Introducing ICT-FLAG

The main goal of the ICT-FLAG project is to design and build a set of e-Learning tools and services to provide support to the learning process in university degrees in the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). The expected benefits will have a repercussion on the students (improvement of the educational experience, greater participation and performance, lower drop-out rate) and on the lecturers, managers and academic coordinators (resources for monitoring a course, making decisions and predictions).

ICT degrees include very practical competencies, which can only be acquired by means of experience, performing exercises, designs, projects, ... In addition to the challenge of motivating students to solve activities, lecturers face the problem to assess and provide suitable feedback to each submission. Receiving immediate and continuous feedback can facilitate the acquisition of the competencies, although this requires support in the form of automatic tools. The automation of the assessment process may be simple in some activities (e.g., practical activities on programming) but it may be complex in activities about design or modeling.

Monitoring the use of these tools can reveal very valuable information for the tracking, management and continuous improvement of the course by the teaching team. However, in order to leverage all its potential, this information should be complemented with data from other sources (e.g., the student’s academic file) and historical information of previous editions.

Taking into account these elements, the contributions of this project will focus on three axes:

• Tools for formative assessment, which can provide immediate feedback by means of automatic assessment. In particular, the research activity will focus on knowledge areas with high cognitive or modeling levels, such as the design or modeling of software and hardware.
• Learning analytics that monitor the activity and the progress of the student about the use of the mentioned tools and allow for analyzing the learning results, identifying the critical points and defining actions of improvement. These analytics will also incorporate other sources of academic and historical information to facilitate the course tracking and decision making processes to the teaching team.
• Gamification, as an incentive scheme in order to motivate students to perform new activities and increase their engagement without sacrificing the academic rigor.

A relevant aspect to be considered by e-learning tools developed in this project is the modularity and independence from technologies or particular virtual campuses, with the aim to facilitate its application to different courses and contexts. To this end, the functionalities of the tools will be offered as a set of services, using appropriate standards.

The contributions of this project will be evaluated in courses of mathematics, computing engineering and telecommunication. The outcomes and tools produced will be published using open source licenses and will be at the disposal of students, educators and the public in general. In particular, it is expected that their use becomes feasible as part of both self-taught education (life-long learning), traditional formal education and massive courses of on-line learning (MOOC).

Automatic assessment

Provides continuous feedback to students during the learning process.

Gamification

Motivates students to solve exercises and perform activities.

Learning analytics

Showcases useful insights about the usage patterns of assessment tools.

Easy to use

Easy to integrate with existing tools and accessible to students and educators.