Computers Supported Education

The early optimism for how technology might transform teaching and learning practices in mainstream school classrooms has long faded in many countries around the world. Whilst early research findings suggested that this was due to obvious barriers such as access to the technology itself, more recent attempts to scale student-access have illuminated other factors and provided a more sound theoretical foundation for us to understanding the processes and products of scaling educational technology innovations. This keynote will use findings from key projects and initiatives to highlight what is being learned – and how this might inform future endeavours to realise a more 21^st century curriculum.

Quality is important in industrial production and all kinds of services. In particular, education is one very important service for our society. Since the Bologna process, European universities try to do their best using the resources the society has given them to satisfy the needs of the European citizens.

Quality is very important but it has no value without a well-established system of continuous improvement based on measurement and knowledge of our capabilities and the needs of the society. The best way to measure the results of a service is by the way of the evaluation. Evaluation always needs to consider two inputs: self-evaluation and external evaluation, but it is particularly interesting when evaluation is considered for improving, not when evaluation is considered as inspection.

During this paper, a review and comparative analysis between quality and evaluation in industry and in universities, based on the author´s own experience, will be done. The experience of industries and other services implemented in our world is a source of knowledge for improvement, so the main part of this paper will be addressed to the review of what is done in industries and how to translate it into the European Higher Education Area. Finally, some proposals for daily activity in university education will be presented, based on the experience of the research group EduQTech.

Recently we observe an enormous grow of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But it proves that the dropout rates of MOOCs are very high. One of the main causes are missing of necessary capabilities of students, inability of students to manage their study and a missing appropriate didactic model. In this paper we compare the dropout rates of MOOCs, regular courses and courses using new didactical approaches as blended learning and flip the classroom. We introduce a new teaching learning model to explain high dropout rates of students in distant learning courses. Finally we discuss possible ways how to teach 21^st century skills as cooperative working, learning, creativity, networking and how to solve real life problems in a context sensitive approach. Our research findings are based on educational experiments at Delft University of Technology (DUT).

Intelligent Tutoring Systems often profit of intelligent components, which allow to personalize the proposed contents’ characteristics and sequence. Adaptive sequencing, in particular, requires either a detrimental data collection for users or extensive domain information provided by experts of the educational area. In this paper we propose an efficient domain independent method to model student progress that can be later used to sequence tasks in large commercial systems. The developed method is based on the integration of domain independent Matrix Factorization Performance Prediction with Kalman Filters state modeling abilities. Our solution not only reduces the prediction error, but also possesses a more computationally efficient model update. Finally, we give hints about a potential interpretability of student’s state computed by Matrix Factorization, that, because of its implicit modeling, did not allow human experts, to monitor user’s knowledge acquisition.

The global aim of this research is to identify, map, and form a taxonomy of the ways, the elements, and the factors that affect learner engagement with virtual worlds when Hybrid Virtual Learning models are used. Thereafter, the more specific objective of the research is to provide clear guidance to educators who are already utilising or are planning to embed this learning model in their educational agenda. For the examination of this topic, a quanti-qualitative research approach is used, as this allows to investigate the subject both from the students’ and the instructional designer’s point of view. The sample of this study consists of both undergraduate and postgraduate university students. Participants are requested to fill in two different questionnaires, one before using the virtual world and one after completing their assignment. That way it is possible not only to fully mirror their thoughts, preconceptions, and opinions towards the use of virtual worlds in Higher Education, but also the impact that the instructional designer’s choices have on enhancing the opportunities for interactions. In addition, a focus group is being observed – both in the physical classroom and in the virtual world – during the course of the assignment. The focus of this experiment was on the impact that the orientation/induction process has on learner engagement. The findings suggest that students’ interactions with the content of the virtual world, and the in-class student-to-student interactions, have stronger impact on student engagement. This is because students’ simultaneous co-existence in both environments eliminated the drawbacks of each educational approach, and broadened the network of interactions.

