systems handle very dynamic contextual information that can be used in task scheduling to increase the

benefits of proactiveness and context-aware characteristics. This paper proposes the use of the calendar

metaphor to solve the scheduling of contextualised tasks in b-learning systems. In particular, the proposal is

centred on building of calendars on the basis of multi-view interfaces. The aim is to provide direct and more

suitable access to structured contextual information according to specific requirements. The proposal is

applied to a particular b-learning case study.

1 INTRODUCTION

Ambient intelligence (AmI) systems are taking

relevance in the user-centred approach of computer

applications (Weiser, 1991, Ducatel, 2001). These

systems incorporate technology into an omnipresent

and transparent infrastructure for the implementation

of smart environments emphasizing on user-

friendliness, more efficient services, and support for

human and group interaction (Hess, 2003).

Important requirements for achieving a successful

AmI scenario are: context-awareness (Dey, 2000),

natural user interfaces (Montoro, 2004),

collaborative and dynamic spaces (Aldunate, 2002),

proactiveness (Oliver, 2000), shared knowledge

(Tazari, 2003), and usefulness (Pascoe, 1999).

The field of computer-aided environments is one

f the main areas of interest for computer scientists.

Since most learning activities are structured, the use

of a task-based approach for modelling the

environment, roles, responsibilities, rules, etc., can

be useful (Garrido, 2005). Context awareness means

that we are interested in identities, their location and

other related concepts such as tasks, roles and

artefacts. For example, relevant issues in an on-site

teaching activity are who the teacher is (i.e. Mairi),

where the classroom is (location), which students are

taking part, and what materials are being used

(adapted to artefacts). Additionally, blended learning

uses both virtual resources (course structures and

communication systems) and physical resources

(projectors, electronic whiteboards, notebooks,

lighting systems, etc.).

Although there is a great deal of interest in this

ind of system (since much effort is devoted to its

design and implementation), various problems arise

due to its expensiveness, technological difficulties

and lack of real support for human activity. For

example, one important activity in a traditional

learning model is resource management and scholar

time scheduling due to limitations of space, artefacts

and teachers. A usual method before courses start is

to plan a course calendar where resources are

assigned to each classroom and teacher. However,

unpredictable dynamic changes in this plan (a new

seminar, need for multimedia support, etc.) give rise

to new demands that must be solved in real time.

These changes sometimes involve the participation

of a new actor (playing the academic manager role)

who is responsible for solving these needs. Thus,

blended learning systems require efficient classroom

management and needs to be adapted to student

timetables dynamically. Usually, however, as the

flexibility in classroom scheduling increases, so do

the number of difficulties when managing

497

F. Arroyo R., L. Garrido J., Gea M., A. Haya P. and M. Carro R. (2007).

INTERFACING TASK SCHEDULING FOR A B-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 497-504

DOI: 10.5220/0001292204970504

 SciTePress

classrooms and resources. When we think about task

scheduling, calendars immediately spring to mind,

whereby people make a note of tasks to be carried

out on either digital or traditional calendars. Due to

proactiveness, we must therefore manage strongly

contextualised tasks and let the system know as

much as possible about both the task and its context.

A reinforcement of task context in the scheduling

process will increase the system’s proactive

capacity.

This research work proposes the use of the

calendar metaphor under the ambient intelligence

paradigm in order to schedule contextualised tasks in

b-learning systems. In particular, the proposal

addresses the design and implementation of

calendars that provide a multi-view interface for

homogeneous data access; the system can create

queries for solving scheduling restrictions or

providing specific information to the users while

planning the task. The advantages of such an

approach is the additional flexibility which is

obtained since certain routine tasks (such as

checking when each actor and resource is free) are

dynamically solved in real time depending on

changing constraints.

The second section of this paper analyses general

technological methods for learning. After that,

Section 3 introduces a general description of the

case study, i.e. AmI system for b-learning, as well as

the concrete problem to be treated with, i.e. task

scheduling. Section 4 proposes the use of the

calendar metaphor for context-aware activity

scheduling. Section 5 shows the design and

implementation scheme carried out on the basis of

the previously described case study. Finally, Section

6 presents the main contributions and outlines future

work.

2 COMPUTER-BASED

LEARNING

Although asynchronous e-learning emphasizes a

one-to-one style of communication which has many

educational advantages, it is not without its

disadvantages: online students often experience

feelings of isolation and insecurity which can only

be overcome by frequent support from the instructor

or other students. Synchronous (meeting and

collaborative) tools, however, can help to improve

group awareness by increasing the feeling of a

virtual meeting.

