A tool-mediated cognitive apprenticeship approach for a computer engineering course

Teaching database engineers involves a variety of learning activities. A strong focus is on practical problems that go beyond the acquisition of knowledge. Skills and experience are equally important. We propose a virtual apprenticeship model for the knowledge- and skillsoriented Web-based education of database students. We adapt the classical cognitive apprenticeship theory to the Web context utilising scaffolding and activity theory. The choice of educational media and the forms of student interaction with the media are central success criteria

Mathematics Exercise Generator: the language of parameterized exercises

Nowadays, the process of teaching and learning is changing from a traditional model in which teachers were the source of information for a model in which teachers appear as advisors who carefully observe students, assist in the selection of information by identifying their learning needs and support students in their autonomous study. In this chapter, the authors describe an approach used in curricular units of first year in Science and Engineer degrees, which results from a connection of three projects born in University of Aveiro: MEGUA, SIACUA and PmatE, and the interconnections of their informatics platforms. Although any scientific area besides mathematics can use this tool, the authors focus in a case study using an example on a specific topic of Calculus courses for first year students on Engineering: Sequences and Series of Functions. The methodology described allows teachers to achieve further goals on learning strategies and students to have enough material to practice.publishe

Sentence Similarity Analysis with Applications in Automatic Short Answer Grading

In this dissertation, I explore unsupervised techniques for the task of automatic short answer grading. I compare a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluate the effect of domain and size on the corpus-based measures, and also introduce a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating automatic feedback from the student answers. I continue to combine graph alignment features with lexical semantic similarity measures and employ machine learning techniques to show that grade assignment error can be reduced compared to a system that considers only lexical semantic measures of similarity. I also detail a preliminary attempt to align the dependency graphs of student and instructor answers in order to utilize a structural component that is necessary to simulate human-level grading of student answers. I further explore the utility of these techniques to several related tasks in natural language processing including the detection of text similarity, paraphrase, and textual entailment

Analogical specification reuse during requirements analysis

This thesis investigates analogy as a paradigm for retrieving, understanding and customising reusable specifications during requirements engineering. Cooperation between software engineers and support tools is necessary for effective analogical reuse. Retrieval uses a computational implementation of analogical reasoning to search and match many reusable specifications. On the other hand understanding, transferring and adapting specifications requires cooperation between the tool and software engineer. Cooperative support was designed for less-experienced software engineers with most to gain from successful specification reuse. Deliverables from this research have implications for software engineering, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-computer interaction. Specification retrieval is founded on a framework of software engineering analogies. This framework includes a set of domain abstractions describing key facts about software engineering domains. A computational model of analogical reasoning which matches domain descriptions to these abstractions was designed, implemented and evaluated during user studies with a prototype reuse advisor. An intelligent dialogue acts as a front-end to this retrieval mechanism by acquiring key domain facts prior to retrieving domain abstractions. This dialogue was designed from empirical studies of software engineering behaviour during requirements capture and modelling. Design of support tools for specification understanding and transfer was based on cognitive task and reasoning models of software engineering behaviour during analogical reuse and mental models of analogical understanding. Two empirical studies of inexperienced software engineers identified problematic mental laziness manifest as specification copying. A third study of expert software engineers who successfully reused specifications identified strategies for effective reuse. Detailed findings from all three studies informed the design of tool-based support for specification understanding and transfer. Findings also have implications for the design of tools to support other requirements engineering activities

Autoria de decisões pedagógicas informadas por dados sob a perspectiva de um MOOC.

