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Building Educational Tools Based on Formal Concept Analysis

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Abstract

The increasing demand for quality in educational software makes it necessary to use tools and methodologies that support both the design and the development process of this kind of software. In this paper we propose Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) as the basis for a practical and well founded methodological approach to the design of educational applications. FCA is a technique that can be applied to model the linguistic conceptualizations that experts make when describing their expertise domain. Thus, FCA can be used as a complementary tool to support design decisions about the structure and the interface of educational applications. We also present how we are using FCA in two different projects: a help system for the Unix operating system, and a multimedia tutorial for improving second language text comprehension. In the final discussion we raise some questions about FCA applicability and introduce some future lines of work. © IFIP, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Authors
  1. Baltasar Fernandez-Manjon
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  2. Alfredo Fernandez-Valmayor
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Fernandez-Manjon, B., Fernandez-Valmayor, A. Building Educational Tools Based on Formal Concept Analysis. Education and Information Technologies 3, 187–201 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009641330050

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