Current MS Students/Nidhi Goel
From CSWiki
Gaming Behavior in Adaptive E-Learning Systems
Contents |
[edit] Abstract
Project/Thesis abstract here.
[edit] What I am planning to accomplish
I plan to do a thorough survey on web based assessment and learning systems that track user activity to evaluate the user, and adapt themselves to improve user learning experience. A very important problem in such systems is the gaming behavior of the user, which can reduce or completely ruin the effectiveness of the system. I plan to gather data from researchers who already have put such systems for field tests (for example the E-ASSISTment system). Finally, I will try to propose new model to detect gaming behavior of the user and correlate it with the collected data.
[edit] Issues to be investigated
Here are following issues which I have to investigate during my thesis:
* What work has been done in adaptive e-learning systems * What are the causes of gaming behavior * What are the consequences of gaming behavior * How can the gaming behavior be modeled accurately
[edit] Why this is academically interesting
[edit] Projected audience
Main audience will be
- The people who make educational policies
- Computer science community doing research in this field
[edit] Why this is MS-level work
This work involves advanced topics which include concepts like data mining, statistical analysis and modeling of user learning and behavior, etc. It also includes thorough research of publications describing past work done in this area.
[edit] Previous work
[edit] Brief literature review
There has been a good amount of research in this area by the computer science community, and a lot of research is still under progress. I have read a few papers (that were published very recently). They give a decent idea about the current state of adaptive e-learning systems, and a brief overview to detect the user gaming behavior in these systems.
- I have collected the Reference Material which I have gone through or intend to go through in the near future.
- I also intend to do relevant literature review in the following:
- Papers based on e-learning applications
- Journal of computer science education
- World Wide Web conferences
- Conference on Information Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE)
[edit] Anticipated challenge(s)
[edit] Challenges
Here are the challenges that can currently be anticipated:
* Collecting and understanding data from an e-learning system * Determining factors which indicate gaming behavior of user * Detecting gaming behavior of user during the e-learning session (from the data) * Predicting models using above results
[edit] Anticipated approach to each challenge
Anticipated approaches corresponding to challenges mentioned above are
* Contacting people who have deployed and used these systems for field tests
(some data has already been obtained).
* Literature review on e-learning systems
* Correlating gaming behavior using different patterns in variables like TIME-TO-REQUEST-HINT
* Using statistical modeling techniques like linear regression
[edit] What I bring to this work
[edit] My relevant background and experience (CS 590)
I did my bachelors in mathematics so I have good basic understanding of mathmatical concepts. I studied data mining concept which was the requirement for one of the class, and I realized that this is a very interesting and useful concept. This concept has given me a lot of interest in this subject and sufficient background to deal with problem.
[edit] What I find interesting about this work
In my perspective, software development oriented projects are generally done in courses or undergraduate work. For graduate work, I want to do research oriented work which uses my previous experience, and can be useful to computer science research community, and to the society as a whole.
Nowadays, systems which track user activities and provide related information have already been commercially deployed. There are many systems based on this strategy, for example:
- Amazon.com suggests users new books to purchase depending on what they already purchased.
- Gmail.com gives links to relevant websites according to contents in the user's emails.
These systems rely on understanding user activity and generating commercially valuable information accordingly. This concepts appears very interesting to me. Though my focus is on e-learning systems, the concepts used are similar.
The concept of adaptive e-learning systems is also very exciting as it can be very useful to the whole student community. Once such systems reach maturity, they can replace chalkboards by keyboards, and help students where there is a shortage of tutors.
[edit] How this work goes beyond my experience and course work
So far, in my course work, I never had to read so many research papers in such details. I never had to study any subject in depth which was of current research. Mostly, usage of the concepts that I learnt in classes was restricted to coursework. With this work, I will be able to use and apply a lot of knowledge that I have acquired during my undergraduate and graduate studies to contribute to the research community and the society.