Although there are various personalised and adaptive eLearning systems developed, a culture factor has been not sufficiently considered in adaptive and personalised learning environments. This paper presents a personalised and adaptive system based on individual differences in cultural backgrounds (individualism and collectivism). A culturally adaptive teamwork system called IdeasRoom is used to implement cultural additions. The IdeasRoom system has adaptations to its interface to include two different versions of design: individualist version (IND) and collectivist version (COL). The paper summarises an initial evaluation of the proposed system. This evaluation of the proposed IdeasRoom system relates to the responses of the participants of the study that involved 52 postgraduate students, so that the version that was not personalised to participants’ cultural backgrounds is compared with the version that was personalised to participants’ cultural backgrounds in terms of their perceptions of usability their preferences of design. The findings show that the participants had perceptions of usability that are shown to be at a higher level when teamwork learning systems are personalised to participants’ cultural backgrounds, which suggests that these results based on identifying users’ cultural backgrounds are of significant importance. Also, this evaluation concludes that participants’ preferences for experiencing a system are matched to their cultural inclinations.

Providing online course materials on the course website has become standard practice in most institutions. These materials are intended to support students’ study after class and especially revision before an examination. Most students download and print out these online materials uploaded by teacher, which reduces the advantages of being online. Besides which, students sometimes suffer from the stress of revising a large amount of material. Maximising the potential of these online materials as an alternative method of revision is a challenge in the area of technology enhanced learning. To address this issue and overcome the challenge, we have developed the self-revision electronic course materials framework (SRECMATs) that features direct access to specific materials through keyword browsing and keyword searching, allowing users to gain a quick overview of extracted keywords along with easy access to related materials. This feature restructures the uploaded materials and delivers intelligent online materials for students. The first prototype was developed and launched for a Design of Information Structures module in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. This paper evaluates the proposed framework in order to assess student satisfaction, understand students’ perceptions of using the system prototype, and understand whether or not the developed features are appropriate for practical use.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an immersive pedagogical approach where the learners’ foreign language represents the medium of classroom instruction. In this paper we will discuss its applicability to primary school, addressing children aged between 6 and 7. Such an approach, relatively novel due to the young age of students, requires ad hoc pedagogical methods, learning resources and multimedia interactive interfaces in order to foster bilingualism and – potentially – even multilingualism. This work will cover all the aspects involved, starting from an overview of the state of the art, defining the research questions, describing the design and implementation of suitable Web solutions, showing a pilot experimentation, and finally discussing the obtained results.

Uncertainties exist in intelligent tutoring. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model may provide useful tools for handling uncertainties. The model may enable an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to choose optimal actions when uncertainties occur. A major difficulty in applying the POMDP model to intelligent tutoring is its computational complexity. Typically, when a technique of policy trees is used, in making a decision the number of policy trees to evaluate is exponential, and the cost of evaluating a tree is also exponential. To overcome the difficulty, we develop a new technique of policy trees, based on the features of tutoring processes. The technique can minimize the number of policy trees to evaluate in making a decision, and minimize the costs of evaluating individual trees.

This developmental research study aimed to design, implement and evaluate an online educational game to improve the quality of life for seniors aged 55 years and older. The game Live Well, Live Healthy! (cvje2.savie.ca) is a Bingo game in which the learning content in the study is integrated into the mechanism of the game. A “pre-test/post-test” single group methodology measured the impact of the game on three dimensions of quality of life: psychological, physical, and social. A total of 56 seniors played for a week in multiplayer mode involving real-time interaction with at least two other participants. The results indicated that the educational game improved the seniors’ perception of a majority of the variables concerning the three dimensions: physical (fatigue, sleep, eating habits); social well-being (building ties, social connectedness, friendships) and psychological well-being (depression, difficulty doing activities, mood and feeling of being loved). Some variables (sadness, isolation, proximity to family and physical habits) generated a weak perception of positive benefits for these seniors.

Computing has recently been introduced as a core subject in British schools, meaning that children need to learn computer programming. Teachers have to be prepared to deliver the new curriculum and children need the correct environment and support to succeed. This paper discusses TuringLab, a challenge-based learning system for the Python programming language and proposes Skramble, an embeddable Python programming environment for use within existing learning systems. TuringLab has been used to teach children how to programme at a number of volunteer-led coding clubs. Children engaged well with the system, and the volunteers, who acted as teachers in these sessions, found it an extremely valuable educational tool. Skramble is an open source environment and is designed to abstract functionality such as code execution, error handling, syntax analysis, code testing, output capture and package management: allowing this feature-rich environment to be easily integrated into existing learning systems.

