Abstract:

With the increased interest in the use of interactive resources to support teaching in engineering degrees, one of the major challenges within the current education context aims to develop tools that include automatic assessment. This is because of two main reasons: on the one hand, to provide students formative feedback and, on the other, to reduce the amount of time devoted by instructors to correct the large number of exercises that are proposed to students for continuous assessment. This situation is particularly striking in automatic control courses since many control problems have multiple solutions, so their assessment can be an unwieldy and time-consuming process, especially for teachers.

Strictly speaking, one of the main benefits of the above-mentioned resources is to promote students’ autonomous learning by allowing them to acquire a greater responsibility and an active role in the teaching-learning process. Bearing this in mind, it seems evident that automatic assessment should be an inherent characteristic of such a kind of resources. Moreover, formative assessment, namely, monitoring student learning (comprehension, needs, and academic progress) to provide ongoing feedback, plays a key role in helping students to identify their strengths and weaknesses and topics that need to work and, consequently, to improve their learning. Likewise, it can help faculty to recognize student difficulties and tackle them immediately, as well as to improve teaching.

Many utilities have been reported in the literature to be able to create educative interactive resources with automatic evaluation, such as the automatic evaluation element [1], the virtual programming lab [2], Nbgrader [3], Web-CAT [4], and MATLAB® Grader™ [5]. However, most of them are intended to compare code in programming courses.

Taking into this motivation, this paper aims to explore the possibilities of MATLAB® Grader™, a browser-based authoring environment that allows to develop and share MATLAB coding problems in any learning environment with interactive assignments and automatically grading of student work, in industrial process control courses in engineering degrees to automatically provide timely formative feedback to students and to reduce the time to complete the entire grading process. An example of application in form of exam will be detailed for Industrial Process Control, a fourth year optional course in the Bachelor Degree in Electronics Engineering and Automation at the University of Extremadura.

References:
[1] G. Farias, D. Muñoz, F. Gómez-Estern, L. De la Torre, C. Sánchez, S. Dormido, “Adding automatic evaluation to interactive virtual labs,” Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 24, no. 7, pp.1456-1476, 2016.
[2] VPL, The Virtual Programming lab for Moodle, Accessed 11 November, 2022. Retrieved from https://vpl.dis.ulpgc.es/.
[3] D. Land, “Automatic Grading in Engineering Classes,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Physics Teaching in Engineering Education, pp. 1-7, 2019.
[4] S. H. Edwards, M. A. Perez-Quinones, “Web-CAT: automatically grading programming assignments,” ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 328–328, 2008.
[5] The MathWorks, Inc. MATLAB® Grader™, Accessed 14 November, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-grader.html.

Keywords:

Automatic evaluation, formative feedback, Grader, MATLAB, industrial process control, learning, engineering.