su White

• University of Southampton

Analysing learners’ behaviours in MOOCs has been used to identify predictive features associated with positive outcomes in engagement and learning success. Early methods predominantly analysed numerical features of behaviours such as the page views, video views, and assessment grades. Analysing extracted numeric features using baseline machine lear...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have a great potential for sustainable education. Millions of learners annually enrol on MOOCs designed to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and international student population. Participants’ backgrounds vary by factors including age, education, location, and first language. MOOC authors address conseque...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer online courses, in which participants with widely diverse cultural and educational backgrounds can study. These participants may have very different goals and expectations of their courses. Unfortunately, MOOCs do not always meet the needs and expectations of participants. In response, critiquing the static...

MOOCs offer world-widely accessible online content typically including videos, readings, quizzes along with social communication tools on a platform that en- ables participants to learn at their own pace. The number of learners who sign up and attend the courses are exponentially growing. Consequently, MOOC platforms generate a large amount of data...

p>In most of widely used distance education platforms which are named as MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) language of lectures are English, but even so, they have participants from a lot of different countries. This situation causes differences in learners usage behaviors and performances. In our previous studies we tried to divide the users into...

Student performance estimation, measurement and improvement are concepts that have gained importance in recent years. Measurement of learning performance are one of the most popular topics in educational data mining and learning analytics research areas. 75% of the courses on massive open online course platforms(MOOCs) are offered in English. The g...

In this study, we aim to analyse English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a First Language (EFL) MOOC participants' engagements in a MOOC. We aim to find out key points which directly effect learners' dropout and performance in MOOCs. We worked on a FutureLearn data which is provided by the University of Southampton. The course is Understa...

In this study, we aim to analyse English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a First Language (EFL) MOOC participants’ engagements in a MOOC. We aim to find out key points which directly effect learners’ dropout and performance in MOOCs. We worked on a FutureLearn data which is provided by the University of Southampton. The course is Understa...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are making a noticeable impact in Higher education Institutions (HEIs) at a global scale. Every year, new universities incorporate MOOCs in their educational catalogues, and the number of courses on offer has not stopped growing since the launch of the first MOOCs in 2008. Data collected by the team of the Class...

In 2015, 35 million learners participated online in 4,200 MOOCs organised by over 500 universities. Learning designers orchestrate MOOC content to engage learners at scale and retain interest by carefully mixing videos, lectures, readings, quizzes, and discussions. Universally, far fewer people actually participate in MOOCs than originally sign up...

TRACKING COLLECTIVE LEARNER FOOTPRINTS: AGGREGATE ANALYSIS OF MOOC LEARNER DEMOGRAPHICS AND ACTIVITY A. Wilde, M. León Urrutia, S. White University of Southampton (UNITED KINGDOM) Most MOOC platforms collect learner activity and demographics, and record them in datasets for their analysis. Cross-analysis of learner activity against demographic fe...

Higher Education magazines have echoed the rapid spread of MOOCs in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) since 2012. In their pages, MOOC related articles are proliferating. The focus of such articles has often been the disruptive nature as well as the survival of this new form of open online education, especially the first years. However, there is...

The advent and rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have brought many issues to the area of educational technology. Researchers in the field have been addressing these issues such as pedagogical quality of MOOCs, high attrition rates, and sustainability of MOOCs. However, MOOCs personalisation has not been subject of the wide discussions aro...

The Southampton University/British Council “Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching” Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) attracted a large number of enrolments, including many language teachers. The platform and course is designed to promote social learning at scale. This article reports on the implementation and preliminary analysis of a princ...

High attrition rates are one of the biggest concerns in MOOCs. One of the possible causes may be learners' lack of interactions and low levels of participations in MOOCs online discussions. Research to measure and predict recurrent interactions of learners in MOOCs online discussions has the potential to gain inside into the likely impact on the at...

MOOC learners are able to share responsibilities for their learning. In the same note, course mentors play an important role in improving learning outcomes, assessment and enhancing learning activities. The aim of this paper is to determine some methodologies and approaches that can guide and help course mentors in teaching and management their MOO...

