Mcce 2008 Proceedings

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on

Methods and Cases in Computing Education

Held in Salamanca (Spain), October 22nd 2008. Published by the Spanish Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education with the collaboration of the Pontifical University of Salamanca.

www.upsa.es

www.sigcse.es

ISBN 978-84-691-8558-2

Methods and Cases in Computing Education by Spain ACM SIGCSE Chapter is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento 2.5 España License.

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Foreword By Juan-Manuel Dodero, president of the ACM SIGCSE Spanish Chapter The ACM SIGCSE Spanish Chapter is the chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) serving Spain. It started operations in 2008. The chapter provides a forum for common problems among educators working to develop, implement and evaluate computing programs, curricula and courses, as well as syllabi, laboratories, learning technologies, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy. The Chapter supports activities complimentary to SIGCSE, the ACM, and other ACM activities in the Spain area. The Chapter is organized and operated for educational and scientific purposes, its aim being to increase knowledge about computing education, as well as to serve as a means of communication for those interested in this discipline. The workshop on Methods and Cases in Computing Education (MCCE) is the first of a series of events intended to the dissemination of the activities of the chapter members. As such, it will publish articles dealing with the joy, pain and hope of our daily teaching and research experiences in computing education. The MCCE workshop thus constitutes a forum open to anyone wanting to contribute to the chapter aims. The birth of the Chapter and, specially, the first edition of the MCCE workshop, have the main objective of contributing to the discussions on the European Higher Education Area held among the Spanish Higher Education community. For the first edition of MCCE, held at Salamanca, a number of nine contributions were selected after a peer review process carried out by the chapter committee members.

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Table of contents Exploring the impact of planning and design in the development of programming laboratory practice...................................................................7 Jesús Cáceres Tello, Santiago Pérez Cámara, Juan José Sánchez Peña Introducing Information Systems to Computer Science students – how to explain the difference?.................................................................................13 Miguel-Angel Sicilia Educational resource development for Software Engineering and Information Systems core subjects...............................................................19 Elena Orta, Juan Manuel Dodero, Mª Teresa García, Nuria Hurtado, José Luis Isla, Mercedes Ruiz Case study: Glacial Discharge to learn Statistics...........................................29 Carmen Domínguez Álvarez, Ascensión Hernández Encinas, Araceli Queiruga Dios, Isabel Visus Ruiz A Case study of the adaptation of Problem-Based Learning for programming subjects ........................................................................................................33 Víctor Manuel Álvarez García, María del Puerto Paule Ruiz, Juan Ramón Pérez Pérez Continuous Assessment in Software Engineering........................................41 Francisco J. García Peñalvo, Miguel A. Conde González, Sergio Bravo Martín A preliminary evaluation of the impact of using a visual tool in a compilers course............................................................................................................47 Daniel Rodríguez, Salvador Sánchez-Alonso Using learning object repositories for teaching Statistics.............................53 Julià Minguillón, Maria Antònia Huertas, Angel Alejandro Juan, Teresa Sancho, Victor Cavaller

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Exploring the impact of planning and design in the development of programming laboratory practice Jesús Cáceres Tello, Santiago Pérez Cámara, Juan José Sánchez Peña Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá Ctra. Barcelona km. 33.6 – 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) {jesus.caceres,santiago.perez,juanjo.sanchez}@uah.es

Abstract Emphasizing planning and design in small-scale, individual programming assignments has been the subject of methods as the Personal Software Process (PSP), mostly targeted to education in process-orientation. However, there is a lack of evidence about the impact these practices have in the quality of the final product in concrete educational settings. This paper reports on data gathered in the context of a data structures laboratory-based course, contrasting the outcomes of students that followed a process similar to the PSP with those that did not. The results point out that attention to some process activities rather than going straight to programming correlate with better outcomes.

1. Introduction Assignments in beginning courses (CS1) requiring non-trivial programming in some cases result in poor grades and early drop-out of continuous assessment tracks. Particularly, in courses beyond “introduction to programming”, students are faced with practice-oriented courses that require not only considerable time devoted to understanding the theories and techniques explained in the lectures, but also a change in the way of analyzing and dealing with problems of increasing complexity. This requires significant effort and represents a challenge to many students. The evidence of this difficulty can be attributed to several hypothetical causes, one of them being the lack of a proper, disciplined approach to programming. One way to investigate that connection would be that of introducing some small-scale process to students so that they approach programming assignments in a disciplined way, controlling effort and carrying out design prior to coding and testing. The introduction of such small-scale processes can be done by methods as the Personal Software Process [1]. Using such processes can be considered valuable in itself as a preparation to a broader Software Engineering context, but the focus here is only on how such practices may impact the quality of the product of programming assignments. To do so, the research reported here contrasted the grades in programming assignments of two groups of students. Concretely, second semester CS1 students of a “Data Structures” introductory course were divided in two groups randomly, and the PSP was introduced only to one of the groups. The course required a significant amount of programming in the form of assignments, with a total 7.5 credits (with one credit accounting for 10 lecture hours). The profile of the students in these courses is characterized by having passed introductory programming courses, but they have still not been introduced to Software Engineering processes of any kind. The Personal Software Process (PSP) has been used elsewhere in educational contexts [3] as 7

a method for software process improvement, where a major objective is to reduce the number of defects in conducting practices in the laboratories of programming. The PSP is a methodology promoted by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), oriented to professional practice: “the PSP can be used by engineers as a guide to a disciplined and structured approach to developing software”. It considers aspects such as planning, quality, productivity and cost estimates and has been studied from the viewpoint of individual productivity [2]. This covers all the activities that the individual developer undertakes to achieve quality in software by creating a series of documents called scripts, which gather quantitative data on effort spent, among other information, for the purpose of self-learning and self-assessment. The PSP methodology is applicable to non-trivial programming assignments as those often found in Data Structure courses. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides the methodological details of the study reported here. Section 3 discusses the results, and conclusions and future research directions are provided in Section 4.

2. Objectives and method The case reported in this paper had several objectives related to educational research: 1. That the students appreciate and use an appropriate methodology as is the PSP which emphasizes disciplined coding, emphasizing design and reviews. 2. That the students obtain and analyze daily data for self-control of their capabilities and improvement with time. 3. To introduce students on the importance of disciplined practice in the form of processes, as a preparation for Software Engineering courses. The PSP entails the gathering of detailed data, and the instructors developed a digital form for facilitating data collection, covering only the data that was considered significant for the objectives set. That data gathering form was integrated in the virtual classroom (using the Moodle open source platform; http://moodle.org/) used as a supplement to face-to-face lab sessions. The experience was conducted with 60 students of the four-year Computer Science degree offered by the University (in Spanish, the degree is named “Ingeniería en Informática”). The students were enrolled in the mandatory “Data Structures” course, second semester, first year. The students were divided in two groups of the same size, one of them serving as control group. The control group was not instructed about the PSP, and they were not asked to use it. However, both groups had had the same lectures, assignments, instructors and teaching materials. Fig. 1 shows the form PSP, with a first section of identification data ( "Datos de Registro") which identifies both the student as the identifier of the assignment which corresponds to the data provided. The second section (“Registro de Tiempos”) is where the student recorded time spent at each stage in minutes, providing optionally any relevant comments. The third section (“Registros Totales”) summarizes the total number of minutes spent on each phase for the assignments development may indicate that the activities have been carried out in each.

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Fig. 1: Data gathered for each of the assignments.

The phases selected were the following: 1. Planning (“Planificación” in Fig. 1) stage consisting of the time spent by students reading practice and seeking information relating to its final execution. 2. Design (“Diseño” in Fig. 1) stage where the student creates the modular design of his application as well as the designs of required user interfaces. 3. Coding stage (“Codificación” in Fig. 1), the time spent by students writing the application code. 4. Compilation stage (“Compilación” in Fig. 1), time needed for the compilation and initial debugging of code. 5. Testing stage (“Testeo” in Fig. 1) where students perform the necessary test for the application. The following table shows the assignment description. The weight of each assignment was the same except the last with a weight slightly higher than others because of increased complexity.

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Table 1: Description of the assignments. Assignment ID

Objectives

Weight

Start week

End week

ASN1

Definition and management of stacks

30%

1

4

ASN2

Definition and management priority queue

30%

5

9

ASN3

Definition and management of binary trees

40%

10

14

The following table summarizes the times spent by students in each of the phases for each of the assignments. Data in the table are means and standard deviation is provided in parentheses. Table 2: Average and standard deviation for each phase and assignments Assignment ID

Planning

Design

Coding

Compilation

Testing

ASN1

4.5 (3.3)

11.5 (5.5)

135.0 (35.9)

44.4 (11.7)

14.2 (8.6)

ASN2

10.1 (3.8)

22.6 (6.8)

105 (37.3)

34.3 (11.0)

18.8 (8.4)

ASN3

15.4 (2.0)

34.2 (6.8)

87.7 (28.8)

27.1 (9.3)

18.3 (4.68)

The language used in this studio was being Pascal and the tool for developing was the free software FreePascal (http://www.freepascal.org/). The evaluation of the assignments was based on three fundamental criteria: 1. Correctness. 2. Consistency, clarity and source code comments. 3. Documentation, following rules previously established about how to describe the structure of the code.

3. Discussion The main question explored was if process-oriented approaches result in increased programming quality. In consequence, data analysis is oriented to contrast the time spent in process phases (except coding) and the grades obtained in each assignment. Fig. 2 shows the time spent in each phase (measured in minutes) per each assignment. In the last assignment, showed in Fig. 2 (c), students increased their times in the early stages of development. In contrast, time devoted to coding is reduced in some cases up to 30%. Fig. 3 compares the average grades obtained in each of the assignments in the PSP and control groups. Overall, it is apparent that there is an increase in the quality of the outcomes in the case of using PSP, which seems to increases as the course advances. Fig. 4 depicts the changes in time spent along the development of assignments. There is a clear increase in all phases of planning and design contrary to what happens with the other phases in which there is a clear decline in time spent by students.

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180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 0

1

2

3

4

0

5

1

2

3

Stages in the development of Practice

(b)

(a) 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 0

1

2

3

4

5

Stages in the development of Practice

(c) Fig. 2: Time spent by students at each stage and assignment 10 9

Qualifications

8

6,38

7

5,37

6 5 4

4,38

4,6

PSP Group

4,3

4,2

Control Group

3 2 1 0 First

Second

Third

Pratice s

Fig. 3: Grades obtained in each of the groups

160 140 120

Planning

100

Design

80

Coding

60

Compiling

40

Testing

20 0 ASN1

ASN2

ASN3

Fig. 4: Changing times each phase

11

4

5

Stages in the development of Practice

The data presented above provides some evidence on the appropriateness of using methodological approaches in programming assignments, and on the importance of planning and design.

4. Conclusions Introducing process orientation early in student assignments can be considered potentially beneficial as a tool for a more disciplined approach to programming . This paper has reported on a comparative study in which the PSP method was used as an individual process for developing assignments in a Data Structures first year course. The contrast with a control group showed significant improvement in grades correlated to the time spent by students in the design and planning phases. This may be interpreted as evidence on the positive effect of process orientation in programming assignment development. Future work should contrast also the grades with source code metrics, and the contrast should be repeated in the future to increase the reliability of the conclusions presented here. Also, future studies should attempt to uncover the main reasons why process orientation appears as useful in small programming assignments.

References 1. Grove, R.F. (1998) Using the personal software process to motivate good programming practices. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 30(3), pp. 98-101. 2. Hayes, W., and Over, J. W. (1997). The Personal Software Process (PSP): An Empirical Study of the Impact of the PSP on Individual Engineers. Technical Report CMU/SEI-97TR-001, ESC-TR-97-001. Software Engineering Institute. December. 3. Wohlin, C. and Wesslen, A. (1998). Understanding software defect detection in the Personal Software Process. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, p. 49.

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Introducing Information Systems to Computer Science students – how to explain the difference? Miguel-Angel Sicilia Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá Carretera de Barcelona km.33.6 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) SPAIN [email protected]

Abstract Educating Computer Science students in Information Systems (IS) requires a shift from a more theoretical problem-solving education to the organizational context, which is closer to the social sciences and to management. Information System degrees have not been offered in countries as Spain to date, and only with the new regulatory change of the Bologna process it may be possible that IS establishes as a separate academic discipline. In consequence, IS in our national context is not recognizable by most of the students, which tend to confuse IS with the management issues of Software Engineering. Teaching IS topics to CS graduates thus requires first clarifying the scope. This paper reports on a concrete approach that has been used two times in a postgraduate course on introduction to IS to CS students.

1. Motivation The discipline of Information Systems (IS) is considered by the ACM/IEEE/AIS curricula (http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations) as one of the branches of computing, with a clear focus on technology management and information technology as a resource for organizations. In spite of being a discipline with a tradition in many countries, it has still not reached a status of independence from other computing disciplines in countries as Spain. The Spanish regulatory system before the “Bologna process” of European convergence led to a generalist long degree, often of five years, and two shorter three-year degrees with a focus on “systems” and “management”. While the latter short degree typically includes some business management or accountancy courses, the structure and core contents of the three degrees in most of the cases were closer to a Computer Science curriculum, or to a core of Computer Science with emphasis either on Computer Engineering or Software Engineering. In any case, the discipline of IS in Spain was not recognized as independent, and research groups focused on IS topics were scattered. With the recent regulatory change in Spain following the so-called “Bologna process”, the opportunity for having IS degrees has opened, and there is an increasing awareness of the importance of further developing the discipline at the national level. The recent creation of a Spanish chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) is a consequence of that increasing interest. However, as of today, teaching introductory IS to computing graduates in Spain poses the supplementary challenge of communicating the differences of IS with other computing disciplines as Computer Science or Software Engineering. The ACM/IEEE/AIS “Overview Report” of the Computing Curricula 2005 explains the difference by drawings as the one provided in Fig. 1. 13

Fig. 1. ACM/IEEE/AIS graphical representation of IS in the overview report of the Computing Curricula 2005. Fig. 1 clearly shows that IS covers mostly organizational issues and a part of more application-oriented software and infrastructure contents. While these abstract representations are useful to delineate the boundaries, they are not easily understood by students that have never introduced systematically on the core IS topics. Particularly, our classroom experience has uncovered a frequent misunderstanding of IS as the “management” part of Software Engineering (SE). Software Engineering management is defined in the SWEBOK guide (http://www.swebok.org/) as: “the application of management activities—planning, coordinating, measuring, monitoring, controlling, and reporting—to ensure that the development and maintenance of software is systematic, disciplined, and quantified”. This definition refers to the application of management to software development, which is clearly different from the management of information technology and information resources as a strategic or operational resource, the main focus of IS. Most SE management issues are clearly in scope of the consideration of the IS professional, but the reverse is not always true, since SE management is of a narrower and more technical scope. The difficulties described so far require a careful consideration of the introduction of IS to students new in the discipline. This has lead us to considering several strategies to devise “the first lecture” on IS which should have the role of making clear the differences. Using general definitions of IS or contrasting with graphics as in Fig. 1 has limited effectiveness, since they are really abstract and they do not help grasp the essence of the difference to many students. This paper describes the way of introducing IS to CS graduates that we have 14

positively experienced in two consecutive years of a Ms. C. Degree in IS when teaching introduction to IS. The idea was that of focusing on problems that uncover the perspective of IS as radically different from a CS or SE standpoint.

2. Focusing on the role of information technology The core of IS is the intersection of information technology (IT) and organizational needs. In consequence, this relation is a core focus of any IS introductory material. The first question that arises when comparing that relationship is about the value of IT for organizations. The fact is that IT in itself has constituted a competitive advantage to some enterprises in the past, but mainstream IT is closer to a commodity. A controversial but still fresh paper that can be used to introduce the relationship is the “ IT Doesn't Matter” paper by Nicholas Carr [1]. The paper supports the position that IT has become a commodity for companies, like electricity. Carr's arguments have been widely criticized and the paper has the feature of triggering discussion and controversy. The discussion can be put in context by reviewing theories of competitive advantage. Porter's famous five-forces framework [5] can be used as a theoretical background to construct arguments in favor or against Carr's position, and the resource-based view of the firm [7] can be used as a complement. Another important feature of Carr's paper is that there are many replies available through the Web, so that students can review and analyze existing criticisms to construct their own position on the topic. The discussion on the value of IT inside organizations thus connects with models of value and competitive advantage of technology, raising a new class of problems that are not usually taught in Computer Science degrees. Irrespective of the validity credited to Carr's claims, the important morale of the discussion is that IT from the IS view is a mean towards an end, and business and organizational needs are the drivers of the selection and implementation of technology. This can also be easily linked to the current models of ebusiness value [2], thus connecting with another important objective in IS curricula1: the introduction of e-commerce and related business issues. A view on the middle is that IT can be considered a complementary resource that combined appropriately leads to increased productivity, but investment in IT without these other resources (as technology management and operation skills) does not produce by itself the desired effects. Studies in this direction as the one by Brynjolfsson & Hitt [3] complement the view on the role of IT, and they also serve to illustrate the empirical methodology typical of many IS research studies.

1 http://www.aisnet.org/Curriculum/

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3. From the role of IT to IS management decisions Cases have been reported as a useful tool in IS education [8]. The idea of case-based learning is providing a contextualized scenario and supporting the students in analyzing the problems and recommending responses. Once the relationship of IS and business has been clarified, the second important aspect is confronting the students with the kind of decisions they would eventually need to take if they reach a position as IS managers. The second teaching pattern applied for the introductory IS track is focusing on a decision-making problem. The IS management function deals with decision-making on a particular class of problems that are different to purely technical ones. In consequence, the strategy to highlight the difference is searching for a decision-making topic that is (a) up-to-date and somewhat interesting to students and (b) related to some kind of socio-cultural issue and not depending solely in elements that are common in SE management. In our classroom experience, we have used the case of offshore outsourcing. For example, the short article by Ramingwong & Sajeev [6] about the risk of “keeping the mum” in offshore outsourcing provides the ingredients required for raising the discussion and guiding the students to understand the methodological differences between IS and CS. The article is obviously current and it raises student interest, since they are usually concerned in general by offshoring and its effects of national economy. Also, the paper refers to Hofstede's Cultural Analysis [4] which includes several indices that pertain to the socio-cultural domain, as power distance index, individualism, long-term orientation or masculinity. This confronts students with methods coming from the social sciences, which are seldom used in the context of SE management. The presentation of one such paper should be preceded by a brief introduction on the surrounding topic, offshore outsourcing in this case, which also provides room for raising issues related to cross-national regulations and operation optimization as elements to be considered in the offshoring decision of functions difficult to manage as software development. Then, the students can be faced to a combined analysis mixing pure economical analysis (including communication costs) with technical considerations (e.g. level of quality for the software produced) and also socio-cultural risk analysis. The approach described represents a pattern for the given teaching situation that can be tailored to future requirements or particular characteristics of the learner profile. The salient features of the pattern is that it introduces the shift of focus in IS including the centrality of organizational needs and value, the change in methodologies and the emphasis on decision making.

4. Conclusions Introducing the IS view to students coming from more CS-oriented curricula requires shifting the view from the theory of computation and the technical quality of technological artifacts to a consideration of the value of IT as an organizational resource. This paper reports on a successful two-years experience in introducing such topics by first raising the discussion on the strategic value of IT and then moving to some more specific problems that are faced by IS managers and that are not of a technological but of a socio-technical nature.

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References 1. Carr, N. (2003) IT Doesn't Matter. Harvard Business Review, 81(5), pp. 41-49. 2. Currie, W. (2004) Value Creation from E-Business Models, Elsevier, Burlington, MA. 3. Brynjolfsson, E. and Hitt, L. (2000) Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 23-48. 4. Hofstede, G. and Hofstede, G.J. (2004) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, NY, 2004 5. Porter, M. (1979) How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy. Harvard Business Review (May-June 1979), pp. 137-145 6. Ramingwong, S. and Sajeev, A. (2007) Offshore outsourcing: the risk of keeping mum. Communications of the ACM 50(8): 101-103 7. Wernerfelt, B. (1984). A resource-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 5, pp. 171-180. 8. Whiddett, R. J., Jackson, B. X. & Handy, J. A. (2000). Teaching Information Systems Management Skills: Using Integrated Projects and Case Studies. Computer Science Education, 10 (2), pp. 165-177.

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Educational resource development for Software Engineering and Information Systems core subjects Elena Orta, Juan Manuel Dodero, Mª Teresa García, Nuria Hurtado, José Luis Isla, Mercedes Ruiz Department of Computer Languages and Systems, University of Cádiz C/Chile, 1 11003 – Cádiz, Spain {elena.orta,juanma.dodero,mayte.garcia,nuria.hurtado,joseluis.isla,mercedes .ruiz}@uca.es

Abstract In the context of the European Higher Education Area adaptation process, a number of teachers of Software Engineering and Information Systems core subjects of the Computer Engineering degree begin an initiative for the collaborative development of a set of educational resources that will be used or supplemented in diverse courses of such core subjects. This initiative has been implemented as the proposal of a project, which has been accepted in the context of a call for Higher Education innovation projects for teachers and researchers of the University of Cádiz (EUROPA Project) to be developed along the academic year 2008/09.

1. Introduction This paper describes the initiative of a group of teachers of the Department of Computer Languages and Systems of the University of Cádiz (UCA) teaching diverse courses on the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems within the first and second cycles of the Computer Engineering degree of the University of Cádiz. These courses have being involved for years in an adaptation process to the new educational model proposed by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) [1]. As a result of this process, the educational plans and methodologies of these courses have been redesigned. This process of change has been orchestrated through the participation of the teachers in different innovation projects for the EHEA convergence. In this moment and within the scope of this adaptation process, we are developing, in a coordinated and collaborative way with teachers and students, materials and educational resources adapted to the EHEA with the goal that they can be reused in related subjects. In the same way, we intend to continue working in this process of adaptation by increasing the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the teaching-learning process, facilitating the coordination of the involved courses, promoting students’ autonomous learning and fostering their active participation in the learning process through their implication in the creation process of the educational resources. Our proposal is materialized in a project named “Educational resource development for Software Engineering and Computer Systems core subjects”, which has been accepted in the context of a call for projects on Higher Education Innovation for Teachers and Researchers of the University of Cádiz (EUROPA Project), which will be developed along the year 2008/09. Section 2 presents the context, motivation and goals of this initiative, as well as a short review of the participation of the members of the team in previous activities of adaptation 19

to the EHEA. Section 3 describes the experience that we intend to carry out, its scope, the tools used, the methodology taken and the detailed resources that will be developed. Finally, section 4 shows the conclusions of this paper.

2. Context, motivation and goals The construction of the EHEA and its structuring through the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) proposes a new educational model in which the educational plans and methodologies must be based on students’ learning, in opposition to the traditional teachercentered model. A change is sought in the higher education model, where the student is the main character, and the most important thing is what she should learn and how to guarantee that she has learned it. Aware of these changes, a group of teachers belonging to the Department of Computer Languages and Systems of the UCA with several years of experience in activities and projects for the EHEA adaptation process have shared our experiences and carried out a new initiative inside this process. The fundamental goal of this proposal is the development of materials and educational resources adapted to the EHEA in the courses of the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems in the first and second cycles of the UCA Computer Engineering degree. This general goal is stated explicitly in the following specific objectives: ●

To improve the teaching and learning educational methodologies with the purpose of promoting the autonomous learning and the active participation of students in the learning process.

●

To foster the inclusion of ICTs in the teaching-learning process.

●

To help students to acquire the generic and cross competences of core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems in the EHEA context.

●

To facilitate the coordination of the subjects.

●

To promote the collaborative development of materials and educational resources.

●

To develop materials that can be shared in several courses related with the mentioned core subject.

