Motivating students with new mechanisms of online assignments and examination to meet the MOOC challenges for programming

摘要

The advent of massive open online courses (MOOC) poses challenges for teaching and learning programming. This paper has analyzed these challenges and thereby proposed a self-motivating learning platform for students in the introductory programming course. Novel mechanisms of online assignments and examination have been introduced. Our platform provides functions for self-motivating learning and practicing in MOOC, which makes it distinguish from the others. For example, self-paced timetable with supervision, self-motivated exercise contents, exercise market, and relative ranking. The automatic grading approach is also a highlight. Programs even with syntactic or semantic errors can be automatically graded. Our platform gains popularity among both students and teachers. The platform has been used together with a programming MOOC. This course is ranked as the third most popular courses among over 500 courses. The platform has also been used by more than 100 other universities. The application of the platform in both MOOC and the traditional classroom courses has shown that students' self-motivation in learning programming has been greatly promoted, and their practical skills have also been significantly improved.