Progressor: social navigation support through open social student modeling

Abstract

The increased volumes of online learning content produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students.

Increasing Adoption of Smart Learning Content for Computer Science Education

“…• Other kinds of systems such as social navigation systems (e.g., Educo [58] or Progressor [35]) that provide information about how peers have used and progressed through the learning resources, and thus support reflection of one's own working and progress.…”

Open Social Learner Models for Self-Regulated Learning and Learning Motivation

“…OSLM has been demonstrated to produce different effects in both engagement and navigational patterns. For example [15,16] in different studies consistently found that by showing the models of peer learners, students covered more topics in the system, reached higher success rates in self-assessment problems, and that strong students lead in system exploration. Our later work confirms these findings and reveals some other effects.…”

The new trends in adaptive educational hypermedia systems

“…People tend to follow the footsteps of other people who have similar interests. Using this natural tendency, a document may be indexed in the existing hyperspace by a community of users (Wexelblat and Maes, 1999;Hsiao et. Al., 2013).…”