Browsing by Author "Suleman, Hussein"

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    Open Access
    A comparison of mobile search interfaces for isiXhosa speakers
    (2018) Modise, Morebodi; Suleman, Hussein
    Search interfaces have for a long time been targeted at the resource-rich languages, such as English. There has been little effort to support African (Bantu) languages in search interfaces when compared to languages such as English, particularly the isiXhosa language. However, due to the increase in use of mobile phones in developing countries, these interfaces can now be adapted to languages in these settings to support information access on the Web. This study proposes mobile search interfaces to support isiXhosa speakers to search for information on the Web using isiXhosa as a discovery language. The isiXhosa language is considered a low-resourced African (Bantu) language spoken in resource-constrained environments in South Africa. The language is spoken by over eight million people. Yet, there has been no search interface specifically targeted at supporting isiXhosa speakers. Two mobile search interfaces were developed on an Android application. The interfaces were text based and voice based. The design of the interfaces was based on feedback from 4 native isiXhosa speakers in a design focus group, and guidelines from the literature. Using the developed interfaces, an experiment was conducted with 34 native isiXhosa speaking students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. This was done to investigate, which interface could better support isiXhosa speakers to search for information on the Web using mobile phones. Quantitative data was collected using application log files. Additionally, user feedback was then obtained using the standard Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) instrument, and both interfaces were confirmed as usable. In contrast to what was expected, users preferred the text interface in general, and according to most SUMI subscales. This could be because of greater familiarity with text search interfaces or because of the relative scarcity of voice interfaces in African (Bantu) languages. Where users are not literate, the voice interface may be the only option, so the fact that it was deemed usable is an important independent finding. Search in African (Bantu) language collections is still a largely unexplored field, and more work needs to be done on the interfaces as the algorithms and collections are developed in parallel.
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    Open Access
    An Investigation of a Game Generator Tool to Teach Recursion
    (2022) Anyango, Jecton Tocho; Suleman, Hussein
    For many beginners, learning to program has proved to be difficult, in particular, learning the topic of recursion. Serious games have shown much promise in education, including in the teaching of programming. However, the adoption rate in mainstream teaching still remains low. One reason given for this is the lack of game authoring tools to support educators with little or no game programming skills. Moreover, developing educational games is difficult, time consuming and expensive. One way to address this problem is to use domain-specific game generators to create customised games as needed. The proposal in this thesis is that supporting higher education teachers with a game generator tool could potentially aid them to effectively create serious games. The aim was to investigate the use of a game generator tool to aid CS instructors to easily generate instances of educational games to teach recursion. A User Centred Design (UCD) methodology was adopted to develop a prototype game generator tool called the Recursive Game Generator (RGG). Preliminary needs assessment and requirements analysis studies were conducted and conceptual design principles investigated. Four empirical studies were conducted to evaluate the prototype. Three were designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the prototype in supporting CS teachers to create games to teach novices the recursion topic while one evaluated the educational potential of the generated games from the lens of students. Eight conceptual design principles were proposed that could guide the development of serious games that cater to diversity. It was also found that CS educators and trainees found the prototype useful, easy to use and learn; and were satisfied with the tool's effectiveness and efficiency, recommending its adoption. Students'feedback showed that the generated games had educational potential for learning programming. The proposed conceptual design principles are insightful as they add new knowledge in the field of serious games design. Moreover, the positive empirical findings and user experiences suggest that such a higher-order tool has the potential to increase the adoption of serious games in programming education, and broadly meet the needs of a diverse audience of instructors and students.
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    Building heritage collections using games on social networks
    (2012) Havenga, Michelle; Suleman, Hussein
    An application on a social network may provide a means to avoid the cost, decrease time and increase scale of operation of heritage preservation by motivating users to supply and process the data. This project uses a Facebook application for the purpose of gathering heritage pictures and useful metadata and tagging. The application was written in Python using the Django Web Framework, connected to Facebook using the Graph API and was hosted on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance. Motivation techniques to promote user participation were investigated.
