Design

With reference to the aforementioned learning management systems, we aim to create a comprehensive web-based self-learning platform that could be useful to both the students and instructors. The system is considered to be separated into two major parts, a self-learning portal and a management system.

 

The self-learning portal allows learners to log into their account and interact with several tools provided by the system as listed below. For better device compatibility, this portal will be entirely web-based so that all users can use the service with their computers and mobile phones. As for mobile users, a mobile version of the website and an app for both Android and iOS will also be created to optimize the user experience.

 

The management system enables instructors to easily create self-learning materials for learners. It comes with a tool that allows instructors to upload various kinds of materials, namely assets, such as documents, pictures and videos. A snippet can be created from the assets along with some metadata, for example the page(s) of a document or the start and end time of a video, and linked to a particular topic of a course with a few clicks so that learners could access the related assets while they are learning with ease. Moreover, the system also provides a tool to create or modify a knowledge graph (see 2.3).

 

In this paper, we are going to implement a self-learning portal and a management system for knowledge graphs. Details on the tools will be covered below.

Knowledge graph is the core feature of this self-learning platform. It serves as a graphical version of dependencies of different topics within a course. It shows the learners the correct and expected pathway to complete a course so they can simply follow the topics and arrows in the graph to study progressively. Learners can also access the related assets, such as a document, picture or video, and do some related exercises via the quiz system (see 2.3) after picking a topic.

Question Box is a Q&A platform fostering the communication between learners and instructors. It allows learners to post a question about a course anonymously, and instructors to answer the questions. The questions and answers will be publicly visible to everyone and can be linked to a particular topic of a course by the instructor. These bookmarked questions will be shown as a related question while other learners are studying the same topic.

After learners have picked a topic, they can start doing an exercise consisting of a list of multiple-choice questions prepared by the course instructor. More importantly, it serves as a means for instructors to learn more about how the learners perform on the questions. The submission results will be recorded and statistics results will be shown to the course instructor reflecting the overall performance of the learners and the correct and incorrect rates of individual questions.