Higher Education for All. From Challenges to Novel Technology-Enhanced Solutions

Transitioning to higher education is often a stressful experience, with incoming students facing similar issues year after year. This chapter presents two years of data collection regarding the concerns of Computing secondary school pupils when considering their upcoming transition into the first year of higher education. Over the two-year period, it can be seen that pupils continue to demonstrate concerns regarding topics related to money, jobs and course achievement as opposed to those related to environment or social issues. The consistency between relative areas of concern over the two years is striking, further suggesting that an understanding of these issues might help higher education institutions to better support their incoming students.

In this paper, we present an overview of the results achieved by a few applications of educational research towards overcoming the difficulties in the Amazon region’s educational scenarios for a better higher education. Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, demands an urgent increase in the number of qualified professionals, mostly for its Industrial Pole. However, Amazonas has a poor record of educational performance in all scholastic grades. The situation is especially critical in the rural areas, where the population, separated by miles of uncharted jungle, is usually only accessible through the rivers. This geographic isolation transforms the simplest educational activities into a daily challenge. A sustainable solution to the lack of professionals needs the ability to reach the students with learning activities wherever they are. In this work we share experiences in two different scenarios: the Capital and the rural areas. For the capital, the authors began a large-scale program to address three aspects: (i) reducing student dropouts; (ii) enlarging the reachable community; (iii) offering different levels of knowledge. Four different learning activities were prepared: undergraduate and graduate classes, a talent development program, short-term events and intensive training. For the rural towns, the authors describe the educational experience with undergraduate and graduate distance learning and the ongoing research using learning analytics and adaptive models based on the LMS Moodle. The results are encouraging, as the measurement of the positive impacts of the reported initiative clearly indicates that a structured program would bring solid and long lasting benefits. It is also worth noticing that the proposed solutions may also fit other learning scenarios.

Often, academic programs require students to write a thesis or research proposal. The review of such texts is a heavy load, especially at initial stages. Natural Language Processing techniques are employed to mine existing corpora of research proposals and theses to further assess drafts of college students in information technologies and computer science. In this chapter, we focus on examining specific sections of student writings, first seeking for the connection of ideas identifying the pattern of entities. Subsequently, we analyze the justification and conclusions sections, studying features such as the presence of importance in justification and the level of speculative words in a conclusion section. Experiments and results for the different analyses are explained in detail. Each analysis is independent and could allow the student to analyze their text with a set of tools with the aim of improving their writing.

There is a quest to provide education from anywhere, at any time and for anyone, using digital information and communication technologies. However, there is no equivalent increase in support for the instructors responsible for maintaining such courses, which is evidenced by the large number of dropouts and failures in such courses, to which learners justify as a lack of support from instructors. Instructors, however, complaint about the huge effort to manage such courses. In order to provide this support, instructors would have to: (1) to discover situations of pedagogical interest occurring in their courses; (2) understand these situations; (3) make decisions to address them; (4) monitor and evaluate the impact of the decision made. However, instructors do not master these abilities, nor is it practical or appropriate to ask them to do so. We propose a process, and an authoring solution that implements it, to guide pedagogical decision-making in online learning environments. Our proposal is based on decision-making informed by educational data and data visualization, with the assistance of an authoring system to promote cooperation between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We conducted experiments, using a MOOC named MeuTutor-ENEM, to evaluate the process and the authoring solution, and the results indicate that the process helped instructors make better pedagogical decisions, and the authoring solution was positively perceived by the instructors.

Group formation in CSCL refers to the process of adequate selection and grouping of students to create scenarios and situations that help the learning to occur more smoothly. Objective: this paper presents a systematic mapping of the literature about group formation for CSCL intended to characterize the state of the art in the field as well as identifying gaps and opportunities for further re-search. Method: We designed a protocol to collect and analyze the literature on group formation in CSCL and carried it out using a rigorous systematic re-view/mapping method established in the literature. Initially, we collected 3571 papers about CSCL that had the potential to provide important information about research on group formation. After initial screening, 423 were recognized as papers related to group formation. After a careful analysis, 106 papers met the necessary requirements/criteria defined in our protocol. Results: each of the 106 papers was categorized according to their contributions using information extracted from this systematic mapping, and a framework to classify research in the field is proposed. Conclusions: this work provides an extensive analysis of the literature on group formation for CSCL offering an overview of the state of the art as well as opportunities for future research. We also create an infographic to summarize our findings, available at http://​infografico.​caed-lab.​com/​mapping/​gfc/​.

This chapter discusses how high-level knowledge about human expertise features can be modelled, represented and further interpreted to support learning and tutoring interactions, promoting adaptivity. For this, as an instance, the research focuses on the domain of computer programming. In the tutoring of many domains of complex nature, most past work has tended to concentrate on the theoretical principles of how humans acquire expertise. The few implementations there have been are domain-specific. However, the problem of providing an epistemology for describing knowledge about problem statements and students’ states of belief has been neglected. This research treats these problems through (1) a method based on genetic graphs for managing the complexity of courseware authoring of problem statements and (2) a general process for dynamic modelling a learner’s knowledge by overlaying it against the domain expertise features. Both the method and the model are supported by implemented prototype software tools that integrate the educational environment MULTIPLA. To evaluate them, empirical observations have been carried out, focusing on the generality of genetic graphs as an authoring language to provide a unified expert-student framework for developing skills.

