Overview
Aalto University students (at all levels) need more flexible learning opportunities to practice and improve their academic writing skills. However, the current selection of tools in MyCourses allow a very limited choice of interactive exercises (mainly multiple choice and gapfill), which do not support higher level of learning. The current technologies often prevent the creation of intuitive and pedagogically meaningful exercises and lesson designs, and updating the exercises is slow and error prone.
To address some of the problems listed above, this project aims to develop new activity types and/or modify the existing solutions in order to improve lesson designs, user-interaction, and automate feedback when possible. Such activity types include point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and a text field with pattern matching to enhance automated feedback.
Involved courses
LC-1110 – Online writing skills for engineers 1 (1 ECTS)
LC-1111 – Online writing skills for engineers 2 (1 ECTS)
Academic Writing in English (AWE), open material
Links & Materials
Academic Writing in English (AWE)
The source code for the new activity types can be found in GitHub:
- https://github.com/acos-server/acos-pointandclick
- https://github.com/acos-server/acos-draganddrop
- https://github.com/acos-server/acos-pointandclick-example
- https://github.com/acos-server/acos-draganddrop-example
Learning Tools for Language and Communication Courses (PDF)
Examples of new activity types and their implementation in both MyCourses and A+ :
People
Jan-Mikael Rybicki
Language Centre
Pilot leader
Markku Riekkinen
School of Science, Department of Computer Science
System developer: Astra plugin, ACOS activity types
Aisha Saeed
School of Science, Department of Computer Science
AWE migration
Petri Myllynen
Language Centre, Learning Services
Tapio Auvinen
School of Science, Department of Computer Science
Lassi Haaranen
Technology development
Teemu Sirkiä
Technology development
Teemu Lehtinen
Technology development