Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning

In the current socio-health situation, new educational challenges have emerged, such as the need to implement a virtual tutorial action. Therefore, this study has three objectives: (1) to investigate the level of digital competence that early childhood and primary school teachers possess to carry out quality online tutorial actions; (2) to analyse whether there are differences in use at both education stages; and (3) to identify which variables significantly affect the development of this competence at each educational stage. For this purpose, an ex post facto design was used, based on the survey technique, by means of non-probabilistic purposive sampling. The final sample consisted of a total of 1,069 educators working at the early childhood and primary education stages, from all over Spain. The results showed acceptable digital competence, with higher scores in the primary education stage, which may be due to characteristics of the students and the education stage itself, rather than to teachers’ digital competences. On the other hand, it was found that the virtual tutorial action tasks are significantly influenced in the early childhood education stage by blogs, WhatsApp, Facebook, and number of tutoring hours per month with families, while for the primary stage they are influenced by blogs, WhatsApp, Twitter, ClassDojo, Moodle, tutoring hours, number of tutoring hours per month with families, and sex. Based on these results, there is an obvious need for educational institutions to continue to develop teacher training in relation to the use of resources to carry out adequate tutoring actions and thus increase the diversification in the use of resources.

This study explored the potential of Second Life (SL), a popular multi-user virtual online environment, for university counseling. University students (n = 312) were asked to evaluate three counseling channels (i.e., traditional face-to-face, internet, and SL) based on a range of media features deemed relevant and important to counseling and to assess their relative preferability when faced with different counseling problems. For the purposes of this study, counseling rooms with different styles were built, virtual counselors with different genders, ages, and styles were created, and short video recordings of scripted counseling sessions were produced in SL. For the media feature comparisons, the collected data were analyzed by the multivariate analysis of variance, followed by the analysis of variance and post hoc comparisons when significant differences were found, whereas for counseling problem comparisons, repeated-measure analysis of variance and post hoc comparisons were used. The results for the media feature comparisons showed that SL counseling significantly out-rated traditional counseling in all of the examined media features, with the exception of the interactivity dimension. Additionally, while SL and internet counseling were both perceived as significantly better than traditional counseling in areas that are unique to computer-mediated communications, including anonymity, convenience, and flexibility with regard to time and space, as well as privacy of the counseling site, SL was perceived as distinctly superior to internet counseling in five areas due to its unique affordances, including the choice of appearance, choice of counselors, interactivity, diversity of counseling sites, and availability of counseling object dimensions. Furthermore, traditional counseling was regarded as better able to support more fluent and versatile interaction between the counselor and client than the other two computer-mediated channels. As for the results of counseling problem comparisons, SL was rated as least preferred for six out of the seven counseling problems (except for gender identity issues), despite its media affordances. Suggestions for practitioners and future research are provided based on the current findings.

The ability for metacognitive thought, or “thinking about thinking,” is recognized as an increasingly important skill for the future enrichment of social life. However, this skill is difficult to teach because it involves implicit cognitive activities that cannot be perceived by an outside observer. In this study, we propose an interpretation framework of metacognition as one approach to considering metacognitive thinking processes. This framework serves as the design principles for developing a system that makes it possible to provide metacognitive interpretations of gaze behaviors and thought operation actions and provides a common basis for sharing and comparing knowledge from analysis results. In this study, for an example of framework-based system development, we construct a thinking externalization application and thinking analysis support system with a thinking task of dissolving belief conflict as the theme. We also demonstrate an example of the analysis of thinking about belief conflict, as derived from lower-level and higher-level thinking interpretation rules. From the example results of the defined interpretation rules, we found that the desired behavior occurred, demonstrating the postulated possibility of capturing the thought process. By realizing a series of phases on the framework proposed in this paper, it contributes to the feasibility of grasping the metacognition process and accumulating knowledge about it.

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time.

