Software and Programmer Efficiency Research Group

Informa is a web-based platform for Asynchronous Blended Mastery Learning courses. It allows instructors to structure their courses into topics, grouped into themes. Each topic is a clearly delineated testable unit, defining a set of skills. Students have to demonstrate mastery in each topic by mastering all its skills. This is done in regular in-person mastery checks (with an instructor or a TA). Informa provides the information about all themes, topics, and skills, and it keeps track of each students' progress.

To study a topic, students follow a Learn, Practice, Reflect, Construct approach.

To first learn about the concepts of a topic, each topic provides a list of study tasks. A study task is an activity to be conducted independently by the student, with the goal of acquiring the skills of the corresponding topic. There are different kinds of study tasks, such as textbook readings, videos, web-based resources, or focused exercises.

To practice the concepts of a topic, Informa allows students to solve various practice problems. Students then reflect on the topic by creating their own practice problems. This approach is similar to the PeerWise system.

To construct solutions to realistic problems, Informa supports labs. Labs are small mini-projects that students work on, and which serve to practice and integrate skills from various topics.

Informa allows students take notes or ask questions about specific skills or lab items.

Use

Informa is used in several classes at the University of Lugano, amongst the "Programming Fundamentals 2" Bachelor course and the "Software Performance" and "Programming Styles" Master courses.

Publications

• Koli Calling '17: Metacognitive calibration when learning to program
• EC-TEL'17: Identifying Misconceptions with Active Recall in a Blended Learning System

Download

Informa is open source. The complete source code is available in this Git repository on Bitbucket.