E-Learning platforms comparison helps users select the most suitable platform according to their individual pedagogical needs and objectives. However, from decision support perspective, selecting the optimal platform in terms of tools and services that meet user’s requirements still remain difficult to achieve. Thus, we investigate in this paper an e-Learning evaluation method based on a symbolic approach using preference operators and Qualitative Weight and Sum method (QWS) [1] providing a total order among the considered e-Learning systems. However, even the totality ensured by the preference operators we developed, they are still not sufficient from decision making perspective, since they can return a ranking in which several alternatives are all equally and indistinguishably (un)satisfactory. Therefore, we combine our symbolic approach with a flexible ranking method based on linguistic quantifiers and fuzzy quantified propositions along with two new parameters for quality assessment refinement, called least satisfactory proportion and greatest satisfactory proportion, denoted by lsp and gsp respectively, to be able to discriminate among alternatives evaluated as equal. The hybrid method obtained can significantly refine the ranking providing users with valuable information to help them make decisions.

In recent years, presentation tools such as Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint play an important role in knowledge transfer. Despite the fact that over the last decade we have witnessed various technological advances and new media types, existing presentation tools still mainly support the presenter-driven delivery of static content. On the other hand, research in information visualisation illustrates that interactive data exploration and storytelling can significantly improve the extraction and transfer of knowledge from raw data sets. Our goal is to improve data-driven knowledge transfer in presentation tools by applying existing information visualisation concepts. Therefore, we derived a set of general requirements for interactive information visualisation in presentation tools. A prototype of a presentation tool which addresses these requirements has been developed based on the MindXpres presentation platform. Ultimately, the presented requirements might serve third-party slideware vendors as input for improving support for data-driven knowledge transfer in existing presentation tools.

This paper presents AuthELO an authoring environment that can be used for the configuration of logging and authoring of automated feedback for exploratory learning objects (ELOs). ELOs are web components (widgets) that can be integrated with learning platforms to synthesise highly interactive learning environments. AuthELO has been developed in the context of the MCSquared project that is developing a platform for authoring interactive educational e-books. This platform comprises an extendable set of diverse widgets that can be used to generate instances of exploratory activities that can be employed in various learning scenarios. AuthELO was designed and developed to provide a simple, common and efficient authoring interface that can normalise the diversity of these widgets and give the ability to non-experts to easily develop or customise the feedback that is provided to students using a data-driven approach. In this paper we describe the architecture and design characteristics of AuthELO and a small-scale evaluation with activities in a logo-based 3D microworld called Malt+. We reflect on both the challenges of the authoring process and the pedagogical potential of the feedback when these activities are used by students.

Student monitoring, the most common practice in Learning Analytics (LA), has become easier and more efficient thanks to the use of tracking approach that consists of collecting data of users and of their interactions throughout learning platforms. While LA gives considerable assistance to the tutors in the tasks of monitoring online learning, it also creates major drawbacks for the learners. For instance, tracking approach in LA raises many privacy questions. As for the learners, knowing that their personal data are being used, even for educational purposes, they could radically change their perception on e-learning technologies. Not to mention that these concerns would have a strong impact, sometimes very negatively, on not only their behaviors but also their learning outcomes. To better understand the side effect of LA, more particularly the privacy issues in e-learning, the research effort presented in this paper covers two main aspects. First, it outlines various tracking approaches in e-learning. Second, it analyzes how the learners perceive the use of their personal data and the related privacy issues. To do so, an experiment has been carried out with the participation of students from three different universities in France and one university in Germany. The major contribution of this paper is the awareness-raising of privacy concerns in exploiting tracking data in e-learning, which are often overlooked by researchers and learning content providers.

The integration of social media in education has been raising new challenges for teachers, students and organizations, in both traditional and technology-mediated learnings settings. Formal higher education contexts are still mostly anchored and locked up in institutional LMS, despite the innumerous educational digressions that educators have been conducting throughout social media networks. One of the biggest challenges in contemporary educational needs consists on managing the integration, validation and reporting on educational processes, goals and student performance, when they are widely spread in several formal and informal contexts. In this chapter a system for the integration of LMS and social media is presented, as well as evidence on its practical usage. A set of social network analytics are also brought forward as features that are currently being added to the referred system.

