Pantelis M. Papadopoulos

Enhancing software engineering education through open source projects: Four years of students' perspectives

This paper presents the results after four years of running of an instructional method that utilizes free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects as tools for teaching software engineering in formal education. In the last four academic years, a total of 408 juniors majoring in Informatics (in a 4-year program) participated in the study, assuming the roles of requirements engineers, testers, developers, and designers/analysts. Students appreciated the benefits gained by the method and identified aspects that require further improvement. In the paper, we present (a) the details of our method, (b) students’ opinions as recorded through a questionnaire including both closed and open ended questions, and (c) conclusions on how the use of FLOSS projects can be applied, and be beneficial for the students.

Selecting and Evaluating a Learning Management System: A Moodle Evaluation Based on Instructors and Students

This paper presents the rationale behind the utilization of a Moodle Learning Management System for the facilitation of a blended learning approach in the Informatics department. The authors present and analyze the steps followed in order to replace the prior decentralized organizational structure of the courses, which consisted of a multitude of different and incompatible systems. The main goal was to implement a single system, which would be easy to operate, maintain, and update, and would cater to the variety of instructor and student needs. Furthermore, evaluation data of the new system is presented in detail. The analysis of the results serves to confirm the success of this department-wide migration.

Conversational agents for academically productive talk: a comparison of directed and undirected agent interventions

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order to fine-tune the design of automated APT intervention modes and, thus, enhance agent pedagogical efficacy. Building on this line of research, this work explores the impact of a configurable APT agent that prompts peers to build on prior knowledge and logically connect their contributions to important domain concepts discussed in class. A total of 96 computer science students engaged in a dialogue-based activity in the context of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) university course. During the activity, students worked online in dyads to accomplish a learning task. The study compares three conditions: students who collaborated without any agent interference (control), students who received undirected agent interventions that addressed both peers in the dyad (U treatment), and students who received directed agent interventions addressing a particular learner instead of the dyad (D treatment). The results suggest that although both agent intervention methods can improve students’ learning outcomes and dyad in-task performance, the directed one is more effective than the undirected one in enhancing individual domain knowledge acquisition and explicit reasoning. Furthermore, findings show that the positive effect of the agent on dyad performance is mediated by the frequency of students’ contributions displaying explicit reasoning, while most students perceive agent involvement favorably.

How Revealing Rankings Affects Student Attitude and Performance in a Peer Review Learning Environment

This paper investigates the possible benefits as well as the overall impact on the behaviour of students within a learning environment, which is based on double-blinding reviewing of freely selected peer works. Fifty-six sophomore students majoring in Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering volunteered to participate in the study. The experiment was conducted in a controlled environment, according to which students were divided into three groups of different conditions: control, usage data, usage and ranking data. No additional information was made available to students in the control condition. The students that participated in the other two conditions were provided with their usage information (logins, peer work viewed/reviewed, etc.), while members of the last group could also have access to ranking information about their positioning in their group, based on their usage data. According to our findings, students’ performance between the groups were comparable, however, the Ranking group revealed differences in the resulted behavior among its members. Specifically, awareness of ranking information mostly benefited students which were relatively in favor of ranking, motivating them to further engage and perform better than the rest of the group members.

FLOSS in Technology-Enhanced Learning

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Free/Libre Open Source Software FLOSS Learning Management System LMS. Following a selection process we analyze the functionalities and characteristics of 8 tools commonly used in formal and informal education. More specifically we focus on the availability of different tools concerning communication and assistance, such as, forum, email, calendar, portfolios, etc. Our analysis showed that despite their similarities, the appropriateness of different FLOSS LMSs can be greatly affected by the specific needs of students, instructors and institutions.