Researchers in the field of educational technology are paying huge attention to the widespread adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the study of learning online. MOOCs are discussed in many angles including pedagogy, learning sustainability, and business model. However, there are very few discussions around MOOCs personalisation. In t...

The " Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching " MOOC produced by the University of Southampton/British Council attracted a large number of enrollments (almost 30,000 active participants) and incorporated a design structure aimed to promote social learning. This combination of high participant numbers and 'learning as conversation' approach (F...

MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are gradually capturing the public imagination. From experimentalist beginnings in Canada, platforms ranging from ‘homebrew’ to professional have emerged, and although there has been much focus on US platforms, the phenomenon has grown on a worldwide scale. One feature of the early generations of MOOCs has been t...

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent introduction to the palette of educational offerings yet in a short time they have become the subject of massive interest and hype. There are those that predict that these free courses are the first ripple in the coming wave of disruption that the web and on-line education will cause to traditional...

Within the current educational landscape, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have stimulated extensive interest and hype in a short time. It has been asserted that these open courses are no more than a prelude to the disruption that traditional Higher Education Institutions will experience from the growth of on-line education. Meanwhile, institu...

Many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education now accept the view that a conception of personal learning environments provides the most realistic and workable perspective of learners' interactions with and use of technology. This view may not be reflected in the behaviour of those parts of a univer...

On-line and blended learning is much fêted, particularly by university management as part of the solution to many issues currently facing higher education. However, experienced academics lack examples of suitable pedagogically engaging on-line activities, and remain sceptical or resistant to change. This paper describes a case study of an initiativ...

Institutional pressures to make optimal use of lecture halls and classrooms can be powerful motivators to identify resources to develop technology enhanced learning approaches to traditional curricula. From the academic’s perspective, engaging students in active learning and reducing the academic workload are important and complementary drivers....

Teaching professional issues to computer scientists presents academics with the two challenges. Firstly there is the issue of motivating students whose primary driver is their technical specialism. Secondly; how to persuade learners who may have chosen their field of studies with the explicit preference to avoid anything which is textual or discurs...

Modules in professional issues sometimes sit a little awkwardly in the computer science curriculum. They can be seen as an island of discursive teaching coming from what Biglan might have termed the 'soft applied' field of study. In computer science the more usual context is of knowledge and skills based learning and activities of a 'hard pure/hard...

The problem of teaching introductory programming is a recurrent one which has interested and challenged computer scientists over the years. It has evoked differing philosophies, has motivated new languages and fuelled 'wars' between supporters of different languages and approaches. Much of the discourse surrounding these practices dates from a peri...

Universities increasingly promote their values, educational strengths and standing in order to clearly set themselves apart from fellow institutions. In recent years putting students at the centre of learning has become a prominent theme. Equally, graduates require sophisticated skill-sets which demonstrate digital literacies appropriate to the tho...

Many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education now accept the view that a conception of personal learning environments provides the most realistic and workable perspective of learners’ interactions with and use of technology. This view may not be reflected in the behaviour of those parts of a univer...

Universities are increasingly seeking to establish individual identities which set them apart from fellow institutions promoting their values educational strengths and standing. In recent years putting students at the centre of learning has become an increasingly prominent theme. Furthermore an increasing role is being played by technology as an in...

This paper discusses the role and place of Web Science in the computing disciplines. It provides an account of work which has been established towards defining an initial curriculum for Web Science. It presents and analyses plans for future curriculum developments utilizing novel methods to support and elaborate curriculum definition and review. Th...

This paper discusses the role and place of Web Science in the computing disciplines. It provides an account of work which has been established towards defining an initial curriculum for Web Science. It presents and analyses plans for future curriculum developments utilizing novel methods to support and elaborate curriculum definition and review. Th...

Is it possible to create an institutional personal learning environment? This question has recently triggered considerable debate amongst those concerned with implementing learning and teaching technologies within higher education, For some the argument lies in the fundamental (linguistic) paradox of claiming that the institutional can be personal....