In modern information society, workers need to continuously update and improve their knowledge and competences, and new means for supporting effective learning in the workplace are sought. In this work, we describe a process-based approach to e-learning centered around the well-established Business Process Management discipline. In short, we propose that business process models are used to represent the organizational knowledge and the learning contents. We adapt such models to specific learning needs, by augmenting the business process with a learning path specification that outlines learners objectives, activities and expected outcomes. The key idea then is that a learning session corresponds to simulation and monitoring of a route on a defined learning path. To develop such a process-based e-learning platform we leverage Model Driven Engineering technology allowing for efficient model transformation and platform development. We illustrate the approach on a realistic case study.

Games have emerged as promising tools to make learning more fun. Pedagogical effectiveness of an educational game can increase if its behavior changes according to learners’ play and learning styles. Several models for categorizing learning and play styles exist, but not many studies simultaneously detect and utilize both style groups. To alleviate this, as the first contribution, we analyzed and compared existing learning and play style models, and chose the most suitable one from each group. Personality style models were also discussed. We then created a questionnaire based on Honey and Mumford’s Learning Style Questionnaire and Bartle’s Player Types, and collected data from 127 South Korean elementary school children. The results indicated that specific play styles were clearly more dominant (Killer 18%, Achiever 24%, Explorer 32%, Socializer 41%), whereas dominant learning styles were distributed more evenly (Activist 33%, Reflector 37%, Theorist 20% and Pragmatist 25%). As the second contribution, we presented the foundations of a generic adaptation model for utilizing learning and play styles for designing adaptive educational games.

This paper describes a tool with supporting methodology for efficient teacher assisted marking of open assignments based on student answer ranking metrics. It includes a methodology for how to design tasks for markability. This improves marking efficienty and reduces cognitive strain for the teacher during marking, and also allows for easily giving feedback to students on common pitfalls and misconceptions to improve both the learning outcome for the students as well as the teacher’s productivity by reducing the time needed for marking open assignments. An advantage with the method is that it is language agnostic as well as generally being agnostic to the discipline of the course being assessed. The ranking metrics also provide implicit plagiarism detection.

This study explored the use of a web-based tool entitled ‘Problem Distiller’ designed to support teachers in uncovering why their students have problems understanding Threshold Concepts. Data collected involved interviews with two math teachers, invited to experiment the Problem Distiller tool and Think Aloud protocol. Content analysis was used to process and analyse the collected data. Findings show that teachers found it helpful when the information they entered through the Problem Distiller was fed back as they constructed an online diagnostic quiz. Focusing on the teachers’ understanding of why the students have problems is an effective way of tackling the barriers posed by Threshold Concepts and can be integrated with existing strategies and teaching approaches.

Teacher education providers have an important role to play in preparing the next generation of teachers to be able to use ICT in their future teaching practice. Government reports and research have consistently argued that graduates are ill-prepared in their use of ICT [1]. In Australia an increasing regulatory environment means that teacher education providers need to design programs that target the attainment of specific ICT professional standards. To contribute to the discussion of ICT challenges in teacher education, this small-scale study investigated where 69 pre-service teachers acquired the ICT skills/resources commonly used in primary and secondary schools. Findings suggest that many of the generalized skills/resources were learned in their everyday life prior to undertaking their teaching program, and that they acquired a lesser number through their university coursework and/or professional experience placements. A number of implications for teacher education conclude this paper.

