Interactive videos promote learner engagement by transforming the passive activity of watching videos into an active learning process. LIVE, a web platform developed in previous research that allows for the integration of interactive elements into videos, also supports embedding programming tasks. However, at the beginning of our research, the output of the submitted solution was automatically compared to the reference output, but the code itself still had to be checked manually, as no automatic process was available to verify the solution and provide feedback. To address this, a stand-alone application was developed that automatically evaluates students’ solutions to Python programming tasks using a self-hosted large language model. This application was then integrated into the existing platform. To test this approach, a massive open online course containing four interactive videos with several programming tasks and quizzes was created. Students’ performance was analyzed using quiz results, task submissions, self-assessments, and user statistics provided by the course platform and LIVE. The results indicate that utilizing a large language model for automated feedback can positively impact learning outcomes. However, some limitations must be taken into account, such as the need to correct some of the model’s generated outputs manually due to insufficient feedback quality for certain tasks. This suggests that the combination of automated and manual evaluation seems to be the most effective approach for now.
This paper presents the refactoring and evaluation of IDeRBlog, an educational blog platform designed to support German language acquisition in primary schools. Originally developed as part of an EU Erasmus project, IDeRBlog aims to improve students’ spelling skills through a combination of intelligent feedback and blogging features. The recent redevelopment focused on updating the user interface for mobile compatibility and integrating modern web technologies. To assess the impact of these improvements on user experience, two test classes used the IDeRBlog system during regular German lessons. Students received automated feedback on their writing, while teachers tracked progress using learning analytics to identify common error categories. The evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in usability and user experience due to the refactoring, highlighting its positive impact on both student engagement and learning outcomes.
The importance of digital technologies, especially videos, increased over the course of the last few years. Whether they are used to watching the latest news or for entertainment purposes, one could say they have become almost omnipresent in everyday’s life. This development has also influenced education. Therefore, we want to examine the effects of interactive overlays such as programming tasks in interactive learning videos. For this purpose, a MOOC course was created to gain information about participants` learning success. To evaluate whether the interactive elements have a positive effect, two test groups completed the course. The results revealed that the test group with overlays performed better on average than the group without. Some limitations had to be considered, such as the smaller peer group that watched the videos without interactive elements.
This paper focuses on enhancing touch-typing skills through state-of-the-art deep learning technologies. It has been demonstrated that writing posture can be assessed using integrated keyboard detection and hand pose estimation in real-time browser environments. A unique dataset was created for training the object detection model to recognize individual keyboards. The object detection models were trained using various architectures and then assessed for both inference time and accuracy. In addition, a hand pose estimation was implemented to precisely recognize 21 knuckle points of the hand and compute their exact positions. In order to implement object detection and hand pose estimation, a stream transmission of the keyboard and hand scene is required. For this purpose, server-client communication via a QR code connection is implemented to transfer the stream between two mobile devices. Based on these deep learning technologies, a mobile web app was developed that offers 170 learning courses for touch-typing training. With the help of the Typing Learning Academy prototype, a study was conducted as part of this paper to evaluate the usability and utility of the learning app. This research demonstrates the potential for enhancing the development of writing skills through touch typing through the utilization of advanced deep learning technologies.
Digital learning technologies are becoming increasingly important for our modern educational system. In addition to teaching methods that incorporate interactivity, these approaches benefit students’ overall learning experience and success by enhancing their attention and fostering a positive attitude towards the learning content being presented. Interactivity comes in various forms, and while a combination of distinct activities is beneficial, some are more effective at engaging students. Using digital technologies in an educational environment opens up new possibilities for students, teachers, and researchers. It provides new insights into learning behavior and enables the collection of interaction information. This data could, for example, show how often a video was paused or at what point students lost interest and left, but gaining such knowledge requires further processing. The use of visualizations that depict behavior, such as the change of attention over time, can be an effective way to present extracted information. Therefore, our research focuses on developing an application that enables us to generate various visualizations from the collected data. A single command-line input will be sufficient to create them. Furthermore, a video course was created from which we collected behavioral data. Our results aim to showcase the benefits of interactivity, and that the created figures can be used for data evaluation verifies the versatility of the generated visualizations.
