Analysis of Students’ Behavior Watching iMooX Courses with Interactive Elements

Digital learning technologies are becoming increasingly important for our modern educational system. In addition to teaching methods that incorporate interactivity, these approaches benefit students’ overall learning experience and success by enhancing their attention and fostering a positive attitude towards the learning content being presented. Interactivity comes in various forms, and while a combination of distinct activities is beneficial, some are more effective at engaging students. Using digital technologies in an educational environment opens up new possibilities for students, teachers, and researchers. It provides new insights into learning behavior and enables the collection of interaction information. This data could, for example, show how often a video was paused or at what point students lost interest and left, but gaining such knowledge requires further processing. The use of visualizations that depict behavior, such as the change of attention over time, can be an effective way to present extracted information. Therefore, our research focuses on developing an application that enables us to generate various visualizations from the collected data. A single command-line input will be sufficient to create them. Furthermore, a video course was created from which we collected behavioral data. Our results aim to showcase the benefits of interactivity, and that the created figures can be used for data evaluation verifies the versatility of the generated visualizations

Porting a Native Android App to iOS: Porting Process Shown by the Example of the “Schoolstart Screening App”

The two mobile operating systems Android and i(Pad)OS have dominated the smartphone and tablet market for years and app providers have to offer their apps for both systems in most cases in order to be competitive or to be able to reach the majority of potential customers. In native app development, separate applications have to be written and maintained for each platform. Often, apps are developed for one platform first and the second app is developed at a later stage, after some feedback could be collected. This porting from one system to the other can be either (partially) automated or manual, but in any case, it has its challenges. Both systems were designed with different approaches and differ greatly in some parts from each other – not only visually, but also in terms of the underlying structure. To illustrate the porting process, the Android app “Schoolstart Screening App”, which was developed for the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research of Austria by Graz University of Technology at the OU Educational Technology, was ported so that it can be used also on iPads. Automated approaches were discussed and the chosen process is explained to get a good overview of the topic

Scheduling Interactions in Learning Videos: A State Machine Based Algorithm

Based on the currently developing trend of so called Massive Open Online Courses it is obvious that learning videos are more in use nowadays. This is some kind of comeback because due to the maxim “TV is easy, book is hard” [1][2] videos were used rarely for teaching. A further reason for this rare usage is that it is widely known that a key factor for human learning is a mechanism called selective attention [3][4]. This suggests that managing this attention is from high importance. Such a management could be achieved by providing different forms of interaction and communication in all directions. It has been shown that interaction and communication is crucial for the learning process [6]. Because of these remarks this research study introduces an algorithm which schedules interactions in learning videos and live broadcastings. The algorithm is implemented by a web application and it is based on the concept of a state machine. Finally, the evaluation of the algorithm points out that it is generally working after the improvement of some drawbacks regarding the distribution of interactions in the video

Information Systems Maintenance: Maintenance Factors for Information Systems with a Focus on Teaching and Learning

This work deals with the maintenance of information systems—specifically, with the maintenance of information systems that have a focus on teaching and learning. Depending on the context of an information system, there are different influencing factors for the maintenance of these systems. This work clarifies how the maintenance activities and their influencing factors differ in an information system for teaching and learning from other information systems, or why some influencing factors are particularly more important. The first step is to understand what maintenance means, why there is a need for maintenance, and which maintenance strategies can be used. Finally, the defined factors of influencing the maintenance of information systems for teaching and learning are evaluated during interviews with experts in order to be able to determine their relevance. A further part of this document is the influence of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines on information systems maintenance, which came into force on May 25, 2018. These guidelines of the GDPR affect a large part of all information systems that process data—in particular, the processing of personal data. The GDPR regulates, among other things, the rights and obligations of data processing

Math Trainer as a Chatbot Via System (Push) Messages for Android

In the recent years, as technology grew, so did the chatbot technology. More and more companies and people are using and reaping the benefits from them. This paper shows how a chatbot for mathematical tasks, named mathbot, was developed. The chatbot uses mathematical exercises from the “Schulapps” of the LearningLab of Graz, University of Technology and combines them with textual questions to provide a useful utility for practicing. It is shown that such a chatbot could be useful for pupils and teachers by evaluating a test run in an elementary school