student is provided in the form of a coloured bar chart superimposed over the list of topics. The option to provide peer support is only available for those topics in which the student meets a required competency threshold, denoted in the bar chart by the colour blue. The knowledge state of students are updated using the their cumulative performance on assessment items progressively during the teaching period using algorithms described by in khosravi2017.
Figure 7 provides an example of a peer support recommendation in the student interface, identifying the potential peer learning supporter and the two topics for which support is available. Students then have the option to ignore or request a meeting with the recommended peer at the nominated time and date.
A “leaderboard”, as its name implies, displays individuals with highest score on a give task. Use of leaderboards in education has shown to increase student motivation and engagement [Landers and Landers (2014), Banfield and Wilkerson (2014)]. The leaderboard in RiPPLE displays students with the highest score on a variety of items including the number of questions contributed, answered, correctly answered, and rated. It also displays the students with the highest number of achievements, which are presented in terms of gamified badges. Figure 8 shows the leaderboard used in RiPPLE.
4.5 Personal Profile
Each student is provided with a personal profile that includes information on their engagement, achievements, notifications, and their consent on use of their data for educational research purposes.
The engagement level of students on a variety of tasks are presented using a visualisation widget. This widget enables students to compare their engagement using a visualisation type of their choice against their peers or their own targeted goals on a set of tasks. The default visualisation type uses Kiviat diagrams, which are more informally known as radar charts. Kiviat diagrams have been used extensively in visualising educational dashboard (e.g., see [May et al. (2011)]) as they are able to display multivariate observations with an arbitrary number of variables [Chambers et al. (1983)]. The visualisation widget Figure 9 shows the chart used for presenting engagement in RiPPLE.
RiPPLE uses Gamification and badging to increase student motivation and performance. Students are able to achieve badges in three broad categories of “Engagement Badges”, “Competency Badges”and “Peer Support Badges”. The achievement view enables students to track their progress towards achievements. Figure 10 shows the graphical interface used for showing achievements in RiPPLE.
The notification view in RiPPLE allows students to view notifications about their achievements and up coming study sessions.
Upon the first use of the platform, students are presented with a consent form seeking their permission to use their data to improve our understanding of the learning process and to evaluate the effectiveness of the recommended content. The consent view enables students to change their response at any time.
4.6 Instructor Page
Users with “instructor” role have access to an additional page that has three main views: the course overview, consent form, and reported questions.
This view enables instructors to add the set of topics that are to be used for tagging the questions. This list can be updated throughout the semester. This view also allows instructors to track the progress of each of the students that are enrolled in the course. Data related to their progress can be downloaded as a CSV or an SQL dump, which may be useful for educational data mining researchers.
This view enables instructors to develop the content of the consent form, which is to be filled by the students.
This view enables instructors to view, edit, and delete questions that have been flagged as inappropriate.
5 Expected Benefits
This section discusses the multiple beneficial outcomes that RiPPLE provides for students, instructors, and educational data mining researchers.
RiPPLE enables students to:
think about ways of evaluating u