Extracción de datos de interacción de los estudiantes en una plataforma Open Edx

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are courses available to the general public without restrictions that are offered to hundreds or thousands of students and in recent years have been presented as a revolution in online education. They are presented as an alternative to the great demand in higher education for the characteristic of being open and massive because they allow access to education to a huge number of students. They have become an ideal environment for data collection and through the application of learning analytics techniques they have allowed a better understanding of how students learn. However, access to the data from thecurrent open-source MOOC platforms is limited and often difficult to collect and process. This paper presents a proposal for collecting and processing the data from students’ interaction with the Open edX platform through Scripts and a Collector based on Java code. Los cursos masivos abiertos en línea (MOOC por sus siglas en inglés) son cursos que están disponibles para el público general sin restricciones y que están disponibles para cientos o miles de estudiantes. Estos cursos han sido presentados como una revolución de la educación en línea. Son presentados como una alternativa a la alta demanda en la educación superior por la característica de ser abiertos y masivos y permitir la participación de una gran cantidad de estudiantes. Se han convertido en el entorno ideal para la recolección de datos y a través de la aplicación de analíticas del aprendizaje han permitido una mejor comprensión de cómo aprenden los estudiantes. Sin embargo, el acceso a los datos en las plataformas MOOC actuales de código abierto es limitado y a veces éstos son engorrosos de recolectar y procesar. Este artículo presenta una propuesta para recolectar y procesar los datos de las interacciones de los estudiantes con la plataforma Open edX a través de Scripts y un Collector basado en código Java

Using moodle analytics for continuous e-assessment in a financial mathematics course at Polytechnic of Porto

The relevance of electronic learning, commonly called e-learning, has been growing exponentially in the last decade. Virtual learning environments (VLEs) disclosed new paths for interactions and motivation promotion, offering basic learning analytics functions and are becoming progressively popular. Moodle (acronym for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is one of the most used VLEs, it is a free learning management system distributed as Open Source. The VLE Moodle gives professors access to an “endless” use and performance database like the number of downloads for each resource, participation of students in courses, statistics of performed quizzes, among others. The data stored by Moodle offers a good and handy source for learning analytics. One popular definition, from the First International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge in 2011, states that “Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about students and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs”. Thus, using appropriate learning analytics methods and techniques, it would be helpful to analyze what particular learning activities or tools were practically used by students in Moodle, and to what extent. Considering the importance of the student engagement and the benefits of continuous assessment in higher education, as well as the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on educational processes, it is important to integrate technology into continuous assessment practices. Since student engagement is connected to the quality of the student experience, increasing it is one way of enhancing quality in a higher education institution. In this study, will be demonstrated how the use of several educational resources and a low-stakes continuous weekly e-assessment in Moodle had a positive influence on student engagement in a second year undergraduate Financial Mathematics Course. Students felt that their increased engagement and improved learning was a straight result of this method. Furthermore, this suggests that wisely planned assignments and assessments can be used to increase student engagement and learning, and, as a result, contribute to improving the quality of student experience and success.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Designing Engaging Learning Activities in MOOC: A Success Story

The booming era of e-learning has evolved over the past decade. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has revolutionized as the in-thing that offer richer, wider, and connected learning experiences. MOOCs have made an interesting splash on online education canvas especially after Coursera, Udacity, and edX have become the main player in the industry. This article presents a brief success story of the implementation of homemade MOOC for TMU1043 Multimedia Technology course during semester 1, 2015/2016. We also discuss how we designed engaging learning activities on our MOOC. In the future work section, we discuss a plan of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research that we are going to conduct based on our MOOC

Predicting student performance in interactive online question pools using mouse interaction features

Modeling student learning and further predicting the performance is a well-established task in online learning and is crucial to personalized education by recommending different learning resources to different students based on their needs. Interactive online question pools (e.g., educational game platforms), an important component of online education, have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most existing work on student performance prediction targets at online learning platforms with a well-structured curriculum, predefined question order and accurate knowledge tags provided by domain experts. It remains unclear how to conduct student performance prediction in interactive online question pools without such well-organized question orders or knowledge tags by experts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to boost student performance prediction in interactive online question pools by further considering student interaction features and the similarity between questions. Specifically, we introduce new features (e.g., think time, first attempt, and first drag-and-drop) based on student mouse movement trajectories to delineate students' problem-solving details. In addition, heterogeneous information network is applied to integrating students' historical problem-solving information on similar questions, enhancing student performance predictions on a new question. We evaluate the proposed approach on the dataset from a real-world interactive question pool using four typical machine learning models.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, conference lak20, has been accepted, proceeding now. link: https://lak20.solaresearch.org/list-of-accepted-paper

