Demographical Changes of Student Subgroups in MOOCs: Towards Predicting At-Risk Students

Past studies have shown that student engagement in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could be used to identify at-risk students (students with drop-out tendency). Some studies have further considered student diversity by looking into subgroup behavior. Yet, most of them lack consideration of students’ behavioral changes along the course. Towards bridging the gap, this study clusters students based on both their interaction with the system and their characteristics and explores how their cluster membership changes along the course. The result shows that students’ cluster membership changes significantly in the first half of the course and stabilized in the second half of the course. Our findings provide insight into how students may be engaged in learning on MOOC platforms and suggest the improvement of identifying at-risk students based on their temporal data

Revealing the hidden patterns : a comparative study on profiling subpopulations of MOOC students.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) exhibit a remarkable heterogeneity of students. The advent of complex “big data” from MOOC platforms is a challenging yet rewarding opportunity to deeply understand how students are engaged in MOOCs. Past research, looking mainly into overall behavior, may have missed patterns related to student diversity. Using a large dataset from a MOOC offered by FutureLearn, we delve into a new way of investigating hidden patterns through both machine learning and statistical modelling. In this paper, we report on clustering analysis of student activities and comparative analysis on both behavioral patterns and demographical patterns between student subpopulations in the MOOC. Our approach allows for a deeper understanding of how MOOC students behave and achieve. Our findings may be used to design adaptive strategies towards an enhanced MOOC experience

A gamificação como apoio no ensino de metodologia científica: Um relato de experiência e lições aprendidas no domínio de ciências agrárias

A gamificação tem atraído atenção de educadores nos últimos anos, devido aos benefícios relacionados à motivação e engajamento, que podem impactar no desempenho dos alunos. No entanto, para que esses efeitos sejam alcançados, é necessário um bom planejamento, baseado em evidências empíricas, sobre o design da gamificação. Com base no exposto, este estudo visa demonstrar o relato de experiência da aplicação da gamificação, num contexto de sala de aula, para apoiar o ensino de metodologia científica. Para este estudo, foram selecionadas uma turma de três cursos distintos (N = 150 alunos), nas quais foram aplicadas estratégias gamificadas. Os resultados foram analisados de um ponto de vista qualitativo e demonstraram que os alunos se interessam mais em uma aula gamificada, no entanto o trabalho individualizado tornou a aplicação da gamificação impráticável pelo professor, necessitando um novo planejamento em tempo real

Does Gamified Educational Systems Change Students’ Learning Behaviors? A Case Study with Postgraduate Students

In the last few years, gamification studies have increased in the field of education and digital technologies, showing different results on the use of gamified educational systems in relation to students’ learning aspects. These studies, however, often keep the focus on quantitative or qualitative approaches directly related to student learning, without considering students’ perceptions of the gamification design and how the gamification design aspects of the system can influence positively the students’ behavior change. Therefore, this study compared a gamified with a non-gamified version of an educational system, through a mixed (quantitative and qualitative) approach to identify if gamified educational systems are better than non-gamified educational systems to provide positive students’ learning behavior change. The results confirmed that the gamified educational system was more effective than the non-gamified system

Teaching Interactive Fiction for Undergraduate Students with the Aid of Information Technologies: An Experience Report

This paper presents an experience report concerning the use of a platformcalled “Storium” in the subject of “Interactive Fiction” for undergraduatestudents, from a Digital Design Course. The objective was to use the learningtheories of constructivism and multimedia learning to create an instructionalplan devised to teach the students how to create complex interactive narrativesand stories from a practical perspective. During the course, the students learnedthe subject’s theoretical concepts and applied them directly, creating their owninteractive fiction. The results from this research proposes a new approach, usingdigital tools whose resources provides an environment for the creation ofinteractive narratives. These narratives can be used to aid future designs ofinstructional plans for complex writing concepts

Validating the Effectiveness of Data-Driven Gamification Recommendations: An Exploratory Study

Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by the students, i.e., the users of e-learning environments. In this study, we conducted a survey presenting 25 predefined strategies, based on a previous study, to students and analysed each strategys perceived relevance, instanced in an e-learning environment. Our results show that students perceive Acknowledgement, Objective and Progression as important elements in a gamified e-learning environment. We also provide new insights about existing elements and design recommendations for domain specialists

Uncovering associations between users' behaviour and their flow experience

Flow experience is one of the most ambitious targets of any user interface designer. However, it has remained elusive to evaluate how well user interfaces give rise to flow experience outside conducting invasive self-reporting-based questionnaires, which remove the users from the flow experience and can't be massively applied. At the same time, otherwise, well-built systems do track the behaviour of users on the interface, and therefore, user behaviour data could act as a reliable proxy for assessing the experience of users. Currently, there is little empirical research or data about which indices of user behaviours might correspond with having a flow experience as well as the different psychological constituents of the flow experience. Therefore, facing the challenge of using users' behaviour data to model users' experience, we investigated the associations between users' behaviour data (e.g. mouse clicks, activity time in the system, and average response time) and their self-reported flow experience by using data mining (i.e. associations rules) analysing data from 204 subjects. Results demonstrate that the speed of users' actions negatively affects the flow experience antecedents while also positively affecting the loss of self-consciousness. Our study advances the literature, providing insights to identify users' flow experience through behaviour data

Does Tailoring Gamified Educational Systems Matter? The Impact on Students\u27 Flow Experience

Recent research has shown that using gamification can prone to impact negatively on the motivation of students in educational systems. One of the reasons is that people are motivated or demotivated by different gamification elements according to their gamer type . Thus, one of the main challenges in this field is to tailor gamified educational systems based on the students\u27 gamer type and investigate if this kind of system presents better results than the counter-tailored gamified educational systems. This paper aims to investigate the effects of a tailored gamified educational system based on gamer type in terms of students\u27 flow experience. We conducted an experiment with 121 Brazilian elementary school students comparing a tailored version against a counter-tailored version of a gamified educational system in terms of students\u27 flow experience. The main results indicate that there is no significant difference in terms of students\u27 flow experience, surprising and contradicting recent important studies in this field