Kay Berkling

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg

The pandemic caused many universities to adjust their teaching from in-classroom teaching to online teaching formats. Insecurities regarding the effectiveness of attaining the same academic performance are common. These concerns affect both teachers and students. The work presented here is intended as a long-term study approach to understand how st...

Learning curves are a well-known phenomenon in learning and describe the oscillation between correct and incorrect performance that precedes mastery. It demonstrates that making mistakes is part of the learning process. It is equally clear that these learning curves are highly individual and therefore pose a challenge in their description and direc...

The spelling competence of school students is best measured on freely written texts, instead of predetermined , dictated texts. Since the analysis of the error categories in these kinds of texts is very labor intensive and costly, we are working on an automatic systems to perform this task. The modules of the systems are derived from techniques fro...

In order to study competency achievements by students in a Computer Science Bachelor, self-assessment by graduating students is used to reflect on a subset of core competencies across the three years of the Bachelor. At this time, data from 2020 and 2021 are available with 87 and 70 respondents respectively across various subsidiaries (or locations...

Competency achievements in a Computer Science Bachelor are studied using self-assessment by graduating students at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University. Changes across the two ‘pandemic’ years 2020 and 2021 with respect to subsidiary, satisfaction and competencies are analysed. One goal was to identify which competencies may have suffered...

Community and social interaction forms an integral part of university studies for students. Skills and habits that are essential for well-being and motivation are formed within this community. Especially in online teaching, new perils arise and enhance the importance of offering possibilities to interact with fellow students. In order to understand...

This paper describes the collection of the H1 Corpus of children's weekly writing over the course of 3 months in 2nd and 3rd grades, aged 7-11. The texts were collected within the normal classroom setting by the teacher. Texts of children whose parents signed the permission to donate the texts to science were collected and transcribed. The corpus c...

This paper describes the collection of three longitudinal Corpora of German school children's weekly writing in German, called H2 (H1 is available via LDC and contains some of the same students' writing 2 years previously), E2 (E1 is not public), and ERK1. The texts were written within the normal classroom setting. Texts of children whose parents s...

The study presented here was aimed at understanding how teachers go about appropriating technology from the iRead EU Horizon 2020 Project into the classroom. iRead provides an adaptive personalised literacy game called Navigo that is deployed in tablets and intended for regular usage in the elementary school classroom. In our case, the game was pro...

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the EUROCALL society succeeded in holding the 28th EUROCALL conference, EUROCALL2020, on 20-21 August as an online, two-day gathering. The transition process required to make this happen was demanding and insightful for everyone involved, and, in many ways, a logical consequence of the core content and purpose of EURO...

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the EUROCALL society succeeded in holding the 28th EUROCALL conference, EUROCALL2020, on 20-21 August as an online, two-day gathering. The transition process required to make this happen was demanding and insightful for everyone involved, and, in many ways, a logical consequence of the core content and purpose of EURO...

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the EUROCALL society succeeded in holding the 28th EUROCALL conference, EUROCALL2020, on 20-21 August as an online, two-day gathering. The transition process required to make this happen was demanding and insightful for everyone involved, and, in many ways, a logical consequence of the core content and purpose of EURO...

Objectives: The goal of this study is to understand the user experience and conditions of online teaching and learning in cohorts with the goal of continuous improvement. Since misconceptions or underestimation of certain experiences may have a negative impact on student learning, it is important to uncover these. Methodology: A survey was conduct...

In a survey at DHBW just after the beginning of the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Germany more than 4500 participants evaluated more than 10 different video conferencing (VC) tools. A second survey with close to 900 participants examined evaluation and expectations regarding achievements through online teaching. The most important functionali...

This paper describes the analysis of learning progression in a serious game that is part of the iRead EU Project. The goal is to teach students vowel duration in German orthography. Students are asked to identify words with long vowels and receive immediate feedback on their choices through game mechanisms. The game presents the player with a serie...

