More Like this

1. Dysgu: A Tool to Keep Students Engaged Outside the Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE48000.2019.9225894  

   Fuad, Muztaba ( December 2019 , 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE))

   This paper presents an out-of-class active learning environment, called Dysgu. Dysgu presents an innovative approach to out-of-class activities by combining multiple dimensions of best practices from different spectrum of student learning into a coherent idea and delivering such activities with personalization and adaptation. The goal of the Dysgu system is to study the impact of frequent out-of-class activities on student learning and engagement when the students can compare their progress with the rest of the class and where the activities are smaller (in scope) with scaffolding support, are interactive in nature, and delivered via a mobile platform. Initial usability tests and software engineering quality matrices show that the software is easy to use, manage and extend.
2. Active Learning for Out-of-Class Activities by Using Interactive Mobile Apps

   https://doi.org/10.1109/LaTICE.2018.00008  

   Fuad, Muztaba ; Akbar, Monika ; Zubov, Lynn ( April 2018 , 2018 International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LaTICE))

   Keeping students engaged with the course content outside the classroom is a challenging task. Since learning during undergraduate years occurs not only as student engagement in class, but also during out-of-class activities, we need to redesign and reinvent such activities for this and future generation of students. Although active learning has been used widely to improve in-class student learning and engagement, its usage outside the classroom is not widespread and researched. Active learning is often not utilized for out-of-class activities and traditional unsupervised activities are used mostly to keep students engaged in the content after they leave the classroom. Although there has been tremendous research performed to improve student learning and engagement in the classroom, there are a few pieces of researches on improving out-of-class learning and student engagement. This poster will present an approach to redesign the traditional out-of-class activities with the help of mobile apps, which are interactive and adaptive, and will provide personalization to satisfy student's needs outside the classroom so that optimal learning experience can be achieved.
3. Effect of Peer Influence and Self-Reflection on Scaffolded Out-of-Class Activity Administered Using a Mobile Application

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12120863  

   Fuad, Muztaba ; Akbar, Monika ( December 2022 , Education Sciences)

   Student engagement with out-of-class activities is becoming more difficult as students spend fewer hours outside the classroom studying the content. This research developed a mobile educational platform, Dysgu, to provide students with an optimal learning experience outside of the classroom. Dysgu includes social networking and gamification features to increase student engagement. The platform offers interactive auto-graded assessments to help students practice concepts and take tests. Students can see their scores and a summary of the performance of the rest of the class. We used Dysgu for multiple out-of-class activities at two universities with different student demographics for two semesters. The data shows that students obtain better grades when using Dysgu. We also saw more on-time or ahead-of-time submissions with Dysgu. Survey responses indicated several Dysgu features which students found helpful. We conclude that digital educational platforms should consider features to support scaffolding to master the concept, peer influence to keep students engaged, self-reflection to foster critical thinking, and easy adaption of the platform to reduce faculty workload and improve students’ acceptance of the system.
4. Out-of-class Activities: What Have We Been Doing and How We Can Change it for the Future

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2019.8845513  

   Fuad, Muztaba ; Akbar, Monika ; Zubov, Lynn ; Deb, Debzani ( August 2019 , 2019 14th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE))

   It is believed that if students are well engaged in the learning process within the classroom, they will continue the learning process independently outside the classroom. To facilitate such out-of-class learning, there is a plethora of traditional techniques with a variety of learning theoretical backgrounds. While out-of-class activities based on these techniques have shown to improve a student’s overall quality of learning, traditional activities lack the supervision, instant feedback, and personalization that the current generation of students expects. With the rising cost of college tuition, many of today’s students are working more hours outside of an educational setting and therefore need more supervision and encouragement than their predecessors. These factors make traditional out-of-class activities not effective to achieve the desired level of student learning and engagement outside the classroom. The faculty needs to rethink ways to redesign traditional out-of-class activities to make these activities more effective for this generation of students. This paper presents a review of the literature on and categorization of traditional out-of-class activities. The paper also discusses the results of a survey of what the faculty is doing to engage and continue student learning outside the classroom. Finally, the paper presents a new way of designing andmore »delivering out-of-class activities that have the potential to increase student engagement with the help of instructional scaffolding, interactive activities, and personalization and adaptation.« less
5. Keeping Students Occupied with the Course Contents After Leaving the Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3341525.3393990  

   Fuad, Muztaba ; Akbar, Monika ; Zubov, Lynn ( June 2020 , Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE))

   Keeping students engaged with the course contents between classes is challenging. Although out-of-class activities are used to address this challenge, they have limited impacts on improving student's engagement outside the classroom because of the lack of real-time feedback and progress updates. For this reason, these types of activities are less appealing to the current generation of students who feel the pull of instant gratification more intensely. This paper presents a mobile learning system, named Dysgu, which enables students to work on their out-of-class activities, compare their progress with the rest of the class, and improve their self-efficacy. The goal of Dysgu is to better engage students with out-of-class activities and reduce procrastination in those activities. By using Dysgu, faculty can facilitate and monitor learning even after the students leave the classroom and intervene early when students fall behind their peers.