Structuring an undergraduate accounting information systems course: Alternate strategies

Enrollments in the basic undergraduate accounting information systems course are rapidly increasing. Paralleling this growth is the increasing growth in degree programs in management information systems or business information systems. Hence many schools of business offer a variety of information systems courses to their undergraduate students, including accounting students. This paper considers the alternate strategies in structuring an undergraduate accounting systems course (1) when accounting majors complete systems-related courses prior to completion of the accounting systems course and (2) when accounting majors do not complete any other systems-related courses. Results of a study suggest that the latter approach presently dominates in the accounting community, i.e. accounting majors complete a general purpose as opposed to a specific-purpose accounting systems course. Accordingly, this paper presents a suggested outline for a general-purpose systems course.     

Can more interactivity improve learning achievement in an online course? Effects of college students' perception and actual use of a course-management system on their learning achievement

This study aims to investigate how interactivity influence learners' use of interactive functions in the course-management system (CMS) and their online learning performance. A two-tier mediation framework is proposed to examine the mediating effects of different actual-use records concerning the CMS's interactive functions. Data are collected from 381 undergraduate students who enrolled in a general-education asynchronous online course from three universities in Taiwan. The results indicate that the relationships among students' self-reported use of interactive functions, students' perceptions of the usefulness of interactive functions, and students' actual-use logs have some direct influences on students' online learning performance (online-discussion scores, exam scores, and group-project scores). In addition, students' actual-use logs (the number of times of log-ins to the online course, the number of times students read learning materials, and the number of postings on the discussion board) have a mediated effect on students' self-reported frequency of logging into the CMS, students' self-reported frequency of using the learner–instructor/learner–learner interactive functions, and online learning performance. The findings and implications could constitute a useful guide for educational practitioners and designers concerned with the effective integration of interactivity into future online courses.     

SCRUMIA—An educational game for teaching SCRUM in computing courses

Due to the increasing use of agile methods, teaching SCRUM as an agile project management methodology has become more and more important. In order to teach students to be able to apply SCRUM in concrete situations, often educational (simulation) games are used. However, most of these games have been developed more for professional trainings than taking into consideration typical restrictions of university courses (such as, class duration and low financial resources for instructional materials). Therefore, we present a manual paper and pencil game to reinforce and teach the application of SCRUM in undergraduate computing programmes complementing theoretical lectures. The game has been developed following a systematic instructional design process and based on our teaching experience. It has been applied several times in two undergraduate project management courses. We evaluated motivation, user experience and the game's contribution to learning through case studies on Kirkpatrick's level one based on the perception of the students. First results indicate the potential of the game to contribute to the learning of SCRUM in an engaging way, keeping students immersed in the learning task. In this regard, the game offers a low-budget alternative to complement traditional instructional strategies for teaching SCRUM in the classroom.     

A contextual game-based learning approach to improving students' inquiry-based learning performance in social studies courses

Inquiry-based learning, an effective instructional strategy, can be in the form of a problem or task for triggering student engagement. However, how to situate students in meaningful inquiry activities remains to be settled, especially for social studies courses. In this study, a contextual educational computer game is developed to improve students' learning performance based on an inquiry-based learning strategy. An experiment has been conducted on an elementary school social studies course to evaluate the effects of the proposed approach on the inquiry-based learning performances of students with different learning styles. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach effectively enhanced the students' learning effects in terms of their learning achievement, learning motivation, satisfaction degree and flow state. Furthermore, it is also found that the proposed approach benefited the “active” learning style students more than the “reflective” style students in terms of learning achievement. This suggests the need to provide additional supports to students with particular learning styles in the future.     

Behavioral modeling based on cloud computing and target user recommendation for English cloud classroom

The English cloud classroom learning system provides a simple and effective way to access cloud-based training and learning materials. Student records based on behavioral modeling and interactive volume are assumed that the degree of student participation in the course measure. Previous studies, typically the frequency of student activities while ignoring temporary information. Analysis of Students' Activities in the course over time. According to the online classroom activity data, similar behavior change with time students are clustered. These results are three different groups. A large majority of inactive students. Another group to active throughout the students. However, a group of students to the event, but their activity will be reduced throughout the course. These student groups exhibit different performance. Overall students more active, the better the results. In addition to these general trends, also identified a trend of alternative courses that can be found, for example, becomes an active group of students in the course. It suggests that students' behavior is identified from a single course of conduct than the more complex, multi-mode learning activities course. More research is essential. In this study, investigated the Portuguese teachers 'views on classroom management, the relationship between self-off and the efficacy of teachers' and teachers' perception of classroom behavioral teachers' perception of time. Use mediator and moderator variables on the cloud classroom management, and teachers of English teachers perceive the relationship between classroom conditions were cheating process analysis.     