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    Open Access
    Cloud computing for digital libraries
    (2013) Poulo, Lebeko Bernard Nkoebele; Suleman, Hussein
    Information management systems (digital libraries/repositories, learning management systems, content management systems) provide key technologies for the storage, preservation and dissemination of knowledge in its various forms, such as research documents, theses and dissertations, cultural heritage documents and audio files. These systems can make use of cloud computing to achieve high levels of scalability, while making services accessible to all at reasonable infrastructure costs and on-demand. This research aims to develop techniques for building scalable digital information management systems based on efficient and on-demand use of generic grid-based technologies such as cloud computing. In particular, this study explores the use of existing cloud computing resources offered by some popular cloud computing vendors such as Amazon Web Services. This involves making use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store large and increasing volumes of data, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide the required computational power and Amazon SimpleDB for querying and data indexing on Amazon S3. A proof-of-concept application comprising typical digital library services was developed and deployed in the cloud environment and evaluated for scalability when the demand for more data and services increases. The results from the evaluation show that it is possible to adopt cloud computing for digital libraries in addressing issues of massive data handling and dealing with large numbers of concurrent requests. Existing digital library systems could be migrated and deployed into the cloud.
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    Co-designing in the real world: managing a multiple stakeholder design process with an NGO
    (2018) Brittan Sarah; Suleman, Hussein
    Many ICT4D research projects work in collaboration with NGOs in order to meet their development objectives and to increase their interventions’ effectiveness. Herein, aspects of co-design are often applied, where the intention is to include all stakeholders as equal participants in the design process. However, collaborating with NGOs and with users who have reduced access to technology can be challenging. As a result, the ideals of co-design are not easily achieved, due to the vastly differing backgrounds of stakeholders in ICT4D projects. In this thesis, an explicit approach for managing the varying interactions between stakeholders is proposed and described through a case study. The approach was derived from ethnographic action research and participatory design methodologies, led by practical consideration from real-world constraints. The approach is structured around an interactive design process that includes the stakeholder groups in unique ways at each phase of the design process, in order to maximise the contributions in a way that respects their backgrounds and areas of expertise. The proposed approach was evaluated through its implementation in the design of a mobile recordkeeping application, in collaboration with an NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. The NGO comprises of two stakeholder groups: the staff and the micro-entrepreneurs who they empower. The NGO’s focus is to provide training and support over a two-year process to women from low-income communities, by teaching them how to manage their own businesses to become socially and financially independent. The objective of this case study was to design a mobile application that aligned with the recordkeeping curriculum of the NGO and meet the specific requirements and constraints of the target users. Through the implementation of the design approach, the students and staff were able to provide useful and complementary contributions towards the design of the system. A one-month field study of the application with a group of 21 student participants revealed that the system was a suitable solution and appropriately met the needs of the NGO and the end-users. The final evaluation of the stakeholders’ reflections on the design process revealed that it was an appropriate design process to have followed. The results further identified that care must be taken to clarify expectations at each stage of the design process, especially when external factors change, and to frequently communicate with all stakeholders involved. The design approach proposed and employed during this research project, and the unique way that it allowed the stakeholders to contribute, will benefit future ICT4D research projects that are faced with stakeholder groups that vary significantly, where traditional equal participation is not possible.
