E-learning in Course Operating Systems ˇ M. Fikar, L’. Cirka, M. Herceg, and M. Podmajerský Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia, Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology, e-mail:
[email protected], http://www.kirp.chtf.stuba.sk course: http://www.kirp.chtf.stuba.sk/moodle/course/view.php?id=204
Abstract This paper discusses teaching of fundamentals of UNIX operating systems at bachelor study level at Faculty of Chemical and Food Engineering, STU in Bratislava. It also summarises obtained results after 2 years of activity. The course exhibits a large number of study resources, animated interactive sessions, glossaries, quizzes for self-learning and for examination, excercises for presence and distance students and induvidualised assignments. The whole course is implemented in the open-source learning management system Moodle that further includes a detailed log capabilities, enhanced grading system, backup and restore facilities, calendars, etc.
1
Introduction
UNIX operating systems have a strong position in server areas and have been gaining attention in desktop environments in recent years. This is mainly due to success story of Linux that receives attention following its free and open source characteristics, a large variability, robustness, multiplatform usage, remote possibilities, etc. Other well knows UNIX systems include for example BSD, HP/UX, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX. Although there are differences between various UNIX operating systems, they do not differ significantly in the fundamentals. Therefore, it is possible to use the knowledge acquired and to work with any of them. This paper discusses e-learning in course “Operating Systems” at bachelor study level and summarises its new features compared to our previous work [3]. It also summarises obtained results after 2 years of use. The course has span of 39 hours, i.e. 1 hour of lectures and 2 hours of laboratory excercises per week. The average number of students in the course is about 100 and the number of teachers is 2. Students comprise two groups in Bratislava and in Humenne further divided
into presence and external students. There are significant differences between these groups. Hence, course layout and presentation have to respect all these conditions.
2 E-learning Platform There are two mail elearning platforms used at STU. The first one is implemented within university information system and provides basic functionality. The second is based on Moodle [2] and is installed at several faculties. Moodle is Open Source Software (under the GNU Public License) installed more than 70000 times over the world. It provides almost all basic modules needed (authorisation, presentations, assignments, quizzes, assessments, and discussion forums). What’s more, any other functionality can easily be implemented. This system includes a detailed log capabilities, enhanced grading system, backup and restore facilities, calendars, etc. This framework is designed very intuitively from the teacher’s point of view and does not impose any special requirements on the course creators, teachers, and students. At our university, is is coupled with the information system for authentification of users. Students at STU have a possibility of using elearning environment of the company Sun Microsystems [4]. While these elearning courses are usually of high standard, they cannot easily be integrated to our curricula because: • teacher cannot observe progress of the students, • quizzes are not integrated into the overall grading strategy, • customisation of the materials is hardly possible. The course has been implemented in the e-learning platform Moodle.
Figure 1: Main web interface of the course - teacher’s point of view
3
Organisation of the Course
The web page of the course is divided into three columns (Fig. 1). The left column contains administrative tasks and panels (organisation of students, access to activities, backup/restore, etc. The middle column shows actual content of the course. Finally, the right column depends on time and schedule of the course: it displays upcoming events, news, calendar, random item from glossary. In the teachers view, it adds attendances, mailing blocks, and marking block that alerts submissions not yet corrected. The course starts with summary, literature review, and motivation for the students. Then, it is divided into areas – weeks. The organisation of each week is described in the next section. The study material is organised in such a way that it can be both used in presence of students or in distance learning. The course is organised in laboratory with SunRay thin clients using operating system Solaris 10. Students can practise at home with live linux distributions runable directly from CD/DVD, for example Mandriva One, Ubuntu, Knoppix. There are also some remote UNIX servers available for exercises – students can connect to these using secure shell: ssh (from Unix) or Putty (from MS Windows). As student knowledge of UNIX at the beginning of the course is practically negligible, we do not encourage them to install it on their computer. All students need to follow weekly organisation of the course described below. However, external students have
the first meeting at the beginning of the semester and final meeting combined by final quiz at the end of the semester. Between these, activities are completed individually. Similar situation is with presence students in Humenne, where study is organised in blocks.
4 Content of a Typical Week Each week is contained in one area that consists at least of the following elements: book, exercise, quiz, and assignment. In addition, some weeks include supplementary study materials, links to web pages, etc. In the sequel, we will describe a typical week with content shown in Fig. 2. The topic studied in the presented week is “searching for and in files”.
4.1 Book This is the information resource in the form of a series of web pages, with a table of contents, ability to print the whole book and simple navigation tools. Its typical mode of operation can be seen in Fig. 3. As it can be seen from the figure, some of the learning materials are in English. This is not typical at Slovak Universities. Experience from the course shows that combination of written English notes and oral Slovak lectures is suitable. The situation is more complicated with only a few
Figure 3: Book module students that do not speak English at all. However, the acceptance of a such combination is quite high as English is de facto standard in the taught subject. The book resource in Moodle has several advantages compared to other static learning materials. As it is shown in Fig. 3, several definitions in the text are automatically highlighted (for example file, group). This follows from the fact that the course contains vocabulary of common terms and these are automatically linked from all resources. An user can open these links to learn more about the term. Moreover, the web pages contained in a book can embed interactive elements. Fig. 3 shows flash animation on fgrep command.
4.2 Further Study Materials
Figure 2: A typical lesson content
Lectures of the course are provided to students as PDF presentations. The most convenient for the students seems to be a layout with four slides on a page – here they can write down their notes during a lecture. Further suggestions for study in the form of web links round up student study resources. In the next semester we would like to further encourage students to look for additional study resources. Therefore, we will ask them to provide one link to a web page with
further study related material. This will use Moodle activity called database and it will be a graded activity – each student will have to search for additional study materials and rate other students suggestions. This will constitute a small percentage of the overall grade.
