Abstract:

Computer programming is known to be one of the most difficult courses for students in the first year of engineering. They are faced with the challenge of abstract thinking and gaining programming skills for the first time. These skills are acquired by continuous practicing from the start of the course. In order to enhance the motivation and dynamism of the learning and assessment processes, we have proposed the use of three educational resources namely screencasts, self-assessment questionnaires and automated assessment of practical assignments. These resources have been made available in Moodle which is a Learning Management System widely used in education environments and adopted by the Telecommunications Engineering School at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).

Both teachers and students can enhance the learning and assessment processes through the use of new educational activities such as self-assessment questionnaires and automated marking of practical assignments. On the other hand, multimedia resources such as screencasts can guide students in complex topics. The resources proposed allow teachers to improve their tutorial actions since they provide inmediate feedback and comments to students without the enormous effort of manual correction and evaluation by teachers specially taking into account the large number of students enrolled in the course

In this paper we present the case study where three proposed educational resources were applied. We describe the special features of the course and explain why the use of these resources can both enhance the students’ motivation and improve the teaching and learning processes. Our research work was carried out on students attending the "Computer programming" course offered in the first year of a Telecommunications Engineering degree at UPM. This course is mandatory and has more than 400 enrolled students. To assess the efficiency of our proposal, an evaluation was conducted. The obtained results can be found in this paper.

Keywords:

Educational resources, self-assessment, screencasts, automated marking, Moodle, tutorials, on-line assessment.