Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex, hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating feedback for students. We investigate using LLMs to generate feedback for fixing syntax errors in Python programs, a key scenario in introductory programming. More concretely, given a student's buggy program, our goal is…

Nowadays, the improvement of digital learning with Artificial Intelligence has attracted a lot of research, as it provides solutions for individualized education styles which are independent of place and time. This is particularly the case for computer science, as a tutoring domain, which is rapidly growing and changing and as such, learners need…

Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems authoring tools are highly complex educational software applications used to produce highly complex software applications (i.e. ITSs). How should our assumptions about the target users (authors) impact the design of authoring tools? In this article I first reflect on the factors leading to my original 1999 article on…

Programming is a subject that many beginning students find difficult. The PHP Intelligent Tutoring System (PHP ITS) has been designed with the aim of making it easier for novices to learn the PHP language in order to develop dynamic web pages. Programming requires practice. This makes it necessary to include practical exercises in any ITS that…

The realisation of personalised e-learning to suit an individual learner's diverse learning needs is a concept which has been explored for decades, at great expense, but is still not achievable by non-technical authors. This research reviews the area of personalised e-learning and notes some of the technological challenges which developers may…

We survey the literature about the teaching and learning of recursive programming. After a short history of the advent of recursion in programming languages and its adoption by programmers, we present curricular approaches to recursion, including a review of textbooks and some programming methodology, as well as the functional and imperative…

In complex problem solving domains, correct solutions are often comprised of a combination of individual components. Students usually go through several attempts, each attempt reflecting an individual solution state that can be observed during practice. Classic metrics to measure student performance over time rely on counting the number of…

One of the most closely investigated topics in e-learning research has always been the effectiveness of adaptive learning environments. The technological evolutions that have dramatically changed the educational world in the last six decades have allowed ever more advanced and smarter solutions to be proposed. The focus of this paper is to depict…

AutoTutor is a natural language tutoring system that has produced learning gains across multiple domains (e.g., computer literacy, physics, critical thinking). In this paper, we review the development, key research findings, and systems that have evolved from AutoTutor. First, the rationale for developing AutoTutor is outlined and the advantages…

AutoTutor is a natural language tutoring system that has produced learning gains across multiple domains (e.g., computer literacy, physics, critical thinking). In this paper, we review the development, key research findings, and systems that have evolved from AutoTutor. First, the rationale for developing AutoTutor is outlined and the advantages…

Failure rates in first year calculus courses are high in most post-secondary institutions across North America and other parts of the world. This Inukshuk-funded open education project involved the development of five stand-alone pre-calculus learning modules. The design and revision phases of this project occurred between the fall of 2007 and…

Learning to program is a difficult process for novice programmers. AutoLEP, an automated learning and assessment system, was developed by us, to aid novice programmers to obtain programming skills. AutoLEP is ability-training-oriented. It adopts a novel assessment mechanism, which combines static analysis with dynamic testing to analyze student…

IMS Learning Design is a specification to capture the orchestration taking place in a learning scenario. This paper presents an extension called Generic Service Integration. This paradigm allows a bidirectional communication between the course engine in charge of the orchestration and conventional Web 2.0 tools. This communication allows the…

Rapid growth of the volume of interactive questions available to the students of modern E-Learning courses placed the problem of personalized guidance on the agenda of E-Learning researchers. Without proper guidance, students frequently select too simple or too complicated problems and ended either bored or discouraged. This paper explores a…