5 research outputs found
HCI expertise needed! Personalisation and feedback optimisation in online education
Two key challenges in education relate to how traditional educational providers can personalise online provisions to the students’ skill level, optimise the use of tools and increase both the generation and utilisation of feedback (in terms of timing, content, and subsequent use by students). The application of traditional programmes in the online setting is often complicated by the legacy of traditional universities infrastructures, knowledge bases (or lack thereof in the human-computer-interaction/HCI realm), and pedagogical priorities. It is here that HCI experts (designers and researchers) can have real-world impact in line with macro-HCI, while also being able to test new innovations in collaboration with educators (e.g., the practitioners in such education settings). In this note, we make a case that the HCI community is in a situation where it can make a significant contribution to traditional providers in two prospective areas: personalisation, feedback generation and increased feedback utilisation
Automata Tutor v3
Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade.
With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing
personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both
feasible and necessary. In this paper, we present the third version of Automata
Tutor, a tool for helping teachers and students in large courses on automata
and formal languages. The second version of Automata Tutor supported automatic
grading and feedback for finite-automata constructions and has already been
used by thousands of users in dozens of countries. This new version of Automata
Tutor supports automated grading and feedback generation for a greatly extended
variety of new problems, including problems that ask students to create regular
expressions, context-free grammars, pushdown automata and Turing machines
corresponding to a given description, and problems about converting between
equivalent models - e.g., from regular expressions to nondeterministic finite
automata. Moreover, for several problems, this new version also enables
teachers and students to automatically generate new problem instances. We also
present the results of a survey run on a class of 950 students, which shows
very positive results about the usability and usefulness of the tool