Teaching types with a cognitively effective worked example format

AbstractTeaching functional programming as a second programming paradigm is often difficult as students can have strong preconceptions about programming. When most of these preconceived ideas fail to be confirmed, functional programming may be seen as an unnecessarily difficult topic. A typical topic that causes such difficulties is the language of types employed by many modern functional languages. In this paper, we focus on addressing this difficulty through the use of step-by-step calculations of type expressions. The outcome of the study is an elaboration of a worked example format and a methodical approach for teaching types to beginner functional programmers.

Status indicators in software engineering group projects

A segment of studies on group structure and performance in software engineering (SE) project-based learning (PjBL) have focused on roles, including studies that use Belbin team roles and studies that address problematic roles such as social loafing. The present study focuses on the status, which is basically missing in SE PjBL studies, although relating to roles. The study investigates the aspects that students identified as indicators of rising or declining status in their project groups. The status theory was utilized as the framework that motivated the research and on which the results were reflected. An inductive qualitative content analysis was applied to learning reports in which stud…

Digging into group establishment: Intervention design and evaluation

Previous research has documented challenges in students’ group work. An identifiable segment of the previous research that relates to improving students’ group work conditions is the study of group formation and self- and peer-assessment. Though studies that primarily focus on how to address the conditions of students’ group work and the existing problems can be found, there are not many related to higher education settings. On this ground, the present article advances a qualitative evaluation of the intervention that promotes student groups’ self-awareness and thereby self-regulation toward fair group work during a software engineering project. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to…

PARSI

A usual target of automatic assessment in CS education has been a computer program or some other software engineering product. In this paper, we describe the 'PARSI' tool that is used for the automatic assessment of stylistic and technical correctness of office documents and some basic IT skills such as email netiquette and email lists usage. The PARSI tool enables us to run a highly populated course with only one teacher, and investigate how we could make such a course a flexible learning experience where learners take an active role.

Teaching programming by emphasizing self-direction: How did students react to the active role required of them?

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming activities. In this article, we present the first results of an exploratory study, in which we teach programming without lectures, exams, or grades, by heavily emphasizing programming activity, and, in a pedagogical sense, student self-direction. This article investigates how students reacted to the active role required of them and what issues emerged in …

Learning via Summarizing Infographics Assignment in Software Engineering Management e-Course?

This Research-to-Practice, Work in Progress Paper focuses on how learners experience creation of infographics as a summarizing assignment in an advanced level e-course on software engineering management (SEM). We have previously investigated how learners perceive infographics as a repeated reflection assignment during a requirements engineering e-course. To complement this research project, we studied how learners experience the use of infographics as a method for summarizing a whole software engineering management course in e-education setting. The SEM course participants (N=36) found that infographics as a summarizing assignment required complex learning that was altogether deemed highly …

Less is More! Preliminary Evaluation of Multi-Functional Document-Based Online Learning Environment

This work-in-progress paper in innovative practice category presents and evaluates a multi-functional document-based learning management system, TIM (The Interactive Material). This system is developed with the goal of integrating a rich set of features seamlessly into teachers’ every-day pedagogical and disciplinary needs. The aim is that a single system (“Less”) would provide all technological solutions necessary for online teaching and learning (“More”), hence the punchline “Less is More!” We illustrate the system and evaluate it based on feedback from teachers. This preliminary evaluation focuses on how teachers reacted to the multi-functional system and is discussed in the context of T…

For the oppressed teacher: stay real!

This article addresses teachers’ challenges in relation to other stakeholders, in light of funding policies and evaluation mechanisms. In particular, a condition where pressures toward high pass rates or ‘throughput’ in the degree system provide a good negotiation position for students with little learning orientation as to their aspirations after credit units is considered. This condition is intensified by the fact that the mere completion goals of non-learning-oriented students align with the collective goals of administration (university), given the throughput-based funding policies. A teacher willing to honorably exercise the profession is, then, ‘squeezed in between.’ Daily teaching end…

Understanding differences among coding club students

Scholars and instructors have been carrying out a multitude of actions to increase students' interest in computer science during the past years. Still, there is a need for knowledge on how these attempts develop student interest. In this qualitative study, we construct illustrative categories out of students who have attended our K-12 coding club and game programming summer course activities. We found four categories: Inactivity, Lack of self-direction, Experimenting, and Professionalism. We also briefly project this abstraction onto a four-phase model of interest development.

