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Jennifer Alexandra Thompson is a 4th year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), majoring in Computer Science. Since becoming a regular undergraduate teaching assistant for first-year computer science courses, Alexandra became immediately interested in computer science education and other applications her major. Outside of her research and teaching interests, she is an active member of the computer science community at UTM and she is a proud advocate for mental health support in post-secondary education. Alexandra hopes to attend graduate school for her computer science interests in Fall 2022.

Alongside her advisor, Andrew Petersen, Alexandra worked on studying online classroom behaviours since January 2020. Using data from a first-year computer science course at UTM, she was able to see how students used the tool and what were common behavioural patterns. She created a list of different behaviour-based actions, encoded log data to match the behaviours and ran the data through a sequential pattern miner to see what actions and sequence of actions were commonly used by the students. The goal of this research is to understand how higher performing students utilize an unsupervised online learning environment to identify effective strategies in this setting. This research will allow instructors to direct students toward effective methods of using online classroom tools.

DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3408877.3439669