UNIFORM: Automatic Alignment of Open Learning Datasets

Learning Analytics aims at supporting the understanding of learning mechanisms and their effects by means of data-driven strategies. LA approaches commonly face two big challenges: first, due to privacy reasons, most of the analyzed data are not in the public domain. Secondly, the open data collections, which come from diverse learning contexts, are quite heterogeneous. Therefore, the research findings are not easily reproducible and the publicly available datasets are often too small to enable further data analytics. To overcome these issues, there is an increasing need for integrating open learning data into unified models. This paper proposes UNIFORM, an open relational database integrating various learning data sources. It presents also a machine learning supported approach to automatically extending the integrated dataset as soon as new data sources become available. The proposed approach exploits a classifier to predict attribute alignments based on the correlations among the corresponding textual attribute descriptions. The integration phase has reached a promising quality level on most of the analyzed benchmark datasets. Furthermore, the usability of the UNIFORM data model has been demonstrated in a real case study, where the integrated data have been exploited to support learners’ outcome prediction. The F1-score achieved on the integrated data is approximately 30% higher than those obtained on the original data

From teaching books to educational videos and vice versa: a cross-media content retrieval experience

Due to the rapid growth of multimedia data and the diffusion of remote and mixed learning, teaching sessions are becoming more and more multi-modal. To deepen the knowledge of specific topics, learners can be interested in retrieving educational videos that complement the textual content of teaching books. However, retrieving educational videos can be particularly challenging when there is a lack of metadata information. To tackle the aforesaid issue, this paper explores the joint use of Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques to retrieve cross-media educational resources (i.e., from text snippets to videos and vice versa). It applies NLP techniques to both the audio transcript of the videos and to the text snippets in the books in order to quantify the semantic relationships between pairs of educational resources of different media types. Then, it trains a Deep Learning model on top of the NLP-based features. The probabilities returned by the Deep Learning model are used to rank the candidate resources based on their relevance to a given query. The results achieved on a real collection of educational multimodal data show that the proposed approach performs better than state-of-the-art solutions. Furthermore, a preliminary attempt to apply the same approach to address a similar retrieval task (i.e., from text to image and vice versa) has shown promising results

From Web to Apps in Massive University On-line Learning

Universities today have an incredible variety of opportunities for improving their services, thanks to the new information and communication technologies and opportunities. This paper describes the Politecnico di Torino strategy for online and distance learning, both from the technological and the methodological points of view, focusing on the response to the continuously evolving teaching paradigms: from traditional distance learning models to hybrid and blended models, up to the recent MOOC approaches. The on-line educational environment has been designed for a very large number of users: 33,000 students enrolled in 51 curricula, B.S. and M.S. in different areas of Engineering, and it is suitable both for face-to-face students and remote ones. At present the number of logins per months exceeds 1,000,000 and the system provides access to about half a million of educational documents; in total, the number of downloads per yearis over 10,000,000. The paper specifically describes the video-lecture service, that makes about 3,000 hours of lectures available every year (80 courses are involved) and generates about 1,200,000 video streaming/downloads per year. Mobile devices are becoming more and more the favorite tool for accessing university services and content, and Politecnico di Torino followed the technological evolution to improve its services from the traditional web approach to the mobile App model, passing through a number of intermediate steps such as the responsive web and the mobile web models. The paper describes the strategies and the technological choices used to design and deliver the Educational Portal of Politecnico di Torino, that includes the new official App (PoliTO App). This App allows students, teachers and university staff to access quickly and easily educational content and to use the main university and territorial services. Finally, the paper includes an analysis that shows a positive correlation between the use of video-lectures and the success in the exams, thus validating the proposed educational model

OPUS: an Alternate Reality Game to learn SQL at university

The project aims to test the effectiveness of applying the principles of experiential learning within a university course. In particular, the objective of the paper is to investigate the educational effectiveness of the Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and of their characterizing elements: the immersive storytelling, which blends reality and fiction, and the collaborative approach, which activates collective intelligence dynamics. The project combines the concepts of a Database course with the transmedial interaction techniques of a Transmedia course. The idea was to stimulate the interest of Databases course’s students in this subject and help them learn and consolidate SQL. The result was the creation of a playful experience that is classified as Alternate Reality Game, a realistic and highly immersive interactive storytelling, set in a likely fictional universe where the basic rule is “This is not a game”. The ARG was designed to complement the laboratory practice in the context of a Databases university course. In this way, students can practice, review and consolidate the skills acquired during the course. Furthermore, the playful component is accompanied by on-demand educational content, which players have the opportunity to request when they experience difficulties in solving puzzles that require querying the database

Recommending Personalized Summaries of Teaching Materials

Teaching activities have nowadays been supported by a variety of electronic devices. Formative assessment tools allow teachers to evaluate the level of understanding of learners during frontal lessons and to tailor the next teaching activities accordingly. Despite plenty of teaching materials are available in the textual form, manually exploring these very large collections of documents can be extremely time-consuming. The analysis of learner-produced data (e.g., test outcomes) can be exploited to recommend short extracts of teaching documents based on the actual learner’s needs. This paper proposes a new methodology to recommend summaries of potentially large teaching documents. Summary recommendations are customized to student’s needs according to the results of comprehension tests performed at the end of frontal lectures. Specifically, students undergo multiple-choice tests through a mobile application. In parallel, a set of topic-specific summaries of the teaching documents is generated. They consist of the most significant sentences related to a specific topic. According to the results of the tests, summaries are personally recommended to students. We assessed the applicability of the proposed approach in real context, i.e., a B.S. university-level course. The results achieved in the experimental evaluation confirmed its usability

Eye Tracking Impact on Quality-of-Life of ALS Patients

Chronic neurological disorders in their advanced phase are characterized by a progressive loss of mobility (use of upper and lower limbs), speech and social life. Some of these pathologies, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple sclerosis, are paradigmatic of these deficits. High technology communication instruments, such as eye tracking, can be an extremely important possibility to reintroduce these patients in their family and social life, in particular when they suffer severe disability. This paper reports and describes the results of an ongoing experimentation about Eye Tracking impact on the quality of life of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. The aim of the experimentation is to evaluate if and when eye tracking technologies have a positive impact on patients' live

Improving the effectiveness of SQL learning practice: a data-driven approach

Most engineering courses include fundamental practice activities to be performed by students in computer labs. During lab sessions, students work on solving exercises with the help of teaching assistants, who often have a hard time for guaranteeing a timely, optimized, and “democratic” support to everybody. This paper presents a learning environment to improve the experience of the lab sessions participants, both the students and the teaching assistants. In particular, the environment was designed, implemented, and experimented in the context of a database course. The application designed to support the learning environment stores all the events occurring during a SQL practice lab, i.e., task progression, query submissions, error feedback, assistance requests and interventions, and it provides information useful both for use on-the-fly and for later analysis. Thanks to the analysis of these data, the application dynamically provides teaching assistants with a graphical interface highlighting where assistance is most needed, by considering different factors such as the progression rate, the percentage of correct solutions, and the difficulties in solving the current exercise. Furthermore, the stored data allow teachers later on to analyze and to interpret the behavior of the students during the lab, and to have insights on their main mistakes and misconceptions. After describing the environment, the interfaces, and the approaches used to identify the students’ teams that need timely assistance, the paper presents the results of different analyses performed using the collected data, to help the teacher better understand students’ educational needs