Next-generation web-based education

Abstract

Web-based education has become a very important branch of educational technology. For learners, it provides access to information and knowledge sources that are practically unlimited, enabling a number of opportunities for personalised learning, telelearning, distance-learning and collaboration, with clear advantages of classroom independence and platform independence. Also, web-based courses and teleteaching offer numerous possibilities for teachers and authors of educational material, through the availability of authoring tools for developing web-based courseware and cheap and efficient storage and distribution of course materials, hyperlinks to suggested readings, digital libraries and other sources of references relevant for the course. However, there are several problems with web-based education faced by both teachers and learners. Educational material on the web is still highly unstructured, heterogeneous and distributed with other information throughout the web; current learning and authoring tools offer limited support in accessing and processing such material. The main burden of organising and linking the learning contents on the web, as well as extracting and interpreting them, is on the user. What are, then, common prerequisites for creating intelligent web-based educational systems and applications? What kind of intelligent services should they support and how? How can a search engine from the sea of educational web pages select automatically those of most value to the authors, teachers and learners in pursuing their educational goals? These are the questions that this paper tries to answer.