AIMS, or Agent-based Information Management System, is an educational hypermedia and information retrieval system for task-based learning. It was the PhD research of Lora Aroyo at the Universiteit Twente.
It offers students different ways to access and learn the topics of a course:
It has a graphical, graph-based browser for concepts, called “aquabrowser”. The interface shows a fish-eye view of the concept structure. The view is updated as you browse through the concept structure.
In AIMS the student is typically working on a task that belongs to a course. (There is also a no-task mode.) In addition to browsing, another way to use AIMS is to perform a search for keywords. The search is augmented with the task-related keywords to give results that are not only relevant for the search terms but also for the current task.
AIMS stores the user’s knowledge and information about visited documents and performed tasks in a user model.
AIMS has been used and evaluated with students from the educational technology department at the University of Twente.
We describe the user interface for students and for instructors in detail.
Note that although AIMS is a recommender system, just like TV Scout for instance, its adaptation task is very different. The “task” of the learner can be compared to a set of preferences, but recommendations depend on the learner’s knowledge of the different topics, and that knowledge is a moving target as it changes while using the system.