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

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

Supporting the learning dimension of knowledge work

We argue that in order to increase knowledge work productivity we have to put more emphasis on supporting this learning dimension of knowledge work. The key distinctions compared to other TEL approaches are (1) taking the tight integration of working and learning seriously, (2) enabling seamless transitions on the continuum of learning practices, and (3) tapping into the resources (material as well as human) of the organization. Within this contribution we develop the concept of work-integrated learning (WIL) and show how it can be implemented. The APOSDLE environment serves as a reference architecture which proves how a variety of tightly integrated support services implement the three key distinctions discussed above

Context-aware recommender systems

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Providing varying degrees of guidance for work-integrated learning

We present a work-integrated learning (WIL) concept which aims at empowering employees to learn while performing their work tasks. Within three usage scenarios we introduce the APOSDLE environment which embodies the WIL concept and helps knowledge workers move fluidly along the whole spectrum of WIL activities. By doing so, they are experiencing varying degrees of learning guidance: from building awareness, over exposing knowledge structures and contextualizing cooperation, to triggering reflection and systematic competence development. Four key APOSDLE components are responsible for providing this variety of learning guidance. The challenge in their design lies in offering learning guidance without being domain-specific and without relying on manually created learning content. Our three month summative workplace evaluation within three application organizations suggests that learners prefer awarenss building functionalities and descriptive learning guidance and reveals that they benefited from it

Making Holes in Leaves: Promoting Cell State Transitions in Stomatal Development

Any software development project is based on assumptions about the state of the world that probably will hold when it is fielded. Investigating whether they are true can be seen as an important task. This paper describes how an empirical investigation was designed and conducted for the EU funded APOSDLE project. This project aims at supporting informal learning during work. Four basic assumptions are derived from the project plan and subsequently investigated in a two-phase study using several methods, including workplace observations and a survey. The results show that most of the assumptions are valid in the current work context of knowledge workers. In addition more specific suggestions for the design of the prospective APOSDLE application could be derived. Though requiring a substantial effort, carrying out studies like this can be seen as important for longer term software development projects