TOOL DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT LEARNING, IMMEDIATE

FEEDBACK, AND CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT IN LOGIC

Antonia Huertas and Enric Mor

Department of Computer Science, Open University of Catalonia, Rambla Poblenou 156, Barcelona, Spain

Keywords: Logic course, Online learning, Technology enhance logic, Intelligent tutoring system, User centred design.

Abstract: Learning logic in engineering has similar difficulties like in mathematics: a very low academic performance

and a high student dropout. In this kind of subjects interactive training activities with immediate feedback

are fundamental. In a traditional face-to-face logic course the face-to-face interaction with the instructor

usually provides it. In an e-learning or web-based paradigm the role of the instructor should be helped by an

intelligent tutoring system. In this paper we present the design and development process of learning tools for

a logic course. This tool follows a student-centred design approach in order to provide the accurate tool for a

successful learning experience. A general discussion of learning tools for logics is also presented; showing

that this kind of topics has concrete and specific needs in online learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays new fully online universities and an

increasing number of face-to-face universities are

offering academic degrees and programs via the

Internet. While some programs require students to

attend lectures to the campus, many are delivered

completely online. In such scenario Information and

Communication Technologies (ICT) are a central

element of the educational strategies connected with

the new educational paradigm in which the teacher

or instructor is not at the centre of the learning

model, now occupied by the student. In e-learning,

the computer and the instructor are peripheral

elements with respect to the student. In such a new

situation learning methodologies, contents and

resources can not simply be transferred from face-to-

face lectures to a web-based classroom, and new

methodologies, strategies and tools are needed.

E-Learning is based on resources and activities

accessible via a computer device. These digital

contents should offer a high degree of interactivity.

In such context, digital resources constitute a good

alternative to printed learning materials since rich

media can easily be embedded to enhance the

learning. Interactive activities are less linear than

online book or manuals, involving instructional

design techniques and more dynamic type of self-

assessment or immediate feedback.

Another important advantage of e-learning and

digital learning objects is that they can allow

individual training while being easily delivered to a

wide audience via Internet at a relatively low cost.

However, the creation of effective interactive

learning resources has a high human and material

cost (Ritter, Blessing and Wheeler, 2003). The

software for developing is also very complex and

not available to every teacher or instructor.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are computer

systems used to improve the learning process

providing customized assistance and feedback to

students (Kinshuk, Patel, and Scott 2001). Their

main characteristic is the immediate feedback

tailored to the student's particular needs.

Regarding the areas of Logic and Mathematics,

educational reforms are widespread and new

educational models and tools are used, not only in

online learning but also in the traditional face-to-

face education. New learning strategies such as

personalized support, collaborative learning,

integration of ITS in the learning environment and

instructional model are used (Huertas, 2007).

The traditional logic course is a survey of

traditional logic, including classical and

contemporary logic. Special emphasis is given to

the formal language and the classical methods of

reasoning. A typical initial logic course contains

propositional and predicate logic and special

attention is given to formal semantics. Logic is in

222

Huertas A. and Mor E.

TOOL DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT LEARNING, IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK, AND CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT IN LOGIC.

DOI: 10.5220/0002808502220225

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

this level part of mathematical logic and the subject

inherits the mathematical particularities that make it

difficult for students.

Students enrolled to a logic course have to

acquire a set of skills and a small set of contents.

The instructor has an important role when acquiring

these skills and the concrete guidance and

interaction with the teacher is a fundamental aspect

of the learning methodology. In the online scenario,

students have the same interaction needs but they are

remote interacting with the teacher only using their

computer. Furthermore, this computer-mediated

interaction is usually text-based, providing a narrow

way to have feedback. Therefore, this can become a

concern when learning the logic competences.

This paper is organized as follows; Section 2

describes the needs for a specific logic learning tool.

Section 3 describes the design and development

process of the learning tool. Finally, Section 4

presents the conclusions and future work.