Student trajectories in high school mathematics: Issues of choice,support, and identity‐making

Abstract

This study explores the range of experiences students have when making two kinds of decisions in relation to high school mathematics courses: what course to take, and how to and how much to apply themselves. Looking at the choices of students about to enter Grade 10, the first decision is their choice of courses. In mathematics, students leaving Grade 9 selected one course (usually), from five possibilities, for their Grade 10 year: an advanced‐placement Honours stream, an academic course with a traditional symbol‐manipulation approach, an academic course with a technology‐based applications approach, a non‐academic mathematics‐for‐citizenship course, and (as an imposed choice) repeating the Grade 9 mathematics course. The second point of decision‐making occurred within their mathematics and science courses—students constantly made choices about how, and how much, to apply themselves to the challenges of succeeding in the courses they had chosen. These students’ course choices, to a considerable extent, conformed to expectations based on the influence of socioeconomic status and prior achievement. Overwhelmingly, students were concerned more in the credentialing value of courses than their educational value or structural nature. Within their courses, most students focused their attention on doing the work rather than the content or the learning process. Students reported being encouraged to do their work by teachers, but could not provide any indication of tactical support with becoming effective learners. The final outcomes of the students’ marks suggest that, in the context of the study, Grade 10 mathematics courses are much more effective as gate‐keeping mechanisms than as opportunities for students to improve and succeed.     

The nature of adolescent learner interaction in a virtual high school setting

This study used survey data to measure the effect of learners' reported interactions with content, peers, and instructors on several course outcomes in two virtual high school courses that emphasized interactive learning. Surveys found that the large majority of students viewed all investigated types of interaction as educational and motivational. Students perceived learner–instructor and learner–content interactions to have significantly higher educational value (α < 0.01) than learner–learner interactions, and viewed learner–instructor interaction to be significantly more motivational (α < 0.01) than learner–content interaction. Furthermore, nine significant correlations were found involving the time students reported spending on human interaction and course outcomes. Seven of the significant correlations were related to the time students reported spending in human interaction and the more affective outcomes, such as course satisfaction and disposition towards the subject area. Outcomes also indicate that learner–learner interaction had higher correlations with course outcomes than learners' interactions with the content or their instructor. Students' perceived learning was not significantly correlated with any type of interaction, and only students' total reported time spent on learner–learner interaction and students' social learner–learner interaction were significantly correlated with their grade.     

Exploring Online Learners' Interactive Dynamics by Visually Analyzing Their Time‐anchored Comments

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are increasingly prevalent as an online educational resource open to everyone and have attracted hundreds of thousands learners enrolling these online courses. At such scale, there is potentially rich information of learners' behaviors embedded in the interactions between learners and videos that may help instructors and content producers adjust the instructions and refine the online courses. However, the lack of tools to visualize information from interactive data, including messages left to the videos at particular timestamps as well as the temporal variations of learners' online participation and perceived experience, has prevented people from gaining more insights from video‐watching logs. In this paper, we focus on extracting and visualizing useful information from time‐anchored comments that learners left to specific time points of the videos when watching them. Timestamps as a kind of metadata of messages can be useful to recover the interactive dynamics of learners occurring around the videos. Therefore, we present a visualization system to analyze and categorize time‐anchored comments based on topics and content types. Our system integrates visualization methods of temporal text data, namely ToPIN and ThemeRiver, which can help people understand the quality and quantity of online learners' feedback and their states of learning. To evaluate the proposed system, we visualized time‐anchored commenting data from two online course videos, and conducted two user studies participated by course instructors and third‐party educational evaluators. The results validate the usefulness of the approach and show how the quantitative and qualitative visualizations can be used to gain interesting insights around learners' online learning behaviors.     

Trust as a learning facilitator that affects students' learning performance in the Facebook community: An investigation in a business planning writing course

Several studies have found that participants are willing to share personal information on Facebook, due mainly to trust in fellow group members; however, this trust is often influenced by the discussion environment, methods and participants. A learning facilitator is often employed in entrepreneurial courses but few previous studies have examined how they actually influence the effectiveness of teaching. This paper discusses how the trust in such facilitators in the Facebook community influences the development of students in the writing of business plans in order to model learning behavior. We employed pre- and post-test data from a sample of 188 undergraduate students in a mid-sized Taiwanese university and observed the influence of learning facilitators on learning performance. This study also explored the interaction between partner trust and discussion mode with regard to business plan writing. Our results show that having an entrepreneurial consultant participate in the discussion results provide significantly stronger improvements in business plan writing than that afforded by other modes of discussion. A significant interaction between the mode of discussion and partner trust with regard to business plan writing was identified. Our findings make a concrete contribution by increasing our understanding of partner trust and cooperative learning, in a business plan writing course in the Facebook community. The study also provides an alternative course design based on various approaches to the instruction of business plan preparation.     

