Learning Technology Research Group Kingston University Penrhyn Road Kingston Upon Thames http://ltrg.kingston.ac.uk The NoobLab online learning environment for computer programming, first presented at the HEA STEM Conference 2012, has since been deployed on a first year undergraduate module. This paper discusses how the introduction of the environment had an impact on the student experience. A holistic approach was taken to the development of learning content and the learning environment. Conventional lectures were minimised; instead, students were encouraged to spend the majority of their time engaging in practical exploration. The use of the environment for summative assessments allowed for a “zero marking time” paradigm in many cases. Students reacted positively to this, and the detachment that arises when there is a lengthy delay between submission of work and feedback was greatly reduced. An improvement in student outcomes was evident, and a highly significant correlation was found between students’ final marks and time spent within the environment. These positive results have led to the environment being deployed in several other programming modules. The environment is now expected to become the primary delivery tool for teaching introductory programming in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Kingston University.

Traditional lectures are considered inadequate as a sole means of teaching computer programming, and are most commonly combined with practical workshops designed to encourage students to learn by practical experimentation. Delivering these can be difficult when faced with large cohort sizes and flexible modes of study, with deleterious effects on the crucial “learning loop” that exists between student and tutor in an ideal workshop session. NoobLab is an online environment for the delivery of computer programming workshops. The environment provides a seamless, integrated an analogue of the framing lectures, the practical workshop environment, as well as delivering the feedback component of the learning loop. The software is “aware” of a workshop’s learning objectives, providing feedback both on-demand and based on “observation” of the student’s activities. Additionally, by controlling the environment where students engage in practical tasks, students’ progress and the patterns they generate as they solve a problem can be monitored. These patterns can be correlated with other metrics and provide empirical data for investigating pedagogic issues around the teaching and learning of programming.

The IMS Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) specification has existed for many years, and there are a few tools for authoring questions in early versions of the specification. However, the new QTIv2 specification was unsupported in any existing authoring environment. The AQuRate project was funded by JISC’s capital project program to fill this gap. AQuRate is one of three JISC projects, which together aimed to support the whole e-assessment process, from authoring (AQuRate at Kingston University) to storage (Minibix at Cambridge) and finally to a delivery/assessment development (ASDEL at Southampton). This paper considers issues raised during the creation of the tool: data modelling, graphical user interface design, and use cases. It ends raising issues currently effecting on-going development.