1.
Design of Technology Enhanced Learning and Assessment
of an Online Course for the Final Year Undergraduates
S. H. D. Senanayake #1
, K. P. Hewagamage #2
#
University of Colombo School of Computing
Colombo 07
Sri Lanka
shd@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk
kph@ucsc.cmb.ac.lk
HE university education system is a type of tertiary
education which is now mainly focused on student-
centered learning and moving away from the teacher-
centered learning slowly. University of Colombo School of
Computing (UCSC) is a higher educational institute associated
with University of Colombo in Sri Lanka offering
undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs in Computer
Science and Information Systems. This study is conducted
considering final year students who are following a course
called Contemporary Topics in Information Systems in the
Information Systems degree programme. In the faculty, most of
courses are still being conducted through face-to-face (f2f)
teaching environment and it is backed by the Virtual Learning
Environment (VLE) of the faculty at
http://ugvle.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk which is an online collaborative
teaching and learning platform that enhances e-learning by
providing the virtual access to the course contents,
assignments, university news forum, other resources, etc.
created using the Learning Management System known as
Moodle.
In the curriculum development of the degree program, it was
discussed to promote the lifelong learning among final year
students and minimize the f2f interaction to promote the self
and peer learning activities as much as possible in all courses.
At the same time, to introduce some online courses to promote
peer-to-peer learning interaction through online learning
environment. This paper is based on a course which was
introduced on this latter requirement, and it is completely
different from other courses in the program. Simply, there is no
f2f interaction or teaching in the course and students were
asked to participate online discussions based on the topics in
the course. When evaluating the students in the course, both
online ratings and their participation of activities are considered
to decide the grade. The rest of this abstract will briefly
describe the design of learning and assessment of the course
carried out through VLE of the faculty. Finally a basic analysis
is carried out based on the forum participation throughout the
academic year.
The selected course is conducted as a fully online course,
which enhances the awareness among the final year students on
current technologies, trends and hot topics. Although the course
is conducted online, the assessment is accompanied in a
blended environment since the students have to take part in
peer discussions at the end of the course as well as online
discussions. The main objective of this course is to practice the
students to search the information from electronic media such
as e-books, research papers, online articles and reports, or
offline media such as newspapers, textbooks, etc. by
themselves on the relevant topics and share the knowledge
among peers through the discussion forums which enhances the
student-centered learning. At the end of the year the students
are evaluated and graded according to the effort they have
made in the course as the final assessment.
Fig. 1. A discussion forum in the Virtual Learning Environment
T

2.
Fig. 2. Forum participation of the students throughout the academic year
In this course the student interaction is happened through
online discussion forums. The course is running through the
whole academic year and there are ten topics in different areas
to be discussed by the students. At the beginning of the week,
the teacher announces a topic and the topic is going through
two week period of time. During the first week, each student is
required to start two discussions by posting an issue or any
other finding relevant to the announced topic before the
deadline. During the second week, they have to participate in a
discussion as a thread based on the postings that they have
created within the first week by replying with constructive
comments as much as possible. Fig. 1 shows an interface of the
VLE with the postings and the replies that the students have
involved regarding one discussion topic. Also, the students can
rate the posts with a scale of 1-10 according to their estimation
about the ideas and the quality of the posting. At the end of the
year each student has to publish a magazine article individually
and a poster as a group based on a selected discussion topic.
The assessment and the evaluation criteria of the course has
been divided into three categories: 60% is given for the
continuous forum participation, 20% is given for the magazine
article and the other 20% is given for the poster. Therefore the
course evaluation is based on 80% online activities and 20%
blended activities. The requirements for obtaining the relevant
percentage for the postings are, that the postings should be
relevant, valid and interesting. Also they can use images,
audios and videos to explain the posting. At the end of the
posting they have to cite the work properly by giving the
references. The average of the student rating is calculated for
the final marks and the teacher also rate the student’s work
based on the given criteria. The magazine articles are evaluated
by the teacher and the posters are available for the public
community such as other lecturers and the students to evaluate.
Since this course is a compulsory for all fourth year
undergraduates, the sample size of the selected user group is
twenty students. By analyzing the quality of the postings and
replies, it is highlighted that the students are gradually
improving when engaging the discussion forums continuously.
It seems that the searching interest and the ability of continuing
and feeding a discussion is increased as well. When
considering the forum participation and the replies to all the ten
topics, Fig. 2 gives some valuable results.
According to Fig. 2, it shows that the students’ involvement
is low at the beginning of the course. This might happen due to
the unawareness of the flow of the course or this might be the
first fully online course they have involved without the
instructions of a physical teacher. But when they are getting
used to it, they do reply with more constructive and interesting
manner. However the graph shows that, at the end again the
student involvement decreases. One of the key reasons behind
the graph declining may be the high workload on the students
during the semester examinations and the other academic work.
Due to that, they might fail to manage the time to involve with
this online course as earlier. Also when considering the
variation of the quantity of postings and replies made by the
students, the involvement for some topics such as ‘Brain
Computing for Mental Health’, ‘Use of ICT in Automobile
Industry’ and ‘Mobile Cloud Computing’ are higher than the
other topics.
Since there is no f2f interaction between the teacher and the
students, the instructions, guidelines and news are also
published on the VLE by the teacher. Therefore the teacher’s
role throughout this course is a facilitator. The students are
searching in-depth knowledge about different areas in the
Information Technology field by themselves and conduct the
discussions as threads.
At present most of the courses at UCSC are conducted in a
fully f2f environment or in a blended environment. This course
is significant since it is conducted in a totally online
environment without a physical teacher as in the classroom
education. The ultimate goal of conducting these types of
courses is to enhance student-centered learning by promoting
online education. At the end of the course, the student feedback
is going be collected by giving a small survey questionnaire.
Based on the survey results, an analysis can be carried out to
get the students’ opinion towards the course. The final grades
of the students are also analyzed to measure the effectiveness
of this online course. Those results will be more useful to carry
out future enhancement related to these types of courses.
Therefore, it is clear that the use of technology enhanced
learning and assessment techniques for undergraduates is a
better way for the course modules for achieving student-
centered learning within the traditional learning environment. It
is more effective and efficient way of giving in-depth
knowledge to the university students only with a guidance of
the teacher. By using these types of e-assessments in academic
environment will be helpful to develop the curriculum of the
undergraduate degree programs.