Learning Support Systems based on Mathematical Knowledge Management

Michael Kohlhase, FAU Erlangen

Abstract : To cater to the increasingly diverse student bodies, higher education has to personalize education. In times of stagnant educational budgets and staffing problems, this can only be achieved via adaptive, interactive learning support services. In this paper we show how these can be generated by modeling the domain, the learner competencies, and the rhetoric and didactic relations among learning objects, re-using existing technologies and systems of mathematical knowledge management.

The ALeA System (Adaptive Learning Assistant; see BLOCKEDalea[.]educationBLOCKED) has been used on 500-1000 students/semesters in AI and CS courses at FAU Erlangen. Course materials are represented in a sTeX, a special variant of LaTeX. sTeX sources are transformed into an HTML extension and harvested into a knowledge management system that can generate tailor-made learning materials, which are instrumented to monitor student competency development, which turn inform the learning support services.

We show how a surprising variety of user-adaptive and interactive teaching materials with embedded learning support services can be realized from the information in the three remaining models and remark that the heavy lifting in all of this is provided by semantic technologies.