Nevertheless, although this model is currently

useful for many students, the real situation is far

from initial expectations. The reasons for this gap

between hopes and realities are probably technical

(e.g. Internet bandwidth, cost, pedagogical

methodologies, standards), cultural (e.g. relevance of

colleges and institutions), and sociological (e.g. the

importance of personal relationships in any human

activity, including learning). Efforts to integrate

collaboration capabilities in Web-based courses have

already been done. For example, in (Carro, 2003),

adaptation methods and techniques have been used

for the personalization of the course contents, the

navigational options and also different collaboration

aspects. It consists not just of putting adaptive

courses and collaborative tools together, but of

integrating adaptation and collaboration in a

seamless way. A new emerging paradigm has in fact

been proposed, which merges the benefits of each

learning model, and blended learning has now

become the following step, mixing on-site classes

with on-line activities.

Importance of ubiquitous information access and

management is increasing due to the creation and

implantation of Wireless Local Area Network on

Campus and Centres. The ActiveCampus (Sohn,

2006) project is an example of using location-based

services for educational networks enabling

collaboration and services between students and

teacher.

3 LEARNING SCENARIOS

Active spaces are physical places part of the Spanish

Research U-CAT Project (Ubiquitous Collaborative

Adaptive Training). The intended goal is the user

and group’s support for: situated activities,

understanding context and the available resources to

carry out these learning objectives. Some relevant

objectives are the following (Haya, 2004): the

framework to be provided in order to support a

seamless integration among pervasive components

that use heterogeneous technologies (physical

devices and TCP/IP network); use of adapted

interaction mechanism such as natural spoken

interfaces (Montoro, 2004); application of

adaptation techniques to recommend activities to

users according to the users' context (Martín, 2006);

development of authoring tools to facilitate the

creation of adaptive hypermedia (Carro, 2004); and

task support and intelligent behaviour using agents.

As ubiquitous systems, Ambient Intelligent

environments are composed by a great number of

WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

498

sensors and actors. To separate data processing of

sensors at a low-level from the high-level

applications, we need to introduce a middleware

layer to fetch sensor's data and convert them into a

format comprehensible by the application, and

distribute it among the interested applications. Labs,

as shown in Figure 1, can be controlled using web

interfaces or natural spoken language.

Figure 1: The U-CAT laboratory.

The framework proposed is a context layer based

on the blackboard metaphor (Haya, 2004), which

stores a global data structure representing a world

model. This model stores all the relevant

information. This layer is used for the asynchronous

information querying mechanism too.

This approach has two advantages: it is a light

coupling between producer and consumer (the

interpretation is dependent of consumer, and a client

is not aware of the rest), and the model is easily

extensible. This blackboard receives and returns

XML information using HTTP protocol. The

blackboard is able to store generic entities and theirs

relations using a basic information mechanism of

insertion/querying.

3.1 Task Scheduling

The aim is to provide context aware scheduling of

collaborative tasks. In the AmI scenario, presence

classes have similar behaviour as tutoring where

lecturer and students organize meetings for problem

solving. Therefore, the expected intelligence

behaviour have to been done by software agents

identifying current state and restrictions. This task is

context dependent and it can be solved knowing

current tasks, locations and state of actors and

physical devices involved in these activities.

For example, the teacher Mairi decides that next

week, the presential Programming course will be

held in a laboratory instead of the usual classroom to

solve practical problems. The system should have a

decision support mechanism to help her in the

following way: When is Mairi free? When are the

students free? Which laboratories are free? Do these

laboratories have the required features?

These questions should at least be solved (with

or without the aid of involved users) so that these

situations can be managed dynamically. It should be

noted that these resources are shared by different

users, and so once these classes have been fixed, the

other users should be able to see the result.

Therefore, the users involved (teacher and students)

should be notified about the date and the location of

the class. Scheduling and planning bearing in mind

preferences or restrictions have been widely studied

(Brzozowski, 2006) with a range of different

techniques. Scheduling refers to allocation and

cancellation tasks. Since scheduling tasks (i.e.

classes) may change according to a new scenario, it

is therefore important to obtain an efficient

notification mechanism and to know the context of

users in order to understand the current state and

future availability.

