Education support structure for teaching multimodal programming in the cyber-physical space

Programming education has become a mandatory element of many engineering curriculums, covering skills from digitally controlled mechanical processes to intelligent traffic and aviation systems. Many of these disciplines require the interaction with physical devices as programming interfaces. Higher education institutions focusing on quality presence labs with the need for occasional online teaching are thus looking for blended and multimodal solutions in which the physical interaction can be carried over as much as possible into the digital channels. In these solutions, various touch points between the physical and digital worlds should be exploited. This paper contributes such a solution. It introduces a cyber-physical educational support structure called EPOSS aimed at programming ’things’, including robots and derivative stationary and mobile units, that works in flexible lab and online teaching combinations. The system integrates domain-specific scenarios and open data sources for realistic autoprogramming simulations and is made available as open source prototype to foster adoption. The usefulness of the support system is demonstrated with traffic engineering education scenarios

A Closer Look into Recent Video-based Learning Research: A Comprehensive Review of Video Characteristics, Tools, Technologies, and Learning Effectiveness

People increasingly use videos on the Web as a source for learning. To support this way of learning, researchers and developers are continuously developing tools, proposing guidelines, analyzing data, and conducting experiments. However, it is still not clear what characteristics a video should have to be an effective learning medium. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of 257 articles on video-based learning for the period from 2016 to 2021. One of the aims of the review is to identify the video characteristics that have been explored by previous work. Based on our analysis, we suggest a taxonomy which organizes the video characteristics and contextual aspects into eight categories: (1) audio features, (2) visual features, (3) textual features, (4) instructor behavior, (5) learners activities, (6) interactive features (quizzes, etc.), (7) production style, and (8) instructional design. Also, we identify four representative research directions: (1) proposals of tools to support video-based learning, (2) studies with controlled experiments, (3) data analysis studies, and (4) proposals of design guidelines for learning videos. We find that the most explored characteristics are textual features followed by visual features, learner activities, and interactive features. Text of transcripts, video frames, and images (figures and illustrations) are most frequently used by tools that support learning through videos. The learner activity is heavily explored through log files in data analysis studies, and interactive features have been frequently scrutinized in controlled experiments. We complement our review by contrasting research findings that investigate the impact of video characteristics on the learning effectiveness, report on tasks and technologies used to develop tools that support learning, and summarize trends of design guidelines to produce learning video