Succeeding higher education at staggered hours courses is difficult, especially for adults. They usually have a work during the day and sometimes a family to take care of aside work. Therefore, it makes it difficult for them to attend classes during weekday evenings or on Saturday. Generally, support success services are important to help students succeed in courses they are registered to. Unfortunately, there is not much extra time available to provide them with such an assistance in higher education at staggered hours. This work-in-progress paper shows how a continuous competency-based assessment approach has been used to support students all over the year. This paper is about the use of a competency-based assessment (CBA) approach continuously all over the year as an implicit support success service. It shows how the feedback phases can be used as opportunities to support students and drive them towards success. The paper also discusses the consequences of the balance between giving strong deadlines and leaving autonomy to students for their assessments. More precisely, it presents the preliminary results of a study conducted on third year bachelor students in electronics and telecommunication. To conclude, the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected from students who took part in the course lead to the conclusion that the CBA approach helped to support them all over the year. Upcoming work includes a more thorough analysis and a comparison between several cohorts.

Digital technologies are everywhere, and everyone is using them and interacting with them in everyday life. However, not everyone is aware of the impacts that their usage does have on the environment, the climate, their health and well-being, should they be positive or negative. This work-in-progress paper presents how a quiz-based challenge has been designed for young pupils from secondary schools and students in higher education to raise their own awareness about these impacts. More precisely, this paper presents how the challenge has been defined, including young students in engineering in the team. It also details its structure and how the questions set has been designed. The paper then presents preliminary results obtained from the analysis of data collected during a first edition of the proposed challenge, run in November 2022 in the French-speaking part of Belgium. The analysis highlights that negative impacts are better known than positive ones. It also reveals that questions related to energy and CO2emissions are the best-known. Analysing the profiles of the participants also showed that a large majority are paying attention to their digital consumption and would be ready to adapt their behaviour to reduce their negative impacts. The paper concludes with a discussion about how the challenge could be used in engineering schools, as an introduction to courses related to the development of digital technologies, to make students future responsible developers.

Using competency-based assessment (CBA) approaches to evaluate students is gaining in popularity. The work presented in this paper relies on a pragmatic CBA approach integrating the evaluation in the learning process. A specifically designed web-based platform, named TLCA, is used to support the approach. This latter mainly aims at fostering students to be regularly evaluated while allowing the real time monitoring of learners' progress for both students and their teachers.This research full paper analyses the impact of a regular involvement from learners on their success in courses following the proposed CBA approach. The analyses have been conducted on teaching units from several institutions and taught by different teams of teachers. The presented results are supported by qualitative data obtained from students surveys and quantitative data collected by the TLCA platform on the evaluations. These latter mainly consist of competencies acquisition rhythm all over the year. All the collected data tend to show that the proposed approach does have some positive impact on students' involvement, leading to better performances and success rates.To conclude, this paper proposes possible ways to improve students' involvement in their learning, based on observations extracted from several experiments with the proposed CBA approach. These improvements do have a direct impact on students' success. Possible improvements to the pedagogical device and the TLCA platform, both for teachers and students, will be considered in future work.

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents how a course has been designed to be fully taught remotely. The proposed design combines the two concepts of micro-course and competency-based assessments into a single and coherent pedagogical device. Micro-courses are used to structure the course and to help students better organise their learning. Competency-based assessments are used to propose a more personalised and individualised learning experience to students and to keep them motivated and involved. To be able to efficiently follow a remote course, students have to practice several non-technical skills such as communication, digital fluency, autonomy, time management, etc. This paper also shows how the proposed device indirectly teaches these skills, in addition to the technical skills concerned by the course. This particular fact fosters students to be involved with the course, which is way more difficult in a completely remote setting. The proposed course is being tested for the first time during this 2020–2021 academic year, with third-year bachelor students in electronics and telecommunications. A short survey has been conducted at the end of the year to get some results on students' perception of the pedagogical device. Results from the survey which collected qualitative and quantitative data from students show that they adhere to the course and find it suitable in a remote setting. Several elements to be improved for the next edition of the course have also been highlighted.

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents how a course with a traditional evaluation method has been concretely transformed into one following a competency-based assessment approach. This transformation has been carried out in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore also included a set-up for remote education. Transforming a course from one pedagogical device to another one is not easy. This paper explains how the transformation has been carried out, for several aspects: schedule, activities, course material, communication, etc. The transformation mainly aims at improving the quality of students' evaluation and their learning experience, making it more personalised and individualised. It expects to improve students' involvement and offer them a way to better manage their own time and to gain autonomy. This paper presents the experiment that was carried out and reports on the results from the students' and teachers' perspectives, based on qualitative and quantitative data collected with a survey. It concludes with lessons learned, improvement directions and ideas for future editions of the course, should they be organised on-site, online, or following a hybrid approach.