3. Previous works Table 1 recapitulates the docent innovation projects and EHEA adaptation pilot projects where the authors of this paper have participated. The main actions that we have carried out in the framework of such projects fit in the field named Change and Innovation in Teaching and Learning Methodologies for the EHEA adaptation. Table 1. Teaching innovation projects and EHEA adaptation pilot projects. Teaching innovation projects and EHEA adaptation pilot projects Teaching innovation project in the subject of “Advanced Programming” (Computer Science Engineering, 5th year) [3]. First Call for projects to support innovation and improvement educational experiences. Education Planning Vice-rectorship. Technical College, University

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Carlos III of Madrid. School years 2002/03 and 2003/04. Teaching innovation project “Education Improvement of the Computer Science subjects of the University of Cádiz”. UCA. School year 2004/05. Teaching innovation project “Application and Evaluation of Computer Science education improvement actions towards the EHEA” [4]. UCA. School year 2005/06. Teaching innovation project “Adaptation of the Computer Science subjects to the EHEA” [5]. “Proyecto Europa” Call for projects, UCA. School year 2005/06. Teaching innovation project “Educational Methodology Adaptation in the subjects of Software engineering I and Software Engineering II to the EHEA”. “Proyecto Europa” Call for projects, UCA. School year 2005/06. Teaching innovation project “Active Learning in Data Base Management and design subject” [6] “Proyecto Europa” Call for projects, UCA. School year 2005/06. Teaching innovation project “Educational Methodology Adaptation in the subjects of Software engineering I, Software Engineering II and Software Engineering to the EHEA”. “Proyecto Europa” Call for projects, UCA. School year 2006/07. Teaching innovation project “Competence acquisition for software project direction”. [7] “Proyecto Europa” Call for projects, UCA. School year 2006/07. EHEA adaptation pilot project in the subject “Algorithms analysis and design” (Computer Science Engineering, 1st year). Education Planning Vice-rectorship. Technical College, University Carlos III of Madrid. School years 2005/06 and 2006/07. EHEA adaptation pilot project in the subject “Advanced Technology in Data Bases” (Computer Science Engineering, 4th year). Education Planning Vice-rectorship, Engineering College, UCA. School years 2005/2006, 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. EHEA adaptation pilot project in the subject “Requirements Engineering” (Computer Science Engineering, 4th year). Education Planning Vice-rectorship, Engineering College, UCA. School years 2005/06, 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. EHEA adaptation pilot project in the subject “Planning and management of Computer Science Projects” (Computer Science Engineering, 5th year). Education Planning Vicerectorship, Engineering College, UCA. School years 2006/2007 and 2007/2008. EHEA adaptation pilot Project in the subject “Web engineering” (Computer Science Engineering, 4th and 5th years). Education Planning Vice-rectorship, Engineering College, UCA. School years 2006/2007 and 2007/2008.

4. Description of the initiative The work presented in this article essentially consists in the development of materials and educational resources adapted to the EHEA in the courses pertaining to the core disciplines of Software Engineering and Information Systems. The main goals of this work are: to improve the quality of the materials and educational resources currently used, to promote students’ active learning as they develop them, to facilitate coordination and collaboration between these courses and to promote the reusability of materials and educational resources as they are developed. In this section we define the scope of our proposal and provide a global vision of the learning contents and activity development tools that will be used. Next we describe the working methodology and finally we detail the materials and educational resources to be developed as well as the involved courses.

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4.1. Scope The scope of this work includes courses pertaining to the core disciplines of Software Engineering and Information Systems currently taught in the first and second cycle degrees of Computer Science at the UCA Engineering School, i.e. Technical Engineering in Computer Science (with specialization on Management or Systems) and Computer Science Engineering. These degrees are currently taking part in pilot projects of adaptation to the EHEA. The UCA teaching model for these degrees is classroom-based. However, the Moodle [2] elearning platform is supported by the UCA to host all the courses that participate in this initiative. Table 2 shows the courses and degrees in which they are taught. The overall number of students for these courses is 307. Table 2. Courses taking part in the experience. Course

Year/ ECTS Nature Discipline Semester Degree: Technical Engineer in Computer Science (Management) (ITIG) (first cycle) Software Engineering I (SEI) 3rd/1 6 Core SE Software Engineering II (SEII) 3rd/2 6 Core SE Degree: Technical Engineer in Computer Science (Systems) (first cycle) Software Engineering (SE) 3rd/1 6 Compulsory SE Degree: Computer Science Engineer (second cycle) Data Bases Advanced Technology (DBAT) 4th/1 6 Core SE Requirements Engineering (RE) 4th/1 6 Core SE Planning and Management of Computer 5th/2 6 Core SE Science Projects (PMCSP) Web Engineering (WE) 4th and 4.5 Optional SE 5th/2

The teachers who impart these subjects make up the working team of this project, all belonging to the UCA Department of Computer Languages and Systems. 4.2. Tools of creation of contents and learning activities To reach our aims we will use diverse learning contents and activities development tools that facilitate the development of the materials and educational resources and make it possible for teachers to work collaboratively with students. Hereby they promote the autonomous learning of the student and foster their active participation in the learning process. The development tools are the following:

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●

Wikis are shared web contents about a certain topic that is collaboratively written by a group of users, who can edit the shared contents so that the contributions can be commented, extended and/or corrected by the rest. The creation of a wiki for our project will facilitate the coordination of the courses of the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems, as well as the development and reuse of materials and educational resources among the teachers and the students [8].

●

LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) is a tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities [9]. The use of LAMS in our educational methodology is intended to facilitate students’ collaborative

learning as well as to stimulate their active participation in the learning process. ●

Standards-based reusable content development tools. Standards-based educational resource deployment will facilitate reusing learning resources among the courses involved in the project. In order to achieve this goal, tools that deploy SCORM [10] compliant learning contents will be used. Currently there exist different tools that allow creating SCORM-compliant learning contents, such as eXeLearning, which outstands for its usability.

4.3. Work methodology The work methodology for this project is structured in the following phases: 1. To identify the contents of the materials and educational resources to develop in each of the courses included in the experience. 2. To analyse the existing relations among the different courses in order to plan the development of common materials that can be developed together or re-used and/or complemented among the different courses. 3. To develop the planned material using the tools and technologies commented previously. 4. To evaluate the materials and learning resources. The fundamental aims of this last phase are: a) to assess the students’ level of satisfaction with the developed materials and learning resources, and b) to measure the level of reuse of the resources among the different subjects that take part in this experience. 4.4. Materials and teaching resources We have completed the first two phases of the work methodology and the results are summarized in this subsection. Table 3 identifies the following information for the materials and teaching resources that we will be developed: a. Resource: name and a brief description of the contents of the resource b. Resource type: content (C) or learning activity (A) c. Author: either teachers (T) or students (S) under teachers’ supervision. d. Mode: single person (P) or group of people (G). e. Tool: development tool used to create the material or resource. Table 3. Description of the materials and teaching resources. Resource Type Author Mode Tool Standard ISO/IEC 12207-1 C,A S G eXeLearning A document that describes the activities lifecycle software according to ISO/IEC 12207-1 standard System requirements specification C,A S G Document Preliminary document of system requirements specification Functional model realization process C T G Presentation Presentation that explain step by step the process of realization of the functional model in the structured approach Document Software Testing C,A T G Wiki

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Introduction to the types of software tests and how to use unit and integration test frameworks for developing web applications Structured analysis problems C T G Document Solutions to problems of structured analysis Structured design problems C T G Document Solutions to problems structured design Structured approach questionnaires C,A T G Potatoes/Moodle Questionnaires on theory and practice of structured approach Flash Object-oriented analysis process C,A S P SCORM Presentation of the process of object-oriented analysis in UML Object-oriented analysis problems C T G Document Solutions to problems of object-oriented analysis Object-oriented design problems C T G Document Solutions to problems of object-oriented design Object-oriented approach quest. C,A T G Potatoes/Moodle Questionnaires on theory and practice of object-oriented approach. Examples of DRS and DAS A S G Document Documents of system requirements specification and requirements analysis of real systems OCL examples A T P Document Formal specification of textual restrictions on objects modeled with UML. Web systems requirements C T P Presentation engineering Study of the characteristics requirements and techniques elicitation for web systems. Data models A T G LAMS Activity to review the main data models. Current trends in databases C,A S C Wiki Set of web pages designed to describe the principles, structure and main applications of current uses of databases. Conceptual Object-oriented databases C,A S G Maps Conceptual maps that reflect the most relevant aspects of object-oriented databases. Conceptual Object-relational databases C,A S G Maps Conceptual maps that reflect the most relevant aspects of object-relational databases . Object-relational transformation C T P Presentation Document with the rules to transform a diagram of persistent classes to a logicalrelational schema (SQL3) and specific (Oracle). Professional profile for managing C, A S G LAMS software projects Activities to define collaboratively the features of the professional profile of a project manager. Software project manager candidate A S G Video provision and selection Activities to define job vacancies, profiles of candidates and representation of the selection process for project management positions. Selection of the life cycle model C, A S G LAMS Activities to review the life cycle models and case studies to select a life cycle model. Presentation Software project viability study A S G Video Activity to develop and present a software project viability study. The presentation is recorded on video to watch and analyze it further. Software project proposal A S G Document Activity to develop a technical document of a software project proposal. Document Software project plan A S G Presentation Video Activity to develop and present the project plan document. The presentation is recorded on video to watch and analyze it further.

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UML for web applications C S P SCORM Material on the UML profile for the analysis and design of web applications. MVC pattern C T P SCORM Material on the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern-based web application. Agile development methodologies A S G LAMS Descriptions of agile development methodologies and examples based on the Scrum methodology. Web development frameworks C S G Wiki Documents about web application development frameworks based on the MVC pattern and using different programming languages (Ruby, Java, Python, etc.). Object-relational mapping pattern C T P SCORM Technique and tools to map an object-oriented model onto a relational database.

Table 4 shows the relationships between courses and learning materials described in Table 3. For each resource is specified the course in which it is created (C), the courses that reuse it (R), and the courses in which it is changed (Ch). Table 4. Relations between courses and learning resources. Resource \ Course Standard ISO/IEC 12207-1 System requirements specification Functional model realization process software testing Structured analysis problems Structured design problems Structured approach questionnaire Object-oriented analysis process Object-oriented analysis problems Problems object-oriented design Object-oriented approach quest. Examples of DSR and DAS OCL examples Web system requirements engineering Data models Current trends in databases Object-oriented databases Object-relational databases Object-relational transformation Professional profile for managing software projects Software project manager candidate provision and selection Selection of the life cycle model Software project viability study Software project proposal Software project plan UML for web applications MVC pattern Agile development methodologies Web development frameworks Object-relational mapping pattern

SEI C C C C C C C

R

SEII R

SE R C

DBAT

RE

PMCSP

R

C C,R C,R C,R R R

R R R

Ch

R C,R C,R C,R R R

R R R

WE

C C C

R R

C C C C C C C

R

R

R

C C C C

R R

C C C C C

5. Conclusions This paper describes the initiative of a group of teachers of the University of Cádiz to share their previous experiences related with the EHEA adaptation process and developing, in a 25

coordinated and collaborative way, materials and educational resources adapted to the EHEA. These educational components will be used in the courses of the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems of the first and second cycles of the UCA Computer Engineering degree. The fundamental objectives have been commented along with the methodology and tools that will be used. All the learning contents and activities that are thought for development in this project have been analyzed and described. With the development of this project the following results are expected: ●

To improve the coordination and collaboration among courses of the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems.

●

To facilitate the reuse of the materials and educational resources among courses.

●

To increase the student's motivation, to foster autonomous learning and their active participation in the learning process.

●

To help students obtaining the generic and cross competences of the core subjects of Software Engineering and Information Systems in the context of the EHEA.

●

To increase the use of ICTs in the teaching-learning process.

●

To get better the academic results of the students in these core subjects.

