FSP Creator: A Novel Web Service API Creator of Fuzzy Students Progress Profile

摘要

Nowadays, intelligent and expert systems and applications have become a burning issue. In the scientific literature, it seems to be of particular interest to provide educational applications and systems with “intelligence”, in order to be able to adapt either the learning material or the tutoring and learning processes to each individual student's needs. The module of student model is crucial for offering a personalized learning experience to each particular student. Student modeling has been introduced in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), but it's use has been extended to most current educational software applications that aim to be adaptive and personalized. Student modeling is able to highlight students individual needs, learning characteristics, knowledge level, errors or misconceptions etc. However, building a student model is a complex process. In this paper, a novel web service API, which creates platform-independent and technological-independent student models using the technology of web services, is presented. The presented API is called FSP Creator. Its innovative operation relies on the facts that the created student profile i) can be embedded in any educational application (web, mobile, game), regardless of the system's technological characteristics or programming language, ii) can be recognized by all the different applications that use it and call the same web services. Furthermore, the created student profile is based on fuzzy logic sets that are used by a Fuzzy Rule System incorporated in FSP Creator and used for selecting the appropriate learning material and exercises. However, each application that uses the created student profile can extend the fuzzy rule set or use its own fuzzy rule set as desired. For the description of the operations of FSP Creator, we have used three different educational applications (two games and one web-based educational application) that have used the fuzzy student profile, which has been created by the presented API.