Infographics as a Reflective Assignment Method in Requirements Engineering e-Course?

Our Work in Progress Paper in Innovative Practice Category focuses on how learners’ experience use of infographics in advanced level e-course on requirements engineering (RE). Infographics are visual representations of information in such a way that information can be easily understood at a glance. Most of the previous infographics studies have been conducted in the context of inquiry learning. To complement this research, we studied how learners experience use of infographics as a method for reflective assignment and hence if the usage of infographics supported conceptualization about RE. We adopted a qualitative content analysis approach, applying thematic network analysis to the data rec…

Computer Science Outreach Workshop and Interest Development: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study investigates the impact of an extra-curricular programming workshop in student interest development in computer science. The workshop was targeted at 12–18-year old youngsters. A survey was sent to all previous participants with a known home address; 31.5% responded the survey (n = 197). This data was then combined with pre-workshop survey data, and analyzed with mixed methods. Positive development of interest was discovered for 57% of the respondents, of which nearly all attributed their interest increase to the workshop at least partly (92%). Qualitative inspection revealed that the workshop provided three anchors that facilitated students’ reengagement with progra…

Multiple Authentic Project-Based Experiences and Persistent Learning?

This work-in-progress paper in the research category investigates students’ experiences of learning over two project-based courses, of which the first is taken during bachelor studies and the second is taken during master studies. The research goal was to explore if and how the first project experience was considered beneficial to the latter. A pilot interview was conducted and analyzed for qualitatively different themes. Transformative learning theory (TLT) is introduced as the theoretical framework because of its focus on persistent learning originating in transformations in meaning perspectives. The results are discussed in the context of TLT, and they inform curriculum design and resear…

Writing to Learn Programming? : A Single Case Pilot Study

This paper explores the use of writing-to-learn techniques in the context of programming education. It presents a pilot study where a writing assignment is introduced with the purpose of strengthening students' conceptual understanding of a programming construct. The intervention is evaluated using a single case research design, which is augmented by qualitative interview data. Students participating in the study were mildly positive towards the intervention and the results encourage more work on the topic. This work sets directions for further investigations into how writing-to-learn can strengthen programming education and contributes with insights into what kinds of results can be obtain…

How Do Computer Science Students Use Distributed Version Control Systems?

The inclusion of version control systems into computing curricula enables educators to promote competences needed in real-life situations. The use of a version control system also has several potential benefits for the teacher. The teacher might, for instance, use the tool to monitor students’ progress and to give feedback efficiently. This study analyzes how students used the distributed version control system Git in several computing courses. We analyzed students’ commit log data in two advanced programming courses, a second-year introductory software engineering course, and two courses where students developed software products. This enables us to compare Git usage between introductory l…

Five Years of Game Programming Outreach : Understanding Student Differences

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be clas…

Flipping and Blending : An Action Research Project on Improving a Functional Programming Course

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment—flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students’ amount of practice emerged while subsequent challenges relating to students’ independent practical coursework were observed. Particular concerns relating to group work, learning materials, and the attribute of flexibility were investigated during the third action research cycle. The research cycle was analyzed using a qualitative survey on students’ views, teach…

K-12 game programming course concept using textual programming

Several programming environments have been constructed to facilitate novice programming at K-12 and CS0/CS1 levels. The environments can be roughly divided into those using visual or textual programming. This paper presents a K-12 game programming course concept based on textual programming. The concept is based on an easy-to-use C# library, called Jypeli, built on top of Microsoft XNA Framework. The library tries to maintain advantages of visual programming and avoid challenges of textual programming. In particular, the library helps beginners to program their first games in a short period of time and without a heavy syntactic load. The course concept and an initial evaluation consisting o…

Learning mechanisms in multidisciplinary teamwork with real customers and open-ended problems

Recently, there has been a trend towards adding a multidisciplinary or multicultural element to traditional monodisciplinary project courses in computing and engineering. In this article, we examine the implications of multidisciplinarity for students’ learning experiences during a one-semester project course for real customers. We use a qualitative research approach and base our analysis on students’ learning reports on three instances of a project course titled Multidisciplinary working life project. The main contribution of this article is the unified theoretical picture of the learning mechanisms stemming from multidisciplinarity. Our main conclusions are that (1) students generally hav…

