OCTAL
Summary
- Project status: completed
- Involvement: author, masters project
OCTAL, the Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning, is a completed master’s project that investigates student engagement in online courses through an adaptive exercise system that customizes the progression of question topics to each student. By creating an ontology of topics in a course and connecting them in a multi-dimensional hierarchy of prerequisites, it might be possible to adapt questions towards topics that are difficult for a student. In other words, students were presented with topics in an order that was dependent on topic prerequisites rather than on the linear order of a course.
Results were mixed: low participation in the study resulted in statistically insignificant results when comparing metacognitive improvements presenting topics in a hierarchy rather than in a list. However, participants presented with the hierarchical view were less likely to follow concepts in a linear pattern than those presented with the list.
Project Links
- The project is available as an open source GitHub repository.
Publications
Armendariz, D. (2014). OCTAL: The Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning. Masters report published by the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. EECS-2014-76.
Armendariz, D., MacHardy, Z., & Garcia, D. D. (2014). OCTAL: online course tool for adaptive learning. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference (L@S ‘14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 141–142. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2567849
Armendariz, D., MacHardy, Z., & Garcia, D. D. (2014). OCTAL: online course tool for adaptive learning (abstract only). In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE ‘14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 715. https://doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2544318