1. 1 A causal model based subject domain creation for a Web-based education system Anandi Giridharan and P. Venkataram Department of Electrical Communication Engineering Indian Institute of Science Bangalore - 560 012, India

2. 2 Organization of the Talk ● Introduction ● Relationships among modules and concepts ● Subject Domain placement  Consecutive placement  Scattered placement ● Design of Subject Domain of communication protocol course ● Offset Table & Table of Concept to Concept ● Simulation and Results ● Conclusion

3. 3 Introduction  Internet is being used by teachers as a tool in educating students with diverse knowledge.  Web Based Education is collection of linked nodes, through which the students traverse.  Structure of Subject Domain depends on organisation of lecture material.  Primary concern is to design the subject domain so that learners can easily find relevant information depending on his/her need.

4. 4 The Causal model of the proposed Subject domain

5. 5 Relationships among modules and concepts Relationships among modules and concepts Module-Module relation  Intermodule relation and inter-conceptual links are set up based on the order in which subject material is to be presented to the learners. S = {M1, M2, M3....Mn}

6. 6 Module-concept relation  Each of the modules are further classified into the set of concepts.  Mi is divided into r number of concepts, Mi= {Ci1,Ci2,.......Cir}.  The weight of the link between the module and the concept indicates the order in which the concepts to be displayed.

7. 7 Concept-Concept relation 0.6 ● Concept to Concept links is the related concepts that may be distributed among different modules in the subject material. ● Starting from first link and tracing the path through these link till the end with the same topic is called as conceptual path. ● The traversing through these links would enable the system to provide depth understanding of a single concept.

8. 8 Subject Domain placement  Consecutive placement: All the modules with its associated concepts are placed in a single file.  Scattered placement: Each Module of the courseware placed in a file separately and scattered through out the disk.  To speed up the access, we have generated an Offset Index file, which gives the exact physical locations like beginning and ending location of the modules and their concepts.

9. 9 A Screen shot of the Subject domain file

10. 10 A Sample of Offset Table

11. 11 Table of Concept to Concept Whenever a learner likes to have deep understanding about a concept, say concept ATM, query is sent to the server, server checks for the corresponding concept related to that query from the Table of Concept to Concept links.

12. 12 Modules of communication protocol course with their order of presentation Modules of communication protocol course with their order of presentation 

13. 13 Concepts of Modules 1, 2 with their respective links Concepts of Modules 1, 2 with their respective links

14. 14 Access time on consecutive courseware modules Courseware access time The physical placement of the course material has been accessed with different combination of modules and concepts to find the optimality of the placement.

15. 15 Access time on scattered courseware modules

16. 16 Modules access time

17. 17 Concepts access time

18. 18 Conclusion  A prototype design of Subject model for Web-based system has been presented.  We have stored the courseware consisting of modules associated with its concepts in a single file as well as scattered through out the disk.  Experimental results showed that the access time taken in reading the course material from a single file was much faster than the course material from scattered files.  The designed modular tree with multiple conceptual links are very much useful in guiding diverse learners through the courseware.

19. 19 References 1. D. Pilar da Silva, R. Van Durm, E. Duval, H. Olivié, "Concepts and documents for adaptive educational hypermedia: a model and a prototype, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia}, pp. 35-43, 1998. 2. Peter Brusilovsky, "Concept-Based Courseware Engineering for Large Scale Web-based education", In: G. Davies and C. Owen (eds.), "Proceedings of WebNet'2000", World Conference of the WWW and Internet, San Antonio, TX, Oct. 30 - Nov. 4, 2000, AACE, pp. 69-74. 3. Robin Mason, " Models of Online Courses", ALN Magazine, Volume 2, issue 2 - October 1998. 4. Specht, M., Weber, G., Heitmeyer, S., and Schöch, V, " AST: Adaptive WWW-Courseware for Statistics", Proceedings of Workshop Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the World Wide Web at 6th International Conference on User Modeling, UM97, Chia Laguna, Sardinia, Italy, June 2, 1997, pp. 91-95.

20. 20 Thank You!