Progressive Zoom Navigation Support For Personalized E-Learning

The innovation of information technologies have dramatically changed people’s lives. As more knowledge of understanding how people learn, the information technolo-gies become more important for education. With the huge volume of web-based educa-tion resources, and variant of intelligent and adaptive e-learning systems, it is possible to provide effective support for class-room study, long-distance and life-time learning.The abundance of web-based e-learning systems, tools and open course resources lead to at least two problems:first, to guide students to the most suitable resources; and second, how to engage them to learn more effectively. In the field of personalized e-learning, there are two major techniques to solve these two problems, including open stu-dent modeling and adaptive navigation support. However, the existing researches seldom address the scalability and information issues for e-learning with big data visualization.In response to the above issues, this dissertation explores the design principles to solve the scalability and information overloading issues for big data visualization, and to propose a generic progressive zoom navigation framework. Then it explores how to apply this generic framework to the field of personalized e-learning, and introduce progressive zoom navigation support to the integration of open student modeling and adaptive navi-gation support.The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows:1. In order to solve the scalability and information overloading issues for personalized e-learning, this dissertation provides a definition of progressive zoom navigation inspired by the hierarchical multi-scale navigation paradigm of Google Maps, and further proposes a generic progressive zoom navigation framework for big data visualization.2. In response to the "fog of desert" issues for multi-scale zoomable interfaces, this dissertation proposes the progressive zoom navigation support to create a "step-wise" integration of horizontal exploration and vertical immersion for positive in-formation practices and experiences. This proposal is based on the Information Flaneur theory and the focus+context theory for navigation.3. This dissertation explores how to apply the generic progressive zoom navigation framework to personalized e-learning. It further designs and implements innovative progressive zoom open student modeling interfaces with the integration of visual-ization and domain knowledge modeling techniques. As a result, it introduces the progressive zoom navigation support to the integration of open student modeling and adaptive navigation support.