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Disseminating Learning Tools Interoperability Standards

Until recently, most educational tools have worked in silos. If a teacher wanted her students to complete small programming exercises, record videos, and collaborate through discussion boards, three disconnected tools were probably needed. Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a communication protocol that enables different learning tools to talk to each other and share scores with a Learning Management System (LMS). While most commercial LMS now support LTI, most educational software developed by small research efforts do not. This is often because of the lack of resources needed to understand the working of LTI and the process of using LTI in their applications. Our aim is to encourage the use of LTI within the CS Education community. We have developed tutorials that include example applications. We also provide a use case of how LTI is implemented in the OpenDSA eTextbook system. As another use case, we have enabled auto-grading of Jupyter Notebook assignments by providing immediate feedback to students and updating scores to the Canvas gradebook. We provide a Jupyter plugin to upload notebook files to the Web-CAT auto-grading system. We integrate Aalto University's ACOS content into OpenDSA as a third use case. / Master of Science / Until recently, most educational tools have worked in silos. If a teacher wanted her students to complete small programming exercises, record videos, and collaborate through discussion boards, three disconnected tools were probably needed. These disconnected tools did not integrate with the Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Canvas and Moodle. Instructors had to manually manage these separate tools and enter scores into the LMS. There are standards such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) that these learning tools can implement to enable them to talk to each other and to share scores with an LMS. However, most educational software developed by small research efforts do not support LTI. This is often because of the lack of resources needed to understand the working of LTI and the process of using LTI in their applications. We aim to encourage the use of LTI within the CS Education community. We have developed tutorials that include example applications. We also provide a use case of how LTI is implemented in OpenDSA, an eTextbook system developed at Virginia Tech. As another use case, we have enabled auto-grading of Jupyter Notebook (documents that run in a browser and can contain equations, visualizations, live code, and text) assignments by providing immediate feedback to students and updating scores to the Canvas gradebook. We provide a plugin to upload notebook files to the WebCAT auto-grading system directly from the browser. We integrate Aalto University’s ACOS content (Python and Java exercises) into OpenDSA as a third use case.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/90772
Date27 June 2019
CreatorsManzoor, Hamza
ContributorsComputer Science, Shaffer, Clifford A., Seyam, Mohammed Saad, Edwards, Stephen H.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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