2 LEARNING TOOLS FOR

LOGIC COURSES

The design and development of e-learning contents

and tools should be viewed as a formal and

significant project. The user-centered design (UCD)

approach to technology enhanced learning can be the

key element to provide a good learning experience

because the student has been moved to the center of

the learning process. The UCD is a general term

used to describe the design where the user influences

the final result. It is, at the same time, a philosophy

and a process. A philosophy that places the

individual user at the center to develop a product

that suits his or her needs and requirements, and a

design process that focuses on cognitive factors of

people and how these factors are involved in their

interactions with interactive products (Sharp, Rogers

and Preece, 2007).

There are many different computerized learning

tools for introductory logic. Among them we can

consider the following groups (Humet, 2001),

depending on active/passive role of the student.

The checkers (Allen and Hand, 1992),

(Gottschall, 2000) and (Layman, 1999) are

characterized for a quite passive behaviour of the

learner. The main activity of students consists on

verify a deduction or formalization. No direct

intervention or feedback is delivered by the system.

The feedback of the tool is restricted to find errors

when the user requests explicitly the verification of

the exercise be carried out. The constructors

(Barwise and Etchemendy, 1994 and 2007), (Broda

and Zappacosta, 2000), (Endriss, 2000) and

(Gottschall, 2000, (Moreno and Budesca, 2000) are

characterized for a higher degree of interactivity

with the user. They provide buttons, menus and

dialogues to the user for interaction purposes. This

kind of tools gives the students the feeling that they

are being helped in building the solution. The

provers (Endriss, 2000), (Layman, 1999) and

(Moreno and Budesca, 2000) are characterized by

their automatism. In this type of tools the user is

completely passive. The system calculates and

shows the solution of the exercise in an automatic

way.

Logic contents and skills are best acquired

within context that allow learners to actively training

(Nardi, 1997) and this has to be taking into account

when study how to improve the learning activity in

e-learning courses of logic. In addition to the

common learning difficulties of such an instrumental

subject, online learners face specific needs, mostly

related with their isolation and the computer-

mediated communication. There are some important

aspects that should be taken into account:

• Allow interactive training activities to learn

skills instead of informative knowledge

(Kenny, C., Pahl, C., 2009).

• Offering immediate feedback (Melis and

Ullrich, 2003) to the performance of a

student.

3 DESIGNING A LOGIC

LEARNING TOOL

The UOC (Open University of Catalonia;

www.uoc.edu) is a fully online university with a

student-centered educational model. This model

takes advantage of technology enhanced learning to

put each student in the center of the learning process

providing them the educational contents and

learning tools needed for each course. The university

offers several degrees, certificate programs and

master degrees. The computer science degree is the

most technical program and with a basic logic

course. This logic course has around a thousand

students enrolled each semester and the course

outline contains the usual topics of an introductory

logic course.

The goal of the project described here is the

design and development of a tool for learning logic,

in the context of a fully online computer science

TOOL DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT LEARNING, IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK, AND CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT

IN LOGIC

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degree using a web based learning environment.

This tool should provide guidance and interactive

feedback to logic course students. The project

follows the UCD process that includes three main

phases: gathering user requirements, designing the

product iteratively and finally, evaluating the

prototypes of each design iteration. In addition to

these phases, the UCD process applied in the design

and development of learning resources and tools has

to follow the specific goals for the e-learning

context: a) reduce difficulty in teaching and learning

process, b) improve the learning experience and c)

integrate to the existing virtual learning

environment. The key element of this approach is

the evaluation and iteration of the design solutions.

3.1 Requirements

We had two sets of requirements. The university

established a set of organizational requirements

mainly related with its technological architecture

and also related with the e-learning methodological

model. The second set of requirements is user

defined and strongly related with the logic course

students.

Institutional Requirements. E-learning resources

and tools have to be integrated into the actual virtual

campus in terms of user authentication and look and

feel. The new resources have to be placed in the

virtual classroom structure, should be accessed using

a standard web browser and, from a technological

point of view, they should not interfere with existing

resources.

User Requirements. The users of the logic learning

tool will be the students enrolled in the course.

