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.
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Social Learning and Scaffolding to Improve Student's Self-efficacy and Engagement
The majority of Computer Science courses frequently use out-of-class activities to promote skill-building. Yet, the shortcomings of these activities limit their applicability in improving students' skills. This poster presents an innovative mobile-app-based approach to engage students in out-of-class activities. The app - Dysgu - builds on the theories of social learning and enables instructors to break regular out-of-class activities into smaller and interactive entities with instructional scaffolding. Dysgu allows students to compare their progress with their peers and provides personalized notifications and feedbacks to keep students engaged. The goal is to improve student's self-efficacy and engagement in out-of-class activities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712030
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10147975
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1288 to 1288
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3372583
