Enhancement of Student Learning Through the Use of a Hinting Computer e-Learning System and Comparison with Human Teachers

This paper reports the results of an experiment in a Computer Architecture Laboratory course classroom session, in which students were divided into two groups for interaction both with a hinting e-learning system and with human teachers generating hints. The results show that there were high learning gains for both groups, demonstrating the effectiveness of the human teachers as well as of the computer-based hinting e-learning system even without the use of adaptive and personalization capabilities. In addition, in the worst case, the difference in favor of human teachers (with a low student-to-teacher ratio of 13.5 students per teacher) would not be significant with respect to the e-learning system, so the computer-based system can replace teachers without a significant loss of effectiveness.This work was supported in part by the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI within the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+I,” and by the Madrid regional community project eMadrid S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

Managing Assessment Resources in the Open ICOPER Content Space

With the introduction of the Web 2.0 philosophy in the learning arena, the way learning actors interact has changed substantially. From a collaborative perspective, all the actors in the learning landscape could make use of a variety of tools for collaboration, making up what it is called: "collaborative learning 2.0." In this chapter, the discussion is focused on the open educational resources (OER), concretely open assessment resources, i.e., open resources used in the assessment process (formative and/or summative). The authors explore the way to create, share, search, manage, and access to these resources; all these actions are described from the context of collaboration inherited from the Web 2.0 paradigms: collaboration among teachers and course designers, teachers and learners, and any other factors that could arise in the assessment process. On the other hand, the approach to managing the open assessment resources is based on an outcome-based assessment process because of the great importance of the outcome-based learning.This work was partially funded by the Best Practice Network ICOPER (Grant No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), the Learn3 project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008-05163/TSI, and the eMadrid network, S2009/TIC-1650, “Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid”Publicad