eClass

AI in our Learning Management System

I opened up eClass today and saw this big disclaimer for the new AI system that management has added to the platform. I don't even know where to start with this. I suspected something like this was coming but I don't recall any real collegial conversation with management about its plans for implementing this. I'd […]

Are You a Student or Worker? Part 1: Computer User Profiles.

There are a lot of discussions at York University regarding the student status of individuals here at York University. The issue is complex and affects multiple aspects of life at the University. Here, I'm going to tackle one very specific issue: computer user profiles (or IDs). It is very common here at YorkU for an […]

H5P: Time Restrictions with Exceptions

I like to do flipped classes with H5P plugins on Moodle. When I do so I set up "from" and "to" time restrictions to ensure that the homework is done during the class period. It doesn't matter to me if the students are in the classroom or not. What's important is that they're doing homework […]

EECS Tool Highlight: Class Lists

If you're an EECS instructor here at York University, you can obtain a lists of students that are currently in your course, text files that are easy to download and review. They're outside of eClass and found in one of three ways: To access the lists on an EECS server like indigo1, use an SFTP […]

CourseHero Watermarks, Why Doesn't YorkU?

Piracy of professor-authored teaching material is rampant. I've written about it before. Students and teaching staff have uploaded my material to Course Hero and I'm not happy about it. In spite of requesting that they don't do it, they still do it. I write explicit footnotes in my documents saying not to do it, and […]

VPL: A Java Unit Test Example

The following is an example of the files needed to create a working Virtual Programming Lab exercise for Java: vpl_run.sh vpl_evaluate.sh MainClass.java StudentSolution.java TeacherReferenceSolutions.java TheTestClass.java With this you can evaluate one student submission against a single reference solution. Two methods are run: one is the student's method and one is the teacher's method. The output […]

Automated Grading of Python in VPL using Unit Tests

A few of my colleagues here at YorkU have expressed an interest in using Python with Virtual Programming Lab on our Moodle-based eClass Learning Management System. I don't have a lot of Python experience, having only really used it for some data processing and toy embedded system demonstrations in the past. So I adapted the […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 5)

This is the fifth in the series of postings on automated grading in C. Here, I've modified the VPL exercise to include four possible flowcharts that the students can implement, but the particular flowchart now get assigned to the student based on the time of day. The VPL output (both "run" and "evaluate" looks like […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 4)

In this fourth post, I'm going to modify the way the unit tests in C get picked up by the VPL "run" and "evaluate" scripts so that rather than look for a particular phrase returned by the unit test (something like "The unit test expected to see 5 but the student's function returned 1"), it's […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 3)

This is the third post in the series on evaluating student assignments in VPL with C and unit testing. We're targeting using VPL on Moodle / eClass. Specifically, the bash scripts are based on the fantastic work of Smith College professor emeritus, Dr. Dominique Thiébaut. He wrote about his VPL work here and while his […]