Browsing by Author "Mithun, Shamima"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    BlogSum: A Query-based Summarization Approach to Make Sense of Social Media
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, IUPUI, 2016-04-08) Mithun, Shamima
    With the rapid growth of the Social Web, a large amount of informal opinionated texts are available on numerous topics. However, people can be overwhelmed with this vast amount of information and they need help to find the information of their interests. Natural language tools for automatically analyzing these opinions become necessary to help individuals, organizations, and governments in making timely decisions. To address this need, I proposed a summarization approach for opinionated texts. To validate my approach, BlogSum is developed and evaluated experimentally using current benchmarks. Users can ask BlogSum any question (e.g. Why do people like Chrome better than Firefox?). To answer user's question, BlogSum first retrieves relevant blogs, reviews from the web then generates a concise summary that represents people opinions expressed towards the topic. Since blog summarization is a more recent endeavor, an error analysis was conducted by manually analyzing blog summaries to find there is any information processing difference needed for blogs compared to factual data. This analysis shows that question irrelevance and discourse incoherence, which decrease the overall quality of a summary and reduces the summary coherence, are two major issues for blog summaries. To address question irrelevance and discourse incoherence, in this work a domain-independent schema-based summarization approach is developed that utilizes discourse structures. This approach is based on the automatic identification of discourse relations within candidate sentences in order to instantiate the most appropriate discourse schema and filter and order candidate sentences in the most effective way. BlogSum also needs to deal with opinions, emotions effectively to be successful. BlogSum's overall performance as well as performance for question relevance and coherence was evaluated using various dataset. These results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce question irrelevance and discourse incoherence and satisfy user's information need.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Design and Evaluate the Factors for Flipped Classrooms for Data Management Courses
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2020-10) Mithun, Shamima; Luo, Xiao; Engineering Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a framework to evaluate and design flipped classroom activities for data science and management courses. Variants of flipped classrooms have been employed in STEM fields with great success in students' learning outcomes. Research shows that flipped classrooms would improve students' learning if it is implemented following rigorous procedures of an efficient instructional design. As a result, one of the critical focus of current flipped classroom research is what factors educators need to consider when designing a flipped learning environment. Currently, educators incorporate various factors such as "pre-recorded video lecture", "group activity" as a trial and error basis and adjust these factors based on their own experience and students' feedback. On the other hand, the emergence of big data expects a new graduate to demonstrate mastery of concepts and skills for data acquisition, management, and analysis of inference from data when they enter the workforce. Currently, there is no systematic approach available to design a flipped classroom that is for the data science and management courses. In this research, we develop a framework first to investigate and evaluate the flipped classroom factors mentioned in the literature and identify a few that are most relevant to the two data management courses at our institute. Then, we classify each course topics into broader categories. So that the flipped classroom model can be developed for each category. For the flipped classroom for each category, we identify the pre-class and in-class activities to meet a certain learning objective for that topic category for each course. To evaluate the effectiveness of different factors as well as our flipped classroom models, students' performance data, interviews, and surveys are conducted. This process is transformative and can be employed by other STEM disciplines to find the most influential factors to design effective flipped learning classrooms.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Flipped Instructional Design Factors in an Introductory and an Advanced Data Science Course
    (ASEE, 2022-06) Mithun, Shamima; Vickery, Morgan; Luo, Xiao; Computer Information and Graphics Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    In this full research paper, we evaluate the flipped instructional designs of two undergraduate data science courses at a Midwestern university: an introductory course on database fundamentals and an advanced database design course. This study is built upon our prior work in which we identified a set of eight instructional design factors for effective flipped classrooms in the literature and assessed their efficacy with senior students. Our analysis relies on students’ course evaluations, self-reported survey data, focus group responses, course performance data, and instructor observation data to answer the following research questions: 1. How do the eight instructional design factors for effective flipped classrooms serve novice versus advanced data science students? 2. How should instruction in flipped classrooms be varied for novice versus advanced data science students? Our analysis indicates that novice data science students have different instructional needs and challenges compared to their senior peers, particularly in relation to activities that require peer collaboration and were unmoderated by the instructor. We share the results of our quantitative analysis of self-reported survey data in which students ranked the aforementioned instructional design factors based on their effectiveness for their learning and qualitative analysis which takes student comments (from a free-response survey and focus group data) and instructor observation data to contextualize these rankings and inform our instructional design recommendations. These recommendations address students differing academic and interactional needs within the classroom and are to be implemented within the introductory course in its next iteration: (a) group norming and standardization around expectations for communication/collaboration, (b) transparent disclosure of the learning objectives for each activity, (c) offering guidelines to support students in providing actionable peer feedback, and (d) introducing low-stakes peer evaluations. We conclude with a discussion on the general affordances of the flipped classroom model for both introductory and advanced data science instruction compared to traditional lecture-based approaches.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Incorporate Cross-Course Knowledge Integration into Computing Education
