Journal of Computers in Education

Online participation in education is not a new research topic, but the field still lacks succinct account of approaches for enhancing online participation. This paper presents a systematic review of representative literature dealing with online participation in education. All subscribed resources in Web of Science were systematically searched with no time frame limit, and a total of 30 relevant studies published between 1996 and 2020 were selected. Proposed classification of a variety of approaches that evidently enhance and encourage online participation is based on actual empirical results and evidences reported in each analysed study. The key research findings revealed that different communication support (like discussion forums, blogs, and chats) and teaching strategies (like flipped learning, personalized communication, and gamification) were evidenced as predominantly employed approaches which proved to enhance online participation. Besides, facilitative strategies and tools (like online peer voting, wikis, and blogs) along with other support mechanisms (like social media and group awareness tools) were also regarded as valuable means of participation encouragement. Furthermore, in a great majority of analysed research, university students were found to be involved participants (in terms of data collection), while half of studies relied on Learning Management System as supporting technology. The conducted review exposed also a significant empirical evidence to support the argument that students’ learning performance could be enhanced by improving online participation. Further research directions and potential challenges are offered as well.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influences of different online discussion task styles and users’ tool proficiency on group discussion effectiveness. It adopted a case study approach, wherein the student club members’ performance of a two-stage online group discussion activity was observed and examined. Twelve undergraduate members of a club were recruited and divided into high- and low-proficiency groups. Each group performed both a creative task and a planning task in sequence. Findings showed that the high-proficiency group performed better than the low-proficiency group. Also, both groups applied various summary strategies to facilitate the discussion process. This study concluded that the creative task is appropriate for BBS-style online on-task discussions. Recommendations are made to encourage researchers and practitioners to choose proper tools considering the task fitness to facilitate group collaborative online work in the field, especially in educational contexts. Also, it is recommended that instructors investigate the nature and features of various instruments and media before implementing CMC applications especially for further nurturing collaborative creativity.

The popularity of online education has prompted computer-assisted language learning (CALL) teachers to attend online teacher professional development (OTPD) courses. Online education has necessitated a deeper look into online delivery in professional development courses. Hence, an exploratory qualitative case study was conducted to investigate how synchronous, asynchronous, or the blend of both, called bichronous online learning, could develop teachers’ CALL pedagogical knowledge through project-oriented tasks. In light of data from technology-review projects and discussions, it was revealed that bichronous online learning benefited teachers significantly in acquiring CALL pedagogical knowledge, specifically in selecting, developing, and evaluating CALL materials. Bichronous online learning incorporates the best affordances of synchronous and asynchronous modalities. The findings showed that synchronous and asynchronous modalities complement each other and should not be substituted for each other. This study could be considered a contribution on account of informing the community of inquiry about the pedagogical affordances of bichronous online learning and proving that bichronous online learning is an ideal learning setting to aid CALL teacher education programs.

To respond to the growing integration of digital technologies across all sectors of society, a curriculum should be developed to nurture the next generation as creative problem solvers in order to see the world through a computational lens. One way to achieve this goal is to design a curriculum in K-12 to promote computational thinking (CT) through programming. In order to facilitate the design of the CT curriculum, the expected learning outcomes of the curriculum are proposed in this study. The CT learning outcomes of this study compose of CT knowledge, practices, and perspectives. Based on the proposed CT learning outcomes and interest-driven creator theory, this article aims to propose a seven-principle framework for guiding the design of K-12 CT curriculum. The first three principles ensure CT skills and perspectives are delivered in the curriculum through a programming environment that fosters CT knowledge acquisition. The other four principles are the design strategies for CT development: provide incrementally complex computational tasks across all levels of the curriculum to develop CT skills; review each level of the curriculum by producing final project samples to ensure a comprehensive coverage of CT knowledge; design the computational tasks that are of interest to the target learners to nurture interest-driven creator; and establish appropriate assessment criteria for the final projects and showcase their productions to enhance learners’ creativity. The future work is to design, implement, and evaluate CT curriculum underpinned by these seven principles in K-12.

During the last years, MOOCs (massive open online courses) are part of the most discussed developments in educational technology. MOOCs swept the landscape of educational technology in no time. However, through all this enthusiasm, it is difficult to see the contribution of MOOCs to computer-based education. Even though there is a surge in MOOCs as well as in MOOC-research, it is unclear how an effective MOOC-pedagogy can be developed. What is this MOOC-phenomenon? And how can we, as educators, teachers, pedagogues, educational researchers, develop MOOC-pedagogy? In the first part of this paper, we’ll start with an overview of the MOOC-phenomenon. In the second part, we’ll discuss the implicit philosophical attitudes towards educational technology that underlies much of the MOOC-debates. We then argue that, rather than a theoretically grounded approach to educational technology, common sense attitudes of essentialism and instrumentalism prevail. In the last part of the paper, we suggest to concentrate on the educational design of technology and on the development of practices of study necessary to deal with technology, in order to develop a meaningful educational practice.

As an innovative active learning method, flipped learning provides students with several opportunities. This study was conducted to reveal the trends and outcomes in research into the flipped learning approach published between 2012 and 2018. Descriptive content analysis was used to review 316 research and conceptual articles published in academic journals included in five significant databases that ascribe to journals the highest impact factor. The results indicate that most of the studies are conducted with students as the most frequent study group and with a mixed-method research design in the subject areas of education and medicine. The flipped learning approach is mostly conducted in higher education. As a region, Asia has taken the lead in flipped learning studies. Finally, the outcomes of flipped learning indicate an increase in student performance and positive influence on cognitive, affective, and soft skills.

Embodied cognition theory denotes that knowledge is incorporated into the body’s sensorimotor system, which facilitates learning and understanding abstract concepts. In this context, several interaction modalities have been introduced to design learning experiences that promote multisensory processing. This study examined the impacts of the type of embodied interaction modality on learning gains in a real classroom context. The researchers designed learning interfaces involving different interaction modalities including tablet application, tangible user interface, motion-based technology, and multimodal interaction. Thirty-six primary school students (aged 7 to 9) were assigned to four groups to learn the basics of the human body anatomy. The study adopted an immediate and a 20-day delayed post-test to measure students’ knowledge retention. Regardless of interaction modality type, participants showed significant immediate learning gains. However, participants in the multimodal embodiment conditions performed better on the delayed post-test. The findings suggested that multimodal embodied interaction, merging between body movements and tangible user interfaces, may lead to better knowledge retention. The process of performing body movements and physical interaction offered an alternative and a complementary encoding strategy for understanding and memorizing the learning concepts.