Course evaluation is a critical component in higher education pedagogy. It not only serves to identify limitations in existing course designs and provide a basis for curricular innovation, but also to offer quantitative insights for university administrative decision-making. Traditional evaluation methods, primarily comprising student surveys, instructor self-assessments, and expert reviews, often encounter challenges, including inherent subjectivity, feedback delays, inefficiencies, and limitations in addressing innovative teaching approaches. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) within artificial intelligence (AI) present promising new avenues for enhancing course evaluation processes. This study explores the application of LLMs in automated course evaluation from multiple perspectives and conducts rigorous experiments across 100 courses at a major university in China. The findings indicate that: (1) LLMs can be an effective tool for course evaluation; (2) their effectiveness is contingent upon appropriate fine-tuning and prompt engineering; and (3) LLM-generated evaluation results demonstrate a notable level of rationality and interpretability.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven effective in various medical imaging applications, such as automated disease diagnosis. However, due to the local neighborhood aggregation paradigm in message passing which characterizes these models, they inherently suffer from two fundamental limitations: first, indistinguishable node embeddings due to heterophilic node aggregation (known as over-smoothing), and second, impaired message passing due to aggregation through graph bottlenecks (known as over-squashing). These challenges hinder the model expressiveness and prevent us from using deeper models to capture long-range node dependencies within the graph. Popular solutions in the literature are either too expensive to process large graphs due to high time complexity or do not generalize across all graph topologies. To address these limitations, we propose DuoGNN, a scalable and generalizable architecture which leverages topology to decouple homophilic and heterophilic edges and capture both short-range and long-range interactions. Our three core contributions introduce (i) a topological edge-filtering algorithm which extracts homophilic interactions and enables the model to generalize well for any graph topology, (ii) a heterophilic graph condensation technique which extracts heterophilic interactions and ensures scalability, and (iii) a dual homophilic and heterophilic aggregation pipeline which prevents over-smoothing and over-squashing during the message passing. We benchmark our model on medical and non-medical node classification datasets and compare it with its variants, showing consistent improvements across all tasks. Our DuoGNN code is available at https://github.com/basiralab/DuoGNN.

Digital twin technology, traditionally used in industry, is increasingly recognized for its potential to enhance educational experiences. This study investigates the application of industrial digital twins (DTs) in education, focusing on how DT models of varying fidelity can support different stages of Bloom's taxonomy in the cognitive domain. We align Bloom's six cognitive stages with educational levels: undergraduate studies for "Remember" and "Understand," master's level for "Apply" and "Analyze," and doctoral level for "Evaluate" and "Create." High-fidelity DTs support advanced learners by replicating physical phenomena, allowing for innovative design and complex experiments. Within this framework, large language models (LLMs) serve as mentors, assessing progress, filling knowledge gaps, and assisting with DT interactions, parameter setting, and debugging. We evaluate the educational impact using the Kirkpatrick Model, examining how each DT model's fidelity influences learning outcomes. This framework helps educators make informed decisions on integrating DTs and LLMs to meet specific learning objectives.

This study explores Artificial Intelligence use, specifically ChatGPT, in creating educational content. The study aims to elaborate on using ChatGPT to create course materials. The main objective is to assess the efficiency, quality, and impact of AI-driven course generation, and to create a Multimedia Databases course as a case study. The study highlights the potential of AI to revolutionize educational content creation, making it more accessible, personalized, and efficient. The course content was generated in less than one day through iterative methods, using prompts for translation, content expansion, practical examples, assignments, supplementary materials, and LaTeX formatting. Each part was verified immediately after generation to ensure accuracy. Post-generation analysis with Detectia and Turnitin showed similarity rates of 8.7% and 13%, indicating high originality. Experts and university committees reviewed and approved the course, with English university teachers praising its language quality. ChatGPT also created a well-structured and diversified exam for the module. Key findings reveal significant time efficiency, comprehensive content coverage, and high flexibility. The study underscores AI's transformative potential in education, addressing challenges related to data privacy, technology dependence, content accuracy, and algorithmic biases. The conclusions emphasize the need for collaboration between educators, policymakers, and technology developers to harness AI's benefits in education fully.

