Autoria de decisões pedagógicas informadas por dados sob a perspectiva de um MOOC.

Abstract

We are experiencing changes in the educational paradigm. There is a quest to provide education from anywhere, at any time and for anyone, using digital information and communication technologies. There is a global interest in distance learning, but there is no equivalent increase in support for teachers and tutors responsible for maintaining such courses. This difference accentuates the problems and challenges in managing distance courses once that, over time, more students join distance learning, requiring the creation of new courses and classes, increasing the number of distance students being sub-served in terms of pedagogical support. This is evidenced by the large number of dropouts and faiilures in such courses, particularly in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), that students justify as lack of support. This thesis proposes an authoring solution to guide the pedagogical decision making in online learning environments, which was applied in a MOOC. The proposal aims to help teachers and tutors (1) to discover situations of pedagogical interest occurring in their courses; (2) understand these situations; (3) make decisions to address them; (4) monitor and evaluate the impact of the decision made. The interactions in such courses generate considerable quantity and diversity of data,allowing the extraction of pedagogically relevant information. However, teachers and tutors do not master the technology needed to use this data, nor is it practical or appropriate to ask them to be trained to do so. Our proposal is based on informed decision making by educational data, data visualization and authoring systems to promote cooperation between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We conducted two experiments to: (1) evaluate whether the process helps teachers and tutors to make useful and time-course pedagogical decisions; (2) to evaluate if the authoring solution guides the pedagogical decision making of teachers and tutors. The results suggest that the process brought benefits to pedagogical decision making and that the authoring solution was able to guide the pedagogical decision making in course time and that its usefulness and ease of use were positively perceived by teachers and tutors.