DOES ANYBODY NEED HELP?

PUPILS AND TEACHERS IN HARMONY

Creating an Adaptive Visualisation-module for Teachers to Support their

Scheduling and Teaching Processes

Christoph Vogler, Andr

e Schulz and Andrea Hofmann

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

Keywords:

Adaptivity, e-Learning, e-Teaching, School management software, Subjunctive interfaces, User-modelling,

Visualisation.

Abstract:

In this paper a concept for an adaptive visualisation-module (short: AViMo) for teachers is introduced. An

overview on existing European software tools used in schools is given and discussed. Out of this discus-

sion the additional needs for teachers and scholars are outlined and transformed into criteria for the planned

project of AViMo. New technologies, like subjunctive interfaces, together with the knowledge out of two

internal projects are introduced to meet the speciﬁc requirements. Software Tools used in schools e.g. school-

management software or learning management systems provide a wide range of data. The authors describe

ways to integrate and combine this data by the use of interoperability standards. A framework is introduced to

illustrate the system components that are involved in the adaptive determination process. For visual prepara-

tion of the data and their combination an approach based on subjunctive interfaces is presented. The proposed

adaptive visualisation-module is a ﬁrst approach to support teachers to implement an individualised teach-

ing, including the identiﬁcation of the individual support for every scholar in his class. Besides open issues

mentioned in this paper, the work shall offer a basis for further discussions.

1 INTRODUCTION

A good school lesson requires that deﬁned content is

taught in a way that every pupil can follow. There-

fore it would be good to prepare the lessons in har-

mony with the teachers needs and with the pupils grat-

iﬁcations. Many projects tried to ﬁnd solutions for

these requirements, often they ended according to W.

SHAKESPEARE “The wish was father to the thought”.

Working on projects in the ﬁeld of knowledge

management and e-learning, the authors found sim-

ilarities in the problems they worked on, to the re-

quirements for an adaptive visualisation-module used

in schools. In this paper we introduce a planned

project, where a software-tool is to be build that sup-

ports the teachers in planning and organising their

teaching process. From the beginning we would inte-

grate schools, school authorities, teachers and pupils

in the research, for a better interaction between re-

search and application. Bringing the users into the

project will help that certain situations in teaching

and learning will be highlighted and problems will be

identiﬁed. Schools already use well-structured and

easily approachable software especially for admin-

istrative purposes. A lot of data is stored and pro-

cessed, concerning information about pupils, teachers

and administrative data. This is exactly where the au-

thors see problems and gaps in relation to support the

schools, but especially the teachers and pupils.

The starting point of the present paper is the so-

called school management software. Right now this

kind of software serves as a basis to handle the whole

school administrative processes. Quickly available in-

formation is important for schools. Primarily Euro-

pean software products are regarded in this paper (e.g.

WinSCHOOL (Ramcke, 2009), CAS Platon (CAS,

2009), etc.). The various systems differ primarily in

the technical design, the kind of access and the graph-

ical appearance. Basically all the systems provide al-

most the same features: The administration of pupils,

classes and teachers, schedules, registers, reports, sta-

tistical surveys, inventories and books.

446

Vogler C., Schulz A. and Hofmann A. (2010).

DOES ANYBODY NEED HELP? PUPILS AND TEACHERS IN HARMONY - Creating an Adaptive Visualisation-module for Teachers to Suppor t their

Scheduling and Teaching Processes.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 446-450

DOI: 10.5220/0002781804460450

 SciTePress

1.1 Problems and Lacks

The aforementioned systems unambiguously serve al-

most the perfect support for the management of the

schools. There are many approaches within these sys-

tems, which serve the support of teachers, students

and parents. The focus of these systems is mostly

on statistical evaluation, for example classes average,

grade point average, attendance messages, etc.

The problem is, that it is therefore not possible

to allow an intuitive assemble of the different data

within abridgements or evaluation diagrams. There

are few customised analyses, charts or tables for the

users subjected to the individual non-administrative

needs - the teachers and the pupils. Another gap to

support the teachers maybe, that mostly only admin-

istrative data is recorded. This means that the teachers

get the level of knowledge of the class or of individual

pupils only on this basis. This is not enough informa-

tion for the teachers and often it is to late for them to

react on bad marks.

