Progressor

Overview

A large number of educational resources is now made available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produced at least two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them into using these resources and benefit from them. Personalized and social learning has been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Progressor attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning to help students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions for programming.

Progressor is a collaboration work between University of Jena and University of Pittsburgh. The core research goal of the project is to utilize the success of self-assessment programming language learning tool, QuizJET, with rich-interaction interface derived from IntrospectiveViews and provide a better personalized visual access to programming language problems. The research investigates open social student model; how social guidance affects self-assessment programming language learning; motivational effects on the progress of educational content; privacy and data sharing and so on.

We are excited about what we've learnt from this project, we are now extending our approaches to a larger collection of learning objects for cross content navigation and verify its capability of supporting social visualization for personalized E-Learning, please refer to Progressor+

Features

• Learner Analytics: question attempts, successful rates, overall progress etc.
• Privacy management: requests for accessing peers' models.
• Interactivity: interacting with the content, peers etc. from the visualization; allowing the user to feel in control.
• Identity: captures all the information belonging to the student and displays it in a unique model, allowing easy comparisons.
• Exposure: model thumbnails preview. We found that students had more persistent interactions with the system while they had higher visibilities.
• Guidance: implicit social guidance; (explicit social guidance is under investigation now)
• Recommendation: top 3 performers
• Scalability: we design a set of protocols for reusing student progress data in various visualizations.

Apply protocols the social visualization

We design the following protocols allows requesting user or group progress in JSON format. The protocol follows REpresentational State Transfer(REST) architecture and is an extension of CUMULATE protocol. It provides the applicability for applying it to other social visualizations, such as Progressor+.

The URL format for requesting particular user from a group with all his/her activities:

http://adapt2.sis.pitt.edu/ktact/json/user/<the user login>/<the group name>

Example:
http://adapt2.sis.pitt.edu/ktact/json/user/shoha99/IS172011Spring

• id – question rdfid, this is the unique identifier for accessing the parameterized QuizJET question.
• res – total number of correct tries, this number indicates the successful attempts on this pattern of question.
• attempt – total number of tries, this number represents how many times the student has tried on this pattern of question.

...
   {
      "id":"jVariables1",
      "res":"6",
      "attempt":"9"
   },
   {
      "id":"jVariables2",
      "res":"2",
      "attempt":"3"
   },
...

The URL format for requesting all students activities by group:

http://adapt2.sis.pitt.edu/ktact/json/group/<the group name>

Example:
http://adapt2.sis.pitt.edu/ktact/json/group/IS172011Spring

• id – student login, this specifies the student's login.
• name' – student name, this displays the student's name.
• res – student average progress, this number represents the student's average progress across topics.
• topics – id, topic names; res, topic average progress.

{
      "id":"shoha99",
      "name":"Hsiao, Sharon (I-Han)",
      "res":"0.126",
      "topics":[
         {
            "id":"Variables",
            "res":"0.8"
         },
        {
            "id":"Objects",
            "res":"0.2"
         },
        ...
},
{
      "id":"xxxx",
      "name":"lastName, firstName ",
      "res":"0.107",
      "topics":[
         {
            "id":"Variables",
            "res":"0.00"
         },
         {
            "id":"Objects",
            "res":"0.2"
         },
         ...
}
...

^top

Screenshots

• 

  Your personalized Progressor view

• 

  Accessing to the quizzes or other educational material

• 

  Comparing your own model with another or class on average

Publications

• Bakalov, F., Hsiao, I-H., Brusilovsky, P., and König-Ries, B. (2011) Visualizing Student Models for Social Learning with Parallel IntrospectiveViews. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2011), Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, US, February 13, 2011
• Hsiao, I-H., Bakalov, F., Brusilovsky, P., and König-Ries, B. (2011) Open Social Student Modeling: Visualizing Student Models with Parallel IntrospectiveViews. Proceedings of 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2011), Girona, Spain, July 11-15, 2011, Springer, pp.171-182 DOI
• Bakalov, F., Hsiao, I-H., Brusilovsky, P., and König-Ries, B. (2011) Progressor: Personalized visual access to programming problems, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, September 18-22, 2011, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
• Hsiao, I-H., Guerra, J., Parra, D., Bakalov, F., König-Ries, B., and Brusilovsky, P. (2012) Comparative Social Visualization for Personalized E-Learning. International Working Conference Advanced Visual Interfaces, AVI 2012, Capri, Italy, May 21-25, 2012
• Hsiao, I-H., Bakalov, F., Brusilovsky, P., and König-Ries, B. (2013) Open Social Student Modeling for Personalized E-Learning. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 19(2), 112-131. URL

Try Progressor

Current users Login from KnowledgTree portal

Progressor is currently open for courses, groups use. If you wish to try out the system individually, please contact Sharon Hsiao

Try mobile Progressor iphone app v1.0, we also have droid. (new) note: we are enhancing the mobile design. make sure you check back later.

See Also

• QuizJET : parameterized self-assessment tool for Java programming language.
• IntrospectiveViews

Contacts

Sharon, I-Han Hsiao