Design and evaluation of a collaborative learning environment

Collaboration becomes an essential competency in the current knowledge society. In this study, a collaborative learning environment was designed to facilitate students in group collaboration. Instructional support strategies of friendship and meaningful learning tasks were applied to promote collaboration. Scaffolding strategies such as writing progress reports and developing product versions were used to coordinate and monitor the collaborative learning environment. In addition, the online file sharing tool DriveHQ was used to facilitate collaboration. Four classes of students used the learning environment to complete their final project in pairs. Results showed friendship and meaningful learning tasks helped to promote individual accountability and positive interdependence, and the use of progress reports and product versions was useful for coordinating and monitoring the learning process. However, additional strategies might be needed for more effective collaboration to take place. Issues involved in this study are discussed.     

Design and evaluation of a collaborative learning environment

Collaboration becomes an essential competency in the current knowledge society. In this study, a collaborative learning environment was designed to facilitate students in group collaboration. Instructional support strategies of friendship and meaningful learning tasks were applied to promote collaboration. Scaffolding strategies such as writing progress reports and developing product versions were used to coordinate and monitor the collaborative learning environment. In addition, the online file sharing tool DriveHQ was used to facilitate collaboration. Four classes of students used the learning environment to complete their final project in pairs. Results showed friendship and meaningful learning tasks helped to promote individual accountability and positive interdependence, and the use of progress reports and product versions was useful for coordinating and monitoring the learning process. However, additional strategies might be needed for more effective collaboration to take place. Issues involved in this study are discussed.     

A study of the use of the laptop XO in Brazilian pilot schools

This article presents a study on the perception of 63 students and 15 teachers of two Brazilian public school, which took part in the pilot test of the OLPC educational laptop XO. For the students, the XO turned classes more attractive mainly because they changed from individual learning to collective research. The internet, the games and the learning aid are the most important XO's functionalities but gender and age impacted the results. Boys value the laptop for its recreation attribute while girls use the computer for interaction with people and to improve learning at school. Younger students like mostly the games while the older ones value the social interaction and research. The XO design is suitable for students under 6 years old but considered too toyful by the older ones. Rather than an educational tool, the students recognize the XO as a means of communication/entertainment. Despite an initial resistance to the OLPC project, the teachers understand that the introduction of a laptop as a pedagogical tool was worthy, because it enhanced learning, communication and social skills. Technical problems should be override and a sustainability plan should be promoted before the educational project is implemented countrywide.     

Online engagement during COVID-19: Role of agency on collaborative learning orientation and learning expectations

During the COVID-19 outbreak, students had to cope with succeeding in video-conferencing classes susceptible to technical problems like choppy audio, frozen screens and poor Internet connection, leading to interrupted delivery of facial expressions and eye-contact. For these reasons, agentic engagement during video-conferencing became critical for successful learning outcomes. This study explores the mediating effect agentic engagement has on collaborative language learning orientations (CLLO) within an EFL video-conferencing course to understand better how interactions influence academic learning expectations. A total of 329 (Male = 132, Female = 197) students were recruited from four South Korean universities to participate in this questionnaire study. Data analysis was carried out using the statistical software packages SPSS, and a series of data screening procedures were carried out. Findings revealed that collaborative language learning orientations were a statistically significant predictor of academic learning expectations, but this relationship was fully mediated when agentic engagement was added to the model. Students with a propensity for social language learning strategies believe they will succeed; however, this relationship is explained by their propensity to interact with the instructor when video-conferencing. An assortment of learning activities should be provided to support both collaborative and individual learning orientations for academic success. Students with collaborative learning tendencies and a propensity to actively engage the instructor during video conference classes are active participants in the eLearning context, possibly leading to positive course expectations.     

Scaffolding information problem solving in web-based collaborative inquiry learning

This study investigated the impact of different modes of scaffolding on students who are learning science through a web-based collaborative inquiry project in authentic classroom settings and explored the interaction effects with students’ characteristics. The intervention study aimed to improve domain-specific knowledge and metacognitive awareness during online information problem solving (IPS) as part of an online inquiry project. Three experimental conditions (teacher-enhanced scaffolding, technology-enhanced scaffolding, and both forms of scaffolding) were compared with a control condition in a two-by-two factorial quasi-experimental design. Moreover, gender and prior knowledge were examined as two factors which may have a significant impact on Web-based learning. In a four-week field study in secondary science education, pretest-posttest differences were measured. In total 347 students from 18 secondary school classes were involved and the classes were randomly distributed over the 4 conditions. Our findings support the notion of multiple scaffolding as an approach to enhance both knowledge acquisition and metacognitive awareness with respect to IPS-processes and to meet a mix of students with different needs within the context of a web-based inquiry learning project.     

