Empirical studies of adaptive annotation in the educational context have demonstrated that it can help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigational overhead, and encourage non-sequential navigation. Over the last 8 years we have explored a lesser known effect of adaptive annotation – its ability to significantly increase student engagement in working with non-mandatory educational content. In the presence of adaptive link annotation, students tend to access significantly more learning content; they stay with it longer, return to it more often and explore a wider variety of learning resources. This talk will present an overview of our exploration of the addictive links effect in many course-long studies, which we ran in several domains (C, SQL and Java programming), for several types of learning content (quizzes, problems, interactive examples). The first part of the talk will review our exploration of a more traditional knowledge-based personalization approach and the second part will focus on more recent studies of social navigation and open social student modeling

1. Addictive Links:
Engaging Students through
Adaptive Navigation Support and
Open Social Student Modeling
Peter Brusilovsky with:
Sergey Sosnovsky, Michael Yudelson, Sharon Hsiao
School of Information Sciences,
University of Pittsburgh

2. MOOC
Massive Open Online Course

3. Completion Rate

4. MOOC Completion Rate
Classic loop user modeling - adaptation in adaptive systems
http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html

5. What Else These Students Need?
• Top colleges
– Stanford, CalTech, Princeton, GATech, Penn, Duke..
• Great faculty – top guns in their fields
• Great content
• Top online platform – Coursera
• FREE!

6. The Problem of Engagement
• Great free content and top teachers is not
enough to engage students
• Peter Norvig: Motivation and Engagement are
key problems for MOOCs
• The problem is not new
• A lot of great advanced content
– Works perfectly in lab studies, great gains
– Released to students to enhance learning
– No impact – students do not use it

7. The Case of QuizPACK
• QuizPACK: Quizzes for
Parameterized Assessment of
C Knowledge
• Each question is a pattern of a
simple C program. When it is
delivered to a student the
special parameter is
dynamically instantiated by a
random value within the pre-
assigned borders.
• Used mostly as a self-
assessment tool in two C-
programming courses

8. QuizPACK: Value and Problems
• Good news:
– activity with QuizPACK significantly correlated with
student performance in classroom quizzes
– Knowledge gain rose from 1.94 to 5.37
• But:
– Low success rate - below 40%
– The system is under-used (used less than it deserves)
• Less than 10 sessions at average
• Average Course Coverage below 40%

9. Adding Motivation
• Students need some better motivation to work with non-
mandatory educational content…
• Added classroom quizzes:
– Five randomly initialized questions out of 20-30 questions
assigned each week
• Good results - activity, percentage of active questions,
course coverage - all increased 2-3 times! But still not as
much as we want. Could we do better?
• Maybe students bump into wrong questions? Too easy?
Too complicated? Discouraging…
• Let’s try something that worked in the past adaptive
hypermedia that can guide students to the right content

10. User Model
Collects information
about individual user
Provides
adaptation effect
Adaptive
System
User Modeling side
Adaptation side
User-Adaptive Systems
Classic loop user modeling - adaptation in adaptive systems

11. Adaptive Link Annotation: InterBook
1. Concept role
2. Current concept state
3. Current section state
4. Linked sections state
4
3
2
1
√"
Metadata-based mechanism

12. The Value of ANS
• Lower navigation overhead
– Access the content at the right time
– Find relevant information faster
• Better learning outcomes
– Achieve the same level of knowledge faster
– Better results with fixed time
• Encourages non-sequential navigation

13. Questions of
the current
quiz, served
by QuizPACK
List of annotated
links to all quizzes
available for a
student in the
current course
Refresh
and help
icons
QuizGuide = QuizPACK+ANS

14. Topic-Based Adaptation
Concept
A
Concept
B
Concept
C
n Each topic is associated with a number of
educational activities to learn about this topic
n Each activity classified under 1 topic

15. QuizGuide: Adaptive Annotations
• Target-arrow abstraction:
– Number of arrows – level of
knowledge for the specific
topic (from 0 to 3).
Individual, event-based
adaptation.
– Color Intensity – learning
goal (current, prerequisite
for current, not-relevant,
not-ready). Group, time-
based adaptation.
n Topic–quiz organization:

16. QuizGuide: Success Rate
n It works!
n One-way ANOVA shows
that mean success value for
QuizGuide is significantly
larger then the one for
QuizPACK:
F(1, 43) = 5.07
(p-value = 0.03).