Managing programmed instruction and collaborative peer tutoring in the classroom: Applications in teaching Java™

To fulfill part of the course requirements, 34 undergraduate students in two courses completed an online programmed instruction tutor as the first technical training exercise in a Java™ programming course designed for information systems majors. The tutor taught a simple JApplet program to display a text string within a browser window on the Web. Students in the first course next participated in a collaborative peer tutoring session, based on the JApplet program, followed by a lecture on the program and by successfully running the program on the Web. For the second course, the peer tutoring session was scheduled after the lecture and after successfully running the program. Students in both courses completed tests of far transfer (“meaningful learning”) and software self-efficacy before using the tutor and on several subsequent occasions following that initial learning. Students in the second course also completed a 4-item scale to assess the development of classification and functionality knowledge regarding elements of the program. Students in both courses showed progressive improvement in all performance measures across the several assessment occasions. Students’ positive ratings of the effectiveness of both the tutor and the collaborative peer tutoring supported the value of these learning experiences in a technical knowledge domain. The results of this study, based on student performance observed within the context of the classroom, show the importance of providing a range of synergistic learning experiences that culminate in a level of skill and confidence that prepares and motivates all students for advanced instruction in Java. They also show how to manage the instructional techniques in the classroom to accomplish that educational outcome.     

Design and evaluation of a microprocessor course combining three cooperative methods: SDLA,PjBL and CnBL

This paper reports on the design, implementation and assessment of a new approach course structure based on the combination of three cooperative methodologies. The main goal is to reduce the percentage of non-passed students focusing the learning process on students by offering different alternatives and motivational activities based on working in small groups on a robotic project and changing the course assessment. The microprocessor course is a subject in the undergraduate program of telecommunication engineering at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) in Spain. Its traditional teaching methodology was based on Lecture sessions, Problem sessions and Practical activities in the lab (L/P/P). This methodology was changed to comply with the Bologna requirements, where new skills must be addressed and learned during the educational process. Self-Directed Learning activities (SDLA) for lecture sessions and Project based learning (PjBL) for Laboratory sessions were implemented in combination with a final competition activity between groups (CnBL). This paper describes the design, implementation and results; showing the benefits of these new teaching methods, improving student’s motivation including a robotic buggy project and allowing new learning strategies based on a practical point of view and adaptability to students’ previous skills.     

Understanding the ways in which design features of educational websites impact upon student learning outcomes in blended learning environments

This study investigated the effectiveness, in terms of the attainment of relevant learning outcomes, of the types of learning promoted by educational features commonly incorporated in course management systems. Twenty-one courses with significant use of the Internet, but with face-to-face teaching as the predominant instructional mode, were investigated. Five hundred and ninety-five students taking these 21 courses completed a questionnaire which gave feedback on the extent of use of and quality of implementation of internet features, as well as their perception of the attainment of outcomes relating to approaches to learning, communication skills and understanding of content. A confirmatory factor analysis of scales pertinent to information presentation and constructive dialogue features showed a very poor fit to the data, indicating that the two types of function did not act in concert. Structural equation modelling was used to test instructional models in presage–process–product format for ‘information’ and ‘dialogue’ features. The information one showed a marginal fit to the data, but the dialogue one a very good fit. This shows that using the Internet for presenting information in a blended environment does not seem to effectively help students achieve learning outcomes. Using features which promote constructive dialogue and interactive learning activities encourages a deep approach to learning, the development of communication skills and enhanced understanding of content.     

Analytics of learning tactics and strategies in an online learnersourcing environment

Background

The use of crowdsourcing in a pedagogically supported form to partner with learners in developing novel content is emerging as a viable approach for engaging students in higher-order learning at scale. However, how students behave in this form of crowdsourcing, referred to as learnersourcing, is still insufficiently explored.

Objectives

To contribute to filling this gap, this study explores how students engage with learnersourcing tasks across a range of course and assessment designs.

Methods

We conducted an exploratory study on trace data of 1279 students across three courses, originating from the use of a learnersourcing environment under different assessment designs. We employed a new methodology from the learning analytics (LA) field that aims to represent students' behaviour through two theoretically-derived latent constructs: learning tactics and the learning strategies built upon them.

Results

The study's results demonstrate students use different tactics and strategies, highlight the association of learnersourcing contexts with the identified learning tactics and strategies, indicate a significant association between the strategies and performance and contribute to the employed method's generalisability by applying it to a new context.

Implications

This study provides an example of how learning analytics methods can be employed towards the development of effective learnersourcing systems and, more broadly, technological educational solutions that support learner-centred and data-driven learning at scale. Findings should inform best practices for integrating learnersourcing activities into course design and shed light on the relevance of tactics and strategies to support teachers in making informed pedagogical decisions.     

