This paper presents two interactive visualization tools for learning management systems (LMS) in order to improve learning and teaching in online courses. The first tool was developed at the... Show More

This paper presents two interactive visualization tools for learning management systems (LMS) in order to improve learning and teaching in online courses. The first tool was developed at the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (IISLab) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The tool is used to analyse students' activity from automatically recorded user log data and to build interactive visualizations. They provide valuable insights into the learning process and participation of students in a course offered to teachers and students. The second tool was developed at the Unitelma Sapienza University. It extends navigation and search functionalities in the discussion forum of an LMS with a topic-driven paradigm. The tool analyses forum content and automatically identifies discussion topics. It then enhances the original forum with a topic-driven navigation structure and an interactive search graph. Both tools have been developed as plug-ins for the Moodle LMS, but their analysis processes and techniques can be adopted into any LMS.

Recent technology trends evolved the student assessment from traditional ones (“pen-and-paper” and “face-to-face”) to modern e-Assessment system. These modern approaches allow the teachers to... Show More

Recent technology trends evolved the student assessment from traditional ones (“pen-and-paper” and “face-to-face”) to modern e-Assessment system. These modern approaches allow the teachers to conduct and evaluate an exam with huge number of students in a short period of time. Even more important, both the teacher and the students achieve the evaluation results immediately after the assessment has finished. Although the e-Assessment system speeds up the evaluation, teachers face a huge challenge to prepare, organize and generate a huge set of questions. The questions must cover all learning objectives and their number should be as large as possible to prevent cheating by guessing or memorization of correct answers from previous exams. This paper presents several technologies that can efficiently realize strategies to develop a huge question database with minimal teacher efforts. It also describes the methodologies and strategies based on a specific technology. The technologies are categorized in two classes of e-Assessment systems that are used at the authors' faculty: the traditional e-Assessment system with usual multiple-choice answers and the newest e-Assessment system with interactive images. The question generation is based on defining the questions and answers as XML files (for more advanced users) and MS Word-based files (for users with basic IT background). The question database can be used both for efficient and effective e-Assessment and e-Learning.

Though temporal reasoning is a key factor for text comprehension, existing proposals for visualizing temporal information and temporal connectives proves to be inadequate for children, not only for... Show More

Though temporal reasoning is a key factor for text comprehension, existing proposals for visualizing temporal information and temporal connectives proves to be inadequate for children, not only for their levels of abstraction and detail, but also because they rely on pre-existing mental models of time and temporal connectives, while in the case of children the system has to induce the development of a mental model not existing yet. Filling this gap was the main goal of the FP7 European project TERENCE, which developed an adaptive learning system shaped around the concepts of repeated interaction experience and of graded text simplification and consistent with consolidated pedagogical approaches built on question-based games. In particular, in this paper the authors present the main features of its learner-oriented read-and-play visual interaction environment that, according to the dual-coding theory, follows a two-tiers approach pairing verbal and visual information.

In this work the authors investigate the effectiveness of robotics in education. Rather than creating excitement for children when playing with robots in games, they are examining the overall... Show More

In this work the authors investigate the effectiveness of robotics in education. Rather than creating excitement for children when playing with robots in games, they are examining the overall learning environment where a robot acts as a teaching assistant. They designed a suitable lesson plan when groups of teenagers participate in activities involving the use of the robot: the authors first performed experiments for the robot to solve the “Tower of Hanoi” problem; then, they designed a lesson plan to teach the “Tower of Hanoi” problem using a KUKA youBot as a teaching assistant. The experiment involved two groups of students: one group was taught with the robot and the other group without the robot. Finally, the authors present results of a comparative study based on questionnaires, in order to understand if the effectiveness of the teaching has been greater with the robot as teaching assistant.

Note contents taken by students during a blended learning course were evaluated, to improve the quality of university instruction. To conduct a quantitative comparison of the contents of all notes... Show More

Note contents taken by students during a blended learning course were evaluated, to improve the quality of university instruction. To conduct a quantitative comparison of the contents of all notes for effective instruction from lecturer to students to occur, the contents were mathematically compared and evaluated using two ways of summarizing the frequency of term co-occurrences. In order to evaluate visually the differences between the contents of notes taken, an adjacency matrix and Levenshtein distance metrics were employed to represent noun co-occurrence in the notes. In comparing notes between the lecturer and students, insufficient distance and additional distance are defined and measured for all participants during the course. In the results, students recorded additional nouns to replace the nouns given by the lecturer, and introduced new nouns of their own as substitutes as well. There are significant correlation relationships between the above mentioned distances and the ratios, such as between the word ratio and coverage, which have been defined in previous studies. Also, summarizing ways of co-occurrence frequency did not affect any of the relationships. Finally, possible applications for visualizing learning activities of the lecturer and students are discussed.

The visual is a dominant mode of information retrieval and understanding however, the focus on the visual dimension of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) is still quite weak in relation to its... Show More

The visual is a dominant mode of information retrieval and understanding however, the focus on the visual dimension of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) is still quite weak in relation to its predominant focus on usability. To accommodate the future needs of the visual learner, designers of e-learning environments should advance the current attention on usability and functionality to include aesthetics, the visual and the affective. The challenge lies in finding a way to fully address the needs of the visual learner. This paper explores the role of visual aesthetics in improving engagement in online learning.