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    A comparison of socially-motivated discussion forum models for learning management systems
    (2017) Almukhaylid, Maryam Meshari; Suleman, Hussein
    This thesis seeks to contribute to the field of learning management system (LMS) development in tertiary educational institutions, particularly to advance the adoption of learning management systems (LMSes) by exploring the incorporation of sociallymotivated discussion forum models. This study proposes a Web-based application, which includes four different discussion forum models for LMSes, in order to test usability and student preferences. The purpose of this study was to compare two non-social discussion forums and two social discussion forums, to determine their appropriateness in terms of attributes or features and general functionality for LMSes. The design processes led to the creation of a Web-based application called 4DFs, which includes four different discussion forum models. Two of these models are non-social discussion forums: the chat room unstructured model and the traditional general threaded discussion. The other two types are social discussion forums, where users can choose who they converse with: the Twitter-style short comment feed and the Facebook-style. The chat room and the traditional general threaded discussion forums' features are based on those of Sakai, since the research sample was comprised of students from the University of Cape Town (UCT). The Twitter-style and Facebook-style elements, such as retweets, hashtags, likes and reposts, are based on Twitter and Facebook. A pilot study was conducted to discover any errors or issues with the experimental procedure. A controlled experiment was then conducted with 31 students from the institution. Participants had to fill out a background information survey to gather some demographic information and to understand more about participants' previous experiences using chat rooms, discussion forums, and social media applications for university related purposes and for non-university related purposes. Following that, participants were given tasks to test all the features of the different discussion forum models. To avoid bias in the participants' choosing of discussion forum models, the research was conducted with a Counterbalanced Measures Design. Participants had to fill in the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire in conjunction with their use of the Web-based application. Then, after using all discussion forums, they had to fill out a preferences questionnaire that asked about their preferences of the discussion forums and the features. The Twitter-style short comment feed model was preferred in terms of the ease of use and since participants were familiar with this forum. This was followed by the chat room unstructured model and the traditional general threaded discussion in terms of these forums' ease of use and students' preference for the layout. The Facebook-style was less preferable. Also, participants indicated that the post button, reply button, edit, delete, and search button were more beneficial features. Participants mention that the layout of the chat room unstructured model was not optimal, since the massive amount of text made it confusing and unclear to decipher. Participants suggested that including the uploading of media, allowing private chat, adding extra features for important posts, and using a repost button in the discussion forums would be more useful. The study found that students preferred that the learning forum include certain characteristics; they prioritised ease of use, less complexity, less interaction and a user-friendly interface over their familiarity with the forum. For learning, there is a need to use the features for a specific purpose so users do not necessarily want extra fancy features (like emojis), instead they want systems that help them to learn efficiently.
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    Component-based digital library scalability using clusters
    (2011) Omar, Muammar Zamir; Suleman, Hussein
    Digital Libraries (DLs) are systems to manage information or data. They range from monolithic systems to loosely coupled component-based ones. DLs provide the services to manage, retrieve and access this information. Where they have fallen short is providing methods to manage huge volumes of information quickly and effectively. While the services provided by these systems work correctly, the time it takes to provide a response is unacceptable. In many cases, this is due to the underlying architecture of the DL system and other factors which influence resources available to the system owners for upgrades or maintenance. This dissertation documents an alternate approach to the normal one of using more powerful machines to overcome the problem. Instead, a cluster of computers is used to provide increased performance. It presents a DL system in which loosely-coupled components can migrate and replicate across machines in order to meet the demands of the system. These components provide user services such as searching and browsing. Over time, the system adjusts itself automatically to provide better service times as the number of incoming requests increase. These adjustments include migrating components or services to machines with more resources and replicating those which are being queried constantly. The architecture introduced is one which can be created from most component-based DLs and is easily replicated. Initial analysis and evaluation indicate that this system provides better performance under conditions of heavy load while maintaining good response times under minimal loads. This approach has thus proven to be a viable one for addressing performance degradation in an experimental environment and is ready for testing in a live environment.
