Vitaweb: an external web-learning resources manager

Andrew K Lui, S C Ng, and S O Choy
Open University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China


External web learning resources can significantly reduce the cost and time in developing the content for e-learning courses. The World Wide Web (WWW) is populated with an abundance of learning resources, many of which are freely available and expertly created. It is often wiser to refer learners to these external learning resources than to create content on the same topic from scratch. The WWW is a highly dynamic space where new resources may appear at any time, which enables an ongoing e-learning course to include very timely web resources mid-stream. However, as with existing web resources, some links to external resources may disappear at any point. Such dead links to external resources are discovered either during regular revisions of course content or, more undesirably, by students on the course when studying the material. As the latter case is clearly not conducive to effective learning, there is a need for a reliable yet economical method of managing links to external web learning resources.

This paper describes an intelligence system called 'Vitaweb', the functions of which include: (1) monitoring the availability of the external web resources of an e-learning course; (2) notifying instructors when an external web resource is significantly changed or becoming unavailable; and (3) making suggestions for alternative learning resources for possible replacement of the existing ones. Vitaweb is designed to be a non-intrusive system that can be used in conjunction with any e-learning platforms. Users of Vitaweb supply the system with a set of URL links to monitor and then Vitaweb will monitor these links around the clock and act according to the preferences given by the users. Vitaweb also analyses the content of learning resources and extracts key information that can be used to search for alternative learning resources in the WWW.

The techniques and inadequacies of existing tools for webpage change monitoring are discussed; and how text-mining techniques such as topic identification, keyword extraction, and document segmentation can contribute to searching for alternative learning resources is reviewed. The key operations of Vitaweb are described in detail, with an evaluation based on synthetic learning content change scenarios. Finally, the paper considers the limitations of Vitaweb and suggests future directions for improvement.