References 1. Declaración de Bolonia (19 de junio de 1999). Comunicado de la Conferencia de Ministros Europeos responsables de la Educación Superior, http://www.eees.es/pdf/Bolonia-ES.pdf. 2. Web site of Moodle. http://moodle.com. 3. Dodero, J.M., Fernández, C., Sanz, D: An Experience on Students’ Participation in Blended vs. Online Styles of Learning” SIGCSE Bulletin, 35(4), pp. 39-42 (2003). 4. Ruiz, M.: Una experiencia de autoformación para la innovación en la docencia de la informática y su adaptación al EEES. I Jornadas de Innovación Educativa: las enseñanzas técnicas ante el reto del EEES, pp. 357-367. Escuela Politécnica Superior de Zamora (2006). 5. Alonso, J.A., De Castro, C., Domínguez, J., García, M.T., Guerrero, E., Hurtado, N., Medina, I., Núñez, B., Orta, E., Palomo Duarte, M., Palomo Lozano, F., Pizarro, J., Rioja, C.: Adaptación de las asignaturas de las titulaciones de informática al EEES. Actividades de los grupos de formación del profesorado de la Universidad de Cádiz 2005-2006, pp. 179-189. Universidad de Cádiz (2007). 6. Ruiz, M.: Utilizando aprendizaje activo colaborativo en la docencia de las bases de datos. I Jornadas de Innovación Educativa: las enseñanzas técnicas ante el reto del EEES, pp. 65-76. Escuela Politécnica superior de Zamora (2006). 7. Ruiz, M.: Aprendizaje basado en la experiencia para la dirección de proyectos software. II Jornadas de trabajo sobre experiencias piloto de implantación del crédito europeo en las universidades andaluzas. Granada (2007). 8. Godwin-Jones, R.: Emerging Technologies. Blogs and Wikis: Environments for Online 26

Collaboration. Language Learning and Technology, 7(2), pp.12-16 (2003). 9. Dalziel, J.: Implementing Learning Design: The Learning Activity Management System. Proceedings of the 20th ASCILITE Conference,pp. 593-596. Adelaide, Australia, (December 2003). 10. SCORM 2004. 3rd Edition Overview. Advanced Distributed Learning. http://www.adlnet.gov/20043ED/Index.aspx.

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Case study: Glacial Discharge to learn Statistics Carmen Domínguez Álvarez, Ascensión Hernández Encinas, Araceli Queiruga Dios, Isabel Visus Ruiz Department of Applied Mathematics, E.T.S.I.I. de Béjar, Universidad de Salamanca Avda. Fernández Ballesteros 2, 37700 - Béjar (Salamanca) {karmenka, ascen, queirugadios, ivisus}@usal.es

Abstract Our aim, as university teachers, is to make students acquire new knowledge, and what is more important: new competences to be good professionals. In this way, the information and concepts learned during the graduate studies is integrated into prior knowledge and students acquire the appropriate meaningfulness with respect to what is already known. We employ some tools in the specific subject of Statistics so that our students can build up their learning through the different collaborative activities and tools offered, and through communications tools between teachers and students. In this paper we describe an evaluation of the results of the use of new technologies for the particular case of teaching mathematics in Industrial Engineering. We present a case study where students could apply their knowledge and competences to the specific glacial discharge problem.

1. Introduction The Bologna Accord (Bologna, 1999) proposes the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) with a view to unifying university studies in Europe. Emphasis is placed on the creation of a common European space as being key to promoting citizen’s mobility and employment. The use of new technologies in university teaching is considered to be a pre-requisite for countries to adapt to the EHEA. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in higher education allows students to acquire an integrated training so that they gain the knowledge necessary to cope with the technological, scientific or similar problems they will have to confront in their professional careers. The role of the student has also changed, since traditional educational models do not fit in well with the learning process via ICT. Indeed, ICT have thus become a new instrument for supporting and helping traditional teaching, allowing the process of learning to be personalized and enabling students to gain deeper knowledge of their lines of inquiry and become more motivated to learn; apart, that is, from understanding the material better (Kirschner, 2001). ICT facilitate interpersonal communication and provide immediate access to all types of information. In universities, both instructors and students must adapt to a methodological sea-change in the teaching-learning process; this will presumably afford both groups huge advantages. Some ICT applications have been shown to allow individualized follow-up and to increase student motivation, also improving students’ results (Carrasco et al., 2005). As examples, some ICT applications that we use are on-line tutorials, the proposal of activities, and individual contributions by students in which they use the Internet as a resource. 29

The origin of the changes promoted in the subjects we teach lies in the need to improve the actual teaching of them, with a view to facilitating the assimilation of content by our students. Our teaching experience has shown us that the use of these tools brings students closer to the subjects in which such resources are used. The aim of the present work is to report the results of the use of ICT in the subjects we teach —in particular Statistics— and to offer an assessment of those results. This work is structured as follows. In section 1, we discuss the role of mathematics in the teaching of engineering; in 2 we look at the new technologies that we use as tools in our endeavors to meet the specifications of the EHEA. In section 3, we explore the content and importance of linear algebra in the career profiles of future engineers; this is where we perform the assessment. In section 4 we report the assessment made —in questionnaire form— at the University Engineering College in Béjar (Salamanca, Spain). Finally, we report the conclusions drawn for the study.

2. The Industrial Engineer faced with Math subjects An important task for engineers is to learn how it is possible to model daily events and objects with mathematical tools. It is considered that problem solving is an important part of their education; by interpreting such problems as a context within which they can apply mathematics to aspects of the “real world”, they can learn how to make practical use of their mathematical skills (Lantz-Andersson, 2008). Industrial engineering studies are based on a solid initial technical knowledge, complemented with enhancements that, depending on the choice of the student, go deeper into the study of specific technical problems (related to automatic devices and electronics, mechanics, electromechanics, or materials) and problems in industrial organization. However, in the training of industrial engineers, emphasis tends to be placed on the generalist, polyvalent and integrative nature of the teaching, and on the development of skills to learn and solve the technical, organizational, and management problems that are inherent to any industrial or services company. Owing to their multidisciplinary education, industrial engineers are able to develop a career in any technical industrial activity. Notwithstanding, their knowledge mainly enables them to work in fields such as project engineering, technical assistance services, Quality management, I+D, CAD/CAE/CAM Installations System Management or Simulation of mechanisms. Moreover, the engineers at our institution (the E.T.S.I.I. in Béjar) receive instruction in programming languages such as C, C++, Java, or Visual Basic, and in the use of software packages for symbolic calculus and those specific to maths, such as Mathematica, Maple or Matlab. Moreover, most of the students have wide knowledge of tools like access, excel, and so on. Engineers working in industry must acquire and develop basic knowledge and skills, in which the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams, an ongoing interest in new knowledge through the students’ own work, the ability to address the different problems of the company for which they work, and criteria to use the mathematics necessary to solve specific problems must all be combined. As well as having knowledge of applied mathematics, engineers must be able to apply maths from the perspective —and indeed attitude— of a true engineering professional. Knowledge 30

of mathematics helps engineers to systematize logical and analytical thinking, with the help of other disciplines that will in turn help them to structure their synthetic thinking and awaken their creativity.

3. Proposal to applied acquired knowledge We propose an application in statistics, our goal is to get a combination of knowledge, skills and behavior utilized to improve performance, we emphasize the importance of learning environments based on new technologies, encountering theory through personal impact, the power of role models, and the need for a greater focus on the transfer of learning to the world of work after graduation (Petrovich, 2005). Concerning the beginning of the course there are some knowledge and competences that the students in initial courses must dominate, that is the main reason to propose this kind of work (Delgado García, 2005). With this proposal the students will find an environment within the Learning Construction mode (Brooks, 1999) within the pedagogical objectives of teaching, whose aim is to establish coherent relationships between what must be learned (new models) and what is already known (prior knowledge). In this way, the information learned is integrated into prior knowledge and acquires the appropriate meaningfulness with respect to what is already known (Weiss, 2006). Nowadays, the authors of this paper are investigating existence of flows and drainages both endoglacier and subglacier in the subpolar glaciers, in fact, with data from different stations, like Svalbard, Greenland or Ellemere, all of them in North and south poles, we analyze the relation between glacial discharge and the global warming (Eraso, 2001). That is why give the students data from a monitoring station that we have implemented, the King George island in Antarctica, the data includes the period from November, the 30th, 2005, at 9h, to June, the 4th, 2006 at 16h. The studied variables are the specific discharge (m3/sec km2) and the temperature. Considering the temperature as meteorological variable, and the glacier discharge as hydraulic one, the software that will be used by students could be choose between Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, or MS Excel that sometimes is easy to use (Lantz-Andersson, 2008). The data has been saved in a text file. There are three columns for one data per hour: date (including hour), temperature, and glacial discharge. In order to solve the proposed problem, the student has to do the daily averages of the discharge and temperature variables. That will reduce the number of data, since he will remain with a single data per day, instead of 24. Later, a descriptive study should be done, related to both variables separately: average, median, mode, rank, variance, standard deviation, and graphical representations, as much of specific discharge as of temperature (Álvarez, 2004). Finally, the student should calculate the straight line of regression of the variable discharge (y) on the variable temperature (x), represent the cloud of points and the straight line of regression in the same graph.

4. Conclusions The issues and theory involved in the activities described here are essentially the same as those used in traditional classes, with the exception that now the technologies used offer a much greater possibility for students to participate, and they make possible to developed a 31

problem based learning and competence learning mode at the same time. Teachers inform and teach students about the existence, usefulness and value of the new technologies and what is more important: how to use them in a work in their future career. It should be noted that a large number of students finish their first year at university without having looked at the institution’s web site and without having used its e-mail service. Accordingly, it cannot be taken as a given that all students will have extensive knowledge of or frequently use the Internet and the ICT in general. With this proposed work, that could be done in groups or individually, students learn how to applied the acquired knowledge and competences to a real problem: the balance between temperature and glacial discharge.

Acknowledgments This work has been supported by the Project “Memoria D. Samuel Solórzano Barruso” 2008.

References 1. Álvarez Contreras, S. J., Estadística Aplicada. Teoría y Problemas. Editorial Clag, s.a. Madrid (2004). 2. Bologna Declaration: Adaptación del sistema universitario español a sus directrices, 1999. Bolonia (Italia), http://www.crue.org/apadsisuniv.htm. 3. Brooks, J., Brooks, M.: In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, Revised Edition, ASCD (1999). 4. Carrasco, E. Gracia y C. de la Iglesia. Las TIC en la construcción del espacio europeo de educación superior. Dos experiencias docentes en teoría económica. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación, 36/1 (2005). 5. Delgado García, A.M., Borge Bravo, R., Garcá Albero, J., Oliver Cuello, R., Salomón Sancho, L.: Competencias y diseño de la evaluación continua y final en el espacio europeo de educación superior. Programa de Estudios y Análisis. Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (2005). 6. Eraso A., Domínguez M.C., El Calentamiento Global visto desde los glaciares subpolares de la Antártida. Consideraciones sobre su repercusión en la subida del nivel del mar; RIESGOS NATURALES, 44, 819–829, Ed. Ariel, España, 2001. 7. Kirschner, P.A.: Using integrated electronic environments for collaborative teaching/ learning. Research Dialogue in Learning and Instruction, 2, 1 (2001) 1–10. 8. Lantz-Andersson, A., Linderoth, J., Säljö, R., What’s the problem? Meaning making and learning to do mathematical word problems in the context of digital tools, Instructional Science (2008). 9. Petrovich, A., Lowe, M., Developing Cultural Competence, Journal of Teaching in Social Work, vol. 25 (¾), 2005, pp.157. 10. Weiss J., et al. eds., The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, Springer, 14, (2006).

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A Case study of the adaptation of ProblemBased Learning for programming subjects Víctor Manuel Álvarez García, María del Puerto Paule Ruiz, Juan Ramón Pérez Pérez Department of Computer Science, University of Oviedo, Spain

Abstract This article describes a case study of the adaptation of the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) method for a programming subject. For this study, we focused in a Web Programming subject which is part of the academic program for the Computer Science degree at the University of Oviedo. We propose a method adapted to programming learning and based in implementations by other Universities. The article analyses pros and cons resulted from applying this method in Web Programming, as well as results obtained from the study, including grades and appreciations from teachers and students.

