Tutorials

The three Tutorials are open to registered participants of ICCE 2018. Please sign up if you wish to attend any of the tutorials.

Limited spaces available (at most 20 participants per tutorial, first-come-first-served!). Please check the high-level program of ICCE 2018 before you make your registration so that you will not take up spaces of the tutorials which will clash with other events that you will need to attend.

Tutorial 1: Exploring Computer-Based Learning Behaviour Using Lag Sequential Analysis Technique: A Tutorial

Tutor

Nurbiha A Shukor, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Expected Number of Participants: 20

Abstract

In computer-based education, students’ learning behavior can be at macro and micro
level. At the macro level, students’ learning behavior can include posting comments, viewing learning materials, or answering quizzes. At the micro level, learning behavior can be viewed from the way students interact with peers and instructors such as sharing facts, elaborating ideas, or arguing. At the micro level, understanding these behaviours usually applied content analysis technique but little is known about how significant were these learning behavior. Identifying the significant sequence of behaviours can assist social science researchers to evaluate the learning pattern and strategize the most effective intervention to induce the desired learning behavior. This tutorial will demonstrate the data analysis process to evaluate learning behavior using lag sequential analysis technique. It will also explain how data are interpreted and how a report is written based on the data to provide a meaningful contribution to a social science study.

Tutorial Format

Participants will be introduced to the importance of understanding behavioural learning pattern for computer education research, introduction to lag sequential analysis and previous studies that used this technique through lecture and active learning activities. Hands-on activities through exploration of GSEQ software will also be carried out. Participants will be able to experience the data analysis process using GSEQ software and learn how to report findings based on the data analysis process.

Materials for Tutorial

Participants are required to bring their own laptops with GSEQ software installed.
http://www2.gsu.edu/~psyrab/gseq/Download.html

Organizer Biography

Nurbiha A Shukor, is a Creative Multimedia and Learning Technology Manager at
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and also an experienced Senior Lecturer with a
demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Skilled in E-Learning, Educational Technology, educational data mining and recently involved in projects related to STEM Education in Schools with Ministry of Education Malaysia as a Project Manager for STEMazing Project UTM. Manages and conducted training on open education resources development including OCW and MOOCs for University. She is also active in tutoring several projects including UNESCO Open Education Project (http://unesco.ijs.si/project/open-education-resources-oer-for-statistic-and-
probability-in-pacific/) . She graduated from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and received postdoctoral training from Radboud University, The Netherlands for the project Students’ Learning Regulation in Online Mathematics Learning.

 

Tutorial 2: Application of Text Analytics to Enhance Teaching and Learning Experience

Tutors

Prof. Venky Shankararaman, Singapore Management University
Prof. Swapna Gottipati, Singapore Management University

Expected Number of Participants: 20

Abstract

Education Domain has always had the power to generate a large amount of data. The data is either in the form of structured data such as grades, student profile, indexed library resources, and quantitative student feedback etc., or unstructured such as learning objectives, assessments, curriculum, course content, qualitative teaching evaluations, job and internship posting etc. The unstructured data can be in various forms including text, images, videos, audios etc. Mining such datasets provides valuable insights and enables the stakeholders to make informed decisions to improve the teaching and learning experience. Text analytics is a research area that studies a body of text to find meaningful patterns or insights. It is being applied in several business domains and is recently gaining popularity in education domain.

Traditionally, qualitative analysis has been mostly a manual process which is a tedious and painstaking work. The traditional approach of processing text information involves human actions in information gathering, analysis, and dissemination. However, the emergence of analytics techniques and tools that leverages vast amounts of data sets to gain insights, from both structured and unstructured data, has opened new possibilities. The main objective of text analytics in education is to use a data-driven approach to gain insights into the effectiveness of the education process and thus improve the overall teaching and learning experience. This new capability, analytics technology, plays a major role to automate many stages and tasks of the education process.

This tutorial will introduce and discuss the basics of text analytics, the different unstructured datasets in the education domain, and use cases in the education domain where text analytics can be applied. Additionally, we will look at emerging and likely future trends in this field that can give ideas to participants to discover use cases applicable in their institutions. The tutorial session will be highly interactive, discussion-oriented and will include examples and exercises to enhance participation.

