John Hurst

Inferring Student Learning Behaviour from Website Interactions: A Usage Analysis

Web-based learning environments are now used extensively as integral components of course delivery in tertiary education. To provide an effective learning environment, it is important that educators understand how these environments are used by their students. In conventional teaching environments educators are able to obtain feedback on student learning experiences in face-to-face interactions with their students, enabling continual evaluation of their teaching programs. However, when students work in electronic environments, this informal monitoring is not possible; educators must look for other ways to attain this information. Capturing and recording student interactions with a website provides a rich source of information from data that is gathered unobtrusively. The aim of this study was firstly to explore what information can be gained from analysing student interactions with Web-based learning environments and secondly to determine the value of this process in providing information about student learning behaviours and learning outcomes. This study has provided critical information to educators about the learning behaviour of their students, informing future enhancements and developments to a courseware website and the teaching program it supports.

Research and/or learning and teaching: a study of Australian professors' priorities, beliefs and behaviours

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of key aspects of the teaching and research priorities, beliefs and behaviours of 72 professorial and associate professorial academics in Science, Information Technology and Engineering across four faculties in three Australian universities. The academics ranked 16 research activities and 16 matched learning and teaching (L&T) activities from three perspectives: job satisfaction, role model behaviour and perceptions of professional importance. The findings were unequivocally in favour of research in all three areas and remarkably consistent across the universities. The only L&T activity that was ranked consistently well was ‘improving student satisfaction ratings for teaching’, an area in which academics are increasingly held accountable. Respondents also indicated that their seniors encourage research efforts more than L&T efforts. Recommendations include that higher education rewards for quality L&T are maintained or improved and that recognition of L&T research domains is further strengthened.

Usability of accessible bar charts

Bar charts are one of the most commonly used diagram types. Tactile diagrams are a widely used technique for presenting graphics to people who are blind. We explored how to present bar charts using a tactile presentation. Our user study used blind participants and evaluated both user preferences and performance. We found that providing grid lines and values in a tactile diagram was preferred to a direct transcription. In addition, presenting the data as a tactile table was preferred to a tactile chart. Both of these approaches reduced the error rate, and presentation as a table had performance benefits. We also investigated the comparative usability of: a tactile presentation, an audio description of the bar chart, and a tactile/audio presentation in which a tactile diagram is overlaid on a touch-sensitive device which provides audio feedback on demand. We found that tactile was the most preferred while audio was the least.

Determining website usage time from interactions: data preparation and analysis

With the widespread adoption of the Web in tertiary education, students often work in electronic environments away from the direct observation of their educators. It is therefore of critical importance to develop techniques that will inform educators about how their students are using these new environments. A useful metric for gaining an understanding of student use of a Website is the time they spend using the site. This may be determined from captured and recorded student interactions with the Website. However, Website interactions present a large collection of data in a format that is difficult to handle. Using this data to determine access times is not a trivial task and several stages of preprocessing need to be performed. This article presents a method to prepare and analyse Website interaction data to determine site access times. Interactions captured from a courseware Website are used to illustrate this technique. This study has provided valuable information about student use of the site to the educators, informing future enhancements and developments to the Website.

Designing programming tasks to elicit self-management metacognitive behaviour

In most introductory programming courses tasks are given to students to complete as a crucial part of their study. In this paper, a set of guiding principles is presented for designing programming tasks aimed to elicit metacognitive behaviours in first year students. The main source of data gathered for this study is provided by first year programming students that studied in two different information technology degrees.

iCALT: Intelligent Context-Aware Learning and Teaching Environment

This paper presents a novel framework for obtaining real-time feedback from students as well as enabling the teacher to leverage such feedback and understand the context and situation of the students. We present the iCALT system and discuss its educational rationale, its system operation and usage as well results from trial of the system in a classroom setting and a seminar setting.

PIAVEE - a pedagogy-independent education environment

A platform independent agent-based virtual educational environment (PIAVEE) is described. PIAVEE is conceptualized as a lightweight, flexible environment that links educational resources through a virtual data base and that is supported by an intelligent delivery system. PIAVEE is implemented through an evolutionary process, whose initial focus is the development of and access to, the virtual data base. The paper describes the initial implementations, which focus on proof of concept and basic level functionality.