The two mobile operating systems Android and i(Pad)OS have dominated the smartphone and tablet market for years and app providers have to offer their apps for both systems in most cases in order to be competitive or to be able to reach the majority of potential customers. In native app development, separate applications have to be written and maintained for each platform. Often, apps are developed for one platform first and the second app is developed at a later stage, after some feedback could be collected. This porting from one system to the other can be either (partially) automated or manual, but in any case, it has its challenges. Both systems were designed with different approaches and differ greatly in some parts from each other – not only visually, but also in terms of the underlying structure. To illustrate the porting process, the Android app “Schoolstart Screening App”, which was developed for the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research of Austria by Graz University of Technology at the OU Educational Technology, was ported so that it can be used also on iPads. Automated approaches were discussed and the chosen process is explained to get a good overview of the topic.
This work deals with the maintenance of information systems—specifically, with the maintenance of information systems that have a focus on teaching and learning. Depending on the context of an information system, there are different influencing factors for the maintenance of these systems. This work clarifies how the maintenance activities and their influencing factors differ in an information system for teaching and learning from other information systems, or why some influencing factors are particularly more important. The first step is to understand what maintenance means, why there is a need for maintenance, and which maintenance strategies can be used. Finally, the defined factors of influencing the maintenance of information systems for teaching and learning are evaluated during interviews with experts in order to be able to determine their relevance. A further part of this document is the influence of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines on information systems maintenance, which came into force on May 25, 2018. These guidelines of the GDPR affect a large part of all information systems that process data—in particular, the processing of personal data. The GDPR regulates, among other things, the rights and obligations of data processing.
This paper discusses the development and testing of a gamified mathematical learning app. Said app is designed for primary school children in their first two years of learning, so that they can practice the arithmetic operations addition and subtraction in a playful way. Predefined error categories are used to specifically eliminate weaknesses. As an incentive for the learners, mascots, stars and a child-oriented look are offered, as well as a mode in which the players can compete with others worldwide and, in the case of good performance, find themselves on the leaderboard. A test run and a subsequently conducted survey with 49 school children showed that the app generally works well and that the subjective perceptions regarding the motivational ability of the mascots correlate with the overall perception of the app.
Electronic learning, with all its different variations, approaches and applications, is a very relevant topic in today’s education. E-Learning is a wide field, as it affects classes in school as well as training scenarios for adult persons. This work describes the development of two E-Learning systems: EinMalEins Trainer and Division Trainer. Both applications are part of the learning lab of Graz University of Technology. This document sums up the theoretical background of the development process as well as the realization. A lot of emphasis in this work laid on applying different testing methods, therefore thinking aloud testing as well as automated testing are handled more deeply. The methodology behind these methods is explained and the results are presented.
In the recent years, as technology grew, so did the chatbot technology. More and more companies and people are using and reaping the benefits from them. This paper shows how a chatbot for mathematical tasks, named mathbot, was developed. The chatbot uses mathematical exercises from the “Schulapps” of the LearningLab of Graz, University of Technology and combines them with textual questions to provide a useful utility for practicing. It is shown that such a chatbot could be useful for pupils and teachers by evaluating a test run in an elementary school.
Based on the currently developing trend of so called Massive Open Online Courses it is obvious that learning videos are more in use nowadays. This is some kind of comeback because due to the maxim “TV is easy, book is hard” [1][2] videos were used rarely for teaching. A further reason for this rare usage is that it is widely known that a key factor for human learning is a mechanism called selective attention [3][4]. This suggests that managing this attention is from high importance. Such a management could be achieved by providing different forms of interaction and communication in all directions. It has been shown that interaction and communication is crucial for the learning process [6]. Because of these remarks this research study introduces an algorithm which schedules interactions in learning videos and live broadcastings. The algorithm is implemented by a web application and it is based on the concept of a state machine. Finally, the evaluation of the algorithm points out that it is generally working after the improvement of some drawbacks regarding the distribution of interactions in the video.