From deconstructive misalignment to constructive alignment: Exploring student uses of mobile technologies in university classrooms

Becoming increasingly ubiquitous for students are the various uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within their wireless and networked learning environments. Many students use ICTs during lectures or tutorials for tasks unrelated to class learning activities, thus providing a potential misalignment with the intended learning outcomes. A sample of undergraduate and postgraduate psychology and business students were surveyed to determine their frequency of mobile ICT use in the classroom and the students' motivations and rationale for undertaking those activities unrelated to classroom learning. The survey contained quantitative items (categorical and Likert scale response items) and qualitative items requiring responses to open ended questions. Students indicated that using ICTs in ways misaligned with lesson learning outcomes, was related to the course content delivery mode, the promotion of passive or active learning, being domestic or international students, learner maturity, and the need for supporting course information. Understanding how and why students use mobile ICTs in classes can inform the redesign of classroom activities, to actively involve those technologies to assist in constructive alignment with the learning outcomes and enhance the student learning experience.     

EduXs: multilayer educational services platforms

How to use the online social learning communities to improve quality and quantity of interactions in physical social learning communities is an important issue. This work describes the design and implementation of multilayer educational services platforms that enable learners to establish their own online social learning communities and integrate their online social learning communities into a large public social learning portal site—EduCities. Multilayer educational services platforms were designed to integrate various individual online social learning communities, and to map these communities into physical social learning communities. This work proposes and implements an architecture called EduXs, and integrates it with K-12 social learning communities. One year after the EduXs system was released on the Internet, 1,849 schools, 15,772 classes, and 130,908 individuals in Taiwan had registered to use the system to construct their own online social learning communities. Among these registered users, 18.8% of registered schools, and 24.7% of registered classes continue to use the system. Evaluation results indicate that the system is accepted by teachers and students.     

Motivation factors and barriers to the continuous use of blended learning approach using Moodle: students' perceptions and individual differences

ABSTRACT

Practitioners of blended learning encounter challenges on how to cater students individual needs and to increase their motivational involvement with the system. Therefore, this study aims to identify and evaluate the motivation factors and barriers that influence students' decisions to continue using blended learning based on Moodle platform. The study proposes a research model to gain a better understanding of students' behavioural attitudes, motivations, and barriers to the continuous use of blended learning. In addition, a multi-group analysis was conducted to examine individual differences between students from three different universities in Palestine. The findings provide a comprehensive understanding of students' behaviours and the investigated factors of the proposed model were truly significant in forming students' perceptions and reflecting their decisions to continue using such learning approach. Features of blended learning system were found to be the most significant motivational antecedents in relation to influencing students' perceptions and involvements in the learning environment, while perceived behavioural control and subjective norms were found to be the primary factors driving students' continuous use. Finally, the findings shed light on the impact of individual differences on students' perceptions and usage behaviours and suggest that these differences could be leveraged to provide adaptive usage decisions.     

Examining student satisfaction with wholly online learning

Learner satisfaction has been shown to be positively correlated with quality of learning outcomes. An understanding of the factors that influence student satisfaction with online learning in a particular context can be used as an input to the appropriate design of learning environments, and for the provision of targeted support to students, with an aim to positively influence the student online learning experience. Following the mandatory inclusion of at least one wholly online unit of study in all undergraduate programs at Deakin University, a large 'experiences of learning online' (ELO) survey was undertaken to gauge students' perceptions of studying in the wholly online mode. A multivariate linear regression of all the questionnaire items was performed against an overall satisfaction item. Five items were found to significantly contribute to a model that explained approximately 70% of reported student satisfaction. Factors that were found to positively influence student satisfaction with studying a wholly online unit primarily related to how confident they felt about their ability to communicate and learn online, having a clear understanding of what was required to succeed in the unit and how well they thought they were performing in the unit. Other results are also reported.     

