Artigo TERENA - UFRGS

Supporting group learning and assessment through Internet
Liane Tarouco: UFRGS/PGIE, Av Paulo Gama 110, FACED sala 810, 90046-900
Porto Alegre - RS - BRAZIL
Antonio Rodrigo de Vit - UFRGS/PGCC - Campus Vale, Porto Alegre - RS -
BRAZIL
Luciano Hack - UFRGS/PGCC - Campus Vale, Porto Alegre - RS - BRAZIL
Marlise Geller - UFRGS/PGIE, Av Paulo Gama 110, FACED sala 810, 90046-900
Porto Alegre - RS - BRAZIL
Abstract
Internet is being intensively used for distance education. Usual
services like email, chat and videoconference are not enough to fully
support for the proper handling of interactions without extensive non-
automated work. To support group work related to learning activities
it is necessary to develop applications to handle participants'
contributions and to consolidate contributions by providing summaries
of the discussion. At the same time they must be integrated with group
decision support tools to help students draw conclusions from what
was discussed. Assessment in this kind of learning environment also
lacks better support. This paper presents a learning environment
developed to support group work and student assessment through
Internet for distance education.
Keywords: group learning, decision support system, assessment,
distance education
1. Introduction
Computer-mediated distance learning (CMDL) is an uncommonly bright star on
the horizon of innovations in higher education. According to a recent study
by CCA and Associates, 30 percent of colleges and universities have at
least one distance learning program in place and an additional 28 percent
are planning such programs. [Tucker]
Although Internet use in distance education grows exponential nowadays,
services used in the beginning were only those having strong relation with
ancient forms of distance education. Distance education started using post
services and even in those days, many courses used on large scale Post
Office distribution of printed material. Other mass communication media,
such as television and radio or recorded tapes with video or audio where
also very common. Some Internet services started to be used to replace or
complement these kinds of service technologies used as shown in table 1.

|Erro! Indicador não |Internet based environment |
|definido.Ancient forms of | |
|distance education | |
|Printed text books |HTML pages |
|Exercises |Forms and CGI |
|TV broadcast |MBONE |
|VHS tapes |Real Video, MPEG |
|Audio tapes |Real audio |
|Assesment |Forms and CGI |
The use of the Internet offers more possibilities of new forms of
interaction, as shown in the following figure:
[pic]
The use of the Internet for distance education resulted in many advantages: Distribution of knowledge on large scale;
Reduction of distribution costs;
Correction and updating are simpler, since they are conveyed in only one
site, being immediately spread to all students;
Several techniques for assessment are possible through the tracking of the
interaction between students and all the other entities as showed in
figure1.
Support for collaborative writing;
It is easier for the student to give feedback, which allows formative
evaluation.
To support more kinds of interactions derived of group work related to
learning activities, it is necessary to develop applications to handle the
participants' contributions. Collaboration strategies are required to
improve the quality of the information provided to support decisions, but
this srtill remains na innovation in distance educations.
Despite all the bells and whistles of groupware, e-mail continues to be the
most widely used groupware component. Hence one can count on all the
automated work provided by email or news service servers to receive, store
and/or properly forward messages. But no matter if only email or news
service are used for group communication, as well as other forms of
interaction, like chat combined with videoconference or with other
multimedia environment (such as The Palace or Virtual Reality based
environments), the results from group activity are huge amounts of text
derived of participants' contribution. When it comes to the consolidation
phase of the work, it is usually neessary to have a lot of non-automated
tasks to select the main ideas from the many ones presented almost randomly
during the discussion. It is also necessary to provide a voting system to
support group decision about the consolidated results from discussion
(ordering, reordering, selecting, discarding etc).
This work describes the strategies and tools designed to accomplish
automatic grouping of ideas (with focus on common themes) for the
organization of contributions from steps in a group decision process as
well as for student assessment in a framework derived from Kirkpatrick's
model. A set of tools was designed and developed to support distance
education cooperative work. The following section describes the group
tools, and the next describes the assessment ones.
2. Group tool
This work starts from the supposition that group activity results in a log
file containing interchanged texts (synchronously or asynchronously) during
a group debate. Such inputs are submitted to a set of routines that groups
ideas automatically. The system uses a WWW-based interface and log files
derived from the group interchange of ideas. The present results were built
from previous works developed at UFRGS.
The first work considered to start the present project was a tool called
"Issue Analyzer", which provides natural language recognition. It also
contains an algorithm for calculation of similarity between contributions
of participants of a group discussion. This prototype was implemented on
Sun stations and used the software RPC (Remote Procedure Protocol) for
intercommunication between a server and client applications. It provided
the grouping of similar ideas generated during the brainstorming phase and
organized them according to definitions of the group.
Another work previously developed, named Eurekha, showed the importance of
information retrieval techniques to support the organization of textual
information. It pointed to the usefulness of this kind of support in an
environment with information overload like Internet. This solution uses
methods for grouping textual objects. Objects are organized automatically
in similar object groups, facilitating their location, manipulation and
analysis.
Both systems are directed to natural language (in written form) processing.
In natural language processing one of the most important aspects is the
formal language representation. This work applied the Discourse
Representation Theory. This kind of system faces big challenges: linguistic
aspects of natural language representation and handling of problems like
ambiguity, references to names, pronouns, etc. As a result, this solution
also included the grammatical classification of sentences.
The present work aimed at finding out a tool for group decision support
system that is able to handle natural language input.
2.1. The Model Proposed
The system designed used the results of previous works mentioned above. It
starts with a Module I, which handles log files (derived from chat sessions
using softwares like CuSeeMe, The Palace and similar ones). Files are split
into smaller units (files with only one sentence or contribution). Those
smaller units are submitted to a routine that performs similarity
calculation. This module processes each sentence, which results in a
properly labeled version according with a Syntactic Derivation Tree (ADS).
Module II (previous work named Eurekha) handles sentences by grouping them
in clusters according to similarity. In this step the pre-processing of
natural language is done. It is considers that the documents have already
been corrected through an orthographic checker (task also performed by
module I). Besides, it is advisable that the texts suffer some
normalization of terms. However, these procedures are not conditionings to
the operation.
The aditional modules (III to V) were built during the development of this
project (Modules III to V). Module III handles the resulting cluster of
sentences and identifies the most frequent/relevant words that to be used
in the creation of a set that represents each cluster.
Module IV indexes words and links them to original sentences for further
information retrieval, in case one wants to know which sentences provided
more words representative for clusters (and of course who made those
contributions).
Each group of words becomes an alternative in a voting process. The voting
results in a hierarchy of representative ideas set by the group. Module V
implements this voting process. An HTML page with the results of this stage
of the discussion is presented to the participants of the group to feed one
more round of discussion.
2.2 Extended results
A prototype version of the system is running. It provides all the funcions
described above:
clustering of sentences
generation of consolidated ideas for each cluster
integration with a voting system to allow participants to grade and vote
consolidated ideas
The results of this process may be used as a starting point for a new step
of the group work where new discussions will use the results from previous
consolidated work. This cycle can be repeated endlessly.
The tool will b