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Clustering of Animation View Times in an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED) Technical Session 6: First-Year & Sophomore Year Curriculum

Tagged Division

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED)

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43218

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43218

Download Count

162

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Paper Authors

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Tanner Hilsabeck

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Breanne Crockett

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Amir Parsaei

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Kevin S. Xu Case Western Reserve University

biography

Matthew W. Liberatore The University of Toledo Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5495-7145

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Matthew W. Liberatore is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toledo. He earned a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in chemical engineering. From 2005 to 2015, he served on the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines. In 2018, he served as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His research involves the rheology of complex fluids, especially traditional and renewable energy fluids and materials, polymers, and colloids. His educational interests include developing problems from YouTube videos, active learning, learning analytics, and interactive textbooks. His interactive textbooks for Material and Energy Balances, Spreadsheets, and Thermodynamics are available from zyBooks.com. His website is: https://www.utoledo.edu/engineering/chemical-engineering/liberatore/

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Abstract

Data science tools can help elucidate trends from clickstreams and other interactions generated by students actively using interactive textbooks. Specifically, data generated when using animations, which are multi-step visuals with text captions, will be presented in this work. Each animation step divides content into appropriate chunks, and so aligns with tenets of cognitive load theory. Both the quantity and timing of students’ clicks record provide large data sets when examining students across hundreds of animations and multiple cohorts. Specifically, an interactive textbook for a chemical engineering course in Material and Energy Balances will be examined and build upon data presented previously. While most of the previous data focused on very high reading completion rates (>99% median) compared to traditional textbooks (20-50%), a deeper examination of how long students take when watching animations will be explored. With over 140 unique animations and tens of thousands of completed views over five cohorts, a spectral clustering algorithm applied to students’ animation view times distinguished several types of animation watching behavior as well as monitor changes in this animation watching behavior over the course of a semester. After examining different numbers of clusters, two or three clusters in each chapter captured the animation usage. These clusters usually correspond to a group of students who watched animations at 1x speed (longer), another group who watched at 2x speed (shorter), and a third group, when present, who watched irregularly, including skipping animations. Overall, more students belonged to the belonged to the cluster with longer view times, with 63% of students aggregated over all cohorts and chapters compared to 35% of students in the cluster with shorter view times. The remaining 2% of students belonged to the irregular cluster, which was present in less than one quarter of the chapters. Many students stayed in the same cluster between chapters, while a smaller fraction switched between the longer and shorter clusters.

Hilsabeck, T., & Crockett, B., & Parsaei, A., & Xu, K. S., & Liberatore, M. W. (2023, June), Clustering of Animation View Times in an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43218

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