Toward interactive learning by concept ordering

In this paper we present a visual education tool for efficient and effective learning. The toolkit is based on a simple premise: simple concepts should be learned before advanced ones. We propose algorithms to automatically capture such pre-requisite dependence relationships between concepts. We extract concept definitions from the web's hyperlinked environment and create a concept graph arranged in a hierarchical structure and presented to the user in an interactive fashion. Thereafter, the user guides the learning process in a hyperlinked environment, by selecting a target concept, exploring the associated learning graph, learning pre-requisite concepts, and repeating this process till her learning goal is reached. To measure usefulness and correctness of our approach, we conducted a user study with 25 users using precision and recall measures. Overall, the feedback from users was encouraging. We believe this is a positive step toward building user driven interactive learning systems.