I recently encountered a group of very enthusiastic teachers, who wanted to convince me to try a new e-learning environment, with astonishing quizzes, and drills of extreme originality. However, as I’d last used computers in the seventies, I was initially sceptical. Back then computers had just been used to send humans to the Moon. It was hard for me to make the leap from those machines to the machines of today. And quizzes seemed to be a strange use of such a powerful resource.

Nevertheless, I found quizzes to be interesting when they are randomly generated from huge question and answer databases. Wims can do that, and other e-learning systems can do it too.

But Wims can do more: it comes with state-of-the-art syntax analysers, which understand a variety of specialised languages, which enables the server to deal with open answers to open questions.

The price of e-learning

Computer-aided learning is a good solution for many students, particularly when they need to repeat the same training again and again. Present software tools allow you to design attractive interactions, which emphasize clearly, concepts that are difficult to raise with other more traditional tools.

Have you ever tried to author an interactive exercise for your students? If so you may have found that you worked for an entire afternoon to create an interaction lasting ten minutes for the average student. So the throughput is about 25:1 (25 times ten minutes of work to produce an interaction lasting 10 minutes). This throughput ratio can be bigger or smaller, depending on your ambition and the complexity of the interactive sequence. If your ambition is to produce it as a TV show, a throughput of 30,000:1 would not be surprising.

Now, what if your next class is tomorrow? How can you author an interesting sequence in such a short time? That’s where Wims comes in. It uses powerful generators to translate an educational intention into readily usable interactions. This article explains how it works, and why it’s not possible for so many powerful applications to be packed in a single widely distributed proprietary product.

Wims as an exercise server

Ever found an interesting server for educational exercises? Not just drills, and quizzes, etc. I mean something really interesting, something you want to use for more than a few minutes. If you have, Wims is a better one. Go to the Wims site, and have a look at these examples:

Some examples

You can either access the site directly or by going to one of the mirror sites, see the link “mirrors” in the upper part of the main page.

Two students… collaborate?

Let’s imagine two students who are in neighbouring seats, each with their own computer. They are trying to get a good score in a module dedicated to absolute values in maths.

They are given exactly the same exercise.

Here is what Dean sees

Here is what Clive sees

As the challenge is important, Dean asks Clive: “Where should I click?” Clive considers his neighbour’s display, and says: “Click left”. So Dean understands and gets a good first score. Unfortunately, the teacher configured the exercise to ask the same question many times. As the second figure appears, Dean asks Clive “Where should I click?” and gets the same answer: “Click left”… So now Dean is sure to be on the right path, and when the next question comes along, he clicks left without asking, and again it’s the correct answer. Unfortunately for Dean the correct answer for the fourth question is not the left hand figure. When Dean shouts “Oh what a stupid exercise!” Clive considers the display, and says “Dean, don’t you know? An absolute value must always be positive!”

Now let’s consider the situation: after a few seconds, the two students come to make a verbal exchange at a very high level:

“An absolute value must always be positive!” shows a mathematical rule, which is a highly cognitive object. Clive does half of the teacher’s work.

When students collaborate on a Wims exercise, they cannot exchange information at low level. So they communicate high-level topics, doing half of the teacher’s work

A little later, Dean might ask more questions, but organising a racket to steal useful answers from clever students is impossible: even clever students are forced to study each individual case before giving an answer. Communicating knowledge at a high level is the only possible way.

When you get under the Wims hood, you discover powerful engines

Wims is built on top of a Unix or GNU/Linux system, which favours communication between processes.

The official mirrors of Wims currently use the following engines: