Personalizing computer science education by leveraging multimodal learning analytics

This Research Full Paper implements a framework that harness sources of programming learning analytics on three computer programming courses a Higher Education Institution. The platform, called PredictCS, automatically detects lower-performing or 'at-risk' students in programming courses and automatically and adaptively sends them feedback. This system has been progressively adopted at the classroom level to improve personalized learning. A visual analytics dashboard is developed and accessible to Faculty. This contains information about the models deployed and insights extracted from student's data. By leveraging historical student data we built predictive models using student characteristics, prior academic history, logged interactions between students and online resources, and students' progress in programming laboratory work. Predictions were generated every week during the semester's classes. In addition, during the second half of the semester, students who opted-in received pseudo real-time personalised feedback. Notifications were personalised based on students' predicted performance on the course and included a programming suggestion from a top-student in the class if any programs submitted had failed to meet the specified criteria. As a result, this helped students who corrected their programs to learn more and reduced the gap between lower and higher-performing students.