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HONOURS PROJECT PROPOSAL Improving student engagement with educational material Deon Takpuie Reitumetse Chaka Supervised by: Professor Sonia Berman
HONOURS PROJECT PROPOSAL
Improving student engagement with educational
material
Deon Takpuie
Reitumetse Chaka
Supervised by: Professor Sonia Berman
Contents 1. Project description .................................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1
Gamification of the Wiki .......................................................................................................................... 1
2. Problem statement ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Research Questions ................................................................................................................................... 1
Front-End .............................................................................................................................................. 1
Back-End............................................................................................................................................... 1
3. Related work ............................................................................................................................................. 2
Wiki .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Gamification ............................................................................................................................................. 2
Mobile Interfaces .................................................................................................................................. 2
4. Procedures and methods ........................................................................................................................... 2
Development environment ........................................................................................................................ 2
Systems Design ......................................................................................................................................... 2
Wiki....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Heuristics .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Database ................................................................................................................................................ 3
Procedures ................................................................................................................................................. 4
Wiki Tool Implementation .................................................................................................................... 4
Implementing Heuristics ....................................................................................................................... 4
Back-End Integration with Vula ........................................................................................................... 4
Testing ...................................................................................................................................................... 4
5. Ethical, professional and legal issues ........................................................................................................ 5
6. Anticipated outcomes ................................................................................................................................ 5
System Design .......................................................................................................................................... 5
Expected Impact ........................................................................................................................................ 5
Front-End .............................................................................................................................................. 6
Back-End............................................................................................................................................... 6
Key Success Factors ................................................................................................................................. 6
Front-End .............................................................................................................................................. 6
Back-End............................................................................................................................................... 6
7. Project plan ............................................................................................................................................... 6
Table of possible risks to the project ........................................................................................................ 6
Timeline .................................................................................................................................................... 7
Resources required .................................................................................................................................... 7
Deliverables .............................................................................................................................................. 7
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................. 8
Work Allocation........................................................................................................................................ 8
References ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
Appendix A: Gantt chart ............................................................................................................................. 10
1
1. Project description
Introduction
The objective of this project is to improve student
engagement with educational material in order to
improve pass rates. In particular, the aim is to
build tools for online learning environments to
achieve this. The only learning environment
considered is the Sakai open source learning
management system as UCT (University of Cape
Town) use a derivative of this called Vula. The
project objective will be achieved with the use of a
pioneering methodology called gamification,
which is defined as the use of game design
elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al.
2011). An example of gamification in the
education environment is the rewarding of students
with incentives (like bonus marks) to encourage
participation (Bustard et al. 2007). In the context
of the Vula system, students can be awarded for
their participation in wiki tools. The wiki has been
chosen because all user reads and writes are
logged. The wiki tools will not immediately
replace the current ones but will be part of a new
Vula course site that will test the implementation
on a group of students.
Gamification of the Wiki
Students receive points for their participation in
the wiki, different points assigned to different
functions such as creating a new wiki, adding
reviewed and ranked content and peer reviewed
citations. The marks accumulate and give a user
higher roles and level up badges.
Generally this project will be split into the front-
end (essentially putting the gamified Wiki on a
mobile phone) and back-end (involves interacting
with Vula server and the mobile application).
2. Problem statement To improve the pass rates at UCT, it is important
to improve student engagement with Vula tools.
This can be achieved at low financial costs; by
using pre-existing Vula tools to increase student
engagement. Gamification is the chosen method to
achieve this as it improved pass rates in other
universities via educational mobile applications
(Bustard et al. 2011). However, since the front-end
of the project involves software engineering, it is
important to state the shareholders and their needs,
before moving to the research questions.
Clients
The clients are Professor Sonia Berman, computer
science HOD at UCT and also Stephen Marquad,
co-ordinator of Vula UCT. Their interests are to
see an improved wiki developed on a mobile
phone that raises student interests with the tool.
