Search

The inconsistent findings about learning outcomes in VR (virtual reality) learning necessitate further robustness of empirical data. This article addressed this gap by comparing the learning outcomes across VR, phone, and mobile learning on two dimensions: recall accuracy and recall speed, as well as learners' attitudes. Additionally, this paper attempted to investigate the differences between 5 and 10 min time duration. By inviting a total of 28 participants to the lab experiments on English vocabulary acquisition, this study yielded no statistically significant difference in vocabulary recall accuracy between VR, computer, and mobile learning. Nonetheless, the significant difference in vocabulary recall speed was generated. Besides, the time spent on vocabulary acquisition was significantly shorter in VR than in computer and mobile learning. Additionally, pairwise comparisons revealed that learners' perceptions and attitudes toward SUS resulted in significantly lower scores in VR than in computer- and mobile-based learning. Further, merely two of the nine items on the VR sickness scale demonstrated a significant raise in visual fatigue as well as significant decline in headache between 5 and 10 min learning duration. Future research should anticipate a larger sample size to ensure the validity of research findings and further construct a 3D modeling for the same language learning settings for non-college, primary, as well as secondary school students.

Whereas hackathons are widespread within and outside academia and have been argued to be a valid pedagogical method for teaching interdisciplinarity, no detailed frameworks or methods are available for conceptualizing and organizing educational hackathons, i.e., hackathons dedicated to best achieving pedagogic objectives. This paper is dedicated to introducing EDUCational Hackathons for learning how to solve Interdisciplinary Challenges (EDUCHIC) through: (1) defining the fundamental principles for framing an activity as an EDUCHIC, integrating principles from pedagogical methods, hackathon organization, and interdisciplinarity processes; (2) describing general properties that EDUCHIC possess as a consequence of the interaction of the fundamental principles; (3) developing operational guidelines for streamlining the practical organization of EDUCHIC, including an exhaustive end-to-end process covering all the steps for organizing EDUCHIC and practical frames for carrying the key decisions to be made in this process; and (4) a demonstration of these guidelines through illustrating their application for organizing a concrete EDUCHIC.

Primary school children frequently use digital devices, which can be infected by computer viruses. In this mixed methods paper with two studies (N = 278 + 114), we examined 8-year-olds' preconceptions about computer viruses and protection against them; how to teach these children about said topics using three different, 30-min-long, content-equivalent lessons; and what knowledge the children can acquire. We found that participants had limited prior knowledge of computer viruses and almost no knowledge about protection against them. However, they rarely had misconceptions. They learnt, and retained over a month, key general points and a few specific points about this domain. Acquired knowledge was still somewhat patchy, most likely represented in 'pieces' rather than as complex, theory-like chunks. Nevertheless, all three approaches produced notable learning gains (d > 1.78). A lesson organized around a narrative 5-min video and six < 1 min video snippets was the most effective: compared to a lesson organized around two 5-min videos (d = 0.89) and a teacher-led lesson without videos (d = 0.54). The findings are consistent with contemporary instructional design theories and 'knowledge in pieces' conceptual change frameworks. They imply that the topic of computer viruses should be included in second-graders' curricula.

This paper outlines how ideas of 'degrowth' might be used to reimagine sustainable forms of education technology. In essence, degrowth calls for a proactive renewal of technology use around goals of voluntary simplicity and slowing-down, community-based coproduction and sharing, alongside conscious minimalization of resource consumption. The paper considers how core degrowth principles of conviviality, commoning, autonomy and care have been used to develop various forms of 'radically sustainable computing'. The paper then suggests four ways in which degrowth principles might frame future thinking around education technology in terms of: (i) curtailing current manipulative forms of education technology, (ii) bolstering existing convivial forms of education technology; (iii) stimulating the development of new convivial education technologies; and (iv) developing digital technologies to achieve the eventual de-schooling of society. It is concluded that mobilisation of these ideas might support a much-needed reorientation of digital technology in education along low-impact, equitable lines.

