Personalised automated learning environment helps students qualify for design classes

When students come from other universities for a master’s at TU Delft, they arrive with diverse levels of skills and knowledge. The difficult task of ensuring they are prepared to meet the academic requirements could be more efficient with a personalised method.

Associate Professor Chris Verhoeven and Principal Educator Anton Montagne developed an application for their Structured Electronics Design course that generates individualised quizzes to create a portfolio of each student’s level of knowledge and skills and provide guidance on areas for improvement. Through the project, they created an open website and book that can help prepare new students for design classes and improve their learning experience.

Homologation challenge

Teaching can be quite a challenge when a group of students is not all at the same level. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, there are six levels that allow educators to gauge a learner’s progress. And homologation, a process of confirming a student’s equivalent knowledge or skills, can be difficult says Verhoeven. “You need to bring the student to a certain level but you rarely get there,” he says. “That has to do with the fact that you don't know what the starting point is for the students.” While TU Delft bachelor’s students have taken the prerequisite courses for the master’s programme, students from other universities might need to take some bridging courses. Verhoeven and Montagne thought there must be a better, more efficient homologation method that eliminates the guesswork and ensures a level starting point for new students.

Personalised method

To address the levels of individual students, they wanted to create a tool that could personalise the approach. Instead of working on the software and tool themselves, the pair wanted to focus on the content behind the tool. Using an extensive parameterised database of questions tagged with things like topic, Bloom level (classification of learning level), and type, they launched a website that creates individualised quizzes to frame the student’s level of knowledge and skills. Students are then guided through an exploration of self-study where it is needed. It works a bit like a computer adventure game where you need to gain certain skills to survive, explains Verhoeven. A student identifies where they want to go and the system asks questions to determine their skill level, constantly providing feedback along the way. “In the end, each student will have a kind of portfolio where the system tracks what you have and at some point, it can also judge whether your portfolio is good enough for a certain module,” says Montagne. It’s almost like having a digital study advisor.

Structure that works

It was important to present the material with a logical structure, according to Montagne. “We should be teaching students how to solve complex problems as a group of engineers,” he says. “It has to be systematic, keeping track of relations between less and more complex problems.” Students should be able to understand something and then build on that going forward. The pair turned their structured material into an open textbook, published through TU Delft OPEN Publishing, and have plans to translate it to an interactive Jupyter book in the future.

Hundreds of students have now gone through their course using these resources, and students are even accessing the website from other parts of the world. Verhoeven and Montagne are amazed at the results so far, receiving positive feedback from those using their resources. “We’re happy to see that it works because that’s what we’re doing it for,” says Montagne. “When we see students become mature professional designers, we feel almost like proud parents,” notes Verhoeven. “We get lots of talented students and we manage to make the most of that talent and bring them to the highest level. That makes us the proudest, that we can get the students to the max that they can achieve.”

Having created much more material, including posters and infographics, Verhoeven and Montagne would love to expand their project, providing even more educational resources for TU Delft students and others.

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