But it would be wrong to say that the teachers fall

by the wayside. The existing systems are helpful but

not ﬂexible enough to give support in all individual

situations.

1.2 Motivation

Individualisation, personalisation, adaptivity and

user-modelling are in the current software and com-

puter applications development inevitable criteria.

With the aid of these approaches pupils could learn

better. Additionally the emphasis thereby is the sup-

port of the teachers in their daily work. To address

individual problems, these must ﬁrst be detected and

analysed. Exactly this is the starting point of the de-

scribed project: Giving teachers and scholars support

to increase, optimise and better control their teaching

and learning quality.

A teacher has to schedule the study sessions in ac-

cordance to the curriculum. Mostly the tough sched-

ule remains little room to additional maneuvers, e.g.

to extend certain topics or even to repeat certain learn-

ing matters. Could an appropriate software tool pos-

sibly help the teacher in his work, that would not only

record the progress of the students, but would pro-

cess the data and would give the teacher a consis-

tent recommendation on the content for his next ses-

sion? Additionally the planning tool would adapt on

the relevant individuals and therefore could be more

and more concrete in its recommendations. In the fol-

lowing chapter the mentioned features will be differ-

entiated.

1.3 Purpose

For the best purpose of the system, ﬁrstly data

about the speciﬁc strengths and weaknesses of pupils,

classes and subjects can be determined. This al-

lows the teachers to implement an individualised

teaching, including the identiﬁcation of the individ-

ual support for every scholar in his class. Due to

the connection of different information the proposed

visualisation-module allows a dynamic adjustment (i)

of the training of special events (sickness, cancella-

tion of lessons, etc.), (ii) of the level of knowledge

as well as (iii) the individual learning progress of the

pupils or the entire class.

For the teacher the reﬂection of his own educa-

tional work will be better possible. His teaching will

be assessed by reviews from the scholars, who can

comment on the content and on the teaching. By the

visual connection of this assessed data with subject

matters or analog curricula-elements certain weak-

nesses can be quickly determined in the teaching. Si-

multaneously varied custom visualisations of the sub-

junctive interfaces (see section 2.3) can be prepared

and presented to the teachers. With these visualisa-

tions each teacher can draw individually conclusions

and if necessary subsequently reorganise his sessions.

2 APPROACH

How can the identiﬁed shortcomings be remedied?

Below, the authors lead to different solutions to the

problems identiﬁed in section 1.1. A universal inte-

grable adaptive visualisation-module (short: AViMo)

forms the basis of the approach. The main questions

to answer are: (i) What systems provide what data

and how this can be accessed? (Input), (ii) In what

way adaptive determinations are made and what is

needed for this? (Process) and (iii) How does the vi-

sual preparation and presentation work? (Output).

2.1 Interfaces and Data Access

School management software, learning management

systems (LMS), educational platforms and similar

tools generate a large amount of data. Building on the

use of established standards and speciﬁcations, allows

the re-use of these data. Prerequisite is, of course,

these systems offer the exchange of these formats.

The central approach is based on the exchange

of standardised data. The IMS LIP can be used to

get pupil-data. For the evaluation of the learning

progress, data based on IMS SS can be interpreted

DOES ANYBODY NEED HELP? PUPILS AND TEACHERS IN HARMONY - Creating an Adaptive

Visualisation-module for Teachers to Support their Scheduling and Teaching Processes

447

and the individual results of IMS QTI compliant as-

sessments can be used (see IMS GLC ). Basically, the

SCORM (ADL, 2006) approach provides a good ba-

sis for the use of data access. Besides information

on content even curricular data can be used. The

information stored in speciﬁc metadata-formats like

IEEE LOM (IEEE, 2002) can be used to link the

data-elements according to the properties. But the ac-

count of standard based exchange formats is in the

discussion about access to data not enough. There

should also be standardised components to provide

data. AViMo also needs components to provide the

transmitted information to the other system-internals.

2.2 Adaptive Determination Process

The aforementioned information will be required in

order to achieve adaptive decision-making processes.

For this reason the authors propose a speciﬁc frame-

work as shown in Figure 1. In the following the main

elements of the framework are brieﬂy described.

Figure 1: Framework for adaptive Processes.

