As GenAI technologies, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), continue to revolutionize programming and data science, it is increasingly vital for educators to adapt computer science curricula. This paper presents a review of recent technical books on AI-Assisted programming and utilizes the findings to guide curriculum changes in higher education. Our analysis underscores the necessity for novel teaching strategies, emphasizing skills like problem decomposition, top-down design, and advanced debugging. Furthermore, it emphasizes the crucial expansion of curricula to encompass courses on developing applications based on LLMs, utilizing libraries such as LangChain and incorporating Retrieval Augmented Generation functionality. Our analysis reveals a significant gap in technical literature regarding the ethical and societal impacts of GenAI, highlighting the urgent need for programming curricula to evolve and equip students with the skills required to ethically develop AI-enhanced software products. This paper advocates for curriculum development that not only aligns with the latest industry trends but also contributes to research on AI-assisted coding and its future impact.

Peer review has been recognised as a beneficial approach that promotes higher-order learning and provides students with fast and detailed feedback on their work. Still, there are some common concerns and criticisms associated with the use of peer review that limits its adoption. One of the main points of concern is that feedback provided by students may be ineffective and of low quality. Previous works supply three explanations for why students may fail to provide effective feedback: They lack (1) the ability to provide high-quality feedback, (2) the agency to monitor their work or (3) the incentive to invest the required time and effort as they think the quality of the reviews are not reviewed. To help mitigate these shortcomings, this paper presents a complementary peer review approach that integrates training, self-monitoring and AI quality-control assistance to improve peer feedback quality. In particular, informed by higher education research, we built a set of training materials and a self-monitoring checklist for students to consider while writing their reviews. Also, informed by work from natural language processing, we developed quality control functions that automatically assess feedback submitted and prompt students to improve, if necessary. A between-subjects field experiment with 374 participants was conducted to investigate the approach's efficacy. Findings suggest that offering training, self-monitoring, and quality control functionalities to students assigned to the complementary peer review approach resulted in longer feedback that was perceived as more helpful than those who utilised the regular peer review interface. However, this complementary approach does not seem to affect students judgement (leniency or harshness) or confidence in grading. Directions are suggested to further evaluate and refine peer review systems.

Increased enrolments in higher education, and the shift to online learning that has been escalated by the recent COVID pandemic, have made it challenging for instructors to assist their students with their learning needs. Contributing to the growing literature on instructor-facing systems, this paper reports on the development of a learning analytics (LA) technique called Student Inspection Facilitator (SIF) that provides an explainable interpretation of students learning behaviour to support instructors with the identification of students in need of attention. Unlike many previous predictive systems that automatically label students, our approach provides explainable recommendations to guide data exploration while still reserving judgement about interpreting student learning to instructors. The insights derived from applying SIF in an introductory Information Systems course with 407 enrolled students suggest that SIF can be utilised independent of the context and can provide a meaningful interpretation of students' learning behaviour towards facilitating proactive support of students.

The Elo rating system has been recognised as an effective method for modelling students and items within adaptive educational systems. A common characteristic across Elo-based learner models is that they are not sensitive to the lag time between two consecutive interactions of a student within the system. Implicitly, this characteristic assumes that students do not learn or forget between two consecutive interactions. However, this assumption seems insufficient in the context of adaptive learning systems where students could have improved their mastery through practising outside of the system or that their mastery may be declined due to forgetting. In this paper, we extend the existing works on the use of rating systems for modelling learners in adaptive educational systems by proposing a new learner model called MV-Glicko that builds on the Glicko rating system. MV-Glicko is sensitive to the lag time between two consecutive interactions of a student within the system and models it as a parameter that captures the confidence of the system in the current inferred rating. We apply MV-Glicko on three public data sets and three data sets obtained from an adaptive learning system and provide evidence that MV-Glicko outperforms other conventional models in estimating students’ knowledge mastery.

Educational recommender systems (ERSs) aim to adaptively recommend a broad range of personalised resources and activities to students that will most meet their learning needs. Commonly, ERSs operate as a "black box" and give students no insight into the rationale of their choice. Recent contributions from the learning analytics and educational data mining communities have emphasised the importance of transparent, understandable and open learner models (OLMs) that provide insight and enhance learners' understanding of interactions with learning environments. In this paper, we aim to investigate the impact of complementing ERSs with transparent and understandable OLMs that provide justification for their recommendations. We conduct a randomised control trial experiment using an ERS with two interfaces ("Non-Complemented Interface" and "Complemented Interface") to determine the effect of our approach on student engagement and their perception of the effectiveness of the ERS. Overall, our results suggest that complementing an ERS with an OLM can have a positive effect on student engagement and their perception about the effectiveness of the system despite potentially making the system harder to navigate. In some cases, complementing an ERS with an OLM has the negative consequence of decreasing engagement, understandability and sense of fairness.