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    Crowdsourcing a text corpus for a low resource language
    (2016) Packham, Sean; Suleman, Hussein
    Low resourced languages, such as South Africa's isiXhosa, have a limited number of digitised texts, making it challenging to build language corpora and the information retrieval services, such as search and translation that depend on them. Researchers have been unable to assemble isiXhosa corpora of sufficient size and quality to produce working machine translation systems and it has been acknowledged that there is little to know training data and sourcing translations from professionals can be a costly process. A crowdsourcing translation game which paid participants for their contributions was proposed as a solution to source original and relevant parallel corpora for low resource languages such as isiXhosa. The objectives of this dissertation is to report on the four experiments that were conducted to assess user motivation and contribution quantity under various scenarios using the developed crowdsourcing translation game. The first experiment was a pilot study to test a custom built system and to find out if social network users would volunteer to participate in a translation game for free. The second experiment tested multiple payment schemes with users from the University of Cape Town. The schemes rewarded users with consistent, increasing or decreasing amounts for subsequent contributions. Experiment 3 tested whether the same users from Experiment 2 would continue contributing if payments were taken away. The last experiment tested a payment scheme that did not offer a direct and guaranteed reward. Users were paid based on their leaderboard placement and only a limited number of the top leaderboard spots were allocated rewards. From experiment 1 and 3 we found that people do not volunteer without financial incentives, experiment 2 and 4 showed that people want increased rewards when putting in increased effort , experiment 3 also showed that people will not continue contributing if the financial incentives are taken away and experiment 4 also showed that the possibility of incentives is as attractive as offering guaranteed incentives .
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    Designing mobile multi-touch drum sequencing applications
    (2015) Lekena, Mohato Karabo; Marsden, Gary; Suleman, Hussein
    Digital music software can limit the forms of music we create by using interfaces that directly copy those of the analogue instruments that came before. In this study we report on a new multi-touch interface that affords a completely new form of drum sequencing. Based on ideas from Avant-guard music and embodied interaction, a technology probe was created and then evaluated by a wide range of users. We found that for users with no musical training, and for users with a large amount of musical training, the software did allow them to be more creative. However, users with limited training on existing sequencing software found the new interface challenging.
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    A digital library component assembly environment
    (2005) Eyambe, Linda; Suleman, Hussein
    Digital libraries (DLs), originally termed electronic libraries, are the result of the meshing of two communities: library professionals, including librarians and publishers, and computer scientists, including their poster child, Internet developers. Until recently, these two communities had very little interaction. Even now, it is not uncommon to find librarians who know little of digitisation or computer scientists who are unfamiliar with the tools of librarianship. The introduction of the Web has brought about greater collaboration between these two very different disciplines in a quest to facilitate the access to, and dissemination of, information.
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    Digital Repositories in Private Clouds
    (2019) Lumpa, Mushashu Mwansa; Suleman, Hussein
    This study explores the use of digital repositories in private cloud environments. Private cloud computing is a cloud computing deployment model where compute and storage infrastructure are hosted on-premise by institutions. Digital repositories are used to manage institutions’ generated content. The advancement in cloud computing, the promise of elasticity, and the on-demand resource provisioning features of cloud systems are attractive characteristics that institutions can leverage on in delivering digital content to their audiences. In this study, a cloud computing operating system is deployed, and a means to install, monitor, manage and customise a repository system is developed. The repository system used is DSpace. Eucalyptus cloud software was used to setup a private cloud environment. A prototype application was developed to manage the installation and customisation of DSpace in the cloud environment. The prototype also included a feature to monitor the status of the running DSpace instances. To evaluate the efficiency, installation and customisation of DSpace in the cloud environment, two types of evaluations were carried out – a performance evaluation and a usability study. The performance evaluation was used to ascertain how long it takes to ingest and view items in DSpace. The experiments were carried out with varying numbers of running virtual machine instances in the cloud. The usability study evaluated the ease of installing and customising DSpace with the developed tool, called Lilu. A total of 22 participants took part in the usability study that was carried out within the premises of the University of Cape Town’s Computer Science Department. The participants belonged to 3 groups – experts, intermediate and beginners – based on their technical skill levels. The results show that private cloud environments can run institutional repositories with negligible performance degradation as the number of virtual machine instances in the cloud are increased. From the usability study, the tool developed was positively perceived. Participants in the study were able to install and customise DSpace. Institutional repositories can efficiently be installed and used in private cloud environments. Building tools that enable users to create single-click installations of the repositories, and creating user friendly interfaces to customise repositories would potentially increase the adoption and utilisation of private cloud environments by institutions.
