Advances in E-learning-Experiences and Methodologies

Swarm-Based Techniques in E-Learning
sIt
SIT (Gutiérrez, Pardo, & Delgado Kloos, 2006b) is
a generic platform for the development of intelligent
tutoring systems. The platform offers several
services to the tutoring system designer, from
authentication facilities to automatic retrieval and
forwarding of Web resources. Intelligent tutoring
systems built on top of SIT do only have to take
care of the user model, the domain model and the
learning strategies they want to develop (Hartley,
1973). Most administrative tasks are performed
by SIT. It has been calculated that a big amount
of the cost of developing an intelligent tutoring
system has to do with dealing with administrative
tasks (Murray, 1999). SIT permits to focus on the
teaching and learning aspects of development.
SIT puts the focus on adapting the sequence
of learning resources to the user. Thus, tutoring
systems built on top of SIT must implement some
model of the domain they are tutoring and some
sequencing strategy that tailors the sequence of
activities to the student’s capabilities and needs.
It is the responsibility of the tutoring system
to know where to find the appropriate learning
resources. In the context of SIT, resources are
identified by an URL. Resources can be created
by the same pedagogical team than creates the
tutoring system or they can use some resources
already available on the Web. SIT encourages
reuse of already existing learning resources as
it has no resources on its own, but can retrieve
and deliver any resource to the students. They
can be static resources, like images, or dynamic
resources, like PHP pages that perform a full
remediation cycle of showing an exercise, getting
the student’s answers and showing some feedback
adapted to her answers.
It is the responsibility of the tutoring system
to analyse the input from the user, if any, as well
as all former knowledge about her. Using that
information, the tutoring system decides what
is the next learning activity or resource to be sequenced
to the student. This information is given
to SIT and the platform takes the corresponding
resource and forwards it to the student.
SIT wraps the resources in a brief user interface
that allows the student to log out or continue the
tutoring process after she has interacted with the
learning resource (e.g., read some text, solved an
exercise, etc.). If the student logs out, the session
is restarted at the same point the next time she
logs into the system. If the student continues,
all data is collected by SIT and forwarded to the
tutoring system and the cycle restarts.
If only one activity is selected by the tutoring
system as suitable for the student, that is the
activity delivered to the student. But it may be
the case that the tutoring system decides that
there are several activities that are suitable for
the student, given current knowledge about her.
When this happens, SIT shows a menu to the
student with all the options, so the student can
decide which is the next preferred activity based
on the information given by the tutoring system
and forwarded by SIT (typically, a title or short
description of every option).
It is this last characteristic of SIT that is important
from the point of view of this chapter, as
SIT uses some techniques inspired on the mechanisms
that ants use for optimizing the paths from
their nests to food sources (as explained above)
to help students in their decision. Using a method
similar to that of the learning networks explained
above, SIT collects information about the success
of students when interacting with activities and
resources following a particular sequence. It then
feeds back some of this information to students
(Gutierrez, Pardo, & Delgado Kloos, 2006a).
If the administrator of the system allows it
(this can be selected for some specific tutor, or
just for some learning modules, etc.), SIT collects
information about the success of the students
when interacting with those learning activities
delivered to them. Then, when different learning
activities are chosen for the student and a menu
is presented to her, SIT shows information about
how her peers have performed on those activities
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