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The Virtual University of Tunis, Realisations and Perspectives
Houcine CHEBLI
Université Virtuelle de Tunis
Centre Urbain Nord, Siège de l'INSAT, BP 234 - 1080 Tunis Cedex
e-mail : Houcine.chebli@fst.rnu.tn Fax : +216 71 706 200
Mohamed JEMNI
Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Techniques de Tunis
5, Av. Taha Hussein, B.P. 56, Bab Mnara 1008, Tunis, TUNISIE
e-mail : Mohamed.Jemni@fst.rnu.tn Fax: (+216) 71 39 11 66
Abstract : Since its creation in 2002, the Virtual University of Tunis (VUT) devotes a
particular attention to research and innovation in both pedagogy and technology and promotes
the national research teams working in this field. We present in the first part of this paper a
description of the first experimentations of e-learning in Tunisia. The second part of the
paper is dedicated to present research activities of the VUT in partnership with the Unity of
Research of Technologies of Information and Communication (UTIC) of the HSSTT.
Keywords: e-learning, cases study, pedagogy, innovation, research, innovative e-learning
tools and environment.
1. INTRODUCTION
The VUT was created in January 2002. It has two main objectives: first to ensure a proportion
of courses by e-learning methods for a population of students in continuous increasing
number. Second to contribute in the modernisation of the education system by the use of the
new technologies of information and communication. To attempt its goals, the VUT realised a
global plan for training staff (administrative, technical and professors), producing courses to
be diffused in the Internet and integrating progressively e-learning methods in Universities. In
this context, the VUT trained more than 170 tutors, 220 authors and more than 360 directors
and academic supervisors. Furthermore, more than 80 courses are now under development
within many unities of multimedia production created by the VUT.
An other aspect worth to highline is the international cooperation. In fact, believing that e-
learning needs a global effort to develop standards and new adapted pedagogy, the VUT
established international partnership and cooperation with several European and north
American universities and looks forward to reinforce this aspect with new cooperation
specially with Arab and African universities.
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We present in the first part of this presentation a description of the first experimentations of
e-learning in Tunisia, in particular a local Intranet web based experimentation of 130 students
of the Higher School of Sciences and Techniques of Tunis (HSSTT) in 2002 and an Internet
Web Based experimentation of almost 2000 student belonging to a network of Institutes of
Technologies in Tunisia in 2003. The second part of the presentation is devoted to present
research activities of VUT in partnership with the Unity of Research of Technologies of
Information and Communication (UTIC) of the HSSTT.
2- CASES STUDY
2.1 Intranet Experimentation
a) Description
Believing that e-learning is different from classical learning and that needs a new pedagogy
which takes in consideration the new situations and tools of learning and teaching, and in
order to explore the different aspects of this new mode of teaching and to analyze how it can
be efficiently realized, the UTIC team proceeded to realize a pilot innovative experience of e-
learning in Tunisia. It developed two courses of MS-Word and MS-Excel and started
teaching a group of 130 students of the first year of computer science bachelor. The courses
were developed by teachers with the help of two specialists in multimedia to treat images,
audio and video sequences and to prepare flash animation and Java applets.
The group of the 130 students was divided into 8 groups of 16 students. All students received
8 hours training in operating system and 2 hours training in the use of the platform.
b) Evaluation of the experience [5]
We note at first, that the experience started at the beginning of November 2001 and finished at
the beginning of February 2002. To evaluate this experience, we have performed two kinds of
analysis:
- Analysis of user appreciation : questionnaires were distributed to both students and teachers
in order to obtain their appreciation about different aspects. For students, questionnaires
focused, particularly, on the facility of using the platform, course’s structure,
communication,… Whereas, for teachers, the questionnaires concerned two points of view:
the pedagogic strategies and quantification of efforts required for this new learning and
teaching mode, such as time of content creation, time spent to communicate with students
(respond to e-mails, Chat, forum animation) and time needed to correct assessments.
- Statistical analysis of data delivered by the platform: our object here is to know the rate of
the use of tools and resources and to constitute eventually relations between the relevant
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criteria and aspects of e-learning such as the use of tools and time of connection, number of
visits…
Fig.1. Students appreciation of the experience.
The analysis of questionnaires shows many facts presented in the points below :
- More than 85% of students have appreciated the experience as shown by the figure 1.
- Indeed many students have some knowledge before pursuing the two courses, the majority
have learned new things (Figure2).
0
20
40
60
80
100
noyes
Fig.2. Number of students who learned new knowledge.
- Students have been used to the new mode of learning gradually. The figure 3 shows that the
respect of deadlines of evaluations was improved gradually.
