Education Commons^™

Patterns For Active E-Learning In Cms Environments, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The proliferation of course management systems (CMS) in the last decade stimulated educators in establishing novel active e-learning practices. Only a few of these practices, however, have been systematically described and published as pedagogic patterns. The lack of formal patterns is an obstacle to the systematic reuse of beneficial active e-learning experiences. This paper aims to partially fill the void by offering a collection of active e-learning patterns that are derived from our continuous course design experience in standard CMS environments, such as Moodle and Black-board. Our technical focus is on active e-learning patterns that can boost student interest in …

Digital Cs1 Study Pack Based On Moodle And Python, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

We believe that CS1 courses can be made more attractive to students:

• by teaching a highly interactive scripting language – Python
• by using an open source course management system - such as Moodle - to make all course resources available in a comprehensive digital study pack, and
• by offering detailed self-guided online labs

We have used Moodle [1] and Python [2] to develop a "Python First" digital study pack [3] which comprises a wealth of new, original learning modules: extensive e-texts, detailed self-guided labs, numerous sample programs, quizzes, and slides. Our digital study pack pedagogy is described in recent ITiCSE …