Teachers will also be users but they will have more

functionalities and views of the learning tool. An

analysis was carried out by using focus groups with

teachers and students, to identify 1) which part of

the logic curriculum is proving be more difficult for

learners and for which of them the introduction of

the tool would add significant value and 2) students

levels and needs, and 3) students and instructors

skills of ICT.

During one semester an evaluation of such

requirements has been done by carefully studying

the results of the continuous assessment and final

exams. We had several meetings with the twelve

teacher’s team. In those meetings, existing tools for

learning logic were analyzed and evaluated as a

benchmark analysis. The result of this benchmark

was that none one of the tools meet the needs of the

project. In addition to that, a basic prototype of the

tool was build and a pilot test was carried out

observing how students used this first basic

prototype of the learning tool. At the end, it was

clear that the more difficult part of the logic course

is the formal reasoning methods (natural deduction

and resolution). Another important finding was the

need to integrate any kind of learning tool in the

continuous assessment model of the pedagogic

strategy used. This is because if the tool is not part

of that continuous assessment, the students perceive

the time and effort using the tool as an extra effort

without clear reward.

After that analysis the main requirements for the

logic learning tool were:

• Giving immediate feedback to reduce

difficulty of learning the two reasoning

methods for “isolated learners”

• Fostering learning of the strategies and skills

characteristics of logic (specially that two

methods)

• Integrated in the continuous assessment of

the students

• Easy of use / Usable

• Integrated into the existing virtual

classroom

• Multilingual: Catalan and Spanish.

3.2 Design and Development

After testing the initial prototypes, the developing

phase was following. The coding of the tool took

several months and was done by a web developer

member of the team. Other members of the group

supervised and comment the process of

implementation which was done in an iterative way.

The architecture of the tool and other technical

solutions were decided in order to assure the

requirements. The tool would be designed under an

approach based on an architecture in three layers:

interface, domain and persistence.

It is interesting to mention that the only user

requirement in order to use the tool have a browser

compatible with Internet Explorer 5.5 or superior or

with Firefox 2.0 or superior. It is also necessary that

the user has the activated Javascript (option by

default of the browsers). The web pages that are part

of the tool have developed using PHP for the

programming in the server and HTML, CSS and

Javascript. It is also interesting to mention that to

store the data in a persistent way has been used a

MySQL database, which allows to manage sessions

in an efficient way. Finally, the development of this

application requires the communication with the

existing UOC servers to obtain the login information

of the students. This functionality has been covered

through a series of web services provided by the

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UOC technicians

All the design and development were done

iteratively, testing interfaces and prototypes,

involving students and teachers. As a consequence

some of the decisions were changed at any level

after the evaluations.

4 CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER

WORK

We designed and developed a web-based learning

tool for logic course. This tool also follows the ITS

paradigm needed for our requirements

(Hatzilygeroudis and Prentzas, 2004), especially for

the immediate feedback offered: when a task is

correct, when an exercise is correct, and some advise

when a task is not correct. In that case the nature of

the knowledge domain itself, that is, the use of

formal rules of the logic reasoning method,

guaranties the soundness and consistence of the

automatic feedback given.

The tool is completely integrated with the rest of

the learning material and with the continuous

assessment model of the logic course. Students and

teachers easily can track the learning progress since

the tool provides statistics for each individual user,

for the class group and also for the different groups.

Students can see their progression level and both

students and teachers can find the critic points of

every stage of the learning process. The tool has

been built to be modular and reusable and this will

assure the easy extension or partial revision

At present, the tool is being used in the logic

course of the UOC this semester. Using it in a real

scenario will provide a set of usage data that will be

use to improve both performance and usability of the

tool. We already have a first feedback from students

that consists on positive comments about the tool

and how it helps them to learn the course.

On the other hand, further work will be adding

new modules to cover other parts of the logic

subject, improving the feedback system and

functionalities, allowing comments and notes and

building a mobile version, among others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially supported by a 2008

project of educational innovation of the UOC; and

by the Spanish government grants TIN2006-15107-

C02 and HUM2006-12848-C02-01.

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IN LOGIC

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