Katerina Georgouli

Combating anonymousness in populous CS1 and CS2 courses

One of the causes for unsatisfactory results in first year programming courses, as we have observed, is anonymousness: individual students mostly follow the course without recognition from their peers and their teachers, and this often discourages them. Therefore, increasing the visibility of what happens in the classroom and in the labs, as well as helping the students to know who their colleagues are and how they are performing can be very helpful. We recommend three complementary educational strategies which include video recording the classes and making the recordings available on the Internet to help students to review the lectures, using a web-based learning management system to foster the communication between teachers and students and among students, and increasing the visibility of student work by adopting an automatic grading system for lab assignments which can in parallel be used for self-assessment purposes.

Virtual Learning Environments - An Overview

This paper presents an overview of existing virtual learning environments and recent research efforts towards the design of adaptive learning environments. Nowadays, the educational technology offers a considerable number of virtual learning environments to facilitate the learning process, thus supporting web-based education and e-learning to a large extend. E-learning systems work in a synchronous or asynchronous way and have become a common place in all educational environments. Some of them show adaptive characteristics and more rarely some intelligence in the way they communicate with the user. Adaptivity in virtual learning environment has become a prominent research topic during the past decades and has led to a considerable number of web-based adaptive learning environments. Recent research focuses on the further integration of these systems with computational intelligence technologies as well as on the integration of widely used learning management platforms with adaptive tools and web-services.

Incorporating an Automatic Judge into Blended Learning Programming Activities

This paper presents the results of our efforts to incorporate automated judging into the evaluation of programming assignments by students. Our experimentation on automated evaluation of programming assignments was twofold: at first, we have used the stand alone open source system Mooshak independently from the learning management system supporting the rest of e-learning activities; then, we have isolated and integrated its automatic judge engine into the learning management system Claroline. In both cases, automated judging has been used in conjunction with marking by instructors offering regular and frequent feedback. An online questionnaire was presented to the students to quantify their preferences in using the automatic judge with respect to pedagogical results. The data we gathered provides a clear indication that students think positively of the automatic judge when used for evaluation of programming assignments and in conjunction with their instructors’ feedback and marking.