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An Automated FAQ system (AUTOFAQ): Building Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) pages for ALNs

by Sloan-C

Abstract
This paper describes a software system for building frequently asked question pages. The key features of the systems described are (1) automation of acquisition of knowledge for the FAQ and (2) the dynamic building of pages for users in response to a query. The system described was created using Cold Fusion (1998), a product that interfaces web pages to relational databases. The system reduces the time required to create and maintain FAQ pages.

I. INTRODUCTION

A major aspect of Asynchronous Learning Networks is the use of computer conferencing to promote interaction among people. In a typical ALN course, conferencing is used to answer student questions, discuss issues, organize activities, post progress reports and provide interaction among participants in a course. Outside the classroom, conferencing provides the very significant advantage of allowing an instructor to answer a posted question and for all students taking the course to see that answer. This style of interaction dramatically reduces the number of duplicate questions. In the traditional course format, outside of class, students frequently ask the same questions in one-on-one sessions with the instructor either in person or by email. By reducing this redundancy, computer conferencing as a central element of ALN has resulted in significantly decreased time required by instructors and increased student satisfaction. The latter comes from rapidly finding an answer to a question, and from increased interaction with peers.

In the spirit of reducing the amount of time required to answer questions and provide information rapidly to learners in ALN courses, this paper presents a method for building and providing on-line knowledge bases of frequently asked questions. We have found in our offering of the ALN Workshop on "Getting Started with Online Courses" (see http://www.aln.org) that learners often have similar questions from one workshop offering to the next. We hypothesized that providing a searchable knowledge base of questions and answers would provide learners with a way to get immediate help for their problems without waiting for someone to answer on the conference. We do feel, however, that the human contact and answer is very important; the rationale for the FAQ system is that immediate feedback may be sometimes more useful human contact. Moreover, instructor or facilitator time can be reduced by answering questions by referring to known FAQs. For example, in an interaction with a student, the instructor can point out that the answer to the student’s question is contained in a specific FAQ that the student can then look up.

Traditionally, FAQs are easily built simply by creating web pages with questions and answers. However, knowledge in such FAQs becomes difficult to search and maintain when many questions and answers are available. One of our design objectives was to create a web-based system based on a relational database of questions and answers, so that the knowledge would be rapidly searchable and maintainable. We included the feature of permitting submission of FAQs by users with approval by the FAQ administrator. The ultimate goal was to create a system that would reduce the time for facilitators (instructors) and improve the learning by providing a rapid path to needed knowledge.

One of the major benefits for developing an automated FAQ database for the ALN Web group was the prospect of improving the facilitation of our on-line workshops. Currently, we employ about 1 facilitator per 20 or 30 learners. An online automated FAQ might enable us to reduce the number of facilitators or the amount of time that they must spent to deal with questions on-line. A key feature of the FAQ system developed is the capability for anyone, anywhere to add to the FAQ information. In our work with adult learners, this capability is important since the problems of our learners are likely to appear again in subsequent offerings of our workshops.

We hope that the system described, called AUTOFAQ, will be useful for both on-campus and off-campus ALN. For use with traditional courses, the system can be used in large courses with multiple sections to help ensure consistency across sections. Off-campus, AUTOFAQ can serve learners who have similar questions no matter where they might be.

GOALS
Similar to many other knowledge-based systems, our goal of implementing AUTOFAQ was to provide existing knowledge to ALN learners. Other goals were to reduce the time requirements for facilitating workshops, to improve customer (workshop participants) satisfaction, and to increase learners' retention. We hope retention will improve due to the continued availability of the questions and the answering of questions from multiple viewpoints. We hope knowledge provided by AUTOFAQ will also be useful in research; for example, by providing information roll-ups about which course elements learners have most trouble with. Analytical studies might, for example, find the correlations between different types of learning exercises and questions asked, between questions asked and learning styles, or between questions and the method of material presentation. Currently, our priority is to use AUTOFAQ to provide a better quality interaction with learners. We hope that AUTOFAQ will provide faster and better response time to learners, and reduce the time required for facilitators to answer repeated questions.

