CS6604: Designing and Implementing Online Education Systems
Calendar and Coursenotes: Spring 2015

This page will show what we cover each day, and indicate assigned readings, due dates, etc.

• Week 1: Introduction
  • Tuesday, January 20: Introduction
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer Homework: Look at Syllabus, assignments. Start thinking about talk and project topics
    Today's notes
    Reading Assignment (read these BEFORE Thursday class):
    S.B. Conger, If There Is No Significant Difference, Why Should We Care?
    D.G. Oblinger and B.L. Hawkins, The Myth about No Significant Difference
    
  • Thursday, January 22: Metaphors for online learning software
    Presenter: Cory Bart
    Presentation
    
• Week 2
  • Tuesday, January 27: Assessing Educational Interventions; The "No Significant Difference" controversy
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
  • Thursday, January 29: Instances of online learning software
    Presenter: Cory Bart
    Presentation Reading Assignment: See Piazza post @11 for pointers to information about OpenEdX.
• Week 3
  • Tuesday, February 3: Introduction to OpenEdX
    Presenter: Hosam Shahin
    Presentation
    
  • Reading for OpenDSA presentations:
    • E. Fouh, V. Karavirta, D.A. Breakiron, S. Hamouda, S. Hall, T.L. Naps, and C.A. Shaffer, Design and architecture of an interactive eTextbook - The OpenDSA system (DOI, PDF), Science of Computer Programming 88, Special Issue on Software Development Concerns in the e-Learning Domain, 1(August 2014), 22-40.
  • Thursday, February 5: OpenDSA System Architecture: Part 1
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
• Week 4
  • Tuesday, February 10: OpenDSA System Architecture: Part 2
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
  • Thursday, February 12: OpenDSA System Architecture: Part 3
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
• Week 5
  • Reading for Online Education lecture:
    
    • Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman.
  • Tuesday, February 17: Pedagogical effectiveness of online courses
    Presenter: Laura Balis
    Presentation
  • Readings for motivation lecture:
    
    • Emily Schneider and René F. Kizilcec. 2014. "Why did you enroll in this course?": Developing a standardized survey question for reasons to enroll. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference (L@S '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 147-148.
    • Breslow, L. B., Pritchard, D. E., DeBoer, J., Stump, G. S., Ho, A. D., & Seaton, D. T. (2013). Studying learning in the worldwide classroom: Research into edX's first MOOC. Research & Practice in Assessment 8, 13-25.
  • Thursday, February 19: Motivation and related issues in online settings
    Presenter: Vanessa Cedeno
    Presentation
• Week 6
  • Readings for Learning Styles lecture:
    
    • R.M. Felder and L.K. Silverman, "Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education", Engineering Education 78, 7(1988), 674-681.
    • Massa, L.J. and Mayer, R.E., "Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?", Learning and Individual Differences 16, 4 (2006)
  • ASSIGNMENT: Read the papers and answer the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire prior to class on Tuesday.
    
  • Tuesday, February 24: Learning Styles
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
  • Readings for experiment and instrument design lecture
    • Papastergiou, M. (2009). Digital game-based learning in high school computer science education: Impact on educational effectiveness and student motivation. Computers & Education, 52(1), 1-12. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131508000845
    • Nelson, M.A., Geist, M.R., Miller, R.L., Streveler, R.A., and Olds, B. M. (2007, April). How to create a concept inventory: The thermal and transport concept inventory. In Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. http://www.thermalinventory.com/papers/2007HowCreateConceptInv.pdf
  • Thursday, February 26: Experiment and Instrument design
    Presenter: Mohammed Farghally
    Presentation
• Week 7:
  • Readings for Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Presentation
    • R.E. Mayer, " Cognitive Theory and the Design of Multimedia Instruction: An Example of the Two-Way Street Between Cognition and Instruction", New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Spring 2002, 55-71.
  • Tuesday, March 3: Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Presentation (Part 1)
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
  • Thursday, March 5: CLASS CANCELLED DUE TO SIGCSE
• Spring Break: March 7-15
• Week 8:
  • Readings for Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Presentation
    • Picciano, A. G. (2012). The Evolution of Big Data and Learning Analytics in American Higher Education. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 16(3), 9-20.
    • Dunbar, R. L., Dingel, M. J., & Prat-Resina, X. (2014). Connecting Analytics and Curriculum Design: Process and Outcomes of Building a Tool to Browse Data Relevant to Course Designers. Journal of Learning Analytics, 1(3), 220-240.
  • Tuesday, March 17: Student data analytics
    Presenter: Joe Luke
    Presentation
  • Thursday, March 19: Discussion on VT LMS
    
• Week 9:
  • Readings for next lecture:
    • Joanne Gikas and Michael M. Grant. Mobile computing devices in higher education: Student perspectives on learning with cellphones, smartphones & social media.
    • Núria Ferran-Ferrer et al. Chapter 13 : Mobile Learning in Higher Education
  • Tuesday, March 24: Mobile learning and affordances
    Presenter: Peeratham Techapalokul
    Presentation
  • Readings for next lecture:
    • Carlos Alario-Hoyos and Scott Wilson, Comparison of the main alternatives to the integration of external tools in different platforms, in Proceedings of ICERI2010.
    • The Basic Overview on How LTI Works
  • Thursday: March 26: Introduction to Question Interchange Standards
    Presenter: Jon Hellmann
    Presentation
• Week 10:
  • Readings for next lecture:
    • edSurge introduction to Khan Academy
    • Khan Academy in Schools
  • Tuesday, March 31: Khan Academy
    Presenter: Vivek Akupatni
    Presentation
  • Thursday, April 2: Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Presentation (Part 2)
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
• Week 11:
  • Tuesday, April 7: Wrapup on Cognitive Theory; Improving MOOCs
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    Paper to read: P.J. Guo, J. Kim, and R. Rubin, How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos
  • Readings for next lecture:
    • GIFT: A wiki-like markup language for Questions used by Moodle
    • Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Effective Practice with e-Assessment, 2007.
  • Thursday, April 9: Automated assessment systems and question banks
    Presenter: Ambika Karanth
    Presentation
• Week 12:
  • Tuesday, April 14: Assessment in Online Courses
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    Paper: Stephen P. Balfour, Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated Essay Scoring and Calibrated Peer Review Research & Practice in Assessment 8, Summer 2013, 40-48.
  • Thursday, April 16: Automated assessment of programming exercises
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    
• Week 13:
  • Tuesday, April 21: Visual Presentation of Content
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    
  • Thursday, April 23: Visual Presentation of Quantitative Data
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    
• Week 14:
  • Tuesday, April 28: Intelligent Tutoring Systems
    Presenter: Dr. Shaffer
    Presentation
    
  • Thursday, April 30: Project presentations
• Week 15:
  • Tuesday, May 5: Last day of class discussion

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