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Exploring Students' Adoption Of Chatgpt As A Mentor For Undergraduate Computing Projects: Pls-Sem Analysis, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky Dec 2023

Exploring Students' Adoption Of Chatgpt As A Mentor For Undergraduate Computing Projects: Pls-Sem Analysis, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As computing projects increasingly become a core component of undergraduate courses, effective mentorship is crucial for supporting students' learning and development. Our study examines the adoption of ChatGPT as a mentor for undergraduate computing projects. It explores the impact of ChatGPT mentorship, specifically, skills development, and mentor responsiveness, i.e., ChatGPT's responsiveness to students' needs and requests. We utilize PLS-SEM to investigate the interrelationships between different factors and develop a model that captures their contribution to the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a mentor. The findings suggest that mentor responsiveness and technical/design support are key factors for the adoption of AI tools …


Proactive Conversational Agents In The Post-Chatgpt World, Lizi Liao, Grace Hui Yang, Chirag Shah Jul 2023

Proactive Conversational Agents In The Post-Chatgpt World, Lizi Liao, Grace Hui Yang, Chirag Shah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

ChatGPT and similar large language model (LLM) based conversational agents have brought shock waves to the research world. Although astonished by their human-like performance, we find they share a significant weakness with many other existing conversational agents in that they all take a passive approach in responding to user queries. This limits their capacity to understand the users and the task better and to offer recommendations based on a broader context than a given conversation. Proactiveness is still missing in these agents, including their ability to initiate a conversation, shift topics, or offer recommendations that take into account a more …


Assessing The Effectiveness Of A Chatbot Workshop As Experiential Teaching And Learning Tool To Engage Undergraduate Students, Kyong Jin Shim, Thomas Menkhoff, Ying Qian Teo, Clement Shi Qi Ong May 2023

Assessing The Effectiveness Of A Chatbot Workshop As Experiential Teaching And Learning Tool To Engage Undergraduate Students, Kyong Jin Shim, Thomas Menkhoff, Ying Qian Teo, Clement Shi Qi Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we empirically examine and assess the effectiveness of a chatbot workshop as experiential teaching and learning tool to engage undergraduate students enrolled in an elective course “Doing Business with A.I.” in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) at Singapore Management University. The chatbot workshop provides non-STEM students with an opportunity to acquire basic skills to build a chatbot prototype using the ‘Dialogflow’ program. The workshop and the experiential learning activity are designed to impart conversation and user-centric design know how and know why to students. A key didactical aspect which informs the design and flow …


The Effectiveness Of Using Python Programming Approach In Teaching Ffnancial Analytics, Clarence Goh, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan Dec 2022

The Effectiveness Of Using Python Programming Approach In Teaching Ffnancial Analytics, Clarence Goh, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study presents a learning method and challenges regarding implementing a Python programming approach in teaching financial analytics to graduate accounting students. The advent of Big Data, as well as related applications and technologies, has significantly changed the process and practice of accounting. This has led to essential changes in the construction and teaching content of accounting education. While there have been several studies examining how data analytics is embedded in the accounting curriculum, the majority of the teaching cases in accounting focus on analysis and communication with Excel as the principal tool, with very few covering the necessary steps …


Gamified Online Industry Learning Platform For Teaching Of Foundational Computing Skills, Yi Meng Lau, Rafael Jose Barros Barrios, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim Dec 2022

Gamified Online Industry Learning Platform For Teaching Of Foundational Computing Skills, Yi Meng Lau, Rafael Jose Barros Barrios, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online industry learning platforms are widely used by organizations for employee training and upskilling. Courses or lessons offered by these platforms can be generic or specific to an enterprise application. The increased demand of new hires to learn these platforms or who are already certified in some of these courses has led universities to look at the opportunities for integrating online industry learning platforms into their curricula. Universities hope to use these platforms to aid students in their learning of concepts and theories. At the same time, these platforms can equip students with industryrecognized certifications or digital badges. This paper …


A Recommendation On How To Teach K-Means In Introductory Analytics Courses, Manoj Thulasidas Dec 2022

