Time pressures often necessitate the use of more efficient exam tools, such as electronic exams (e-exams), instead of traditional paper exams. However, teachers may face challenges when introducing e-exams in a higher education context. This paper describes what kinds of challenges teachers may face when introducing e-exams, based on experiences in Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) where e-exams have been used since 2012. For this research, the authors used their personal experiences as administrators and teachers of current e-systems used for e-exams in universities in Turku, Finland. Quantitative data were collected by survey from teachers in TUAS (the case study). The learning management systems, Moodle, Optima and ViLLE, and dedicated e-examination systems, Soft Tutor and Tenttis, were also compared to clarify what kind of features are available in order to ease teachers’ work with examinations. The results identified various challenges during e-exam introduction in TUAS. The paper also provides a list of essential services or features for teachers to ease the introduction of e-exams. Among the analysed systems, ViLLE supported most of the required features, and can be used for both learning management and e-examination systems, providing teachers with one single system, which was found to be important to teachers. The key service found by this paper is ‘support for teachers’, which is in line with previous studies.Keywords: e-assessment; e-examination; e-exam; teacher; feature(Published: 8 October 2014)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2014, 22: 22817 -http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.22817
Educational technology is nowadays utilized frequently in programming courses. Still, the final exams are mostly done using "traditional" pen-and-paper approach. In this paper, we present the adaptation of automatically assessed electronic exams in two programming courses. The first course was an introductory programming course taught using Java and the second one an advanced course about object-oriented programming. The usage of electronic exams offers several potential benefits for students, including, for example, the possibility to compile, test and debug the program code. To study the adaptation of electronic exams, we observed two instances of the courses mentioned above. Individual scores, submission counts and time spent on each task were analyzed. This data enabled us to classify the exercises in exams according to their difficulty level. This information can be used to further design exams to measure students' knowledge and skills adequately. The analyzed data and the student feedback seem to confirm that electronic exams are an excellent tool for evaluating students in programming courses, and can be recommended to other educators as well.
Executive SummaryProgram visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical -often animated -and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of program execution. Typical program visualization techniques include code highlighting, visualization of the call stack, and presenting information on variables. Despite the large number of studies performed on program visualization, little is known about the effects of such systems on learning.We have developed a program visualization tool called ViLLE, with the main objective of offering an environment for students to study the execution of example programs -whether written by students themselves or prepared by the teacher -and explore the changes in the program state data structures. A key feature of ViLLE is language independency, including parallel execution of a program in two different languages and the ability to define new languages. ViLLE also provides role information of program variables and supports the design and use of interactive pop-up questions.In this paper, we report and discuss the results of a study on the effectiveness of ViLLE. The research was conducted on university students in their first programming course. Students participated in a two hour session in a computer class, where they were randomly divided into two groups. T he control group used only traditional textual material during the session, whereas for the treatment group, the same material was extended with interactive examples using ViLLE. With this research setting, we tried to answer two research questions: " Does ViLLE help students in learning to program?", and "Is there any difference in learning when previous programming experience is taken into account?" We found some support for a positive answer to the first question, although we couldn't fully reject the null hypothesis. For the second question, we obtained solid evidence that ViLLE enhances the learning of students with no prior programming experience substantially, so that the statistical differences between the novices and the more experienced learners disappeared as a result of a single training session. This indicates that program visualization indeed improves novice students' learning.
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