Usability on computer-mediated scenarios means

that different goals must be achieved: continuous

notification, due to the fact that the availability of

resources can change constantly and the actors must

know the variations which have occurred according

to their preferences; hierarchical planning, social

support demands that priorities be identified in order

to achieve the best solution (precedence of teacher

restriction rather than student restrictions); usability

issue, although the information managed is complex,

it should be easy to use and understand, and adapted

to each available device (PDA, phone, etc.) and user

preferences; and variable granularity, temporal

planning means that time should be dealt with at

different levels of perception (Ning, 2002) since

planning can cover days, weeks or even semesters,

and so the proper level of detail is needed in each

case (hiding irrelevant information from the user).

The fuzzy nature of human time (Payne, 1993),

however, must be considered due to human

interaction. Kutar (2002) addressed the difficult task

of managing statements with both contextual and

fuzzy semantics, such as “on the same day” might

be.

Scheduling multiple activities is a complex task

requiring the collaboration of system users and a

great degree of resource management by the system.

This system (like many others with a large number

of users attempting to carry out collaborative

activities) generates a series of widely studied

inherent problems (Dix, 1998). Since the users we

deal with have different needs and abilities, we need

a system which is easy to use but which has

powerful scheduling capacities due to the

INTERFACING TASK SCHEDULING FOR A B-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

499

enormously complex system we are working with.

In the following section, we will study a traditional

scheduling mechanism which can be used to solve

both problems.

4 CALENDAR AS AN

INTERFACING MECHANISM

FOR TASK SCHEDULING

A calendar has traditionally been considered as a

tool for noting down and remembering events and

meetings on a temporal dimension (viewed by

day/week/month/year). Various types of calendars

are available and these are used for planning

individual and also collaborative events (Tullio,

2002, Palen, 1999). This is a well-known paper

metaphor for representing activities on a temporal

axis. Nowadays, computer technology can transfer

these calendars to any artefact (PC, mobile phone,

PDA) or applications (mail system, Web based), and

important effort has been focused on

synchronisation mechanisms (i.e. Evolution, Mozilla

Sunbird). This synchronisation could be present in

two forms: synchronisation between the same user’s

various calendars, and synchronisation between

different users’ calendars. Both these cases reflect

the fact that one person may have different calendars

or schedules for noting down events according to

their nature (job, personal, leisure, etc.) or their

location at that moment (office, home, meeting,

etc.), and they reflect the need for global calendar

coherence between system users in order to enable

the capability of semi or fully automated scheduling.

An interesting example is the digital family

calendar (Neustaedter, 2006) (as an alternative to a

traditional one) has received good results as a

planning tool. An academic planning calendar shares

four similar features with a family calendar: Firstly,

it has been designed as a basic context-aware

mechanism: the simplicity and intuitiveness of the

calendar is an advantage to the user (since it is easy

to use and recall). The complexity and error rate can

be reduced if the calendar is designed to perform

specific tasks (Norman, 1998). Secondly, it should

be flexible enough to support different kinds of tasks:

planning involves capturing, organizing, and

integrating different types of information (to do lists,

stick notes, paper reminders) using the calendar. The

digital model should allow these combinations to

include different organisational schemes and

visualizations. Thirdly, it should offer coordination

support: task planning involves a group (e.g. a

family, department, school) where decisions should

be reached by general consensus. Deliberation is

carried out by phone, in person, or using other

technological instruments (email, instant-

messenging), and negotiation is the basis for this

agreement. And fourthly, it should consider location

awareness: in the case of the family calendar, the

digital calendar has a physical placement and each

occupant knows where it is.

However, some additional features should also

be present in ubiquitous academic systems. These

are scalability: a b-learning system can contain

more than a hundred participants. Since task

allocation for each user is huge, the system must

therefore manage only relevant information

(Mackinlay, 1994) with an expected time response

which is independent of the number of users;

privacy (Boyle, 2003): information should follow a

restriction policy, and must also administer time

intervals for private use (users can decide whether to

make tasks visible to others); and remote

notification: information may be obtained anywhere

at any time. The system should notify users of when

the relevant tasks are due to start and end. In order to

prevent annoying situations (Werle, 2002) the

notification mechanism should be defined by the

user.

4.1 Calendar Definition

When people use calendars to schedule tasks or

other kinds of appointments, they unconsciously

perform different operations on the calendars. For

example, when two people are trying to arrange a

meeting in a given week, they try to find a common

free slot in both calendars. Unconsciously, what they

do is to combine both calendars for that week, and

search for free slots. Similarly, we can outline two

additional operations (Harris, 1998) intersection and

difference. The first is useful to see the common

events between calendars, and the second is used to

exclude certain kinds of events from a calendar.