Background: Given the increasing popularity of reading from screens, it is not surprising that numerous studies have been conducted comparing reading from paper and electronic sources. The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to consolidate the findings on reading performance, reading times and calibration of performance (metacognition) between reading text from paper compared to screens. Methods: A systematic literature search of reports of studies comparing reading from paper and screens was conducted in seven databases. Additional studies were identified by contacting researchers who have published on the topic, by a backwards search of the references of found reports and by a snowball search of reports citing what was initially found. Only studies that were experiments with random assignment and with participants who had fundamental reading skills and disseminated between 2008 and 2018 were included. Twenty-nine reports with 33 identified studies met inclusion criteria experimentally comparing reading performance (k = 33; n = 2,799), reading time (k = 14; n = 1,233) and/or calibration (k = 11; n = 698) from paper and screens. Results: Based on random effects models, reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance relative to paper (g = -0.25). Based on moderator analyses, this may have been limited to expository texts (g = -0.32) as there was no difference with narrative texts (g = -0.04). The findings were similar when analysing literal and inferential reading performance separately (g = -0.33 and g = -0.26, respectively). No reliable differences were found for reading time (g = 0.08). Readers had better calibrated (more accurate) judgement of their performance from paper compared to screens (g = 0.20). Conclusions: Readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.

This article describes how with the advent of computer-based technology, there is movement from manual to automated systems for different aspects of the education system. Testing is an essential part of teaching process that helps academics in classifying the level of students and evaluating the outcomes of their teaching process. The testing process requires a large amount of attention and professionalism. Automated Test Paper Generation is a system applying the shuffling algorithm in designing different sets of questions without repetition and duplication. It helps the faculty in developing and designing exams with a particular level of difficulty required in evaluating the students by using the utility-based agent. The system includes a knowledge base of many questions' types that are linked to a test engine where the faculty can specify the type and the difficulty level of the exam and then the system will assemble the exam and produce the output as electronic or paper-based. Questions will be picked randomly from the knowledge database. This automated system provides cost saving and time efficient solutions.

To coherently integrate computing and digital technology into teacher education, stakeholders at teacher preparation institutions must grapple with a complex landscape of problems and opportunities. This paper's literature review maps that landscape into problems and opportunities that are (1) technological, (2) pedagogical, definitional (3) ideological, (4) political, and (5) developmental in nature. While existing frameworks respond to particular aspects of these areas (e.g. the popular TPACK framework zooms in on technological and pedagogical questions), stakeholders engaged in curricular planning must think more holistically about how to prepare future teachers. We share EnCITE (Entrypoints to Computing Integrated Teacher Education), a framework that indexes all five areas as it positions pre-service teachers as learners and teachers about, with, through, and against technology and computing. We share examples from our practice steering an initiative to integrate computing and digital literacies into teacher education at a large urban university system in the Northeast of the U.S, to illustrate how teacher educators with diverse backgrounds can use EnCITE to orient to a complex landscape and to imagine curricular possibilities that can respond to those challenges.

Global trends in higher education emphasize the development of curricula that offer greater responsiveness to learners. Creating flexible and responsive curricula will require additional support systems for curriculum management. The first step toward sustainably developing this kind of system is to represent essential curricular information in a way that allows sharing common components across various work processes within the educational environment. The current research implements a new approach for representing curriculum components, by systematically analyzing external source data to extract the basic knowledge, skills and dependencies which then become objects into an ontology. The resulting ontology should act as a computationally-accessible model of the curriculum with sufficient information and usable quality. This paper describes a trial implementation of our approach using actual curriculum documents. Results from performance metrics and expert evaluation validate the proposed strategy and suggest that the approach is feasible for real-world practice.

The impact of digital technologies on the ways people work, learn and live has been debated and researched for half a century. Digital literacy approaches have recurrently been the focus of educational and industry learning; however, current framings of digital literacy are not sufficient to support students' digital capability development, nor do static digital literacies reflect the dynamic and contextual nature of digital capabilities. A digital capability continuum that fluidly moves between digital foundation skills, digital literacies and digital fluency is a more robust model for education. By unpacking the digital capability continuum and responding to both learning and curriculum paradigms, this paper expands on an earlier framework (Coldwell-Neilson, 2020), the decoding digital literacy framework, as well as building on our research and academic experiences, to inform higher education. A key agenda is that the higher education sector frames digital fluency as a mindset and an attitude. The model and framework underscore that capabilities need to be flexible and transferable across technologies, disciplines and the world of work.