Visual authoring of virtual reality conversational scenarios for e‑learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to face-to-face activities being developed in a virtual format that often offers a poor experience in areas such as education. Virtual Learning Environments have improved in recent years thanks to new technologies such as Virtual Reality or Chatbots. However, creating Virtual Learning Environments requires advanced programming knowledge, so this work is aimed to enable teachers to create these new environments easily. This work presents a set of extensions for App Inventor that facilitate the authoring of mobile learning apps that use Chatbots in a Virtual Reality environment, while simultaneously monitoring of student activity. This proposal is based on integrating block-based languages and Business Process Model and Notation diagrams. The developed extensions were successfully implemented in an educational app called Let’s date!. A quantitative analysis of the use of these extensions in App Inventor was also carried out, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of blocks required. The proposed contribution has demonstrated its validity in creating virtual learning environments through visual programming and modelling, reducing development complexity

Digital neocolonialism and massive open online courses (MOOCs): colonial pasts and neoliberal futures

Through evaluating dominant MOOC platforms created by Western universities, I argue that MOOCs on such platforms tend to embed Western-centric epistemologies and propagate this without questioning their global relevance. Consequently, such MOOCs can be detrimental when educating diverse and complex participants as they erode local and indigenous knowledge systems. Arguing that the digital divide is an exacerbation of historical inequalities, I draw parallels between colonial education, specifically across Sub-Saharan Africa, and ‘digital neocolonialism’ through Western MOOC platforms. I analyse similarities in ideology, assumptions, and methods of control. Highlighting evolving forms of coloniality, I include contemporary problems created by neoliberal techno-capitalist agendas, such as the commodification of education. Balance is needed between the opportunities offered through MOOCs and the harms they cause through overshadowing marginalised knowledges and framing disruptive technologies as the saviour. While recommending solutions for inclusion of marginalised voices, further problems such as adverse incorporation are raised.Cambridge Trust is my sponsor for my Ph

Data Visualization in Online Educational Research

This chapter presents a general and practical guideline that is intended to introduce the traditional visualization methods (word clouds), and the advanced visualization methods including interactive visualization (heatmap matrix) and dynamic visualization (dashboard), which can be applied in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. This chapter also presents the potentials of each visualization method for assisting researchers in choosing the most appropriate one in the web-based research study. Graduate students, educational researchers, and practitioners can contribute to take strengths from each visual analytical method to enhance the reach of significant research findings into the public sphere. By leveraging the novel visualization techniques used in the web-based research study, while staying true to the analytical methods of research design, graduate students, educational researchers, and practitioners will gain a broader understanding of big data and analytics for data use and representation in the field of education

An algorithm and a tool for the automatic grading of MOOC learners from their contributions in the discussion forum

MOOCs (massive open online courses) have a built-in forum where learners can share experiences as well as ask questions and get answers. Nevertheless, the work of the learners in the MOOC forum is usually not taken into account when calculating their grade in the course, due to the difficulty of automating the calculation of that grade in a context with a very large number of learners. In some situations, discussion forums might even be the only available evidence to grade learners. In other situations, forum interactions could serve as a complement for calculating the grade in addition to traditional summative assessment activities. This paper proposes an algorithm to automatically calculate learners' grades in the MOOC forum, considering both the quantitative dimension and the relevance in their contributions. In addition, the algorithm has been implemented within a web application, providing instructors with a visual and a numerical representation of the grade for each learner. An exploratory analysis is carried out to assess the algorithm and the tool with a MOOC on programming, obtaining a moderate positive correlation between the forum grades provided by the algorithm and the grades obtained through the summative assessment activities. Nevertheless, the complementary analysis conducted indicates that this correlation may not be enough to use the forum grades as predictors of the grades obtained through summative assessment activities.This work was supported in part by the FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades;Agencia Estatal de Investigación, through the Smartlet Project under Grant TIN2017-85179-C3-1-R, and in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the e-Madrid-CM Project under Grant S2018/TCS-4307, a project which is co-funded by the European Structural Funds (FSE and FEDER). Partial support has also been received from the European Commission through Erasmus+ Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education projects, more specifically through projects LALA (586120-EPP-1-2017-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), InnovaT (598758-EPP-1-2018-1-AT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), and PROF-XXI (609767-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP)

Exploring the experiences of instructors teaching massive open online courses in tourism and hospitality: a mixed methods approach