Users
Are university of Cape Town (UCT) students from
any faculty and their objective is to enjoy using the
wiki tool.
Research Questions
The research question aims to see whether
gamification of the Vula wiki can be done
successfully on a mobile phone.
Front-End
Can gamification techniques be successfully
ported from desktop to mobile?
It is ideal for users to want to use Vula tools (i.e.
wiki) quickly and on the go. Given that
gamification techniques have been shown to work
on the desktop, so it is useful to implement them
on mobile. This can be evaluated by seeing
whether users can complete typical tasks properly
and do they find gamified wiki more engaging?
Back-End
Can a back-end provide the right information
for the interface to a gamified mobile Wiki?
An extensive part of developing a Vula tool is the
integration with the current Sakai framework and
to have this done successfully is essential. This can
be evaluated by checking if real users can log on to
Vula and then use the new wiki tool.
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Can heuristics be implemented that will
separate academic content on the wiki from
non-academic content.
Any tool where anyone can contribute (such as the
wiki) could possibly have meaningless content
posted. Therefore, it is desirable to only keep the
meaningful/academic content on the tool. To test
this, there wiki will have to determine out of a
series of article which ones are academically valid.
3. Related work
Wiki
It has been researched that voluntary participation
has a positive influence on learnability (Greitzer et
al. 2007) hence participation within wikis has been
proven a necessity and potential for value to the
students. The context design implementation has
been researched in conflict resolution (Kittur et al.
2007) and peer content review framework (Adler
& Alfaro 2007). This research has demonstrated
how users can have higher preference over others
within wiki edits due to a history of good
contributions. Also, relevant wiki articles can be
nested by frequency of use(e.g. reads and edits), to
enable users quick access to the most popular
articles, by using tree maps (Shneiderman 1992).
Gamification
This trend relates to integration with human
computer interaction heuristics dating back to the
1980s (Malone 1982) which experiments on how
addition of elements inherited from game designs
can enhance interest of an audience. Effects of
gamification on university students has been
investigated in a research (Fitz-walter et al. 2011)
and showed an improvement in interactions with
the system information and completion of tasks.
There is also a study done at UCT that evaluates
the most successful gamification techniques
(Donovan 2012).
Mobile Interfaces
Research of use of mobile device input and display
optimisation Micro-Blog (Gaonkar et al. 2008)
aims to employ a variety of smartphone
technology features as means of input for the
application. It therefore explores alternative means
that can be used for text or other media input
provided by a mobile phone. Content output and
interaction and generation has been explored in
Wheels around the world (Christine et al. 2008)
which enables a user to view web content through
use of rotating icons and screen portions. Lastly,
there has also been a recent mobile oxford online
learning implementation that is basically a
optimized Vula for mobile (Oxford 2012).
4. Procedures and methods
Development environment
The wiki will be redesigned on the websites for
mobile phones using the Sakai Open Source
Architecture. The reason mobile phones are
chosen is that students can use the learning tools
on the go. The development language will be
HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) for each
tool, since website enable greater and easier phone
portability than specific mobile languages. The
website will work for smartphones and normal
phones as it uses HTML. JavaScript will be used
to create simple website effects (client-side) and
PHP will do data processing (server-side) with a
local MySQL database (i.e. not related to a real
course). Sakai’s Learning Tools Interoperability is
used to integrate the tools (as they will be designed
externally to Vula) into Vula’s actual framework.
This is since the redesigned tools will not be stable
enough this year to be deployed campus-wide.
Systems Design
The system layering for the redesigned tools will
be built on top of the framework that Vula already
has. On the other hand, the tools will use a
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gamification layer, a context / presentation layer
and a utility / processing layer. The gamification
layer is essentially the game rules that are to be
applied in order to tally user points across the wiki.
