E-assessment: how can we support tutors with their marking of electronically submitted assignments?

One of the problems with tutor feedback to students is that a balanced combination of socio emotive and cognitive support is required from the teaching staff, and the feedback needs to be relevant to the assigned grade. Is it possible to capitalise on technology to build training systems for tutors in Higher Education, that will support them with their feedback to students, and which will encourage their students to become more reflective learners? One approach to this question was to build an electronic tool to support tutors in the feedback process. Our work has involved building an open-source mentoring tool for tutors, known as Open Mentor. This tool analyses and displays the different types of comments provided by the tutor as feedback to the student. It then provides reflective comments to the tutor about their use of feedback. Open Mentor was not designed for use at institutional level, but to give teaching staff a tool that can be used in training and also later as personal support that will enable individual tutors to track their use of feedback to students

Software Verification and Graph Similarity for Automated Evaluation of Students' Assignments

In this paper we promote introducing software verification and control flow graph similarity measurement in automated evaluation of students' programs. We present a new grading framework that merges results obtained by combination of these two approaches with results obtained by automated testing, leading to improved quality and precision of automated grading. These two approaches are also useful in providing a comprehensible feedback that can help students to improve the quality of their programs We also present our corresponding tools that are publicly available and open source. The tools are based on LLVM low-level intermediate code representation, so they could be applied to a number of programming languages. Experimental evaluation of the proposed grading framework is performed on a corpus of university students' programs written in programming language C. Results of the experiments show that automatically generated grades are highly correlated with manually determined grades suggesting that the presented tools can find real-world applications in studying and grading

An Optimization Based Design for Integrated Dependable Real-Time Embedded Systems

Moving from the traditional federated design paradigm, integration of mixedcriticality software components onto common computing platforms is increasingly being adopted by automotive, avionics and the control industry. This method faces new challenges such as the integration of varied functionalities (dependability, responsiveness, power consumption, etc.) under platform resource constraints and the prevention of error propagation. Based on model driven architecture and platform based design’s principles, we present a systematic mapping process for such integration adhering a transformation based design methodology. Our aim is to convert/transform initial platform independent application specifications into post integration platform specific models. In this paper, a heuristic based resource allocation approach is depicted for the consolidated mapping of safety critical and non-safety critical applications onto a common computing platform meeting particularly dependability/fault-tolerance and real-time requirements. We develop a supporting tool suite for the proposed framework, where VIATRA (VIsual Automated model TRAnsformations) is used as a transformation tool at different design steps. We validate the process and provide experimental results to show the effectiveness, performance and robustness of the approach

A cross-layer approach to enhance QoS for multimedia applications over satellite

The need for on-demand QoS support for communications over satellite is of primary importance for distributed multimedia applications. This is particularly true for the return link which is often a bottleneck due to the large set of end-users accessing a very limited uplink resource. Facing this need, Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA) is a classical technique that allows satellite operators to offer various types of services, while managing the resources of the satellite system efficiently. Tackling the quality degradation and delay accumulation issues that can result from the use of these techniques, this paper proposes an instantiation of the Application Layer Framing (ALF) approach, using a cross-layer interpreter(xQoS-Interpreter). The information provided by this interpreter is used to manage the resource provided to a terminal by the satellite system in order to improve the quality of multimedia presentations from the end users point of view. Several experiments are carried out for different loads on the return link. Their impact on QoS is measured through different application as well as network level metrics

FYP Online Marking System (FOMS)

Final Year Project (FYP) is one of the compulsory courses that need to be taken by all of the final year students. In UTP, FYP course is available in two semesters, namely FYP1 and FYP2 respectively. For each of the courses, the FYP students need to submit several deliverables in order to complete their coursework. These deliverables will be evaluated by the students’ supervisor and the panel of examiners. The FYP marking process in UTP is still manually implemented. This means that the supervisor and the panel of examiner manually write down the students information and the awarded mark for the students in a paper-based score sheet. The manual FYP marking process causes a lot of problem to the supervisor and the panel of examiners as well as the FYP coordinators, who administrator the FYP course. Among of the problems identified are inefficiency and error-likely of FYP manual marking process, unorganized and time-consuming of FYP oral presentation and paper wastage and confidential issue. Therefore, the implementation of FYP Online Marking System is vital with the objectives to convert the manual FYP marking process into an automated FYP online marking system, to increase the process efficiency and reduce the possible error chances, to have a more organized and time-saving FYP marking process flow, to go green and help to preserve the environment. The scopes that the FOMS project covers include FYP marking process out of the overall FYP course process and the CIS department’s lecturer and panel of examiners as the main user. The FOMS system implementation covers for both of the FYP1 and FYP2 courses. In order to complete the FOMS system, prototyping will be the methodology used as it allows the project analysis, design and implementation to be done concurrently and repeatedly until complete. A set of survey has been done to gather the feedback on the current manual FYP marking process and their opinion on FOMS. An acceptance test has also been carry out to gather feedback related to the FOMS system

The Automatic Assessment of Multiple Artefacts: An Investigation into Design Diagrams and Their Implementations

As the Higher Education sector has moved towards student-centred learning so too has the growth in electronic support for learning. E-assessment has been a part of this growth as increasingly assessment and its feedback is seen as an integral part of the students’ learning process. Mature e-assessment systems exist, particularly where answers to questions are restricted to a prescribed list of alternatives. However, for free response artefacts, where there is a limited restriction placed on answers to questions, automated assessment systems are embryonic. This dissertation presents an investigation into the automated assessment of free response artefacts. Design diagrams and their accompanying source code implementations are examples of free response artefacts. A case study is developed that investigates how to automatically generate formative feedback for a design diagram by utilizing its accompanying implementation. The dissertation presents a two-staged solution, initially analysing the design diagram in isolation before comparing it with the implementation. A framework for this approach has been developed and tested using a tool applied to coursework submitted by undergraduate computer science students. The tool was evaluated by comparing the formative feedback comments generated by the tool with those produced by a team of computer science educators. Evaluation was undertaken via two Likert questionnaires, one completed by students and one completed by a team of computer scientists. The results presented are favourable, with the majority of comments produced by the tool being seen to be as least as good as those generated by the computer science educators

Practical Application Of Uml Activity Diagrams For The Generation Of Test Cases

Software testing and debugging represents around one third of total effort in development projects. Different factors which have influence on poor practices of testing have been identified through specific surveys. Amongst several, one of the most important is the lack of efficient methods to exploit development models for generating test cases. This paper presents a new method for automatically generating a complete set of functional test cases from UML activity diagrams complementing specification of use cases. Test cases are prioritized according to software risk information. Results from experiences with more than 70 software professionals/experts validate benefits of the method. Participants also confirm its interest and effectiveness for testing needs of industry

Sixth Workshop and Tutorial on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools Aarhus, Denmark, October 24-26, 2005

This booklet contains the proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools, October 24-26, 2005. The workshop is organised by the CPN group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. The papers are also available in electronic form via the web pages: http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/workshop0