Title
Supporting the Process of Learning and Teaching Process Models
Date Issued
01 July 2020
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Sanchez-Ferreres J.
Delicado L.
Andaloussi A.A.
Burattin A.
Weber B.
Carmona J.
Padro L.
Publisher(s)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Abstract
The creation of a process model is primarily a formalization task that faces the challenge of constructing a syntactically correct entity, which accurately reflects the semantics of reality, and is understandable to the model reader. This article proposes a framework called Model Judge, focused toward the two main actors in the process of learning process model creation: Novice modelers and instructors. For modelers, the platform enables the automatic validation of the process models created from a textual description, providing explanations about quality issues in the model. Model Judge can provide diagnostics regarding model structure, writing style, and semantics by aligning annotated textual descriptions to models. For instructors, the platform facilitates the creation of modeling exercises by providing an editor to annotate the main parts of a textual description, which is empowered with natural language processing capabilities so that the annotation effort is minimized. So far around 300 students in process modeling courses of five different universities around the world have used the platform. The feedback gathered from some of these courses shows good potential in helping students to improve their learning experience, which might, in turn, impact process model quality and understandability. Moreover, our results show that instructors can benefit from getting insights into the evolution of modeling processes, including arising quality issues of single students, but also discovering tendencies in groups of students. Although the framework has been applied to process model creation, it could be extrapolated to other contexts where the creation of models based on a textual description plays an important role.
Start page
552
End page
566
Volume
13
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería de sistemas y comunicaciones
Educación general (incluye capacitación, pedadogía)
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85083707365
Source
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
ISSN of the container
19391382
Sponsor(s)
Manuscript received March 29, 2019; revised September 20, 2019 and March 19, 2020; accepted March 25, 2020. Date of publication March 30, 2020; date of current version September 16, 2020. This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Grant TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R and in part by MINECO and FEDER under Grant TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R. (Corresponding author: Josep Carmona.) Josep Sànchez-Ferreres, Luis Delicado, Josep Carmona, and Lluís Padró are with the Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de Catalu-nya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain (e-mail: jsanchezf@cs.upc.edu; ldelicado@cs. upc.edu; jcarmona@cs.upc.edu; padro@cs.upc.edu).
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus