Developing a Personal Electronic Learning Environment (PELE)

On all levels of education, including the fundamental education at the ETH, there is considerable impetus towards skill based competence. This leads to project oriented assignments independently performed and submitted by the students. Problem and project oriented programs lead, especially in large scale courses, to an enormous administrative effort (receiving and correcting assignments, giving feedback, grading, etc.).

One possible solution is to decentralize the exercise classes by using additional teaching staff (at the ETH mostly assistants). However, this also increases the administrative effort (e.g. recruiting of assistants, organization of exercise groups, additional room allocation).With the development of a personal electronic learning environment (PELE), this rigid structure of exercise groups should be replaced by individualized groups. In addition the grading of individual solutions will be replaced by verbal formative assessments with personal feedback.The newly provided structure will not only provide a solution for electronic enrollment for an individual appointment and a fair distribution of teaching assistants, rooms and time slot. But also lead towards self organizing exercise classes. This should reduce the administrative effort required for large scale project oriented programs significantly. With the help of the newly-created system students should be able to inform themselves about their personal skill level and compare it to the required skill level for the final evaluation. Decentralized organized exercise classes might lead to a “loss of control” by the lecturer. Therefore, the system will provide them insight into the current processes, via monitoring tools and allow them to regain control.

• Automated tutorial group management: Thanks to the efficient, automatic management of flexible tutorial groups, student can choose the most convenient appointment for the formative project presentation and the end-of-semester exams.
• Individualization and feedback: Frequent and individualized feedback help the students to get to know their positions in the learning process.
• Equal opportunities: Learning success does not depend on pre-knowledge, a specific teaching-assistant or gender.

PELE makes individualized project-oriented learning possible even with big cohorts (>200 students). Through automated enrolment to tutorial groups the organizational effort is being reduced. This allows continuous formative assessment on the one hand and peer-evaluation that can be used as an instrument for quality-control on the other hand.

Students and teaching assistants request more detailed feedback. In addition to the rating of assistants and students PELE should therefore be supplemented with more activity-data. For the lecturer, this aggregated data can serve as a source for real-time feedback.

• After completion of a self-learning unit, students appreciate the personal contact with the teaching assistant and the individual feedback.
• The intensive and regular engagement with the learning material already during the semester is positively rated by the students.
• Students judge the random allocation of teaching assistants as fair and reasonable.

• Qualitatively good project tasks and sufficient teaching assistants are a precondition for using PELE.
• The tailor-made technical development in close cooperation with teaching assistants and students has been very successful.

• Learning and Teaching Fair 2020