Papers by Filippo Sciarrone
Knowledge-Based Systems, 2009
As with the growing degree of office automation and diffuse use of electronic media, such as e-ma... more As with the growing degree of office automation and diffuse use of electronic media, such as e-mails, written business communication is becoming a key element to promote synergies, relationships and disseminating information about products and services. Task recognition and the definition of strategies and suitable vocabularies are some of the activities that office workers deal with each time a communicative intent has to be effectively transferred and understood by a given addressee. This paper introduces a web-based intelligent training system based on the constructivism theory and self-directed learning paradigms for assisting company workers in the drafting business letters-writing task. A case-based engine suggests ad hoc rhetorical letters that users have the chance to adapt to their particular contexts and save them into user-defined case libraries.
Peer Assessment is a powerful tool to enhance students high level meta-cognitive skills. In this ... more Peer Assessment is a powerful tool to enhance students high level meta-cognitive skills. In this paper we deal with a simulation framework (K-OpenAnswer) allowing to support peer assessment sessions, in which peers answer a question and assess some of their peers’ answers, with the enrichment of “teacher mediation”. Teacher mediation consists in the possibility for the teacher to add information into the network of data built by the peer assessment, by grading some answers. This can be useful to enhance the automated grading functionality of an educational system supporting peer assessment. We present a software system allowing to apply the K-OpenAnswer simulation framework on simulated Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs). The system allows to guide the dynamic of the student models and grades evolution, according to the teacher’s intervention. It also allows to appreciate such dynamic and make observations about it. The aim of this paper is to show the functionalities that the tea...
Il presente lavoro nasce nell’ambito del progetto Open Learning, in cui un gruppo di ricerca mist... more Il presente lavoro nasce nell’ambito del progetto Open Learning, in cui un gruppo di ricerca misto, aziendale (CASPUR e Open Informatica) ed accademico (Universita Roma Tre), mira a concretizzare l’unione tra le tecnologie piu usate per la didattica a distanza, i Learning Management Systems e i vantaggi dei sistemi personalizzati, al fine di proporre un modello innovativo di veicolazione dei contenuti didattici, incentrato sulla personalizzazione dell’esperienza formativa. Il plug-in proposto integra in Moodle un motore che adatta automaticamente la sequenza di materiale didattico proposta al discente, sulla base delle sue conoscenze pregresse e dei suoi stili di apprendimento.
In this paper, we present the CHeM system, Cultural Heritage e-mail Manager, a support system for... more In this paper, we present the CHeM system, Cultural Heritage e-mail Manager, a support system for the analysis of e-mails of the Restoration and Conservation newsgroup, hosted by the Yahoo portal from December 2000 to January 2003. The complexity of the domain as well as the specificity of the e-mails, prompted us to build the first system prototype based on a client-side architecture, to help less expert users in classifying information contained in e-mails. The system goal is therefore to provide an instrument capable of classifying the received messages, downloaded onto the users’ desktops, into standard categories, based on their content, using the well-known techniques of Data Mining and Information Retrieval. The categories thus obtained are then used to label the messages in order to provide valuable information on the domain and therefore support specific information retrieval and produce new user groups by an automatic generation of mailing lists. The methodology presented ...
We describe our approach to the computation and visual representation of the learning dynamics of... more We describe our approach to the computation and visual representation of the learning dynamics of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), where the educational strategy of Peer Assessment is used. The state of the MOOC, at a point in time, is representable through the student models and the relationships and data produced during the Peer Assessment. Such representation is rendered through a Graph Embedding approach, supported by Principal Component Analysis, as a point in a 2-dimensional space. The evolution of the MOOC, during a series of Peer Assessment sessions, is then representable as the path of the points where the MOOC status has been. Basing on a simulated MOOC, with 1000 students, modeled by a normal distribution of the student model features, we show that the proposed representation can picture effectively the evolution of the MOOC in time.
Curriculum Sequencing is one of the most appealing challenges for educational environments where ... more Curriculum Sequencing is one of the most appealing challenges for educational environments where learners need adapted courses, i.e., courses tailored to their own personal traits. In this work we address the problem of how to compare and test different Curriculum Sequencing algorithms in order to reason about them through a self-contained and homogeneous environment. We propose LS-lab, a framework for comparing and testing different Curriculum Sequencing algorithms in learning environments such as Educational Hypermedia. LS-lab has been designed to run different Curriculum Sequencing algorithms, each of them provided with its own Student Model representation. In this framework, the Knowledge Domain must be IEEE LOM compliant, while, through a suitable GUI, one can insert new algorithms or run already available ones. We are carrying out the implementation by using a 3-tier Java application technology, in order to provide this environment available on the Internet. Finally we perform...
Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, 2018
Thanks to the exponential growth of the Internet, Distance Education is becoming more and more st... more Thanks to the exponential growth of the Internet, Distance Education is becoming more and more strategic in many fields of daily life. Its main advantage is that students can learn through appropriate web platforms that allow them to take advantage of multimedia and interactive teaching materials, without constraints neither of time nor of space. Today, in fact, the Internet offers many platforms suitable for this purpose, such as Moodle, ATutor and others. Coursera is another example of a platform that offers different courses to thousands of enrolled students. This approach to learning is, however, posing new problems such as that of the assessment of the learning status of the learner in the case where there were thousands of students following a course, as is in Massive On-line Courses (MOOC). The Peer Assessment can therefore be a solution to this problem: evaluation takes place between peers, creating a dynamic in the community of learners that evolves autonomously. In this article, we present a first step towards this direction through a peer assessment mechanism led by the teacher who intervenes by evaluating a very small part of the students. Through a mechanism based on machine learning, and in particular on a modified form of K-NN, given the teacher's grades, the system should converge towards an evaluation that is as similar as possible to the one that the teacher would have given. An experiment is presented with encouraging results.
Telematics and Informatics
One standing problem in the area of web-based e-learning is how to support instructional designer... more One standing problem in the area of web-based e-learning is how to support instructional designers to effectively and efficiently retrieve learning materials, appropriate for their educational purposes. Learning materials can be retrieved from structured repositories, such as repositories of Learning Objects and Massive Open Online Courses;
Journal of E Learning and Knowledge Society English Version, Jan 31, 2011
Learning Management Systems are among the most popular e-learning tools. Over the last few years,... more Learning Management Systems are among the most popular e-learning tools. Over the last few years, however, scientific research has made considerable progress in developing valuable resources currently unavailable in most Learning Management Systems, including solutions aimed at providing students with personalized support throughout the learning process, which is an essential requirement in continuing education. Observing and modelling the learner, and adapting their learning experience accordingly means opening up new technological and, above all, methodological perspectives in e-learning. The work described in this paper is part of the Open Learning project, in which business-based and university researchers aim to combine the most frequently used e-learning technologies, Learning Management Systems, with the benefits of customized systems so as to develop an innovative learning content delivery system based on the personalization
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2016
With its 5, 006, 202 articles, 49 millions of registered people and on average 800 new articles p... more With its 5, 006, 202 articles, 49 millions of registered people and on average 800 new articles per day, Wikipedia provides a knowledge base for teachers and instructional designers to build didactic materials. As a matter of fact, teachers often consult this encyclopaedia to arrange, integrate or enrich their courses. Moreover, with the exponential growth of the Internet, didactic materials are freely available and usable by teachers, instructional designers and students from Learning Objects Repositories such as Mertlot or Ariadne and others. On the other hand, designing and delivering a new course is a crucial task for teachers, who have to face two main problems: building or retrieving and sequencing learning materials. Retrieving or building learning materials requires a great effort and is time-consuming, while sequencing requires an accurate didactic project. In this paper we present a sequencing engine of learning materials, embedded in the Wiki Course Builder system, a system capable of retrieving and sequencing Wikipedia web pages, taking into account both the teacher model based on the Grasha teaching styles and on a social didactic approach. The main goal is to support teachers building on-the-fly courses, i.e., building courses quickly, with a few clicks of the mouse. An important feature of the system is represented by its ability to allow teachers to interact with the recommended learning path through a graph-based interface where they can directly modify the proposed learning path, adding or deleting Wikipedia pages. A first questionnaire has been submitted to a sample of teachers with encouraging results.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2016
The process of carefully choosing and sequencing a set of Learning Objects (LOs) to build a cours... more The process of carefully choosing and sequencing a set of Learning Objects (LOs) to build a course may reveal to be quite a challenging task. In this work we focus on an aspect of such challenge, related to the verification and respect of the relationships of pedagogical dependence that holds between two LOs added to a course (meaning that if a given LO has another one as "pre-requisite", then any sequencing of the LOs in the course will need to have the latter LO taken by the learners before of the former). An innovative Machine learning-based approach for the identification of these kinds of relationships is proposed.
Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2016
Concept maps represent a significant tool in education, used to plan and guide learning activitie... more Concept maps represent a significant tool in education, used to plan and guide learning activities and to help teachers in some endeavors such as analyzing and refining their teaching strategies, retrieving suitable learning material, and supporting the provision of adaptive guidance in adaptive learning environments. Here we propose seven measures of similarity among concept maps, representing course modules. They deal with both structural and didactic aspects of the maps, to find out educational similarities among their associated course modules. The performance of the proposed similarity measures are analyzed and evaluated by means of some significant case studies.
Journal of E Learning and Knowledge Society Italian Version, Jan 30, 2011
International Association for Development of the Information Society, 2008
This paper presents Lecomps5, a web-based system for automated course personalization in distance... more This paper presents Lecomps5, a web-based system for automated course personalization in distance learning environments. This system is an upgraded version of the Lecomps4 system, where the student model was represented by means of the student's starting knowledge, measured by initial assessment tests. In the Lecomps5 system, personalization is obtained taking into account the student's learning styles, building a dynamic
Computers in Human Behavior, 2015
ABSTRACT On line education is a student centred activity, and most of the research in this field ... more ABSTRACT On line education is a student centred activity, and most of the research in this field focuses on students; yet the quality of teaching is undoubtedly the basic ingredient for a successful learning. In particular, fostering new forms of collaboration between students and teachers, i.e. pursuing co-learning aspects of e-learning, probably needs giving teachers new means of collaboration, also among themselves. In this paper, we tackle the aim of providing the teacher with social collaboration tools, to support the process of course construction. Such a process comprises several distinct steps, from concept mapping, through selection of suitable learning material, to the final stages of delivery in a Learning Management System. It is an heavy process, through which teachers have to spend a lot of time to build or to retrieve the right learning material from local databases or from specialized repositories on the web. The support we foresee should exploit the knowledge of the whole teaching community, in which the teacher acts, to help her/him in doing the above described job. By “knowledge” we mean basically a representation of the ways of usage of learning materials, by the teachers in the community for their courses. To start on a solid footing, here we address the topic of modeling the teacher. The model we define aims to give teachers a personalized support, encompassing consideration for their own pedagogy, teaching styles, and teaching experience during course creation. It is deemed to consider all those issues in a dynamic way and to guide the teacher towards the best didactic choices.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
In recent years, there has been a radical change in the world of education and training that is c... more In recent years, there has been a radical change in the world of education and training that is causing that many schools, universities and companies are adopting the most modern technologies, mainly based on Web architectures and Web 2.0 instruments and tools, for learning, managing and sharing of knowledge. In this context, an e-Learning system can reach its maximum potential and effectiveness if it could take advantage of the information in its possession and process it in an intelligent and personalized way. The Educational Data Mining is an emergent field of research where the approach to personalization makes use of the log data generated by learners during their training process, to dynamically update users learning profiles such as skills and learning styles and identify students behavioral patterns. In this paper we present a case study of a data mining approach, based on cluster analysis, in order to support the detection of learning styles in a community of learners, following the Grasha-Riechmann learning styles model. As an e-learning framework we used the Moodle LMS platform and studied the log files generated by a course taken by a community of learners. The first experimental results suggest a connection between clusters and learning styles, reinforcing the use of this approach.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013
Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, the request for distance learning is increasing. Private compan... more Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, the request for distance learning is increasing. Private companies and public institutions are very sensitive to the saving of costs that such type of education could implicate, i.e., with no limits in time and place. Besides, the results obtained by this kind of learning are comparable to those reached by the classic in-presence lessons. Consequently, instructional designers need didactic instruments to build courses in a rapid way, especially if they would build their courses starting from learning objects already posted into Learning Object Repositories by other peers. Our work proposes a system, at a very early stage of development, with the aim to help instructional designers to find and retrieve learning objects suitable for their courses, starting from the classic conceptual map of the course to be built. The system contains an OLAP module to let teachers to drill-down into concepts as well.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
In the context of e-learning courses, personalization is a more and more studied issue, being its... more In the context of e-learning courses, personalization is a more and more studied issue, being its advantage in terms of time and motivations widely proved. Course personalization basically means to understand student’s needs: to this aim several Artificial Intelligence methodologies have been used to model students for tailoring e-learning courses and to provide didactic strategies, such as planning, case based reasoning, or fuzzy logic, just to cite some of them. Moreover, in order to disseminate personalised e-learning courses, the use of known and available Learning Management System is mandatory.
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Papers by Filippo Sciarrone