Question-Answer Support in a Distance Education System: VIEW Classroom

Kaoru Katayama (9551022)


This thesis describes a concept and facilities of VIEW Classroom, a distance education system supporting interactions between teachers and students, especially for asking questions and answering them.

VIEW Classroom provides a facility to answer the same questions as the past ones automatically utilizing Question-Answer Database which keeps the past questions and answers. By using this, it is possible for a teacher to reduce her/his overload and for students to be given answers, if they are similar questions.

A question consists of a key-phrase selected from teaching materials and a content of the question such as 'Explain in detail'. Question-Menu is a window including contents of a question which teachers expect to ask before lectures and were asked in the previous lectures. This facility is used for teachers to grasp quickly content of each question and select good ones. In order to express questions in texts, it is easier to judge whether a question is the same as the past one or not.

VIEW Classroom provides a facility to select suitable answers for a questioner. If there are several answers for a question in Question-Answer Database, this facility selects answers asked by the past questioner who has similar characteristics to a new questioner.