Abstract
Recently, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been offering a new online approach in the field of distance learning and online education. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading material and easily accessible tests for students. For a computer programming course, it is important to provide interactive, dynamic, online coding exercises and more complex programming assignments for learners. It is expedient for the students to receive prompt feedback on their coding submissions. Although MOOC automated programme evaluation subsystem is capable of assessing source programme files that are in learning management systems, in MOOC systems there is a grader that is responsible for evaluating students’ assignments with the result that course staff would be required to assess thousands of programmes submitted by the participants of the course without the benefit of an automatic grader. This paper presents a new concept for grading programming submissions of students and improved techniques based on the Java unit testing framework that enables automatic grading of code chunks. Some examples are also given such as the creation of unique exercises by dynamically generating the parameters of the assignment in a MOOC programming course combined with the kind of coding style recognition to teach coding standards. (Published: 11 July 2017) Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2017, 25: 1945 - http://dx.doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v25.1945
Highlights
Some aspects of grading Java code submissions in massive open online courses (MOOCs)Sándor Királya*, Károly Nehézb, Olivér Hornyákb aDepartment of Information Technology, Eszterházy Károly University, Eger, Hungary; bDepartment of Information Engineering, University of Miskolc, Miskolc, Hungary (Received 7 November 2016; final version received 30 March 2017)
A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online teaching programme that provides unlimited participation for traditional course materials via the web
MOOC systems apply automatic graders to assess the thousands of programmes submitted by the students of the programming course
Summary
Sándor Királya*, Károly Nehézb, Olivér Hornyákb aDepartment of Information Technology, Eszterházy Károly University, Eger, Hungary; bDepartment of Information Engineering, University of Miskolc, Miskolc, Hungary (Received 7 November 2016; final version received 30 March 2017). Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been offering a new online approach in the field of distance learning and online education. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading material and accessible tests for students. For a computer programming course, it is important to provide interactive, dynamic, online coding exercises and more complex programming assignments for learners. It is expedient for the students to receive prompt feedback on their coding submissions. This paper presents a new concept for grading programming submissions of students and improved techniques based on the Java unit testing framework that enables automatic grading of code chunks. Some examples are given such as the creation of unique exercises by dynamically generating the parameters of the assignment in a MOOC programming course combined with the kind of coding style recognition to teach coding standards
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