Session T4E 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T4E-1 Aaprender: Combining on-Line Training and Virtual Learning Environments to Improve Problem Solving Skills Gilberto Huesca, Víctor Robledo-Rella, Julieta Noguez and Luis Neri Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México, {ghjuarez,vrobledo,jnoguez,neri}@itesm.mx Abstract - We have developed a new version of an on-line training system that allows students to foster their ability to solve problems. The students receive on-time feedback linked with small tutorials and virtual learning environments such as active simulators. The system presents to the student a set of problems, designed by a professor, with five possible answers: the correct one and four distracters. The system allows sharing tests banks and didactic resources among courses and professors and also keeps track of student performance. We present the software system architecture and discuss the problems and distracters design. We have tested the software using a sample of 121 undergraduate students taking physics courses and we show that the students using the software have a larger average learning-gain than those students who did not use it. Index Terms - Active simulators, Engineering education, On- line assessment, On-line training, Physics problem solving, Self-testing. INTRODUCTION One of the big advantages of using information technology tools in education is to make teaching, learning materials and interaction more widely accessible to a greater number of students in any time at any place [1]. Also, some students prefer to use interactive on-line tools rather than printed test to enforce their problem solving skills [2]. On the other hand, the use of on-line training environments for “hard sciences” such as physics or math has considerably increased in recent years. The evolution of the Companion Websites, presented by main editorials worldwide, has produced now robust products such as [3], [4], [5] or [6]. However, in many cases, students don’t receive a personalized feedback according to their specific actions and they get easily lost among exercises instructions and obtained results. The e-Learning research group at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México has developed an on- line training system aimed to help professors to define a set of problems and to help students to improve their knowledge and their problem solving skills in a given domain. This system also allows sharing specific content among different professors and courses. AAPRENDER: ON-LINE LEARNING AND TRAINING ENVIRONMENT Considering the on-line tools for exercising and assessing knowledge characteristics, we have developed a new version of the on-line tool described in [7]. This new system is called Aaprender 1 and it allows professors to create a bank of exercises and didactic resources. These resources can be shared between different courses and can be solved on-line by students. A segment of the system architecture is shown in Figure 1. This architecture is designed to provide a structure to catalog exercises according to a knowledge course structure. FIGURE 1 AAPRENDER SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE. This system uses three databases: a knowledge-base, a problem-base and a didactic resources-base. In the knowledge-base, professors can define the knowledge structure of a course. This structure is a hierarchical graph organization that denotes the relationships between the concepts that are taught in a course. Figure 2 shows a segment of the hierarchical graph for a basic undergraduate Physics course at our institution. Each exercise is attached to a node in the graph to state the central within the problem and to have a complexity classification also. 1 This software was developed in an Apache Tomcat application server under JSP, Servlet, AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and MySQL technologies PROBLEMS GRADING PROBLEMS VISUAL DEPLOYMENT KNOWLEDGE BASE PROBLEMS BASE DIDACTIC RESOURCES BASE KNOWLEDGE ITEM MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS MANAGEMENT DIDACTIC RESOURCES MANAGEMENT Student Professor