The Adaptation-Model contains attributes that es-

sentially needed for the process of adaptation. Rules

for the adaptation are stored in the Rules-Model

[RM], while the Component-Model [CM] stores de-

scriptions about the system components and its func-

tionalities. The User-Model [UM] contains ”[...] col-

lections of information and assumptions about indi-

vidual users (as well as user groups) which are needed

in the adaptation process” (Kobsa, 1995). Meta-data

and other information are normally stored in a Data-

Model [DM]. The system itself does not include any

data that is relevant for visualisation. Therefore the

data-model will be dynamically built on data that is

available through the Data-Interface [DI] which real-

izes the above mentioned topics of data-access (see

section 2.1). The Mapping Engine combines data-

elements with speciﬁc system-components by cre-

ating relations between them on the basis of pre-

deﬁned rules from the Rules-Model. The informa-

tion of this mapping-process are stored in the User-

Component-Model [UCM] and the Data-Component-

Models [DCM].

The Adaptive Engine represents the central pro-

cessing unit of the proposed framework. Speciﬁc

adaptation rules will be used to process the mapped

data in order to serve the Presentation Engine [PE]

with speciﬁc determinations. This is where the vi-

sualisation and subjunctive interface approach comes

in.

2.3 Visualisations and Subjunctive

Interfaces

Complex problems, are sometimes easier to solve

with visualisation, e.g. the spatial representation. For

the solution of such problems we use the visualisa-

tion, that means, we generate a mental picture of the

relevant spatial situation (Schlieder, 1996), by giv-

ing the scholars visual information about the relevant

learning matter. For the support of such mental im-

ages superﬁcially, context-sensitive visualisation ob-

jects must be applied. On the technological level this

means, ﬁnd appropriate technologies for transmitting

such visualisations. At this point, the technology of

subjunctive interfaces must be mentioned.

Subjunctive interfaces are a motivated concept

from the cognitive psychology to evaluate different

variants of complex issues and solutions. It is based

on Hofstadter’s (Hofstadter, 1979) playful notion of

a subjunc-TV. In Jantke and Lunzer (2005) it is ex-

plained that subjunctive interfaces are a concept for

interface design. This approach has the potential that

people in the working process acquire solutions that

they otherwise would not ﬁnd. This proﬁt in the pro-

cessing of knowledge is to be found in the simulta-

neous and visually intuitive determinable representa-

tion of variants. Subjunctive interfaces provide mech-

anisms for the parallel setup, viewing and control of

scenarios, aiming to support users’ thinking about and

interaction with their choices. Additionally they are a

way to provide such mechanisms by extending appli-

cations to support parallel setup, viewing and control

of alternative scenarios (Lunzer and Hornbæk, 2008).

In Lunzer and Hornbæk (2008) are illustrated

three key design principles for subjunctive interfaces:

the interface should give support by (i) setting up mul-

tiple independent scenarios that exist at the same time;

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

448

(ii) viewing those scenarios side by side; and (iii)

making changes to many scenarios in parallel.

Below the authors will show an example based

on the ﬁrst aforementioned design principle “i” (set-

ting up multiple independent scenarios that exist at

the same time). Figure 2 illustrates an interface for

getting different information about a pupil.

Figure 2: Interface for one data record.

Once the user has selected an item in each menu,

the system displays the corresponding records for the

learning progress in one subject. The selection in a

menu can be changed simply by clicking on a differ-

ent item, thereby accessing a different record. This

kind of interface provides good support for requesting

any individual record, but not for tasks that involve

accessing a large number of records.

Figure 3 shows a subjunctive interface for this ap-

plication. This interface can support multiple scenar-

ios, where a scenario in this application comprises a

selection in each menu, and the corresponding results.

The layout of the browsers elements is unchanged,

but each menu can support distinct selections in the

various scenarios, and each result displayed shows a

separate value for each scenario. Especially for the

example in Figure 3 the user can get a comparison of

the learning progress for different pupils at the same

time, additionally the user can get a combination of

certain results.

3 RELATED WORK

The two projects Knowledge Media Aspects and

Adaptive Schoolbook serve as previous work. In one

of these projects the goal is to provide adaptive supply

of learning material in digital media. Here the areas

adaptivity and user-modelling play a major role. The

second project deals with the issue of visualisation.