A Recommendation On How To Teach K-Means In Introductory Analytics Courses, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We teach K-Means clustering in introductory data analytics courses because it is one of the simplest and most widely used unsupervised machine learning algorithms. However, one drawback of this algorithm is that it does not offer a clear method to determine the appropriate number of clusters; it does not have a built-in mechanism for K selection. What is usually taught as the solution for the K Selection problem is the so-called elbow method, where we look at the incremental changes in some quality metric (usually, the sum of squared errors, SSE), trying to find a sudden change. In addition to …


Cold Calls To Enhance Class Participation And Student Engagement, Manoj Thulasidas, Aldy Gunawan Dec 2022

Cold Calls To Enhance Class Participation And Student Engagement, Manoj Thulasidas, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The question whether cold calls increase student engagement in the classroom has not been conclusively answered in the literature. This study describes the automated system to implement unbiased, randomized cold calling by posing a question, allowing all students to think first and then calling on a particular student to respond. Since we already have a measure of the level of student engagement as the self-reported classparticipation entries from the students, its correlation to cold calling is also further studied. The results show that there is a statistically significant increase in the class participation reported, and therefore in student engagement, in …


Vr Computing Lab: An Immersive Classroom For Computing Learning, Shawn Pang, Kyong Jin Shim, Yi Meng Lau, Swapna Gottipati Dec 2022

Vr Computing Lab: An Immersive Classroom For Computing Learning, Shawn Pang, Kyong Jin Shim, Yi Meng Lau, Swapna Gottipati

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) is gaining popularity amongst educators and learners. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a VR session is worth a trillion words. VR technology completely immerses users with an experience that transports them into a simulated world. Universities across the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries have already started using VR for higher education in areas such as medicine, business, architecture, vocational training, social work, virtual field trips, virtual campuses, helping students with special needs, and many more. In this paper, we propose a novel VR platform learning framework which maps elements …


Uncovering Inclusivity Gaps In Design Pedagogy Through The Digital Design Marginalization Framework, Jaisie Sin, Cosmin Munteanu, Michael Nixon, Velian Pandeliev, Garreth W. Tigwell, Kristen Shinohara, Anthony Tang, Steve Szigeti Jul 2022

Uncovering Inclusivity Gaps In Design Pedagogy Through The Digital Design Marginalization Framework, Jaisie Sin, Cosmin Munteanu, Michael Nixon, Velian Pandeliev, Garreth W. Tigwell, Kristen Shinohara, Anthony Tang, Steve Szigeti

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designers play a key role in the design of inclusive and socially conscious interfaces. Thus, it is imperative for designers to be thoughtful of the ethical and social implications of design. However, gaps in the foundational training that designers receive (e.g., as university students) can negatively impact their ability to consider the social implications of their design practice. This can result in consequences such as digital marginalization, which, as defined by the Digital Design Marginalization (DDM) framework, is the “pushing away”, whether intentional or not, of a defined group of users from a digital or online service or system, where …


Itss: Interactive Web-Based Authoring And Playback Integrated Environment For Programming Tutorials, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan, David Lo May 2022

Itss: Interactive Web-Based Authoring And Playback Integrated Environment For Programming Tutorials, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video-based programming tutorials are a popular form of tutorial used by authors to guide learners to code. Still, the interactivity of these videos is limited primarily to control video flow. There are existing works with increased interactivity that are shown to improve the learning experience. Still, these solutions require setting up a custom recording environment and are not well-integrated with the playback environment. This paper describes our integrated ITSS environment and evaluates the ease of authoring and playback of our interactive programming tutorials. Our environment is designed to run within the browser sandbox and is less intrusive to record interactivity …


Hci Education And Ux Practice: Highlights From Singapore, Tamas Makany, Dharani Perera-Schulz May 2022

Hci Education And Ux Practice: Highlights From Singapore, Tamas Makany, Dharani Perera-Schulz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This position paper highlights trends in education, practice, and support of HCI/UX in Singapore, a small city-state island in Southeast Asia. The paper was prepared for the 2022 Southeast Asia Computer-Human Interaction (SEACHI'22) virtual workshop on Apr 14, 2022, as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22) international conference.


Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh Jan 2022

Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences conducting cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) competition for cybersecurity enthusiast participants (inclusive of both tertiary students and working professionals) local and abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning and appreciation of cybersecurity concepts for our participants with little to no technical background can be challenging. Gamification methods such as capture the flag competition style is a popular form of cybersecurity education to help participants overcome this challenge and identify talents. Participants get to apply theoretical concepts in a controlled environment, solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting and gain hands-on active learning …


On Analysing Student Resilience In Higher Education Programs Using A Data-Driven Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Ee-Peng Lim, Aldy Gunawan Dec 2021

On Analysing Student Resilience In Higher Education Programs Using A Data-Driven Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Ee-Peng Lim, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analysing student resilience is important as research has shown that resilience is related to students’ academic performance and their persistence through academic setbacks. While questionnaires can be conducted to assess student resilience directly, they suffer from human recall errors and deliberate suppression of true responses. In this paper, we propose ACREA, ACademic REsilience Analytics framework which adopts a data-driven approach to analyse student resilient behavior with the use of student-course data. ACREA defines academic setbacks experienced by students and measures how well students overcome such setbacks using a quasi-experimental design. By applying ACREA on a real world student-course dataset, we …


Statistical Moderation: A Case Study In Grading On A Curve, Manoj Thulasidas Dec 2021

Statistical Moderation: A Case Study In Grading On A Curve, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a negative perception about “grading on a curve,” because of the feeling that the cohort strength may skew the final grades one way or another. However, given the difficulties in ensuring absolute uniformity in assessment across the years, especially when taught and assessed by different instructors under different settings, grading on a curve may be a necessary evil. Once we accept this type of statistical moderation as the last line of defense in standardizing the final scores so that student cohorts from different terms or sections or schools may be compared, we have to implement it well. In …


Integration Of Information Technology Certifications Into Undergraduate Computing Curriculum, Eng Lieh Ouh, Kyong Jin Shim Dec 2021

Integration Of Information Technology Certifications Into Undergraduate Computing Curriculum, Eng Lieh Ouh, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences of integrating information technology certifications into an undergraduate computing curriculum. As the technology landscape evolves, a common challenge for educators in computing programs is designing an industry-relevant curriculum. Over the years, industry practitioners have taken technology certifications to validate themselves against a base level of technical knowledge currently in demand in industry. Information technology (IT) certifications can also offer paths for academic computing programs to stay relevant to industry needs. However, identifying relevant IT certifications and integrating it into an academic curriculum requires a careful design approach as substantial efforts are needed …


Profiling Student Learning From Q&A Interactions In Online Discussion Forums, De Lin Ong, Kyong Jin Shim, Gottipati Swapna Nov 2021

Profiling Student Learning From Q&A Interactions In Online Discussion Forums, De Lin Ong, Kyong Jin Shim, Gottipati Swapna

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The last two decades have witnessed an explosive growth in technology adoption in education. Proliferation of digital learning resources through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and social media platforms coupled with significantly lowered cost of learning has brought and is continuing to take education to every doorstep globally. In recent years, the use of asynchronous online discussion forums has become pervasive in tertiary education institutions. Online discussion forums are widely used for facilitating interactions both during the lesson time and beyond. Numerous prior studies have reported benefits of using online discussion forums including enhanced quality of learning, improved level of …


Design And Supervision Model Of Group Projects For Active Learning, Yi Meng Lau, Kyong Jin Shim, Swapna Gottipati Oct 2021

Design And Supervision Model Of Group Projects For Active Learning, Yi Meng Lau, Kyong Jin Shim, Swapna Gottipati

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research paper presents a group project framework for a second-year programming course, which was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework offers well defined stages of the group project which allow students to work on their choice of a real-world problem, integrate their learnings from previous courses, and present a working solution. In the group project, students actively participate, reflect, and contribute to achieving the goals set in the learning objectives of the course. Our framework incorporates key features from Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (1984) and principles of active learning from Barnes (1989) to achieve active and experiential learning …


Mining Informal & Short Student Self-Reflections For Detecting Challenging Topics: A Learning Outcomes Insight Dashboard, De Lin Ong, Gottipati Swapna, Siaw Ling Lo, Venky Shankararaman Oct 2021

Mining Informal & Short Student Self-Reflections For Detecting Challenging Topics: A Learning Outcomes Insight Dashboard, De Lin Ong, Gottipati Swapna, Siaw Ling Lo, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Having students write short self-reflections at the end of each weekly session enables them to reflect on what they have learnt in the session and topics they find challenging. Analysing these self-reflections provides instructors with insights on how to address the missing conceptions and misconceptions of the students and appropriately plan and deliver the next session. Currently, manual methods adopted to analyse these student reflections are time consuming and tedious. This paper proposes a solution model that uses content mining and NLP techniques to automate the analysis of short self-reflections. We evaluate the solution model by studying its implementation in …