In this paper we discuss the types of knowledge used by six middle school students as they engaged with a debugging task designed to integrate ideas from computer science, mathematics and science. Our findings show that the computational thinking practice of debugging is a rich source of opportunities to integrate these different disciplines. The analysis illustrates how the types of knowledge the students did and did not use at each step of the debugging process were related to their ability to succeed at each step. Our work contributes to theory and practice by uncovering implications for studying debugging through two refined frameworks and for designing debugging tasks to support transdisciplinary learning.

A systematic review is a type of literature review that aims to collect and analyse all available evidence from the literature on a particular topic. The process of screening and identifying eligible articles from the vast amounts of literature is a time-consuming task. Specialised software has been developed to aid in the screening process and save significant time and labour. However, the most suitable software tools that are available often come with a cost or only offer either a limited or a trial version for free. In this paper, we report the release of a new software application, Catchii, which contains all the important features of a systematic review screening application while being completely free. It supports a user at different stages of screening, from detecting duplicates to creating the final flowchart for a publication. Catchii is designed to provide a good user experience and streamline the screening process through its clean and user-friendly interface on both computers and mobile devices. All in all, Catchii is a valuable addition to the current selection of systematic review screening applications. It enables researchers without financial resources to access features found in the best paid tools, while also diminishing costs for those who have previously relied on paid applications. Catchii is available at https://catchii.org.

Owing to the predominant role of Machine Learning(ML) across domains, it is being introduced at multiple levels of education, including K-12. Researchers have leveraged games, augmented reality and other ways to make learning ML concepts interesting. However, most of the existing games to teach ML concepts either focus on use-cases and applications of ML instead of core concepts or directly introduce ML terminologies, which might be overwhelming to school students. Hence, in this paper, we propose "ML-Quest," a game to incrementally present a conceptual overview of three ML concepts: "Supervised Learning," "Gradient Descent" and "K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) Classification." The game has been evaluated through a controlled experiment, for its usefulness and player experience using the TAM model, with 41 higher-secondary school students. Results show that students in the experimental group perform better in the test than students in the control group, with 5% of students in the experimental group scoring full marks. However, none of the students in the control group could score full marks. The survey results indicate that around 77% of the participants who played the game either agree or strongly agree that ML-Quest has made their learning interactive and is helpful in introducing them to ML concepts.

As augmented, virtual and mixed reality have become more user-friendly and affordable, these technologies gained increasing interest from education. Teachers all over the world are triggered by the perceived benefits and start experimenting. However, teachers encounter obstacles to pursue effective implementation. This paper describes how these obstacles are being tackled in Flanders (Belgium) via a large-scale, nation-wide framework for the implementation of augmented, virtual and mixed reality in K-12 technical and vocational education. This framework was designed, adopting an Educational Design Research approach, and consists of five interrelated pillars: hardware, software, professional development of teachers, practice-oriented research, and coordination. The proposed framework provides guidelines, both for researchers and education policy makers.

This article analyses the developments in computer education in French-speaking Western Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. It investigates how computer education changed with the arrival of microcomputers, who the agents of these changes were, and with what sociopolitical and economic developments these pedagogical changes interacted. By analysing archival material from five cantonal departments of education and from Raymond Morel (at the time, Western Switzerland's most influential educational IT expert), it is argued that computer education in Western Switzerland's general education experienced three shifts. First, education "with" computers displaced education "about" computers in the first half of the 1980s. Second, from the mid-1980s onwards, office applications became central. Third, computer education morphed into telecommunications education around 1990. The paper contributes to the historiography of local school computers and computer education. It adds comment on the "glocal" histories of computers, which shed light on local computer cultures and economies across the globe.

During COVID-19, universities across the globe experienced a rapid requirement to move to online learning and teaching provision. This rapid move has been explored as emergency remote education (ERE). This paper reviews and presents some emerging literature regarding ERE, demonstrating how this created an environment where technology-mediated abuse could arise within the university context. Intentional and unintentional forms of technology-mediated abuse, within a global context, are considered with account of how intersectional characteristics can impact. The paper concludes with a set of provocations explored within an example framework. The provocations are given to situate ways of thinking which are facilitative of safer and more respectful use of technological spaces. Both the provocations and example framework aim to be useful critical tools for program and module teams to adapt in higher education institutions within the online sphere. The phenomenon of ERE is an opportunity to consider what can be learned with regard to management of technology-mediated abuse. However, a focus on ERE presents limitations in the paper because of the smaller number of academic sources at this time, due to recency of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students in a computer technology course completed either a paper-and-pencil test (n=40) or an online test in a proctored computer lab (n=43). Test scores were equivalent, but the online group, particularly freshmen, completed the test in less time. Online testing time did not correlate with test score. (Contains 30 references.) (SK)

