Classroom instructions and activities form the core of formal learning. Since limited class time (at the college level) is not enough to help students build their skills, out-of-class activities, such as homework or assignments, are frequently used to complement the learning process. Such out-of-class activities also help students build skills in time management, independent learning, and self-efficacy. However, keeping students engaged in out-of-class activities has been challenging. Students spend more hours working part or full-time for several reasons. The current student population has different motivating factors, including gamification or peer influence.

This research investigates the impact of a mobile-based educational platform, Dysgu, on keeping students engaged in out-of-class activities. Although active learning is valued as an effective technique for improving student learning and engagement, it is often not utilized for out-of-class activities and traditional unsupervised activities are mainly used to keep students engaged in the content after the class. Dysgu enables active learning for out-of-class activities and, through the transformational role of mobile devices, allows students to participate in out-of-class activities anywhere and at any time. Dysgu engages students with out-of-class activities better and reduces procrastination. Using Dysgu, faculty can facilitate and monitor learning after the students leave the classroom and intervene early when they fall behind.

Dysgu provides features to achieve student learning and engagement outside the classroom, with the following major features:

# The system's background operations are transparent to the stakeholder, so there is no need for administration or day-to-day management of the software. It is achieved through a cloud-based repository system designed explicitly for Dysgu. Neither the faculty nor the students have to worry about managing or paying for such cloud infrastructure and services.

# Dysgu allows activities to be put in modules with learning paths with different degrees of difficulty to support instructional scaffolding. A module can have different learning paths with various activities.  Some of the modules' paths can be designated as practice paths to help students practice the concept. Other paths are designated as student learning outcome (SLO) paths, where students are assessed on their learning skills. Additionally, some paths can be assigned as extra credit, which has problems that require additional effort from students.

# Students can earn a score in the SLO path, which is used to calculate their course grades; however, students can only earn points by solving problems in other paths, which they can use to extend the deadlines.

#  Each exercise in a path is modeled as an interactive activity. While these activities have to be finished within a timeframe, they have interactive elements.

# Dysgu provides lightweight gamification and social networking aspects within student privacy regulations to motivate and engage students. Students can compare their progress with their classmates. Dysgu shows the student score, placement compared to the class and timing information. Additionally, students are awarded badges depending on different conditions and they can see what badges they won and compare them with the rest of the class. It also shows how many other students have checked their progress, which might encourage the students to engage more in the activities.

# Dysgu is developed to support several adaptations for different class situations and personalization to address student needs. For instance, the client app allows students to set the number of notifications they will receive from the app each day or what time of the day. This enables students to change and update their study time to match their class, work, and other schedules and instruct the app when to remind them of pending tasks and how many times to remind them during the day.

 The new pedagogy, with the help of Dysgu was used for two semesters in the same Computer Science course. Because of COVID, the software could not be used for three semesters as planned because all classes were moved online, and we could not supply students with devices and training to use the software. The research studied the student-generated evidence of the strong and weak points of the Dysgu interventions and explored various research questions around these evidences. The comparative study based on students' grades and submission time shows that the intervened group performed better than the non-intervened group.  Analysis of survey responses shows very high levels of agreement on perceived learning and engagement. Answers to the open-ended questions reveal mostly appreciated features of Dysgu and differences between student responses at WSSU and in the collaborator's university regarding assignment grades, submission timeframe, and usage analytics. The grading and timing data and experience surveys show that peer influence and self-reflection in the mobile platform are good motivators and positively impact performance and on-time submission. Overall, students enjoyed Dysgu, explored it enough to suggest necessary improvements and expressed the desire to experience more of it beyond the intervened course.

Last Modified: 12/12/2022
Modified by: Muztaba Fuad