Online Education: What Works in Mathematics

Florida State University and University of Helsinki Information technology has the potential to deliver education to everybody by high quality online courses and associated services, and to enhance traditional face-to-face instruction by, e.g., web services offering virtually unlimited practice and step-bystep solutions to practice problems. Regardless of this, tools of information technology have not yet penetrated mathematics education in any meaningful way. This is mostly due to the inertia of academia: instructors are slow to change their working habits. This paper reports on an experiment where all the instructors (seven instructors and six teaching assistants) of a large calculus course were required to base their instruction on online content. The paper will analyze the effectiveness of various solutions used, and finishes with recommendations regarding best practices.

Online Genetic Algorithms

This paper present a technique based on genetic algorithms for generating online adaptive services. Online adaptive systems provide flexible services to a mass of clients/users for maximising some system goals, they dynamically adapt the form and the content of the issued services while the population of clients evolve over time. The idea of online genetic algorithms (online GAs) is to use the online clients response behaviour as a fitness function in order to produce the next generation of services. The principle implemented in online GAs, “the application environment is the fitness”, allow modelling highly evolutionary domains where both services providers and clients change and evolve over time. The flexibility and the adaptive behaviour of this approach seems to be very relevant and promising for applications characterised by highly dynamical features such as in the web domain (online newspapers, e- markets, websites and advertising engines). Nevertheless the proposed technique has a more general aim for application environments characterised by a massive number of anonymous clients/users which require personalised services, such as in the case of many new IT applications.

Services for Content Creation and Presentation in an Iconographical Digital Library

Content creation and presentation are key activities in a multimedia digital library (MDL). The proper design and intelligent implementation of these services provide a stable base for overall MDL functionality. This paper presents the framework and the implementation of these services in the latest version of the “Virtual Encyclopaedia of Bulgarian Iconography” multimedia digital library. For the semantic description of the iconographical objects a tree-based annotation template is implemented. It provides options for autocompletion, reuse of values, bilingual entering of data, automated media watermarking, resizing and conversing. The paper describes in detail the algorithm for automated appearance of dependent values for different characteristics of an iconographical object. An algorithm for avoiding duplicate image objects is also included. The service for automated appearance of new objects in a collection after their entering is included as an important part of the content presentation. The paper also presents the overall service-based architecture of the library, covering its main service panels, repositories and their relationships. The presented vision is based on a long-term observation of the users’ preferences, cognitive goals, and needs, aiming to find an optimal functionality solution for the end users.