Design a Computer Programming Learning Environment for Massive Open Online Courses

Introduction

The evolution of e-learning in the last decades has been astonishing. In fact, e-learning seems to be constantly reinventing itself, finding new uses for technology, creating new tools, discovering new concepts. Platforms for supporting e-learning have been evolving for some years, exploring many approaches and producing a great variety of solutions.

These solutions make the learning and teaching more efficient and productive, but they usually lack effective real-time monitoring to learning process (Henda, 2013).

In the meantime many universities and institutions are using platforms for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), characterised with a great diversity of topics and a huge number of enrolments. However, the real-time feedback is important for the effectiveness of MOOCs. We state that novice students in an e-learning system might feel being isolated from the teachers and other students, because of the lack of essential interactions components in the system design (Jonas & Burns, 2013). This issue leads to a negative impact on the students' outcome. With well-designed synchronous virtual classrooms and collaborative tools it is possible to reduce this negative impact (Nedeva & Dineva, 2010).

This issue augments when we talk about complex domains. Learning complex skills is hard. A good example is the computer programming domain. Introductory programming courses are generally regarded as difficult and often have high failure and dropout rates (Ala-Mutka, 2005), (O'Kelly & Gibson, 2006) and (Robins et al, 2003). Many educators claim that “learning through practice” is by far the best way to learn computer programming and to engage novice students (Jonas & Burns, 2013), (Eckerdal, 2009). Practice in this area boils down to solving programming exercises. Nevertheless, solving exercises is only effective if students receive an assessment on their work. Assessing the work of students and providing individualised feedback to all students is time-consuming for teachers and frequently involves a time delay. The existent tools and specifications prove to be insufficient in complex evaluation domains where there is a greater need to practice (Rongas & Kaarna, 2004).

This paper presents a conceptual design model for learning environments regarding complex domains. Specifically, we focus on the computer programming domain. This environment uses the portal interface design model gathering information from a network of services such as repositories and program evaluators. These services will improve the responsiveness of the environment, a crucial success factor in massive courses.

The design model includes also the integration with learning management systems, a central piece in the MOOC realm, endowing this way the model with characteristics such as scalability, collaboration and interoperability.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: the next section presents a brief survey on integration specifications such as, the digital repositories interoperability specification and the learning tools interoperability specification. Next, we present the conceptual model of a learning environment for a complex domain such as the computer programming domain. In the following section we propose a graphical user interface for such model focusing on the user profiles and actions, screen layout and implementation details. Finally, we conclude with a summary of the main contribution of this work and a perspective of future work.