Bridging the contextual distance: the e-CASE learning environment for supporting students’ context awareness

Supporting students’ awareness of the complex way that contextual issues affect knowledge application in authentic situations is a critical instructional mission and can lead to improved problem solving in the workplace. In this work we present the design of e-CASE (Context Awareness Supporting Environment), which is a case based learning environment for supporting instruction in the domain of software development. In designing e-CASE we employ a model for context which further guides the use of script and narrative control techniques as external representations for enhancing students’ context awareness. Our system applies an appropriate metadata scheme for connecting various pieces of information and creating crossing paths for the learner, in the web of authentic application cases. It also provides functionality for updating and extending its content allowing people from the workplace to become content providers. Thus, we argue, e-CASE can help bridging the contextual distance, supporting the development of an extended learning community by establishing flexible and instructionally efficient links between the traditional educational settings and the workplace.

Towards Integrating Conversational Agents and Learning Analytics in MOOCs

Higher Education Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) introduce a way of transcending formal higher education by realizing technology-enhanced formats of learning and instruction and by granting access to an audience way beyond students enrolled in any one Higher Education Institution. However, although MOOCs have been reported as an efficient and important educational tool, there is a number of issues and problems related to their educational impact. More specifically, there is an important number of drop outs during a course, little participation, and lack of students’ motivation and engagement overall. This may be due to one-size-fits-all instructional approaches and very limited commitment to student-student and teacher-student collaboration. This paper introduces the development agenda of a newly started European project called “colMOOC” that aims to enhance the MOOCs experience by integrating collaborative settings based on Conversational Agents and screening methods based on Learning Analytics, to support both students and teachers during a MOOC course. Conversational pedagogical agents guide and support student dialogue using natural language both in individual and collaborative settings. Integrating this type of conversational agents into MOOCs to trigger peer interaction in discussion groups can considerably increase the engagement and the commitment of online students and, consequently, reduce MOOCs dropout rate. Moreover, Learning Analytics techniques can support teachers’ orchestration and students’ learning during MOOCs by evaluating students’ interaction and participation. The research reported in this paper is currently undertaken within the research project colMOOC funded by the European Commission.

Student Groups as Tutors in Information Systems Education - Students Perspectives on Collaboration and Outcomes.

The study explores the potential of the research-teaching nexus in a peer-tutoring setting. During the Fall semester of 2016, students in an Information Systems course worked collaboratively on domain topics, assigned to them by the teacher and created educational material for their fellow students. Students’ tutoring role was concluding with a class presentation and a discussion session in each course lecture. The study focuses on students’ perspectives in the collaborating groups and the audience and analyzes how learning strategies in self-regulation, peer learning, and help seeking affect students’ experiences during group work. Analysis of student activity revealed four distinct patterns of collaboration. Findings suggest that students that rely more on group members for help were less satisfied by the communication among them. However, students were in general satisfied with their collaboration, being able to adapt the activity to their needs. Similarly, the teacher and the audience (students attending the student-tutoring sessions) evaluated positively students’ performance as teachers.

Improving the Quiz - Student Preparation and Confidence as Feedback Metrics.

The study analyzes the potential of different feedback metrics that could improve learning in quiz-based activities. For five consecutive weeks, a group of 91 sophomore students started their classes on Information Systems with a short multiple-choice quiz. The quiz activity was organized into three phases: (a) provide initial response to the questions, (b) view feedback on class activity and revise initial responses, and (c) discuss correct answers and class performance with the teacher. The feedback included information on the percentage of students that selected each choice, on students’ self-reported levels of preparation, and their, also self-reported, confidence that their initial responses were correct. The students used an online quiz tool that was developed for the study and were randomly distributed into four groups, according to the type of feedback they received (only percentage; percentage & confidence; percentage & preparation; percentage, confidence, & preparation). Result analysis revealed that students were relying first and foremost on the percentage metric, even in cases where a wrong answer had the highest percentage value. However, statistical analysis also revealed a significant main effect for confidence and preparation metrics in questions where the percentage metric was ambiguous (i.e., several choices with high percentages).

The Role of Peer Review in Supporting the Sustainability of Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments

We present a series of three studies on the peer review method. We argue that the implementation of such a method in a technology-enhanced learning environment can enhance the learning experience for the students, and consequently affect the sustainability of the learning environment itself. In the context of the paper, sustainability is viewed through a pedagogy lens, describing the property of a learning environment to maintain an active group of students. Finally, we present how different aspects of the peer review process can affect a learning activity.