A Learner-Centered Navigation Path Planning in Web-based Learning

The main issue addressed in this paper is how to help learners navigate in existing web-based learning resources. Towards this issue, we introduce a learner-centered navigation path planning. The key idea is to provide learners with a space, in which they can see through WWW pages to plan a navigation path. In this paper, we also demonstrate an assistant system, which is composed of hyperspace map, page previewer, and path previewer. The page previewer generates an overview of each WWW page in the map by extracting representative information from the HTML file. The path previewer helps learners make a sequence of the pages previewed as navigation path plan. These facilities help learners decide which page to visit and plan a navigation path without visiting hyperspace. This paper also describes a preliminary evaluation with the assistant system. The results indicate that the system facilitates learning and navigation in a more complicated hyperspace.