Abstract:

A move from static e-learning courses to the creation of courses or paths that are adapted to the needs of students has been the focus of experts for many years. However, a personalized student e-learning study plan cannot be developed as a single process. Such an activity, in fact, requires a series of subprocesses, which logically follow one another. It concerns the creation of a student model, involving steps such as the identification of what the student knows as well as their study preferences and the identification of their study objectives. One of the most important subprocesses in this sequence is correct assessment of student’s knowledge.

This paper deals with the area of education of English as a second language in an e-learning form. An e-learning system, here in the form of a learning management system, is supported by an expert system, which is the basis of the decision-making process in individual subprocesses. The paper presents a model of this e-learning system, describes its general structure and partially deals with individual parts. Adaptation is achieved by dividing the progress into four basic processes - acquisition, completion and evaluation of the input information about the student; definition of language learning objectives and admissible solutions for their achieving; modelling the progress of individual proposed solutions; approving one of the proposed solution as the best variant to achieve the learning objectives.

Each process is dealt with by the expert system individually, when the system evaluates the input information of the given process using a knowledge base, which is created for every step separately. The knowledge bases, including all steps for correct creation of a student’s model from the pedagogical point of view, are defined by an expert/tutor on teaching English, who cooperates with an expert on expert system creation. This also holds for this paper. The focus of the paper is primarily the part of the system which is responsible for assessment of student’s knowledge. Apart from the description of the expert system itself, i.e. the informatics part of the process using a fuzzy-oriented expert system, it is necessary to consider the pedagogical point of view, i.e. how to process the “placement test” and under what conditions. The final part of the paper presents an experimental verification on real data acquired from students.

Keywords:

Expert system, e-learning, fuzzy-oriented system, language learning.