0
10
20
30
40
50
Eval4Eval3Eval2Eval1
Fig.3. Non respect of deadlines of evaluations
Experience evaluation
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
excellentvery goodgoodenough goodmediumbadvery b a d
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- The questionnaire shows that most students prefer e-mail tool to communicate (figure 4),
few students used chat and a very small number of students used forum.
0
20
40
60
80
mailChat
Fig. 4. The most used communication tool
- Most students find that the chat tool is useful but not necessary, and the majority used it for
others objects rather than learning or didn’t used at all (Figure 5)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
necessarynot usefuluseful
Fig.5.a Appreciation of chat tool
0
10
20
30
40
50
don't useotherlearn
Fig.5.b The object of chat use
2.2 Internet Experimentation
A first pilot experience of e-learning started in February 2003 in collaboration with the
general direction of the Institutes of technologies in Tunisia. The experience involved almost
2000 students of two fields : « Management of enterprises» and « administration and
communication ».
a) Management of enterprises :
681 students of the first level were subscribed to the two courses : « General introduction to
the Management » and « French Language », 718 students of the second level were
subscribed two the courses « Micro Economy» and « Analytic accounting of management»
and 138 students of the third level were subscribed to the two courses « Finance » and « tax
system».
5
0
50
100
150
200
Rades Nabeul Sousse Mahdia Sfax Gafsa Gabes Jerba
Geographic repartition of students
Fig.6. Geographic repartition of students of the first level of Management of enterprises
b) Administration and communication
175 students of the first level were subscribed to the two courses : « General introduction to
the Management » and « French Language », 153 students of the second level were
subscribed two the courses « marketing » and « French Language ».
c) Experience with other universities:
The VUT developed and diffused on-line several courses in many other disciplines such us :
mathematics, computer science, physics, electronics, …The purpose is to give the opportunity
to students to e-learn these courses in complement to face to face learning.
Economy
54%
S.V.T
12%
Elctrical
engineering
2%
mathematics
5%
Computer science
10%
Physics
17%
Computer science
mathematics
Physics
Electrical engineering
S.V.T
Economy
Fig.7. Development of on-line courses by discipline
2.3 Main results
From the two experiences we have enumerated the following positive points :
- Elimination of psychological barrier : students can ask questions and do pretests without the
hesitation and the inconvenience of classical situations.
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- Discrete contacts : student can freely communicate with his teachers or colleagues via e-mail
or chat.
- Personal annotation : indeed courses are available, students can take annotations and
remarks which they find pertinent.
- Possibility of feedback : students can review all notions at any time.
- Respect of individual rate : every student can learn at his appropriate rate.
- Amelioration of pedagogical methods : teachers benefit of environment providing
sophisticated LCS to produce contents of high quality.
- Permanent availability of courses : teachers invest once in course production, furthermore
they concentrate in their main task ( i.e. teaching, helping and tutoring students.)
- Flexibility of teaching schedule : the constraints of scheduling traditional teaching and
training are eliminated.
3. RESEARCH ASPECT :
e-learning is becoming an important tool that allows the flexibility and the high quality of
modern learning process. Notice that, the aim of developing new training models and defining
new didactic contents is to give more efficiency to this learning mode. However, almost of
those educational processes are based on software tools and systems such as on-line
platforms, which are, mainly, focused on how to deliver information, lacking the principal
agent of the process: the student.
In this context, UTIC with the support of the VUT is conducting a research project called
PERSO [3,4].
3.1 The PERSO Project
The gowl of PERSO is to answer the two following questions:
First, why do we provide the same content and the same amount of details to all students
when they do not all have the same background?
Secondly, why do we present a course in the same manner to the entire group when it is
heterogeneous and all students do not have the same preferences?
Our suggestion is to propose courses adapted to users with very different backgrounds and
prior knowledge of the subject. For example, students with some knowledge of the subject
would not be taught the known material again, and less prepared students would get more
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details. To guaranty more efficiency in practice, courses should be adapted automatically to
the student by means of a system, that analyses student background and preferences, and
determines the parts of course needed with the desired form of presentation.
The system PERSO addresses this specific problem and tries to match the student’s particular
needs by recommending to each an appropriate training content. It offers an adaptive e-
learning environment, where learners with different learning goals and different learning
aptitudes are treated differently, by building a model of knowledge and preferences about
each user.
PERSO is mainly based on the elaboration of dynamic questionnaire’s generator to model
the student background regarding the subject to be taught. It uses an open approach where
the student answers the system question with a free verbal statement. The system performs an
analysis of the student answer by calculating its semantic closeness to the correct answer,
previously stored in the system. The semantic closeness is calculated by use of a powerful
techniques named Latent Semantic Analysis [6,7].