Enhancing Project Based Learning With Unsupervised Learning Of Project Reflections, Hua Leong Fwa Sep 2021

Enhancing Project Based Learning With Unsupervised Learning Of Project Reflections, Hua Leong Fwa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of research and application that uses computers to analyze human text. It has seen wide adoption within several industries but few studies have investigated it for use in evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions and pedagogies. Pedagogies such as Project based learning (PBL) centers on learners solving an authentic problem or challenge which leads to knowledge creation and higher engagement. PBL also lends itself well in plugging the gap between what is taught in classrooms and applying the knowledge gained to the real working environment. In this study, we seek to investigate how …


Up Close And Personal With Mr Sundar Selvam: Hitting Zero Targets, Sundar Selvam Aug 2021

Up Close And Personal With Mr Sundar Selvam: Hitting Zero Targets, Sundar Selvam

Oral History Collection

He might not be one you would have come across on campus. And not one you might read much about in SMU news or in the limelight for its achievements, preferring to remain in the background. But look around the SMU campus and you will see the fruits of his work and that of his team. Meet Sundar, SMU’s Vice-President for Campus Infrastructure and Services. Since January 2015, he has been at the forefront of driving SMU’s own sustainability journey which has resulted in several “firsts”. This interview was published in the August edition of SMU CIRCLE.


Rapid Transition Of A Technical Course From Face-To-Face To Online, Swapna Gottipatti, Venky Shankaraman Jan 2021

Rapid Transition Of A Technical Course From Face-To-Face To Online, Swapna Gottipatti, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Just like most universities around the world, the senior management at Singapore Management University decided to move all courses to a virtual, online, synchronous mode, giving instructors a very short notice period—one week—to make this transition. In this paper, we describe the challenges, practical solutions adopted, and the lessons learnt in rapidly transitioning a face-to-face Master’s degree course in Text Analytics and Applications into a virtual, online, course format that could deliver a quality learning experience.


Renewal Of An Information Systems Curriculum To Support Career Based Tracks: A Case Study, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Kyong Jin Shim Dec 2020

Renewal Of An Information Systems Curriculum To Support Career Based Tracks: A Case Study, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The pace at which technology redefines traditional job functions is picking up rapidly. This trend is triggered particularly by advances in analytics, security, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence and big data. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study on our approach to renewing an undergraduate IS Major curriculum to align with the needs of the industry. We adopt a survey based approach to study Information Systems (IS) graduate skills requirements and re-design the curriculum framework for the IS program at our school. The paper describes in detail the process, the redesigned IS curriculum, the impact of the …


Using Student Perceptions To Design Smart Class Participation Tools: A Technology Framework, Swapna Gottipati, Shankararaman, Venky, Mark Wei Jie Ng Oct 2020

Using Student Perceptions To Design Smart Class Participation Tools: A Technology Framework, Swapna Gottipati, Shankararaman, Venky, Mark Wei Jie Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our research full paper studies the perceptions of students and proposes technology design framework for smart class participation tools. Participation in classroom discussions has been observed to improve student comprehension and performance. In our contemporary tertiary educational context, student participation is characterised in mainly two forms; inclass discussions and online forums. Both forms of participation generate voluminous amounts of knowledge. However, the present difficulty in capturing and analysing these forms of participation leads to loss of knowledge and insights, which otherwise could be very useful. This study aims to analyse ways to improve data capture as well as data analysis …


A Visual Analytics Tool For Personalized Competency Feedback, Joelle Elmaleh, Shankararaman, Venky Aug 2020

A Visual Analytics Tool For Personalized Competency Feedback, Joelle Elmaleh, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we report our study on the design and implementation of a visual analytics tool, Competency Analytics System (CAS), which provides feedback to instructors on both the cohort and individual student’s competency acquisition rate, as well as provide personalized dashboard to each student on his or her competency acquisition for a specific course. We present the key functionalities of CAS and describe a case study on the implementation of CAS in a first-year programming course. Data from a student survey indicates that the personalized dashboard provided by CAS contributed to enhancing their ability to clearly identify the extent …


