What are best practices when using eContent in courses? How should it be chosen? Organised? Made available? What kind? What works best?

Experiences with augmenting lectures with online materials

With the ever-increasing globalisation of higher education, learning institutions have to cope with culturally induced differences in prerequisite knowledge and learning practices. This is especially pronounced at Jacobs University Bremen with an international student body: 1100 students from 88 countries on April 8, 2008. We have observed that students struggled in our General Computer Science course (GenCS) due to different educational and cultural backgrounds, leading to unexpected peaks in the number of failing grades and a concentration of nationalities. We assume that our students are capable of passing the course, but eventually give up when they are not able to map their previous mathematical background and practices to our course. In this situation, we want to augment lectures with online material that can be adapted to individual user needs.

For the adaptation, we have focus on the adaptation of mathematical notations in lecture materials (represented in content-oriented document formats, such as OMDoc). Lecturers are able to specify the notations for the course. Their selection is used to guide the conversion from the content-oriented representation of notations (e.g. in OpenMath or Content MathML) into the web-accessible Presentation MathML format. We have applied our notation conversion workflow to the lecture notes of our GenCS course. With a total of approx. 1000 pages, covering diverse topics such as naïve set theory, semantics of functional programs, propositional logic, boolean algebra, graph theory, digital circuits, and logic programming, the GenCS corpus provides a sufficiently large and diverse source to test the coverage of our notation conversion approach. The lecture materials are authored in a semantic extension of LaTeX (sTeX) and can be converted to a content-oriented XML format, in particular, OMDoc+OpenMath, using the LaTeXML conversion process by Bruce Miller. We were able to generate 2206 notations for the GenCS slides and have tremendously improved the Presentation MathML output for the embedded OpenMath notations. For example, we support the automatic rendering of brackets: no brackets are missing and all brackets are consistently either left our or left in, a task that we have so far not achieved with traditional manual authoring of LaTeX or Presentation MathML.

The content-oriented representation of our lecture material allows us to generate scripts for various output formats (PDF and XHTML). The web-accessible slides (in XHTML) are displayed our online system (panta rhei), which offers students an additional opportunity to discuss their assignments and exams next to the face-2-face lecture and the tutorials. Instead of setting up an ordinary forum, panta rhei facilitates the annotation of course content. Annotations are stored in a forum-like structure, allowing students, teaching assistant, and the professor to reply and link between postings. Moreover, the system integrates a rating option, allowing students to indicate which lecture material they found to hard and/ or where they would like to receive additional examples and exercises (see also 1 and 2).

All ratings and annotations are linked to a specific concept in the lecture: The OMDoc format allows authors to annotate the category of parts in their document, such as section, example, definition, etc. Each annotated part can be uniquely identify with an ID, which is preserved when converting OMDoc into XHTML (technically we use the xml:id attribute). These IDs are used to support users in annotating parts of the lecture material: User can select parts of the document and create a comment or question entry in the system. The interlinking with lecture concepts allows us to e.g. improve the search for previous discussion entries in the system.

For future work we want to extend our online platform to allow students to configure the notations in our online system according to their cultural and educational backgrounds.