A route to success: a google maps
feedback system implemented within blackboard
Dr Karl Stringer
University of Ulster
School of Computing & Information Engineering
Coleraine
ks.stringer@ulster.ac.uk
www.ulster.ac.uk/staff/ks.stringer.html
Professor Maurice Stringer
University of Ulster
School of Psychology
Coleraine
m.stringer@ulster.ac.uk
www.science.ulster.ac.uk/psyri
Abstract
Feedback to students is widely regarded as critical in the learning process. We describe a
system based on Google Maps within the Blackboard environment that provides a “learning
landscape” that corresponds to the progress that students make through practical exercises
in a 1st year Computing course. The student is presented with a trail on a map with icons
representing pieces of work that need to be completed. Making use of the newly
introduced “review” system in Blackboard the system can automatically track progress
through the material and reflect this in real time on the map. Using a Google Fusion layer
on the map allowed an additional icon at each step of the route to change colour
dependent on the overall class progress. Although students could not see the individual
progress of their peers this feedback was sufficient to allow them to gauge their progress
relative to the cohort as a whole.
To control progress between stages a multiple choice feedback question is posed before
the next stage and was released via the Blackboard “Adaptive Release” mechanism.
Students were surveyed about their experience of using the system. How much of the
mapping to the “learning landscape” remained at the end of the semester was also
investigated.
Keywords
Feedback, student engagement, learning landscapes.
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1. Introduction
Providing timely feedback to students is an on-going issue at all levels of education. There is
much research which highlights the benefits of such formative feedback; see Gikandi et al
(2011) for a recent review with particular emphasis on the online and blended learning
environments. The feedback issue has been brought into sharper focus in recent years with
the increasing class sizes in higher education in the U.K. alongside an increase in fees and
rising student expectations on the quality of course delivery; the student as conscientious
consumer Higgins et al (2002). The use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is one
response to this pressure with their mechanisms for material delivery and feedback. The
particular VLE used at Ulster is Blackboard and they have recently introduced a feature
“Mark Reviewed” that allowed course developers to get students to click a button to
confirm they had completed a section of the material. Subsequent material can be set via
“adaptive release” to only appear if pre-requisites have been marked as reviewed by the
student. A second thread of this work was the efficient way in which the human memory
system records and remembers geographic or location-based information. Young people
are frequently immersed in online games with huge maps showing pathways and routes
available to their character and have little difficulty in remembering all this as it taps into a
visual location and mapping facility in humans that dates back to hunting/tracking and finding
your way home skills developed very early in history.(ref)
Our Approach: We decided to tap into this geographic skill to provide a map representing
progress through a series of 1st-year computing practicals. The expectation was that
students would be provided with a “learning landscape” on which they would get feedback
from their sense of progression along a variety of routes as well as creating an association
between the easy-to-remember visual map and the less memorable course material. A
second aspect was an element of competition created by providing feedback on overall
class progression through the tasks.
In the next section we outline the technical aspects to implementing the system before
analysing how the system operated with a particular cohort and their feedback on using the
system.
2. Implementation
Google mapping technology was chosen to provide the graphical representation since one
of the authors had previous experience in programming using the API (application
programming interface) provided. The interface allows you to center the map on real
geographic co-ordinates at a particular zoom level with a choice of satellite and terrain
views. In our case the map was centered on the Coleraine campus of the University of
Ulster and the various trails led outward from this starting point, see figure 1.
Figure 1: The dynamic route selector map.
This first map is a dynamic one representing each route as the user hovers over an area of
the map. Each of the trail destinations is a well-known local town or tourist attraction. On
clicking the route the user is shown the Google map with the trail indicated as a series of
waypoints, see figure 2.
As students complete the steps in the practical the waypoints change their icon to indicate
progression along the route. The route icons also represent hyperlinks to the underlying
practical material allowing students to navigate quickly to any step in the practical. The
current system assumes a linear progression – each stage must be completed to progress.
Figure 2: Google trail with waypoints.
