Oscar Lin

• PhD
• Professor at Athabasca University

Online higher education provides exceptional flexibility in learning but demands high self-regulated learning skills. The deficiency of self-regulated learning skills in many students highlights the need for support. This study introduces a confidence-based adaptive practicing system as an intelligent assessment and tutoring solution to enhance sel...

This chapter presents a novel GenAI tool, called PBL Support Chatbot, designed to support project-based learning (PBL) by integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and knowledge graphs (KGs). The aim is to address common challenges in PBL, such as project complexity and curriculum alignment. The tool provides students with real-time, adaptiv...

The growing demand for self-paced online learning (SPOL) courses lead to post-secondary institutions exploring how information technology can be used to improve the quality of SPOL courses by evaluating teaching and learning strategies, methods, activities, and the way students engage with their studies. One of the main barriers in SPOL is that stu...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generating adaptive feedback by identifying the chain of weakest learning objectives to a learner working in a domain. It combines the domain model based expert-driven model with question-answering based data-driven model. The domain model is an AND/OR graph of domain knowledge structure based on the re...

This research sets out to validate a mobile app intervention that aimed to improve the participant’s mental health by asking them to engage in small daily challenges. The challenges encouraged the participant to create a better sleep, diet, and exercise routine, which in turn create better mental health. The challenges were gamified with points, ba...

Self-paced online learning provides great flexibility for learning, yet it brings some inherent learning barriers because of the nature of this educational paradigm. This review paper suggests some corresponding strategies to address these barriers in order to create a more supportive self-paced online learning environment. These strategies include...

In this study, a smart Ubiquitous Geometry (Smart-UG) system with smart mechanisms support was developed to facilitate learners’ geometry learning through measuring objects in authentic context. Further, we designed a real-time collaborative measuring function based on the augmented reality (AR) in the mobile device. Learners were required to measu...

One of the goals of adaptive learning systems is to realize adaptive learning sequencing by optimizing the order of learning materials to be presented to different learners. This paper proposes a novel approach to recommending optimal and personalized learning sequences for learners taking an online course based on the contextual bandit framework w...

Soil classification is an important but challenging problem for the re-search community. As such, current solutions for classifying soil for a wide va-riety of reasons are out of the reach of hobbyists and the small research firms. This research study focuses on comparing various machine learning algorithms on a custom database generated from Canad...

Offering online learners with a personalized, ethical, and privacy-protecting pedagogical companion that can detect their affective engagement and that can run on the devices they use to learn (edge devices) requires not only generating lightweight models but also interpretable, trustworthy, and generalizable ones. SqueezeNet is a lightweight deep...

Online education is gaining popularity because of its flexibility, accessibility , multimedia usage, and many other benefits that students enjoy. However, online learners, particularly in self-paced online learning (SPOL) courses, confront some inherent learning barriers, such as low learning awareness and engagement , lack of academic intervention...

Navigation in a traffic congested city can prove to be a difficult task. Often a path that may appear to be the fastest option is much slower due to congestion. If we can predict the effects of congestion, it may be possible to develop a better route that allows us to reach our destination more quickly. This paper studies the possibility of using a...

Adaptive learning aims to provide each student individual tasks specifically tailed to his/her strengths and weaknesses. However, it is challenging to realize it, overcoming the complexity issue in online learning. There are many unsolved problems such as knowledge component sequencing, activity sequencing, exercise sequencing, question sequencing,...

Higher educational institutions capture huge amounts of educational data, especially in online learning. Data mining techniques have shown promises to interpret these data using different patterns . However, understanding the mining patterns and extracting meaningful information from the data require reasonable skills and knowledge for the users. I...

Improving the information obtainable in untreated digital illustration is generally performed with a selected image improvement practice. The image improvement techniques play a main role in analyzing a variety of imaging modalities, such as fundus retinal image, blood slides, dermoscopic image, ultrasound, mammogram, thermal imaging, CT scan slice...

Online education is growing because of its benefits and advantages that students enjoy. Educational technologies (e.g., learning analytics, student modelling, and intelligent tutoring systems) bring great potential to online education. Many online courses, particularly in self-paced online learning (SPOL), face some inherent barriers such as learni...