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    An efficient management system for large digital object collections
    (2011) Van Niekerk, Kathryn; Suleman, Hussein
    Cultures evolve continuously, and it is therefore vital to track and record these changes, and most importantly of all, manage the resulting huge mass of data such as images, video clips, audio recordings and documents. This thesis examines the design of a Web-based solution, hereafter referred to as the Information Management System (IMS), to handle the efficient, accurate and secure management of a large number of objects.
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    An end to end solution for complex open educational resources
    (2012) Mohamed, Morwan Nour I; Suleman, Hussein
    The main objective of this thesis is to provide content creators and educators with a solution that simplifies the process of depositing into digital repositories. We created a desktop tool named ORchiD, Open educational Resources Depositor, to achieve this goal. The tool encompasses educational metadata and content packaging standards to create packages while conforming to a deposit protocol to ingest resources to repositories.
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    Enhancing digital heritage archives using gamified annotations
    (2017) Maina, Job King'ori; Suleman, Hussein
    In the context of digital heritage archives, we find heritage objects having intrinsic contextual and historical information. Capturing all that information is difficult, especially if that effort is left only to the professionals or institutions responsible for those digital heritage archives. In this study, we investigate how digital heritage archives can be enhanced using an annotation framework with a focus on gamification. So far, they have been focused on the collection of information and not really on the collaborative capabilities that they could have. We look at how we can add a collaborative element to an already existing digital heritage archive and incentivise users to engage with it more. This way, the owners present their data as the fixed content of the archive and the viewers are then able to present their contributions as annotations layered on the original work. Therefore, using gamified annotations as a proposed solution, we hypothesise that gamification could play an important role in giving the participants an incentive as to why they should be engaging with the digital heritage archive as well as guiding them to contribute relevant content. Through an experimental study, we found that gamified annotations do affect the number and quality of annotations submitted. We believe a successful implementation of a gamified annotation framework should go a long way to improve viewership, sharing, learning and debate around the content of the said digital heritage archives.
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    Evaluating automated and hybrid neural disambiguation for African historical named entities
    (2022) Dunn, Jarryd; Suleman, Hussein
    Documents detailing South African history contain ambiguous names. Ambiguous names may be due to people having the same name or the same person being referred to by multiple different names. Thus when searching for or attempting to extract information about a particular person, the name used may affect the results. This problem may be alleviated by using a Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) system to disambiguate names by linking them to a knowledge base. In recent years, transformer-based language models have led to improvements in NED systems. Furthermore, multilingual language models have shown the ability to learn concepts across languages, reducing the amount of training data required in low-resource languages. Thus a multilingual language model-based NED system was developed to disambiguate people's names within a historical South African context using documents written in English and isiZulu from the 500 Year Archive (FHYA). The multilingual language model-based system substantially improved on a probability-based baseline and achieved a micro F1-score of 0.726. At the same time, the entity linking component was able to link 81.9% of the mentions to the correct entity. However, the system's performance on documents written in isiZulu was significantly lower than on the documents written in English. Thus the system was augmented with handcrafted rules to improve its performance. The addition of handcrafted rules resulted in a small but significant improvement in performance when compared to the unaugmented NED system.