17. QuizGuide: Motivation
• Adaptive navigation support increased student's
activity and persistence of using the system
Average activity
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
2002 2003 2004
Average num. of
sessions
0
5
10
15
20
2002 2003 2004
Average course
coverage
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
2002 2003 2004
Active students
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
2002 2003 2004
n Within the same class QuizGuide session were much longer than
QuizPACK sessions: 24 vs. 14 question attempts at average.
n Average Knowledge Gain for the class rose from 5.1 to 6.5

18. A new value of ANS?
• The scale of the effect is too large…
May be just a good luck?
• New effect after 15 years of research?
• Maybe the effect could only be
discovered in full-scale classroom
studies – while past studies were lab-
based?

19. Round 2: Let’s Try it Again…
• Another study with the same system
– QuizGuide+QuizPACK vs. QuizPACK
• A study with another system using similar kinds
of adaptive navigation support
– NavEx+WebEx vs. WebEx
• NavEx - a value-added ANS front-end for
WebEx - interactive example exploration system

20. WebEx - Code Examples

21. Concept-based student modeling
Example 2
Example M
Example 1
Problem 1
Problem 2
Problem K
Concept 1
Concept 2
Concept 3
Concept 4
Concept 5
Concept N
Examples
Problems
Concepts

22. NavEx = WebEx + ANS

23. Does it work?
• The increase of the amount of work for the
course
Clicks - Overall
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Examples
Quizzes
Lectures - Overall
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Examples
Quizzes
Learning Objects - Overall
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Examples
Quizzes

24. Is It Really Addictive?
• Are they coming more often? Mostly, but there
is no stable effect
• But when they come, they stay… like with an
addictive game
Clicks - Per Session
0
5
10
15
20
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Examples
Quizzes
Learning Objects - Per
Session
0
1
2
3
4
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Examples
Quizzes

25. Why It Is Working?
• Progress-based annotation
– Displays the progress achieved so far
– Does it work as a reward mechanism?
– Open Student Modeling
• State-based annotation
– Not useful, ready, not ready
– Access activities in the right time
– Appropriate difficulty, keep motivation

26. A Deeper Look

27. The Diversity of Work
• C-Ratio: Measures the breadth of exploration
• Goal distance: Measures the depth
Self-motivated Work - C-Ratio
(%)
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Quizzes
Examples
Self-motivated Work - Goal
Distance (LO's)
0
5
10
15
20
Non-adaptive Adaptive
Quizzes
Examples

28. Round 3: Trying another domain…
• Is it something relevant to C programming or to
simple kind of content?
• New changes:
– SQL Programming instead of C
– Programming problems (code writing) instead of
questions (code evaluation)
– Comparison of concept-based and topic-based
mechanisms in the same domain and with the same
kind of content

29. • SQL-KnoT delivers online SQL problems, checks student’s
answers and provides a corrective feedback
• Every problem is dynamically generated using a template
and a set of
databases
• All problems have
been assigned to 1
of the course
topics and
indexed with
concepts from the
SQL ontology
SQL Knowledge Tester

30. • To investigate possible influence of concept-based
adaptation in the present of topic-based adaptation we
developed two versions of QuizGuide:
Topic-based Topic-based+Concept-Based
Concept-based vs Topic-based ANS

31. • Two Database Courses (Fall 2007):
§ Undergraduate (36 students)
§ Graduate (38 students)
• Each course divided into two groups:
§ Topic-based navigation
§ Topic-based + Concept-Based Navigation
• All students had access to the same set of SQL-
KnoT problems available in adaptive
(QuizGuide) and in non-adaptive mode (Portal)
Study Design

32. • Total number of attempts made by all students:
in adaptive mode (4081), in non-adaptive mode (1218)
• Students in general were much more willing to access
the adaptive version of the system, explored more
content with it and to stayed with it longer:
Questions
0
25
50
75
100
Quizzes
0
5
10
15
20
25
Topics
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Sessions
0
1
2
3
4
5 Session Length
0
5
10
15
20
25
Adaptive
Non-adaptive
It works again! Like magic…

33. Round 4: The Issue of Complexity
• Let’s now try it for Java…
• What is the research goal?
• Java is a more sophisticated domain than C
– OOP versus Procedural
– Higher complexity
• Will it work for complex
questions?
• Will it work similarly? 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
C
Java
language complexity
Easy
Moderate
Hard

34. Meet QuizJET!

36. Naviga&on
Area
Presenta&on
Area
JavaGuide

37. !! !!
JavaGuide
(Fall 2008)
QuizJET
(Spring 2008)
!! parameters (n=22) (n=31)
Overall User
Statistics
Attempts 125.50 41.71
Success Rate 58.31% 42.63%
Distinct Topics 11.77 4.94
Distinct Questions 46.18 17.23
Average
User Session
Statistics
Attempts 30.34 21.50
Distinct Topics 2.85 2.55
Distinct Questions 11.16 8.88
Magic… Here We Go Again!