It is an abstraction that encompasses the wiki front
end and backend. The context layer deals with the
front-end task like website display whereas the
utility layer deals with back-end tasks such as data
creation and processing. At the systems level, a
Wiki uses a testing database and interacts with the
Sakai framework via the back-end tool-integration
as well as received content editing from the
Artificial Intelligence module. Here is an overall
implementation.
Wiki
The wiki design will be similar to the standard
wiki however optimised for mobile use. The aim is
to enable the user retain functionality traditionally
viewed on a computer web browser to the mobile
medium. Users will be able to create new topics
and contribute to existing threads through edits
and comments. A tree map may be used to show
hierarchical nesting of frequently used wiki
articles, to enable quick user information retrieval.
As an additional layer gamification on the wiki
will allow tracking of user activity thus giving the
user points for positive peer reviews of their
contribution. The result of the points system will
give the users experience levels.
The wiki layer will be designed in three phases
using a modular approach so components can be
tested individually. The first phase is a feasibility
study of the concept which entails porting a simple
gamification concept on to mobile and connecting
to the Vula system successfully. The second phase
will consist of development on gamification
techniques on to the current web desktop version
of the Vula system. Within the last phase the
system will be ported on to mobile and a heuristics
plugin for user contribution validation will be
developed. This application will use the LTI
integration mentioned above. The challenge in the
LTI integration will be interacting with Vula to get
user authentication data (or general security data)
as this requires an in-depth knowledge of the
current Vula architecture. Essentially, the second
and third phases will be tested on the basis of the
research questions of the project.
Heuristics
The heuristics will be used to separate academic
content from non-academic content for the Wiki.
This is necessary because students must be able to
reach the information they are looking for quickly.
These heuristics also necessary to ensure that
students do not make useless posts just for the sake
of getting bonus marks (or gamification points).
Heuristics are implemented for the Wiki to flag
content which is suspect and deny points given
until peer based or administrative review. The
heuristic plugin should allow a setting of how
vigorous the checks should be depending on an
administrator or creator setting.
Database
The database will be hosted locally (i.e. outside of
the Vula environment) and will be a MySQL 5.x
database. The database will consist of but not
limited to two tables called Leaderboard and
UserLog. The Leaderboard table will have:
Student_ID, Points, Level and Bonus Marks. The
Leaderboard table is used to record user points,
also to promote users (students) to the appropriate
level corresponding to their points and then award
them with bonus marks relative to their level.
UserLog (at the conceptual level) table will have 3
fields: Student_Number, Reads and Writes. This
table records user reads and writes on any tool.
The Leaderboard table either gets updated from a
complex event like a student receives a vote (on
wiki) for an answer and needs extra points, or the
table is updated for general events like when a
student writes or reads to a tool.
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Procedures
Wiki Tool Implementation
The design of the tool will be done using JQuery
mobile and WebKit; these are GUI (Graphical
User Interface) tools for designing HTML pages
for mobile phones. This framework creates HTML
pages compatible with all popular smartphones
such as Android, Blackberry and iPhone. The
HTML front-end designed by this tool will interact
with a PHP (server-side) file which will then
interact with the Vula LTI framework and the local
database. An example is when a student posts a
comment in the Wiki, the html file will pass this
event to the PHP file, which will update the user’s
points in the Leaderboard table of the database. In
addition, this user post will also be sent from the
client browser to the server where it will record it
on to the UserLog database. Also, the PHP and
JavaScript files will also be used to interact with
Vula’s LTI environment using REST services. At
this stage, it has just been made known that REST
is simpler to use than SOAP as it is native to the
Vula environment. Finally, the back-end tasks like
authentication and session handling will be done
by Reitumetse whilst the Wiki interactive design
mentioned above takes place.
Implementing Heuristics
As mentioned before, the purpose of heuristics in
the project will be to select what is genuine
academic content and discard irrelevant content in
the Wiki and subsequent comments. Text mining
will be used to classify text according to a fixed
category set (Kao 2005a). The chosen
implementation, which is simple for now, is just to
have a hash table of academic words and scan a
wiki article post to see if the words used occur at
least 50%/some threshold of the time in the
academic words hash table. If this is the case, then
the post is academically viable else it can be
deleted.