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    Flexible packaging methodologies for rapid deployment of customisable component-based digital libraries
    (2006) Mhlongo, Siyabonga; Suleman, Hussein
    Software engineering is a discipline concerned with manufacturing or developing software. Software plays a pivotal role in everyday life, an absence of which will be devastating to a number of governmental, recreational and financial activities, amongst many others. One of the latest branches of software engineering, component-based software engineering, is concerned with the development of software systems using already existing components which speculatively will ensure rapid and inexpensive software development processes. Parallel with the advances in software engineering, the field of digital libraries - a field dealing with Web-based access to and management of structured digital content - has adopted this development model from software engineering to shift focus from developing and using traditionally monolithic software systems to developing and using more flexible component-oriented software systems. Since componentised development approaches are relatively recent, other areas such as packaging and managing component-based software systems still remain unattended to. This dissertation presents research on techniques and methodologies for packaging customisable componentbased digital libraries such that deployment is rapid and flexibility is not compromised. Although the reference point of this research was that of component-based digital library systems, it is believed that this research can be generalised across the family of Web-based component-based software systems. An outcome of this research was a prototype packaging system consisting of a pair of tools: a package builder tool and a package installer tool. This packaging system was developed to model the ideas and methodologies that were identified as important to the processes of packaging and installing component-based digital library systems. These tools consequently underwent a user evaluation study whereby they were evaluated for understandability, usability and usefulness to the processes of packaging and installing component-based digital libraries.
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    A hybrid scavenger grid approach to intranet search
    (2009) Nakashole, Ndapandula; Suleman, Hussein
    According to a 2007 global survey of 178 organisational intranets, 3 out of 5 organisations are not satisfied with their intranet search services. However, as intranet data collections become large, effective full-text intranet search services are needed more than ever before. To provide an effective full-text search service based on current information retrieval algorithms, organisations have to deal with the need for greater computational power. Hardware architectures that can scale to large data collections and can be obtained and maintained at a reasonable cost are needed. Web search engines address scalability and cost-effectiveness by using large-scale centralised cluster architectures. The scalability of cluster architectures is evident in the ability of Web search engines to respond to millions of queries within a few seconds while searching very large data collections. Though more cost-effective than high-end supercomputers, cluster architectures still have relatively high acquisition and maintenance costs. Where information retrieval is not the core business of an organisation, a cluster-based approach may not be economically viable. A hybrid scavenger grid is proposed as an alternative architecture - it consists of a combination of dedicated and dynamic resources in the form of idle desktop workstations. From the dedicated resources, the architecture gets predictability and reliability whereas from the dynamic resources it gets scalability. An experimental search engine was deployed on a hybrid scavenger grid and evaluated. Test results showed that the resources of the grid can be organised to deliver the best performance by using the optimal number of machines and scheduling the optimal combination of tasks that the machines perform. A system-efficiency and cost-effectiveness comparison of a grid and a multi-core machine showed that for workloads of modest to large sizes, the grid architecture delivers better throughput per unit cost than the multi-core, at a system efficiency that is comparable to that of the multi-core. The study has shown that a hybrid scavenger grid is a feasible search engine architecture that is cost-effective and scales to medium- to large-scale data collections.
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    Improving Pan-African research and education networks through traffic engineering: A LISP/SDN approach
    (2017) Chavula, Josiah; Suleman, Hussein; Densmore, Melissa
    The UbuntuNet Alliance, a consortium of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) runs an exclusive data network for education and research in east and southern Africa. Despite a high degree of route redundancy in the Alliance's topology, a large portion of Internet traffic between the NRENs is circuitously routed through Europe. This thesis proposes a performance-based strategy for dynamic ranking of inter-NREN paths to reduce latencies. The thesis makes two contributions: firstly, mapping Africa's inter-NREN topology and quantifying the extent and impact of circuitous routing; and, secondly, a dynamic traffic engineering scheme based on Software Defined Networking (SDN), Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) and Reinforcement Learning. To quantify the extent and impact of circuitous routing among Africa's NRENs, active topology discovery was conducted. Traceroute results showed that up to 75% of traffic from African sources to African NRENs went through inter-continental routes and experienced much higher latencies than that of traffic routed within Africa. An efficient mechanism for topology discovery was implemented by incorporating prior knowledge of overlapping paths to minimize redundancy during measurements. Evaluation of the network probing mechanism showed a 47% reduction in packets required to complete measurements. An interactive geospatial topology visualization tool was designed to evaluate how NREN stakeholders could identify routes between NRENs. Usability evaluation showed that users were able to identify routes with an accuracy level of 68%. NRENs are faced with at least three problems to optimize traffic engineering, namely: how to discover alternate end-to-end paths; how to measure and monitor performance of different paths; and how to reconfigure alternate end-to-end paths. This work designed and evaluated a traffic engineering mechanism for dynamic discovery and configuration of alternate inter-NREN paths using SDN, LISP and Reinforcement Learning. A LISP/SDN based traffic engineering mechanism was designed to enable NRENs to dynamically rank alternate gateways. Emulation-based evaluation of the mechanism showed that dynamic path ranking was able to achieve 20% lower latencies compared to the default static path selection. SDN and Reinforcement Learning were used to enable dynamic packet forwarding in a multipath environment, through hop-by-hop ranking of alternate links based on latency and available bandwidth. The solution achieved minimum latencies with significant increases in aggregate throughput compared to static single path packet forwarding. Overall, this thesis provides evidence that integration of LISP, SDN and Reinforcement Learning, as well as ranking and dynamic configuration of paths could help Africa's NRENs to minimise latencies and to achieve better throughputs.