Fig. 8. Architecture of the generator of questionnaires
The user model developed next to the questionnaire is used to generate automatically an
appropriate training content for each student. In order to build a new course, PERSO tries to
Dynamic
questionnaire
generator
Question
Answer analyzer/ Level
calculus
Student
Student level
calculated
Yes No
Continue
Y/N ?
Answer
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exploit previous experimentations and solutions when creating a new personalized course by
the use of a case based reasoning approach.
PERSO is composed of five components: the curriculum, the student model, the analyzer, the
adapter system and the planner [3,4]. The following figure illustrates these components and
the interactions between them.
Fig.9-ERSO architecture
3.2 The automatic answering tool
The aim of this tool [8] is to reduce lecturers’ work load and to give an immediate answer to
the student (when possible) by exploring the cumulative experiences from previous students’
answers for the benefit of new ones. It is well known that in every learning session of a given
course, students may ask the same questions and that tutors (who may be different) may
answer the same answers. Our approach consists of storing questions/answers (with the
permission of the tutor) in a data base. If any e-mail’s similarity occurs regarding asked
and/or answered questions, the tool tries to search for this information in the data base and
! Hypermedia adaptive
course
!
Stored
solution
!
Stored cases
! Learnin
g
ob
j
ect ! Student’s media
preference
! Student’s background
! question
learner
! response
Student model Curriculum CBR system
Planner
Analyzer
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answers automatically the student by giving him the stored data. Otherwise, the question will
be submitted to the tutor. The functioning of the tool is summarized in figure 10.
A prototype of the answering tool is currently under development [8]. It is based on open
source software i.e. My Sql database, tomcat web server, JSP code and Linux operating
system. We plan in the future to integrate it in the system PERSO in order to experiment and
evaluate it before making it available at the internet for free use.
5. CONCLUSION
We presented in this paper a description of the first experimentations of e-learning in Tunisia
in addition of main activities of the VUT in partnership with the Unity of Research of
Technologies of Information and Communication (UTIC) of the HSSTT. Finally, we reiterate
the will of the VUT to share its experiences and products and to built cooperation and
partnership with international partners.
Automatic
answering
tool
Tutor
Student
Data base
Answer
Answer
Question
Question
The tutor
answers new
questions that
do not exist in
the data base
Research of the
question in the
data base
Tutor
Interface Student
Interface
Treatment in the
data base
The student
asks a questio
n
and waits for
the answer
LSA
Fig. 10. General architecture of the answering tool
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6. REFERENCES
[1] Arroyo, I., Conejo, R., Guzmand, E. and Woolf, hB.P., “An Adaptative Web-Based
Component for Cognitive Ability Estimation”, in Proceedings of AIED’01, pp. 456–466,
2001.
[2] Brusilovsky P., Eklund J., Schwartz E., “Web-Based Education for All: A Tool for
Developing Adaptive Courseware”, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 30, 1-7, pp.
291-300, 1998.
[3] H. Chorfi & M. Jemni, PERSO : Towards an adaptative e-learning system, to appear
in the “Journal of Interactive Learning Research, Special Issue on Computational Intelligence
in Web-based Education” 2004.
[4] H. Chorfi & M. Jemni, PERSO: A System to customize e-training, 5th International
Conference on New Educational Environments, May 26-28 2003, Lucerne, Switzerland.
[5] H. Chorfi & M. Jemni, Evaluation and perspectives of an innovative Tunisian e-learning
experimentation, International Conference Advances in Infrastructure for e-business, e-
education, e-science and e-medecine on the Internet, l'Aquila, july 29 – August 04 2002,
Italy.
[6] Gounon P., Lemaire B.“Semantic Comparison of Texts for Learning Environments” . In
F.J. Garijo , J. C. Riquelme Santos, M. Toro (Eds): Advances in Artificial Intelligence -
IBERAMIA 2002, Berlin: Springer Verlag LNCS 2527, 724-733.
[7] Landauer, T.K., Foltz, P., & Laham, D. “Introduction to Latent Semantic Analysis”.
Discourse Processes, 25, pp. 259-284, 1998.
[8] M. Jemni & Issam Ben Ali : Design of an automatic answering tool for e-learning
environment, International Conference on Engineering Education, October 16-21, 2004,
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA.
[9] Web site of the Virtual University of Tunis : http://www.uvt.rnu.tn
[10] Web site of the HSSTT : http://www.esstt.rnu.tn
[11] Wilke, W., Bergmann, R., (1998) Techniques and Knowledge Used for Adaptation
During Case-Based Problem Solving, Proceedings of IEA-98-AIE, Springer-Verlag, Berlin
Heidelberg New York.