There are many reasons for the implementation of authentication on learning platforms. For instance, it is required for the teachers to identify individual students if the learning platform offers some kind of assessment. In addition, authentication is the base for a successful monitoring of the attendance of the students. Compulsory attendance is often applied because many positive effects have been reported by authors of several studies. To monitor the attendance at online videos interactive components can be applied. Another benefit of such interactive components is that they help retain the attention of the students. This study was carried out to examine how the students used a video learning platform which provides interactive components of the videos as part of a course offered at Graz University of Technology. Up until now, a major drawback of this platform has been that the students have been required to register manually on the platform. Now, students are able to use the platform without manual registration and authentication, because these steps happen automatically via the main learning platform that provides all of the course materials. Furthermore, the course design and the application of the interactive components, presenting multiple-choice questions, are evaluated. It is pointed out that the concept improves the performance of the students and equips the teacher with valuable feedback regarding the students’ interests.
Due to the fact that students are confronted with a growing amount of texts, colours, figures and shapes and due to their ability to process only a limited number of such information simultaneously, it seems to be obvious that efforts should be made to increase the students’ attention-levels. This is important because research results have indicated that selective attention is considered as the most valuable resource in the process of human learning. The application of interaction and communication to the process of learning is a useful strategy to direct the students’ attention. It seems to be obvious that this is also true for learning videos. Therefore, this work contains a description of how a video platform with interactive components can be used to support the students and teacher. The video platform is explained and evaluated by analysing its usage in a large teaching course at an institution of higher education. The application of this strategy improved the students’ performance and optimized the teacher’s workload.
Many studies are claiming that compulsory attendance has its benefits for students because it is positively influencing their performance in consequence. This means that fully attending students are receiving a better grade than those who skip parts of the course. Whereas there are existing technologies to monitor the attendance of students in standard classroom situations the possibilities to provide such functionalities at online videos are limited. Because of that this work introduces an approach to assess the performance of students at videos. For that a web-platform which offers a detailed recording of the watched parts of videos is presented. The evaluation shows the performance of the students at a course consisting of videos with compulsory attendance and furthermore it points out that the approach for monitoring the attendance at online videos is basically working.
Der Begriff „Neue Medien“ ist den Teenagerjahren inzwischen entwachsen. Vieles, was vor 15 Jahren darunter verstanden wurde, ist mittlerweile selbstverständlicher Teil unseres täglichen Arbeits- und Privatlebens. Den digitalen Wandel und seine Dynamik zu beobachten, ihn kritisch zu hinterfragen, aktiv zu gestalten und wissenschaftlich zu begleiten, ist eine zentrale Aufgabe der Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft e.V., kurz GMW. Dieser Band versammelt die Beiträge der Jahrestagung 2016 unter dem Titel „Digitale Medien: Zusammenarbeit in der Bildung“. Zentrales Thema sind dabei die Schnittstellen zwischen Institutionen, Lernenden, Lehrenden, wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen und Technologien, wobei insbesondere technologiegestützte Möglichkeiten der Zusammenarbeit in der Gestaltung von Bildungsangeboten betrachtet werden.
This study focuses on the positioning of interactive questions within learning videos. It is attempted to show that the position of a question’s occurrence has an impact on the correctness rate of its answer and the learning success. As part of the study, the interactive learning videos in which the questions are placed are used as teaching materials with a class. The pupils have been working with the videos for around one month and some interesting results could be obtained. It is shown that questions which are asked too early in the videos are answered incorrectly more often than other questions. This manuscript also recommends an adequate positioning of the first question in learning videos. The new hypothesis that the length of intervals between popping up questions plays a minor role at rather short learning videos is constructed in this publication. Moreover, the positive impact on the long-term learning success of the participants of learning videos is determined.