Asking students and lecturers from several universities in different countries (here only raw results from 755 students and 127 lecturers from different DHBW locations) about their expectations, what could happen after switching from on-campus studies to complete online-studies.

This paper describes a short-term study of employing learning games in a German school setting. Games focusing on long and short vowel identification are chosen from the suite of iRead Project games and presented to groups of first and second graders. The children are presented with a game of identifying long vowels seeing around 25 words in 1-2 mi...

This paper describes the design of a 3D running game with educational content. The goal of the game is to teach children capitalization in German. Sentences are presented to the children in increasing order of difficulty, determined by the syntactic structure of the sentences. Words within sentence were presented decaptialized and the children had...

The iRead project is developed by a Europe-wide consortium. It contains games that support reading acquisition for elementary school children in both L1 and L2 contexts. It is of interest to understand child motivation during the use of the games. In order to plan for the evaluation, the games are analyzed with respect to frameworks that are presen...

Peer Reviews between students in higher education is the topic of this paper. By integrating this instruction method into university classroom activities, students train meta-skills and self-reflection, encouraged not only through giving constructive feedback to others but also by reflecting critically on received feedback for their own projects. M...

More than 800 users from a cross-section of ages and gender were asked about the games they play and what motivates them to play these. The answers were cross-matched with game features. Based on this match and subjective answers of those surveyed, a pattern emerges for the essential ingredients of addictive games across these demographics, as well...

More than 800 users from a cross-section of ages and gender were asked about the games they play and what motivates them to play these. The answers were cross-matched with game features. Based on this match and subjective answers of those surveyed, a pattern emerges for the essential ingredients of addictive games across these demographics, as well...

Learning games now play a role in both formal and informal learning, including foundational skills such as literacy. While feedback is recognised as a key pedagogical dimension of these games, particularly in early learning, there has been no research on how commercial games available to schools and parents reify learning theory into feedback. Usin...

This work is part of a series of publications on enabling education for children without access to schools, teachers and who have little parental guidance. New estimates by UNESCO reveal that 263 million children and youth are out of school. At the moment there exist no open source free online schools that do not expect a teacher to accompany the s...

The 6th International Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI) was held in conjunction with ICMI 2017 in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 13, 2017. The workshop included ten papers spanning a range of topics relevant to child computer interaction, including speech therapy, reading tutoring, interaction with robots, storytelling using figurines,...

This paper evaluates an automatic spelling error tagger and classifier for German texts. After explaining the existing error tags in detail, the accuracy of the tool is validated against a publicly available database containing around 1700 written texts ranging from first grade to eighth grade. The tool is then applied to a longitudinal study consi...

Educational Games tend not to be designed by game engineers. They usually do not compare either in graphics or in addictiveness to small games that people have installed on their mobile devices. In order to understand why people play today, a survey was conducted to determine players’ explicit and implicit knowledge about motivators in addictive ga...

It is known that children have difficul- ties with correct spelling of orthographic regularities in German (’liebe’, ’kennen’). By looking at instruction material in first grade, this work is a first step of an ongoing study to understand how children’s spelling in German is affected by their method of instruction. A major influence on spelling and...

This work is part of a larger effort about understanding the effects of didactic materials on acquisition of reading and writing. In this paper, the focus is on progression in primers (beginner readers). Texts are analyzed in terms of complexity, as measured by entropy between letters and phonemes, from the point of view of reading or writing that...

Phontasia and the magic words: An iPad game for systematic literacy acquisition Speech therapists are regularly faced with cases of orthographic weakness and dyslexia. For existing therapy materials, this new method presents a complementary instrument. In this paper we describe the adaptation of the English "Phonics" approach to the German language...

Creating a blended and open learning environment that supports self-directed learning is a desirable achievement. However, the difficulty of moving away from a guided, grade-based, exam-cramming teaching style has been shown to be demotivating for students and it is still unclear, how to design the on-boarding process well. We show that the current...