1. Background: Problem Based Learning in the classroom In 1982 Barrows, one of the fathers of the Problem-Based Learning (PBL), defined it as “A learning method based on the principle of using problems as starting point for the acquisition and integration of new knowledge”. The goal of PBL is to stimulate students active learning, in the sense that it is the student who, by him/herself, has to find out what he/she needs to learn in order to get the solution for a given problem. Teachers are responsible for providing students with problems before they have acquired the knowledge and act as facilitators during the learning process, motivating a self-searching and a selflearning necessary to solve the problems. The Medical School of McMaster, in Canada, was the first in proposing the use of ProblemBased Learning for its courses, which was latterly adopted by other medical institutions. But, although PBL was initially associated to the medical field, it has being evolved and adapted to different areas of application. This situation has provoked many variations in the method in respect to the first proposal. However, the core features [1] can be summarized in the following six points: 1. Learning is student-centered 2. Learning occurs in small student groups 3. Teachers are facilitators or guides 4. Problems are the organizing focus and stimulus for learning 5. Problems are the vehicle for the development of clinical problem-solving skills 6. New information is acquired through self-directed learning The method described in this article takes these features and adapts them to students enrolled in a web programming course, proving Problem-Based Learning also valid for teaching programming subjects.

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2. Choice of a new learning method for a programming course We took as a base for this case study the Web Programming course. Web Programming is an optional subject worth 6 credits (60 hours) and corresponding to the third course of the Computer Science degree at the University of Oviedo. The main goal of this subject is to introduce students to the field of Web application development, focusing in practical aspects of design and programming. Timing is equitable splitting in theory and laboratory classes, although theory is mainly used to introduce the work the students have to perform in the laboratory. The number of students is usually low (between 20 and 30) and, in the particular case of the academic year 2006/2007, when this experience was performed, 22 students were enrolled in this course. Students had all programming experience from other programming courses and freely take Web Programming with the aim to improve their programming skills in a field with good professional perspectives. But in this context, we considered that a learning method based in traditional classrooms settings and the realization of batteries of exercises in the laboratory was not the most useful to achieve the goals and full fill students expectations. Overall, we found the following reasons to change the learning method: 1. Students did not feel enough motivated with traditional learning methodologies. 2. We wanted to develop professional competences like self-learning and team work through the realization of laboratory work. 3. We wanted the students to be capable of showing a real understanding of the subject, and not only knowledge and comprehension capabilities according to Bloom's taxonomy [2]. Overall, we aimed to experiment a different learning method to improve the level of satisfaction, develop professional competences and improve the level of analysis [2] of the students. That is why, in the academic year 2006/2007, we took the decision of changing the previous methodology. We considered that an active method was more suitable for our purpose due to its proved effectiveness for students to learn, apply, integrate and retain information [3]. The choice of Problem-Based Learning among other active methods was based in: 1. The study of scientific evidence of results obtained by the PBL method in other Universities, as it is documented in an article written by Bridges and Hellinguer in 1997 [4]. 2. PBL fit very well into the learning goals of the subject, which was mainly practical. 2.1 Problem-Based Learning adapted to programming subjects Taking as reference AIRE, a four steps adaptation of Problem-Based Learning developed by the University of Alcalá (http://www.uah.es/problembasedlearning/), and our own experience as Software Developers, we developed a method for teachers adapted to the characteristics of the programming subject. The main characteristics of this method are the following: 1. Define the reasons and purposes for doing Problem-Based Learning, the procedures to use and expectations. 34

2. Establish a size for the teams, each team have a representative with well defined functions. 3. Describe the problem as a type of software application the students have to develop and a set of characteristics to be met. The specific problem to be solved is to be choose by each team. 4. Document best practices to help students meet their goals. 5. Define a set of milestones or control points to be met during the life-cycle of the project. Control points include the delivery of documents, prototypes and components. One control point consists in a public exposition of the project by all team members. 6. Define a evaluation method which takes into account the team and individual work during the course. 7. Prepare a “mini-lecture” to introduce the problem and the method described in the previous points to the students. Following this method, we wrote a master document for the students, which included all the information needed for the organization, development and revision of a software project. This includes diagrams, definition of the problem, goals, control points, deliveries, evaluation and best practices. Best practices are a few recommendations to assure the good progress of the projects and control point meetings. They included essential tips like how to follow the classes, how to organize team work or how to deliver the work, and less significant recommendations like how to include bibliography in a document. The course started with a “mini-lecture” which introduced the problem and explained how the course would be organized. Then we passed the master document to the students, who were asked to create groups of three people to work in a four months project. In the academic year 2006/2007, we asked the students to develop a web emulator for a voice-based application. We defined a set of basic characteristics for the project, but the final problem and more specific characteristics were choose by each group of students and supervised by the lecturer or facilitator, who had to agree in the final specifications. This scenario, gave the students the freedom to choose the problem they wanted to solve, but also kept the context and purpose for the laboratory work the lecturers had previously decided. Moreover, the students were also responsible for choosing a name for the group, a representative or team leader, and the technologies and methods to apply during the development process. It is important to remark two aspects: 1. The project required to accomplish a number of common characteristics for a software application, but the final project was choose by the students. 2. Knowledge to solve the problem was not initially given by the lecturers, the students were responsible to obtain this knowledge while progressing with the project, always with the reference and direction of their lecturers, but also with the freedom and commitment for choosing the techniques and procedures they wanted to apply for each case. 35

The four months project was divided into milestones, deadlines or, in PBL terminology, control points, with specific tasks to be accomplished and deliveries which included documents, prototypes and different components of the application. Besides these deliveries, teams were also asked to make a public exposition of their projects, where they had to explain the lecturers and their fellow students the reasons for choosing their projects, scopes, which technologies they were going to apply for the solution and which goals they were pursuing. All the team members participated in this exposition, and members from other teams participated also by making inquires which might be of their interest or useful for their own work. We have to highlight the role performed by the team representative during the development process, as he/she was responsible for the internal coordination of the team, the communication with the lecturer, as well as for having the deliveries presented on time. For this reason, team representatives were granted with a bonus grade. As for the evaluation, control points were considered a fundamental part of the work and they provided the 25% of the individual grade of the subject. The rest 75% were divided into the grade for the group work (50%) and the knowledge test (25%). Group work was evaluated as the final result of the project as a whole, taking into account aspects such as characteristics of the project, deliveries and technologies and methods applied during the development process. The test was given once the learning period was completed. Bonus for team representatives consisted in a 10% over the grade for their group work.

3. Results The results taken from this experience were very positive, both from the lecturers and the students. Regarding the academic results obtained after the four months development period, all the teams succeeded in meeting the control points and got a minimum grade of 7/10 for their group work. Only 3 out of 22 students failed to pass the individual test and two of them chose to repeat this test in order to high their grades.

Fig 1: Academic results

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Fig. 1 shows a range for grades in a scale 0 to 10. All the students passed the subject and most of them have punctuations between 7 and 8.9. There is a 5% portion of the graphic which corresponds to the student who only obtained 4.5 out of 10 in the individual test and preferred not to do a second attempt. The rest 14% have a grade between 9 and 10, which corresponds to students with high grades in all the sections of the evaluation.

Fig 2: Comparison between Knowledge Test grade and Group Work grade. Relation among independent variables 'Knowledge Test grade' and 'Group Work grade' are shown in Fig 2. All the students but one passed the Knowledge test, which is a good indicator that most of the students acquired the knowledge required to obtain the learning goals, which they applied in turn to their group work with the goal of getting a remarkable group grade (>=7). However, highest group grades don't seem directly related to highest test grades. This result make us consider that, despite of all the students individually obtained the minimum learning goals we had planned initially, the division of group work, provoked some students to focus more deeply in certain tasks than others in a way that, once individual tasks were finished, they could put them in common to obtain the final work. Although it is obvious that students required to have a minimum knowledge of the work made by all the team members in order to perform this integration, we think that this division of tasks and the individual commitment to the project have deeply influence the individual and group results. Moreover, Fig 2 shows highest individual grades matching the average for group grades and average individual grades matching the highest for group grades. In our opinion, this result reflects that students who are not the most brilliant in the class can create a group with a good level of understanding and which performs well, while most brilliant students are not necessarily an asset for obtaining good group performances. Regarding our appreciations as lecturers, we would like to remark the following results: 1. We perceived an increment in the students motivation. 37

2. Freedom to choose a problem provide of many, some of them brilliant, ideas. 3. Team work proved to be very positive for the learning process. 4. Students showed capable to affront a real problem. We think that the immediate reward in the grade for meeting control points encouraged students to keep their work up-to-date. Control points were successfully met by all the teams and communication with the lecturer were very fluid. The introduction of freedom for the election of the problem and techniques generated a general brainstorming in class from which many good ideas were taken. One of the ideas have even been continued by one of the original team members to develop a GNU/GPL voice-based RSS reader (Feedo; http://feedo.sourceforge.net) for his Final Year Project. We consider that team work was also very positive for the learning process. Students discovered new competencies which were not included in the program for the subject, such as developing skills for cooperative and collaborative work and make public expositions. Division in teams and team leadership also increased the level of competition in order to obtain better grades. However, team work also showed disadvantages, like students who didn't perform well in the team work and were covered by their fellow students, something very difficult to detect by the lecturer and which can be compensated by the individual test. In any case, the most rewarding result was that, at the end of the course, students showed capable to affront a real problem and work in teams to solve it. From the students point of view, learning while solving a real problem was also very rewarding and they reported us to feel satisfied with overcoming difficulties while doing their work. Control points and team work were very welcome, as they resemble the work in the 'real world', with their respective pros and cons. One of the main disadvantages of team work is coincident with the lecturer point of view and consists in having students not performing at a good level but obtaining the same grades as their colleagues for their group work.

4. Conclusions The use of a method based in Problem-Based Learning can be applied successfully to programming learning. Students are encouraged to develop skills like the ability to work as a team member as well as work efficiently under pressure and meet deadlines, which will be crucial for their professional life. Learning concepts in the moment they are needed have also proved to be very positive for the learning process, as it makes students obtain a practical vision of the knowledge they have acquired. PBL propitiates a high level of motivation among students. Control points are seen as an immediate reward, easier to accomplish than long term deliveries. Freedom to chose the project and what technologies are more suitable for obtaining solution, as well as freedom to join and manage a software team, also encourage students to perform a good work in order to achieve the shared goals established by their group. Besides, group tasks are assigned among members, who have to work together and coordinated to achieve the goals, making this whole process to be seen more as a real software development than a traditional laboratory work. One of the inconveniences of this method is the possibility of having students who don't feel 38

enough motivated or integrated in the group. However, individual evaluation allows teachers to detect students who didn't achieve the required knowledge during the course and try to find the causes. Generally, the results obtained from the evaluation suggest a big success of this method with only one student not passing all the sections evaluated. Teachers felt very comfortable with the method during the course, as they perceived how the communication with their students was improved as well as a good response from the students during their work in the laboratory. The satisfaction was also very high since teachers came from an business environment and PBL made possible to adapt professional techniques to be used in the classroom. We consider that more experiences need to be performed, including timing estimations, in order to improve the method described in this article and introduce it into the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). But overall, we feel very motivated with the outcome as the experience resulted in a very rewarding and even a enjoyable one. Acknowledgment This paper has been partially funded by the University of Oviedo under the project UNOV-08-MB-14. References 1. Barrows H. (1996) Problem-Based learning in medicine and beyond: A brief overview. In Wilkerson L., Gijselaers W. H. (eds) Bringing Problem-Based Learning to Higher Education: Theory and Practice, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, pp. 3-12. 2. Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green. 1956 3. Bonwell, Charles C. and James A. Eison. (1991) Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington DC: The George Washington University, School of education and Human Development. 4. Bridges, E, and Hallinger, E. (1997) Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 72, No. 2, New Ways of Training for School Leadership, pp. 131-146

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Continuous Assessment in Software Engineering Francisco J. García Peñalvo, Miguel A. Conde González, Sergio Bravo Martín Universidad de Salamanca, Facultad de Ciencias, Plaza de los Caídos s/n, 37008 Salamanca (España) [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract European convergence towards European Space of Higher Education demands an important innovation process in the academic assessment system. In this sense, continuous assessment presents some advantages which are exposed in this paper due to it introduction as an additional assessment in Software Engineering subject.