High school students' perspective to university CS1

This paper presents a qualitative study of a school-university collaborative project where a game-themed CS1 course was offered as-is to high school students. Our specific interest was to explore the students' experiences with the university level course. Our analyses indicate that immediate and regular support was highly important for student performance, as support of this kind could mitigate issues related to students' orientation towards the high workload of the course. Students who showed academic interest were likely to pass, whereas students lacking self-direction or work efficiency were likely to drop out. Both passed and drop-outs found the course to be a good learning experience. …

Exploring Creativity Expectation in CS1 Students’ View of Programming

Full paper in Research category: Literature provides creativity definitions that are applicable to educational settings. For example, the definition by Plucker et al. emphasizes the ‘social context’ in which the usefulness and novelty of a creative outcome is evaluated, and notes that this emphasis allows students’ coursework to be deemed creative without extraordinary characteristics. Computing educators tend to assume that incoming CS course populations welcome creativity, and utilize application contexts (e.g., games, media, arts, and robots) in which creativity is a central attribute. Previous research also suggests that beginner CS students may initially possess versatile identities re…

Data Analytics in Healthcare: A Tertiary Study

AbstractThe field of healthcare has seen a rapid increase in the applications of data analytics during the last decades. By utilizing different data analytic solutions, healthcare areas such as medical image analysis, disease recognition, outbreak monitoring, and clinical decision support have been automated to various degrees. Consequently, the intersection of healthcare and data analytics has received scientific attention to the point of numerous secondary studies. We analyze studies on healthcare data analytics, and provide a wide overview of the subject. This is a tertiary study, i.e., a systematic review of systematic reviews. We identified 45 systematic secondary studies on data analy…

Korkeakoulujen yhteinen tutkintotavoitteinen koulutus : toiminta- ja koulutusmalli

Tämä raportti on syntynyt osana Euroopan sosiaalirahaston rahoittamaa DI/FM-yhteiskoulutuksen kehittäminen -hanketta. Raportissa tarkastellaan yhtä toimenpiteistä, joilla reagoitiin Keski-Suomen alueella alkaneeseen äkilliseen rakennemuutokseen vuosina 2008 – 2009. Toimenpide konkretisoitui Jyväskylän yliopiston sekä Tampereen teknillisen yliopiston järjestämänä yhteiskoulutuksena, jonka tavoitteena oli kehittää rakennemuutoksen kohderyhmän osaamista ja koulutusta alueellisten yritysten ja elinkeinorakenteen tarpeiden mukaisesti. Koulutuksen kohderyhmänä olivat alemman korkeakoulututkinnon suorittaneet työttömät tai työttömyysuhan alla olleet tuotekehitys-, prosessi- tai tuotantotehtävissä …

Making teaching of programming learning-oriented and learner-directed

Programming education has been traditionally realized in the form of lecturing, but other approaches are under discussion. These emphasize active participation on the part of students, and, as a research activity, consider pedagogic questions holistically. We join this discussion by stating a course design in which we promote a learning-oriented study culture where learning should not be characterized principally as the task of meeting some predefined completion requirements. Moreover, we want our course to be learner-directed meaning that students should take control over their own learning process. Grounded on these goals, this discussion paper gives us a starting point for a subsequent a…

Life two years after a game programming course: longitudinal viewpoints on K-12 outreach

In our faculty we have run week-long K-12 game programming courses now for three summers. In this paper we investigate what programming-related activities students do after they take a course, and what factors in the students' background relate to post-course programming. We also investigate a possible change in the students' interest towards higher education science studies. We find that most students continue programming after the course and that their interest towards science studies keeps increasing. In student background we observed some indicative trends, but did not find reliable explaining factors related to post-course programming or increased interest towards science studies.

