Principio de operación del Generador de Imanes Permanentes

This section describes the basic authoring paradigm employed by the My Online Teacher tool [47].

14 2.5.1 My Online Teacher – MOT1.0 (MOT++)

Unlike Interbook [27] or AHA! [48], which are designed for both delivery and authoring, MOT++ [47], [49] is a purpose-built authoring tool1 for use with a separate delivery system and is based around the LAOS framework [36]. Please note that although many previous publications refer to MOT++, it has since been renamed to MOT1.0 for ease of comparison to other tools. The XML-based CAF file format [3] has been defined to store the first two layers of the LAOS framework, the domain model and the goal model. This enables interoperability with compatible delivery engines, such as AHA!, ADE [50], or GALE, the GRAPPLE FP7 STREP project’s adaptation engine [26]. This section explains the basic functionality made available by MOT1.0, however actual implementation and usability specifics are described in Chapter 3 .

2.5.1.1 Domain Maps

Domain maps form a hierarchical tree structure of concepts. Each concept must have a title attribute and can have any number of other attributes that describe the concept. Each attribute has a type such as ‘text’, ‘keywords’, ‘image’, ‘video’,

‘introduction’ or ‘conclusion’. Each attribute can contain the static domain content (either HTML or plaintext). MOT1.0 provides a basic interface to allow authors to author the content of each attribute (Chapter 3 explains the interface in detail).

MOT1.0 also allows authors to copy concepts between domain maps, allowing authors to reuse domain content (either their own, or those made by other users).

15 It is important that the content of each attribute is standalone – that is to say that the content does not specifically require the presence of another attribute. For instance, if a concept is described using two attributes ‘diagram’ and ‘text’ the text attribute should not contain phrases such as “as can be seen in the diagram”, since (depending on the adaptation strategy) it is not possible to guarantee that the user can see the diagram.

Similarly, the author must consider the granularity of the content [51]. A resource with coarse-grained (also known as ‘large’ or ‘low’) granularity has a large amount of content that is stored within a single object/page/concept [52]. However, resources with fine-grained (also known as ‘small’ or ‘high’) granularity divide the content into smaller chunks. Using resources with fine-grained granularity means that if the content is reused in other courses the author has greater freedom in choosing which parts of the content to reuse. Similarly, coarse-grained content offers less flexibility in terms of personalisation since the learning object may

contain information that is irrelevant to the user but cannot be specifically removed by the strategy. The issues surrounding granularity are also investigated in Chapter 9 .

2.5.1.2 Goal Maps

A goal map is a hierarchical tree structure of groups of ‘sublessons’. Usually, goal maps are created by using MOT1.0’s feature for converting domain maps into goal maps. Goal maps initially follow the structure of the associated domain map, with each attribute represented by an individual sublesson. Figure 2.2 shows how

16 sublessons are arranged into groups based on the domain concept to which they belong.

Figure 2.2: A basic domain and equivalent goal map within MOT1.0

MOT1.0 allows authors to rearrange the structure/order of concepts. Goal maps can contain links to any number of domain maps. This means that a course author can reuse domain content in a different goal map.

Authors can add a label and a weight to each sublesson, for use as pedagogical metadata. There are no built-in keywords to define the meaning of weights and labels. The meaning of the weights and labels depends purely on the adaptation strategy.

2.5.1.3 Adaptation Strategy

Within the MOT authoring paradigm, adaptation must be authored within a LAG file [53]. Most strategies make use of the pedagogical metadata defined by the goal map, or even the attribute types used within the domain. The LAG file is responsible for the definition of the Adaptation Model, User Model and Presentation Model. Section 2.6 describes some of the strategies that can be defined.

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2.5.1.4 Delivery

As described above, MOT1.0 is specifically designed as an authoring tool, rather than a combined authoring and delivery system. For this reason, the formats generated by the MOT authoring paradigm need to be converted into a format that can be delivered by an external tool. Previous research has created a method of importing content from MOT into WHURLE[54], [55], however the main target for MOT1.0 was AHA![3], [56]. However, subsequent research (described in Chapter 7 ) created ADE [50], which is a delivery engine that was specifically created to work with CAF and LAG files.

2.5.2 MOT2.0

MOT2.0 [57], [58] was created to research the potential of Web 2.0 style interaction within e-learning. Rather than utilising adaptation strategies, it

encourages learners to interact with each other through collaborative tools, such as online chat messaging, tagging and rating. MOT2.0 is therefore not a direct upgrade of MOT1.0, however it does inherit some of its domain model and goal model principles from LAOS[36] to form Social LAOS (SLAOS) [59].

Although MOT2.0 had different functionality to that of MOT1.0, some of the interface and functionality aspects of MOT2.0 could clearly be brought into the MOT1.0 authoring paradigm. Specifically, MOT2.0 introduced a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and a graphical way of displaying the hierarchical structure of a course. Similarly, MOT2.0 introduced methods of importing content from widely used e- learning formats [60]. These features are further described (and used) in Chapter 3.

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