ISiCLE research project

Interoperability and Social Media in Computer Science Learning Environments

The focus of this project is to improve the current state of educational systems in Aalto University. Currently, courses provide separate educational systems supporting teachers and learners. The first goal of this project is to make it easier for other universities to take these systems into use. A further vision of this project is to provide a uniform environment for teachers and students by combining multiple educational systems into one platform. Another aspect of research is to provide social media aspects to learning environments.

Partners of the project are Department of Computer Science and Engineering from School of Science and The Media Lab from School of Art and Design.

The duration of the project is from 2011 until 2014. The project is funded (200.000 EUR) by Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation (Teknologiateollisuuden 100-vuotissäätiö).

Publications

• L. Haaranen and T. Lehtinen. 2015. Teaching Git on the Side: Version Control System as a Course Platform. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 87-92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2729094.2742608
• L. Haaranen, L. Hakulinen, P. Ihantola and A. Korhonen, "Software Architectures for Implementing Achievement Badges - Practical Experiences," Teaching and Learning in Computing and Engineering (LaTiCE), 2014 International Conference on, Kuching, 2014, pp. 41-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LaTiCE.2014.16
• V. Karavirta, P. Ihantola, and T. Koskinen, “Service-oriented approach to improve interoperability of e-learning systems,” in 13th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2013, pp. 341–345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICALT.2013.105
• Lassi Haaranen, Petri Ihantola, Lasse Hakulinen, and Ari Korhonen. 2014. How (not) to introduce badges to online exercises. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538921

PhD Theses

• Tapio Auvinen. (2015). Educational Technologies for Supporting Self-Regulated Learning in Online Learning Environments. (Doctoral dissertation)
• Juha Helminen. (2014). Supporting Acquisition of Programming Skills in Introductory Programming Education. (Doctoral dissertation).

Meetings

• ISICLE meeting 9.11.2013. Discussions and demonstrations about virtual learning environments
• EduFeeder - Organizing blog based courses
• AVLE - Aalto Virtual Learning Environment
• A+, EdX, and Goblin demos
• fle4.aalto.fi - WP plugin for scaffolded discussion forums
• Eliademy.com - future European MOOCs provider
• LeTech and LeGroup demo and discuss different platforms 3.10.2012
• Collaboration continued in MOOC Suomi network

Software

• A+ is a learning management system (LMS) focused around interoperability. So far (Spring 2016), it has been used in 20 courses in Aalto University, 2 courses in Tampere University of Technology and 1 course in A°bo Akademi. https://github.com/Aalto-LeTech/a-plus
• Daechschen is a widget for A+ to award students achievement badges based on their performance in A+. https://github.com/LassiHaaranen/daechschen

Project Leaders

• Lauri Malmi
• Ari Korhonen
• Teemu Leinonen