Theorizing a one-semester real customer student software project course

Project courses in software engineering education have, roughly speaking, as long a history as the term software engineering itself — about 40 years. Several project course models have been described in the literature, including the research target of the dissertation, a one-semester course where students develop software in small groups for real customers. The long history of the research field constitutes a challenge for new research. The research approach of this dissertation is theorizing in the sense of classical grounded theory. The motivation behind this theorizing approach was the possibility of finding fresh viewpoints in a long-established research field and a need to give structure …

How Research Came Inside Me as a New Knowledge

Scholars have argued that there is no simple definition for research due to a wide variety of disciplines and educational contexts; how students are involved in research may vary a lot with a discipline, and with national and regional curricula within a particular discipline. The present study advances autoethnographic accounts of two Bhutanese students' participation in research. The context of participation is their exchange period, and specifically their attendance at a particular Computing Education Research course, at Uppsala University. The autoethnographic epiphanies that our report suggest transformations in perspective as to what research is and what it may provide personally. The …

Critical Exploration of Flexible Delivery

This work-in-progress research article presents an introductory qualitative study on students' perceptions of a flexibly delivered, modular computer science course. Many contemporary approaches to education rely in various ways on flexible delivery of course content. This is often done to capitalize on modern technology and the web, and to put the student ‘in the center.' However, it is becoming manifest that these approaches may challenge both the students and the equity between them, making it important to understand the effects of flexible delivery in terms of the students. In the voice of our students, flexible delivery was seen as a largely positive approach, reducing stress, promoting…

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Scholars agree on the importance of incorporating use of version control systems (VCSs) into computing curricula, so as to be able to prepare students for today’s distributed and collaborative work places. One of the present-day distributed version control systems (DVCSs) is Git, the system we have used on several courses. In this paper, we report on the challenges for learning and using the system based on a survey data collected from a project-based course and our own teaching experiences during several different kinds of computing courses. The results of this analysis are discussed and recommendations are made. peerReviewed

Test-driven development in education

Test-Driven Development (TDD) was applied in educational setting right after it became well-known as a key practice of Extreme Programming (XP). Basically, there are many studies reporting positive experiences on TDD applied in different levels of a curriculum. In this paper, we discuss the role of TDD in education through the students' experiences. In our experiment, a challenging programming task was applied in order to see what kind of difficulties the students would encounter and discuss. The students' answers revealed several topics that require a careful treatment in teaching to avoid conceptual confusion. For example, the topics include the scalability of TDD, extent of single test, …

Students’ Opinions on Financial Compensation from Project Work

Project-based learning with real customers arguably offer value for all stakeholders. This value has been discussed in literature both from the viewpoint of customers and the related economic value, and the enhanced learning of students. This paper presents the results from an empirical study on students who have completed a multidisciplinary project course with real customers. A qualitative survey was focused on how students see the value of project-based learning and whether there should be financial compensation to students. The students placed a higher value on learning than financial compensation, and while they argued that it would be fair and nice if some compensation was paid, they …

First Year Computing Students' Perceptions of Authenticity in Assessment

The problem of how best to assess student learning is a fundamental one in education. Changes to computer science curricula seek to emphasise teaching practices that promote deep learning through direct, contextual examination of student performance on tasks that resemble those of practitioners, rather than more traditional methods. This kind of "authentic assessment" is becoming more popular as it appears to incorporate employability skills associated with professional practice into the curriculum in a natural way. In this paper, we report on an investigation into how computing students themselves understand the terminology of authentic assessment. We give a brief summary of some of the sa…

Open-ended projects opened up — aspects of openness

Abstract—One of the most important areas of competence for professional engineers is the ability to function well in project work, in particular they need to be able to efficiently solve open-ended problems in different collaborative settings. The development of this ability is however not prominent in engineering education despite numerous authors suggesting openended problems as a pedagogical tool to promote development of collaborative problem solving competence by including elements of group or project work in courses. In our own long experience of using open-ended problems in collaborative student projects, we have identified a lack of systematic progression in learning outcomes and sk…

CSI with games and an emphasis on TDD and unit testing

How Students Get Going : Triggers for Students’ Learning in Project-Based Education

Repeatedly documented positive student responses to project-based learning during its decades-long tradition in CS attest to the effectiveness of learning by doing. Support for reflective learning nevertheless continues to be a topic worth studying because the intensity of project work together with a high technical orientation among CS students often complicate reflective practice. A critical incident-inspired assignment was added to a project-based course to support reflective practice in spring 2017. In a previous study, the authors analyzed how students approached the assignment and whether they found it supportive for learning. The present study content-analyses the situations that tri…

Making group processes explicit to student

This article considers student learning about group work in the context of project courses where student groups work under realistic expectations. Based on the literature, justice is explicated as a group work concept and regarded as a professional skill that can be practiced. Preliminary student feedback on teaching through continuous discussions on justice are presented together with teacher experiences.

