Automatically augmenting learning material with practical questions to increase its relevance

Relevance of a concept being taught to the real world is believed to contribute to an increase in the intrinsic motivation and engagement of a learner. Such relevance is often found lacking in learning material such as textbooks. Practical issues and problems one could face while learning or implementing new concepts are a means of establishing such relevance. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically augment learning material with practical questions about the concept being learnt. We use questions and answers from StackOverflow, a leading social Questions and Answers (Q&A) website to augment an electronic textbook interface, thus connecting the concepts being taught to the real world. For achieving this automatically, we first mine the textbook content to locate words and phrases which are likely to be the most important concepts on each page of the textbook. We then select only those words and phrases which appear as `tags´ in StackOverflow, typically defined by users while asking and answering questions. Using permutations of these tags as queries, we query the StackOverflow database to obtain relevant questions and answers to augment any given page. We present an interface to augment textbooks with such questions using the aforementioned method. We also present the results of a student survey examining the effectiveness of the augmentation in establishing relevance to their learning.