The paper aims to present application of Educational Data Mining and particularly Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) for students profiling and further to design a personalised intelligent learning system. The main aim here is to develop a recommender system which should help the learners to create learning units (scenarios) that are the most suitable for them. First of all, systematic literature review on application of CBR and its possible implementation to personalise learning was performed in the paper. After that, methodology on CBR application to personalise learning is presented where learning styles play a dominate role as key factor in proposed personalised intelligent learning system model based on students profiling and personalised learning process model. The algorithm (the sequence of steps) to implement this model is also presented in the paper.
The rapid development of new technologies requires a new set of skills from all users in operating, using, and maintaining digitised environments. Curriculum design in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) undergoes a rapid change as technological achievements do influence education.
The aim of the article was to present research results on the mappings of learning outcomes to taxonomies to evolve from requirement-based assessment to competency-based assessment. The research was carried out on the problem-based learning (PBL) module. The article presents a novel PBL model design with activities and evaluation schema. The developed model could be used to guide the curricula design of information technologies for generic competencies, and to foster skills essential for the future ICT sector.
Student evaluations to measure the teaching effectiveness of instructor's are very frequently applied in higher education for many years. This study investigates the factors associated with the assessment of instructors teaching performance using two different data mining techniques; stepwise regression and decision trees. The data collected anonymously from students' evaluations of Management Information Systems department at Bogazici University. Additionally, variables related to other instructor and course characteristics are also included in the study. The results show that, a factor summarizing the instructor related questions in the evaluation form, the employment status of the instructor, the workload of the course, the attendance of the students, and the percentage of the students filling the form are significant dimensions of instructor's teaching performance.
Contests are usually applied in the academic environment to simulate real professional situations that require from the participants a more pro-active attitude than the one shown in conventional coursework. Although they are commonly applied in the scope of a unique course, the contest described here was an extracurricular experience applied in an Information System undergraduate program. The evaluation of the contest is also presented; the objective was to assess the role of the contest as a tool to bring together interdisciplinary subjects, complementary to the traditional disciplinary structure of the program curriculum. The results indicate that a significant portion of the participants noticed increase in their knowledge after the contest, which is verified by statistical tests. However, students from the first stages received more benefits, probably because such students were more motivated and had more available time to be involved in the contest activities.
We have applied Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on an introductory programming course for several years with positive results. In this paper we present the outcomes and discuss our experiences of applying a modified version of PBL such that needs less tutoring resources and could better be used in large-scale courses, too.
PBL has many positive effects on studying: Students report that they liked the social aspect of studying in a group. Generally students appreciated the possibility to be active participants in a course. On the other hand, group dynamic difficulties, tolerance of uncertainty and demanding studying skills caused problems that were too hard to overcome to some students. In this paper we introduce different versions of PBL, discuss efficiently and inefficiently working PBL groups and present their characters. We also discuss the possible reasons for differently working groups. Finally, we give some suggestions for interventions that might help the PBL groups to work better.