II. IMPLEMENTATION OF AUTOFAQ

In general, Frequently-Asked-Question (FAQ) systems on the Internet's World Wide Web are structured from a few HTML pages. Information added to these pages is usually static. The reason of popularity of this form stems from the ease of maintaining a few static HTML pages. However, this technique becomes unwieldy as the collected information grows. Unfortunately, the amount of knowledge that can be comfortably put on a web page is quite limited -- on the order of perhaps a few dozen questions and answers; certainly not enough for a long workshop or a multi-month online course.

The availability of database-web interfacing methods provides a way to scale-up a FAQ system to permit dynamic creation of web pages. We used Allaire Cold Fusion (www.allaire.com), a web/database development tool, to create AUTOFAQ. First, we created a relational database using Microsoft Access. The database was used to store all information concerned with the FAQ. SQL (structure query language) connections to the database were created to provide web interfaces for entering and maintaining FAQ knowledge. In our first trials, knowledge was entered from our experience with offering our on-line course.

AUTOFAQ was divided into two parts, one for the user and the other for the system administrator. Each part is explained below.

A. User Interface
The user interface consists of (1) a Search Form and (2) a FAQ entry form.

1. Search Form
Users are allowed to search for keywords that appear in questions and answers anywhere in the FAQ database. Keywords and Boolean operator are permitted in the search criteria.

Search query expressions

Users can enter multiple words separated by comma, e.g., software, Microsoft, Allaire. The comma is treated like a logical OR. If the commas are omitted, the query expression is treated as a phrase, so documents would be searched for the phrase "software Microsoft Allaire."

Logical operators can be used: software AND (Microsoft OR Allaire). To include an operator in a search, users have to surround the operator with double quotation marks: e.g., software "and" Microsoft. This expression search for "software and Microsoft."

Generally, a simple query employs the STEM operator and the MANY modifier. STEM searches for words that derive from those entered in the query expression, so that entering "find" will return documents that contain "find," "finding," "finds," etc. The MANY modifier forces the documents returned in the search to be presented in a list on a relevancy score.

Figure 1 below is an example search of the FAQ database. In this example, we have searched for the keyword "form."

Figure 1. Search the FAQ

The search result is similar to Figure 2.

Figure 2. Search Results

The search result page presents questions that are related to the search criteria with hyperlinks, number of records found, and search scores. If the user wants to look further for other information associated to the question, he or she can click on the hyperlink of that question. The screen produced is similar to Figure 3.

Figure 3. Hyperlink Example

The information presented includes the question, answer, category, and related questions with hyperlinks. At the end of each FAQ page, there is a question asking for feedback from the user about whether this information answered his or her question. Three selections are given to user to choose from: Yes, No, and Didn't apply. After selecting a choice of feedback and clicking on the 'Submit' button, the submitted information including the question ID number and the feedback choice will be recorded and added into the 'feedback' table of the database. This information will be used to analyze the utility of each question and answer. Whenever a question is retrieved from the database, the counter field of each question is incremented. The access and utility information recorded is used to modify questions.

In addition to be able to search for specific knowledge or keywords from the database, the user can also choose to display all available questions with or without category grouping. This can be done by clicking on either the "Display all questions" or "Display all questions grouped by category" hyperlinks in the Figure 1.

If the user clicks on the "Display all questions" hyperlink, the next screen displays a list of all available questions. The screen produced is similar to Figure 4.

Figure 4. Display all questions

The user may click on each question hyperlink to view further information associated with each presented question. The screen produced will be the same as Figure 3.

If the user clicks on the "'Display all questions grouped by category" hyperlink, all categories will be presented as hyperlinks.

Figure 5. Display all questions grouped by category

When clicking on each category hyperlink, all questions that belong to that specific category are presented. Figure 6 is an example when we clicked on 'Allaire Forums' category.

Figure 6. Questions under Allaire Forums category

Again, if the user wants to look further for the information associated with each question, he or she can click on each quesiton hyperlink. The screen produced is similar to Figure 3.

2. User FAQ Entry Form
End-users may suggest a new question for the FAQ (Figure 7). After a FAQ is submitted, AUTOFAQ generates and sends email notification to the FAQ administrators about each new entry. After receiving the notification, the administrators evaluate the relevance and utility of the submitted question. If the FAQ is useful, the administrator can optionally approve the FAQ as is or edit the FAQ before inserting it into the database. After approval, a "thank-you" message is generated by the system and sent to the submitter. This approval mechanism was chosen to insure the quality of FAQs entered in the database.