It is widely known that interaction, as well as communication, are very important parts of successful online courses. These features are considered crucial because they help to improve students’ attention in a very significant way. In this publication, the authors present an innovative application, which adds different forms of interactivity to learning videos within MOOCs such as multiple-choice questions or the possibility to communicate with the teacher. Furthermore, Learning Analytics using exploratory examination and visualizations have been applied to unveil learners’ patterns and behaviors as well as investigate the effectiveness of the application. Based upon the quantitative and qualitative observations, our study determined common practices behind dropping out using videos indicator and suggested enhancements to increase the performance of the application as well as learners’ attention.
It is clear that a system known as selective attention is the most crucial resource for human learning (Heinze et al. 1994). Due to this fact a web based information system is developed to support the attention of the watchers of a learning video. This is done by enriching the video with different forms of interactions. Among others there are interactions presenting multiple-choice questions at predefined positions in the video as well as randomly occurring interactions displaying general questions, which are not content related. To gain a basic plan which points out how to distribute the interactions over the video the usage of the information system at a lecture is analyzed. For that on the one hand some feedback of the users is provided and on the other hand an objective analysis of the results of the multiple-choice questions is done by evaluating their time of occurrence in the video.
Learning videos are currently more and more in use because of the evolving trend of so-called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) (Khalil & Ebner, 2013). However learning videos have only a consuming character due to the fact that they are of passive nature. According to Carr-Chellman & Duchastel (2000) interaction as well as communication are key features of a successful online course. Because of that a web based information system has been developed to support learning videos with different forms of interac- tion (Ebner et al., 2013). It is obvious that such an information system has to be easily useable and due to that this research study presents the development process of a suitable User Interface (UI). The associated usability study as well as the field study point out that the design approach is generally working and also identified some components to improve.
Due to the fact that students’ attention is the most crucial resource in a high-quality course it is from high importance to control and analyze it. This could be done by using the interaction and the communication because they are known as valuable influencing factors of the attention. In this publication we introduce a web-based information system which implements an attention-profiling algorithm for learning-videos as well as live-broadcastings of lectures. For that different methods of interaction are offered and analyzed. The evaluation points out that the attention profiling algorithm delivers realistic values.
In general videos have a more or less consuming character without any interaction possibilities. Due to this fact a web-based application is developed which offers different methods of communication and interaction to a certain learning-video. This should help attendees to avoid that they become tired and annoyed. The lecturer is able to use interactions to omit whether learners are able to understand the content of the video. For instance the developed web-application offers the possibility to add multiple-choice-questions at predefined positions. Furthermore there are many different kind of analysis as for example a detailed attention-profile. In this publication the implementation of a first prototype is described as well as a first field study which points out that learners? interactions and engagements increased arbitrarily.
Videos sind meist reine Konsumationsmedien ohne weitere Interaktion. Aus diesem Grund wird eine Web-Anwendung entwickelt, welche es ermöglicht, verschiedene Formen der Interaktion und Kommunikation während dem Betrachten eines Videos bereitzustellen. Dies soll den Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern helfen, den sogenannten “Berieselungseffekt” zu vermeiden. Die bzw. der Vortragende sollte mit Hilfe der Interaktionen feststellen können, ob die Teilnehmer/innen die Lerninhalte verstehen. Die entwickelte Web-Anwendung bietet unter anderem die Möglichkeit, Multiple-Choice-Fragen zu bestimmten Zeitpunkten in das Video einzubetten. Außerdem stehen viele Analysemöglichkeiten wie zum Beispiel ein genaues Aufmerksamkeitsprofil zur Verfügung. Eine erste Evaluation zeigt eine rege Teilnahme an den Interaktionen.
Human learning processes are strongly depending on attention of each single learner. Due to this fact any measurement helping to increase students’ attention is from high importance. Till now there are some developments called Audience-Response-Systems only available for face-to-face education even for masses. In this publication we introduce a web-based information system which is also usable for online-systems. Students’ attention will be conserved based on different interaction forms during the live stream of a lecture. The evaluation pointed out that the system helps to enlarge the attention of each single participant.