Programming is one of the basic subjects in most informatics, computer science mathematics and technical faculties' curricula. Integrated overview of the models for teaching programming, problems in teaching and suggested solutions were presented in this paper. Research covered current state of 1019 programming subjects in 715 study programmes at total of 218 faculties and 143 universities in 35 European countries that were analyzed. It was concluded that while most of the programmes highly support object-oriented paradigm of programming, introductory programming subjects are mainly based on imperative paradigm.
Students' performances in introductory programming courses show large variation across students. There may be many reasons for these variations, such as methods of teaching, teacher competence in the subject, students' coding backgrounds and abilities, students' self-discipline, the teaching environment, and the resources available to students, all of which can affect student performance and outcomes. Our observations in teaching programming courses (at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh) are that many students (up to 50% per course) drop out. There is a strong belief by many instructors that such a high dropout rate is due, at least in part, to students underestimating the effort needed to finish this course and not following instructions as recommended. This paper reviews the factors that affect student performance in an introductory programming course (CS1) and aims to discover correlations between various assessment methods, students' participation and their final performance measured. It analyses mark distributions across various assessment methods to identify which assessment method best predicts final exam marks and overall marks, and gives recommendations for assessment in introductory programming courses.
Open Educational Resources have emerged as important elements of education in the contemporary society, promoting life-long and personalized learning that transcends social, economic and geographical barriers. To achieve the potential of OERs and bring impact on education, it is necessary to increase their development and supply. However, one of the current challenges is how to produce quality and relevant OERs to be reused and adapted to different contexts and learning situations. In this paper we proposed an agile method for the development of OERs - AM-OER, grounded on agile practices from Software Engineering. Learning Design practices from the OULDI project (UK Open University) are also embedded into the AM-OER aiming at improving quality and facilitating reuse and adaptation of OERs. In order to validate AM-OER, an experiment was conducted by applying it in the development of an OER on software testing. The results showed preliminary evidences on the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of the method in the development of OERs.
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of the penetration of mobile technology through all strata of society. Mobile technologies including cell phones, tablets, and even some e-readers are used for surfing the web, running apps, reading email, posting to social media, conducting banking transactions, etc. This liberation from desktop and laptop machines and from the requirements of a specific geographic location raises concerns regarding the problems and challenges of maintaining security while traversing cyberspace. The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the attitudes, behaviors, and security practices of business students using mobile devices to access online resources. One group of students surveyed received no specific training regarding mobile security while a second group was surveyed following the completion of an online training program. Results show no significant difference in the security practices of the two groups, indicating that commercially available security training programs are largely inefficacious with respect to modifying student behavior and that additional research on training efficacy is needed.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education provide a new learning environment where the student builds his own knowledge, allowing his visualization and experimentation. This study evaluated the Geogebra software in the learning process of Calculus. It was observed that the proposed activities helped in the graphical interpretation of the covered content.
Online learning has become a widespread method for providing learning at different levels of education. It has facilitated the learning in many ways and made it more flexible and available by providing learners with more opportunities to learn information, further access to different learning resources, and collaboration rather than face-to-face learning. In spite of these benefits and rapid growth of online education, success and persistence in such courses is one the important aspects of online learning research and it relies on different factors. Therefore investigating the reasons of students' dropout of an online education course or program and its contributing factors is essential in this area. One of the most barriers in online learning system is lack of interactions. In learning, interaction between students themselves, with the course content, and course instructors is important for conveying information, enhancing teaching quality, give directions, and many more functions. The aim of this research is to review the literature to propose a clearer picture of studies have been conducted regarding online interaction and factors that impact it in online education systems.
In this paper we present our experiences of teaching an annually organized virtual reality (VR) capstone course. We review three iterations of the course, during which a total of 45 students completed the course and 16 VR applications were implemented. Our comparative analysis describes the students' evaluation of the course, the applications created by them, and their development experiences. The results suggest that our gradual improvements on the course and the utilized software paid off, as the latest of the compared course iterations produced the best feedback and the highest quality VR applications. Our learning assessment analysis reveals that our course is effective in teaching VR application development and having students meet their personal learning goals. We also bring forward our RUIS toolkit that was used in the course with success, and present evidence on how better software toolkits can affect the development experience and allow students to create more impressive applications. Finally we share the lessons learned during five years of teaching the course, introducing several practical considerations for VR course organizers regarding pedagogics, software, and hardware.
The purpose of this study is to identify the perceptions of university students towards their ICT Competencies from two universities, one in Mexico and the other in Hungary. The research type is quantitative and exploratory. The instrument consists of 14 questions related to three types of competencies: Basic, Application and Ethical. The sample was of 567 students, 302 students from the Veracruzana University in Veracruz, Mexico and 265 students from Óbuda University in Budapest, Hungary. The quantitative data analysis was performed with SPSS software using descriptive statistics and ANOVA tests. The situation of education in Hungary and Mexico is not so very different although each country has taken different paths in the field. The results referring to the perceptions of Hungarian and Mexican students towards ICT competencies indicate that they perceive themselves with a positive valorisation. Also the perceptions of the students indicated that the highest ponderation obtained was for Ethical Competencies, followed by Basic Competencies and finally Application Competencies.