Analyzing e-learner’s task and designing a support system for iterative knowledge reuse

Abstract

E-learners often have trouble finding things that they plan to review and lack ways to remind themselves of what they have learned. In this thesis, I consider an approach for supporting an e-learner’s task of iterative knowledge reuse. To support efficient finding and maintaining of learning materials, approaches used by Personal Information Management are employed. To support reminding learners of what they have already studied, techniques of Automatic Text Summarization are used. This thesis suggests a new method, called interactive summarization, of summarizing the original text using an e-learner’s feedback such as highlights, underlines, and annotations. Interactive summarization produces not only the main theme and important phrases but also information about the user’s interests while he was reading the article. The conventional design process of Human-Computer Interaction is implemented to design a support system for knowledge reuse. E-learner’s tasks are analyzed to obtain data requirements and functional requirements. After the task analysis, I designed the interaction of tasks between the e-learner and the computer. The system was developed as a prototype. The usability of the system was evaluated by query techniques of HCI, and the performance of the interactive summary was evaluated by comparing the time performances of subjects’ recalling tasks in three modes: highlight only, automatic summary, and interactive summary. The results of two evaluations validate the idea that the system supports an e-learner’s task of iterative knowledge reuse.