Estimating Learners ’ Subjective Impressions of the Difficulty of Course Materials in e-Learning Environments

One of the problems of present e-learning compared with traditional classroom lectures is that teachers cannot assess learners’ interest in learning or willingness for learning. According to the achievement motivation theory, the learners’ interest or willingness is deeply related to the learners’ subjective impressions of the difficulty of each course material (SIDC). In this paper, we propose the method for estimating the learners’ SIDC by observing their behaviors during e-learning, in order for the teachers to be able to assess the learners’ interest or willingness. In estimating the learners’ SIDC, we use different feature processing criterion for each learner based on the correlation between the learners’ SIDC and the features extracted from their behaviors, which is differently modeled by SVM for each learner, considering that the correlation between the learners’ SIDC and the features may depend on the learners. In the result of our experiment, the learners’ SIDC were estimated with accuracy of 85.8% on an average.