We have been using the system (panta rhei) within the General Computer Science lecture for undergraduate Computer Science students since September 2007. Currently the system is only tested for Firefox, however, a lot of first year students were using Internet Explorer which caused a lot of frustration in the first week. Moreover, the first javascript plugins were not running properly on all platforms.

By November 10th 2007, 70 students have been registered for the GenCS course: 68 students have signed up for the system, from which 27 posted in the forum. From 297 overall-postings, 136 have been created by the students and 158 by the 7 teaching assistants and the professor. Moreover, 30 postings were referencing slides and assignments, i.e. they have been created using panta rhei’s annotation feature. 46 postings were initialized in the panta rhei forum. 221 postings were replies. Students were also typing their postings with the available types: 13 advices, 51 answers, 14 changes, 34 comments, 1 example, 29 explanations, and 114 questions were posted. 5 threads were posted in the scope “slides”, 45 threads in the scope “assignment” and 47 in the scope “news”, where as the latter also subsumes postings from “slides” and “assignments” with the type: “news”.

By December 3rd 2007, 70 students have been registered for the GenCS course: 69 students have signed up for the system, from which 34 posted in the forum. From 446 overall-postings, 226 have been created by the students and 208 by the 7 teaching assistants and the professor. Moreover, 63 postings were referencing slides and assignments, i.e. they have been created using panta rhei’s annotation feature. 44 postings were initialized in the panta rhei forum. 339 postings were replies. Students were also typing their postings with the available types: 20 advices, 89 answers, 14 changes, 51 comments, 1 example, 32 explanations, and 189 questions were posted. 5 threads were posted in the scope “slides”, 72 threads in the scope “assignment” and 56 in the scope “news”, where as the latter also subsumes postings from “slides” and “assignments” with the type: “news”.

The increase of postings from 297 to 446 at the end of the semester can be explained with the increasing difficulty of assignment as well as questions concerning the midterm and ?nal exam. Moreover, the integration of the HTML editor TinyMCE [Tin07] as well as the eMail notification feature, tremendously increase the usability and acceptance of the system by our students. Looking at the statistics, students ?rst primarily used the forum, but lately also made us of the annotation feature. The rating feature of the slides was not used at all. Moreover, students mainly posted questions and answers, but also commented on the lecture material. Examples were not posted. The superior number of question is most likely a consequence of making “question” the default type. In particular, students were interested in discussing the assignments, only 5 forum threads were referencing the lecture notes. This can be explained by the rather poor quality of the automatically generated slides, which still needs to be improved. In consequence, although students prefer the online material, they are still referring to the PDFs to prepare for the exams.

In the next semester, panta rhei will be extended with a sophisticated math editor, we will integrate the WIRIS math editor [Wir07] as a graphical solution as well as implement a plugin for TinyMCE, which allows students to enter math in a LTEX like syntax. In addition, we are currently preparing the course material to be used in the mmlkit conversion. This will allows us to publish much more readable and consistent slides next semester and hopefully increase the student’s interaction with the online material. The latter will also be promoted by our work on an improved annotation and rating paradigm.

I would like to thank Alen Stojanov for his efforts in improving the panta rhei implementation. Moreover, I want to thank all GenCS1 students for their patience and feedback on the system. I also like to thank the GenCS TAs, especially Ankur Modi and Christoph Lange, for their numerous postings that made the system more attractive. Last but not least, I would like to thank Prof. Michael Kohlhase for providing the semantically enriched GenCS content as well as for his support during the development and deployment of the system.

I am looking forward to improving panta rhei for the next case study, which will be launched in February 2008. I am especially happy that Alen Stojanov and I will be supported by Jakob Uecker, who recently joint the development team!!!