Plenary Lecture
Web Mining usage in Course Development
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Dr. Peter Toth Principal director of Centre for Engineering Education Obuda University Hungary E-mail: toth.peter@tmpk.uni-obuda.hu |
Professor Imre J. Rudas President of Obuda University Hungary E-mail: rudas@uni-obuda.hu |
Abstract: The development of e-Learning, the use of Learning Management System and Learning Content Management System are becoming more and more dominant in engineering education, especially since “caned” solutions are easy to “configure” for desired purposes. However, the quality issue is only a second criterion in development process, making content and conventional teaching strategies to be the main issue. The two main criterion is “content and form” – the precise pedagogic aims, didactic structure and suitably tailored environment. Apart from these, we should also evaluate the customs of accessing the system and course pages of users, both tutors and learners. Thus we obtain some usability indicators by usage of web mining methods in order to recognize and understand the users’ activities and behavior, to identify learning strategies and problems in virtual learning environment. By this approach the web mining method accommodates organically to a development model of virtual learning environment. This presentation shows such indicators and their relationship to the efficiency and the effectiveness of virtual courses.
Brief Biography of the Speakers:
Dr. habil. Peter Toth is Professor of Centre for Engineering Education at Obuda University, Hungary where he is participating in technical initial teacher training and in-service training courses. Currently he is a principal director of the Centre.
He earned his MSc in Engineering Education at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Peter Toth has Ph.D and habil. degree in Educational Research from Eötvös Loránd University.
He plays leading role in planning, development and managing traditional and virtual engineering programs. Dr. Toth is doing research on pedagogy of virtual learning environment, improvement of problem-solving thinking and analyzing of spatial abilities in engineering education. His actual research area is analysis of students’ activities and behavior in virtual learning environment by web mining methods.
He has been contributing in some European researches and projects on pedagogical aspects of e-learning and development of creativity and abilities of future engineers and teachers as well. He is member of Committee for Teacher Training of Hungarian Rectors’ Conference and secretary of Informatics Section of Pedagogical Committee of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Toth has issued about 75 papers in several journals and conference proceedings.
Prof. Dr. Imre J. Rudas graduated from Bánki Donát Polytechnic, Budapest in 1971 and received the Master Degree in Mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest while the Ph.D. in Robotics from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1987. He is active as the President of Obuda University and as a professor of John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics.
Prof. Rudas is a Fellow of IEEE, Administrative Committee member of the Industrial Electronics Society, member of the International Board of the Robotics & Automation Society, Chairman of the joint Hungarian Chapter of these Societies, and RAS and IES Chapter Coordinator of Region 8. He is also a registered expert of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the EU.
He is the President of the Hungarian Fuzzy Association and Steering Committee Member of the Hungarian Robotics Association and the John von Neumann Computer Society.
Prof. Rudas serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, member of editorial board of Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Control Engineering Practice, member of various national and international scientific committees. He is the founder of the IEEE International Conference Series on Intelligent Engineering Systems Prof. Rudas was the General Co-chair of ICAR2001, and also serves as General Chairman and Program Chairman of numerous scientific international conferences.
His present areas of research activity are: Robot Control, Soft Computing, Computed Aided Process Planning, Fuzzy Control and Fuzzy Sets. Prof. Rudas has published more than 290 papers in various journals and international conference proceedings.