Practical guidelines for designing and evaluating educationally oriented recommendations

There is a need for designing educationally oriented recommendations that deal with educational goals as well as learners' preferences and context in a personalised way. They have to be both based on educators' experience and perceived as adequate by learners. This paper compiles practical guidelines to produce personalised recommendations that are meant to foster active learning in online courses. These guidelines integrate three different methodologies: i) user centred design as defined by ISO 9241-210, ii) the e-learning life cycle of personalised educational systems, and iii) the layered evaluation of adaptation features. To illustrate guidelines actual utility, generality and flexibility, the paper describes their applicability to design educational recommendations in two different contexts, which in total involved 125 educators and 595 learners. These applications show benefits for learners and educators. Following this approach, we are targeting to cope with one of the main challenges in current massive open online courses, which are expected to provide personalised education to an increasing number of students without the continuous involvement of educators in supporting learners during their course interactions.     

Exploring the use of multimedia examination formats in undergraduate teaching: results from the fielding testing

Students' and faculty's perspectives toward using the multimedia examination format will influence whether digital testing can be implemented successfully or not. This study examined the students' attitudes and anxiety toward taking the multimedia examinations, factors (i.e. gender, major, student classification, and computer experience) that may influence their attitudes, and faculty's attitudes toward creating multimedia tests. Students in two undergraduate courses [a regular course (n=100), and an online course (n=97)] participated in this research. The results showed that there was strong support from the students and faculty for using multimedia exams as a primary assessment form. They embraced the interactive technology, and felt the incorporation of rich media in assessment could provide additional support for their learning and teaching. While students from both the regular and online courses found it acceptable to be evaluated using the multimedia format, multimedia testing was accepted more when it was a closer reflection of the instruction. The findings showed that students with more computer experience had lower anxiety and better attitudes toward using the multimedia format. Students entering colleges in recent years were more technologically literate. No significant differences in overall attitude and anxiety scores were found between male and female students, or between liberal arts and natural sciences majors.     

Five applications of computers in the chemistry curriculum

This paper describes a systematic application of courseware to help meet three educational challenges: provide remedial education for poorly prepared students; provide a stimulating and challenging learning environment for well prepared and highly motivated students: and minimize the time spent by instructors on clerical tasks. Five applications of computers to the undergraduate chemistry curriculum have evolved during the past decade at the University of Pittsburgh as a result of this work: a library of computer-assisted instruction lessons: a computer-assisted test construction system: a library of simulation and data reduction programs: a library of computer-managed instruction programs: and a senior-level elective course. “Numerical Methods in Chemistry”. This paper contains a discussion of this software and its use in several chemistry courses.     

Teaching, Exploring, Learning—Developing Tutorials for In-Class Teaching and Self-Learning

This paper presents an experience report on a novel approach for a course on intermediate and advanced computer graphics topics. The approach uses Teachlet Tutorials, a combination of traditional seminar–type teaching with interactive exploration of the content by the audience, plus development of self-contained tutorials on the topic. In addition to a presentation, an interactive software tool is developed by the students to assist the audience in learning and exploring the topic's details. This process is guided through set tasks. The resulting course material is developed for two different contexts: (a) for classroom presentation and (b) as an interactive, self-contained, self-learning tutorial. The overall approach results in a more thorough understanding of the topic both for the student teachers as well as for the class participants. In addition to detailing the Teachlet Tutorial approach, this paper presents our experiences implementing the approach in our Advanced Computer Graphics course and presents the resultant projects. Most of the final Teachlet Tutorials were surprisingly good and we had excellent feedback from the students on the approach and course.     

Isolated versus integrated case studies: A comparison in the context of teaching complex and domain-specific IT applications

Previous research on IT fluency in connection with non-IT majors points at the increasing need for more “realistic” courses teaching the use of complex and domain-specific IT applications. That research also suggests certain desirable course design characteristics, of which one of the most important is the close integration of realistic case study-based material into one single course (as opposed to the less costly alternative of inserting single case study-based material into other courses). This paper describes a study in which the use of case study-based learning modules in an integrated way (i.e., as part of one main course) is compared against the use of those modules in isolation (i.e., inserted into other courses). The modules have been designed to teach complex and domain-specific IT applications in three main domains – anthropology, sociology, and chemistry. The study, which involved 76 undergraduate students, suggests that the integration of modules into one single course, when compared with the option of using the modules in isolation, significantly increased the level of perceptions of IT’s potential for solving complex problems, perceived learning about specialized IT applications, and perceived learning about IT issues in general. The key conclusion of the study is that integration may be a desirable option regardless of the potential extra costs involved.