Diagnosing the State of the Student's Knowledge in a Web-based Learning Environment

Web-based learning environments have become very popular and are used widely in universities. Thanks to their features, students are free to study with no limits of time or space, and teachers can take advantage of computer-based communication tools for creating discussion groups, shared exercises, and delivering multimedia content. But, for the teacher’s perspective, the physical distance between teacher and learner could give rise to a problem of evaluating the student's current state of knowledge. In this paper we propose a simple model to create a representation of the computer’s system beliefs about each student in the class. Without changing the tools used by the teacher to create and delivery their courses, we propose a structure of a tool which is able to represent, in a very comfortable and intuitive way for the teacher, the actual state of knowledge of the whole class of students.