Concepts and techniques for better representation of

planning processes for a faster decision-making will

Figure 3: Parallel View and Data Combining.

be created for special applications, e.g. the planning

and scheduling of the production in a manufacturing

enterprise. From these two projects the priorities of

adaptation and visualisation are highlighted.

An effective and efﬁcient system is characterised

by a good balance between adaptivity and adaptabil-

ity. “To increase the quality of technology enhanced

learning it is important to distinguish what should be

adapted, to what features should it be adapted and

how should it be adapted” (Specht, 1998).

Interactive systems that adapt to individual users

are used to increase usability and accessibility on the

one hand and to increase effectiveness and efﬁciency

on the other hand. The adaptation process of such so-

called user-adaptive systems are based on ”[...] pro-

cesses of user-model acquisition and application that

involve some form of learning, inference, or decision

making” (Jameson, 1999).

Our actual projects (e.g. Adaptive Schoolbook)

not only ask for methods of adaptation. Debates about

potentials and hazards of adaptivity and the required

process of user-modelling are central issues, too. Our

goal is to ﬁnd ways out of problems of adaptation as

a self-fulﬁlling prophecy (Kobsa, 1990). A differen-

tiated and interdisciplinary view on the methods and

approaches is important for creating useful solutions.

The basis of user-adaptive systems are user-

models. In order to build user-models the system must

collect information about its users. A so called user-

modelling-component incrementally construct a user-

model. It stores, updates and deletes entries, draws

inferences from initial assumptions and maintains the

consistency of the model.

Basic user-modelling approaches like the

Overlay-Model, the Deviation-Model or the

Stereotype-Model (Rich, 1979) are mainly based

on knowledge-modelling. Our current studies are

investigating new ways of user-modelling. The goal

is to integrate motivational factors and individual

interests to build up an user-model based on the

DOES ANYBODY NEED HELP? PUPILS AND TEACHERS IN HARMONY - Creating an Adaptive

Visualisation-module for Teachers to Support their Scheduling and Teaching Processes

449

approaches of Stereotype-Models.

How to bridge the gap between digital and tra-

ditional (non-digital) learning material? The Adap-

tive Schoolbook project will answer this question by

combining digital media with common schoolbooks.

Measuring the level of a useful integration of digital

media in the everyday school life: When is it creating

an additional value, when is it a distraction?

The objectives of the project mentioned above are

to deﬁne needs and to create an application that re-

trieves digital media by special identiﬁcators. The

middle-ware approach implies the need of certain in-

terface speciﬁcations. Besides the adaptation of the

selected media for the used technology, a learner-

adapted representation of the digital content will be

implemented. The arisen knowledge about adaptive

methods and user-modelling techniques will be basi-

cally for the discussion of AviMo.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Since years management tools are used on the macro-

level, the ministries and school administrations. On

this level, the acceptance of the systems and its values

are highly proven. On a meso-level, planning systems

for schools ﬁnd their ways in the schools but seem to

go through a process of usability and acceptance. In

this paper we discussed the micro-level -the teachers

and the pupils- and criteria for such a system.

It seems that data for the micro-level already ex-

ists. However the statistical data, originally collected

for the school administration often is misused to get

information about the micro-level. As an example,

the data of marks do not give sufﬁcient view on the

performance of the relevant pupil. Information on

the time needed for the exercise, on replications and

on user characteristics additionally should be taken

into account. Then individual representations could

give the people on charge a differentiated overview

on pupils, their needs and their potentials.

The primary technical discussion about this topic

raises many open issues to the authors. Considera-

tions to the basic GUI-Design in the light of best pos-

sible usability arise questions about the appropriate

choice of given Principals of Subjunctive Interfaces.

Needless to say, the visualisation style and upcoming

questions about their ﬁeld of application must be an-

swered. Precisely for the practical use, it is necessary

to discuss the degree of adaptability and adaptivity.

The proposed adaptive visualisation-module is a ﬁrst

approach to this and offer a basis for discussion.

When getting to work on this tool the future users

should be involved into the projects from the begin-

ning. They must be able to use it, they should accept

it and only they can optimise the beneﬁt of the adap-

tive visualisation-module.

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.

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