The impact of social performance visualization on students

Over the last 10 years two major research directions explored the benefits of visualizing student learning progress. One stream of research on learning performance visualization attempts to build a visual presentation of students' learning progress, targeting the needs of instructors and academic advisors. The other stream of research on Open Student Modeling (OSM) attempts to visualize the state of individual student's knowledge and present the visualization directly to the student. The results of the studies in that area show that, presenting students with basic representation of their knowledge will result in facilitating their metacognitive activities and promoting self-reflection and awareness. This paper tries to study the impact of a more sophisticated form of performance visualization on students. We believe that our visualization tool can positively influence students by granting them the opportunity to get a view of their performance in the content of the class progress. Moreover, we tried to boost their motivation by building a positive sense of competition using a representation of average class performance. In this paper we present study comparing two groups of students, one using the visualization and another without visualization. The results of the study shows that: 1) the students are likely to use the social visualization tool during the whole semester to monitor their progress in comparison with their peers; 2) the visualization tool encourages students to use the learning materials in a more continuous manner during the whole semester and 3) students will achieve a higher success rate in answering self-assessment quizzes. © 2012 IEEE

Unravelling the dynamics of learning design within and between disciplines in higher education using learning analytics

Designing effective learning experience in virtual learning environment (VLE) can be supported by learning analytics (LA) through explicit feedback on how learning design (LD) influences students’ engagement, satisfaction and performance. Marrying LA with LD not only puts existing pedagogical theories in instructional design to the test with actual learning data, but also provides the context of learning which helps educators translate established LA findings to direct interventions. My dissertation aims at unpacking the complexity of LD and its impact on students’ engagement, satisfaction and performance on VLE using LA. The context of this study is 400+ online and blended learning modules at the Open University (OU) UK. This research combines multiple sources of data from the OU Learning Design Initiative (OULDI), system log data, self-reported surveys, and performance data. Given the scope of this study, a wide range of visualization techniques, social network analysis, multi-level modelling, and machine learning will be used

Guiding and motivating students through open social student modeling: Lessons learned

Background/Context: A large number of educational resources are now made available on the web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. The abundance of available content has produced at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using and benefiting from these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work attempts to integrate these directions of research by combining the ideas of adaptive navigation support and open student modeling with the ideas of social comparison and social visualization. We call our approach Open Social Student Modeling (OSSM). Objective/Research Questions: First, we review a sequence of our earlier projects focused on Open Social Student Modeling for one kind of learning content and formulate several key design principles that contribute to the success of OSSM. Second, we present our exploration of OSSM in a more challenging context of modeling student progress for two kinds of learning content in parallel. We aim to answer the following research questions: How do we design OSSM interfaces to support many kinds of learning content in parallel? Will current identified design principles (key features) confirm the power of the learning community through OSSM with multiple learning-resource collections? Will the OSSM visualization provide successful personalized guidance within a richer collection of educational resources? Research Design: We designed four classroom studies to assess the value of different options for OSSM visualization of one and multiple kinds of learning content in the context of programming-language learning. We examined the comparative success of different design options to distill successful design patterns and other important lessons for the future developers of OSSM for personalized and social e-learning. Findings/Results: The results confirmed the motivational impact of personalized social guidance provided by the OSSM system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics and motivated them to work ahead of the course schedule. Both strong and weak students worked with the appropriate levels of questions for their readiness, which yielded consistent performance across different levels of complex problems. Additionally, providing more realistic content collection on the navigation-supported OSSM visualizations resulted in uniform performance for the group. Conclusions/Recommendation: A sequence of studies of several OSSM interfaces confirmed that a combination of adaptive navigational support, open student modeling, and social visualization in the form of the OSSM interface can reinforce the navigational and motivational values of these approaches. In several contexts, the OSSM interface demonstrated its ability to offer effective guidance in helping students to locate the most relevant content at the right time while increasing student motivation to work with diverse learning content

Social Interaction and Academic Performance of Construction Management Students

Social interaction between students is a crucial but under-researched part of the education realm. Understanding how connections form in university classes and their effects on learning outcomes may provide extraordinary knowledge for researchers, educators, and policy-makers. This paper collected data from the questionnaire survey and then processed them with Gephi software to produce visualization and measurement. Initial results seem to indicate a significant correlation between students' connectedness and academic performance in one class. However, in another class, the results show a contrasting situation as there is no evidence that social network attributes impact learning performance. Taken together, these results would seem to suggest that the characteristics of the network should be judged on a case-by-case basis, and large-scale SNA analyses have been rarely reported. This present study provides a springboard for a new way to shed some light on classmates' interconnection. Using a similar approach to this article, it is believed that there is ample opportunity to study the association between classmate connectedness and career success. Research techniques and approaches around Social Network Analysis are expected to evolve further in the foreseeable future

Motivational Social Visualizations for Personalized E-Learning

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor + , an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor +  in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them

Progressor: Social navigation support through open social student modeling

The increased volumes of online learning content have produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students. © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Virtual reality in theatre education and design practice - new developments and applications

The global use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has already established new approaches to theatre education and research, shifting traditional methods of knowledge delivery towards a more visually enhanced experience, which is especially important for teaching scenography. In this paper, I examine the role of multimedia within the field of theatre studies, with particular focus on the theory and practice of theatre design and education. I discuss various IT applications that have transformed the way we experience, learn and co-create our cultural heritage. I explore a suite of rapidly developing communication and computer-visualization techniques that enable reciprocal exchange between students, theatre performances and artefacts. Eventually, I analyse novel technology-mediated teaching techniques that attempt to provide a new media platform for visually enhanced information transfer. My findings indicate that the recent developments in the personalization of knowledge delivery, and also in student-centred study and e-learning, necessitate the transformation of the learners from passive consumers of digital products to active and creative participants in the learning experience

QuizMap: Open social student modeling and adaptive navigation support with TreeMaps

In this paper, we present a novel approach to integrate social adaptive navigation support for self-assessment questions with an open student model using QuizMap, a TreeMap-based interface. By exposing student model in contrast to student peers and the whole class, QuizMap attempts to provide social guidance and increase student performance. The paper explains the nature of the QuizMap approach and its implementation in the context of self-assessment questions for Java programming. It also presents the design of a semester-long classroom study that we ran to evaluate QuizMap and reports the evaluation results. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Progressor: Personalized visual access to programming problems

This paper presents Progressor, a visualization of open student models intended to increase the student's motivation to progress on educational content. The system visualizes not only the user's own model, but also the peers' models. It allows sorting the peers' models using a number of criteria, including the overall progress and the progress on a specific topic. Also, in this paper we present results of a classroom study confirming our hypothesis that by showing a student the peers' models and ranking them by progress it is possible to increase the student's motivation to compete and progress in e-learning systems. © 2011 IEEE