Teaching Analytics: a feedback control approach to aid student self-assessment in higher education

Organiser

Simone Formentin , Associate Professor, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

Sponsoring IFAC Body:

TC1.1 (Modeling, Identification and Signal Processing)

Overview

Development of a software tool that

• Asks students a series of automatically generated questions about the logical connections among the contents of control-related courses. For example, questions of the type: “ Consider the knowledge component X (e.g., Laplace transforms). Which ones among the knowledge components Y, Z, W… (e.g., complex numbers, integrals, complex exponential, eigenfunctions, ...) necessary to know to learn X? Which ones are useful but not necessary?Which ones are equivalent? ”
• Collects the answers from the students, processes the information, and creates personalized graphs of what each individual students think about the logical connections of the topics within automatic control,
• Compares the graphs of the individual students with the “nominal connections” graphs, i.e., graphs like the ones above that have already been obtained through asking the same questions to a set of automatic control teachers (an activity that has been performed within a dedicated Erasmus+ project led by Damiano Varagnolo)
• Visualizes the mismatches to the individual students, providing in this way individual suggestions on what to re-study
• Finds patterns of misunderstandings and highlights them to the teachers.