1. Introduction As result of the convergence towards European Space of Higher Education [1] (from now on ESHE), subjects assessment gets a new approach. In the first place assessment is not limited to check final results, but presents an educational approach based on learning in a way which allows to value if a learner has obtained the knowledge and competences previously established. Secondly, the teacher must assess the assimilation of knowledge and skills development by students, not only at the end of the process but over the period school through regular activities. With this new approach, the evaluation becomes a teaching activity continued, progressive and sometimes evolutionary, in order to adapt to the learning ability of students. The purpose of this communication is to present the process of continuous assessment in place, since the academic year 2005-2006, in Software Engineering subject at the program of Computer Science Education at the University of Salamanca, as well as share the results to serve as an example and reference in the implementation of evaluation systems that improve the current in the way of adaptation to ESHE.

2. Teaching Approach of Software Engineering software Computer Science Education at the University of Salamanca is organized into two study programs based on an initial three-year cycle (Basic Engineering Degree) and a second cycle of two (Senior Engineering) and a second cycle of two (High-Level Degree). The student makes his first contact with the Software Engineering in the first. This course tries to raise awareness among students on a range of disciplines that are applied regularly and systematically in the work of design and construction software [2]. The subject is taught in the first quarter of the course and consists in 60 hours 4.5 theoretical and 1.5 practical). Looking at his approach under the new rules of European convergence, the approach of the subject taking equivalence of official credits to European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) is chosen, involving change in teaching methodology. This change in methodology is an 41

increase in the work of assimilation and self student, assuming 112.5 hours for these aspects on the theory and 45 hours in the practice. The total number of work hours is 157.5. This number would be between 150 and 180, according to the new rules, depending on whether the each credit has 25 or 30 hours. The work of assimilation is optimal considering the nature of the subject. In order to understand the different concepts is necessary that the student was capable of performing a job for reflection, assimilation and practice of different underlying concepts of the subject. Encouraging these disciplines, and considering that in most cases students apply every effort to end a learning process whose aim is only pass the subject, it becomes necessary to apply a methodology for continuous assessment.

3. Assessment Process The implementation of continuous assessment in the context of this subject is a major challenge, therefore should be implemented on two large groups with approximately 100 students each one. To do this, the first decision taken was raised as an optional element, which nobody would be forced to follow, and those who follow it and fail would have the opportunity to complete a final exam. The next step was to design a protocol for its development. To understand the process of continuous assessment is essential to know the official assessment (OA) established in the course. This method consists of two parts, theory and practice, which was evaluated separately and contributing both with 50% of the final grade: ●

Firstly, the theory is assessed through a final exam that consists of two parts: a test and a set of theoretical and practical assumptions. Both should be approved independently.

●

Moreover, the practice carried out in working groups, is assessed through a presentation and defence against the professor.

In addition to the traditional evaluation system, students can be optionally chose a continuous assessment (CA), in which attendance and active participation play an important role. This pattern is determined by the following process: ●

Related to the test part in the theoretical exam: ●

●

Regarding the part of the set of theoretical and practical assumptions from the exam, student can get points added to the score obtained in this section of the review. ●

42

3 tests will be conducted during the theoretical classes, which shared the contents of the different learning units of the program of the subject. Pass these tests will mean the elimination of part test for the theoretical exam, if student gets a score greater than or equal to 5 in all these tests. Average score only be calculated if in all tests the score is greater than 3.

In practical workshops: ●

All groups must hand the exercise defined at the end of the meeting (and printed using any of the modeling tool proposals). If fraud is detected is deducted 1 point.

●

The volunteer groups defense the works performed and make reports

with delivery in 15 days. Both the defense and the report can contribute up 0.5 points each one. If there are no voluntary groups, the teacher will choose randomly a group. In this case both the defense and the report could negatively rate (up to -1), this report would be mandatory. ● ●

Continuously and successful collaboration can contribute up 0.5 points.

Regarding the delivery of exercises ●

May be delivered up to 3 modeling exercises, with instructions obtained from the literature (and unresolved). After its review in tutoring hours might contribute up 0.75 points.

4. Results and conclusions From the academic year 2005-2006, the subject of Software Engineering incorporates continuous assessment as additional modality that the students can use to pass it. The teaching team sets out a series of indicators based on numerical counts stemming from the results of the examination session on January, highlighting: ●

Total students who pass on continuous assessment.

●

Total students who fail on continuous assessment.

●

Total students who pass on official assessment.

●

Total students who fail on official assessment.

There’s no doubt, the large number of students enrolled, guarantee the reliability of the results. Fig. 1 provides a chart showing the evolution of these indicators over the last three years:

Fig. 1. Evolution results of the continuous and official assessment If we look in detail the figure we can detect that: 43

●

The percentage of students who pass the subject in the form of continuous assessment is considerably higher, in all years, the percentage of the official. The average percentage of passing at the three academic years is doubled, 60% on continuous assessment compared to 33% of the official.

●

Regarding to the failing the situation is completely inverted. In this case, the percentages of students who fail in continuous assessment are much lower than those of the official. Emphasize the academic year 2007-08, in which the proportion of failing in continuous assessment is 14% while in the official reaches 86%.

As discussed above, if the student does not pass the subject in the form of continuous assessment, may still be submitted to the official assessment. In order to see the level of incidence of continuous assessment in the official assessment will take further annotations on the following indicators: ●

Total students who fail the subject in the form of continuous assessment but they pass by official evaluation.

●

Total students who pass the subject exclusively by the official evaluation.

According to the results obtained, we can conclude that the process of continuous assessment is presented as an additional advantage by offering greater guarantees to finally pass the subject [3]. Among the advantages that also get the student, we consider the following: ●

Gradual assimilation of the contents subject and progressive development of the established powers.

●

Knowledge about the teacher assessment, and the degree of demand required to pass.

●

Information on the pace of learning needed to assimilate the contents and put them into practice through various workshops scheduled during the course, as well as in practice mandatory.

●

Preparing to face successfully the final test according to the official assessment of the subject.

From the teacher point of view, the evaluation system provides continuous on-line information about subject that can contribute to improving or even redirect the process of student learning. However, the effort and workload of teachers are increased significantly, worthy of being valued and taken into account in case of wanting implants. Similarly, excessive care must be taken in several subjects that do not coincide with this evaluation system in the same period school because they can get to saturate the student.

Acknowledgments We want to thank members of the Group of Research in Interaction and eLearning of the University of Salamanca for their collaboration in the form of critical feedback in the development of this article. This work is partially supported by Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through the research project KEOPS (TSI2005-00960) and by the Regional Ministry of Education of Junta de Castilla y León through the project SA056A07 44

References 1. European Ministers of Education, The European Higher Education Area - Bologna Declaration, Bologna on the 19th of June 1999. 2. García, F.J. and Moreno, M.N. 2004. Software Modelling Techniques for a First Course in Software Engineering: A Workshop-Based Approach. IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 47, No. 2, May 2004. 3. González-Rosende, M.E. 2008. La Evaluación Continua en el Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior.

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A preliminary evaluation of the impact of using a visual tool in a compilers course Daniel Rodríguez and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso Department of Computer Science, University of Alcalá,28805 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain {daniel.rodriguezg, salvador.sanchez}@uah.es

Abstract During the last academic year (2007-2008), theoretical lectures on the Compilers module were complemented with a visual tool to reinforce some of the more difficult concepts in the module. JFlap, a visual tool aimed at visualizing automata models which can also be used in a compiler course to trace, visualize and in-depth study the parsing methods taught in the course, was the tool of choice. This paper reports on the experience we carried out at the University of Alcalá where students were shown how to use JFlap, although its use was not compulsory. At the end of the term, a survey was conducted around students to discover its use while learning the subject and compared with their marks in the exam. The results show that students using JFlap frequently achieved better results than both students that do not use JFlap at all and those that make only sporadic use of it. Based on both qualitative and quantitative results, JFlap can be used as a help in a course like this, the user satisfaction using this kind of tools from an student’s perspective being fairly positive.

1. Introduction Compilers is one of the compulsory subjects in the third year of the Computer Science degree at the University of Alcalá. It is composed of theoretical lectures (2 thirds of the time is dedicated to this) and laboratory work (one third of the time is spent in the lab). Per week, students have to attend to two classes of two hours of duration with a break of approximately 10 minutes in the middle, and one laboratory of two hours. The work in the laboratory is composed of 3 assignments to be completed during the term. We used JLex/JFlex [3] and CUP [1], the Java version of the popular Lex [4] and YACC [2]. While the first assignment is mainly related to grammars using only JLex, the second one is about joining JLex and CUP with a very simple grammar. The last assignment usually extends the previous one with a more complex grammar. Last year around 100 students were enrolled in the course, divided into two groups. During the academic year 2007/2008, theoretical lectures were complemented with a visual tools to reinforce some of the difficult concepts in the compilers module. Students were encouraged to learn the theoretical subject with the help of JFlap [5], a graphical software which was used as a demonstration tool during the lecturers. However, its use was not compulsory. At the end of the course, we surveyed the use of JFlap and compared the marks of those students who used it against the marks of those who did not.

2. Context, Subjects and Questionnaire As stated previously, the compilers module is a compulsory subject composed of theoretical and practical classes. During a term lasting approximately 15 weeks, there are 2 classes of 2 hours of theory and one session in the laboratory per week. In the laboratory, students have 47

to finish 3 assignments, using JLex and CUP. These assignments must be completed with some coursework at home. The syllabus is a standard first year compilers’ course with some emphasis in the syntactic analysis from LL(1) to LALR(1). Although approximately 4 weeks are spent in this section of the module, a large number of errors were related to this part of the course (e.g., doubts in generating the First and Following sets, confusion with the different types of tables to use depending on the syntactical analysis, parsing of the inputs, etc.). As a result, lectures were complemented with JFlap to show students a tool able to help with lexical and syntactical analysis. Being the first year that the tool was introduced, it was not compulsory to use it for any assignment or practical work. Fig. 1 represents a screenshot of JFlap with the grammar, automaton, First and Follow sets and analysis tables. JFlap can also show how to step-by-step parse an input string that will be either accepted or rejected according to the grammar.

Fig. 1: The JFlap tool. At the end of the course, we surveyed its use between students to decide whether to adopt the use of such a tool more intensively next year. The survey was conducted using a questionnaire after the exam to gather the maximum number of responses. Out of 116 of students enrolled in the compilers module (in two different groups), 94 students took part in the survey. The questionnaire was not anonymous as wanted to correlate the use of the tool with the marks in the exam. Their final mark was, of course, not affected by their answers in the questionnaire. This was clearly explained to them at the beginning of the experience. There was no time limit to answer the questionnaire (shown in Appendix A). 48

3. Hypothesis Our initial hypothesis is that students using JFlap would understand better the subject in general, and the syntactical analysis in particular. Student’s knowledge is measured by their marks in the exam. It is worth noting that although the final mark is composed of the mark of exam and the laboratory, in this study we only considered the mark in the exam as it is closer to the theoretical issues we want students to master with the use of the tool. In the questionnaire, we also considered the number of exercises students did using the tool, None, Sporadic (between 1 and 3) and frequent (more than 4). Therefore, we consider the null hypothesis as there is no difference between the means for the different groups.

4. Results We analyzed the results taking into account the different groups depending on their use of JFlap (None, Sporadic, Frequent). Descriptive statistics (Table 1) show that different groups follow a normal distribution, existing some difference among the means but not statistical difference between the variance of the means (this was performed using the F-test two sample for variances). Table 1: Descriptive Statistics for the Different Groups Usage

Count

Avg

Variance

Std.Dev

Min

Max

Range

Std.Skewness

Std. Kurtosis

None

56

6.14

4.22

2.05

1.21

9.47

8.26

-1.07

-0.47

Frequent

19

7.65

2.52

1.58

3.88

9.39

5.51

-1.80

0.354

Sporadic

19

6.08

3.53

1.87

3.67

9.64

5.97

0.96

-0.87

Total

94

6.43

4.05

2.01

1.21

9.64

8.43

-1.29

-1.07

Fig. 2 and 3 show the scatter and box-and-whisker plots for the different groups.