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    Individual document management techniques : an explorative study
    (2007) Sello, Mpho; Suleman, Hussein
    Individuals are generating, storing and accessing more information than ever before. The information comes from a variety of sources such as the World Wide Web, email and books. Storage media is becoming larger and cheaper. This makes accumulation of information easy. When information is kept in large volumes, retrieving it becomes a problem unless there is a system in place for managing this. This study examined the techniques that users have devised to make retrieval of their documents easy and timely. A survey of user document management techniques was done through interviews. The uncovered techniques were then used to build an expert system that provides assistance with document management decision-making. The system provides recommendations on file naming and organization, document backup and archiving as well as suitable storage media. The system poses a series of questions to the user and offers recommendations on the basis of the responses given. The system was evaluated by two categories of users: those who had been interviewed during data collection and those who had not been interviewed. Both categories of users found the recommendations made by the system to be reasonable and indicated that the system was easy to use. Some users thought the system could be of great benefit to people new to computers.
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    Investigating a learning analytics interface for automatically marked programming assessments
    (2021) Ndenge, Kinsley; Suleman, Hussein
    Student numbers at the University of Cape Town continue to grow, with an increasing number of students enrolling to study programming courses. With this increase in numbers, it becomes difficult for lecturers to provide individualised feedback on programming assessments submitted by students. To solve this, the university utilises an automatic marking tool for marking assignments and providing feedback. Students can submit assignments and receive instant feedback on marks allocated or errors in their submissions. This tool saves time as lecturers spend less time on marking and provides instant feedback on submitted code, hence providing the student with an opportunity to correct errors in their submitted code. However, most students have identified areas where improvements can be made on the interface between the automatic marker and the submitted programs. This study investigates the potential of creating a learning analytics inspired dashboard interface to improve the feedback provided to students on their submitted programs. A focus group consisting of computer science class representatives was organised, and feedback from this focus group was used to create dashboard mock-ups. These mock-ups were then used to develop high-fidelity learning analytics inspired dashboard prototypes that were tested by first-year computer science students to determine if the interfaces were useful and usable. The prototypes were designed using the Python programming language and Plotly Python library. User-centred design methods were employed by eliciting constant feedback from students during the prototyping and design of the learning analytics inspired interface. A usability study was employed where students were required to use the dashboard and then provide feedback on its use by completing a questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed using Nielsen's Usability Heuristics and AttrakDiff. These methods also assisted in the evaluation of the dashboard design. The research showed that students considered a learning analytics dashboard as an essential tool that could help them as they learn to program. Students found the dashboard useful and had an overall understanding of the specific features they would like to see implemented on a learning analytics inspired dashboard used by the automatic marking tool. Some of the specific features mentioned by students include overall performance, duly performed needed to qualify for exams, highest score, assignment due dates, class average score, and most common errors. This research hopes to provide insight on how automatically marked programming assessments could be displayed to students in a way that supports learning.