Our experience with LEARN in ELA001-Circuits

1. Our experience with LEARNin ELA001-Circuits Felipe Iza, Chin Panagamuwa, Keith Gregory School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering f.iza@lboro.ac.uk e-learning showcase Loughborough, 1st February 2012 http://learn.lboro.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1844

2. Why we turned into LEARN? • “No choice”: Minimum presence  Module card • “Students request” (Student feedback forms) :  Notes, tutorials, reading list,… No correlation to attendance • “What we wanted”: Formative assessment  Challenge: ~150 students Other options: • LEARN vs Perception

3. What we wanted • Series of quizzes during the year to … • Get students to study regularly (2% final mark/quiz) • Provide feedback to students • Inform us of student progress • Required features • Open & invigilated time-limited quizzes • Variety of question types (most numerical) • Automatic immediate marking • Automatic immediate feedback for each question • “Randomized” questions (cheating & recycle)

4. Example “LEARN can do it”: http://learn.lboro.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1844 Things to note: • Question types=> MC, numerical questions, schematics/graphs • Randomized numbers on questions • Most questions require more than one answer => “Embedded answers / Cloze” • Instant marking and feedback • Positive student response

5. Learning curve • Learning LEARN • Interface • Quizzes • Questions IT TAKES TIME AND EFFORT • BUT… • It has pedagogical value • It has been well received by students. • Most material can be recycled • Support available: e-Learning team

6. A current limitation LEARN Randomized question with 1 answer(“calculated”) Question with multiple answers (“Cloze”) Randomized question with multiple answers (“NA”) • Q: The double of {x} is _____ • A: 2*{x} • Q: The double and triple of 3 are _____ and _____ respectively. • A: 6,9 • Q: The double and triple of {x} are _____ and _____ respectively. • A: 2*{x}, 3*{x}

7. Workaround • Create an “Embedded Answers / Cloze” question that will be used as template • Export the question as Moodle xml • Run a custom written program that uses the exported question as a template to create a given number of randomized variations • Import the randomized questions into LEARN

8. Workaround (contd): template example ## Input parameters ##a=1:10 ##b=1:10 ##B=1:10 ##phi=-90:15:90 %%a+B*cos(phi*pi/180) %%b+B*sin(phi*pi/180) %%sqrt(a^2+b^2)*B %%atan(b/a)*180/pi+phi %%sqrt(a^2+b^2)/B %%atan(b/a)*180/pi-phi Given the following two phasors A and B: A=\a\+j\b\ B=\B\|\phi\° What are the results of these phasor operations? A+B={1:NM:=10:0.1}+j{1:NM:=10:0.1} in cartesian coordinates A·B={1:NM:=10:0.1}|{1:NM:=10:0.1}° in polar coordinates A/B={1:NM:=10:0.1}|{1:NM:=10:0.1}° in polar coordinates Header %% Answers in order of appearance Question

9. Logistics • Capacity of computer labs: For ~150 students: 2+2+1 labs across campus Timetabling Invigilators • DANS  Extra time: Define groups Duplicate quiz and change time limit  Individual rooms

10. Conclusions • Pedagogical side of things… • Enables formative/summative assessment of large group of students • Enables prompt feedback to large group of students • Effective and well-received by students • Practical side of things… • It can be very time consuming to set up… • Mind the logistics particularly with large groups and don’t forget DANS students • One would expect things to improve as LEARN is further developed and adopted by more academics.