The PENCIL platform: Connecting learners, tutors, and tools

This paper describes a flexible and extensible platform for supporting collaborative exercise solving in distance learning scenarios called PENCIL (Platform for Exercise sharing aNd Collaborative and Interactive Learning support). With the underlying API, PENCIL can be easily extended by connecting different Web-based tools for creating solutions (called "solution creation tools") as well as processing tools (called "solution discussion tools"). With the exposed CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations and a common database that stores exercises, solutions, and solution steps, PENCIL directly supports the process of exercise solving in an integrated fashion. We developed a proof of concept implementation for teaching UML (Unified Modeling Language) and provided two tools called "PINBOARD" and "StudentUML". These tools enable learners and tutors to collaboratively create, share, and discuss UML exercises and solutions. The platform and the two tools were evaluated with 42 learners and four tutors from five European countries.