APM Block

The APM portfolio module emphasizes upon two features: (1) coupling with moodle Activities and (2) an interchangeable scorm package. We implement this module as HTML based portfolio for two considerations:

(1) viewing the portfolio through the moodle site directly and (2) making it possible to view the portfolio at offline circumstance.

Figure 4 - 4 shows the user interface to generate portfolio. Four categories are supplied in APM: “Annotations”, “Files”, “Grades”, and

“Activities” where “Annotations” would appear in case LAM module has been installed in this course and eight subcategories of moodle activities are included in the “Activities”. While the portfolio is generated, there will be a corresponding folder for each genus of the chosen selections in the portfolio catalogue and a corresponding tab in portfolio view like Figure 4 - 5.

Optional

Figure 4 - 4 Overview of Generate Portfolio

30

Scorm 1.2[31][32] is adopted as our scorm package version with the concept model illustrated in Figure 4 - 6. imsmanifest XML structured as Listing 4 - 4 is the main file of scorm standard. It specifies the constitution of certain material, i.e. the content packed into scorm package and the dependence among specifications and physical files as the matched pairs. In APM block, all the chosen slides

Added Annotations Slide Image

Figure 4 - 5 Overview of View Portfolio

Figure 4 - 6 Concept Model of Scorm 1.2

31

are bundled together in one scorm package rather than one slide per package. This would facilitate the interchangeability and interoperability between distinct LMS platforms.

<manifest>

<organizations>

<organization>

<title>

</title>

<item>

</item>

</organization>

</organizations>

<resources>

<resource>

<file/>

</resource>

</resources>

</manifest>

……

Matched Pair

…

Listing 4 - 4 Structure of imsmanifest XML

32

Chapter 5 Evaluation

The architecture and how we implemented LAM and APM modules have been described in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 respectively. This chapter evaluates these two plugins. Section 5.1 compares our proposed modules with other existing systems and subchapter 5.2 shows the experiment result of LAM module.

5.1 Comparison

5.1.1 Annotation Comparison

I. Glover et al. stated the general requirements for educational web annotation systems[25] consisting of conceptual factors and technical factors which both have essential and desirable perspectives listed below. Conceptual factors are those being intrinsic to annotation where technical factors are those being related to the implementation of the conceptual factors.

 Essential Factors

 Conceptual

(a)Text annotations (b)Private annotations

 Technical

(c)No additional software necessary (d)Accessible

(e)Browser independent

(f)Maintains page integrity

 Desirable Factors

 Conceptual

(a)Graphical annotations (b)Linking annotations (c)Shared annotations

33

(d)Annotation reports

 Technical

(e)Open architecture (f)Non-commercial

Table 5 - 1 shows the satisfaction with these requirements of the annotating systems presented in [25] and LAM module. LAM meets all the essential requirements and misses two of the six desirable ones.

Since LAM module merely offers textual annotation at present, these two kinds of annotation are not supported.

Table 5 - 1 Requirements for Educational Annotation Systems

Table 5 - 2 Annotation on Learning Materials

34

Table 5 - 2 enumerates the benefits and drawbacks of LAM and other annotation skills on pedagogy characterized in Chapter 2. Our LAM module is the only application that integrates with LMS. The annotations can be made on specific pages rather than on whole material and no additional devices are needed.

5.1.2 Portfolio Comparison

Learning portfolios have been trended towards web-based. Most of current implementation schemes of the portfolios are web-oriented.

We compare our portfolio module, APM, with the existing moodle portfolio plugins, Exabis ePortfolio and Simple Portfolio. APM portfolio is the only one plugin that integrates with moodle activities and supports offline viewing. Like the scheme utilized in Exabis ePortfolio, APM provides SCORM portfolio package as well. Our portfolio focuses on the course itself and the files of this course.

So APM doesn’t allow students to add personal files into their portfolio packages.

5.2 Experimentation

An experiment about LAM has been conducted in a computer science course in our school, National Chiao Tung University, during the spring semester of 2009 to evaluate the actual effect of this module.

Table 5 - 3 Comparison among Existing Plugins

35

5.2.1 Experiment Method

There were total 98 undergraduate students took part in this experiment and these students were asked to read distinct articles and make annotations upon them using the LAM module on moodle LMS.

Students were divided into several groups and each group had five students for the sake of collaborative and interactive learning. Every member in a group read, commented, and provided questions regarding the same article and submitted a brief report in the end of the experiment. This experiment lasted about five weeks. We design a questionnaire based on technology acceptance model (TAM) to investigate the effects of LAM.

5.2.2 Experiment Discussion

83 of the participated students answered the questionnaire and 13 of the responded questionnaires are considered as invalid since whole the questionnaire’s answers are the same. All the statistics of this questionnaire are exhibited in Appendix D. 76% of these students whose questionnaires are valid thought information can be shared via the LAM module. 78% of them agreed that LAM is easy to learn and use and 63% of them agreed it is useful in tasks about annotation.

58% of students would like to utilize it once again.

The students had also proposed some feedbacks about LAM module along with the questionnaire. Their feedbacks focused on the following points:

 More user friendly interface

LAM merely supports textual annotation at present. Students would like to possess more annotating skills such as highlight, search, and hand written. The deletion and modification of added annotation should be more convenient as well.

 Sticky note

36

The sticky notes provide an advantageous way to read both the personal and public annotations. But it would be a little chaos when there were too much sticky notes in one annotatable page.

There should be certain mechanism to let the students filter the annotations.

 Content / annotation selection

Because the teaching material is converted into image format via the utilization of convert engine, the material content can’t be selected like the conventional operation on office software and so does the added annotation.

 Hyperlink reference

There were some hyperlinks in the articles designated for this experiment. As the reason above, these links can’t be referenced within the image. Besides, students also asked for the reference function on the sticky notes.

 Notification for public annotation

Students thought information can be shared via public annotations. Though the annotations are synchronized while there are new ones being added, students still want to have some notification mechanism to be aware of new annotations.

37