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The CS Education community has developed many educational tools in recent years, such as interactive exercises. Often the developer makes them freely available for use, hosted on their own server, and usually they are directly accessible within the instructor's LMS through the LTI protocol. As convenient as this can be, instructors using these third-party tools for their courses can experience issues related to data access and privacy concerns. The tools typically collect clickstream data on student use. But they might not make it easy for the instructor to access these data, and the institution might be concerned about privacy violations. While the developers might allow and even support local installation of the tool, this can be a difficult process unless the tool carefully designed for third-party installation. And integration of small tools within larger frameworks (like a type of interactive exercise within an eTextbook framework) is also difficult without proper design. This paper describes an ongoing containerization effort for the OpenDSA eTextbook project. Our goal is both to serve our needs by creating an easier-to-manage decomposition of the many tools and sub-servers required by this complex system, and also to provide an easily installable production environment that instructors can run locally. This new system provides better access to developer-level data analysis tools and potentially removes many FERPA-related privacy concerns. We also describe our efforts to integrate Caliper Analytics into OpenDSA to expand the data collection and analysis services. We hope that our containerization architecture can help provide a roadmap for similar projects to follow 

Textbooks for theory courses in CS tend to be heavy on prose and mathematics. We find that students do not engage such material, and skip or rush through it without understanding. To increase students level of engagement, we developed support within the OpenDSA eTextbook system support for creating materials based on the Programmed Instruction pedagogical paradigm. This requires near-constant activity by the student, who must read a little, ideally a sentence or a paragraph, and then answer a question or complete an exercise related to that information. Based on the question response, students are permitted to continue, or must retry to solve the exercise. Versions of the eTextbook have been used to teach the senior-level Formal Languages course at Virginia Tech for two semesters. In this demonstration, we show how students interact with material developed using the Programmed Instruction approach. 

Textbooks for theory courses in CS tend to be heavy on prose and mathematics. We find that students do not engage such material, and skip or rush through it without understanding. To increase students level of engagement, we developed support within the OpenDSA eTextbook system support for creating materials based on the Programmed Instruction pedagogical paradigm. This requires near-constant activity by the student, who must read a little, ideally a sentence or a paragraph, and then answer a question or complete an exercise related to that information. Based on the question response, students are permitted to continue, or must retry to solve the exercise. Versions of the eTextbook have been used to teach the senior-level Formal Languages course at Virginia Tech for two semesters. In this demonstration, we show how students interact with material developed using the Programmed Instruction approach. 

Researchers in many disciplines are developing novel interactive smart learning objects like exercises and visualizations. Meanwhile, Learning Management Systems (LMS) and eTextbook systems are also becoming more sophisticated in their ability to use standard protocols to make use of third party smart learning objects. But at this time, educational tool developers do not always make best use of the interoperability standards and need exemplars to guide and motivate their development efforts. In this paper we present a case study where the two large educational ecosystems use the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard to allow cross-sharing of their educational materials. At the end of our development process, Virginia Tech’s OpenDSA eTextbook system became able to import materials from Aalto University’s ACOS smart learning content server, such as python programming exercises and Parsons problems. Meanwhile, University of Pittsburgh’s Mastery Grids (which already uses the ACOS exercises) was made to support CodeWorkout programming exercises (a system already used within OpenDSA). Thus, four major projects in CS Education became inter-operable. 

We share approaches for coordinating the use of many online educational tools within a CS2 course, including an eTextbook, automated grading system, programming practice website, diagramming tool, and debugger. These work with other commonly used tools such as a response system, forum, version control system, and our learning management system. We describe a number of approaches to deal with the potential negative effects of adopting so many tools. To improve student success we scaffold tool use by staging the addition of tools and by introducing individual tools in phases, we test tool assignments before student use, and we adapt tool use based on student feedback and performance. We streamline course management by consulting mentors who have used the tools before, starting small with room to grow, and choosing tools that simplify student account and grade management across multiple tools.