Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Selby experiment (Basili & Selby, 1987), origi-
nally used for comparing V&V techniques, now
considering the educational context. The experi-
ments in each course involved 36 (9 teams) and
52 (13 teams) students, respectively. The results
were mainly analyzed in terms of the students'
ability and uniformity on: (1) detecting existing
faults; (2) generating test cases; and (3) cover-
ing the test requirements. In general, students
were able to master the involved knowledge and
perform the practical activities properly. Such
results provided some evidences of the learning
effectiveness achieved by the SoftTest module.
Details can be found at (Barbosa et al., 2008a).
Besides software testing, SP-DEM and IMA-
CID have been applied into several different
domains, especially in the context of two broad
projects - QualiPSo and INCT-SEC . Such proj-
ects involve heterogeneous and geographically
dispersed teams; therefore, they are particularly
interesting in order to evaluate the collaborative
issues addressed by SP-DEM and IMA-CID. In
general terms, the same benefits observed during
the development of SoftTest have been confirmed
in the development of the educational modules for
the QualiPSo and INCT-SEC projects.
We also highlight that in the evaluations
performed until now, the focus was to assess the
effects of SP-DEM and IMA-CID, mainly in
terms of collaborative development, on the overall
quality of the resulting educational products. In
this sense, we point out the need for conducting
more systematic and controlled experiments, con-
sidering not only the perspective of collaborative
development but also aspects of collaborative
learning. Such experiments have already been
planned, involving different courses, regarding
software testing and other domains, offered to
graduate and undergraduate students as well as
to professionals from industries. Different learn-
ing approaches should be considered, especially
focusing on lifelong learning experiences. Stu-
dents, instructors and developers' attitudes toward
SP-DEM, IMA-CID and the resulting modules
produced should also be evaluated. The adop-
tion of SP-DEM and IMA-CID in the context of
QualiPSo and INCT-SEC projects will contribute
in such further evaluations.
FUTURE WORK
In this section we summarize our ongoing work as
well as our plans for future enhancements of SP-
DEM standard and IMA-CID modeling approach.
Recent research motivates efforts to achieve
semantically rich, well-structured, standardized
and verified educational content. In this direction,
one of the perspectives we are now investigat-
ing refers to the use of ontologies (Uschold &
GrĂ¼ninger, 1996) as supporting mechanisms for
modeling the educational content. The goal is to
evolve IMA-CID to allow that both conceptual
mapping and ontologies can be used for structuring
and representing the knowledge domain. By using
ontologies in the conceptual level of IMA-CID
we intend: (1) to provide a better comprehension
of the knowledge domain to be taught; (2) to ease
collaboration and knowledge sharing among
developers; (3) to provide a well-established
structure for a knowledge repository; and (4) to
provide support for interoperability, considering
the relationship among different paradigms and
languages. In the didactic level, the adoption of
ontologies should also be explored together with
the idea of open specifications aiming at provid-
ing adaptive personalization in different learning
contexts.
Besides that, in the instructional level of IMA-
CID we are exploring the use of the ALOCoM
(Abstract Learning Object Content Model) ontol-
ogy (Verbert et al., 2005) - a formal representation
for learning objects and their components. The
idea is to adopt ALOCoM for establishing the
media (continuous and discrete elements) related
to information items and instructional elements.
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