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have existed as a disruptive educational phenomenon for nine years. Grounded in the roots of distance education, open education, Open Educational Resources, and OpenCourseWare, MOOCs have now survived various critics and have continued growing globally. Reports about MOOCs in both the press and scholarly publications began to grow significantly in 2013 (Sánchez-Vera, Leon Urrutia, & Davis, 2015; Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017) and, since then, more and more researchers have joined the discussions, developing them to explore various new topics. To contribute to the literature of MOOC studies, this doctoral thesis begins with an in-depth analysis of the background, history, growth, and vision, and proposes a tentative definition of MOOCs. Meanwhile, by conducting bibliometric research to review MOOC studies conducted between 2015 and 2017, this thesis fills in the gap that has existed due to a lack of systematic reviews of MOOC literature since 2015. The results of the bibliometric research summarised the relevant MOOC research into nine categories, including learner focused, commentary and concepts, case reports or evaluations, pedagogy, curriculum and design, course object focused, provider focused, technology, systematic review of literature, and learning analytics and big data. They also suggested a limited amount of provider focused research, which became the research interest and focus of this thesis. In the centre of the Europe, Swiss universities have marched forward in the MOOC movement, together with other over 550 universities (Shah, 2016) around the world. Università della Svizzera italiana (USI; Lugano, Switzerland), a Swiss public university, became a MOOC provider in 2015 and offered the first MOOC in the topic of eTourism: eTourism: Communication Perspectives. This doctoral thesis is closely related to this university-level initiative, which was dedicated to producing the first pilot MOOC at USI. Therefore, the cases chosen by this thesis are positioned in the discipline of tourism and hospitality. The first MOOC with a large audience taught artificial intelligence in 2011 (Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017). Nowadays, MOOCs have broken the barrier of space and time to educate the masses in a wide range of subjects. However, the provision of MOOCs in the subject of tourism and hospitality did not appear until 2013, when two MOOCs from two American universities became available. In the past four years since these MOOCs were launched, the number of tourism and hospitality MOOCs available in the market has remained limited (Tracey, Murphy, & Horton-Tognazzini, 2016). This scarcity contradicts the fact that tourism and hospitality is the field that contributes the most to the employment of the global workforce. Pressing problems, such as high turnover, seasonality, and new global challenges have urged for solutions to quickly training people working in this area to become available (Cantoni, Kalbaska, & Inversini, 2009). A call for more studies about tourism and hospitality MOOCs has emerged. The combined reality of the lack of studies regarding MOOC providers, opportunities for first-hand experience of producing a tourism MOOC in a university, and the deficiency in both the research and practises of tourism and hospitality MOOCs has inspired the direction of this thesis in regard to exploring MOOC instructors’ experiences, using cases in the field of tourism and hospitality. It cumulates six studies, using a mixed methods approach, to tackle the two main research objectives: to investigate at large the tourism and hospitality MOOC provisions between 2008 and 2015 and to report the experiences of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) when producing the eTourism MOOC. In order, the first two studies in Chapter 3 of this thesis focus on tourism and hospitality MOOCs in general and produce a big picture context for the other four studies in Chapter 4. The first study proposes a conceptual framework through which to describe and analyse the course design of a MOOC and applies it to 18 tourism and hospitality MOOCs produced between 2008 and 2015. The second study then continues to interview six tourism and hospitality MOOC instructors, to describe their experiences and perspectives of teaching MOOCs. After exploring a holistic view of the overall development of MOOCs in tourism and hospitality and gaining a deep understanding of the instructors behind these offerings, this thesis introduces the experiences of one single MOOC provider: Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Chapter 4. It first introduces its overall implementation process (Study 3), and further elaborates three phases of this process: how it selected a suitable MOOC platform at the beginning (Study 4); how it assessed learner engagement in the MOOC (Study 5); and, eventually, how it evaluated the performance of the MOOC (Study 6). This thesis was written mainly from the perspective of eLearning, with the intention of benefiting its community of scholars and practitioners. It has contributed to the literature by developing a framework with which to review MOOCs (in Study 1), the implementation process of producing MOOCs (in Study 2), practical review schema of MOOC platforms (in Study 4), the MOOC Learner Engagement Online Survey (in Study 5), and how to use the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate MOOCs (in Study 6). These conceptual frameworks and experiential tools can benefit future researchers and practitioners. Meanwhile, due to its intimate connection with the field of tourism and hospitality, by directly using its cases, the research outputs of the six studies can also benefit the tourism and hospitality education and training sector as a reference for further action