Abstract:

This paper studies help principles and techniques for adapting Web-based context-sensitive support to teachers' needs when they use authoring tools. A teacher is an expert whose goal is not learning to use a tool, but rather to achieve an objective with the help of a tool.
Usually, a teacher must pay attention to teaching, which is the main task, but, at the same time, he must know how to manipulate the authoring tool, and if he needs help, he would also have to interact with the help. His mind would be involved in different cognitive processes, such as finding and manipulating appropriate help to use the tool. A help system with an index for searching help according to a particular vocabulary or a list of help options can add more headaches to a teacher, because he must know the keywords to find the required help.
Our main idea is to help teacher use a tool rather than teach how to use it. The solution that we created is a Web-based assistant, ARIALE (Authoring Resources for Implementing Adaptive Learning Environments). This assistant includes a help system with problem-solving support for generating and recommending worked-out examples that teachers can reuse. ARIALE also uses adaptive, context-sensitive and Web-based help about how to use an authoring tool. The context-sensitive help provided is adapted to the teacher’s progress, learning and accumulated experience using the help included in our system.
More specifically, when teachers are using the authoring tool to create an interactive learning process, an adaptive help system can help them.
ARIALE stores data related to the help that each teacher receives and this data is the basis to personalize Web-based help according to each teacher’s degree of progress accessing the help. The objective of this personalization is to decrease the teachers’difficulties accessing, finding and adapting help according to his needs.
Information about the interaction between the teacher and the system allows ARIALE to customize the support to be provided. In the case of Web-based help, context-sensitive help adapted to the teacher’s characteristics is a useful principle for designing the support required by teachers.
Some tools include different types of help, namely wizards, tutorials, and context-sensitive help, but teachers would prefer more personalized support on technical and pedagogical aspects.
Authoring tools that integrate adaptive Web-based and context-sensitive help for teachers have not been studied frequently, specially topics related to Web-based intelligent help and supporting teachers. In addition, we found that there are not enough studies on traditional help for desk applications and about the help required for Web-based authoring tools.

Keywords:

Problem-solving Support, Help Techniques, Web-based Help, Context-sensitive Help, Adaptive Help, Recommender System.