This study aimed to investigate how the use of a smartphone clicker app by a group of 390 Saudi Arabian male undergraduate students would impact their learning performance while participating in a computer science class. The smartphone clicker app was used by the students during peer group discussions and to respond to teacher questions. A conceptual framework identified teacher-student and student-student interactions, collaborative learning, and student engagement as three primary practices that could improve student performance when a smartphone clicker app was used. The relationships between these factors were tested empirically by participant completion of a self-administered online survey. This study found the use of a smartphone clicker app promoted increased teacher-student and student-student interactivity, leading to active collaboration learning by students and improved learning performance. No positive relationship was found between the smartphone clicker app use and increased student engagement. These results demonstrated the role of the smartphone clicker app in enhancing the learning experience of the Saudi undergraduate students included in this study, but not the overall student engagement. Further research into how use of a smartphone clicker app in classroom settings might promote student engagement to improve the overall learning performance is needed.

"Intelligent Books" are Web-based textbooks that combine computer-supported exercises with content that is both adaptive and extensible. They impose very few restrictions on the kind of exercise that can be placed within the book, and they allow students to contribute material that they have written, and to incorporate material from the Web into the book. In this chapter, the authors describe the influences that affect the design of intelligent books. These come from looking at the roles that textbooks and course notes play in education, and economic factors that affect the sustainability of intelligent books - competing for the attention of users, and ensuring that network externalities do not prevent a sufficient quantity of material from being usable within the book.

Studio courses have become a key way in which professional skills, especially those involving collaboration and design, are taught in many fields, including computer science. Studios typically involve students working on a design problem, periodically presenting their work for critique, and critiquing the work of other students or groups. They support productive inquiry, as well as teamwork, communication, and reflection. However, although studios have become an important mode of instruction for on-campus students, they have not typically been offered for online or distance education students. In this paper we describe a studio critique process that is designed to work asynchronously, using short videos, and a tool that we have built to support it. We also describe qualitative observations from a pilot study, in which video-based critiques were used at a university whose students predominantly study online rather than on-campus.

Recently there has been rapid growth in the number of online courses and venues through which students can learn introductory computer programming. As software engineering education becomes more prevalent online, online education will need to address how to give students the skills and experience at programming collaboratively on realistic projects. In this paper, we analyse factors affecting how a supercollaborative on-campus software studio course could be adapted as a project-led supercollaborative MOOC.

Intelligent Books are Web-based textbooks that can adapt and improve their content and guide students through graphical example exercises that resemble the diagrams and notations a student might use on paper. The exercises use formal AI systems to analyse students' work, and different AI systems are used for different questions. This brings the issue of how a person can write questions if they are not an expert in the AI system used. We describe our experiences developing an authoring tool for electronics questions that use a specialised circuit AI with its own extensive circuit language. The tool works on the principle of exposing an appropriate visual model of the AI, while factoring out the language detail and the architecture of the book itself, and allowing the question writer to decide which parts of the AI model to expose to the student (as the desired mental model for the student).

Smartphone clicker apps are increasingly used in university classrooms to facilitate teacher–student interaction and collaborative learning. This study aimed to identify the factors that influence teachers’ decisions to adopt smartphone clicker app technology to enhance teacher–student interactions in university classrooms in Saudi Arabia. A mixed-method study design was employed in this study. Thirty-three teachers from a Computer Science faculty completed a questionnaire and 14 of them participated in focus group interviews to provide their views. Two main findings emerged in this study: positive and significant relationships between teachers’ perceptions of the smartphone clicker app’s ease of use and its perceived usefulness; and a significant relationship between teachers’ perceptions of the usefulness of the smartphone clicker app and their attitude towards its use in the classroom. This study also identified that training on how to implement the smartphone clicker app effectively in lesson activities is a significant influence on teachers’ perceptions of the usefulness of, and their decision to use, the app. The main implication of these findings is that smartphone clicker app developers and user training coordinators must consider teachers’ perceptions of the suitability of the technology and their desire to design learning tasks to facilitate student participation and engagement.

We have developed a web-based homework tutor for discrete mathematics that is a step of progress towards building an intelligent adaptive textbook. The student works on mathematical problems in a notation that is closely mapped to the notation the student would be expected to write on an exam paper. The tutor gives advice and feedback as the student is working, in a co-operative manner rather than submission-and-response. This feedback is linked into the topic structure of the intelligent book, allowing the student to query for content material relating to a piece of advice. More than one content item is available on any topic, allowing server rules to choose items the that are likely to be useful to the individual student, while still allowing the student to reject the tutor's selection and choose a different content item.

The Intelligent Book project aims to improve online education by designing materials that can model the subject matter they teach, in the manner of a reactive learning environment. In this paper, we investigate using an automated proof assistant, particularly Isabelle/HOL, as the model supporting first year undergraduate exercises in which students write proofs in number theory. Automated proof assistants are generally considered to be difficult for novices to learn. We examine whether, by providing a very specialized interface, it is possible to build something that is usable enough to be of educational value. To ensure students cannot "game the system" the exercise avoids tactic-choosing interaction styles but asks the student to write out the proof. Proofs are written using MathsTiles: composable tiles that resemble written mathematics. Unlike traditional syntax-directed editors, MathsTiles allows students to keep many answer fragments on the canvas at the same time and does not constrain the order in which an answer is written. Also, the tile syntax does not need to match the underlying Isar syntax exactly, and different tiles can be used for different questions. The exercises take place within the context of an Intelligent Book. We performed a user study and qualitative analysis of the system. Some users were able to complete proofs with much less training than is usual for the automated proof assistant itself, but there remain significant usability issues to overcome.