Along with massive open online course (MOOC) budding popularity, some problems have begun to surface. One that appears prominent concerns sustainability: for example, high dropout and low completion rates, which are reported to be less than 10 % on average. In response to growing concerns over these issues, some MOOC providers have begun to campaign for the development of offline supporting communities. Meanwhile in Indonesia, where provider supported learning communities are not yet present, some MOOC learners took the initiative to form their own community, which they called IDCourserians. This paper reports on a qualitative study which aimed to investigate and to make sense what was actually happening in the IDCourserians as an independent MOOC learning community. Nine overarching themes were identified from the collected data that illuminate the purpose of the IDCourserians, the way the community’s members learn MOOCs, and the benefit the participants perceived by joining the IDCourserians. These findings then are discussed further with regard to two key theoretical perspectives: collaborative learning and communities of practice. The paper concludes that where English is not the main spoken language and the hub model is not yet provided, creating face-to-face communities in local communities should be considered, as this may be a better way for learners to experience MOOCs and make their learning more meaningful in the local context. This also offers potential for overcoming the common difficulties in MOOCs, such as a lack of motivation and difficulties in interpreting the material through developing collaborative support activities within a community of practice.

For the last one decade, research in self-regulated learning (SRL) and educational psychology has proliferated. Researchers and educators have focused on how to support leaners grow their SRL skills on both face-to-face and e-learning environments. In addition, recent studies and meta-analysis have greatly contributed to the domain knowledge on the use of SRL strategies and how they contribute and boost academic performance for learners. However, there is little systematic review on the literature on the techniques and tools used to measure SRL on e-learning platforms. This review sought to outline recent advances and the trends in this area to make it more efficient for researchers to establish the empirical studies and research patterns among different studies in the field of SRL. The findings from this study are concurrent with existing empirical evidence that traditional methods designed for classroom supports are being used for measuring SRL on e-learning environments. Few studies have used learner analytics and educational data mining (EDM) techniques to measure and promote SRL strategies for learners. The paper finally points out the existing gaps with the tools presently used to measure and support SRL on learning management systems and recommends further studies on the areas of EDM which can support SRL.

Digital Leadership is relatively a new field of leadership study which focuses on leveraging the technology and Internet in support of one’s leadership practice. Currently, very little is known how Malaysian school principals practice Digital Leadership particularly in support of their communication practice. Therefore, this qualitative study was undertaken with the aim of understanding Digital Leadership among principals from four High Performing Schools (HPS) in Malaysia. Semi structured interviews were employed involving four exemplar school principals as the main respondents and 12 school staff as secondary respondents to the study. Findings of the study indicate that social media have become the contemporary communication conduit among exemplar Malaysian school principals and this medium has become more prominent than face-to-face interaction. Findings have also suggested that it may have a positive relation with job performance and productivity. The aforesaid findings have meaningful implications for all school principals to better integrate social media in their communication practice within members of the schools and those outside the school, including the stakeholders.

The incubation effect (IE) is a problem-solving phenomenon composed of three phases: pre-incubation where one fails to solve a problem; incubation, a momentary break where time is spent away from the unsolved problem; and post-incubation where the unsolved problem is revisited and solved. Literature on IE was limited to experiments involving traditional classroom activities. This initial investigation showed evidence of IE instances in a computer-based learning environment. This paper consolidates the studies on IE among students playing an educational game called Physics Playground and presents further analysis to examine the incidence of post-incubation or the revisit to a previously unsolved problem. Prior work, which focused on predicting successful outcomes, includes a coarse-grained IE model developed with logistic regression on aggregated data and an improved model which leveraged long short-term memory (LSTM) combined with dimensionality reduction visualization technique and clustering on fine-grained data. The additional analysis which aims to understand factors that may trigger the post-incubation phase also used fine-grained data and LSTM to create a revisit model. Results show that time elapsed relative to the activity period and encountering a problem with a similar solution during incubation were possible factors in revisiting previously unsolved problems.