Selecting essential questions using question support facilities in a distance education system

Abstract

The VIEW classroom is a distance education system where the teacher and students in a distributed environment are connected by a computer network, and the lectures are supported using hypermedia and database. It often happens that distance education turns out to be a one‐way broadcast from the teacher, since there is no sufficient means of interaction in real time. The basic configuration of interaction between the student and the teacher is question and answer. Consequently, it is very effective in improving the quality of education that the means of interaction in class is further extended. The VIEW classroom is intended to realize an interactive environment close to individual teaching in distance education that includes a large number of students. In the question support mechanism of the VIEW Classroom, each question is composed of three parts: (1) keyphrase, (2) location of material including figure and video, and (3) question text. The questions are categorized based on similarity in terms of (1) to (3). According to the priorities, the questions are ranked and presented to the teacher so that the most essential or urgent questions can be selected easily. The answers by the teacher constitute a database and are reused as automatic answers to the same questions issued in other classes. A large number of questions received in connection with the lecture enable the teacher to know the students' learning situation in real time. Automatic answering is effective in promoting quick understanding by the students and in reducing the load of the teacher. This paper focuses on the mechanism used to select the best‐suited question in the question support facility of VIEW classroom. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 29(7): 65–74, 1998