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

The system manages basically courses. A course is structured in layers. A layer contains a group
of concepts pedagogically structured by the experts that must be presented to the student and that must be
evaluated after seen it. Layers in a course get progressively more complicated. Each layer contains several
sessions. A session is equivalent to a class at the school (1-hour). The system stores the analytic and the
multimedia version of a session (Fig. 2). A session contains a series of activities that the student has to
make. Each session contains three parts: a presentation, activities and an evaluation to test whether the student
has understood the contents for what the session was designed.
Figure 2: A session for analytic (left) and multimedia (right) students
Teaching With Activities
An activity is an interactive exercise to be done by a student. It is the smallest piece of work that
the system manages. It usually involves some abilities to work on listening, reading, and writing…). We
have defined 20 different types of activities, on which the user can work during a session. They include (1)
Highlight mistakes in a text where the students read a text and have to highlight the words with mistakes
such the one depicted in (Fig. 2). There is also a progress cue, which shows the percentage of the exercise
already completed. (2) Multiple choice exercise that consists of several questions based on a multimedia
document (just text, a video clip, sound…) the students have to look through previously. The student has to
choose the correct response to a question from a group of selected answers previously given. (3) True-false
exercise, which is a variant of the previous type of activity. In this case, the students have only two possible
answers to choose: true and false. (4) Free answer exercise. In this case, the questions about the document
have no predefined answers. The student has to write a complete answer. (5) Ordering exercise where the
student has to choose the right order of all of several elements offered in a random order to get a coherent
result. Currently, the elements we work with are words, sentences, paragraphs and images, such as in (Fig.
2) right. (6) Matching elements, where the student has to find for each element in a list a matching element
in another list. At the moment we working on object names and their pictures, words and their definitions,
words and one of their synonyms, words and one of their antonyms. (7) Fill in blanks. The student receives
a text with some blanks to be filled in. The exercise may optionally provide a cue with a list of words to be
used. (8) Translation exercise where the student has to translate a column with short sentences or alternatively
words. There is another column to fill in with the corresponding translation of the element offered.
(9) Translation of documents. This exercise presents a text either in Spanish or Basque and the student has
to translate it to the other language. (10) Fill in speech balloons of comic strips. The system shows a comic
strip and the student has to fill in the balloons in the strip to build up a story. (11) Sum up exercises. Starting
from a multimedia document, the student has to write an essay summarizing its ideas. (12) Compositions
or essays. The student has to develop an essay about a briefly exposed subject (usually a sentence
with four or five ideas to start organizing the result).