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This is now an inactive research group it's members have moved on. You can find them at their new research groups:

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Learning Technologies

Themes

This theme focuses on research, development and evaluation of tools and techniques which apply distributed hypermedia and multimedia to areas of learning and teaching in Higher Education, and industrial and commercial training.

The group works in close collaboration with the Faculty's Learning and Teaching Task Force on a number of projects supporting the application of multimedia educational materials, their delivery in a networked environment, and their evaluation with classes of students at the University.

We also have a number of collaborative projects with other subject specialists from across Higher Education and industry.

Research Areas

Adaptive Hypermedia Interfaces

Adaptive hypermedia systems allow the presentation of information in a form that is appropriate to the individual reader or learner. Active research issues in this area include the creation of user models, understanding the learning styles of users, the type of adaptations that ease the learning process, the representation of information for automatic adaptation and the use of open hypermedia systems to deliver adaptation.

Agents to Support Learning

Using agent architectures to research reasoning about domain knowledge and individual student's educational needs. This research area is directly related to adaptive hypermedia as a technology for supporting the knowledge representation and the production of user models.

Distributed Learning Environments

We are interested in all aspects of the development, integration and impact of learning technologies in education. The university is a member of the Worldwide University Network (WUN) which is a global alliance of research-led universities pursuing co-operative research and leading edge teaching. The group is involved in the development of tools and the evaluation of such approaches, and issues such as eTutoring and eCare of students and the use of Digital Libraries for resource based learning.

Hypermedia Design and Authoring

Large Scale Hypermedia Applications for Education, the development of metrics to facilitate the analysis of the authoring process. diagrammatic representation of the design of hypermedia applications and the evaluation of the application of such tools. Multimedia Interfaces Technologies to combine interaction with audio and video streams to enhance the educational experience.

On-Line Assessment

The use of computer based testing is becoming routine within higher education, and the group runs the e3an project, aimed at helping engineers to collect and share question banks. This raises research issues about how to search for suitable questions, and interoperability between assessment packages. We are also working on automated marking of computer based code and plagiarism detection.

Tecnology in the Lecture Hall

As technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous it becomes interesting to examine how it can aid the classroom experience. We have a project on the use of personal response systems to obtain and provide feedback to students during lectures, and are looking to extend this approach to using computers and other hand held devices.

Projects