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents a pedagogical device, supported by a tool, moving evaluations at the heart of the learning process. The device gives back to students the control over their own learning and provides them with real-time feedback about their progress. Instructors can also monitor the progress of their classrooms. Designing a proper evaluation is not an easy task for instructors. It must make sense to students and should be adapted to the way they learn. Students are often quite afraid, stressed and not motivated by evaluations whose main perceived role is to achieve a decent grade to succeed the course. The method presented in this paper follows a competency based assessment approach. Each course's objectives are described with a list of competencies to get. Students have to prove they master them by passing evaluations ranging from simple quizzes to projects, including missions, codings and oral interviews. Students can choose the assessments to work on, that best suit their own way of learning. They can present them at their own pace. The proposed pedagogical device and associated developed tool are being tested for the first time during this 2019-2020 academic year. It has been proposed to second-year bachelor to master computer science engineering students, on classrooms with between 17 and 34 people. First feedback collected from students is globally positive and engaging, and the system will undergo a more formal and thorough evaluation.

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents the Challengr tool, a modern Classroom Response System (CRS) used to organise micro-contests in classrooms, especially for higher education. The proposed tool is designed to evaluate students in a fun and challenging way. It also allows instructors to collect feedback about students' performances to adapt and improve their lessons and teaching. CRS is an interesting technology to increase students' motivation and introduce interactions in classrooms in a scalable way. Classical CRS like clickers can be used to implement active and cooperative learning, making students engaged actors of their own learning. The tool proposed in this paper is not meant to provide interaction during the lesson or collect real-time statistics with brief questions to the audience. The micro-contests can take place at the beginning of the lesson to check students' backgrounds or memories of the previous ones. At the end of the lesson, it can be used to probe what they understood. Finally, the system supports local challenges and online remote ones and can accept guests. It additionally offers an API to connect it to other tools, like Learning Management System (LMS). Challengr is suitable for computer science engineering courses, in particular when skills to be mastered by students are piecewise and incremental. This work-in-progress tool is planned to be tested for an introductory programming course. It is critical for instructors to follow up how students are assimilating the material from the lessons. It will also undergo a thorough evaluation measuring the impact on students' learning.

This paper describes how to automatically detect potential automation surprises in interactive systems, within a rapid automation interface design tool named ADEPT. The proposed analysis method in this paper is based on a conformance relation, called full-control, between the model of the actual system and a mental model of it, that is, its behavior as perceived by the operator. The method can, among other things, automatically generate a so-called minimal full-control mental model for a given system. Systems are well designed if they can be described by relatively simple mental models for their operators, which can be assessed with the minimal full-control mental model generation algorithms. During the generation, potential automation surprises are detected and highlighted with execution examples that may lead to confusion. The analysis methods are based on an enriched version of labeled transition systems to describe the system and mental models. In order to be able to integrate the analysis method within ADEPT, a semantics for ADEPT models makes it possible to translate them into enriched LTSs. The proposed translation is automated for a specified class of ADEPT models that are characterized and defined in this paper. A case study demonstrates the proposed analysis framework and informs how the integration with ADEPT can be improved.

Automated systems are increasingly complex, making it hard to design interfaces for human operators. Human-machine interaction (HMI) errors like automation surprises are more likely to appear and lead to system failures or accidents. In previous work, we studied the problem of generating system abstractions, called mental models, that facilitate system understanding while allowing proper control of the system by operators as defined by the full-control property. Both the domain and its mental model have Labelled Transition Systems (LTS) semantics, and we proposed algorithms for automatically generating minimal mental models as well as checking full-control. This paper presents a methodology and an associated framework for using the above and other formal method based algorithms to support the design of HMI systems. The framework can be used for modelling HMI systems and analysing models against HMI vulnerabilities. The analysis can be used for validation purposes or for generating artifacts such as mental models, manuals and recovery procedures. The framework is implemented in the JavaPathfinder model checker. Our methodology is demonstrated on two examples, an existing benchmark of a medical device, and a model generated from the ADEPT toolset developed at NASA Ames. Guidelines about how ADEPT models can be translated automatically into JavaPathfinder models are also discussed.