Academics expend a large amount of time and effort to sustain and enhance the motivation of undergraduate students. Typically based on a desire to ensure that all students achieve their full potential, approaches are based on an understanding that students who are highly motivated will learn more. Furthermore, institutional rewards accrue from effe...

The far-reaching impact of the Web on society is widely recognised. The interdisciplinary study of this impact has crystallised in the field of study known as Web Science. However, defining an agreed, shared understanding of what constitutes web science requires complex negotiation and translations of understandings across component disciplines, na...

Academics expend a large amount of time and effort to sustain and enhance the motivation of undergraduate students. Typically based on a desire to ensure that all students achieve their full potential, approaches are based on an understanding that students who are highly motivated will learn more. Furthermore, institutional rewards accrue from effe...

The far-reaching impact of Web on society is widely recognised and acknowledged. The interdisciplinary study of this impact has crystallised in the field of study known as Web Science. However, defining an agreed, shared understanding of what constitutes Web Science requires complex negotiation and translations of understandings across component di...

Rapidly evolving technological change is necessarily accompanied by matched evolution of individual practice amongst users. In a connected world, the users are universal, and students entering universities may arrive with a mix of sophisticated and naïve approaches to using technology to support their learning. The University of Southampton has des...

Is it possible to create an institutional personal learning environment? This question has triggered considerable debate amongst those concerned with implementing learning and teaching technologies within higher education, Rapid technological change is necessarily accompanied by matched evolution of individual practice amongst users. At universitie...

Many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education now accept the view that a conception of personal learning environments provides a the most realistic and workable perspective of learners’ interactions with and use of technology. This view may not be reflected in the behaviour of those parts of a univ...

Faculty invest considerable effort to provide students with formative feedback. Educational research has endorsed the value of a clearly articulated approach when providing student feedback known as `assessment for learning'. In order to ascertain whether claims associated with `assessment for learning' hold true in the engineering disciplines, a t...

Faculty invest considerable effort to provide students with formative feedback. Educational research has endorsed the value of a clearly articulated approach when providing student feedback known as ‘assessment for learning’. In order to ascertain whether claims associated with ‘assessment for learning’ hold true in the engineering disciplines, a t...

The understanding that personal learning environments provide a more realistic and workable perspective of learners’ interactions with and use of technology has gained widespread acceptance across many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education. However in universities the service which normally pur...

Over the last few years we have been working to reinvent Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key pa...

It would be unlikely for any first year programming class to be solely composed of novices with the same aptitude for learning. We all have students who arrive with a range of abilities and backgrounds. We have students who barely know their way around a keyboard and those who have programmed professionally; this starting knowledge is also no indic...

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilita...

The potential impact of widespread use of linked-data in Higher Education is immense. Everyday understandings of the power derived by placing raw data in the public domain is growing. It promises to transform education, interconnecting administrative data, enriching and embellishing teaching resources while providing tools and resources for learner...

Effective planning is essential to any collaborative activity. However, in practice, the co-authoring process can become derailed from an initial plan of action due to unforeseen circumstances. To be effective, the process must be capable of adapting in ways that are efficient and avoid conflict. We analyze the experiences of users involved in fift...

An update of the work of EdShare, institutional learning and teaching repository at the University of Southampton

The relationship between research and teaching has possible benefits and inherent tensions. Exploring the potentially beneficial relationship is of interest and possible value to faculty, students, and stakeholders. Much of the existing literature has described approaches using a vocabulary derived from the soft/applied social science fields of stu...

Supporting and sustaining the motivation of our most able and experienced first year undergraduates in introductory programming modules is as important as providing a supportive environment for novices who face a greater and more difficult challenge of mastering their first programming language. Designing and integrating additional challenges into...

The value of semantic technologies in the context of learning and teaching has often been associated with the use of reasoning to support learning processes. This paper discusses the value of linked data in addressing data interoperability and integration across higher education institutions and repositories. This value is related to higher educati...

The relationship between research and teaching has possible benefits and inherent tensions. Exploring the potentially beneficial relationship is of interest and possible value to faculty, students, and stakeholders. Much of the existing literature has described approaches using a vocabulary derived from the soft/applied social science fields of stu...

