Welcome To iHelp!
The iHelp suite of tools is made up of a number of web based applications designed to support both learners and instructors throughout the learning process. The most well established of these applications is the iHelp Discussion system, which acts as a forum for students to converse with one another, with subject matter experts, and with their instructors. This system integrates with the existing academic role structure in courses to seamlessly support the various kinds of users that exist (students, markers, tutorial assistants, instructors, etc.) and the permissions and needs that they have with their courses. In addition to displaying the public discourse within a course to the various human actors, special care has been taken to ensure that this information is preserved in a machine readable format and accessible for research-based intelligent systems.
The second of these tools is the iHelp Learning Content Management System (LCMS), also called iHelp Courses, designed to deliver online courses to students working at a distance. This system provides students with a portal to multimedia rich course content, including interactive examples and exams. In addition, students are connected with their peers and their instructors through a synchronous chat application. This chat application follows the browsing pattern of the student, so as they navigate through the course content of discussion forums they are able to chat with others who are at a similar spot in their studies. Finally, instructors are provided with a rich set of course authoring and administration applications which control how, when, and to whom various pieces of content should be displayed. Like the iHelp Discussion system, care has been taken to preserve student interaction with the system in a machine readable format for use by research systems.
In addition to these three production quality tools, there are a number of ongoing research projects connected within the iHelp suite dealing with intelligent e-learning systems. These efforts include the development of a student modelling server to help match similar students together for peer help, a dynamic planner for delivering learner personalized content, and community building applications. While development of these new applications is ongoing, a number of aspects of these tools have been deployed and tested with a variety of classroom settings. This research and development activity has been conducted within the [http://www.cs.usask.ca/research/research_groups/aries/ Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems] (ARIES) Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. Support for these projects has been provided in part by the TeleLearning Network Centres of Excellence (1995-1999), the [http://www.lornet.org/ LORNET] NSERC Research Network (2003-Present), as well as the University of Saskatchewan and the Government of Saskatchewan through the [http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/branches/elearning/tel/ Technology Enhance Learning] program.
A live demonstration of iHelp is available by going to http://ihelp.usask.ca.