The COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine have forced students to use distance learning. Modern information technologies have enabled global e-learning usage but also revealed a lack of personalization and adaptation in the learning process when compared to face-to-face learning. While adaptive e-learning methods exist, their practical application is slow because of the additional time and resources needed to prepare learning material and its logical adaptation. To increase e-learning materials’ usability and decrease the design complexity of automated adaptive students’ work evaluation, we propose several transformations from a competence tree-based structure to a graph-based automated e-evaluation structure. Related works were summarized to highlight existing e-evaluation structures and the need for new transformations. Competence tree-based e-evaluation structure improvements were presented to support the implementation of top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top transformations. Validation of the proposed transformation was executed by analyzing different use-cases and comparing them to the existing graph-to-tree transformation. Research results revealed that the competence tree-based learning material storage is more reusable than graph-based solutions. Competence tree-based learning material can be transformed for different purposes in graph-based e-evaluation solutions. Meanwhile, graph-based learning material transformation to tree-based structure implies material redundancy, and the competence of the tree structure cannot be restored.
E-learning is rapidly gaining its application. While actively adapting student-oriented learning with the competency evaluation model, the standard of competency support in existing e-learning systems is not implemented and varies. This complicated integration of different e-learning systems or transfer from one system to another might be challenging if the student had his or her competency portfolio in list form, while another system supports tree-based competency portfolios. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a transformation model dedicated to converting the competency list to a competency tree. This solution incorporates text processing and analysis, competency ranking based on Bloom’s taxonomy, and competency topic area clustering. The case analysis illustrates the model’s capability to generate a qualitative tree from the competency list, where the average accuracy of competency assignment to appropriate parent competency is 72%, but, in some cases, it reaches just 50%.
In today’s learning environment, e-learning systems are becoming a necessity. A competency-based student portfolio system is also gaining popularity. Due to the variety of e-learning systems and the increasing mobility of students between different learning institutions or e-learning systems, a higher level of automated competency portfolio integration is required. Increasing mobility and complexity makes manual mapping of student competencies unsustainable. The purpose of this paper is to automate the mapping of e-learning system competencies with student-gained competencies from other systems. Natural language processing, text similarity estimation, and fuzzy logic applications were used to implement the automated mapping process. Multiple cases have been tested to determine the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The solution has been shown to be able to accurately predict the coverage of system course competency by students’ course competency with an accuracy of approximately 77%. As it is not possible to achieve 100% mapping accuracy, the competency mapping should be executed semi-automatically by applying the proposed solution to obtain the initial mapping, and then manually revising the results as necessary. When compared to a fully manual mapping of competencies, it reduces workload and increases resource sustainability.
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