Vivemos uma mudança no paradigma educacional onde se busca prover educação de qualquer lugar, a qualquer momento e para qualquer pessoa, utilizando tecnologias digitais da informação e comunicação. Há um interesse global no ensino à distância, mas não há um aumento equivalente de suporte aos professores e tutores responsáveis por manter tais cursos. Essa deficiência acentua os problemas e desafios existentes na gestão de cursos a distância, pois com o tempo mais estudantes aderem ao ensino a distância, requerendo a criação de novos cursos e turmas, incrementando a quantidade de estudantes sendo sub-servidos em termos de apoio pedagógico. Isso é evidenciado pelo grande número de desistências e falhas em tais cursos, particularmente, nos MOOCs (Cursos Online Massivos e Abertos), que os estudantes justificam como falta de suporte. Esta tese propõe uma solução de autoria para guiar a tomada de decisões pedagógicas em ambientes online de aprendizagem, tendo sido aplicada em um MOOC. A proposta visa auxiliar professores e tutores (1) a descobrir situações de interesse pedagógico ocorrendo em seus cursos; (2) compreender essas situações; (3) tomar decisões para aborda-las e; (4) monitorar e avaliar o impacto da decisão tomada. As interações em tais cursos geram grande quantidade e diversidade de dados, sendo possível extrair informações pedagogicamente relevantes. Entretanto, professores e tutores não dominam a tecnologia necessária para utilizar esses dados, nem é prático ou apropriado solicitar que sejam treinados para tanto. A proposta se fundamenta na tomada de decisões informada por dados educacionais, na visualização de dados e nos sistemas de autoria para promover a cooperação entre a inteligência artificial e a inteligência humana. Realizamos dois experimentos para: (1) avaliar se o processo auxilia professores e tutores a tomar decisões pedagógicas úteis e em tempo de curso; (2) avaliar se a solução de autoria guia a tomada de decisões pedagógicas de professores e tutores. Os resultados sugerem que o processo trouxe benefícios à tomada de decisões pedagógicas e que a solução de autoria foi capaz de guiar a tomada de decisões pedagógicas em tempo de curso e que sua utilidade e facilidade foram percebidas positivamente por professores e tutores.We are experiencing changes in the educational paradigm. There is a quest to provide education from anywhere, at any time and for anyone, using digital information and communication technologies. There is a global interest in distance learning, but there is no equivalent increase in support for teachers and tutors responsible for maintaining such courses. This difference accentuates the problems and challenges in managing distance courses once that, over time, more students join distance learning, requiring the creation of new courses and classes, increasing the number of distance students being sub-served in terms of pedagogical support. This is evidenced by the large number of dropouts and faiilures in such courses, particularly in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), that students justify as lack of support. This thesis proposes an authoring solution to guide the pedagogical decision making in online learning environments, which was applied in a MOOC. The proposal aims to help teachers and tutors (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. The interactions in such courses generate considerable quantity and diversity of data,allowing the extraction of pedagogically relevant information. However, teachers and tutors do not master the technology needed to use this data, nor is it practical or appropriate to ask them to be trained to do so. Our proposal is based on informed decision making by educational data, data visualization and authoring systems to promote cooperation between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We conducted two experiments to: (1) evaluate whether the process helps teachers and tutors to make useful and time-course pedagogical decisions; (2) to evaluate if the authoring solution guides the pedagogical decision making of teachers and tutors. The results suggest that the process brought benefits to pedagogical decision making and that the authoring solution was able to guide the pedagogical decision making in course time and that its usefulness and ease of use were positively perceived by teachers and tutors

Policy-based planning for student mobility support in e-Learning systems

Student mobility in the area of Higher Education (HE) is gaining more attention nowadays. It is one of the cornerstones of the Bologna Process being promoted at both national and international levels. However, currently there is no technical system that would support student mobility processes and assist users in authoring educational curricula involving student mobility. In this study, the problem of student mobility programmes generation based on existing modules and programmes is considered. A similar problem is being solved in an Intelligent Tutoring Systems field using Curriculum generation techniques, but the student mobility area has a set of characteristics limiting their application to the considered problem. One of main limiting factors is that mobility programmes should be developed in an environment with heterogeneous regulations. In this environment, various established routines and regulations are used to control different aspects of the educational process. These regulations can be different in different domains and are supported by different authors independently. In this thesis, a novel framework was developed for generation of student mobility programmes in an environment with heterogeneous regulations. Two core technologies that were coherently combined in the framework are hierarchical planning and policy-based management. The policy-based planner was designed as a central engine for the framework. It extends the functionality of existing planning technologies and provides the means to carry out planning in environments with heterogeneous regulations, specified as policies. The policy-based planner enforces the policies during the planning and guarantees that the resultant plan is conformant with all policies applicable to it. The policies can be supported by different authors independently. Using them, policy authors can specify additional constraints on the execution of planning actions and extend the pre-specified task networks. Policies are enforced during the planning in a coordinated manner: situations when a policy can be enforced are defined by its scope, and the outcomes of policy evaluation are processed according to the specially defined procedures. For solving the problem of student mobility programme generation using the policy-based planner, the planning environment describing the student mobility problem area was designed and this problem was formalised as a planning task. Educational processes valid throughout the HE environment were formalised using Hierarchical Task Network planning constructs. Different mobility schemas were encoded as decomposition methods that can be combined to construct complex mobility scenarios satisfying the user requirements. New mobility programmes are developed as detailed educational processes carried out when students study according to these programmes. This provides the means to model their execution in the planning environment and guarantee that all relevant requirements are checked. The postponed policy enforcement mechanism was developed as an extension of the policy-based planner in order to improve the planning performance. In this mechanism, future dead-ends can be detected earlier during the planning using partial policy requests. The partial policy requests and an algorithm for their evaluation were introduced to examine policies for planning actions that should be executed in the future course of planning. The postponed policy enforcement mechanism was applied to the mobility programme generation problem within the descending policy evaluation technique. This technique was designed to optimise the process of programme components selection. Using it, policies for different domains can be evaluated independently in a descending order, gradually limiting the scope for the required component selection. The prototype of student mobility programme generation solution was developed. Two case studies were used to examine the process of student mobility programmes development and to analyse the role of policies in this process. Additionally, four series of experiments were carried out to analyse performance gains of the descending policy evaluation technique in planning environments with different characteristics