**7. Discussion**

IT education is in a state of change. Similar to nursing education, IT courses have a high content load to teach in the state of the art. However, the large student numbers and limited staff in the computer class often hinder interested educators combining PBL with structured teaching in their curricula. The question is "without an effective and efficient tool, it seems impractical to ask an educator handle with large number of group discussions in the discipline of PBL".

In this experiment, we test whether these two algorithms in the learning system can support PBL discussion in IT curricula or not? We want to know:


The first algorithm, MALESAbrain has been tested in our graduate laboratory, with "70%" learning rate setup and for two-week time of discussion. This experiment invited six of the postgraduate students to discuss the question: "How to fix an illegal operation? An illegal operation is an operation requested to be performed by either the Operating System or CPU that is not understood and therefore is illegal".

The evaluation after the experiment, with "56%" learning rate on the due date; and MALESAbrain has received some comments from the participants:

In considering of the methodology, the learning system


In considering of the educators' benefits, the learning system


However, the strategies to set up the "learning thresholds" in MALESAbrain still remain to be evaluated and estimated. There are two reasons:


In the experiment, the thresholds' setup proves to be challenged by the participants – "why not let them decide the thresholds before the meeting, because it is their discussions and is their responsibility to answer the educator's request". This means we cannot approve a best thresholds setup at this stage. However, the following table is their suggestion setup.


Table 1. A suggestion learning thresholds set up in MALESAbrain with 6 participants.

The second experiment, of MALESAassessment, found the keywords in the AK-cells are not well matched the problem issues. It is because learners' assign keywords, during MALESAbrain discussion, will have individuals' viewpoints without integrated into an overview for reusing. It affects the searching results in the test. After we re-assign keywords to each AK-cell, MALESAassessment becomes quite significant for reusing the learned knowledge. The Assessment Report and log file, in section 6.3, show one of the successful retained cases after test. This means there are no difficulties to give a proper mark to a successful answered student and give a proper advice to a failure answered student in this experiment.
