Enable students to acquire new hands-on software experience using the modular teaching assistance system

Abstract

As long as learning management systems (LMS) are offering a predefined set of functionalities and could be not flexible enough for changes and improvements. Especially, it could be difficult to enable usage of a new software tool, which is required only by a special teaching curriculum and when change requests are relevant only for a particular course of study. Thus, incorporating innovative technologies into existing learning platforms could be a very challenging task. However, this Problem can be addressed through the latest IT technologies in combination with innovative teaching methodologies. In this work, students are supported in acquiring better hands-on experience using real software in real scenarios. It is done in a way that such scenarios and tools are directly embedded into a teaching curriculum. The introduced modular teaching assistance system helps to simplify installation, configure, and data wrangling phases and enables students to focus on primary tasks, which is solving scenario problems, rather than spend valuable time and deal with software as such. On one hand, the system takes care of various problems with installation and configuration for students, on the other hand, the system is modular and enables adaptation of an innovative teaching experience by being flexible and extensible by design.