This qualitative study explores how using Peer Learning Forums (PLF) in an online asynchronous computer programming course can be analyzed to derive information about Student Activity Focus (SAF) for adult Information Technology students. Three instruments are proposed to assist instructors classify questions posted by students on these forums, obtain easy quantitative measures of their SAF, an...

In recent years, the use of technological tools to enhance the delivery of teaching materials has gained popularity in universities and has brought positive improvements in the classroom. With advanced hardware, instructors can hand-write notes onto their computer electronically and shared it with the students. While with advanced educational collaborative software, instructor and students can ...

My research explores methods for automatic generation of high-quality feedback for computer programming exercises. This work is motivated by problems with current automated assessment systems, which usually provide binary (“Correct”/“Incorrect”) feedback on programming exercises. Binary feedback is not conducive to student learning, and has also been linked to undesirable consequences, such as ...

Software Engineering courses are core elements of the Computer Science curricula. While the main aim of such courses is to give students practical industry-relevant “software engineering” in the large experience, often such courses fall short of this important target due to lack of industrial experience and support infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary to design and develop better infrastr...

A Bluetooth mobile application is developed to enhance student-instructor interaction during delivery of university courses. The paper presents Mobile application via Bluetooth wireless technology (MAvBT) consists of a server installed on a Bluetooth enabled computer, mobile application installed on student's mobile phones, and a website that enables the instructors to edit materials and the de...

With increasing and various pedagogical activities are conducted within them, computer-aided learning environments play significant roles in educational institutes, enterprises, and organizations. The cost of operating computer-aided learning environments inevitably goes up along with increasing demands from instructors and learners. Consequently, it is a critical issue to figure out how to pro...

Language learners are known to perform best in one-on-one interactive situations in which they receive optimal corrective feedback. However, one-on-one tutoring by trained language instructors is costly and therefore not feasible for the majority of language learners. This particularly applies to oral proficiency, which requires intensive tutoring. Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) sys...

Computer science students contemplating a career in graphics need to develop a visual sense, but traditional course topics do not meet this need. Visual analysis is a teaching technique developed for computer science instructors that helps impart this ability. Through the use of a few visual cues, students learn to visually identify surface algorithms, shaders and lighting techniques. An intera...

Authoring tools for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) provide environments that can be used by authors-instructors who are not necessarily computer experts to easily develop cost-effective ITSs. However, the quality of the ITSs to be generated depends heavily on these authors-instructors who will provide the content for the courses. This means that authoring tools should be carefully designed...

Text components of digital lessons and problems are often static: they are written once and too often not improved over time. This is true for both large text components like webpages and documents as well as the small components that form the building blocks of courses: explanations, hints, examples, discussion questions/answers, emails, study tips, motivational messages. This represents a mis...