Exploring the critical incident technique to encourage reflection during project-based learning

Previous research has reported on the challenge of promoting students' generic reflection during authentic project-based courses. This work explores a teaching intervention based on Flanagan's Critical Incident Technique (CIT) during a project-based software development course. The intervention aims at increasing students' awareness of their own learning and at encouraging reflective practice throughout the project. Students were asked to report on 'incidents' when they experienced learning during the course, and to reflect on the task itself at the end of the course. The present study focuses on how students approached the incident reporting task and how they perceived it. The results indi…

Incorporating teacher-student dialogue into digital course material : Usage patterns and first experiences

This work-in-progress research investigates teacher-student communication via Learning Management Systems (LMS) in highly populated courses. An LMS called TIM (The Interactive Material) includes a specific commenting technology that attempts to make teacher-student dialog effortless. The research goal is to explore students’ willingness to use the technology and identify patterns of usage. To these ends, a survey with both Likert and open-ended questions was issued to CS1 and CS2 students. A favorable student evaluation was observed while several critical viewpoints that inform technology development were revealed. We noticed that besides appreciating the possibility of making comments, man…

Flipping and Blending : An Action Research Project on Improving a Functional Programming Course

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving towards a practical and flexible study environment—flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students’ amount of practice emerged, while subsequently challenges relating to students’ independent practical coursework were observed. Particular concerns relating to group work, learning materials, and the attribute of flexibility were investigated during the third action research cycle. The research cycle was analyzed using a qualitative survey on students’ views, t…

What Did CS Students Recognize as Study Difficulties?

Computing education research shows substantive interest in novice programming challenges. The present study was rather interested in any phenomena that students would recognize as difficulties during their university studies. The research question was what computing students recognized as their study difficulties after the first year of study. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to the students’ personal writing of the difficulties experienced. The main result categories were independence in new environment, academic requirements, lack of prospects, learning to work, and social integration, which were illustrated by multiple lower level themes. The results inform educators of the wid…

On the design of effective learning materials for supporting self-directed learning of programming

This paper reports on the action research that studies how to implement self-directed learning of programming in the academic context. Based on our findings from the previous steps with this research agenda, we focus on the design of learning materials. That is, we aim to facilitate the students' self-directed learning by developing illustrative and concise materials that the students could use to efficiently develop theoretical understanding of the learning topics. In designing the materials, we will rely on the cognitive load theory as the guiding theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates the planning stage of our second action research cycle.

Understanding beginners' mistakes with Haskell

AbstractThis article presents an overview of student difficulties in an introductory functional programming (FP) course taught in Haskell. The motivation for this study stems from our belief that many student difficulties can be alleviated by understanding the underlying causes of errors and by modifying the educational approach and, possibly, the teaching language accordingly. We analyze students' exercise submissions and categorize student errors according to compiler error messages and then manually according to the observed underlying cause. Our study complements earlier studies on the topic by applying computer and manual analysis while focusing on providing descriptive statistics of d…

Perceived status and value

This article examines how students in a multidisciplinary project-based learning course involving real customers perceive their interactions with their customers. The authors conducted a qualitative study and analysed students’ learning reports by means of a thematic network analysis. The analysis shows how students perceive their status in relation to their customers and how their perceptions of their work affect how they see the value of the projects. The authors consider their empirical findings in the context of the existing literature on university–industry collaboration and thereby summarize different scenarios of the contrasting working practices and priorities in academia and indus…

Searching for Global Employability : Can Students Capitalize on Enabling Learning Environments?