    (IEEE, 2019-10) Mithun, Shamima; Luo, Xiao; Computer Information and Graphics Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    This research to practice full paper describes our cross-course knowledge integration approach, which uses a project-based learning environment. The structure and instructional pedagogies of some of our data management concentration courses in our department have not changed in a long time. Most of our data management courses cover theoretical knowledge without showing their practical applications. As a result, students don't find those courses interesting enough. In addition, none of our data management courses require cross-course interactions, which is the current instructional pedagogical direction. With the goal of addressing these issues and improving student learning, faculty employed a cross-course knowledge integration model to teach the advanced database design course CIT 44400. We redesigned this advanced database course as part of our data management curriculum enhancement also to align with the trends of the IT industry and to enable students to correlate knowledge learned in various courses. In this redesign process, we integrated a project that aligns with industrial projects in this higher-level course curriculum, so that students can integrate and apply theoretical knowledge gained in lower-level courses through participating in a project-based learning approach, using current technology of the field. Evaluation results show crosscourse knowledge integration-based pedagogy gives students comprehensive knowledge that improves students' performance and helps them link and apply knowledge learned in various courses.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Incorporating Global Learning Perspectives in a Freshman Computing Curriculum
    (IEEE, 2022-10-11) Mithun, Shamima; Goldfarb, Nancy; Computer Information and Graphics Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    This research-to-practice full paper describes our integration of global learning perspectives through a research-based group project in a First-Year Seminar course for new technology major students at our urban Midwestern university, IUPUI (Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis). Since 2003, the ACE (American Council on Education) has emphasized global competencies, which are defined as "the attitudes, skills, and knowledge to live and work in a multicultural and interconnected world". Despite the increasing recognition of the importance of developing these global competencies, opportunities for young people to do so suffer from issues of accessibility. Educational institutions are challenged with providing opportunities to prepare students for global citizenship in the twenty-first century and are working to expand global competency education. Our undergraduate institution is no exception.In accordance with this mission, we incorporated global learning perspectives through a group project in our First-Year-Seminar course to increase students’ interest in global learning experiences (such as studying abroad) and provide resources for students to develop global competencies. This is important both for personal development in the quest for a more equitable world and employability; employers repeatedly convey that awareness of global issues is a highly desirable characteristic in potential hires.In our implementation, students selected a global issue, chosen from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals database, which had unique significance to them and their communities. This approach allowed space for students to take ownership and agency over the content of their learning experiences while ensuring they engaged with the following learning objectives: 1)Team collaboration, communication, and cohesion 2)Conducting independent research on a global problem and its solutions 3)Synthesis of information from multiple sources and perspectives to develop an informed stance 4)Developing a stance regarding a global problem and justification of this stance using data 5)Creating a well-organized deliverable with consideration for the audience (i.e., their peers) and contextWe point to course survey data and student reflections to evaluate our course. Students conveyed how the course structure enabled them to (a) consider global perspectives around issues that may or may not have been salient to them before the course, (b) experience empathy for people experiencing challenges related to the issues of interest and gratitude for their circumstances, and (c) consider their personal role in addressing global issues in their communities. Students also indicated an interest in further addressing such issues through self-education and advocacy on a community and political scale.To further expand efforts to make global competency education accessible, our next implementation will utilize Collaborative Online International Learning experiences in which students virtually collaborate with students outside of the United States through our local Office of International Affairs. Through these collaborations, students will be challenged to consider how such global issues manifest in different communities, cultures, and geographic regions and the implications of these differences for solution design.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Novice Versus Advanced Undergraduate Computing Students’ Engagement in Collaboration in an Online Flipped Classroom
    (International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2022) Vickery, Morgan; Mithun, Shamima; Computer Information and Graphics Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    This paper explores students' engagement in collaborative learning activities within two data science courses (one introductory and one advanced) taught synchronously online during the 2020-2021 academic year. Here, we draw on a multidimensional perspective of student engagement to understand novice and advanced computing students' collaborative learning practices and propose instructional design elements informed by students’ unique needs and the limitations of the virtual format.