Proceedings

Call for Participation

Track Sessions

Advisory Committee

Featured Speakers

Important Dates/Deadlines

Conference Agenda

Pre-Conference Workshop

Poster Sessions

Workshops

Registration Form

Payment Information

Hotel Information

Travel Information

Exhibit Information

Previous Conferences

itconf@mtsu.edu

Tutoring in Web courses: A theoretical approach using “Rough Set” Theory

Abstract

May web courses suffer from the inability to satisfy the heterogeneous needs of students. The same “one size fits all” material is presented to the students with varying knowledge of the subjects. In order to remedy this negative effect, a profile of the student needs to be established to adapt the web course to the individual knowledge and interests of individual needs. In this presentation we model “student knowledge” in the java programming language using “Rough Set” theory and show that the prerequisite knowledge of the student is an important factor of determining concepts that are “roughly” understood and concepts that “cannot” be understood by students.

Description

In the online environment the assessment workload of instructors grows dramatically, as we work with increasing numbers of students who are ever more diverse and who are seldom seen in person. Online tutoring becomes a major headache for instructors since they are faced with challenging variety of students needs. “Intelligent Tutoring Systems” for the last two decades which focus on student modeling have helped Instructors to tutor in the traditional environment. Empirical studies have shown that adaptive systems with student modeling increase the speed of learning and adaptive presentation can improve student learning. In this study we show that student modeling using “Rough Set Theory” can help establish the deep knowledge of the student. We consider students in the “java” programming language. We devise ten questions to gage their knowledge on one concept of java programming. We show that some questions are understood by students, and such can be answered. That is the student has enough prerequisite knowledge to relate such a question to the concept at hand and as such can answer the questions. Other questions can be roughly understood. That is the student can understand a given concept with some “approximation”. Other questions are totally misunderstood by students. That is the student does not have enough background to answer such a question. The proposed approach identifies concepts which the student is capable and incapable of learning. The Tutoring system can then focus on the misunderstood concepts and the roughly understood concepts in a remedial fashion.