This scoping review examines the relationship between Generative AI (GenAI) and agency in education, analyzing the literature available through the lens of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we collected 11 studies from academic databases focusing on both learner and teacher agency in GenAI-enabled environments. We conducted a GenAI-supported hybrid thematic analysis that revealed three key themes: Control in Digital Spaces, Variable Engagement and Access, and Changing Notions of Agency. The findings suggest that while GenAI may enhance learner agency through personalization and support, it also risks exacerbating educational inequalities and diminishing learner autonomy in certain contexts. This review highlights gaps in the current research on GenAI's impact on agency. These findings have implications for educational policy and practice, suggesting the need for frameworks that promote equitable access while preserving learner agency in GenAI-enhanced educational environments.

To achieve autonomy in complex real-world exploration missions, we consider deployment strategies for a team of robots with heterogeneous autonomy capabilities. In this work, we formulate a multi-robot exploration mission and compute an operation policy to maintain robot team productivity and maximize mission rewards. The environment description, robot capability, and mission outcome are modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). We also include constraints in real-world operation, such as sensor failures, limited communication coverage, and mobility-stressing elements. Then, we study the proposed operation model on a real-world scenario in the context of the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The computed deployment policy is also compared against the human-based operation strategy in the final competition of the SubT Challenge. Finally, using the proposed model, we discuss the design trade-off on building a multi-robot team with heterogeneous capabilities.

The level of detail of the feedback influences its effectiveness [80], and feedback can be given at many levels ranging from targeting how to work on and complete specific tasks to considering personal characteristics and behavior[26, 36, 59]. In teaching and learning programming, automated assessment systems have been a key tool for providing feedback at a scale already for more than a half a century [30, 36, 61]. Researchers have sought to automate step-by-step guidance [78], provide hints during the programming process [55], improve programming error messages [6], and aid in providing textual feedback by grouping similar code submissions together [23, 37, 58]. To support the understanding of how novices construct programs, researchers and educators have been collecting increasing amounts of data from students' programming process [31]. Such data can be collected at multiple granularities, ranging from final course assignment submissions to individual keystrokes from solving the assignments [31]. Programming process data has been, for example, used to play back how students construct their programs step by step or keystroke by keystroke to create a broader understanding of the process [27, 73, 83]. So far, despite shared efforts towards providing timely feedback to students[33], the potential of fine-grained programming process data for feedback purposes is still largely untapped. Large Language Models (LLMs) are a potential tool for realizing the transformation of programming process data into actionable feedback items. Within Computing Education Research, LLMs have broadened the horizon of what computing education researchers and practitioners can achieve[65], calling even for rethinking how computer science and programming is taught [16].

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Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) leverages both pre-trained offline policies and online policies trained for downstream tasks, aiming to improve data efficiency and accelerate performance enhancement. An existing approach, Policy Expansion (PEX), utilizes a policy set composed of both policies without modifying the offline policy for exploration and learning. However, this approach fails to ensure sufficient learning of the online policy due to an excessive focus on exploration with both policies. Since the pre-trained offline policy can assist the online policy in exploiting a downstream task based on its prior experience, it should be executed effectively and tailored to the specific requirements of the downstream task. In contrast, the online policy, with its immature behavioral strategy, has the potential for exploration during the training phase. Therefore, our research focuses on harmonizing the advantages of the offline policy, termed exploitation, with those of the online policy, referred to as exploration, without modifying the offline policy. In this study, we propose an innovative offline-to-online RL method that employs a non-monolithic exploration approach. Our methodology demonstrates superior performance compared to PEX. The code for this comparison is readily available.

Recurrent neural networks are a successful neural architecture for many time-dependent problems, including time series analysis, forecasting, and modeling of dynamical systems. Training such networks with backpropagation through time is a notoriously difficult problem because their loss gradients tend to explode or vanish. In this contribution, we introduce a computational approach to construct all weights and biases of a recurrent neural network without using gradient-based methods. The approach is based on a combination of random feature networks and Koopman operator theory for dynamical systems. The hidden parameters of a single recurrent block are sampled at random, while the outer weights are constructed using extended dynamic mode decomposition. This approach alleviates all problems with backpropagation commonly related to recurrent networks. The connection to Koopman operator theory also allows us to start using results in this area to analyze recurrent neural networks. In computational experiments on time series, forecasting for chaotic dynamical systems, and control problems, as well as on weather data, we observe that the training time and forecasting accuracy of the recurrent neural networks we construct are improved when compared to commonly used gradient-based methods.