Figure 7. End-User Entry Form

B. System Administrator

1. Administrator Maintenance Form
This form contains an "Add New Question Category" form, "Add New Question/Answer form", "Edit/Update/Delete FAQ page", "Re-index FAQ Collection", and Maintain User FAQ" form (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. FAQ Maintenance Page

2. Add New Question Category
This form is used when the administrator adds a new category into the database or modifies existing categories. Questions are classified into categories. While adding a new question/answer into the main FAQ database, sometimes the user might find that a desired question category does not exist. To resolve this problem, the administrator uses this form to create a new category in the ‘Category’ table of the database. The administrator can also use this form to correct the existing categories, if needed.

Figure 9. Add/Modify Questioning Category Form

3. Add New Question/Answer Form

Figure 10. New Question/Answer Form

This form permits the administrator to add new questions/answers, including step-to-step instructions, other help information, and pointers to course materials into the FAQ database. After filling out all the information and clicking on the 'submit' button, the name of the person who performs the action will be recorded as the author of this record into the database. After submission is completed, the user will be asked whether he or she wants to add other questions related to this question. If the user clicks on the 'Yes' hyperlink, he or she can pick a related question out of the list of all available questions in a pull-down box menu. This action will associate the existing questions with the newly added question. In addition, a question can be associated with more than one related question.

4. Edit/Update/Delete the FAQ
This form is the main administrator page. It allows the administrator to do several tasks, including adding a new question-answer, updating or deleting existing question-answers. This form shows a list of 10 questions/answers from the FAQ database at a time. If there are more than 10 questions/answers present in the database, a 'Next' link allows user to move on to next page. An 'Edit' hyperlink permits the user to edit the information on that particular question/answer from the FAQ database. After clicking on the 'Edit' link, the representation of information will be similar to 'Add New Question/Answer' screen. Questions can be deleted or added from this page.

Figure 11. Edit/Update/Delete the FAQ Form

5. Re-index FAQ Collection
Verity Collections (Verity, 1998) are used to provide rapid indexing of the materials in the database. Periodically, these collections must be reindexed to provide optimal performance. Verity Collections can be used to index data in various different database management systems including Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Oracle and others.

6. Maintain User FAQ Form
Figure 12 shows the form used by the administrator to edit, update, or delete a suggested question/answer provided by a user. AUTOFAQ generates an email message to the administrator whenever a suggested FAQ is submitted. From a link in the email, the administrator can access this form and approve or disapprove or edit the submission.

Figure 12. FAQ-by-User Maintenance Form

The 'Edit/Update/Modify' hyperlink on the right most column of the screen allows the user to modify the record. If clicked, the screen will present the information as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. Edit/Update/Modify FAQ-by-User Form

While reviewing the question, the user can easily modify or add other relevant information by using this form. After filling in information, the user must click on the 'Add this question to the FAQ Main table' button in order to approve this question and add it into the main database. When adding the new question into the main FAQ table, the system automatically generated and sends a thank you email to the person who previously submitted this question. Meanwhile, the 'Approved' field of the database is automatically converted from 'No' status to 'Yes' status. Then, the sequence of adding a new question to the database continues (asking to add the related questions and so on.). After reviewing the question, if the user believes that the question should not to be added into the main FAQ, the user may want delete this question. This action can be accomplished by going back to the previous page and clicking on the 'Delete' hyperlink.

NOTE:
Currently, the AUTOFAQ system is being readied for use in the ALN Workshops that are offered on-line as part of work of the ALN Web. The AUTOFAQ system will be available for download soon. To run AUTOFAQ, a copy of Cold Fusion is required (http://www.allaire.com). AUTOFAQ may be used in any course or workshop. If you are interested to get the AUTOFAQ system, please send us a email.

REFERENCES

1. Access, Microsoft Corporation, 1998
2. SQL Server, Microsoft Corporation, 1998
3. Cold Fusion, Allaire Corporation, http://www.allaire.com
4. The ALN Web, http://www.aln.org
5. Verity Corp, www.verity.com