The PROFFORMANCE project aims to support higher education institutions and teachers in improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning. The call for projects was launched by the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology and Tempus Foundation with the support of the ministries of five partner countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia). The evaluation criteria included digitisation, inclusion, internationalisation and sustainability as priorities.
The organisers were looking for good institutional examples in four categories:
- Student-centred course design
- Innovative teaching and learning
- Assessing the Student's Learning
- Impact and mission with and for the society
The project submitted by Pázmány ITK was carried out by a team with Tamás Zsedrovits as leader and with János Juhász and Dániel Győrffy as team members.
In the project "Personalized Assessment thRough generaTed Exercises foR pRogramming coursEs " (PARTERRE), our lecturers introduced a comprehensive toolset for digital teaching material and exercise generation for programming courses.
The development was inspired by the challenges of the "Introduction to MATLAB Programming" course, ie.
- the large number of students in the course did not allow the instructors to provide personalised feedback to the students on the homework assignments throughout the semester, and
- students felt that the difficulty level of exams fluctuated within a semester.
As part of the project, the team developed a pipeline consisting of Python scripts and MATLAB live scripts to generate teaching materials problems for homework and exams and exercises.
With the toolset, it is possible to generate virtually infinite variations for a given exercise, defining interchangeable parameters which the system randomly generates. This way, students get unique exam sheets, but the difficulty level is the same for everyone. For teachers, it is easier to create many similar problems and exercises and import them into Moodle, which saves a lot of time both in the construction phase of the course and for the assessments. The exercises have a built-in evaluation and feedback, encouraging students to work individually.
For more information on the project and the details of the solution, its application and possible adaptations, please visit the PROFFORMANCE website and the good practice database.
