Witschel, Hans Friedrich
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Enhance classroom preparation for flipped classroom using AI and analytics
In a flipped classroom setting, it is important for students to come prepared for the classroom. Being prepared in advance helps students to grasp the concepts taught during classroom sessions. A recent student survey at Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW), Business School, Switzerland, revealed that only 27.7% students often prepared before a class and only 7% always prepared before a class. The main reason for not preparing for classes was lack of time and workload. A literature review study revealed that there is a growth of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), for example, chatbots and teaching assistants, which support both teachers and students for classroom preparation. There is also a rise in the use of data analytics to support tutor decision making in real time. However, many of these tools are based on external motivation factors like grading and assessment. Intrinsic motivation among students is more rewarding in the long term. This paper proposes an application based on AI and data analysis that focuses on intrinsically motivating and preparing students in a flipped classroom approach.
Ensuring Action: Identifying Unclear Actor Specifications in Textual Business Process Descriptions
In many organisations, business process (BP) descriptions are available in the form of written procedures, or operational manuals. These documents are expressed in informal natural language, which is inherently open to different interpretations. Hence, the content of these documents might be incorrectly interpreted by those who have to put the process into practice. It is therefore important to identify language defects in written BP descriptions, to ensure that BPs are properly carried out. Among the potential defects, one of the most relevant for BPs is the absence of clear actors in action-related sentences. Indeed, an unclear actor might lead to a missing responsibility, and, in turn, to activities that are never performed. This paper aims at identifying unclear actors in BP descriptions expressed in natural language. To this end, we define an algorithm named ABIDE, which leverages rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We evaluate the algorithm on a manually annotated data-set of 20 real-world BP descriptions (1,029 sentences). ABIDE achieves a recall of 87%, and a precision of 56%. We consider these results promising. Improvements of the algorithm are also discussed in the paper.
Workplace Learning - Providing Recommendations of Experts and Learning Resources in a Context-sensitive and Personalized Manner
Support of workplace learning is increasingly important as change in every form determines today's working world in industry and public administrations alike. Adapt quickly to a new job, a new task or a new team is a major challenge that must be dealt with ever faster. Workplace learning differs significantly from school learning as it should be strictly aligned to business goals. In our approach we support workplace learning by providing recommendations of experts and learning resources in a context-sensitive and personalized manner. We utilize user s' workplace environment, we consider their learning preferences and zone of proximal development, and compare required and acquired competencies in order to issue the best suited recommendations. Our approach is part of the European funded project Learn PAd. Applied research method is Design Science Research. Evaluation is done in an iterative process. The recommender system introduced here is evaluated theoretically based on user requirements and practically in an early evaluation process conducted by the Learn PAd application partner.
Training and re-using human experience: a recommender for more accurate cost estimates in project planning
In many industries, companies deliver customised solutions to their (business) customers within projects. Estimating the human effort involved in such projects is a difficult task and underestimating efforts can lead to non-billable hours, i.e. financial loss on the side of the solution provider. Previous work in this area has focused on automatic estimation of the cost of software projects and has largely ignored the interaction between automated estimation support and human project leads. Our main hypothesis is that an adequate design of such interaction will increase the acceptance of automatically derived estimates and that it will allow for a fruitful combination of data-driven insights and human experience. We therefore build a recommender that is applicable beyond software projects and that suggests job positions to be added to projects and estimated effort of such positions. The recommender is based on the analysis of similar cases (case-based reasoning), "explains" derived similarities and allows human intervention to manually adjust the outcomes. Our experiments show that recommendations were considered helpful and that the ability of the system to explain and adjust these recommendations was heavily used and increased the trust in the system. We conjecture that the interaction of project leads with the system will help to further improve the accuracy of recommendations and the support of human learning in the future.
Random walks on human knowledge: incorporating human knowledge into data-driven recommenders
We explore the use of recommender systems in business scenarios such as consultancy. In these situations, apart from personal preferences of users, knowledge about objective business-driven criteria plays a role. We investigate strategies for representing and incorporating such knowledge into data-driven recommenders. As a baseline, we choose a robust and flexible paradigm that is based on a simple graph-based representation of past customer cases and choices, in combination with biased random walks. On a real data set from a business intelligence consultancy firm, we study how the incorporation of two important types of explicit human knowledge – namely taxonomic and associative knowledge – impacts the effectiveness of a data-driven recommender. Our results show no consistent improvement for taxonomic knowledge, but quite substantial and significant gains when using associative knowledge.
KPIs 4 Workplace Learning
Enterprises and Public Administrations alike need to ensure that newly hired employees are able to learn the ropes fast. Employers also need to support continuous workplace learning. Work-place learning should be strongly related to business goals and thus, learning goals should direct-ly add to business goals. To measure achievement of both learning and business goals we pro-pose augmented Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In our research we applied model driven engineering. Hence we developed a model for a Learning Scorecard comprising of business and learning goals and their KPIs represented in an ontology. KPI performance values and scores are calculated with formal rules based on the SPARQL Inferencing Notation. Results are presented in a dashboard on an individual level as well as on a team/group level. Requirements, goals and KPIs as well as performance measurement were defined in close co-operation with Marche Region, business partner in Learn PAd.