Literature on global employability signifies “enabling” learning environments where students encounter ill-formed and open-ended problems and are required to adapt and be creative. Varying forms of “projects,” co-located and distributed, have populated computing curricula for decades and are generally deemed an answer to this call. We performed a qualitative study to describe how project course students are able to capitalize on the promise of enabling learning environments. This critical perspective was motivated by the circumstance of the present-day education systems being heavily regulated for the precipitated production of human capital. The students involved in our study described edu…

Understanding TDD in academic environment

Several studies have reported positive experiences with Test-Driven Development (TDD) but the results still diverge. In this study we aim to improve understanding on TDD in educational context. We conducted two experiments on TDD in a master's level university course. The research setting was slightly changed in the second experiment and this paper focuses on comparing the differences between the two rounds. We analyzed the students' perceptions and the difficulties they faced with TDD. The given assignment clearly affected the students' reflections so that the more difficult assignment evoked a richer discussion among the students. Additionally, some insights into teaching TDD are discusse…

Open Resources as the Educational Basis for a Bachelor-level Project-Based Course

This article presents an innovation-based course concept for project-based learning. In this course, student groups are asked to ideate and implement a software product based on Open Data and Open API releases. By emphasizing students’ own product ideation, the course requires and enhances self-directed learning skills and prompts the students to see the unlimited possibilities in becoming and being a practitioner of the computing discipline. Relatedly, the course provides a tool to improve student self-efficacy, as the students, coached through challenges, come to know that they are able to produce software using various open interfaces.

Issues with a course that emphasizes self-direction

In this paper, we examine a master's level course that emphasizes self-direction on the part of students. The course is run by weekly group assignments and requires independent work such that only one mandatory classroom session is arranged each week. Our specific research interests are how students responded to the setting of this kind and whether they demonstrated self-direction during the course. We surveyed the students' view of the course, their group work experience, and their study habits, and analyzed the resultant survey data for themes. The results suggest that while the pass rate was considerably high and the course was regarded as well-organized by the students, there were sever…

Research has noticed that imparting TDD-like testing to an early computing curriculum is challenging because it increases technical and cognitive load for the students. This paper addresses the challenge with a software-based solution constructed to facilitate the process of writing tests. The solution allows using a compact while efficient syntax for formulating tests, writing tests into JavaDoc comments, thus close to the source code that implements intended functionalities, and automates the generation of actual test code. The constructed solution -- the ComTest tool -- has now been used in four introductory level programming course offerings. The paper presents the tool and concludes wi…

Revisiting rainfall to explore exam questions and performance on CS1

The Rainfall problem comprises small tasks that have been used to investigate student performance in introductory programming. We conducted several kinds of analyses to inform our understandings of student performance in CS1 relating to this problem. We analyzed implementation approaches and program errors, as in related studies, and also explored the role of test writing vis-a-vis the most common student error. Finally, using correlation analyses and manual inspection of the exam answers, we studied how well the Rainfall problem served as an exam question. The students' implementation choices reflected their familiarity with particular loop constructs, while the single most common error co…

Project Education and Adams’ Theory of Equity

This work-in-progress paper in research category is concerned with students’ perceptions of justice in software engineering group projects. Taking a directed content analysis approach, the aim is to analyze the relevance of Adams’ theory of Equity for small-group project education. The analysis was applied to the data collected from a third-year project course in which students encounter an open-ended group assignment. The results indicate that the theory can serve as a useful framework that helps teachers to identify justice-related issues in project courses. On the other hand, it was concluded that special carefulness is advisable considering the simplicity of the theory. peerReviewed

Moderating cultural effects in a higher e-education context? Supervisor's tone of voice in recorded audio feedback

Providing feedback to learners on their writing assignments is one of the most important and time-consuming tasks that a supervisor performs. In e-Education environments, especially in the case of distance learning, giving feedback becomes more challenging because there are often no opportunities for face-to-face interaction. Typically, a supervisor provides comments to learners in written form via email; however, the use of recorded audio feedback (RAF) in e-Education environments has become a viable alternative. This work in progress reports on learners’ perceptions of RAF in a multi-cultural higher eEducation context. Our observations indicate that learners tend to have positive feelings…

Habituating Students to IPR Questions During Creative Project Work

Exploring students’ identity development from the perspective of study difficulties

This work-in-progress paper in research category reports preliminary findings on how students taking introductory computing courses develop identity from the perspective of study difficulties. The motivation was that students identified lack of meaning and prospects (cf. identity) as a study difficulty in a previous qualitative study. The present study further explores this finding by issuing both an identity development and a self-efficacy scale to a larger first-year student cohort. The aim is to characterize the study cohort by the aspects included in the identity development scale, and thereby increase understandings of students’ challenges. Moreover, a correlation analysis between iden…