Fig. 2: Scatter Plot We considered the ANOVA (One-Way analysis of variance) to compare the means of the different groups to accept of reject the null hypothesis. As shown in Table 2 the ANOVA decomposes the variance of the marks into two components: a between-group component and a within-group component. The F-ratio, which in this case equals 4.73859, is a ratio of the between-group estimate to the within-group estimate. Since the P-value of the F-test is 49

less than 0.05, there is a statistically significant difference between the mean mark from one level of use of JFlap to another at the 95.0% confidence level.

Fig. 3: Box and Whisker Plot Table 2: Analysis of Variance Source

SS

Df

Mean Sqr

F-Ratio

P-Value

Between groups

35.57

2

17.78

4.74

0.01

Within groups

341.63

91

3.75

Total (Corr.)

377.20

93

To compare which means are significantly different from which others, a multiple comparison procedure was followed. This is represented in Table 3. The bottom half of the output shows the estimated difference between each pair of means. A diamond asterisk has been placed next to 2 pairs, indicating that these pairs show statistically significant differences at the 95.0 confidence level. At the top of the figure, 2 homogeneous groups are identified using columns of X’s. Within each column, the levels containing X’s form a group of means within which there are no statistically significant differences. The method currently being used to discriminate among the means is Fisher’s least significant difference procedure. With this method, there is a 5.0% risk of calling each pair of means significantly different when the actual difference equals 0. Table 3: Multiple range tests for mark by use of JFlap Usage

Count

Mean

Groups

None

56

6.14

A

Sporadic

19

6.08

A

Frequent

19

7.65

B

Contrast

Difference

+/- Limits

None - Frequent

◊-1.51

1.022

None - Sporadic

0.058

1.02

Frequent - Sporadic

◊1.57

1.24

◊ denotes a statistically significant difference

5. Conclusions Theoretical lectures in Compilers at the University of Alcalá were complemented with JFlap, a visual tool targeted at reinforcing some of the difficult concepts in the module. We 50

reported herein on an survey carried out during the last academic semester. During this period the use of JFlap was introduced to students, although its use was not compulsory. The main objective of this survey was to assess whether its use among students affected their performance comparing their marks in the final exam. The results show that students using JFlap achieved better results than students not using JFlap or using it sporadically, according to both qualitative and quantitative results. As the main conclusion, it can be said that the use of JFlap is of help in a course like the one assessed. Student satisfaction is high at the same time, as it is reported in the free text comments section of the questionnaire, as the use of JFlap is linked to higher levels of confidence to facing final evaluation.

References 1. S. E. Hudson, F. Flannery, C. S. Ananian, D. Wang, and A. W. Appel. Cup parser generator for java. Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ, 1999. 2. S. C. Johnson. Yacc - yet another compiler compiler. Computing Science Technical Report 32, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, 1975. 3. G. Klein. Jflex–the fast scanner generator for java. URL: http://www. jflex. de. 4. M. E. Lesk and E. Schmidt. Lex—a lexical analyser generator. pages 375–387, 1990. 5. S. Rodger. JFLAP: An Interactive Formal Languages and Automata Package. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., USA, 2006.

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Appendix A. Questionnaire about JFLAP — Survey Name: 1. Have you used FLAP as a study tool for this subject? Yes □ No □ If the answer to the above question is yes (a) According to the subjects studied during the course, JFLAP was used for Regular expressions: □ Grammars: □ Both: □ (b) Estimate the number of exercises that you did using JFLAP 1––3:□ 4––10:□ More than 10: □ (c) Taking into account the following scale 1:"Not at all" 2:"Low" 3:"Average" 4:"High" 5:"Very High" Please, score to the following statements: i. JFLAP helped me to understand the creation of the First and Following sets: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ ii. JFLAP helped me to understand the differences between the ascendant and descendant analysis: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ iii. JFLAP helped me to understand how to create analysis syntactic tables: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ iv. JFLAP helped me to understand conflicts: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ v. JFLAP helped me to understand how to generate LR(0): 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ vi. JFLAP helped me to understand how to analyze the inputs according to the different analyzers: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ vii. JFLAP helped me to understand how to construct syntactic trees 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ (d) JFLAP global evaluation. I consider the JFLAP tool quality as: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ (e) I consider that lecturers of this module should use JFLAP in following year: 1: □ 2:□ 3:□ 4:□ 5:□ (f) Other comments:

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Using learning object repositories for teaching Statistics Julià Minguillón1, Maria Antònia Huertas1, Angel Alejandro Juan1, Teresa Sancho1, Victor Cavaller2 1Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain 2Information and Communication Science Studies Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain

Abstract This paper describes an experience regarding the use of learning object repositories for supporting online students in a virtual learning environment. Before the introduction of the learning object repository, all learning resources were made available through a specific space within the virtual classroom, as part of the digital library of the university. Resources were classified according to their nature (textbooks, examples, exercises, software, data, etc.) and stored in compressed files, so students could download them as a whole package. Nevertheless, by using this traditional method it was impossible to know the real usage of these learning resources, as most students downloaded all the packages at the beginning of the academic semester and never visited the digital library again. Students also complained about the lack of additional descriptions, which makes the contextualization of each resource in the learning process very difficult. In subjects with a large amount of learning resources (several hundreds), such as Statistics in the Computer Science degree, we propose to use a learning object repository, as it seems clear that it is a basic element of any virtual learning environment, providing users with high quality contents, properly described and supported by means of metadata, taxonomies and ontologies. The integration of such repositories into the learning process is a key issue for ensuring a proper use, not just being a mere space in which to find educational resources. This will help students to better understand the basic key topics in Statistics and it will also provide online instructors with information about the real usage of the learning resources in the virtual classroom.

1. Introduction There is currently growing interest in taking advantage of Information and Communications Technologies in general, and the Internet in particular, to develop and share quality teaching materials among universities worldwide. Projects such as the MIT Open Courseware (http:// ocw.mit.edu) and MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org ) are clear examples of this phenomenon. In the field of mathematics and statistics, the interest in creating and developing web repositories with quality content that is easily accessible and usable by the university community is becoming increasingly widespread, giving rise to initiatives such as MathWorld (http://mathworld.wolfram.com), MathForum(http://mathforum.org), Joining Educational Mathematics (http://www.jem-thematic.net), etc. Although this sphere may seem highly focalized, it is one of the key factors in the success of a repository. This is shown in the example of DLESE (http://www.dlese.org), a resource repository for natural sciences which, based on an initial working community, has built up a 53

true learning community around it. The aim is thus to explore, select, develop and establish guidelines and recommendations for these technologies, standards and taxonomies that will effectively facilitate the creation of web repositories that are open (content that is completely accessible and free of charge), high quality (content that is created and reviewed by university professors), and collaborative (content developed by professors at different departments and/or universities). The contents of these repositories will be classified following a specific taxonomy and using keywords so that they can be easily located either via a portal directory or by using the repository’s own search engine. These repositories should be capable of hosting and indexing a whole range of materials: texts with theoretical and practical explanations of concepts, solved exercises, examples of applications, multimedia documents (videos, recordings, etc.), examples of using mathematical and/or statistical software, and so on. Finally, these repositories should follow guidelines on scale and standards that allow their resources to be shared with other open repositories that use international standards.

2. Teaching Statistics in VLEs The proliferation of PCs, the continual evolution of computer products (in terms of both hardware and software) and the Internet phenomenon in the last few years have all engendered a series of transformations which are helping to redefine the university education panorama in every area of knowledge, and especially in the area of mathematics and statistics. On a global level, numerous teaching groups have stressed how important it is to use ICT to improve the quality of mathematics teaching (Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, Mathematical Association of America, Mathematical Sciences Education Board, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, etc.), and, as advocated by certain authors [1,2], the use of these technologies is a key factor in the future of mathematics teaching. In terms of Spanish universities, there is an obviously growing interest by mathematics and statistics departments in incorporating information and communications technologies in their teaching of the different degree courses [3]. The upsurge of ICT in general and Internet use in particular has brought with it the emergence of numerous virtual learning spaces for mathematics which, in many cases, strengthen or complement the teaching methods based on classroom attendance. As well as the emergence of these virtual spaces, there is increasingly intensive and curricular-integrated use of statistical and mathematical software, which encourages students to be more creative (giving them the chance to experiment and work with advanced concepts and techniques), and highlights the applied aspect of mathematics and statistics in modeling and problem-solving in other areas of knowledge. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering the other major factor that is also decisively involved in the process of transformation that university mathematics teaching is undergoing: universities are currently going through a time of significant change, driven by the implementation of a European cultural framework that imposes the need to maintain and strengthen a series of social and ethical values, by the progressive adaptation to the most recent technological and socioeconomic changes, and, most importantly, by the convergence towards an integrated European university system. As highlighted by certain authors [4], the main philosophy behind the configuration of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is to put the study programs of different European countries on an equal footing, which will 54

encourage the mobility of both students and teaching staff between the various European universities and will be very beneficial for what the EHEA describes as "mutual learning". Thus the construction of this EHEA represents a huge challenge: adapting old structures (especially traditional ones in the field of mathematics teaching) in order to facilitate the transparency and comparability of higher education, making it easier to recognize qualifications and making them more uniform throughout the length and breadth of the European Union. It is very likely that the new framework defined by the EHEA will involve significant changes to educational curricula. In some universities, efforts are already being made by different mathematics departments to share their teaching experiences and unify the criteria of convergence to the EHEA, giving thought to both the general and specific skills that each area of knowledge needs to develop through the use of mathematical and statistical information. Therefore, due to the influence of the EHEA, the new configuration of learning environments —both online and classroom-based— are centered on the students rather than the teacher, resulting in a reduction in the number of master classes and an increase in group working experiences, i.e. collaborative learning [5]. Also, there is a greater emphasis on the teaching director as the supervisor of the students’ work, promoting the use of all kinds of learning resources (web sites, online libraries, learning objects, etc.) and the appropriate technologies for each subject (specific software, learning platforms, etc.). Likewise, the acquisition of transversal skills and competencies in other subjects is being introduced. In this respect, some specialists have already formulated proposals that point towards strengthening the use of mathematics as a transversal tool for use in other disciplines [6]. 2.1. The UOC case The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (in English Open University of Catalonia) is an institution which has emerged from the knowledge society. The mission is to provide people with training throughout their lives. The university’s principal aim is to ensure that each student satisfies his/her learning needs in a virtual environment, gaining the maximum benefit from their own efforts. To this end, it offers intensive use of information and communications technologies (ICT), thereby enabling us to overcome the barriers imposed by time and space for offering an educational model based on personalized attention for each individual student. Within the UOC Virtual Campus, each subject has a virtual classroom for teaching and learning process and they are the virtual meeting point for learning activities, following a student centered model [7]. A digital library provides students with all the resources they need during their learning process. Although this solution satisfies some basic requirements, such as accessing digital content, it does not contextualize such content within the learning process. We propose to improve the semantics of the repository integrated in the virtual classroom for providing students with the most appropriate resources according to the learning context and his/her particularities (preferred learning style, used device, disability issues, and so). In the particular case of the Computer Science Degree, there are a lot of courses which involve the study and use of mathematics and statistics. Among them, we have chosen Statistics because it has several interesting characteristics: it is a multidisciplinary subject across several degrees, it involves around three hundreds of students (in Computer Science only), and it has a large quantity and variety of learning resources, such as textbooks, 55

