5 COURSEWARE/TESTING ITEMS MANAGEMENT THE COURSEWARE/TESTING ITEMS...

2.5 Courseware/Testing Items Management The courseware/testing items management agent administers the details of maintain-ing the courseware repository and testing items database. The agent provides lots of robust functions for teachers to upload, delete, or revise the content of courseware in the courseware repository. Through the agent, experts can design testing items for learning content. Because all coursewares in the courseware repository have followed the standard of SCORM 1.2 (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) metadata information model (Advanced Distributed Learning)[14],the agent can exchange courseware with other e-learning systems.

3 Experiment and Evaluation

Based on the multi-agent framework, an adaptive e-learning system has been im-plemented. The proposed system is implemented on the platform of J2EE. More-over, the genetic algorithm, data mining algorithm and machine learning are used to implement this system. Fig.2. is one of the learner’s interface. To verify the sys-tem’s effectiveness for the proposed personalized intelligent learning system, some high school students were invited to test this system. To evaluate learners’ satisfac-tion degree for the proposed personalized e-learning system, a questionnaire which involves many questions distinguished six various question types(table1) were Table 1. The six question types

Question type Description

The satisfy of To investigate whether learners satisfy the provided learner interface and course materials system services Learning interests To investigate whether learners are interested in using the proposed adaptive e-learning system for mathematical learning learning mode To investigate whether learners can accept the proposed learning mode with personalized tutoring learning interction To investigate whether the proposed adaptive e-learning system affects learning interaction between teachers and between teachers and learners learners learning attitude To investigate whether learners with computer use the proposed personalized e-learning system for learning at home learning To investigate whether the proposed personalized performance e-learning system can promote learners’ learning performances and confidence Fig. 2. The learner’s interface designed to measure whether the propose.There are totally 216 effective question-naires filled out by learners who participated in this experiment. Among 216 effec-tive questionnaires, 78% learners selected “strongly agreed” or “agreed” items,13% learners selected “neutrality” items, only 9% learners selected “strongly disagreed” or “disagreed” items. The investigation result illustrates that the multi-agent adap-tive e-learning framework is high feasible and robustd e-learning system satisfied the real requirements of most learners.

4 Conclusions

This paper proposed a multi-agent framework for building adaptive e-learning system. The proposed architecture considered all indispensable functions which include diagno-sis(assessment),online-helping, adaptive navigation and courseware recommendation, and so on, in the personalized e-learning system. This paper makes a critical contribu-tion: proposed a multi-Agent framework to realize an adaptive e-learning system. The experiment also demonstrated that the system can efficiently and splendidly perform personalized web-based tutoring works. However, the project is still in its early stages; there are still a lot of works left to be done and there are still many open design and im-plementation issues. Additionally, in order to improve the system in terms of functional-ity and efficiency, some design aspects need further investigation.

Acknowledgment

This material is based upon work funded by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.Y107750. Thanks to the financial support from Natural Science Foundation of China with granted number 60773197.

References