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- A survey of e-learning content aggregation standardsPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Leal, José PauloAs e-learning gradually evolved many specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfil the needs of teachers and students, such as repositories of learning objects, authoring tools, intelligent tutors and automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity raises interoperability issues giving the standardization of content an important role in e-learning. This article presents a survey on current e-learning content aggregation standards focusing on their internal organization and packaging. This study is part of an effort to choose the most suitable specifications and standards for an e-learning framework called Ensemble defined as a conceptual tool to organize a network of e-learning systems and services for domains with complex evaluation.
- Integration of e-portfolios in learning management systemsPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Oliveira, Lino; Leal, José Paulo; Moreira, FernandoThe LMS plays a decisive role in most eLearning environments. Although they integrate many useful tools for managing eLearning activities, they must also be effectively integrated with other specialized systems typically found in an educational environment such as Repositories of Learning Objects or ePortfolio Systems. Both types of systems evolved separately but in recent years the trend is to combine them, allowing the LMS to benefit from using the ePortfolio assessment features. This paper details the most common strategies for integrating an ePortfolio system into an LMS: the data, the API and the tool integration strategies. It presents a comparative study of strategies based on the technical skills, degree of coupling, security features, batch integration, development effort, status and standardization. This study is validated through the integration of two of the most representative systems on each category - respectively Mahara and Moodle.
- GATUGU: six perspectives of evaluation of gamified systemsPublication . Swacha, Jakub; Queirós, Ricardo; Paiva, José CarlosAs gamification spreads to new areas, new applications are being developed and the interest in evaluating gamified systems continues to grow. To date, however, no one has comprehensively approached this topic: multiple evaluation dimensions and measures have been proposed and applied without any effort to organize them into a full gamut of tools for the multi-dimensional evaluation of gamified systems. This paper addresses this gap by proposing GATUGU, a set of six perspectives of evaluation of gamified systems: General effects of gamification, Area-specific effects of gamification, Technical quality of gamified systems, Use of gamified systems, Gamefulness of gamified systems, and User experience of gamified systems. For each perspective, GATUGU indicates the relevant dimensions of evaluation, and, for each dimension, one measure is suggested. GATUGU does not introduce any new measurement tools but merely recommends one of the available tools for each dimension, considering their popularity and ease of use. GATUGU can guide researchers in selecting gamification system evaluation perspectives and dimensions and in finding adequate measurement tools. Thanks to conforming to GATUGU, the published gamification system evaluation results will become easier to compare and to perform various kinds of meta-analyses on them.
- PROud - a gamification framework based on programming exercises usage dataPublication . Queirós, RicardoSolving programming exercises is the best way to promote practice in computer programming courses and, hence, to learn a programming language. Meanwhile, programming courses continue to have an high rate of failures and dropouts. The main reasons are related with the inherent domain complexity, the teaching methodologies, and the absence of automatic systems with features such as intelligent authoring, profile-based exercise sequencing, content adaptation, and automatic evaluation on the student’s resolution. At the same time, gamification is being used as an approach to engage learners’ motivations. Despite its success, its implementation is still complex and based on ad-hoc and proprietary solutions. This paper presents PROud as a framework to inject gamification features in computer programming learning environments based on the usage data from programming exercises. This data can be divided into two categories: generic data produced by the learning environment—such as, the number of attempts and the duration that the students took to solve a specific exercise—or code-specific data produced by the assessment tool—such as, code size, use memory, or keyword detection. The data is gathered in cloud storage and can be consumed by the learning environment through the use of a client library that communicates with the server through an established Application Programming Interface (API). With the fetched data, the learning environment can generate new gamification assets (e.g., leaderboards, quests, levels) or enrich content adaptations and recommendations in the inner components such as the sequencing tools. The framework is evaluated on its usefulness in the creation of a gamification asset to present dynamic statistics on specific exercises.
- Defining requirements for a gamified programming exercises formatPublication . Swacha, Jakub; Queirós, Ricardo; Paiva, José Carlos; Leal, José PauloComputer programming is a complex domain both to teach and learn. This incited endeavors to find methods that could mitigateat least some of the existing barriers. In the last years, automatic assessment has been playing an important role in reducing theburden of teachers in the assessment of students’ attempts to solve programming exercises and fostering the autonomy of studentsby allowing them to practice in any place and at any time with timely feedback.Even more recent development is the use of gamification in computer programming education in order to raise the enjoyment andengagement of students. Despite its rising spread, until now, there is not a programming exercise specification format addressingthe needs of gamification, such as the definition of challenges, the underlying storyline, including the links to other exercises, orthe rewards for solving challenges in form of points, badges or virtual items. Such a data format would allow the exchange ofready-to-use programming exercises along with the gamification-related data among different educational institutions and courses,providing instructors a possibility to make use of gamification in their courses without having to invest their own time in defininggamification rules themselves.In this paper, we analyze a set of concepts related to programming gamification developed in our previous work to identify therequirements for the specification of a gamified exercise format.
