Engaging Students through Video: Integrating Assessment and Instrumentation

CS50 is Harvard’s introductory course for majors and non-majors alike. For years, we have posted videos of the course’s lectures and sections online for the sake of review and distance education alike. But students’ experience with these videos has been historically passive. Students have been able to watch the course’s content on demand, rewinding and fast-forwarding at will, but they have not had means to engage interactively with the content or to check their understanding of material while watching videos. Furthermore, while we collected basic usage data (e.g., how many times a video was viewed), we lacked detailed analytics describing, for example, which portions of a video were commonly skipped or watched multiple times by students. To make videos more immersive and engaging for students, we developed CS50 Video, an open-source video player for desktop and mobile devices. CS50 Video allows instructors to integrate assessment questions to be answered by students at their own pace or at specific points in time directly into a video player. CS50 Video also allows students to search over video transcripts to find content easily as well as view videos at variable playback speeds (in order to make videos more accessible for ESL learners). Finally, CS50 Video integrates with third-party analytics solutions to allow instructors to view detailed usage statistics describing how students are interacting with videos (e.g., which videos or portions of videos are commonly watched or skipped over). We have deployed CS50 Video to students taking CS50 online and have obtained preliminary results. Because CS50 Video stores responses to questions server-side, we have been able to track students’ performance on in-video assessments. Thus far, we have observed that only 28% of students who watch online videos have engaged with assessment questions. Students who answer an assessment question incorrectly on their first attempt will often try again until reaching a correct answer, with 84.5% of correct answers reached in at most three attempts. We next plan to analyze the effects of in-video assessments on students’ mastery of material and introduce A/B-testing functionality for questions. We also plan to use students’ performance on assessments to understand the topics with which students struggle.Engineering and Applied Science

Autograding and detecting plagiarism in student programming assignments

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, April 2019In computer science, practical assignments ensure that students put the theory they learn in class into practice by writing computer programs to solve problems. Practical assignments also play a critical role in assessing students’ understanding of course materials. For course facilitators, grading programming assignments is a time-consuming task. The course facilitators must run each student’s submission. Moreover, some students copy the code from their friends and change the lexicon and structure. This makes it nearly impossible for the course facilitators to detect plagiarism. A possible solution to these problems is a system that allows course facilitators to write tests that apply automatically to all students’ submissions and consequently allocate grades based on test results. To curb the plagiarism issue, the system should have a component that calculates the peer plagiarism index and flags students’ submissions that may have plagiarism issues. This applied project is an attempt to develop, test and evaluate such a system. While designing the system, it became apparent that running students’ submission and instructors’ tests on the server would pose a security threat to the server. After evaluating possible workaround for the issue, we decided to run the submissions and tests on a docker sandbox within a virtual machine. The plagiarism index is calculated by quantifying the lexical and structural similarities. To integrate the two components, we developed an API. To test and demonstrate the workings of the system, we developed a frontend client to consume the critical endpoints of the API. This project is proof of concept that the solution for the problem can be developed and successfully deployed.Ashesi Universit

An exploration of the teaching and learning of Information Technology (IT) programming in a higher education institution in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN)

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.In this study, classic grounded theory, threshold concepts, self-study and practitioner research capture the processes of Information Technology (IT) academics who teach computer programming to first-year IT students at a university of technology in Kwa-Zulu Natal. The qualitative data analysis revealed the basic pedagogy of teaching and learning computer programming, and described how IT academics perceived their vocation and their decisions to take action to ultimately improve the quality of teaching and learning of IT programming. From the data, the following four themes emerged in the process of teaching and learning computer programming: 1) Teaching IT; 2) Learning IT and its impact; 3) Challenges in teaching IT; 4) Recommendations for teaching IT programming. This study will assist first-year IT programming academics to understand their pedagogical impact at an institution of higher learning. This study will further potentially serve as a path for future research and aid in understanding the pedagogical impact of the teaching and learning of IT on first-year IT students

ICTERI 2020: ІКТ в освіті, дослідженнях та промислових застосуваннях. Інтеграція, гармонізація та передача знань 2020: Матеріали 16-ї Міжнародної конференції. Том II: Семінари. Харків, Україна, 06-10 жовтня 2020 р.

This volume represents the proceedings of the Workshops co-located with the 16th International Conference on ICT in Education, Research, and Industrial Applications, held in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in October 2020. It comprises 101 contributed papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 233 submissions for the five workshops: RMSEBT, TheRMIT, ITER, 3L-Person, CoSinE, MROL. The volume is structured in six parts, each presenting the contributions for a particular workshop. The topical scope of the volume is aligned with the thematic tracks of ICTERI 2020: (I) Advances in ICT Research; (II) Information Systems: Technology and Applications; (III) Academia/Industry ICT Cooperation; and (IV) ICT in Education.Цей збірник представляє матеріали семінарів, які були проведені в рамках 16-ї Міжнародної конференції з ІКТ в освіті, наукових дослідженнях та промислових застосуваннях, що відбулася в Харкові, Україна, у жовтні 2020 року. Він містить 101 доповідь, які були ретельно рецензовані та відібрані з 233 заявок на участь у п'яти воркшопах: RMSEBT, TheRMIT, ITER, 3L-Person, CoSinE, MROL. Збірник складається з шести частин, кожна з яких представляє матеріали для певного семінару. Тематична спрямованість збірника узгоджена з тематичними напрямками ICTERI 2020: (I) Досягнення в галузі досліджень ІКТ; (II) Інформаційні системи: Технології і застосування; (ІІІ) Співпраця в галузі ІКТ між академічними і промисловими колами; і (IV) ІКТ в освіті

Матеріали 9-го семінару з хмарних технологій в освіті (CTE 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 17 грудня 2021 року

Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Cloud Technologies in Education (CTE 2021). Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, December 17, 2021.Матеріали 9-го семінару з хмарних технологій в освіті (CTE 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 17 грудня 2021 року

Хмарні технології в освіті: матеріали 7 семінару CTE 2019

This volume represents the proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cloud Technologies in Education (CTE 2019), held in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, in December 20, 2019. It comprises 42 contributed papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. The accepted papers present the state-of-the-art overview of successful cases and provides guidelines for future research. The volume is structured in four parts, each presenting the contributions for a particular workshop track.Цей том представляє матеріали 7-го семінару "Хмарні технології в освіті" (CTE 2019), який відбувся у Кривому Розі, Україна, 20 грудня 2019 року. Він містить 42 доповіді, ретельно перевірені та відібрані з 66 робіт. Прийняті документи представляють сучасний огляд успішних випадків та надають рекомендації щодо майбутніх досліджень. Том складається з чотирьох частин, кожна з яких представляє внески для певного тематичного напряму семінару

Queensland University of Technology: Handbook 2018

The Queensland University of Technology handbook gives an outline of the faculties and subject offerings available that were offered by QUT