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Volume 4 Issue 1 March 2006
Implementing Courseware to Support Learning Through Real-World Erroneous Examples: Students’ Perceptions of Tertiary Courseware and Obstacles to Implementing Effective Delivery Through VLE
Rachada Monthienvichienchai1 and Erica Melis2
1London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, UK
2German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany
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Erroneous examples have often been used in many subjects to prevent students making common mistakes in a particular domain; for example, calculus in mathematics and systems design in computer science. However, such examples are often only loosely related to the actual difficulties and causes of misconceptions that the students may have with the domain. Consequently, often to the surprise of the instructor, students still make errors that are related to erroneous examples already given to them. A possible solution for this is to use as examples, errors that actually came from the student population themselves or another student population that has similar characteristics to the target student population. Such examples, compared with those from other sources, would be more grounded in the experience of the students eLearning courseware that delivers teaching through erroneous examples, if effectively implemented, has a distinct advantage over traditional learning material in that it enables the students to vicariously experience through rich media how the errors are made and how they can be effectively corrected.
This paper presents a study in a UK university that investigated how first-year Information Systems undergraduates perceived such courseware and what obstacles had to be overcome to implement effective eLearning support for teaching and learning with real-world erroneous examples. Excerpts of the courseware created, the eLearning environment, the students’ work when using the courseware and one-to-one interview data are provided. The study finds that socio-cultural factors play an important role in creating effective ‘tertiary’ courseware and that students highly rate the effectiveness of such material in supporting their effort to learn systems diagram construction and dealing with their personal misconceptions. Moreover, the process of creating the courseware also allowed the instructor to discover the real causes of the students’ misconceptions and deal directly with them rather than the multitude of symptoms.
The paper concludes by detailing the attributes of effective delivery of real-world erroneous examples in eLearning and proposes a direction for extending the implementation of such examples and eLearning delivery system to other domains.
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