Publikationen

Currently, e-learning systems as well as learning environments are still suffering from a lack of explicit and adaptable didactic design - an issue of quality management. Students complain about insufficient adaptability of e-learning offers to the learners’ needs. This is especially the case in university teaching. University professors are not necessarily experts in the didactics of teaching their subject. As a way out of this dilemma the authors utilize their formerly developed storyboard concept. Storyboards are an explicit representation of a didactic design, which enjoys simplicity, clarity, visual appearance, and the chance for standardized development. Everybody may easily become a storyboard author - a step toward pedagogical engineering. By representing didactics explicitly, learners are supported to find their individually appropriate way. Besides this processing issue, storyboards have the potential to identify successful didactic patterns. This is, in fact, the vision of knowledge discovery in didactics. In the authors' experience, embedding topical content into game adventures appears to be a promising didactic mean when properly linked in a related didactic pattern. The success of the authors' approach is demonstrated by an application to one of the authors' real life courses.

Complex long term learning activities may be exhausting, tiring and sometimes even frustrating. In high level education such as university studies, there is a system of offers, rules, requests and prerequisites, which need to be matched with students' needs and desires. University students need assistance in the jungle of opportunities and limitations at today's universities. Here, we employ our formerly developed storyboard concept to face this problem and introduce a storyboard to develop, maintain, and evaluate academic education. Storyboarding is based on the idea of formally representing, processing, evaluating and refining didactic knowledge. It is more powerful in managing education than general AI knowledge representations such as frames, because the syntax of storyboards is driven by the particular nature of didactic knowledge. The concept is a supplement to the educational system (called Dynamic Learning Needs Reflection System: DLNRS) of the School of Information Environment of Tokyo Denki University, Japan. Concretely speaking, the didactic knowledge of DLNRS can be represented by storyboard and used for supporting dynamic learning activities of students.

The success of Turing Test technologies for system validation depends on the quality of the human expertise behind the system. As an additional source of human experts' validation knowledge a Validation Knowledge base (VKB) and so called Validation Expert Software Agents (VESAs) revealed to be useful. Both concepts aim at using collective (VKB) and individual (VESA) experience gained in former validation sessions. However, a drawback of these concepts were their disability to provide a reply to cases, which have never been considered before. The paper proposes a case-based data mining approach to cluster the entries of VKB and VESA and derive a reply to unknown cases by considering a number of most similar known cases and coming to a "weighted majority" decision. The approach has been derived from the k Nearest-Neighbor approach.