Patricia Haden

Illustrating performance indicators and course characteristics to support students’ self-regulated learning in CS1

In higher education, quality feedback for students is regarded as one of the main contributors to improve student learning. Feedback to support students’ development into self-regulated learners, who set their own goals, self-monitor their actual performance according to these goals, and adjust learning strategies if necessary, is seen as an important aspect of contemporary feedback practice. However, only those students who are aware of the course demands and the impact of certain study behaviors on their final achievement are in a position to self-regulate their learning on an informed basis. Learning analytics is an emerging field primarily concerned with using predictive models to inform educational instructors or learners about projected study outcomes. In a scoping study, over 200 students of an introductory programming course (CS1) were supplied with information revealing performance indicators for different stages on the course and projecting final performance for various achievement levels. The study was set out to explore the impact of this type of feedback in the confined context of a CS1 course as well as to learn about students’ attitudes toward diagnostic course data in general. The results from the study suggest that students valued the information, but, despite high engagement with the information, students’ study behavior and learning outcome remained rather unaffected for the aspects investigated. Given these multi-layered results, we suggest further exploration on the provision of feedback based on diagnostic course data – a vital step toward more transparency for students to foster their active role in the learning process.

It takes a village to teach information technology

The recent introduction of a radically updated national secondary school curriculum in computer science (CS) and information technology (IT) has left many New Zealand high school teachers unprepared and anxious. At Otago Polytechnic, we are currently implementing a programme of supported teacher development that joins tertiary teachers, tertiary students and secondary teachers in collaboratively addressing problems of content knowledge, teaching methods and curricular materials. Our aim is to establish a long-term working partnership that will serve to enrich secondary education and strengthen the diversity and preparedness of incoming tertiary students.

Otago polytechnic accessibility software hub: an open source repository of accessibility software for motor impairment

Accessibility software for motor impairment permits individuals who cannot access electronic devices through traditional input hardware to control desktop computers, tablets or smart phones despite moderate or severe dysfunction of motor control. Due to the relatively small size of the severely motor impaired community and the large fixed costs of developing accessibility software, commercial accessibility software solutions are often relatively expensive, with price ranges between 500-10,000 USD, which renders them unaffordable for a sizable proportion of the motor impaired population. Furthermore, due to the modest potential for profit of the accessibility software market, certain technologically feasible accessibility software solutions are often not even developed by commercial companies. Until recently, open source accessibility software solutions have been relatively scarce and the existing ones do not cover the entire range of available commercial software solutions. In this work, we present an initiative created by scholars at Otago Polytechnic to address this mismatch. We have leveraged capstone projects of our Information Technology degree program to guide students towards the creation of a range of open source accessibility software solutions that are made widely available through an online repository. Thereby, motor impaired users with limited financial means can use our software for free to interact with computers. The open source nature of our projects makes it possible for computationally skilled software developers to extend our software solutions by adding new features or improving existing functionality. We present here the first applications created by our initiative and the corresponding online repository where we make them available to address the needs of the financially constrained motor impaired community.