Back-End Integration with Vula
Implementation of Sakai will make use of the
REST platform on the server. Authentication of
the users will be carried out through the mobile
Vula login form and all subsequent requests will
use a generated cookie to identify the user. The
wiki module/tool will be added on to the test users
menu as a tool which links to the system
implementation hosted externally to the Vula
server. Because of the same origin policy on web
browsers, some HTML and JavaScript files will
have to be hosted under the Vula domain name for
access on the REST services. The greatest
challenge will be to identify and continuously
authorise the Vula generated session cookie and
maintain security against attacks on such an
implementation.
Testing
Front-end
In order to evaluate the first research question (i.e.
can gamification work on a mobile phone), the
users must see whether they can complete a set of
task successfully on the mobile wiki. Also, in a
post-experiment interview, the users can fill in a
questionnaire to determine whether they found it
enjoyable to use the mobile gamified wiki.
Back-end
The first research question about the back-end was
whether it can actually work properly. This,
the back-end will be evaluated by checking if the
correct information like user sessions, and
database results are being sent to the application
interface. For instance, a user must be able to log
into Vula and then use the new wiki tool (even
though it is external to Vula). Also, if a user adds
content to the wiki, their points need to be updated
in the database and immediately reflected at the
user profile screen.
With regards to heuristics, the wiki will have to
determine out of a series of articles which ones are
academically valid. One example of a metric is
that if the wiki flags content correctly on 10
consecutive test cases the heuristics is working.
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5. Ethical, professional and legal
issues
Within its development and final implementation,
this learning tool intends to iteratively apply target
audience input. Hence, ethical clearance for
evaluations to be carried out on the institutions
members will be required. Our considerations in
the domain of gamification research indicate the
underlying potential of undesirable use such as
causing competition, cheating or any form of
addiction.
With regard to the resulting system, specifications
outlined by the university Sakai implementation
“Vula”, including security considerations will be
adhered to. All the user information provided to
the system in the testing phases will be kept
confidential only to the parties involved.
6. Anticipated outcomes
System Design
On completion of our project we expect to have a
system consisting of a gamified wiki, which will
be for the mobile platform. These systems will be
built apart from the Sakai installation server.
Figure 1 illustrates the modules expected at the
completion of the development. The back end
constitutes of the processing functionality of the
system. Following the Model-View-Controller
architecture; it connects the user requests with the
database and serves the resulting view data back to
the client. The back end which forms the core of
this implementation will interface with the Sakai
system for user authentication and Sakai native
user requests. System data will be stored in a
database external to the main Sakai server. The
back-end will feature a heuristics plugin to process
input data on the wiki (like articles) to filter
academically relevant content.
Figure 1: illustration of the Engage Modules and Sakai
Interface
The design framework is expected to have layers
respective to functionality. The utility layer forms
the underlying processing functionality of the
system on the back end including creation of new
wikis, tools and user listings. Whilst the context
layer refers to user activity on tools on the front
end device such as votes, edits and content
contribution. The context layer information is
logged and translated to the game layer. The game
layer includes usage rules, instructions,
achievements and experience levels.
Expected Impact
Based on the some past results of gamification and
the improvements it has shown in student pass
rates (Donovan 2012) it is believed the
gamification will improve the Vula tools.
If the project is successful, the gamified Vula wiki
has the potential of replacing the actual
corresponding tools in the real Vula courses. For
6
each of the research questions, here is the expected
impact:
Front-End
Can gamification techniques be successfully
ported from desktop to mobile?
It is anticipated that it is possible to part
gamification techniques from desktop to mobile as
it has been done before.(Fitz-walter et al. 2011)
Back-End
Can a back-end provide the right information
for the interface to a gamified mobile Wiki?