The On-line Cambridge Dictionary defines a

calendar as “a list of events and dates within a

particular year that are important for an

organization or for the people involved in a

particular activity”. While this is the most general

intuitive meaning for the word calendar, we will

expand this concept to a more general definition

which is useful for our needs in our environments.

We therefore define calendar as a list of entities and

dates that are important for scheduling other

entities.

WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

500

This new calendar definition is useful for

understanding what the calendar is for and what kind

of elements are being recorded. As we mentioned

previously, traditional calendars trace a person’s

tasks, but we are not only limited to this: we can also

have calendars for objects as well as humans.

We denote the calendars as C

, where C

represents the calendar and the subscript symbolizes

an instance. We define three operations over them:

union (

∗), intersection ()) and difference (\). Figure 2

shows examples of these operations on personal

calendars with noted down tasks. Therefore, C

Mairi’s calendar and C

is Pádrig’s, and tasks have

been noted down on both. Letters are used to

symbolize the different tasks: e.g. task A may

correspond to the task GiveClass.

This system also has collaborative tasks which

are shared between several people. It must be

remembered that these tasks are common to more

than one personal calendar yet refer to the same task

element, and this is important for a correct

understanding of calendar operation within the

system.

Figure 2: Calendar operations (letters show individual

4.2 Case Study: A b-Learning

We need the system to be capable of managing the

recorded in the system.

l as the system needs more

con

mework (Garrido, 2005), we have

defi

t use all the

sem

f AmI environments provide to

imp

tasks, and question marks symbolize tasks which have

been marked as private).

Environment

available system resources and to represent the

activities performed by each user in a given time

stamp. Due to the problem domains which we aim to

solve, we can use time slots lasting an hour and so

we can divide a day into 24 equal time slots. Any

entity can be noted down with a precision of an hour

although it can conclude at any time after it starts.

For example, a planned class lasting two hours may

finish after an hour and a half, and so it must be

The entities recorded on the calendar cannot be

restricted to a text labe

cise knowledge about what will happen and what

will be needed. As a proactive system, it must be

able to infer future events and for this, it needs to be

as aware as possible about their environment. For

these reasons, each record must be associated with a

semantic related to specific system elements, with

the possibility of navigating, interconnecting, linking

and tracing them.

Based on the AMENITIES conceptual and

methodological fra

ned a design model (Arroyo, 2006) that includes

the structured semantic of the task modelling as the

primary class context on AmI systems.

In order to correctly integrate a scheduling

system within a task model, we mus

antic capacity we have available. We are able to

provide the necessary flexibility in the calendar’s

tools and to reduce the intrusive proactivity with

increased knowledge about the activities occurring

in the system. Figure 3 shows the established link

between calendar scheduling and system modelling,

and the correspondence between this and the

modelled real world. This figure also shows Mairi’s

calendar and the planning of a future class has been

highlighted. As this is a relation between the task

and the time slot (and not only a label), we have

increased semantic information about it so that we

know who is involved in it, which roles or resources

are needed, etc.

We must emphasize the benefits that the

semantic web o

licit scheduling, simplifying the overhead cost of

users in planning tasks. Since our AmI model

establishes a semantic network which merges

ubiquitous and task-driven elements, when a task is

defined, we can explore this network by navigating

through the links and extracting the information that

we consider to be important, whether ubiquitous or

related to the task model. For example, if we plan a

class in classroom 3-A on Wednesday with Mairi as

a teacher, even though Mairi notes down that she

will have this classroom, we can create a calendar

for classroom 3-A by showing the people who will

be in it, using the information provided by all the

system users to complete new calendars. We should

not forget that the system is dynamic and that, for

example, users move around the system. The

ubiquitous location of users can be traced using

these calendars since they store not only future but

also past and present events.

INTERFACING TASK SCHEDULING FOR A B-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

501

Figure 3: The calendar annotates semantic information

about task.

contextual information, we can show how

the di

source

other words,

Fig the

mantic net associated to calendar queries. The

) and

be the

This de

which is ab define multip ws of the system

cal

Now that we have presented our conceptual

model for

fferent calendars can be constructed from the

semantic network. As we defined in Section 4.1, a

calendar is not only useful for people as we define

the calendar for any entity. We consider the entire

semantic network to be a set S and any calendar C is

a subset of S. We define the following two attributes

for any calendar C:

Source: we define source as the entity

interested in the calendar. We denote the

source with

superscript (C ). For

example, we can write Cactors to define

those people (actors) who will be the entities

interested in the calendar. We can assign

attribute-value pairs to the source list and so

we can write C

actors

{name=Mairi}

to define a

calendar where Mairi is the interested entity.

