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The PADS sometimes assigned very difficult exercises for advanced students (SA responded this). These exercises
required more time to complete than the simple exercises. Hence, the advanced students needed to spend more time
completing the assigned exercises than other students. They thought it was not fair. Although we did not focus on the
assessment mechanism in this study, it remains an important issue to have a fair assessment mechanism when each
student is assigned with the exercises of different levels of difficulty. This issue is also found in the researches
related to CAT (Lilley, Barker, & Britton, 2004). In addition, to reduce the advanced students’ workload, the rules
for assigning programming exercises may use the decision model and also consider students’ workload. Thus, if a
student received very difficult exercises, then PADS can automatically reduce the number of assigned exercises from
3 to 2 or 1.
E-dictionary integrates distributed learning materials in a concept map structure. Hence, students can easily find the
learning materials related to a programming concept and learn the concept from its explanation and related examples.
The experimental results showed that the students highly accepted and used the e-dictionary. It may represent that
the e-dictionary system is an effective tool in helping students complete programming exercises. However, some
students complained that the e-dictionary system contained too little material and that some of it was too vague. Most
of the learning materials within the e-dictionary were gathered from the web-based learning system and were
categorized into explanation, example, and discussion. Because of the limitation of sources and categories of the
learning materials, the e-dictionary may be more useful in helping students perform low-level cognitive processes,
such as remembering, understanding, and applying programming concepts, than in helping students perform highlevel
cognitive processes, such as analyzing, evaluating, and creating (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Future work
can redesign the e-dictionary system so that students can collectively insert and edit the content in the e-dictionary
system by themselves. The editing process is similar to that used in a wiki system, such as wikipedia
(http://www.wikipedia.org/). Moreover, the e-dictionary also can provide personal note-taking tools that can
associate collective knowledge representation with personal knowledge representation (Chen & Hung, 2002).
The reply and questions-solved rates were increased after the students were able to use the peer recommendation
system. These results may represent that most of the selected peers are willing to answer the assigned questions and
are able to help questioners solve the questions. A student who is notified to answer a question may recognize that
he/she has a responsibility to answer it. Thus, the reply and questions-solved rate were increased. The students who
just passively receive answers will not learn better than the students who actively participate in discussion.
Therefore, peer recommendation can be thought of as a strategy for motivating students to participate in discussion.
However, the number of questions posted was very few. The reason may be that we did not encourage students to
post their questions in the discussion board in the beginning of the course (Preece, Nonnecke, & Andrews, 2004).
Limitations
In the proposed WCSS, the teacher and TAs were required to perform certain tasks such as identifying the concepts
needed in a programming exercise, measuring the complexity level of algorithm in each programming exercise,
constructing a concept map for this course, and extracting concept explanations from textbooks. These tasks require
a significant amount of time. Therefore, nine TAs were employed to help the course teacher complete the tasks.
Although these tasks required a significant time commitment, most were performed once, including constructing a
concept map and extracting concept explanations from the textbook, and some tasks were completed by students,
such as identifying the concepts used in a submitted assignment. Only two tasks, entering the examination grade and
the coursework grade into the database, were repeatedly performed by the teachers and TAs. Therefore, the workload
of teachers and TAs was only minimally increased.
The nine experts sometimes had some difficulty in consistently identifying the concepts required for completing an
exercise. That is students can adopt different programming concepts to complete an exercise. For example, when
solving the programming problem “Sum the integers between 1 and 100”, a student may use “for”, “while” or
“recursive method” to control the loop. Thus, some experts may choose “for” and others choose “recursive method”
as the main concept. The learning objective of the course was to train students in understanding and applying the
basic programming concepts, but not in learning complex programming skills, such as algorithm analysis or data
structure. Hence, the concepts used in each exercise must be clearly identified. For example, the above problem can
be stated as “Sum the integers between 1 and 99, using recursive method.”
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