38. Round 5: Social Navigation
• Concept-based and topic-based navigation support
work well to increase success and motivation
• Knowledge-based approaches require some
knowledge engineering – concept/topic models,
prerequisites, time schedule
• In our past work we learned that social navigation –
guidance extracted from the work of a community of
learners – might replace knowledge-based guidance
• Social wisdom vs. knowledge engineering

39. Open Social Student Modeling
• Key ideas
– Assume simple topic-based design
– No prerequsites or concept modeling
– Show topic- and content- level knowledge progress of
a student in contrast to the same progress of the class
• Main challenge
– How to design the interface to show student and class
progress over topics?
– We went through several attempts

40. Parallel Introspective Views
40

41. 0
40
80
120
160
QuizJET+IV QuizJET+Portal JavaGuide
Attempts
Attempts
Results: Progress

42. F(1,32)= 11.303, p<.01
71.35%
42.63%
58.31%
0.00%
20.00%
40.00%
60.00%
80.00%
100.00%
QuizJET+IV QuizJET+Portal JavaGuide
Success Rate
Success Rate
Results: Success

43. Class vs. Peers
• Peer progress was important, students
frequently accessed content using peer models
• The more the students compared to their peers,
the higher post-quiz scores they received (r=
0.34 p=0.004)
• Parallel IV didn’t allow to recognized good peers
before opening the model
• Progressor added clear peer progress

44. Progressor
44

45. The Value of Peers
205.73
113.05
80.81
125.5
0
50
100
150
200
250
Attempts
Progressor
QuizJET+IV
QuizJET+Portal
JavaGuide
68.39%
71.35%
42.63%
58.31%
0.00%
20.00%
40.00%
60.00%
80.00%
Success Rate
Progressor
QuizJET+IV
QuizJET+Portal
JavaGuide

46. The Secret

47. Take-home messages
• A combination of progress-based and state-
based adaptive link annotation increases the
amount and the diversity of student work with
non-mandatory educational content
• The effect is stable and the scale of it is quite
large
• Properly organized Social Navigation might be
at least as successful as the knowledge-based
• Requires a long-term classroom study to
observe

48. Why It Is Important?
• Many systems demonstrated their educational
effectiveness in a lab-like settings: once the students
are pushed to use it - it benefits their learning
• However, once released to real classes, these systems
are under-used - most of them offer additional non-
mandatory learning opportunities
• “Students are only interested in points and grades”
• Convert all tools into credit-bearing activities?
• Or use alternative approaches to increase motivation

49. What we are doing now?
• Exploring new generation of open social
modeling tools in wide variety if classes and
domains from US to Nigeria
– Interested to be a pilot site?
• Exploring more advanced guidance and
modeling approaches based on large volume of
social data
• Applying open social modeling to motivate
readings

50. Acknowledgements
• Joint work with
– Sergey Sosnovsky
– Michael Yudelson
– Sharon Hsiao
• Pitt “Innovation in Education” grant
• NSF Grants
– EHR 0310576
– IIS 0426021
– CAREER 0447083

51. Try It!
• http://adapt2.sis.pitt.edu/kt/
• Brusilovsky, P., Sosnovsky, S., and Yudelson, M. (2009)
Addictive links: The motivational value of adaptive link annotation.
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 15 (1), 97-118.
• Hsiao, I.-H., Sosnovsky, S., and Brusilovsky, P. (2010) Guiding
students to the right questions: adaptive navigation support in an E-
Learning system for Java programming. Journal of Computer Assisted
Learning 26 (4), 270-283.
• Hsiao, I.-H., Bakalov, F., Brusilovsky, P., and König-Ries, B.
(2013) Progressor: social navigation support through open social
student modeling. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia [PDF]
Read About It!