ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

is to monitor the status of learners. Then, when the learner log in the system, the system should present
appropriate information and tell him/her what to do according to his/her status and the defined learning
model. However, current web servers are passive and stateless in nature. They present the same information
for each user. These servers will not notify a user when some event or condition happens. This issue is referred
as guidance and notification problem.
To sum up, in current situation, the instructors, web server managers, or learning system development
team should write many programs to build a web based collaborative learning system for each desired learning
model. The instructors need an easy-to-use facility tool by which they can easily regulate desired collaborative
learning models. An instructor support system is also necessary to automatically manage learners’ learning
behavior, i.e. control student’ learning action and generate notification information.
The Activity regulation tool
To allow instructors for regulating intended learning models, an activity regulation tool is supported
in the web site system. An instructor initially organizes a learning group and assigns roles in the group. The
learning group is then put in a learning activity. A participant of a certain role has responsibility to perform
some actions. The participants of different roles have also different capacities on performing actions.
Therefore, to facilitate instructors in regulating desired learning models, the activity regulation tool must allow
an instructor for specifying the following information: (1) learning groups that perform the activity, (2) roles
involved in the activity, (3) role assignment for organizing the activity, (4) actions that a role can perform in
the activity, (5) capabilities of each participating role, and (6) responsibilities of each participating role.
An illustrative quiz learning activity is given in figure 2. To clearly explain the idea, an informal
notation is used. The team games and discussion activities in the TGT scenario can be also regulated in a
similar manner.
------------------------------------------------------- Quiz Activity ------------------------------------------------------------
---
Participants:
s 1, s 2,, ta 1 , t 1
Roles:
Student, Teacher, TA , All
Role assignment:
Participants s 1, s 2 play Student role.
Participant ta 1 plays TA role.
Participant t 1 plays Teacher role.
Actions: read quiz paper, read correct answer, read student’s answer, read revised answer,
set quiz paper, announce correct answer, submit answer, revise student’s answer
Capabilities Grants:
G1: All roles (Student, TA, Teacher) can read quiz paper.
G2: Teacher roles can read correct answer.
G3: TA roles can read correct answer.
G4: A student role can read correct answer. But he/she can not read correct answer until he/she has Submit his/her
answer.
G5: TA roles can read student’s answers.
G6: Teacher roles can read student’s answers.
G7: A Student roles can read a student’s answer if he/she is the author of the answer.
G8: Teacher roles can read revised answer.
G9: TA roles can read revised answer.
G10: A Student role can read revised answer if the revised answer is for his/her submitted answer.
G11: Teacher roles can set quiz paper.
G12: TA roles can announce correct answer.
G13: A student can submit his/her answer. But he/she can not submit his/her answer one day after Teacher role set
the quiz paper.
G14: TA roles can revise student’s answer.