Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification In ICT Education, 2016
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the computer to education is the ability to give immediate f... more Perhaps the greatest contribution of the computer to education is the ability to give immediate feedback to a learner about the state of their knowledge. This feedback often comes in the form of automated assessment for practice problems. Assessment systems with automated feedback provide more practice for students with less grading time for instructors. Self-assessment can increase learners motivation, promote students' ability to guide their own learning, and help them internalize factors used when judging performance (Andrade and Valtcheva, 2009; McMillan and Hearn, 2008). Other forms of feedback include "gamification" elements where students are informed about progress through the material, and they might be given "rewards" for progress in an effort to provide motivation. Instructors interested in experimenting with new pedagogical approaches (blended learning, "flipped" classroom, etc.) might find that the path to implementing these pedagogies is easier due to the affordances provided by new learning technology. Online educational systems can also provide feedback to system developers and instructors about the performance of their students. The most obvious type of feedback to instructors is level and time of completion for individual students. Another type of feedback is student analytics data in the form of logs to record keystrokes, mouse clicks, and timestamps, as well as higher-order information such as performance on practice problems. Such information is sometimes referred to as learning analytics (Ferguson, 2012; Siemens and Baker, 2012). With such information, developers can hope to first deduce patterns of student behavior, then correlate the different behavior patterns to successful outcomes, and finally improve the system so as to enhance student performance in various ways. In this chapter, we discuss all of these aspects of feedback given by online courseware to students, instructors, and system developers. We provide a number of case studies. The context for our case studies is the OpenDSA eTextbook system (Fouh et al., 2014b). OpenDSA is an open-source project with international collaboration that seeks to create an infrastructure and a body of materials appropriate for use in a range of computer science courses. The bulk of the content relates to data structures and algorithms (DSA). This particular topic area lends itself to an eTextbook treatment for two reasons.
Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification In ICT Education, 2016
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the computer to education is the ability to give immediate f... more Perhaps the greatest contribution of the computer to education is the ability to give immediate feedback to a learner about the state of their knowledge. This feedback often comes in the form of automated assessment for practice problems. Assessment systems with automated feedback provide more practice for students with less grading time for instructors. Self-assessment can increase learners motivation, promote students' ability to guide their own learning, and help them internalize factors used when judging performance (Andrade and Valtcheva, 2009; McMillan and Hearn, 2008). Other forms of feedback include "gamification" elements where students are informed about progress through the material, and they might be given "rewards" for progress in an effort to provide motivation. Instructors interested in experimenting with new pedagogical approaches (blended learning, "flipped" classroom, etc.) might find that the path to implementing these pedagogies is easier due to the affordances provided by new learning technology. Online educational systems can also provide feedback to system developers and instructors about the performance of their students. The most obvious type of feedback to instructors is level and time of completion for individual students. Another type of feedback is student analytics data in the form of logs to record keystrokes, mouse clicks, and timestamps, as well as higher-order information such as performance on practice problems. Such information is sometimes referred to as learning analytics (Ferguson, 2012; Siemens and Baker, 2012). With such information, developers can hope to first deduce patterns of student behavior, then correlate the different behavior patterns to successful outcomes, and finally improve the system so as to enhance student performance in various ways. In this chapter, we discuss all of these aspects of feedback given by online courseware to students, instructors, and system developers. We provide a number of case studies. The context for our case studies is the OpenDSA eTextbook system (Fouh et al., 2014b). OpenDSA is an open-source project with international collaboration that seeks to create an infrastructure and a body of materials appropriate for use in a range of computer science courses. The bulk of the content relates to data structures and algorithms (DSA). This particular topic area lends itself to an eTextbook treatment for two reasons.
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