Design and Implementation of Bio-Inspired Student Clustering Approach Based on Students’ Annotations on Web-based Reading Materials

When students read a book, they usually annotate important words in the text. Students may perhaps miss some important information while reading the book. If students are reminded about the potentially important annotations, they may achieve better academic performance later, in terms of having better marks for written exams, quizzes, and other learning activities. With an annotation system’s help, teachers can create online reading activities for students and review students’ annotations on the e-text. This project aims to design and implement a bio-inspired clustering method. The proposed method can cluster students into groups according their annotation behaviours. The clustering results will be used by the annotation system to find content that might be important for students, but that, they did not annotate, and remind them to review the content again. The expected outcome of the proposed method is to produce fast and accurate clustering results.

Faculty Supervisor:

Maiga Chang

Student:

Miao-Han Chang

Partner:

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

University:

Athabasca University

Program:

Globalink Research Award