Requirements and design strategies for open source interactive computer science eBooks

Abstract

Online education supported by digital courseware will radically alter higher education in ways that we cannot predict. New technologies such as MOOCs and Khan Academy have generated interest in new models for knowledge delivery. The nature of Computer Science content provides special opportunities for computer-supported delivery in both traditional and online classes. Traditional CS textbooks are likely to be replaced by online materials that tightly integrate content with visualizations and automatically assessed exercises. We refer to these new textbook-like artifacts as icseBooks (pronounced "ice books"), for interactive computer science electronic books. IcseBook technology will in turn impact the pedagogy used in CS courses. This report surveys the state of the field, addresses new use cases for CS pedagogy with icseBooks, and lays out a series of research questions for future study.

Increasing Adoption of Smart Learning Content for Computer Science Education

“…Such surveys have focused on specific issues of the denoted SLC subareas. While some previous ITICSE working groups [71,54] have listed a large number of SLCs, we are not aware of any comprehensive survey of SLCs, and we recognize that such a survey would be very wide. Our online survey augments previous surveys by giving some overview of SLCs currently used by educators and our literature survey covers some recent developments in the field.…”

“…For example, it is quite common nowadays to organize course content as an online book with smooth narration and links to interactive content embedded into the book structure [54]. However, the separation of SLCs from delivery platforms can benefit any course organization approach.…”

“…Several previous ITiCSE working groups discussing issues in smart content [71,72,54] have carried out online surveys for educators on various issues of using and adopting SLCs. Our work here augments these previous survey results.…”

“…Roessling, Malmi, et al [71] provided only guidelines to be considered in developing SLCs, while Roessling, Crescenzi, et al [72] discussed issues in integrating SLCs with Moodle. Korhonen, Naps, et al [54] focused on interactive computer science books (icseBooks) and presented an architecture for such books and discussed in some detail what support is needed for different stakeholders. They also discussed customization, peer review, versioning, authentication and authorization, as well as data collection in the context of icseBooks.…”

“…al. [54] discussed similar issues in the context of interactive computer science education books that they called icseBooks. They designed a software architecture for the implementation of such books, taking into account the needs of various stakeholders (authors, teachers, and CSE researchers).…”