This paper reports a novel visual metaphor of parallel views on open student models and a new design of the IntrospectiveViews interface implementing this metaphor. The interface allows visualizing not only the student's own model, but also displaying parallel views on the models of her peers and the cumulate model of the entire class or group. In the paper, we describe the application of parallel IntrospectiveViews for visualizing models representing student progress on the QuizJET parameterized questions.
Engaging students with social learning technologies has
become an important trend in modern e-learning. One of the
biggest challenges is to provide support in the social
learning context, at the same time allowing students feel in
control. One of the popular solutions to address the issue of
control is so-called open student modeling, an approach that
allows the students to observe and reflect on their progress.
In particular, visual approaches for open student modeling
were explored to provide students with an easy-to-grasp and
holistic view on their progress [2-3, 8]. However, most of
the open student modeling research focuses on a
representation of an individual student ignoring the social
aspect of learning. In contrast, several social visualization
approaches explored in e-learning context [
The social interface presented in the paper expands our earlier work on improving student access to parameterized questions, which support student learning and selfassessment of their knowledge. Main goal of that work was helping students to locate the right educational content at the right time. In the past, we explored semantic and personalized approaches to guide students. Semantic approach means building ontology of topics and using it to arrange the questions into topic folders on an e-learning portal. It provides students an approximate guidance to the question within the logical structure. Personalized approach means using student models and adaptive navigation support to guide students to personally relevant questions. This paper explores social guidance approach motivated by collaborative tagging systems. In a collaborative tagging system a user is frequently guided to the right information socially, by other users. Exploring tagged bookmarks of a user who is similar to you usually helps finding valuable resources. Similarly, we hoped, exploring semantically structured progress of learners similar to you can help to select most appropriate learning content. Semanticallystructured social visualization could be very important on both stages of social guidance: recognizing peers as similar and grasping their progress to select most useful content. This paper investigates the value of a specific social visualization approach - parallel visualization of multiple student models using IntrospectiveViews - in finding the right questions. In the next section, we provide a short literature review on the related work. The system and study design are presented in the following section. Finally, we summarize this work and discuss the future research plan.
2.1. Open Student Modeling
A range of benefits have been reported on opening the
student models to the learners, such as increasing the
learner’s awareness of the developing knowledge,
difficulties and the learning process, students’ engagement,
motivation, and knowledge reflection [
3.1. QuizJET: Parameterized Questions of Java
Evaluation Toolkit
QuizJET is a system for authoring and delivery of
parameterized questions for the Java programming
language. It generates parameterized questions for
assessment and self-assessment of students’ knowledge of a
broad range of Java topics. Each QuizJET question (Figures
1.a and 1.b) asks the student to predict the results of
execution of a specific Java program (i.e., mentally execute
the program and enter the final value of some variable of
the text to be printed by the program.) All questions are
parameterized, i.e., include a random parameter, which
QuizJET instantiates when the question is delivered to a
student. As a result, the student can attempt to answer the
same question multiple times with different values of the
parameter, which helps to achieve the mastery level. The
implementation and functionalities of QuizJET were
described in detail in [
QuizJET questions are semantically organized into topic
folders and displayed under a tree structure through the
course management portal (Figure 1.c). In addition, to
every question we associate a set of concepts, which
semantics is defined in a domain ontology. The domain
ontology (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~paws/ont/java.owl) was
developed by the TALER Lab at the School of Information
Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. It is formalized in the
OWL-Full ontology language and contains more than 300
classes related to the Java programming language. The
classes are connected via three relations: subClassOf,
partOf-hasPart and relatedTo.
3.2. IntrospectiveViews Interface
IntrospectiveViews was first proposed for scrutinizing
semantically-enriched user interest models in [
In this paper, we demonstrate the application of parallel IntrospectiveViews for visualization of student progress on QuizJET questions semantically organized into topics and lectures. Figure 2 shows parallel IntrospectiveViews for a student in a class on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). The visualization consists of two panes: the left pane displays the student’s own model, whereas the right one displays someone else’s model. By default, the right pane displays the average progress of the entire class, but the student can switch to the progress of a specific classmate by selecting the classmate’s name from the combobox menu located at the top of the right pane. Each pane visualizes the student progress in the form of a pie chart consisting of circular sectors representing the class lectures. The lectures are displayed in a clockwise order denoting their prerequisite sequence, i.e., the order they are taught in the class. Lectures may consist of one or several topics, which are represented as annular sectors placed within the circular sector of the corresponding lecture. For example, in Figure 2, Basic Concepts is the first lecture in the Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming class and consists of three topics, namely, Variables, Objects, and Classes. The radius (width) of annular sectors denotes the amount of readings, quizzes, and exercises assigned to the topic. In a similar way, the span of circular sectors indicates the amount of learning content assigned to the corresponding lecture. Such a representation allows the student to easily estimate the amount of work she has to spend on each individual topic or lecture.
The shade of each annular sector denotes whether the topic has been covered and, for the covered ones, indicates the progress the student has made with respect to the topic. The sectors painted grey represent the topics that have not been covered yet, whereas the sectors painted a shade from the color range red to green represent the sectors that have been already covered. For the covered topics, the interface displays the student progress. The progress, in the current implementation, is the ratio of successfully completed quizzes to the total quiz count in the topic. If the ratio equals 0, i.e., no quiz has been successfully completed, the sector is painted red. If it equals 1, i.e., all quizzes have been completed, the sector appears green. The shades in the range between red and green denote partial completion of the quizzes.
Similar to the previous design of IntrospectiveViews [
Such visualization can help the student to plan her class work by providing an overview of her progress in the class and showing the topics that she has already completed and the ones that she has to work on. In addition to that, the ability to view someone else’s progress allows the student to quickly find the peers that can help with a difficult topic or quiz. For example, if the student experiences difficulties in completing some quizzes, using the parallel views, she can find a classmate who has already successfully completed those quizzes and ask for help. Finally, the ability to view the average progress of the entire class allows the student to relate her progress to the one of the whole class and estimate whether she is ahead or behind of the class on average.
In this paper, we have presented a novel visual metaphor of parallel views on open student models in social learning systems. We have described the implementation of this metaphor using the integration of the IntrospectiveViews interface and the QuizJET student modeling approach. We believe that such a visualization can substantially enhance social learning, foster a better cooperation among students, improve their performance, and become an attractive tool for accessing learning materials.
Currently, the interface is being used in the Object-Oriented Programming class at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Upon the completion of the class, we plan to evaluate the interface by asking the students to fill out evaluation questionnaires. This will help us to find out its problems and weaknesses, which we will address in the next versions.
In addition to that, we plan to add a number of new features. One of the most important extensions planned is the comprehensive privacy management. Our aim is to provide the student with flexible mechanisms to control the access of others to her model. Apart from that, we plan to enhance the zoom function by displaying different levels of details at different zoom levels. Also, we are going to extend the comparison mode to allow the student to view multiple progress charts at one time as well as to sort them either by the overall progress or the progress in a specific topic.