Distributed Awareness for Class Orchestration

The orchestration process consists of managing classroom interactions at multiple levels: individual activities, teamwork and class-wide sessions. We study the process of orchestration in recitation sections, i.e. when students work on their assignments individually or in small groups with the presence of teaching assistants who give help on demand. Our empirical study revealed that recitation sections suffer from inefficient orchestration. Too much attention is devoted to the management of the relationship between students and teaching assistants, which prevent both sides from concentrating on their main task. We present a model of students’ activities during recitation sections that emphasize the issue of mutual awareness, i.e. monitoring help needs and TA's availability. To tackle these difficulties, we developed two awareness tools. Both tools convey the same information: which exercise each group is working on, whether it has asked for help and for how long. In the centrali...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ECTEL
• Authors: Hamed S. Alavi, Pierre Dillenbourg, Frédéric Kaplan
• Keywords: ECTEL 2009, Empirical Study, Machine Learning, Recitation Sections, Teaching Assistants