Abstract:

In the context of the digital era, one of the current trends in engineering education focuses on the development of interactive resources to support teaching so as to achieve quality learning and more effective teaching. However, the use of this kind of resources in the classroom introduces various challenges to cope with that have a profound effect on both students and lecturers. From students’ point of view, one of their interests arises from being part of effective learning methods, and particularly, receiving adequate formative feedback to better understand the limits of their own knowledge and how to improve. To contribute to the effectiveness in this sense, at lecturers’ side it is important to reduce the assessment workload derived by the large amount of activities that are proposed to students for the acquisition of the different outcomes so that they can provide students feedback on time. Hence, an automated grading system for student submissions that is unbiased is extremely desired and beneficial to students and lecturers.

There are several approaches that allow to develop educative interactive tools with automatic evaluation, such as the automatic evaluation element, the virtual programming lab, Nbgrader, Web-CAT, and MATLAB® Grader™. Although most of them were created to compare code in programming courses, from the authors’ viewpoint MATLAB® Grader™, a browser-based authoring environment that allows to create and share MATLAB coding problems in any learning environment with interactive assignments and automatically grading of student work [1], offers a great potential to tackle assessment of other kinds of engineering problems.

In automatic control courses taugh in engineering degrees, many control problems have multiple solutions, so their assessment can be an unwieldy process. Likewise, at the University of Extremadura, students learn control thanks to the Control System Toolbox of MATLAB. Both reasons, together with the low exploitation, lead us to think that MATLAB® Grader™ can be a valuable environment to perform assessment different from code comparison.

Given this motivation, this paper explores the possibilities that MATLAB® Grader™ can offer lecturers of such courses in engineering degrees to automatically provide timely formative feedback to students and to reduce the time to complete the entire grading process. Strengths and limitations of this environment in the academic performance of students will be discussed from both students’ and instructors’ perspective. For illustration purposes, an example of application will be described in the context of Automatic Regulation, a third year obligatory course in the Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Extremadura.

References:
[1] The MathWorks, Inc. MATLAB® Grader™, Accessed 14 November, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-grader.html.

Keywords:

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