This paper discusses how to ensure that students attain professional values important to the workplace by integrating them into computing curricula. It describes a survey of the attitudes of students, faculty and professionals in computing towards the teaching and assessment of such values. The results show that these groups share a set of professi...

This report presents and discusses the findings of the SemTech (Semantic Technologies for Learning and Teaching) project that was funded by JISC and commenced its activities in September 2008. SemTech addressed the following questions: • What are semantic technologies? • Which tools that make use of semantic technologies are, or could be, relev...

The relationship between research and teaching has possible benefits and inherent tensions. Exploring the potentially beneficial relationship is of interest and possible value to faculty, students, and stakeholders. Much of the existing literature has described approaches using a vocabulary derived from the soft/applied social science fields of stu...

Effective planning is essential to any collaborative activity. However, in practice, the co-authoring process can become derailed from an initial plan of action due to unforeseen circumstances. To be effective, the process must be capable of adapting in ways that are efficient and avoid conflict. We analyze the experiences of users involved in fif...

Effective collaborative authoring techniques require tools that consider the social aspects of collaboration in addition to the technical aspects. Collaborative authoring is fundamentally different to individual writing because of the communications that must inevitably take place between team members.Despite the fact that collaborative authoring h...

A significant challenge that faces any teacher of introductory programming is the diversity of the class. At one extreme there will be students who have never programmed before, while at the other there will be students who have many years experience of programming. Handling this diversity is difficult. The temptation for the instructor is often t...

The University of Southampton was one of a group of UK universities to benchmark e-learning in 2007. We used the eLearning Maturity Model (eMM) developed by Marshall at the University of Victoria, New Zealand. The findings of the benchmarking confirmed that the current version of the University’s eLearning Strategy had identified a comprehensive s...

At the University of Southampton, in the UK, we have been developing the Research Repository (e-Prints Soton) since 2005, to showcase the research output and make it more accessible. As a significant next step, the University has taken the strategic decision to develop a repository for educational materials. In developing EdShare at Southampton, we...

The relationship between research and teaching has possible benefits and inherent tensions. It is a recurrent topic of discussion by faculty including engineering educators. Exploring a potentially beneficial relationship and is of interest and possible value to engineering faculty, our students, and our stakeholders. Institutions and departments...

At the University of Southampton, in the UK, we have been developing the Research Repository (e-Prints Soton) since 2005, to showcase the research output and make it more accessible. As a significant next step, the University has taken the strategic decision to develop a repository for educational materials. In developing EdShare at Southampton, we...

See full text at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-317/ Experiences of Technology Enhanced Learning: What Went Wrong? Su White and Hugh C Davis Learning from the past: TEL implementation 1997 and 2007 Stephen Brown Distilling lessons from across different types of e-learning interventions Gráinne Conole What went wrong: A programme manager's perspective...

Knowledge of the actions of other users is essential to the design of an effective collaborative authoring system. The reasons for this are rooted in the concept of awareness of individual and group activities. This research presents CAWS, a collaborative authoring system that builds upon several areas of research including studies of co-authoring...

Finding effective means of meeting students' varied needs during introductory programming classes is a perpetual challenge. Maintaining motivation and a sufficient level of engagement across an undergraduate group with diverse prior experience is not a simple task. Claims for successful approaches include forms of differentiated teaching and paired...

Many institutions make claims in strategy documents and official publications that students will receive an education which is research-led, research-informed, or guided by the scholarship of teaching and learning. Academics who teach regularly experience at first-hand the sometimes conflicting demands of research, teaching and supporting learning....

Computer technology has been harnessed for education in UK universities ever since the first computers for research were installed at ten selected sites in 1957. Subsequently real costs have fallen dramatically. Processing power has increased; network and communications infrastructure has proliferated; and information has become unimaginably access...

It would be unlikely for any first year programming class to be solely composed of novices. We all have students with a range of abilities, and this generates challenges as to the best way in which to manage and teach the class. The students at the top need to be enthused whilst we provide extra help to the students at the bottom, and try not to de...

