Figure 1.7 – Control Systems MOOC overview. At the top in the red box, you can see the course’s main pages. On the left, you can see the course’s modules. The horizontal blue box show the sequence of the selected module.
1.3 Data collection in Digital Educational Settings
In this section, we discuss issues and current approaches related to the data students produce as a result of their interaction with the CPLs, when embedded in a web platform. First, we talk about the measurements and their use in other tools, second about the activity traces students are leaving behind.
1.3.1 Interaction Continuity
When students are experimenting in a lab room, they almost always keep record of the set of parameters they applied to the lab equipment and the corresponding results. This is either done by hand with pen and paper, or using a computer if the lab’s apparatus is connected to it with a data acquisition cable for example. This data is used for graphing or for archiving, and it is valuable for students to understand what they did and link their results to the theories they learned in ex cathedra classes. When using a cyber-physical lab in an online learning environment, students do the same: they push parameters to the lab through the lab’s web app, and they expect back results which they would want to collect for later use. We discuss two modalities currently used in Graasp and Open edX to support such a mechanism:
In the Go-Lab infrastructure: the learning phases of an ILS shown in Figure 1.5 are the equivalent of folders in the authoring tool Graasp as shown in Figure 1.8. In addition to the five inquiry learning folders for the phases, there are two which are hidden to the students: About and Vault. The Vault folder is destined to be as placeholder in the background of the ILS student view
Chapter 1. Introduction
Figure 1.8 – The Vault space destined for saving and retrieving files, only accessible to the teacher
Figure 1.9 – When the Vault is opened, we can see the contents are generated and used by apps in the ILS, in this case it’s a single data file.
for data exchange between applications. Figures 1.8 and 1.9 show the Vault space in the teacher view and the contents of it respectively. For example, the data viewer app shown in Figure 1.5 uses that file to do the plot.
In Open edX: the platform does not provide any mechanism for saving and retrieving data from and to third-party applications. An ad-hoc solution for supporting the manipulation of student files was put in place: an external database supported the traffic of the measurements from the embedded lab web app to other tools used in the platform. Figure 1.10 shows how the data flows first from the embedded lab web app, then is retrieved in a graphing tool to fit a model to the results, which in turn can be saved to that database.
In these two cases, we say that the continuity of interaction or activity [51] is supported, because the students don’t have to leave the online environment to save and retrieve their experimental data in order to use it in other tools.
1.3. Data collection in Digital Educational Settings 1 2 3 CPL web app Graphing tool Platform- independent database for saving experimental data
Figure 1.10 – The ad-hoc solution for edX: an external database holds the experimental data and serves to the tools [figure adapted from [62]]
1.3.2 Activity Tracking
Students’ interaction with the cyber-physical labs produces large corpora of activity data, which describes their actions on the system through the use of the embedded web app (clicking buttons, moving sliders...). In the context of the Go-Lab infrastructure and in Open edX, students are tracked at different levels of the interaction, either at the level of the platform (which page is opened), or at the level of the learning resource (watching a video), or both. This data is then used to visualize the collective and individual activity of class members. Next we discuss how activity tracking is implemented and utilized in the Golabz infrastructure and Open edX. In the Go-Lab Infrastructure: in the case of using a CPL embedded in an ILS, a platform- specific solution for collecting the traces of students is used, and is managed by the teachers who decide whether they want to track their students or not. Then the teachers can use the data in custom-made dashboards which show them metrics of students’ behavior. While the apps are destined for teacher-use, they can choose to share them with their students. Teachers are responsible for regulating students’ privacy, and students only have access to the dashboards if the teacher provides it.
In Open edX: students are tracked with platform-specific mechanisms. Neither the students nor the course instructors can control whether tracking is activated or not, only the platform adminis- trators. The data is available to the instructor, and the platform provides built in dashboards for certain indicators. An example dashboard is shown in Figure 1.12 where instructors can see the breakdown of the number of active learners, watched videos and attempted problems for the week ending on October 15th, 2017. Teachers can also download data from the platform as shown in
Figure 1.13, where it is possible to download in a CSV format the profile of students, responses to problems and others.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Figure 1.11 – An example learning dashboard in Graasp made of two activity visualization apps: (1) the Active Users app on the top which shows in real-time which students are in which phase of the ILS; and (2) the Time Spent app in the bottom which shows the time spent per student in the each phase of the ILS [Source: [76]].
Figure 1.12 – Example dashboard provided by Open edX showing student engagement on the week of
October 15th, 2017. It shows the number of active learners, videos watched and problems attempted by
students.