Modeling Academic Education Processes by Dynamic Storyboarding

In high-level education such as university studies, there is a flexible but complicated system of subject offerings and registration rules such as prerequisite subjects. Those offerings, connected with registration rules, should be matched to the students’ learning needs and desires, which change dynamically. Students need assistance in such a maze of dynamically changing opportunities and limitations. To cope with this problem, a new storyboard concept for academic education, called “dynamic storyboarding” is proposed to assist university students. Dynamic storyboarding is based on the idea of semi-formally representing, processing, evaluating, and refining didactic knowledge. This storyboarding is more appropriate in managing high-level education than is general artificial intelligence knowledge representations such as frames. This is because the structure of dynamic storyboarding is driven by the semi-formal and multilayered nature of didactic knowledge in university education. A feasibility study showed that storyboarding can be used to supplement an academic educational system, such as the dynamic learning need reflection system (DLNRS) of Tokyo Denki University (TDU) in Japan. Concretely speaking, didactic knowledge in the university curricula was proven to be easily and clearly represented by dynamic storyboarding. This contributed to the students’ dynamic learning activities by supporting features that help students review and adapt their own individual curricula.