Abstract:

Development of information technologies lead to the change of learning approaches which were used for decades. The development of e-learning became more and more popular and in-demand topic because of learning anytime and anywhere.

The problem of innovative teaching methods lies in their wide applicability, but at the same time there are significant drawback - it is the passage to a new level with a specific threshold. Those, when person collects certain percentage of correct answers, he can go to the next level, not taking into account that part of the tasks were not performed or were performed incorrectly. This is an important issue, because all topics are interconnected and there should not be any "gaps" in knowledge.

The other problem is related more to the adult educational process more related to the IT, where people have to to learn new content for being more competitive. In this case we are talking about learner who is having some knowledge background and just want to improve some knowledge in specific topic related to his background.

To solve these problems a literature survey on e-learning was conducted to see how different systems detect users learning progress. After, we introduce smart education support system. This system could make process of learning more personalized taking into account assimilability of the content. Proposed solution is a personalized system which could be used for both: basic education and adult education. Basic education is concentrated more on using a technology of knowledge gaps reduction, which consists of the fact that at a certain threshold of passing threads (e.g, 80%), person will have the opportunity to go to the next level, but at the same time, the missing answers will be taken into account at the next level. System will analyze where learner is making mistakes and find closely related topics which he or she has to study more. This process is a bottom up process. Adult education is concentrated more on finding gaps between study materials and person’s knowledge base. System will detect what person needs to learn more and go deeper in the material for covering gaps which he has for future career development. This process is a top down process.

Discussed system is an Ontology-driven system, because Ontology is a good instrument for presenting a knowledge base of learning process and relationships between different topics, as well as for creating a new knowledge using SWRL-rules. As well system uses Watson technologies (like retrieve and rank) in finding relevant information when person is learning additional material for improving knowledge.

Particular solution allows to personalize learner’s educational gaps due to the fact that incorrect answers will be taken into account in the next level. Accordingly, the student, who will take the whole course due to the rules, will be fully familiar with the material, which is proposed for the study. Also it will help on-the-fly in improving adult’s knowledge in some particular domain. This technique also allows to maintain performance records according to various criteria, for example: to determine what topic is the most incomprehensible, also possible to draw conclusions about what is the relationship between age and the assimilation of the material, as well as any analytical conclusion is based on statistics, which in future will successfully affect the tuning (change) of the learning system.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, smart education, learning capabilities, Watson technologies, Ontology.