Page 207 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1883 Christina A. et al.
• Additionally, at the beginning of the course, the students received a time
table, containing rough guidelines about what they, in the groups, were
expected to process during the week. The guidelines were deliberately
kept in an imprecise way, without details, in order to allow own initiatives
of the students and to let self-centered learning take place. For example,
the first week the guidelines encouraged the students to gather basic
knowledge about their topic, the second week to search for existing
algorithms for the method etc. The students were told to use the
guidelines to structure their information retrieval, but that the main
research about the multivariate method itself should be a student-
centered inquiry-based learning process.
The guidelines suggested following steps to be processed during the
semester:
1. Theoretical background of the method
2. A summary of required data preparation
3. Implementation of the method in R
4. Application to a real-world data set
5. Interpretation of results
• The students were offered to use the web conference tool Adobe Connect
to perform their out-of-class group meetings online.
• As another out-of-class activity, the students were asked to construct a
wiki-based website about their multivariate method.
Description of the in-class activities:
• Weekly web conferences, where both the students and the lecturer
participated, were offered.
• In these web conferences, mainly the students were the actors, presenting
the weekly progress of their research about their group’s multivariate
method. These presentations contained both the theoretical explanation
of the studied method as well as practical implementation of the method
in R and the application to a real-world problem, including a thorough
interpretation of the R output and the numerical results.
• Weekly, a Questions-&-Answers session was offered in either the chat or
the discussion room of Adobe Connect. In this session, the students had
the opportunity to ask the lecturer about non-understandable issues,
concerning their multivariate method.
• During one extra web conference, the students presented the wiki-based
websites they had prepared.
As a prerequisite to take the final exam, the students had to attend at least
80% of the web conferences and, additionally, regularly report about their
topic.

196 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9