Considering culture both in technology-enhanced learning and human computer interaction research is an important issue since culture has a strong impact on many cognitive and affective processes including those related to learning. Also, people with different cultural backgrounds develop alternative interpretations and strategies and do not value their environment in the same way, and this reflects on their interactions and satisfaction with learning technologies, especially e-learning systems (ELSs). Thus, adapting ELS to specific users, taking advantage of knowledge acquired about their cultural, technological, educational and personal characteristics is an essential feature in order to improve usability and flexibility of ELS. This paper presents the context-aware and culture-oriented aspects of an adaptability approach designed for ELSs and validated by an experiment conducted with a group of 65 students of three different countries to evaluate their satisfaction in the culture-oriented adaptation provided by the system. Based on the data of the participants, the results suggest that the culturally adapted interface has more participant satisfaction than the non-cultural one.

Knowledge monitoring is a fundamental metacognitive skill for the development of other metacognitive skills and is related to successful learning in all academic settings, including higher education. This skill allows students to identify their knowledge gaps more precisely, so they can engage in self-regulated activities. Self-regulated learners are proactive in setting goals, planning and deploying study strategies, monitoring the effectiveness of their actions and taking control of their learning and more prone to achievement in college. The knowledge monitoring skill becomes increasingly more important for basic education students who will enter higher education, given the demands for higher thinking skills in college. This chapter aims to present an Animated Pedagogical Agent (APA) that trains the metacognitive ability of knowledge monitoring in computer learning systems. The training provided by the APA encourages learners to reflect on their knowledge and has its content and frequency of intervention adapted to the characteristics of each student. Results from evaluations with seventh and eighth grade students supported the hypothesis that students who receive the training improve both their knowledge monitoring skill and their performance in the domain. Results also suggest a less hasty behavior from students who received the APA training. These findings indicate that the proposed APA can help students in basic education to acquire essential metacognitive skills to enter higher education.

Gamification has a great number of studies in the education area since the emergence of the term. However, there is a lack of primary and secondary studies that explore the negative effects that gamification may have on learners, and lack of studies that analyze the gamification design that are linked to those negative effects. Based on this premise, we aim at answering the following research question “What are the negative effects that can occur in gamification when applied to educational contexts?”. We seek to answer this question by analyzing the negative effects that are associated to gamification and the gamified learning design that are linked with them. To answer this question, we conducted a systematic mapping study to identify these negative effects. Based on the studies that were analyzed, we identified and mapped 4 negative effects and their gameful design. Loss of Performance was the most occurring effect and Leaderboard the most cited game design element, among other 11 elements. Moreover, elements and effects were linked in order to identify how these elements may have influenced on these outcomes. Based on our results, we found out that the game design may lead to a negative impact. For instance, Leaderboards are strongly associated to many negative effects mapped in this work. This result is corroborated by the psychology literature regarding ranking systems within learning environments. We believe our work may be useful to guide gamification instructors and specialists to avoid those negative effects in education contexts, by avoiding some game design elements settings.

Educational games offer different ways for representing complex themes. However, creating a game that precisely addresses the subject being taught and effectively provides students’ learning and engagement is a complicated task. With this in mind, we researched and created an educational game for improving students’ Software Process Improvement (SPI) knowledge. The aim of this game is to bring practices from the software development industry to the students. In an attempt to provide a better guidance, this work describes the issues and challenges associated with the creation and validation process of a Software Engineering educational game. We adopted an incremental and iterative approach, where each step involves different knowledge, allowing us to point out a set of important aspects that should be taken into account during the development. These aspects can guide new developers and instructors in the design and selection of educational games.

During Collaborative Learning (CL), scripted collaboration may cause a motivation problem which makes the students to dislike and drop out the group activities over time. In order to cope with such a problem, we proposed the use of gamification as a technology to increase the students’ motivation and engagement in CL scenarios. As consequence of increasing the motivation of students, we assume a reduction in the desistance of CL activities when the scripted collaboration is gamified. However, gamification is a complex task that requires knowledge about game elements (such as leaderboards and point systems), game design (e.g. how to combine game elements) and their impact on motivation and learning. To address these issues, we have developed an ontology that aims to give structured guidance on how to gamify CL scenarios. In the study presented here, we focused on describing the ontology and how it is used to gamify CL scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach to deal with the motivation problem through an empirical study in which the students enrolled in the introduction to computer Science course at the university of São Paulo participated in either non-gamified CL sessions or ontology-based gamified CL sessions. Significant differences were found in the students’ intrinsic motivation and the percentage of students by groups who had incomplete participation in the CL session. The students who participated in ontology-based gamified sessions reported to be more intrinsic motivated than the students who participated in non-gamified CL sessions, and the percentage of students by groups who had incomplete participation was significantly less in ontology-based gamified sessions than in non-gamified CL sessions. These results indicate that our approach can be used to deal with the motivational problem caused by the scripted collaboration. They also validate the assumption that the gamification of CL scenarios can be used to reduce the desistance of students in CL activities when CSCL scripts are used as a method to orchestrate and structure collaboration.

Interactive educational resources can promote a virtual environment that enable their users to acquire knowledge, train skills and have constant feedback. However, for an educational resource to be effective, its development should be systematic and multidisciplinary. Different methods have been proposed to provide support for the educational resources development. However, they do not describe the entire lifecycle, including the multiple requirements, such as, learning objectives and content definition, learner performance assessment, nonlinearity, student engagement and continuous feedback. This paper describes an overview of the AIMED method, an agile, integrative and open method for educational resources development, in a holistic and multidisciplinary way. It integrates the areas of simulation modelling, game design, instructional design, principles of agile development methods, project management and content domain. AIMED is based on integration of DevJSTA methodology, for creation of serious games, and AM-OER method, for development of open educational resources. A feasibility study was done with one serious game development.