Assessment method sends messages to students to define and priorities what is important to learn and ultimately how they spend their time leaning it. Traditional grading methods are largely based on human judgments, which tend to be subjective. In addition, it is based on sharp criteria instead of fuzzy criteria and suffers from erroneous scores assigned by indifferent or inexperienced examiners, which represent a rich source of uncertainties, which might impair the credibility of the system. In an attempt to reduce uncertainties and provide more objective, reliable, and precise grading, a sophisticated assessment approach based on type-2 fuzzy set theory is developed. In this paper, interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy sets, which are a special case of the general T2 fuzzy sets, are used. The transparency and capabilities of type-2 fuzzy sets in handling uncertainties is expected to provide an evaluation system able to justify and raise the quality and consistency of assessment judgments. A simplified implementation of interval type-2 fuzzy system using the basic knowledge of type-1 fuzzy is presented. A comparison between the use of type-1, interval type-2 fuzzy systems and the simplified IT2 fuzzy systems in reducing uncertainties and providing more transparent and fair assessment that can reflect needs of individual students and foster development is presented.

In the OpenAnswer system it is possible to compute grades for/to the answers to open-ended questions given to a class of students, based on the students’ peer-evaluation and on the teacher’s grading work, performed on a subset of the answers. Here we analyze the systems’ performances, expressed as the capability to infer correct grades based on a limited amount of grading work by the teacher. In particular, considering that the performance may well depend on alternative definitions (valorization) of several aspects of the system, we show an analysis of such alternative choices, with the intention of seeing what choices might result in better system’s behavior. The factors we investigate are related to the Bayesian framework underpinning OpenAnswer. In particular we tackle the different possibilities to define probability distribution of key variables, conditional probabilities tables, and methods to map our statistical variables onto usable grades. Moreover we analyze the relationship between two main variables that express knowledge possessed by the student and her/his peer-assessing skill. By exploring alternative configurations of the system’s parameters we can conclude that Knowledge is in general more difficult than Assessment. The way to reach such a (not astonishing) conclusion provides also a quantitative evidence of Bloom’s ranking.

This study investigated whether a Wii Bowling tournament could improve older adults’ attitudes towards digital games and factors affecting their gaming experience. This study applied a two-group pre-post design. A total of 142 older adults aged 60 and over were recruited from 14 community and senior centers (N = 81 in the experimental group; N = 61 in the control group). The participants in the experimental group formed a total of 21 teams, which played against one another once a week for a period of eight weeks. The findings indicated that the Wii Bowling tournament improved older adults’ attitudes towards digital games (t = 2.53, p = .01). More importantly, the authors identified six factors that contributed to the positive gaming experience of older adults in community and senior centers.

Research highlights a need for a structured approach, consistent support and continuous professional development for teachers in order to facilitate the development of 21^st Century pedagogies and the integration of technology, as well as to support their changing role in the classroom. This chapter describes a particular model of 21^st Century teaching and learning, and explores teachers’ experiences of its implementation in their classrooms. A total of 15 teachers who attended a Contextual Mathematics module on a postgraduate certificate course provided consent for their data to be used in this study. A qualitative, case study approach has been taken in order to explore the teachers’ experiences of using the model of teaching and learning, as well as their perceptions of the students’ experiences. A constant comparative analytic technique has been used to analyze their written reflections. Results indicate that the approach has the potential to address many of the issues associated with the integration of 21^st Century teaching and learning, identified in the literature.

This chapter presents the design and evaluation of a digital storytelling workshop for older adults held across multiple workshop iterations and examines the adjustments made across these iterations. Adjustments to the design were made prior to the second and the third iteration to accommodate the needs of the learners. Results from older adult participants’ evaluations of three iterations of the workshop, involving seven different workshop groups, are also presented. Researchers found that the facilitation approach and socially supportive environment were important to the digital learning experience and were seen as benefits that workshop participants appreciated. Furthermore, participants reported increased digital storytelling skills and, to a lesser degree, other computer and internet skills. Additionally, participants reported enjoying the contribution of others, sharing stories with each other, and being able to learn something new. The main challenge reported by participants was the lack of sufficient time provided in the workshop.

This article studies the conditions of use of a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) by primary school teachers. It first presents a triangulated model to explore Virtual Learning Environments’ adoption in primary schools. The theoretical models cover three approaches: the social acceptance, the practical acceptance and the situated acceptance. The situated acceptance of teachers is studied according to the model by using activity theory and qualitative methods (individual and collective interviews). Our study describes how teachers (8 participants) perceived the role of the VLE in the evolution of their working practices (maintaining, transforming or restricting existent practices), in their relationship with parents and in the follow-up of their students.