Informatics in Education

It has now become an important issue to evaluate the performance of technical institutions to develop better research and enrich the existing teaching processes. The results of such performance appraisal would serve as a reference point for decisions to choose a particular institution, hire manpower, and provide financial support for the betterment of students and underperforming institutions. The performance of institutions responsible for promotion of technical education in a vast country, like India also needs to be assessed for its journey to share a major role in global economy. In this paper, an integrated approach combining PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation) and GAIA (Geometrical Analysis for Interactive Aid) methods is applied for evaluating the performance of 20 National Institutes of Technology (NITs) in India with respect to nine pivotal criteria. It is observed that NIT, Tiruchirappalli and NIT, Warangal are the two best performers based on the last five years data. On the other hand, NIT, Patna takes the last position in the ranking list of 20 NITs suggesting allocation of more resources for its efficient management and subsequent development. Placement of the graduated students from those NITs is found to be the most important criterion.

In the paper, we point out several observations and remarks on time effectiveness of electronic testing, in particular of its new form (interactive tests). A test is often used as an effective didactic tool for evaluating the extent of gained cognitive capabilities. According to authors Rudman (1989) and Wang (2003) it is provable that the relationship towards e-testing depends on the degree of previous experiences with this form of examination. Conducted experiments (not only by these authors) show that students using the traditional testing form (putting answers down on a paper) are happy to have the opportunity to use a computer for testing. The reason is the fact that they are usually used to a complete explanation of the educational content, frontal examination during the lesson and also in the course of the school year and more limited possibilities to use the Internet for educational purposes. Most of them do not even know about the possibilities of e-learning and electronic evaluation. On the other hand, the group of students who are being tested using the traditional form and at the same time using computers usually prefer the traditional form, while using multimedia tools is more or less normal to them.

Mathematics' skills and knowledge lay the basis for engineering studies. However, the resources targeted to mathematics' teaching are in many cases very limited. During the past years in our university the reduction of mathematics' contact hours has been significant while at the same time the study groups have grown. However, the mathematical proficiency of incoming students has not increased. Consequently, during the contact hours, the learning of basics requires more time and the need of personalized learning is increasing.

How to enable students to create a personalized learning environment? What are the criteria of evaluation of the ICT-based learning process personalization affordance? These questions are answered by conducting multiple case study research of the innovative ICT-based learning process in iTEC (Innovative Technologies for Engaging Classrooms) project in Lithuania. Analysis of the research data led to discernment of evaluation criteria of personalization affordance and creation of a framework for the ICT-based learning personalization affordance, comprised of the following three groups of evaluation criteria: (I) 'extremely important' criteria, (II) 'essential' criteria, (III) 'important' criteria. Students, who performed various constructionist ICT-based learning activities as part of innovative learning scenarios, evaluated these according to the 'extremely important' criteria. A majority of students have agreed that the proposed learning activities enable them to feel more confident and engaged into the learning process. The framework for ICT-based learning personalization affordance should help other teachers enable personalized learning in daily practice.

Service modelling has become an increasingly important area in today's telecommunications and information systems practice. We have adapted a Network Design course in order to teach service modelling to a mixed class of both the telecommunication engineering and information systems backgrounds. An integrated approach engaging mathematics teaching with strategies such as problem-solving, visualization, and the use of examples and simulations, has been developed. From assessment on student learning outcomes, it is indicated that the proposed course delivery approach succeeded in bringing out comparable and satisfactory performance from students of different educational backgrounds.

The growing amount of information in the world has increased the need for computerized classification of different objects. This situation is present in higher education as well where the possibility of effortless detection of similarity between different study courses would give the opportunity to organize student exchange programmes effectively and facilitate curriculum management and development. This area which currently relies on manual time-consuming expert activities could benefit from application of smartly adapted machine learning technologies. Data in this problem domain is complex leading to inability for automatic classification approaches to always reach the desired result in terms of classification accuracy. Therefore, our approach suggests an automated/semi-automated classification solution, which incorporates both machine learning facilities and interactive involvement of a domain expert for improving classification results. The system's prototype has been implemented and experiments are carried out. This interactive classification system allows to classify educational data, which often comes in unstructured or semi-structured, incomplete and/or insufficient form, thus reducing the number of misclassified instances significantly in comparison with the automatic machine learning approach.

One of the main goals of many educational courses at various colleges, especially those which focus on applied economics and management, is the development of students' entrepreneurship skills. It is usually accomplished through various project-oriented tasks. The development of the students' entrepreneurship skills is also the primary objective of the E-commerce course offered by our Faculty of Economics. This course combines theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Students work on a number of practical exercises with the aim to create a functional e-shop. They have to look for business opportunities, understand economic processes, work within a team, and be able to promote their ideas, strategies, and procedures. Finally, yet most importantly, they must not be afraid to present and defend their solutions. This study examines whether and to what extent this approach contributes to the development of skills which are usually associated with entrepreneurship. The exploration was performed based on students' evaluation. Means-end chain model and hierarchical value map approach were chosen as a research method. The results of this research show that entrepreneurship skills are being developed except for a motivation of students to accept a risky business competitive environment. However, the propensity to take risk is one of the basic traits of successful entrepreneurs. Our future effort will aim therefore at modifying our educational content. Greater emphasis will be placed on how to teach students to accept competitive environment which is risky and mostly unpredictable.

There are many important issues in informatics and many agree that algorithms and programming are most important issues that need to be included in informatics education (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012). In this paper, we propose how some of these issues can be easily taught using the notion of a formal system which consists of axioms and inference rules by which theorems can be proved. As is argued in (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012), we can introduce important topics in informatics using puzzle-like examples and students do not need to have prerequisites for learning. The materials presented in this paper have been used in a college-level elective class titled Hypertext and Computability in our university since the fall semester of 2008 and we believe that the contents proposed in this paper can be easily used to teach beginner students without technical backgrounds.

Research on the effectiveness of introductory programming environments often relies on post-test measures and attitudinal surveys to support its claims; but such instruments lack the ability to identify any explanatory mechanisms that can account for the results. This paper reports on a study designed to address this issue. Using Noss and Hoyles' constructs of webbing and situated abstractions, we analyze programming novices playing a program-to-play constructionist video game to identify how features of introductory programming languages, the environments in which they are situated, and the challenges learners work to accomplish, collectively affect novices' emerging understanding of programming concepts. Our analysis shows that novices develop the ability to use programming concepts by building on the suite of resources provided as they interact with the computational context of the learning environment. In taking this approach, we contribute to computer science education design literature by advancing our understanding of the relationship between rich, complex introductory programming environments and the learning experiences they promote.

Scientific issues like the behavior of wild and domesticated animals can serve as a motivation to learn programming concepts. Instead of following a systematic introduction, the students directly dive into programming and start immediately with their projects. In this constructionist approach the educational challenge for the teacher is to provide suitable scaffolds like step-by-step instructions, architectural spike solutions, discovery questions, puzzles and role plays, which support individual and self-directed learning.