In this paper we present a new approach to enabling pedagogically sound reuse and re-purposing of online learning objects in a community of practice. The lack of specific software for non-technical users inspired the development of an innovative toolkit. The toolkit allows users to edit learning objects collaboratively in a Wiki-type editing enviro...

Computing, Computer Science and Information Science are the nearest UK equivalents of the European Informatics degree. Informatics is a term more often associated with research or multidisciplinary applications of Computing. Barely five percent of UK departments concerned with the discipline actually use the word Informatics in their title, and pot...

It is difficult for a student to learn about programs and to understand the rational that went into the development of the parts that led to the whole. Tools for explaining this essentially dynamic process are limited and typically static in nature, making it difficult for students to understand how it was developed, or where to start. This paper p...

A preliminary survey of 680 UK school pupils was conducted in order to get an understanding of how experiences of computing out of school and at school influence the perception of computing careers and future career plans in computing. The study found that pupils perceive themselves in IT careers. This poster will demonstrate how these experiences...

A preliminary survey of 680 UK school pupils was conducted in order to get an understanding of how experiences of computing out of school and at school influence the perception of computing careers and future career plans in computing. The study found that pupils perceive themselves in IT careers. This poster will demonstrate how these experiences...

A preliminary survey of 680 UK school pupils was conducted in order to get an understanding of how experiences of computing out of school and at school influence the perception of computing careers and future career plans in computing. The study found that pupils perceive themselves in IT careers. This poster will demonstrate how these experiences...

Crucial to effective collaborative writing is knowledge of what other people are doing and have done, what meaningful changes are made to a document, who is editing each section of a document and why. This is because awareness of individual and group activities is critical to successful collaboration. This paper presents the problems that surround...

Knowledge of the actions of other users is essential to the design of an effective collaborative authoring system. The reasons for this are rooted in the concept of awareness of individual and group activities. This paper identifies the most common problems in collaborative authoring, and a prototype system, CAWS, is presented as a solution to thes...

Educational technology in higher education has not managed to match the ubiquity of technology in everyday life. Is this because higher education institutions are inherently resistant to change? The organization, structure, culture and climate of higher education institutions reflect the wider agendas of current and predominant practice. They may p...

The e-learning community is beginning to amass a great deal of experience of successful practice, but typically final project reports and associated papers concentrate only on the successful outcomes. There has been very little published on the innovations that failed or the unexpected and unwanted outcomes of such projects. This experiences paper...

Many different teaching methods are used to support learning in higher education. Research into the relationship between the knowledge traditions of fields of study and their most appropriate teaching methods identifies clear differences between the appropriate which are the most suitable in different disciplines. Increasingly, blended approaches t...

The uptake and diffusion of the use of learning technologies in UK Higher Education is an instance of the adoption of change. There has been considerable research into the ways in which the uptake and diffusion of innovation can bring about change processes. This work has identified the importance of barriers and drivers to change as a part of the...

It is difficult for a student to learn how to program and to build an understanding of the rationale which underpins the development of a program's component- parts. Conventional tools and approaches for explaining this essentially dynamic process are limited and typically static in nature. This paper presents AnnAnn, an animated code annotator, wh...

This paper presents research into ways that e-learning can be integrated into conventional higher education teaching. It examines how appropriate techniques and technologies may be selected, adapted and combined for effectiveness, to accommodate the preferences or needs associated with disciplinary differences. The research reviews existing literat...

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology is a vocabulary for mapping social networks. In this paper we propose an extension to FOAF in order to allow it to model learners and their social networks. We analyse FOAF alongside different learner modeling standards and specifications, and based on this analysis we introduce a taxonomy of the different fea...

The crucial importance of first experiences in shaping future success has been widely acknowledged. Creating the best foundations in large cohorts of students from diverse backgrounds presents special problems of its own. But a secure foundation can enhance student achievement and improve retention - and the students may even have fun too. Research...

Traditional teaching methods have acknowledged limitations. Lectures may be used to transmit information efficiently, but often fail to motivate students to engage with the subject. Coursework assessments and examinations may lack authenticity and thus fail to help students develop 'real world' skills even though they ensure technical competence.Th...