It should be plausible to create a working back-end
for the mobile gamification application, as there is
abundance of Sakai documentation and even a
current oxford Sakai mobile wiki
implementation(Oxford 2012).
Can heuristics be implemented that will
separate academic content on the wiki from
non-academic content.
The problem of filtering quality from non-quality
data has a lot of associated literature hence should
be deployable for the new wiki.(Kao 2005b)
Key Success Factors
Front-End
Can gamification techniques be successfully
ported from desktop to mobile?
This can be determined by how many tasks the
user is able to complete on the mobile application
(e.g. 70 % success rate might be good) and also
what percentage (possibly aim for 70%) of users
actually enjoy the mobile application.
Back-End
Can a back-end provide the right information
for the interface to a gamified mobile Wiki?
The back-end should fill the database with the
correct values when awarding users points for wiki
contribution and it should be able to allow the
external tool (wiki) to interact with Sakai.
Can heuristics be implemented that will
separate academic content on the wiki from
non-academic content.
One example of a metric is that if the wiki flags
content correctly (academically) on 10 consecutive
test cases the heuristics is working.
7. Project plan
Table of possible risks to the project
Risk Effects Severity Probability Mitigation
Group member falls
ill.
Can have serious
impact if the back-
end integration has
not been shared
between the two
partners.
Medium-
High
Medium Share knowledge
amongst group.
Failure to meet
project deadlines
May lead to
cascading delays
that can result in
project failure
High Medium Good group
communication
and time
scheduling.
7
Data loss This can lead to a
delay in the project
and if it is the thesis,
can cost the whole
project/
Medium-
High
Medium Backup data at
many places
including using
cloud storage.
Timeline
This is an illustration of how the workload will
be divided into a number of sections
corresponding to different deliverables and team
member allocation. Refer to the Gantt chart
included as appendix A.
Resources required
Development of the system will require standard
computers with web development software such
as Adobe Dreamweaver along with any standard
integrated development environment and a local
host server. System testing will be carried out on
a remote host that has a database and HTTP
server. Mobile devices with web browsers
capable of running JavaScript and possibly
HTML will be required for user interface
development and testing. For Sakai integration
we will also require access to host some
development script under the Sakai domain
name and also an authentication protocol.
Deliverables
The following Table illustrates a detailed list of
the deliverables necessary for the completion of
this project:
Deliverable Description
Literature Synthesis A study of previous related work
Project Proposal Presentation to supervisor and class.
Project Web Presence Online availability of proposal and project timeline.
Project Poster Poster representation of Project.
Project Web Page Open Availability of Project Webpage.
Project Report A report on the results of the research.
Project Application The actual project.
Final Project Proposal Final copy of Proposal for evaluation.
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Milestones
Milestone Title Date due
Project proposal May 21
Presentation of project proposals May 24
Initial project web presence June 11
Project designs started June 12
Project Feasibility Test June 15
Desktop Gamification June 29
Background/Theory Chapter July 29
Design chapter August 29
First Experimentation and Report Sept 19
Final Experimentation and Report Sept 28
Implementation and Testing
Chapters complete. Coding done.
Oct 3
Outline of complete report. Oct 10
Project Report Draft Completed Oct 24
Final Project Report Hand in Oct 31
Project Poster Nov 3
Project Web Page Nov 7
Project Demonstrations Nov 8
Reflection Paper Nov11
Final Project Presentation Nov18
Work Allocation
Each project member will be allocated certain
tasks. The two major components will be the
front-end and back-end. As shown on the Gantt
chart, the systems modules are interdependent.
Reitumetse will develop the back end which
constitutes of Sakai authentication, database
connection and data processing. He will later
add on heuristics (filtering academic and non-
academic articles). Deon will design and
develop the wiki interface for a mobile device
(and initially desktop) as well as user testing.
Both partners implement gamification,
Reitumetse will calculate points at the back-end
and Deon will display elements such as
leaderboards on the front-end.
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Appendix A: Gantt chart
