Informatics in Education

Nowadays, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) have been used as complementary methods to support classroom teaching. SPOCs are courses that apply the usage of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), combining classroom with online education, making them an exciting alternative for contexts such as emergency remote teaching. Although SPOCs have been continuously proposed in the software engineering teaching area, it is crucial to assess their practical applicability via measuring the effectiveness of this resource in the teaching-learning process. In this context, this paper aims to present an experimental evaluation to investigate the applicability of a SPOC in a Verification, Validation, and Software Testing course taught during the period of emergency remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Therefore, we conducted a controlled experiment comparing alternative teaching through the application of a SPOC with teaching carried out via lectures. The comparison between the teaching methods is made by analyzing the students’ performance during the solving of practical activities and essay questions on the content covered. In addition, we used questionnaires to analyze students’ motivation during the course. Study results indicate an improvement in both motivation and performance of students participating in SPOC, which corroborates its applicability to the software testing teaching area.

Nowadays, few professionals understand the techniques and testing criteria to systematize the software testing activity in the software industry. Towards shedding some light on such problems and promoting software testing, professors in the area have established Massive Open Online Courses as educational initiatives. However, the main limitation is the professor’s lack of supervision of students. A conversation agent called TOB-STT has been defined in trying to avoid the problem. A previous study introduced TOB-STT; however, it did not analyze its efficacy. This article addresses a controlled experiment that analyzed its efficacy and revealed it was not expressive in its current version. Therefore, we conducted an in-depth analysis to find what caused this result and provided a detailed discussion. The findings contribute to the TOB-STT since the experimental results show that improvements need to be made in the conversational agent before we use it in Massive Open Online Courses.

A lesson plan is an important methodological component of the learning process. The key purpose of the article is to analyse the current situation and suggest how the information technologies can assist in the development of lesson plans, their accumulation and retrieval, thus ensuring their effective application. The authors disclose the problems of lesson plan creation and their description as well as make comparative analysis of information and lesson plan templates provided at learning objects storages. The authors identified the main components of lesson plans and their description, based on application of learning objects metadata standard model and the principles for improving the model elements as well as on the results of the analysis made, and proposed the templates for creating the technology-based lesson plans and their description. The development of lesson plans and descriptions will allow educators reuse didactic resources (lesson plans) as an effective learning tool. The storage of didactic resources will allow teachers to use the best practices, and the same learning objects in different learning scenarios.

A brief overview of formation method of flexible learning objects is presented in this article. The basis of this method is e-learning material that is structured and separated from display rules. The learning objects that have such e-learning material may be adapted to individual needs and may be used in different learning contexts without changing e-learning material. To change the presentation form of e-learning material of such objects, it is enough to change display rules of this material. However, if the e-learning material must be adapted too, it is much easier to do this as the material is structured and contains less technical information of representation. The adaptation of such learning objects is more effective and needs less work time input, therefore they are called as flexible learning objects.