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

Organiser

Simone Formentin

Description

Development of an open web-platform (https://faceit.pythonanywhere.com/) that has the following features:

  • Teachers-oriented features (aiming at helping to share assessment material with colleagues around the world):
    • Users can upload their own exams and questions (so far, only in .tex format) into the portal;
    • Users may also categorize these questions based on their type (e.g., multiple choice, numeric, open), which topics are addressed (i.e., their content units), and which public accessibility they will have (e.g., ‘only my students’, ‘everybody’, etc.);
    • Users may then search questions that are publicly accessible via the platform using suitable filters (e.g., question type and content units);
    • Users may then visualize the questions directly in the portal, select the ones they prefer, and download them in a .tex format;
  • Students-oriented features (aiming at making it possible for students to visualize their estimated knowledge status):
    • Registered users can select some available questions (either graphically or filtering them by Question Type, Course, Institution, Content Units, etc.) and answer them directly in the portal;
    • These answers are then stored and processed into an individualized estimated knowledge status defined over a teachers-defined contents unit logical relations graph;
    • These estimates can then be visualized on top of these concepts maps, so that the users can keep track of their progresses (and the teachers can retrieve information regarding the knowledge of the whole class);
  • Automatic control community-oriented features:
    • Every user can create a personalized graph of how the topics within automatic control are logically connected (a feature that is intended to be used in a ‘per-course’ fashion). The resulting graphs can be then used as the state for graphically superposing the estimated knowledge status of the student in relation to the course by displaying the graph nodes (typically representing a course topic, e.g., Rational Transfer Functions, Nyquist Diagram, etc.) with different colors.