The current shift from traditional classrooms to online learning in higher education calls for more attention to self-regulated learning. This research is motivated by the growing interest in potential of using learning analytics dashboard (LAD) to increase individuals' self-regulation by creating visibility into their performance in various applic...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), a group of agents that work together to solve complex problems, always have concerns around trust management among the agents in a cyber physical system. With the technological advancements in decentralization, automation, and interactions between physical and software agents, the demand for using MAS is increasing though...

In this paper, we consider a novel method of mining biometric data for user authentication by replacing traditional captchas with game-like captchas. The game-like captchas present the user with a short game in which they attempt to get a high score. The data produced from a user's game play will be used to produce a behavior biometric based on use...

Online learning plays a key role in current education system. Engagement detection in online learning is crucial as the student's success in online courses heavily depends on his/her state of mind. In our previous work, we used facial expressions labeled as engaged and not-engaged for student's engagement detection. In this paper, we use student's...

This paper presents a short review of existing visualization systems that focus on online course discussion forums. Discussion forums in online courses are used as an important means for students-students and students-instructors communications. However, a large amount of asynchronous and heterogeneous posts in the discussion forums and their compl...

Online learners participate in various educational activities including reading, writing, watching video tutorials, online exams, and online meetings. During the participation in these educational activities, they show various engagement levels, such as boredom, frustration, delight, neutral, confusion, and learning gain. To provide personalized pe...

E-learning systems based on a conversational agent provide the basis of an intuitive, responsive, engaging interface for the online learner. This paper proposes an approach to intelligent intervention and strategic pedagogical design for improving student engagement when chatting with a conversational agent. First, we used previous conversational l...

Course Offering Determination (COD) is a strategy of an educational institution to maximize the satisfaction of the students and the enrollment of the courses within budget and other resource constraint. COD is a resource allocation problem which is difficult to solve due to the complexity in students’ preferences and resource constraints. In this...

E-learning systems based on a conversational agent (CA) provide the basis of an intuitive, engaging interface for the student. The goal of this paper is to propose an agent-based framework for providing an improved interaction between students and CA-based e-learning applications. Our framework models both the student and the CA and uses agents to...

In this paper, single sample face recognition (SSFR) problem is addressed by introducing an adaptive biometric system within a modular architecture where one detector per target individual is proposed. For each detector, a face model is generated with the gallery face image and updated overtime. Sequential Karhunen-Loeve technique is applied to upd...

Well scheduling is a complex business process which includes the tasks of planning and execution of locating land, constructing, drilling, completing, and tie-in of a well. In our previous work, a multi-agent based framework was proposed to automate well scheduling, where a challenge was to automate the estimation of the price for the tasks that th...

Course offering determination (COD) is a complex task for the educational institutions by which they decides what subset of courses an academic department or program should offer in a given academic term or semester. For an effective COD, historic data in enrollment, constrained in budget, staff, and resources, and student's course selection prefer...

Efficient task allocation and resource scheduling have been challenging in oil and gas industries for many years, because they are influenced by a number of factors including resource availabilities, environment, regulations, stakeholders, finances, and market. With the advancement of information communication technologies (ICT), the oil and gas in...

High rate of students dropout in courses has been a major problem for many universities or educational institutions that offer online education. If the dropout-prone students can be identified in their early stages, the dropout rate can be reduced by providing individualized care to the students at-risk. Due to the electronic nature of the e-learni...

Practicing is very important in the process of learning physics. Experiencing physics laws and observing the phenomenon in the experiments and labs help students learn. However, some contexts like the law of orbits in physics cannot be practiced directly and students can only learn it from animation or drawings. We have designed a Kinect game for s...

Building pedagogical applications in virtual worlds is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that involves learning theories, application development framework, and mediated communication theories. This paper presents a project that integrates game-based learning, multi-agent system architecture (MAS), and the theory of Transformed Social Interaction (TSI)...

With the popularity of social networking services (SNSs) and the increase of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in terms of the recommendation of personalized services and the collective decision-making process. Usually, in an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among t...

This paper proposes an approach for creating and testing an multiagent systems based adaptive social educational game (SEG), QuizMASter, using the concept of simulated learners to overcome experimentation complexity and unpredictable student availability, as is typical with online learning environments. We show that simulated learners can play two...

