A Student-Centered Visually Enhanced Learning Environment

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has widened the range of learning possibilities and provides the required technological support to create a new learning environment. Classical list-based interfaces are common in virtual environments for online learning and they have well-known open source libraries for implementing them. However, when considering an alternative option based on visual interfaces, they cannot be used and other libraries must be found or developed. In this work, a student-centered visually enhanced interface is selected [1] to ease navigation through complex relationships, including more contextual information and following multimedia principles for learning. The aim of the selected interface is to ease students’ online learning experience, along with the pedagogical values of the new European Higher Education Area. This is achieved by means of:

· designing degree maps thereby providing access at any moment to the necessary data for student placement

· avoiding common feelings of confusion in a virtual learning environment

· allowing access to some information, as sometimes that could be a problem in a traditional Learning Management System

· permitting students to identify their own learning pathway. In the same way, subjects could benefit from these improvements in terms of visualization and adaptation to the learning itinerary

This paper offers a comparison between two open source libraries; Processing and gvSIG, for developing the proposed student-centered learning environment with an enhanced visual interface. The comparison is made from a set of features needed by the selected learning environment. Both options obtain a goodness level for each feature in an analysis process. Next, those goodness levels are summarized into advantages and drawbacks to obtain recommendations of use for both implementation options.

The gvSIG library offers an easy and comfortable means of navigation and has the possibility of showing different information layers directly. Its database connectivity features have to be taken into account, too. However, gvSIG needs a precomputed teaching plan, so modifying any subject is translated to recompute the whole planning process. Since it is used mainly for geographical concepts, it needs all data to be statically georeferenced. Moreover, it needs skilled programming techniques and while documentation is poor, it is being updated regularly.

The Processing library has been focused mainly on visualization for design and aesthetic purposes. It simplifies the implementation of 2D and 3D visualization projects, so a skilled programmer is not necessary and as it is focused on visualization, it offers very high quality graphics, as well as accurate animation functions. It is a lower level library than gvSIG, therefore offering increased flexibility with respect to gvSIG when dynamically rearranging the teaching plan, showing different layers and providing any desired interactivity. However, this lower level implementation may entail longer development times. Furthermore, it has no default database connectivity. Nevertheless, as it is based on java language, database support is implicitly given.

The chosen alternative is the Processing library which is due to two factors: firstly, the lack of strong drawbacks, which can be found in the gvSIG option for its static definition and high programming skills; secondly, the Processing library offers richer visual options, which is a critical requirement needed in the selected learning environment.

Concluding, since current virtual learning environments are not using all the potential of visualization, interaction and monitoring that the Internet allows today, new alternatives need to be explored. When planning to develop a visually enhanced student-centered learning environment, two open source options have been considered: gvSIG and Processing, both rooted in different fields. Different features have been evaluated for each alternative. Processing appears as the suggested option because of its better performance in visualization power, dynamic teaching plan rearrangement and needed programming skills.

REFERENCES

[1] J. Cuartero-Olivera, L. Porta-Simó, F. Giménez-Prado, M. Serra-Vizern, R. Beneito-Montagut, A. Pérez-Navarro, J. A. Morán-Moreno, E. Santamaría-Pérez, A Geographycal Information System in a Virtual Learning Environment, IASTED VC, Innsbruck, Austria, March 2008