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Massive Open Online Courses and Monoids

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Formal Methods: Foundations and Applications (SBMF 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10090))

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Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOC) allows for distributed long-distance learning for extremely large student enrollment. Nowadays most universities throughout the world have their courses online. Web portals such as Coursera or edX join together courses from many of them. Even though there are many platforms to support the development of MOOC, such as Moodle or XBlock, it does not seem to be the case that there are many languages to help course descriptions. Moreover, we would like to allow the description of different paths to teach and learn a given subject. We propose Learn, a declarative language for course descriptions. The contribution of this paper is manyfold: (i) we exemplify Learn descriptions, (ii) formalize the meaning of Learn descriptions and teaching strategies, that allows for different teaching paths, and (iii) discuss the implementation of a toolkit to specify, analyze and generate a course in a MOOC platform from Learn descriptions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A transformer from Learn descriptions to regular grammars is also available in Learn’s Git Hub repository. It implements a formalization of Learn descriptions as right-linear grammars discussed in [12].

References

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Acknolwdgements

The authors would like to thank Bruno Lopes and the reviewers of SBMF 2016 for their constructive comments on a draft of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Computação, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil

    Hugo Farias & Christiano Braga

  2. Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Paulo B. Menezes

Authors
  1. Hugo Farias
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  2. Christiano Braga
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  3. Paulo B. Menezes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christiano Braga .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Leila Ribeiro

  2. ClearSy, Aix en Provence, France

    Thierry Lecomte

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Farias, H., Braga, C., Menezes, P.B. (2016). Massive Open Online Courses and Monoids. In: Ribeiro, L., Lecomte, T. (eds) Formal Methods: Foundations and Applications. SBMF 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10090. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49815-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49815-7_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49814-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49815-7

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