- Towards a framework for gamified programming educationPublication . Swacha, Jakub; Queirós, Ricardo; Paiva, José CarlosComputer programming is a difficult subject that can only be mastered with lots of practice. It is therefore of primary importance to rise and retain students' engagement during a programming course, a task in which gamification has been proven as a competent method. Even though there are numerous reports on applying gamification to programming courses, there are no available open resources or dedicated platforms that could be used by programming teachers to gamify their courses, meeting both the requirements of being easy to adopt and leaving the decisions on the scope of the course and the level of gamification to the teachers themselves. In order to fulfill this gap, a consortium of four European institutions initiated a common project to develop open gamified programming exercises and interactive course materials for popular programming languages. In this paper, we report the results of the first stage of this work, which defined the range of gamification concepts to be covered within the developed framework and its evaluation by students.
- Managing gamified programming courses with the FGPE platformPublication . Paiva, José Carlos; Queirós, Ricardo; Leal, José Paulo; Swacha, Jakub; Miernik, FilipE-learning tools are gaining increasing relevance as facilitators in the task of learning how to program. This is mainly a result of the pandemic situation and consequent lockdown in several countries, which forced distance learning. Instant and relevant feedback to students, particularly if coupled with gamification, plays a pivotal role in this process and has already been demonstrated as an effective solution in this regard. However, teachers still struggle with the lack of tools that can adequately support the creation and management of online gamified programming courses. Until now, there was no software platform that would be simultaneously open-source and general-purpose (i.e., not integrated with a specific course on a specific programming language) while featuring a meaningful selection of gamification components. Such a solution has been developed as a part of the Framework for Gamified Programming Education (FGPE) project. In this paper, we present its two front-end components: FGPE AuthorKit and FGPE PLE, explain how they can be used by teachers to prepare and manage gamified programming courses, and report the results of the usability evaluation by the teachers using the platform in their classes.
- Specifying a programming exercises evaluation service on the e-FrameworkPublication . Leal, José Paulo; Queirós, Ricardo; Ferreira, DuarteThe e-Framework is arguably the most prominent e-learning framework currently in use. For this reason it was selected as basis for modelling a programming exercises evaluation service. The purpose of this type of evaluator is to mark and grade exercises in computer programming courses and in programming contests. By exposing its functions as services a programming exercise evaluator is able to participate in business processes integrating different system types, such as Programming Contest Management Systems, Learning Management Systems, Integrated Development Environments and Learning Object Repositories. This paper formalizes the approaches to be used in the implementation of a programming exercise evaluator as a service on the e-Framework.
- Integration of e-learning systems with repositories of learning objectsPublication . Leal, José Paulo; Queirós, RicardoThis paper describes a communication model to integrate repositories of programming problems with other e-Learning software components. The motivation for this work comes from the EduJudge project that aims to connect an existing repository of programming problems to learning management systems. When trying to use the existing repositories of learning objects we realized that they are mainly specialized search engines and lack features for integration with other e-Learning systems. With this model we intend to clarify the main features of a programming problem repository, in order to enable the design and development of software components that use it. The two main points of this model are the definition of programming problems as learning objects and the definition of the core functions exposed by the repository. In both cases, this model follows the existing specifications of the IMS standard and proposes extensions to deal with the special requirements of automatic evaluation and grading of programming exercises. In the definition of programming problems as learning objects we introduced a new schema for meta-data. This schema is used to represent meta-data related to automatic evaluation that cannot be conveniently represented using the standard: the type of automatic evaluation; the requirements of the evaluation engine; or the roles of different assets - tests cases, program solutions, etc. In the definition of the core functions we used two different web services flavours - SOAP and REST - and described each function as an operation for each type of interface. We describe also the data types of the arguments of each operation. These data types consist mainly on learning objects and their identifications, but include also usage reports and queries using XQuery.
- Orchestration of e-learning services for automatic evaluation of programming exercisesPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Leal, José PauloManaging programming exercises require several heterogeneous systems such as evaluation engines, learning objects repositories and exercise resolution environments. The coordination of networks of such disparate systems is rather complex. These tools would be too specific to incorporate in an e-Learning platform. Even if they could be provided as pluggable components, the burden of maintaining them would be prohibitive to institutions with few courses in those domains. This work presents a standard based approach for the coordination of a network of e-Learning systems participating on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The proposed approach uses a pivot component to orchestrate the interaction among all the systems using communication standards. This approach was validated through its effective use on classroom and we present some preliminary results.