examples, exercises, simulations, data sets, software tools and even multimedia presentations. All these learning resources are linked together through the Teaching Plan, a document which helps students to follow the preplanned schedule integrating all the learning resources into the learning process. Nevertheless, students usually complain about the lack of flexibility of the schedule and the excessive number of learning resources, which makes them unable to follow the course. Preliminary studies show that students prefer more flexible systems which allow them to find the appropriate resources when they need them, instead of having all the resources available from the beginning. Learning resources should be properly tagged and contextualized within the learning process; any learning resource should be able to answer the following questions, among others: "what is this? ", "what is this related to? " and "what is this intended to? ". Other interesting possibilities are rating (usefulness, understandability, and so) and annotation (comments, errata, and so). The concept of the repository is fundamental to the achievement of some of these functionalities, such as building true learning communities around a given theme or area of knowledge. Following the maxim of David Wiley, "learning is not just about content", which means it will be necessary not only to provide students with simple, effective access to this content, but also the tools necessary to participate in its joint creation and subsequent evaluation [8], strengthening the development of transversal skills such as those that are information-related, the ability to make critical appraisals, and a capacity for decisionmaking. The repository, when properly integrated in the learning process, must allow students to advance in their personal development in such a way that the whole set of educational resources that can be used in the planned teaching activities is constantly available. The repository is not simply a technological tool, but something that enhances the use of educational resources, involving the student in the whole process. The repository is the equivalent of a fishing rod, rather than the fish that represent the educational resources provided with each activity and once they are used up, the context for their use is lost. In contrast, the repository helps students to understand the relationship of each educational resource within a context, whether explicitly because of the information it contains or implicitly, through its exact location by means of the taxonomy and keywords designed for that purpose. Instead of being isolated elements, the educational resources in a repository become parts of a greater design, the actual process of learning, which integrates activities and other elements necessary for the optimum acquisition and development of the skills for that particular area of knowledge. The repository can be based on a very specific initiative which addresses the needs of a particular area of knowledge, but it can also go on to transcend that and provide solutions at a higher level, whether institutional or even national [9]. 2.2 Project goals The aim of this project is based on a combination of the following factors: 1. The transversal presence of mathematics and statistics in numerous degree courses: To a greater or lesser extent, subjects under the mathematics and statistics umbrella form part of the educational curriculum for numerous university degrees relating to diverse areas of knowledge: experimental sciences, technical teaching, social sciences and health sciences. In addition, because of their instrumental nature —something that is absolutely essential in today’s Information Society— this area of knowledge is 56

also important in other postgraduate training courses such as Master’s and doctorate programs. Meanwhile, subjects with a mathematical or statistical nature are, generally speaking, among those in which students perform least well, which is why they deserve special attention. In particular, the educational resources in these subjects need to be constantly updated in line with methodological improvements, curriculum changes and the different profiles and prior knowledge of the students. It is feasible to use the same teaching content or resource in several areas of knowledge, either as a case study in itself in one particular field, or as an example of the instrumental use of a mathematical or statistical concept in other subjects. The concept of a repository should allow efforts to be united in this transversal direction. 2. General interest in integrating ICT in mathematics teaching in universities: Developments in computer systems and, in general, in information and communications technologies have facilitated new ways of teaching mathematics to university students and are providing professors with teaching tools that are constantly evolving: virtual environments, collaborative learning platforms, mathematical and statistical software, Internet-based educational resources, etc. These technologies are being used with increasing intensity in both university distance learning and traditional classroom-based teaching, the second of which is increasingly using online educational elements to complement conventional face-toface teaching. Despite the apparent explosion and success of these technologies, they often create content that already exists or is used without any criteria (turning the technology into an end rather than a means), so it is essential to carry out a study that helps to establish the ground rules for the effective use of these technologies and ensure that the resources generated are re-used. 3. The need to adapt to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA): The EHEA represents an excellent opportunity to unify academic criteria and facilitate the standardization of university qualifications in the Old Continent, yet at the same time it represents a new challenge for most European universities, which within a very short span of time will need to adapt their teaching practices to the new directives based on the principles of quality, mobility, diversity and competitiveness (the criterion of employability). The fields of mathematics and statistics are not immune to this challenge and, in fact, because of their intrinsic characteristics these fields are destined to play a key role in developing many of the generic skills that future European students will need to acquire: methodological skills (organizational strategies, troubleshooting and decision-making), technological skills (information management, computer technologies, etc.), critical appraisal ability, skills in system operations, the ability to take a global and multidimensional view of the facts, the ability to analyze complex and diffuse facts, the ability to see all the parts of a whole and how they relate, etc. Therefore, in the field of university teaching of mathematics and statistics, it will be necessary to examine and reappraise teaching methodologies, adapt academic content to each degree course, and focus on integrating information technologies in the educational process. The processes involved in acquiring and developing general and specific skills in a particular subject should be done using a different approach, not based on content as the center of the learning process, but rather on designing activities that allow students to advance in that subject, working jointly on the location, adaptation and creation of the educational resources needed 57

in each case. 4. Availability of UOC teaching material in digital format: Over the last few years, the UOC has generated a considerable number of resources in this field. Most of them follow the editorial model of production and design, based on modules, which are learning units with one or two credits designed for learning a specific topic of the course contents. The cost of generating quality digital resources with this system has been high; the process of creating and editing them takes on average one year, and maintaining and updating them to changes in the course subjects is complex and costly, given that it once again entails the whole editorial process. Many resources have also been generated as examples, exercises, activities, experiments and selfassessment tests associated with the subjects in question, resulting from the teaching activities of each academic semester. At present, these resources are mainly dispersed among the materials of the different course subjects; they are not classified or placed in any order, and it is not easy for them to be reused either by students or professors. This means that many students are missing out on the use of these resources and are not getting the benefit from them expected by the teaching staff. Equally, the teaching staff do not have the adequate search criteria for identifying the resources that could be reused for creating new educational resources. This means it is essential to design and create efficient web repositories to make these resources available in the form of digital learning objects that can be rapidly located and are in a format that allows them to be reused. 5. UOC policy for creating and managing educational resources: In 2007 the UOC embarked on a process of reflection on the new European Higher Education Area, setting up a series of working groups on various key issues related to the correct adoption of the model proposed in what has become known as the Bologna Process. One of these working groups was tasked with defining the technological and methodological needs of the learning process in terms of creating and managing educational resources, detecting current inadequacies and proposing specific solutions for improving them. The results from this working group clearly indicated that a centralized management model based on an editorial policy was needed to generate a set of quality resources, but that in the long term this structure would block all the new opportunities offered by information technologies today to create and share educational resources. Therefore, a decentralized model for creating and managing educational resources based on themed repositories (depending on the area of knowledge, e.g. Mathematics and Statistics) which would allow greater participation of all those involved in the educational scenario (authors, editors, teachers and students) seems to be the only viable option for guaranteeing the sustainable growth of the process of publishing quality educational material. This decentralized model is based on integrating the different repositories in the same virtual learning environment in a way that is totally transparent for the user, as is already the case with the UOC’s Digital Library, where the same search interface can be used to locate any kind of resource. In this respect, the concept of a repository solves two of the problems facing many universities today: the first is how to promote the reuse of the educational resources generated during the teaching process in each academic semester, involving both professors and students, as well as the knowledge created collaboratively; the second is having a service that allows 58

educational experiences to be developed according to the needs of each user, taking into account their individual requirements and idiosyncrasies by means of adaptable educational syllabuses created from a combination of the educational resources available at any given time in the repository. In the first place, the creation of web repositories of educational content simplifies the process of creating and publishing new educational material for teachers; and secondly it facilitates students’ access to the resources they need during their course. These repositories should also allow the available resources to be shared more efficiently between different universities, with the aim of increasing the overall quality of the resources used in the learning process. This is particularly valid in an area as important as Mathematics and Statistics, where students demonstrate a lot of gaps in their knowledge which can be identified and partly solved by the intensive use of information and communications technologies.

3. Evaluation The use of learning object repositories for supporting learners in blended or pure virtual learning is becoming a common reality in learning management systems. Previous studies show that just allowing students to download all the resources is not effective from a pedagogical point of view, specially if the number of available resources is large (hundreds or even thousands) [10]. Learners need some guidance to use such learning resources within their learning process. The use of repositories provides instructors with a powerful tool for a better understanding of the learning process, as described in [11]. The usage data gathered from the repository can be used to establish relationships between the usage of learning resources and academic performance, but also for improving the way of describing such learning resources. In order to evaluate the results of the project, some pilot tests will be carried out on the subjects of mathematics and statistics. During these tests, the students and teaching staff will be able to use the repository we have created in accordance with the following conditions: ●

Students can use the repository to locate the resources they may need in their learning process, using the taxonomy and set of content descriptors created for that purpose integrated in the search interface of the repository implemented.

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Similarly, teachers can use the repository to select and recommend resources to their students as well as using them to propose certain activities. It is hoped that the use of the repository will considerably improve the ease of generating new quality material suitable for certain specific uses and at a given time during the course, as well as the option of personalizing students’ learning process.

The following activities will be used to gather data for evaluating the pilot scheme. First, questionnaires drawn up by the researchers on this project, which will be sent to the teaching staff of the subjects for them to evaluate the effectiveness of the repository and also identify any inadequacies. Two studies will be designed: one prior to the use of the repositories, to coincide with the end of the semester prior to the pilot experiment, and another after the experiment. The first study will assess the quantitative indicators relating to the use of basic and complementary resources for that subject (frequency of use, resources chosen, timescales, efficacy of the search for resources in view of satisfaction with them, etc.), and qualitative indicators (level of satisfaction with resources, usability of the interface, general satisfaction, etc). In the second study, the questionnaires will be sent out 59

prior to the start of the pilot scheme, and the quantitative indicators will evaluate the effectiveness and use of resources (frequency of use, type of use, resources chosen, timescales, search efficiency, etc.) and qualitative aspects (level of satisfaction with the tool and the meta-data, usability of the interface, general satisfaction, etc.) will be clearly identified in the design of the questionnaire. A comparative analysis will be made of both results. Second, questionnaires drawn up by the researchers of this project, which will be sent to students to evaluate the level of effectiveness and satisfaction with the repository. There will also be two studies: one prior to the use of the repository, thus relating to the use of resources currently available to students, and the other after the pilot scheme. The quantitative indicators (frequency of use, resources chosen, effectiveness of search, etc.) and qualitative ones (level of satisfaction with the tool —and the meta-data in the second study — usability of the tool, general satisfaction with the educational resource, etc.) will be formally defined when the questionnaires are drawn up. The design of these questionnaires, as well as those in the previous section, will be carried out jointly by expert researchers in mathematics teaching and expert researchers in quantitative and qualitative methodologies used in educational research on the Internet. A comparative analysis will be made of both results. Finally, these data will be cross-referenced with other quantitative data extracted from the actual use of the repository, available in the log files of the content management server. The analysis of the quantitative indicators obtained will offer an initial evaluation of efficiency. The team of researchers includes experts in this particular methodology. The analysis of the previous experimental data will be carried out by a team of experts in these methodologies and will allow an evaluation of the efficiency of use of the digital repositories in improving the motivation, performance and satisfaction of users as compared to the previous situation of using educational technology, as well as the effectiveness and usability of the tool itself (including the search interface).

4. Conclusions The increasing large number of available learning resources for teaching Statistics makes impossible to manage them unless a coherent system is provided along with the learning process. In this paper we have described the introduction of a learning object repository in a virtual classroom of a pure online university, trying to fulfill two basic goals: assuring preservation and increasing reusability of learning resources, which are one of the most valuable assets of any university. With respect to the students, the repository will provide them with a personalized source of exercises, examples and so, but also with a contextualized map which may be a useful guide for understanding all the relationships between the concepts in the Statistics course. Regarding teachers and instructional designers, the system will gather usage data that can be analyzed to better understand how students evolve during the learning process, helping also to identify those learning resources which may be more (or less) useful to students. Current and further research in this topic includes the creation of a complete taxonomy of all the mathematical resources used in the Computer Science degree by means of an upper ontology which allows us to establish a hierarchical classification of the knowledge domain. This would allow learners to better contextualize what they are doing when using the learning resources (examples and exercises involving formulas). The integration of the repository in a personalization system which adapts the learning process to the specific characteristics of each learner is also an interesting issue that must be addressed. 60

Acknowledgments This paper is partially supported by Spanish government grants under refs. E-MATH++ EA2008-0151 and PERSONAL(ONTO) TIN2006-15107-C02.

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