手持终端点菜系统在餐饮业中的研究与设计

当今社会是信息爆炸的时代,在节奏快速的经济社会,餐厅成为人们的主力厨房。但在绝大多数餐饮行业企业中,信息化管理的概念目前仍然只停留在"用财务软件记记账、打打单子"的程度上。如何以信息化提升餐饮业服务水平,是很多餐饮业经营者关心的问题。本文从我国餐饮业所面临的问题入手,通过对市场的分析,最终设计开发了手持终端点菜系统,通过对该研究成果的实际应用,真正实现便民便店的双赢餐饮模式。     

A personalized recommendation-based mobile learning approach to improving the reading performance of EFL students

In this paper, a personalized recommendation-based mobile language learning approach is proposed. A mobile learning system has been developed based on the approach by providing a reading material recommendation mechanism for guiding EFL (English as Foreign Language) students to read articles that match their preferences and knowledge levels, and a reading annotation module that enables students to take notes of English vocabulary translations for the reading content in individual or shared annotation mode. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted on a senior high school English course by assigning three classes of students to two experimental groups and a control group. One experimental group learned with the recommendation system with the individual annotation function, the other experimental group learned with the recommendation system with the shared annotation function, while the students in the control group learned with the individual annotation function, but without the recommendation system. The experimental results show that both experimental groups outperformed the control group, but there was no difference in learning outcome between the two experimental groups in terms of learning achievements.     

Community-organizing agent: An artificial intelligent system for building learning communities among large numbers of learners

Web-based (or online) learning provides an unprecedented flexibility and convenience to both learners and instructors. However, large online classes relying on instructor-centered presentations could tend to isolate many learners. The size of these classes and the wide dispersion of the learners make it challenging for instructors to interact with individual learners or to facilitate learner collaborations. Since extensive literature has confirmed that the substantial impact of learner interaction on learning outcomes, it is pedagogically critical to help distributed learners engage in community-based collaborative learning and to help individual learners improve their self-regulation. The E-learning lab of Shanghai Jiaotong University created an artificial intelligence system to help guide learners with similar interests into reasonably sized learning communities. The system uses a multi-agent mechanism to organize and reorganize supportive communities based on learners’ learning interests, experiences, and behaviors. Through effective award and exchange algorithms, learners with similar interests and experiences will form a community to support each others’ learning. Simulated experimental results indicate that these algorithms can improve the speed and efficiency in identifying and grouping homogeneous learners. Here, we will describe this system in detail and present its mechanism for organizing learning communities. We will conduct human experimentations in the near future to further perfect the system.     

Empowering students through digital game authorship: Enhancing concentration,critical thinking,and academic achievement

Digital game-based learning is a popular strategy for engaging students by making learning fun. Actively involving students as designers and producers of digital games may have even greater potential for student empowerment through enhancing concentration and engagement, fostering higher order thinking, and improving learning outcomes. Thus, this study empirically investigated the impact of digital game authoring on students' concentration, critical thinking skills, and academic achievement. A total of 67 students in two seventh-grade classes participated in this 19-week-long experiment, and were divided into an experimental group (32 students designing digital games) and a comparison group (35 students designing Flash animations). The interdisciplinary approach involved integrating biology and computer programming classes. Students in the experimental group designed digital games based upon biology course content, while the comparison group collaboratively produced Flash animations based upon the same course content. The experimental results, using MANCOVA for pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest scores, demonstrate significant improvements in critical thinking skills, and academic achievement, with increased retention of both course content and critical thinking skills observed for the delayed posttest. For concentration, a relative advantage for the experimental group as compared with the comparison group was noted, but did not reach statistical significance. Based on the results of this study, implications for practitioners and researchers are provided, including the integration of programming or computer science with other courses for digital game authoring and the evaluation of other learning outcomes such as creative thinking, problem-solving, and flow.     

Virtual teamwork in very large undergraduate classes

Collaborative work is an important part of tertiary education but it is very difficult to arrange and supervise for extremely large classes of students in their first year. The possibility that computer-mediated communication can be used to facilitate this type of learning is appealing from a pragmatic organisational point of view. This paper explains in detail what a ‘virtual team’ is in the educational context. It reports on an interpretive field study where students taking an introductory course were allowed to choose where and when they did the required collaborative work. The paper discusses the factors that should be taken into account when offering students the option of working as a virtual team. These include factors that influence the students’ choice. The project cannot be considered to have been successful but indicates reasons for the lack of success and suggests contexts in which it would be valuable to repeat the project. The importance of extensive preparation in terms of teaching the students necessary social and technological skills cannot be over emphasised.     