With the popularity of Social Network Service (SNS) and the increasing of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in recommendation of the personalized services, and in a collective decision-making process as well. In an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among the whole us...

The intelligent agent based systems have existed for many years, only recently its surge of mainstream popularity motivated researchers to acknowledge its educational value. With the increasing usage of educational games, using intelligent agents in the game to provide reliable personalized services has become more critical. Quiz game is a game gen...

Incorporating intelligence and social behaviours into virtual worlds for learning is becoming more desirable in making them smart, adaptive, personalized, and therefore, more effective and engaging. Realistic non-player controlled characters (NPCs) are essential of a game world and are making the virtual world more real for players. This is true in...

This paper describes the design of a multiagent system that facilitates course-offering decision making for a program in an institution. We model course-offering determination for upcoming semesters as a multi-winner election with exogenous constraints that is a problem of computational social choice in multiagent systems, which has rarely been con...

Incorporating autonomy and intelligence into virtual worlds to build an engaging virtual environment for applications such as serious games is becoming more desirable. There are challenges in integrating these systems including concerns with synchronization, communication, monitoring, efficiency, and control. This paper presents an approach to inte...

With the rapid growing of users in the SNS environments, their network relationships in Internet have become as complex as in the real world. On the other hand, the user's social role plays an important role in providing individualized services, such as information recommendation in the SNS environments. However, as we know, people will switch or c...

In this paper, a video streaming system for education based on a wireless mesh network is proposed. A wireless mesh network is a self-organizing, self-managing and reliable intelligent network, which allows educators to deploy a network quickly. Video streaming plays an important role in this system for multimedia data transmission. This new system...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether differences in information and communication technology (ICT) readiness and access across countries were fundamentally related to the variable of English language adoption. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was utilized to comparatively examine the developments of ICT readiness and...

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is slowe...

The advantages of portfolios come from observing the student learning process and recording feedback. Students utilized their own learning portfolios to do learning assessment and self-correction. The research that has been done in Taiwan has shown that using a portfolio is effective in improving English speaking performances (ESP). The purpose of...

This paper presents the rationale behind the utilization of a Moodle Learning Management System for the facilitation of a blended learning approach in the Informatics department. The authors present and analyze the steps followed in order to replace the prior decentralized organizational structure of the courses, which consisted of a multitude of d...

The increasing advances of new Internet technologies in all application domains have changed life styles and interactions. E-learning and collaborative learning environment systems are originated through such changes and aim at providing facilities for people in different times and geographical locations to cooperate, collaborate, learn and work to...

Distance education has experienced profound changes due to the introduction of new technologies, especially mobile devices of different types. It is necessary to define new learning techniques which are able to capture students’ attention and to engage them in their learning activities, reducing problems like distraction generated by the use of the...

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, distance education has become a popular educational mode. In this paper, the authors propose an online image automatic annotation distance education system, which could effectively help children learn interrelations between image content and corresponding keywords. Image automatic annotation is a...

Computer system is useful for improving real time and interactive distance education activities. Especially in the case that a large number of students participate in one distance lecture together and every student uses their own computer to share teaching materials or control discussions over the virtual classrooms. The problem is that within this...

The confluence of technology convergence, market forces, and student demand for greater access is reshaping higher education institutions. Indeed, the convergence of technological innovations in hardware, software, and telecommunications, combined with the ubiquity of learning management systems, is reconfiguring and strengthening traditional teach...

The current post-apartheid system of education in South Africa requires students to be critical thinkers. Education institutions utilise a variety of assessment strategies; peer assessment, self-assessment, and group assessment are some of the formative assessments that are crucial in the promotion of students. This article reports on the findings...

Spirit diagnosing is an important theory in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), by which a TCM doctor can diagnose a patient’s body state. But this theory is complicated and difficult to master simply learned from books. To further the theory and skill of spirit diagnosing, in this paper, the authors propose a remote education system that can accep...

This study provides a combined test of the media naturalness and channel expansion theories with a study of communication media perceptions and use outcomes in the context of a college information systems course delivery. Data was collected from undergraduate students at the middle and end of a long semester. Approximately half of the students took...