This paper presents conceptual ideas and a first prototype towards establishing a GamES (GAM)ified (E)lementary (S)chool MOOC for children who do not have access to schools. The project is being developed across several Bachelor student projects in collaboration between Cooperative State University, Karlsruhe and the German University of Cairo. A h...

Progression in der Lehre bewegt sich schrittweise vom Einfachen zum Komplexen. Die Komplexität einer Orthographie lässt sich anhand des Entropie-Maßes bidirektional zwischen Graphemen und Phonemen quantifizieren. In einer orthographisch flachen Sprache wie dem Finnischen mit einer kontextunabhängigen Graphem-Phonem-Korrespondenz ist eine solche Pro...

This paper describes the process of designing a course for Software Engineering that promotes self-driven learning while taking into account student motivation, scaffolding and a constrained ecosystem at the XXX University. The University has certain particularities that distinguish it from other Universities because students alternate quarters bet...

The work presented here is part of a larger study that looks at the impact that struc-tured teaching materials have on improving orthographic skills. The first step is an analysis of the current status of linguistic structures in common primary readers (primers) since their key purpose is to lead children along a systematic learning path towards be...

This paper evaluates an automatic spelling error tagger that is available via web interface. After explaining the existing error tags in detail, the accuracy of the tool is validated against a publicly available database containing around 1700 written texts ranging from first grade to eighth grade. The precision of the tool ranges from 83% to 100%....

In order to train and evaluate tools for the automatic transcription of misspelled texts and automatic annotation of over 20 spelling error categories, it is important to create training data. A very large database of children’s freely written text was collected in the past and in this paper we describe the tool that we have developed in order to m...

This paper evaluates the onboarding phase for students who are exposed to a blended and open learning environment for the first time, where self-directed learning is key to success. The study was undertaken in a very restricted environment, where the primary motivation of students is the achievement of good grades in the most efficient manner due t...

This paper studies the student view of functionality offered by a research-based design of a blended learning environment. The course in question is a Software Engineering course at the Cooperative State University students alternate between study and work in a quarter-based system and complete their study in three years. Based on findings over the...

This paper describes the setup for a gamified classroom for the subject of Software Engineering. A series of papers have resulted from this work: “Understanding Student Motivation” at CSEDU 2013 [1] and “Bridging the Motivation Gap”, an IGIP SPEED Young Scientist award paper here at ICL 2013 [2]. The intention behind gamifying the course was to inc...

This paper builds on work previously published as best paper at CSEDU 2013 [1], which describes the motivation gap between the teacher's view of student motivation and their actual motivation. As a result of this mismatch, the gamified Software Engineering course under observation [2], did not appeal to the students in the expected way. Our finding...

This paper describes the implementation of a prototype for blended learning in a Software Engineering course at the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg in Karlsruhe. The University has certain particularities that distinguish it from other Universities because students alternate quarters between study and work. Thus, students receive a s...

In Germany, international and national comparative studies such as PISA or IGLU have shown that some 20% of school children do not reach the minimal competence level as defined by PISA literacy stages by the age of 15. Such a large number of students can no longer be supported by a single teacher in a classroom. The proposed submission demonstrates...

The synthesis of child speech presents challenges both in the collection of data and in the building of a synthesiser from that data. Because only limited data can be collected, and the domain of that data is constrained, it is difficult to ob-tain the type of phonetically-balanced corpus usually used in speech synthesis. As a consequence, building...

Reading and writing are core competencies of any society. In Germany, international and national comparative studies such as PISA or IGLU have shown that around 25% of German school children do not reach the minimal competence level necessary to function effectively in society by the age of 15. Automized diagnosis and spelling tutoring of children...

Reading and writing are core competencies of any society. In Germany, international and national comparative studies such as P ISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) or P IRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study -IGLU in German) have shown that around 25% of German school children do not reach the minimal competence leve...

In this article, we focus on keyword detection in children's speech as it is needed in voice command systems. We use the FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus which contains emotionally colored spontaneous children's speech recorded in a child-robot interaction scenario ...