Enhancing student knowledge acquisition from online learning conversations

This article reports a theory-driven experimental study that evaluates the effects of an annotation functionality on online social interaction and individual learning outcomes. The central hypothesis of this study is that directly addressing a part of a text by annotating it and then connecting each annotation with its related discussion can decrease coordinative interaction costs and result in a higher-quality discussion that favors greater gains in individual learning outcomes. To reach our objective, we carried out a theory-driven experimental study that compares two versions of an anchored discussion system: one with annotation functionality and one without it, both displaying the learning material side by side with its associated discussion in one window. Participants were 106 students enrolled in two sections of a blended-format course in health education. We assigned each section to a software condition. The examination of students’ online social interaction centered on a fine-grained content analysis of coordination and knowledge construction activities as well as sequential analysis of knowledge construction activities. The results indicate that annotation functionality decreased coordinative interaction costs and stimulated more elaborated discussions that favored greater gains in individual learning outcomes. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

EcoMOBILE: Integrating augmented reality and probeware with environmental education field trips

Positioned in the context of situated learning theory, the EcoMOBILE project combines an augmented reality (AR) experience with use of environmental probeware during a field trip to a local pond environment. Activities combining these two technologies were designed to address ecosystem science learning goals for middle school students, and aid in their understanding and interpretation of water quality measurements. The intervention was conducted with five classes of sixth graders from a northeastern school district as a pilot study for the larger EcoMOBILE project, and included pre-field trip training, a field trip to a local pond environment, and post-field trip discussions in the classroom.During the field experience, students used mobile wireless devices with FreshAiR™, an augmented reality application, to navigate the pond environment and to observe virtual media and information overlaid on the physical pond. This AR experience was combined with probeware, in that students collected water quality measurements at designated AR hotspots during the experience. We studied the characteristics of learning and instruction using measures of student attitudes, content learning gains, and opinions teachers provided via written and verbal feedback. We observed gains in student affective measures and content understanding following the intervention. Teachers reported that the combined technologies promoted student interaction with the pond and with classmates in a format that was student-centered rather than teacher-directed. Teachers also reported that students demonstrated deeper understanding of the principles of water quality measurement than was typical on prior field trips without these technologies and that students had expanded opportunities to engage in activities that resemble scientific practice. Overall, results of the students' surveys and teacher feedback suggest that there are multiple benefits to using this suite of technologies for teaching and for learning.     

Examining effectiveness of communities of practice in online English for academic purposes (EAP) assessment in virtual classes

The literature on English for academic purposes (EAP) methodology highlights the significance of learners' engagement in learning language (Hyland, 2006) in mainstream general and online contexts. Blogs have been recommended in many studies as having the potential to bring the sense of community and collaboration in online classes. Therefore, this study sought to investigate whether blogs in large classes would help students enhance their perceptions of learning. To this end, Forty-two undergraduate students of Information Technology (IT) at an Iranian university participated in a weblog writing course in order to promote collaboration and reflective learning. Instrumentation included a questionnaire of perceived learning and sense of community, semi-structured interviews, and participant observations. The findings revealed a significant difference in perceived learning between the students with low sense of community and those with a high sense of community. Based on the qualitative findings of the study, we suggest an assessment framework incorporating constructivist and social-interactionist theories of learning in order to treat students as members of a community of learning. The findings may promise implications for gearing EAP assessment to more collaborative modes in online courses and suggest a model framework for the assessment of students in EAP online classes.     

Exploring embedded guidance and self-efficacy in educational multi-user virtual environments

In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study into the relationship between student self-efficacy and guidance use in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) science curriculum project. We describe findings from a sample of middle school science students on the combined impact on learning of student self-efficacy in scientific inquiry and use of individualized guidance messages, and on the interplay between levels of self-efficacy and use of an embedded guidance system in an educational MUVE. Results from our study showed that embedded guidance was associated with improved learning outcomes for learners across a spectrum of self-reported efficacy in science. However, we also found that learners with low levels of initial self-efficacy in science viewed fewer guidance messages than their higher efficacy peers, and did not perform as well as their higher efficacy peers regardless of guidance use level. At the same time, outcomes for low self-efficacy students who used the guidance system heavily were raised to the level of high self-efficacy students who did not use the system.