We can use equal to, different from or a list

of values for the attribute. A source must be

defined to create a calendar.

Target: we define target as the entities that

are important for the source. In

the entities we aim to be recorded in the

calendar’s time slots. We denote the target

with subscript (C

target

). If the target is not

present, then all the entities are of interest to

the source. For example, C

actors

tasks

will

construct a calendar for the actors where their

associated tasks comprise the entities to be

noted down on it. We can specify attribute-

value pairs as we did for the source. For

example, if we want to construct a calendar

for the actors containing any task except the

task PlanClass, we define the calendar C

actors

tasks→{name≠ PlanClass}

ure 4 represents the construction of

rations defined in Section 3.1 are implicit in the

notation introduced here. We can establish the

following equivalences between this notation and

the previously used algebraic notation:

1. If we have a calendar containing Mairi’s

tasks (C

or C

actors

{name=Mairi}

tasks

another containing Pádrig’s tasks (C

actors

{name=Pádrig}

), we can define C

∗

as C

actors

{name=(Mairi,Pádrig)

tasks

}

If we have a calendar containing Mairi’s

tasks, we can consider it to

intersection of the calendar containing

all the actors’ tasks (C

or C

actors

tasks

) and

the calendar containing Mairi as an actor

or C

actors

{name=Mairi}

), and therefore

) C

= C

actors

{name=Mairi}

tasks

. Similary,

if we want the task of all actors except

Mairi, we can define the result as C

\ C

= C

actors

{name⎯Mairi}

tasks

finition presents a degree of freedom

le to le vie

different calendars, covering different needs by

relying on the same information in a homogeneous

way. For example, if we want to check on where

Mairi will be, we can generate a calendar such as

actors→{name=Mairi}

locations

. This sentence will create a

calendar where Mairi is the actor we are interested in

(source) and the locations are the entities (target).

We can therefore conclude that by using this

calendar definition, we expand the uses which

endar has traditionally had. By abstracting

interested entities from people to any other kind of

element, we can specify a wider range of calendars,

and use different conceptions for them, generating

multiple homogeneous views of the global

annotation system. In this way, we increase calendar

flexibility, and are able to define which entity is

interested in representing which by means of a timed

tabular view.

Figure 4: Construction of a calendar as a series of queries:

a) the full semantic network; b) the semantic network with

squares as the source entities (for example, if the squares

correspond to actors, we can denote them as C

actors

); c) the

target established as the circles entities (for example, if the

circles correspond to the tasks, we can notate them as

actors

tasks

); and d) an individual specific square chosen as

the source (for example, if the chosen square is Mairi, we

can notate it as C

actors

{name=Mairi}

tasks

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5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

In this paper, we have presented the definition and

address

que

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is partially supported by a Spanish

Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st Century.

Du Ambient

He cation of a

De bowd, G.D., Brown, P.J., Davies, N., Smith,

WORKS

implementation of a calendar as an interfacing

mechanism to be applied to b-learning systems. This

mechanism is able to benefit from an enriched

context by adding entities of the task model

paradigm as the primary context. We conclude that

calendars are useful for scheduling activities on

these complex environments, and which fulfil the

requirements that a scheduling system must provide.

This calendar model solves the main drawbacks of

traditional models, such as synchronisation issues,

non-flexible records and ubiquitous locations. In

addition, we have describe the implementation of a

real system so that the calendar retains all its

functionality at an appropriate abstraction level,

without modifying the existing lower layers.

By way of future work, we intend to

stions related to adaptive and user-friendly

interfaces as soon as the system has been provided

with a scheduling-driven proactiveness to help the

end user by notifying and resolving conflicts. Our

aim is to implement the task re-planning and the

notification caused by the cancellation of other

planned tasks. We also aim to include the

elimination of the time sampling on the user’s side

in an attempt to eliminate the fixed time slots,

thereby providing a greater scheduling flexibility.

R&D Project TIN2004-03140, Ubiquitous

Collaborative Adaptive Training (U-CAT).

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