Immediate feedback has a positive effect on the performance of a student practising a procedural skill in exercises. Giving feedback to a number of students is labour-intensive for a teacher. To alleviate this, many electronic exercise assistants have been developed. However, many of the exercise assistants have some limitations in the feedback they offer. We have a feedback engine that gives semantically rich feedback for several domains (like logic, linear algebra, arithmetic), and that can be relatively easy extended with new domains. Our feedback engine needs to have knowledge about the domain, how to reason with that knowledge (i.e. a set of rules), and a specified strategy. We offer the following types of feedback: correct/incorrect statements, distance to the solution, rulebased feedback, buggy rules, and strategy feedback. We offer the feedback functionality in the form of light-weight web services. These services are offered using different protocols, for example

Abstract. In these lectures we will introduce an interactive system that supports writing simple functional programs. Using this system, students learning functional programming: – develop their programs incrementally, – receive feedback about whether or not they are on the right track, – can ask for a hint when they are stuck, – see how a complete program is stepwise constructed, – get suggestions about how to refactor their program. The system itself is implemented as a functional program, and uses fundamental concepts such as rewriting, parsing, strategies, program transformations and higher-order combinators such as the fold. We will introduce these concepts, and show how they are used in the implementation of the interactive functional programming tutor. 1

This article reports on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, project name Backstage, dedicated to large classes aiming at empowering not only the audience but also the speaker, at promoting the awareness of both audience and speaker, and at promoting an active participation of students in the lecture. The backchannel supports different forms of inter-student communication via short microblog messages, social evaluation and ranking of messages by the students themselves. Backstage allows for the aggregation of student's opinions aiming at supporting the community building of the audience and strengthening the students ' awareness of and co-responsibility for the class work. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students ' opinions making it possible to strengthen the lecturer's awareness for students ' difficulties. The backchannel's conception is motivated by learning sciences ' findings and theories. This article is an extended version of (Bry et al., 2011) published at the IADIS International Conference e-Society, held

Abstract—One of the main principles underlying the design of human–system interactions within ITSs or ILEs is that the closer the “artificial ” principles are to those involved by human teachers, the more efficient the learning will be. However, the very notion of “human-likeliness ” is neither very new nor very precise. We suggest here that these human-like interactions need to be grounded in the very core human social capabilities, notably those allowing mind reading. We address this problem here, first in reviewing the literature about tutoring principles, then in proposing a new classification scheme of these principles. Third, we sketch the first lines of a model and a LSA-based software architecture that attempts to comply with this “humanlikeliness” by providing teacher-like advice for learning courses.

WP/Task responsible

Abstract –The demand for information systems security education has never been higher, while the availability of high-quality information systems security instruction and of well-qualified instructors are both extremely limited. Meeting the demand requires converting teaching from an individual activity to a community-based research activity. As a result, Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative and the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT ® Program have collaborated in the development of an online secure coding module that exemplifies how to capture expert content, ensure high-quality learning, and scale to meet rapidly growing demand. This paper describes this effort and how high-quality information systems security instruction can be scaled to meet existing and projected demand.

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of teachers ’ feedback in focus groups about online reports aimed at providing accessible information about English language learners ’ (ELLs) performance on reading assessments designed for formative purposes. Examples of the online reports are included

doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00090 Can executive control be influenced by performance feedback? Two experimental studies with younger and older adults

Factors influencing responsiveness to feedback: on the interplay between fear, confidence, and reasoning processes