4.3
Exercise
After familiarisation with the topic, flash animations are used to guide students and to review the corresponding knowledge. These animations do not require a real terminal and contain interactive simulations where a certain scenario is played on a virtual terminal. After posing a question, students have to choose between several possible answers – system gives hints about incorrect responses and controls the flow of the entire sequence. Further exercises are to be followed on a real terminal: either locally or by connection to a remote UNIX server. In order to provide exactly the same results in various UNIX flavours, the structure of the exercise is as follows. Students have to download and unpack a part of a prepared directory structure with selected files. Afterwards, they perform a sequence of tasks and compare with a Moodle resource whether their obtained results (terminal output) are the same as in the provided materials. Our experience shows that students would appreciate if they not only can compare their results against the provided ones but also if they see the actual solution in the case when they have problems with it. We explore several ways of providing the answers after the students have attempted to solve the problems and failed in it. This problem is especially visible with distance students.
4.4
Quiz
To check the progress, simple quiz questions are to be answered that contribute to classification. Quiz module in Moodle is very flexible and allows to setup quizzes in many different ways. Question types are such that allow for automatic grading: multiple choice (with one or more correct answers), yes-no, and matching. During the course, the quizzes are designed to give a maximal learning effect. To do so, students can take an arbitrary number of attempts and the maximum value of the grade is taken as the final result. Thus, students usually undertake a quiz several times to improve the grade – usually between 1 to 6 attempts. A quiz bank consists 10 categories corresponding to weeks. Each category contains 15-20 questions and each quiz attempt comprises 5-10 random questions from the category. Thus, after completing several attempts, student goes over much larger set of problems as in a single one.
In addition, it is possible to submit the response in each question and to obtain an immediate feedback whether the answer is correct. If the answer is incorrect, penalisation for the question results. This also improves learning of the students as they can exactly see, what study material should be read once more. Each quiz shows automatically two students with the best grades and with the worst grades so far. This further increases competitiveness of students – they take it as a play and thus learn more happily (see Fig. 4).
Figure 4: Results from quiz The course contains two summary quizzes: after the first half of the semester and after the second half of the semester. These consists of random questions from the coresponding study themes. When comparing with assignments, quizzes are better suited for more simpler tasks. On the other hand, teacher needs not to correct results and thus can be concentrated on other learning aims. An example of a quiz part is shown in Fig. 5. The first question is of matching type. Notice that there are more answers than necessary, so that students cannot easily complete the last answer based on previously selected ones. The remaining two questions shown are of multiple choice type: the first of them with only one correct response, the second on with several correct/incorrect responses.
4.5 Assignment Final part of the student work is Assignment. There are several possibilities for assignments in Moodle. The standard assignments can be set as on-line work, off-line work, one file, and advanced upload.. We have used the on-line type of assignment in previous years but we were not entirely satisfied with it. The major problem faced was sharing of solutions between students – several students posted exactly or almost exactly the same solutions. In order to cope with this situation, we have developed a custom solution – Moodle assignment plugin called Random Assignment [1]. Its main idea is to provide several
4.7 Communication Communication with students is based on combination of mails, instant messages, skype communications and on weekly Moodle chat room – it is opened during one hour each week and it has been very popular. The chat room makes possible to record a session. Thus, students not present at the disponible chat time can consult the discussion later. Experience shows that chat room constitute an important means for learning, especially for distance students.
5 Conclusions
Figure 5: An example of a quiz files with assignments of a similar complexity that are uploaded to the course and Moodle assigns in a random way one of them to each student. Teacher can also upload files with solutions to each assignment – this aids to the teacher correcting student submissions. Moreover, there can be one teacher that develops assignments and several teaching assistants correcting the submissions. On average, we provided 5 files per assignment. Thus, in a class of 20 students, there are only about 4 students sharing the same file. The ideal solution against plagiarism would be at least 20 different files, but 5 were found as reasonable. The sharing of solutions was found to be negligible and knowledge of students at the end of semester was greatly improved.
4.6
Teacher’s Notes
A part of each week that is not visible to students contains teacher’s notes. If students are present in the lab, the notes describe some hints and propositions to their work. This improves preparation of teaching assistants before laboratory session. Moreover, teachers share notes about the session here and can propose possible improvements for the next semester.
We have presented a course dealing with UNIX operating systems. It contains quite a large number of advanced elearning features. Although our university provides inhouse elearning platform, it is not sufficient and does not contains all necessary components. Therefore, the course has been implemented in Moodle. It provides combination of study materials and resources, interactive activities, and communication tools. As such, it is suitable for both combined and external studies. In presence study, it complements in-class activities, in external study, it provides enough information for self-study. Experience from the course indicate that students acceptance is quite high.
Acknowledgments The authors are pleased to acknowledge the financial support of the Scientific Grant Agency of the Slovak Republic under the grants 1/3081/06, 1/4055/07, and of the Agency for Support of Research and Development under the grant APVV 0029-07.
References ˇ [1] L’. Cirka and M. Fikar. LMS Moodle – random assignment. In M. Huba, editor, Proc. of 8th International Conference Virtual university 2007, pages 168–170, Bratislava, December 13–14 2007. [2] M. Dougiamas. Moodle - a free, open source course management system for online learning, 2005. http://moodle. org. ˇ [3] M. Fikar and L’. Cirka. E-learning course on solaris operating system. In M. Huba, editor, Proceedings of 6th International Conference Virtual University VU’05, pages 72–75, Bratislava, 2005. [4] SUN-WEB. Sun academic initiative, 2008. https:// sailearningconnection.skillport.com/.
