Julien Broisin

Lab4CE: a Remote Laboratory for Computer Education

Remote practical activities have been demonstrated to be efficient when learners come to acquire inquiry skills. In computer science education, virtualization technologies are gaining popularity as this technological advance enables instructors to implement realistic practical learning activities, and learners to engage in authentic and problem-based learning. However, virtualization solutions have not been designed especially for education and do not address any pedagogical concern. Since several large-scale studies showed that instructional supports during practical activities are almost as important as technical features, this article investigates the following research question: how the scaffolding around the lab increases students’ engagement in remote practical learning of computer science? To answer this question, we introduce the Lab4CE environment, a remote laboratory for computer education which adopts a distributed, modular and flexible architecture to integrate a set of scaffolding tools and services intended for instructors and learners. An exploratory study conducted with 139 undergraduate students enrolled in the first year of a computer science degree suggests a positive effect of the framework on learners’ engagement when they come to practice system administration, and reveals a significant positive correlation between students’ activity within the system and students’ learning achievement.

A Generic Representation Allowing for Expression of Learning Object and Metadata Lifecycle

To allow multiple professionals to design and realise together a specific learning object (LO) by using a repository that store and index their several modifications, we need to represent the different steps followed by a LO and its metadata throughout its lifecycle. Here, we study various initiatives related to this issue and notice significant differences between them in the terms of terminology and sequences. Thus, we infer a generic representation that can be applied to any given learning situation. Finally we validate this representation by connecting it to the International E-Miage approach (computer methods for companiesx92 management), a French digital campus, basis of our experimentation.

Learning Object Virtualization Allowing for Learning Object Assessments and Suggestions for Use

Works presented in this paper offer teachers and learners the opportunity to express their learning objects assessments and suggestions for use directly from a learning management system, and to store these annotations within a learning object repository. Annotations are thus stored when and where they become relevant. Thanks to an open and standardized architecture, these annotations can be widely shared and exploited in various contexts such as re-authoring, curriculum designs, or learning object retrieval. Indeed, annotations can represent a basis for a (personalized) quality-based sorting mechanism helping users to find and reuse learning resources that match with their preferences. An implementation focusing on Moodle and the Ariadne knowledge pool system validates our approach.

Tsaap-Notes -- An Open Micro-blogging Tool for Collaborative Notetaking during Face-to-Face Lectures

Social theories of learning demonstrated that collaborative note taking during face-to-face lecture provides important benefits: better learner engagement, collaborative learning, and knowledge building. In this paper we present Tsaap-Notes, an open micro-blogging platform dedicated to collaborative note taking that can be used as a standalone application, or fully integrated into existing virtual learning environments. Tsaap-Notes provides users with advanced features such as annotations, questions, or filtering that encourage learners to participate in the collaborative activity. Our tool has been experimented with a cohort of forty students during a short period of time, results show that learners are getting more and more familiar with Tsaap-Notes and that this application becomes useful when the time of preparing exams has come.

Toward configurable performance monitoring: Introduction to mathematical support for metric representation and instrumentation of the CIM metric model

This research study addresses the design of a QoS & Management-oriented architecture capable of recognizing the specified metrics in order to monitor them dynamically. Particularly, this paper deals with the representation and instrumentation of metrics reflecting the performance and the dynamic characteristics of network resources and services. This study focuses on some recent research projects related to the monitoring of Web Services performance at the application layer. Based on our objectives and evaluation criteria, we identified several lacks such as standards adoption, generic and adaptable architecture. While taking into consideration the integration and interoperability of a wide variety of management protocols, our architecture adopts the Common Information Model (CIM) as an information model. This model is exploited as a mediator to exchange information between the QoS & Management worlds, and the Monitoring world.