The synthesis of child speech presents challenges both in the collection of data and in the building of a synthesizer from that data. We chose to build a statistical parametric synthesizer using the hidden Markov model (HMM)-based system HTS, as this technique has previously been shown to perform well for limited amounts of data, and for data colle...

This study compares two different methodologies for produc- ing data-driven synthesis of child speech from existing systems that have been trained on the speech of adults. On one hand, an existing statistical parametric synthesiser is transformed us- ing model adaptation techniques, informed by linguistic and prosodic knowledge, to the speaker char...

Majoreconomicupheavalscanhavethesortofe?ectthatSchumpeterforesaw60 yearsagoascreativedestruction.Inscienceandtechnology,equivalentupheavals resultfromeitherscienti?crevolutions(asobservedbyKuhn)ortheintroduction of what Christensen calls disruptive technologies. And in software engineering, there has been no technology more disruptive than outsourc...

Even today, software projects still suffer from delays and budget overspending. The causes for this problem are compounded when the project team is distributed across different locations and generally attributed to the decreasing ability to communicate well (due to cultural, linguistic, and physical distance). Many projects, especially those with o...

The 16 papers in this special section focus on speaker and language recognition. The advances reported here expand the scope of practical applications for this technology by reducing constraints, such as allowing greater variations in channel conditions.

Offshore software development has become one of the prominent software engineering trends in recent years. Many software development projects are switching to offshore sites due to global and economic reasons. This trend has resulted in the need for new tools and platforms to provide support for the challenges that are faced by collaborators in gl...

Distributed software projects are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry. Yet, software engineering education rarely graduates students with the necessary skills and hands-on experience that are particular to off-shore software development projects. Three key areas in successful off-shore software development projects are well documented in...

Automatic language identification of speech is the process by which the language of a digitized speech utterance is recognized by a computer. In this paper, we will describe the set of available cues for language identification of speech and discuss the different approaches to building working systems. This overview includes a range of historical a...

In this paper we apply a study of the structure of the English language towards an automatic syllabification algorithm and consequently an automatic foreign accent identification system. Any word consists of syllables which can in turn be divided into its constituents. Elements within the syllable structure are defined according to both their posit...

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : xiv 1 Introduction : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 1 1.1 From Speech Recognition to Language Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1.1 Acoustic-Phonetic Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.1.2 A...

This paper studies the structure of foreign-accented read En- glish speech. A system for accent identification is constructed by combining linguistic theory with statistical analysis. Results demonstrate that the linguistic theory is reflected in real speech data and its application improves accent identification. The work discussed here combines a...

Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering Automatic Language Identification involves analyzing language-specific features in speech to determine the language of an utterance without regard to topic, speaker or length of speech. Although much progress has been made in recent years, language identification systems have not been built on detailed underly...

A variety of approaches to language identification, based on (a) acoustic features, (b) broad-category segmentation, and (c) fine phonetic classification, are introduced. These approaches are evaluated in terms of their ability to distinguish between English and Japanese utterances spoken over a telephone channel. It is found that the best performa...

This paper presents an analysis of the phonemic language identification system introduced in [5], now extended to recognize German in addition to English and Japanese. In this system language identification is based on features derived from a superset of phonemes of all three languages. As we increase the number of languages, the need to reduce the...

We describe a system designed to recognize the language of an utterance spoken by any native speaker over the telephone. Our previous work based on language-specific phonemes [5] is extended to include sequences of all lengths of language-independent speech units. These units are derived by clustering phonemes across all languages in the system (Hi...

We describe a system designed to recognize the language of an utterance spoken by any native speaker over the telephone. The current approach extends our previous work on language identification based on sequences of speech units (K. Berkling and E. Barnard, 1995). To improve performance we extend this work to allow for inaccurate matches of such s...

This paper presents an analysis of the phonemic language identification system introduced previously (see Eurospeech, vol.2, p.1307, 1993), now extended to recognize German in addition to English and Japanese. In this system language identification is based on features derived from a superset of phonemes of all three languages. As we increase the n...