The underpinning Javascript code has to extract from the Blackboard environment the state
of the “Mark Review” buttons associated with each practical step before updating the map,
see figure 3.
Figure 3: The Blackboard “Mark Reviewed” mechanism.
The state of the “Mark Reviewed” buttons can be used within Blackboard to conditionally
make visible to students subsequent material. This is very flexible in that you can control
the release of material based on not only the usual date/time criteria, but also on the basis
of the material they have reviewed or quizzes they have attempted; this later facility being
used in this study.
A multiple-choice quiz was interleaved between stages to test their understanding of the
material, but more importantly to prevent a student simply clicking all the review buttons
without examining the material.
Adding a Google Fusion layer onto the map allowed an additional icon at each step of the
route to change colour dependent on the overall class progress. Although students could
not see the individual progress of their peers this feedback was sufficient to allow them to
gauge their progress relative to the cohort as a whole. This proved difficult to implement as
only staff have access to individual student progress details and this required a polling
program run on a secure machine to routinely update the Google Fusion tables held in the
cloud. The extra information is shown in Figure.4.
Figure 4. The Google Fusion progress layer.
The Fusion layer provides coloured circles at each waypoint that change colour after a set
proportion of the class has completed the stage. The student can also right-click a circle
and get the total number of students who have completed that stage.
3. Student Feedback
Students were surveyed by questionnaire about their experience with the system.
The results are shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Survey Results showing % response (n=87)
Students believe that the quizzes between sections made them concentrate more on the
material although a significant minority felt the questions were too hard. Competition
between students is only significant to a minority of students. In general there was a
positive response to using the system, but students are not keen on extending it into
formal assessment.
As part of the questionnaire students were also asked to recall the topic associated with
each of the nine trails. The results indicate that there was a strong association retained
between the geographic trail and the topic covered with up to 66% of students selecting
the correct option from nine alternatives for the best remembered down to 47% for the
least. A further test to see if student familiarity with the actual driving route was linked
with strength of the association between topic and trail did not find a significant effect.
4. Discussion
The system developed has provided a map trail analogy to the progress through the course
material. There is good evidence that students associate the trail with the topic. The
system gives a visual indication of how far through the material students have progressed
and how they are performing relative to their peers. Some of the problems experienced
with the system concerned the linking quiz questions. These currently provide an absolute
barrier to progression and it was difficult to pitch these at the correct level. Although these
were mostly multiple-choice with unlimited attempts it is easy to inadvertently set
questions with too many alternatives where more than one answer has to be selected. It
was also difficult generating sufficient questions for all the stages. This meant that some
questions were not tied closely enough to the material just covered, which for some
students undermined the reason for having questions during the practical.
Non-linear progression would also be possible as a further development with branches to
re-enforce a particular topic or supplementary material for students who found the
material too challenging. This would allow students to feel that they were in a more
exploratory map-like setting were they could choose the low level detail of the route they
followed through the material while still requiring some prerequisite material to progress
through key checkpoints. Evidence from the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games) community suggests that not only can people remember hugely complex
maps in these games, but also enjoy the exploratory nature of the gameplay; see Bian et al
(2010) for an application of MMORPG in an educational setting.
The visual nature of the feedback provided by the system may favour students with certain
learning styles/personality types. Future work could investigate this using for example the
Myers Briggs Type Indicator.
5. References
Gikandia J.W., Morrow D., Davis N.E. “Online formative assessment in higher education: A
review of the literature” Computers & Education Volume 57, Issue 4, December 2011,
Pages 2333–2351
Higgins, R., Hartley P.,Skelton A. “The Conscientious Consumer: reconsidering the role of
assessment feedback in student learning” Studies in Higher Education Volume 27, No. 1,
2002
Bian Wu, Wang, A.I., Yuanyuan Zhang, "Experiences from implementing an educational
MMORPG," Games Innovations Conference (ICE-GIC), 2010 International IEEE Consumer
Electronics Society's , vol., no., pp.1-8, 21-23 Dec. 2010