PACER (Personalized Access to Open Corpus Educational Resources)

Overview

A variety of educational resources such as tutorials, electronic textbooks, and subject overviews are now available on the Web for almost every subject. Finding high quality educational resources is much less of a problem with modern Web search engines and DL search services. However, the resources that one finds have different presentation styles, target audiences, and coverage; many resources are highly redundant. The abundance of resources has created another problem: How to help students find, organize, and use resources that match their individual goals, interests, and current knowledge. In brief, access is not the issue; personalized access is.

In the context of this project we are developing a new generation of techniques for personalized access to open corpus educational resources. Our main foci are adaptive navigation support and adaptive visualization - the least investigated areas on the map of personalized information access research. These technologies support a higher level of interactivity and expressive power than what is now offered by modern adaptive information retrieval and filtering systems and take into account not just the interests, but also the current knowledge and goals of their users.

In a range of smaller-scale projects and systems listed below we are exploring and developing techniques that can provide adaptive navigation support for browsing-based access to open corpus resources and support information access through adaptive information visualization. The systems and tools we are developing are open for the educational use in other universities. We are also interested in collaborating with teams who share our goals and interests.

Funding

Project is Funded by NSF (Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS) ) through Award# 0447083

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Systems

• AnnotatEd
• Knowledge Sea II
• NavEx
• ADVisE

Recent Publications

Farzan, R. and Brusilovsky, P. (2005) Social navigation support through annotation-based group modeling. In: L. Ardissono, P. Brna and A. Mitrovic (eds.) User Modeling 2005. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, (Proceedings of 10th International User Modeling Conference, Edinburgh, UK, July 24-29, 2005) Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 463-472. [PDF]

Brusilovsky, P., Farzan, R., and Ahn, J. (2005) Comprehensive personalized information access in an educational digital library. In: Proceedings of The 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Denver, CO, June 7-11, 2005, ACM Press, pp. 9-18. [PDF]

For more refer to Publications page, sections AnnotatEd and Knowledge Sea II