Title: An intelligent framework for activity led learning in network planning and management

Authors: Rahat Iqbal; Faiyaz Doctor; Nazaraf Shah; Xiang Fei

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB, Coventry, UK ' Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB, Coventry, UK ' Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB, Coventry, UK ' Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB, Coventry, UK

Abstract: Monitoring students' activity and performance is vital to enable educators to provide effective teaching and learning to engage students with the subject and improve their understanding of the material. We describe the use of a fuzzy linguistic summarisation (LS) technique for extracting linguistically interpretable rules from student data describing prominent relationships between activity/engagement characteristics and achieved performance. We propose an intelligent framework for monitoring individual or group performance during activity and problem-based learning tasks. The proposed system is developed as a set of services to cater for data heterogeneity and deployable on a cloud computing platform. We present a case study and experiments in which we apply the fuzzy LS technique for analysing the effectiveness of using a group performance model (GPM) to deploy activity led learning (ALL) in a master-level module. Results show that the fuzzy rules can identify useful relationships between student engagement and performance.

Keywords: student performance monitoring; fuzzy systems; fuzzy linguistic summarisation; activity led learning; ALL; network planning; network management; student monitoring; individual performance; group performance; problem-based learning; PBL; cloud computing; case study; student engagement; higher education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2014.062228

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2014 Vol.12 No.4, pp.401 - 419

Published online: 21 Jun 2014 *

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