Using Sequential Pattern Mining to Explore Learners’ Behaviors and Evaluate Their Correlation with Performance in Inquiry-Based Learning

This study analyzes students’ behaviors in a remote laboratory environment in order to identify new factors of prediction of academic success. It investigates relations between learners’ activities during practical sessions, and their performance at the final assessment test. Based on learning analytics applied to data collected from an experimentation conducted with our remote lab dedicated to computer education, we discover recurrent sequential patterns of actions that lead us to the definition of learning strategies as indicators of higher level of abstraction. Results show that some of the strategies are correlated to learners’ performance. For instance, the construction of a complex action step by step, or the reflection before submitting an action, are two strategies applied more often by learners of a higher level of performance than by other students. While our proposals are domain-independent and can thus apply to other learning contexts, the results of this study led us to instrument for both students and instructors new visualization and guiding tools in our remote lab environment.

How to Leverage Reflection in Case of Inquiry Learning? The Study of Awareness Tools in the Context of Virtual and Remote Laboratory

In this paper we design a set of awareness and reflection tools aiming at engaging learners in the deep learning process during a practical activity carried out through a virtual and remote laboratory. These tools include: (i) a social awareness tool revealing to learners their current and general levels of performance, but also enabling the comparison between their own and their peers’ performance; (ii) a reflection-on-action tool, implemented as timelines, allowing learners to deeply analyze both their own completed work and the tasks achieved by peers; (iii) a reflection-in-action tool acting as a live video player to let users easily see what others are doing. An experimentation involving 80 students was conducted in an authentic learning setting about operating system administration; the participants evaluated the system only slightly higher than traditional computational environments when it comes to leverage reflection and critical thinking, even if they evaluated the system as good in terms of usability.

A remote laboratory to leverage motivation of learners to practice: An exploratory study about system administration

This paper introduces a framework dedicated to online practical activities. Our remote laboratory is based on a distributed architecture composed of three layers: the learning interface is dedicated to end-users; the laboratory layer hosts the resources on which learners, teachers and tutors perform remote actions; the middleware layer acts as a broker between the two previous layers and embeds various control and learning services. The originality of our framework stands on: (1) a standard to control and supervise the resources of the remote laboratory, (2) the tracking of all users activities at a low level of granularity (including both actions performed on the remote resources, as well as those resulting from the invocation of the learning services) so that various pedagogical features can be further designed, and (3) its independence regarding the learning domain to be learned. An implementation of the framework based on open source software and dedicated to computer engineering is exposed, allowing for an exploratory study involving 139 students enrolled in the first year of a computer science degree. The results of this study are discussed, and suggest a positive effect of our framework on motivation of learners when they come to learn system administration.

Online Tests Based on Contributions Provided by Teachers and Students during Face to Face Lectures

Our previous work has introduced the Tsaap-Notes platform to increase the motivation and engagement of students in the process of collaborative note taking during lectures. In this paper, we introduce the approach Notes as Feedback which consists of recycling interactive questions asked during a lecture in order to semi-automatically build computer based self-assessment tests where feedback provided to students is based on the notes taken by students. A first experimentation on a group of 54 students enrolled in a computer science Master course helped to highlight the benefits of this work: increased participation in note-taking, a massive engagement of students to play the self-assessment tests, and improved student results at the final exam.

Reflexive Learning, Socio-cognitive Conflict and Peer-assessment to Improve the Quality of Feedbacks in Online Tests

Our previous works have introduced the Tsaap-notes platform dedicated to the semi automatic generation of multiple choice questionnaire providing feedbacks: it reuses interactive questions asked by teachers during lectures, as well as the notes taken by students after the presentation of the results as feedbacks integrated into the quizzes. In this paper, we introduce a new feature which aims at increasing the number of contributions of students in order to significantly improve the quality of the feedbacks used in the resulting quizzes. This feature splits the submission of an answer into several distinct phases to harvest explanations given by students, and then applies an algorithm to filter the best contributions to be integrated as feedbacks in the tests. Our approach has been validated by a first experimentation involving master students enrolled in a computer science course.