Abstract
The ever-growing amount of learning material poses a challenge to both learners and teachers. In order to perform a learning task, students often need to search for additional information. Inquiry might be hampered if they do not know what exactly to search for, especially if they lack prior knowledge in a domain. Furthermore, they might need to recall meta-information, e.g., the implicit links between learning resources or the location of an explanation within a document. In addition, their performance in a learning task might suffer from the constant need for further information. As the authoring of learning material is a time-intensive task, reusability of resources in different contexts should be enabled. In this paper, we present the ALMA-Yactul ecosystem, a holistic approach for student-centered integration of learning material. Based on semantic annotations, learners are provided with scaffolding support for retrieving material related to their current study task. This integration of resources is showcased in a variety of applications and domains, such as a plugin for an IDE or an enhanced sketchnoting app. Moreover, we show how Yactul, a gamified student response platform, can benefit from semantic annotations and integration of learning material. Additionally, teachers are provided with semi-automatic annotation support in the popular Office 365 suite to foster the reusability of their content. Apart from presenting the results of its usage in university classes, we also show how high school students without prior knowledge benefitted from this scaffolding support. A significantly better performance in resolving programming-related tasks could be observed compared to a traditional search process. Finally, the ecosystem is evaluated against a state-of-the-art technology integration model.
Highlights
Organizing a vast collection of learning material is a challenging, time-intensive task for both learners and teachers
The use of hashtags and the integration of learning material using the ALMA repository among subjects without prior knowledge was beneficial, compared to their colleagues using a traditional search engine. This finding is similar to (García-González et al 2017), in which the test group could benefit from a similar scaffolding support provided in the Sakai Learning Management Systems (LMS)
Conclusion & future work This paper presented the ALMA-Yactul ecosystem, an approach for providing scaffolding support to learners by integrating related learning material in their current study context
Summary
Organizing a vast collection of learning material is a challenging, time-intensive task for both learners and teachers. To avoid losing track of the lecture, the student can hardly look this information up while in class. On a certain topic, learners could potentially have a vast set of resources, both locally stored or available on the Internet. In absence of an explicit link between a task and related documents through, e.g., cross-references or hyperlinks, they would need to remember implicit links, which is hardly feasible for a large set of resources. In absence of an explicit link between a task and related documents through, e.g., cross-references or hyperlinks, they would need to remember implicit links, which is hardly feasible for a large set of resources. Beaudoin (2013) calls this phenomenon the meta-access problem, which "prevents people from fully capitalizing on knowledge resources"
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