Key Learning Outcomes

On completing this tutorial, you will be able to

  • Understand the basics of text analytics and explore various unstructured datasets in the education domain.
  • Gain insights into how text analytics can be applied to the datasets to enhance teaching and learning
  • Identify potential use cases where text analytics can be applied in your institution

Tutor Biographies

Venky Shankararaman is a Professor of Information Systems (Education) and Associate Dean (Education) at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. His current areas of specialization include business process management and analytics, enterprise systems architecture and integration, and education pedagogy. He has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry in various capacities as a researcher, academic faculty member, IT professional and industry consultant. Venky has designed and delivered professional courses for government and industry in areas such as business process management and analytics, enterprise architecture, technical architecture, and enterprise integration. He has published over 65 papers in academic journals and conferences.

Swapna Gottipati is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems (Education) at the
School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Her research interests include text analytics, natural language processing, information extraction, opinion mining, machine learning and social networking. Her main focus is to enhance data mining models while she applies her research findings to software, education, security and mobile applications. Prior to joining SMU, she worked as a consultant for banking, financial, health and mobile projects, where she designed, developed and supported various software systems.

 

Tutorial 3 (Invited Tutorial): Introduction to Computational Thinking (CT)

View the CT Tutorial Presentations

Tutors

H. Ulrich Hoppe, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Chee-Kit Looi, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Gautam Biswas, Vanderbilt University, USA

Expected Number of Participants: 20

Abstract

This invited tutorial will provide an overview of the Computational Thinking in Education and two hands-on activities for beginners.

  1. Essential concepts of CT (30 mins)
    The essence of Computational Thinking (CT) lies in the creation of “logical artifacts” that externalize and reify human ideas in a form that can be interpreted and “run” on computers. Although Papert had already used the term “Computational Thinking” (CT) ten years earlier, the current discussion of CT can be traced back to Wing (2006). Wing characterized CT by stating that it “involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science”. This involves representing information in the form of data structures as well as techniques for the specification of algorithms for data processing and analysis. It is a problem of the current educationally oriented discussion of CT that the specific meaning of some of the underlying concepts (esp. “abstraction”) differs substantially from the common sense understanding. A better understanding of these specificities will be promoted through examples in this introductory module.
  2. Curricular/pedagogical relevance of CT (30 mins)
    Beyond its direct relevance as an essential prerequisite for professions in information technology and computational systems, computational thinking (CT) has influenced scientific methods and models and thus our way of thinking and reasoning in general. Based on this perception, Wing (2008) asks: “If computational thinking is added to the repertoire of thinking abilities, then how and when should people learn this kind of thinking and how and when should we teach it?” Adequate answers to this bundle of questions have to be contextualized in and harmonized with general pedagogical theories of curriculum and lines of argumentation to justify educational content. This relation to pedagogy and curriculum theory will be explored in this Part 2 of the tutorial.
  3. Role of Unplugged activities in CT education (40 mins)
    “Unplugged” activities have been effective at engaging people of all ages in playful explorations of the big ideas in computer science through story-based problems, games, puzzles, and role play. Can activities that don’t use computers develop computational thinking? To what extent? How do we know? In part 3 of the tutorial, attendees will participate in unplugged activities, followed by a discussion exploring the tension between the open, inquiry nature of the original CS Unplugged activities for informal learning / outreach / enrichment, and the needs of a formal curriculum to assess students according to learning objectives.
  4. Synergistic learning of CT and STEM (45 mins)
    Synergistic learning of computational thinking (CT) and STEM has proven to be an effective method for advancing learning and understanding in a number of STEM domains, and, at the same time, disseminating and enhancing CT education. This Part 4 of the tutorial will discuss our approach to designing and developing a Collaborative, Computational STEM (C2STEM) learning environment. This system is based on a novel computational paradigm, which combines visual modeling with a domain specific modeling language (DSML) to promote a synergistic learning of a number of science topics that include physics, earth sciences, and marine biology, along with CT concepts and practices. After a short introduction to the system and design approach, we will conduct a hands on tutorial with the C2STEM system.