Main Page

Introduction

The mission of the Educational Exercises and Activities Community Group is to develop standards for educational exercises and activities and to make recommendations with regard to other standards.

With respect to educational exercises and activities, a large number of scenarios are to be considered. Educational exercises and activities can be URL-addressable Web resources, resources in learning objects, resources in digital textbooks, and the items of quizzes and exams. Varieties of educational exercises of activities under discussion range from multiple choice questions to those having multiple steps, WebGL 3D graphics and mathematics handwriting recognition.

Use Cases

Education and Training

Exercises and activities are utilized across education and training scenarios.

School Counseling

Exercises and activities are utilized in assessment by school counselors.

Career Counseling

Exercises and activities are utilized in assessment by career counselors.

Human Resources

Exercises and activities are utilized in assessment by human resources personnel.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence systems can utilize educational exercises and activities as training data.

Implementation Ideas

Packages

Educational exercises and activities can be composed of collections of hypertext and other multimedia files. Educational exercises and activities can also be represented as collections of such files in ZIP containers. Scenarios both with and without ZIP containers for collections of such files are in scope for this group.

ZIP containers for educational exercises and activities could utilize the EPUB Open Container Format.

Standardization activities could include specifying a new kind of package file for educational exercises and activities.

Reasons for providing the capability to include multiple variants of an educational exercise or activity in the same ZIP container include accessibility, internationalization and portability. With respect to accessibility, variants could provide different accessibility features. With respect to internationalization, variants could be in different languages. With respect to portability, variants could be designed for different technologies, feature sets or configurations. There could, then, be multiple variants of an educational exercise or activity with a package file for each in a ZIP container. Each variant's package file could be referenced in a container.xml file, per the Open Container Format, and such references could be differentiated via XML attributes. Variants of educational exercises and activities could also be described and differentiated via the metadata of a new kind of package file.

Educational exercises and activities within ZIP containers might run in nested browsing contexts resembling those of object elements or inline frames. The JavaScript environments and API's available for such educational exercises and activities could be topics for specification. Some other topics pertaining to such uses of nested browsing contexts include styling the contents of nested browsing contexts, potentially the inheritance of styles and stylesheets, and the interoperation of hypertext-to-speech and media overlay functionalities across browsing contexts.

Structural Semantics

See also: http://www.idpf.org/epub/profiles/edu/spec/

Metadata and Ontology

Different educational exercises and activities can be interrelated. For instance, educational exercises and activities sharing deep structure can be said to be isomorphic. An example pair of isomorphic tasks are Tower of Hanoi and Monsters and Globes.

Accessibility

Educational exercises and activities can make use of hypertext-to-speech and media overlay functionalities.

Automata

Automata could be of use for tasks including, but not limited to, processing user interface layer events into event streams (e.g. Experience API or Caliper) and processing such event streams. Graph-based technologies (e.g. flowcharts, activity diagrams and workflows) could be of use for tasks including, but not limited to, cognitive modeling. Technologies for discussion include semantically-annotated graphs and semantically-annotated automata.

Timed automata could function as the skeletons upon which software logic providing interactive exercises or activities could be constructed, upon which system behaviors could be attached, for example providing hints and feedback, and upon which assessment-related computations could occur. Timed automata could contain multiple routes of progression through exercises and activities. During learners' particular routes of progression, assessment objects could be constructed and updated. Assessment objects could be more complex than scalars, for example containing data pertaining to learners' timed routes of progression as well as notes. Timed automata, processing event streams into assessment objects while producing system behavior, could be processed on either a client or a server.

Playlists

We can envision playlists of educational exercises and activities, including with performance-based routes or progressions.

Existing Technologies

Main article: Existing Technologies

Hyperlinks

• International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society
• International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era
• Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring