ADAPT Centre at heart of €3 million EU project to make online learning accessible across languages

Posted Fri, 21/08/2015 - 09:15 by lgrehan
ADAPT members Jonathan Barr, Sheila Castilho and John Judge

Major new EU funding for research aimed at tearing down the language barriers to distance learning has been announced by a group including the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology at Dublin City University (DCU).

The TraMOOC (Translation for Massive Open Online Courses) consortium involves nine partners from six countries and has won more than three million euro in funding as part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme.

Software that helps to keep first-year students on track

Posted Thu, 20/08/2015 - 11:04 by cstears
Predicted.jpg

All colleges help first-year students adapt, so they don’t get overwhelmed or drop out. A novel project at DCU uses data to predict performance and sends students helpful weekly emails

Students may find their first few months at college a shock to the system, having been minded by parents and teachers through school.

With newfound freedom and no one to check their homework, make them go to lectures or point them in the general direction of the library, it’s no surprise students might find themselves overwhelmed with all the autonomy.

Ireland's Best Young Computer Programmers Win a Trip to Compete at the Olympics of Programming

Posted Fri, 10/07/2015 - 11:50 by gconway

AIPO IOI Team 2015After several rigorous selection rounds, team Ireland has been chosen after a 3 day bootcamp in DCU to attend the prestigious International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

Essentially the Olympics of high school computer programming, the IOI is attended by over 80 countries showcasing their brightest young talent. Four teenagers from the around the country will travel on a trip of a lifetime to meet up with over 300 students from around the world at the 27th IOI in Almaty, Kazakhstan at the end of July. They’ve come a long way to reach this stage and it’s testament to their passion and commitment to programming.

This is the final stage of the All-Ireland Programming Olympiad (AIPO) which is sponsored by Fidelity Investments and hosted by the School of Computing, DCU. The lucky students who will represent Ireland at the IOI in Kazakhstan are:

  • Áron Hoffman, Luttrellstown Community College, Dublin
  • Daniel Mulcahy, Gonzaga College, Dublin
  • Noah Donnelly, Our Lady's Secondary, Monaghan
  • Teofil Camarasu, Dundalk Grammar School, Louth

Insight at the fore of Learning Analytics

Posted Fri, 03/07/2015 - 12:46 by gconway
Insight-Logo

In a recently published article with TheJournal.ie, Professor Alan Smeaton discusses the advanced learning analytics that Insight Centre for Data Analytics are applying to help individual students in their progression through first year undergraduate degrees.

In the first semester of the last academic year 1,200 students in DCU signed up to PredictEd a weekly email alert service that predicts what their exam result will be, based on their level of engagement with course material online.

Students who opted to receive the alerts performed better in their exams compared to those who opted not to receive the alerts, with a net increase of 3% in exam marks, based only on the weekly alerts across 10 different modules. For one module, Business Mathematics, the improvement in exam performance was 8%.

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