This paper describes an integration of different Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) of two Course Management Systems (CMS) called Sakai and the Common Factory for Inspiration and Value in Education (CFIVE). First, when the service of CMS is provided campus-wide, the problems of user support, CMS operation and customization of CMS are cla...

Distributed workflow technology has been widely used in modern education and e-business systems. Distributed web applications have shown cross-domain and cooperative characteristics to meet the need of current distributed workflow applications. In this paper, the author proposes a dynamic and adaptive scheduling algorithm PCSA (Pre-Calculated Sched...

In traditional classes, having many questions from learners is important because these questions indicate difficult points for learners and for teachers. This paper proposes a FAQ-based e-Learning environment to support Japanese language learning that focuses on learner questions. This knowledge sharing system enables learners to interact and share...

The objective of this research is to validate the algorithm of learning effort which is an indicator of a new real-time and non-interfering based diagnostic technique. IC3 Mentor, the adaptive e-learning platform fulfilling the requirements of intelligent tutor system, was applied to 165 university students. The learning records of the subjects who...

Information Security Awareness, though known as a primary and important issue in the domain of Information Security, CSI computer crime and security survey showed poor security awareness training in public and private sectors. In many studies, the authors have found that the usage of knowledge maps helps the process of learning and conception build...

Distance learning, where instruction is given to students despite wide separations of students and teachers, is increasingly popular. Videoconferencing, which is examined in this study, is a distance learning mode of featuring real-time interaction of students and teachers and provides sequence, real-time, vision, and actual interaction. This study...

Mobile learning is e-learning delivered through mobile computing devices, which represents the next stage of computer-aided, multi-media based learning. Therefore, mobile learning is transforming the way of traditional education. However, as most current e-learning systems and their contents are not suitable for mobile devices, an approach for mobi...

Ontologies are one of the most popular and widespread means of knowledge representation and reuse. A few research groups have proposed a series of methodologies for developing their own standard ontologies. However, because this ontological construction concerns special fields, there is no standard method to build domain ontology. In this paper, ba...

Course-offering determination (COD) for educational programs is the complex task of deciding what subset of courses an academic department or program should offer in a given academic term or semester. In this paper, we first model COD decision settings, e.g. modeling students as a group of self-interested agents, and then use a group decision-makin...

Invited Papers This paper presents an approach to user modeling in QuizMASter, a multi-user educational game shows that uses multi-agent systems to create a personalized learning environment. To keep the students motivated during the games, the system creates, maintains, and uses models of all attending contestants (i.e., learners). Taking advantag...

With the rapid development of case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques, CBR has been widely applied to real-world applications such as collision avoidance systems. A successful CBR-based system relies on a high-quality case base, and a case creation technique for generating such a case base is highly required. In this paper, we propose an automated ca...

This paper presents an agent-oriented approach to modeling software systems for distributed learning to increase the functionality and flexibility of the systems and meet the requirements from the resource-oriented nature of distributed learning environments. We model a distributed learning software system as a multi-agent system using an open coll...

The goal of the study in this chapter is to support learners to engage in the active learning of common fraction operations from the constructivists’ perspective. An Internet-based Fraction-learning Intelligent Learning Environment (IFILE) is designed under the knowledge-based approach to model the learning process of the target topic. It is intend...

This paper presents an ongoing project that builds engaging, affectionate and effective pedagogical agents in 3D virtual worlds for learning. Employing the theory of Transformed Social Interaction (TSI), we design pedagogical agents with abilities of self-representation, emotional states reasoning and situational awareness. A prototype of a virtual...

Use of mobile and sensor technologies in learning has emerged as a growing research area, and has given rise to a lot of research that takes advantage of learner's location, environment, proximity and situation to contextualizing the learning process. The adaptivity and personalization in these scenarios have taken a new meaning by bringing authent...

This paper presents the conceptual design of a virtual 3D quiz game based on a multi-agent system (MAS) architecture aptly named QuizMASter. The QuizMASter supports formative assessment by providing adaptive testing and feedback using intelligent pedagogical agents within an immersive game-based virtual learning environment. This enables instructor...