Deep Learning Of Facial Embeddings And Facial Landmark Points For The Detection Of Academic Emotions, Hua Leong Fwa Jul 2020

Deep Learning Of Facial Embeddings And Facial Landmark Points For The Detection Of Academic Emotions, Hua Leong Fwa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic emotion recognition is an actively researched area as emotion plays a pivotal role in effective human communications. Equipping a computer to understand and respond to human emotions has potential applications in many fields including education, medicine, transport and hospitality. In a classroom or online learning context, the basic emotions do not occur frequently and do not influence the learning process itself. The academic emotions such as engagement, frustration, confusion and boredom are the ones which are pivotal to sustaining the motivation of learners. In this study, we evaluated the use of deep learning on FaceNet embeddings and facial landmark …


Smu Teaching Bank: Case Study Of A Multiyear Development Project Utilizing Student Resources, Alan Megargel, Terence P. C. Fan, Venky Shankararaman Dec 2019

Smu Teaching Bank: Case Study Of A Multiyear Development Project Utilizing Student Resources, Alan Megargel, Terence P. C. Fan, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A domain refers to a business sector such as banking, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing etc. For an IS student, it is imperative that the domain knowledge includes a comprehension and understanding of business processes, technology and data related to the chosen domain. For example, when learning the retail banking domain, an IS student must have an understanding of the transactions concerned with retail banking such as fund transfers and loan repayments. The student must also gain a strong foothold in transaction fulfilment processes, the various application services that are used, the data that is transferred, etc. Teaching domain knowledge is very …


Applying Case-Based Learning For A Postgraduate Software Architecture Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Yunghans Irawan Jul 2019

Applying Case-Based Learning For A Postgraduate Software Architecture Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Yunghans Irawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software architecture remains a difficult subject for learners to grasp and for educators to teach given its level of abstraction. On the other hand, case-based learning (CBL) is a popular teaching approach used across disciplines especially in business, medicine and law where students work in groups apply their knowledge to solve real-world case studies, or scenarios using their reasoning skills and existing theoretical knowledge. In this paper, we provide how we apply case-based learning to address the challenge in teaching a postgraduate software architecture course. Our learners are postgraduate students taking a master’s program in software engineering. We first describe …


An Intelligent Platform With Automatic Assessment And Engagement Features For Active Online Discussions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Yun-Chen Chen, Bing Tian Dai Jul 2019

An Intelligent Platform With Automatic Assessment And Engagement Features For Active Online Discussions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Yun-Chen Chen, Bing Tian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a universitycontext, discussion forums are mostly available in Learning and ManagementSystems (LMS) but are often ineffective in encouraging participation due topoorly designed user interface and the lack of motivating factors toparticipate. Our integrated platform with the Telegram mobile app and aweb-based forum, is capable of automatic thoughtfulness assessment of questionsand answers posted, using text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP)methodologies. We trained and applied the Random Forest algorithm to provideinstant thoughtfulness score prediction for the new posts contributed by thestudents, and prompted the students to improve on their posts, thereby invokingdeeper thinking resulting in better quality contributions. In addition, …


Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong Dec 2018

Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study reports the use of a physical robot and robot simulator in an introductory programming course in a university and measures students' programming background conceptual learning gain and learning experience. One group used physical robots in their lessons to complete programming assignments, while the other group used robot simulators. We are interested in finding out if there is any difference in the learning gain and experiences between those that use physical robots as compared to robot simulators. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in terms of students' learning between the two approaches. However, the control group …


Text Analytics Approach To Extract Course Improvement Suggestions From Students’ Feedback, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Jeff Rongsheng Lin Dec 2018

Text Analytics Approach To Extract Course Improvement Suggestions From Students’ Feedback, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Jeff Rongsheng Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In academic institutions, it is normal practice that at the end of each term, students are required to complete a questionnaire that is designed to gather students’ perceptions of the instructor and their learning experience in the course. Students’ feedback includes numerical answers to Likert scale questions and textual comments to open-ended questions. Within the textual comments given by the students are embedded suggestions. A suggestion can be explicit or implicit. Any suggestion provides useful pointers on how the instructor can further enhance the student learning experience. However, it is tedious to manually go through all the qualitative comments and …