In a cloud computing environment, traditional digital forensic processes (such as turning off the computer to image the computer hard drive) can be disruptive to businesses because the data of businesses may be co-mingled with other content. As technology changes, the way digital forensics acquisitions are conducted are also changing. The change in methodology affects the way this subject matter is taught in programs and institutions. Methods to teach digital forensic acquisition methods in a cloud computing environment are limited due to the complexity of the cloud environment. This paper explores how a panel of expert practitioners viewed evidence acquisitions within the cloud environment, the implications for digital forensic education, and suggestions on how the education field can prepare students for technological changes in digital forensic acquisition processes where cloud computing environments are concerned and also help develop new methodologies. The paper offers a classroom case scenario as an example on how new methodologies and tools can be used in the classroom.

Recent advances in smart devices and online technologies have facilitated the emergence of ubiquitous learning environments for participating in different learning activities. This poses an interesting question about modality access, i.e., what students are using each platform for and at what time of day. In this paper, we present a log-based exploratory study on learning management system (LMS) use comparing three different modalities--computer, mobile, and tablet--based on the aspect of time. Our objective is to better understand how and to what extent learning sessions via mobiles and tablets occur at different times throughout the day compared to computer sessions. The complexity of the question is further intensified because learners rarely use a single modality for their learning activities but rather prefer a combination of two or more. Thus, we check the associations between "patterns" of modality usage and time of day as opposed to the "counts" of modality usage and time of day. The results indicate that computer-dominant learners are similar to limited-computer learners in terms of their session-time distribution, while intensive learners show completely different patterns. For all students, sessions on mobile devices are more frequent in the afternoon, while the proportion of computer sessions was higher at night. On comparison of these time-of-day preferences with respect to modalities on weekdays and weekends, they were found consistent for computer-dominant and limited-computer learners only. We demonstrate the implication of this research for enhancing contextual profiling and subsequently improving the personalization of learning systems such that personalized notification systems can be integrated with LMSs to deliver notifications to students at appropriate times.

In the 1980s, Polish schools hardly had access to computers, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. The main reasons were funds and shortage of qualified staff that could handle computer hardware. As a consequence, the youth first came across a computer, how to use it, service hardware, and write programs outside schools in the early 1980s. Often informal groups of hobbyists gathered around a single computer were the seeds of microcomputer clubs, which cropped up in huge numbers in Poland in the 1980s. The objective of the paper is to portray the role of microcomputer clubs in the process of shaping the youth and computer education in the 1980s in Poland compared to other countries. The conclusions are founded on a literature review. The analyzed material included an Internet Archive collection "The Computer Magazine Archives". The content of one of the first Polish computer magazines, Bajtek Magazine was analyzed in detail. It has been demonstrated that the Polish youth of the 1980s first came across a computer mainly outside schools, primarily in microcomputer clubs. It was the root of computer and information technology education in Poland. Moreover, microcomputer clubs were reported to provide education, as well as foster character education, aid socialization, and shape attitudes.

It has been suggested that individuals' technology acceptance are affected by personality traits. This paper aims to emphasise the importance of personality traits beyond BIG 5 on the acceptance and individual usage of Cloud Computing Systems (CCSs) with Perceived Ease of Use (PEU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU). Based on this, a quantitative cross-sectional survey research was designed, and 722 students studying at Sakarya University, Pedagogical Training Certification Program in the academic year of 2016-2017 were involved to the study. A path analysis which is a structural equation model was performed to examine the direct and indirect effects of the variables that are theoretically interrelated in the study. According to the results, while Extroversion (EXT), Agreeableness (AGR), Conscientiousness (CONS), and OE are not predictors of PEU and PU components, Nervousness (NEUR), is a significant predictor of PEU in the model. In addition to this, behavioural intention (BI) is significantly predicted by both PU and PEU, and PEU is a significant predictor of PU and BI on the individual usage of CCSs.

The fields of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have seen massive growth in recent years. Numerous degree programs have started to redesign their curricula to meet the high market demand for people qualified to fill related job positions. In this paper, the authors perform a content analysis of online job postings hosted on Indeed.com and provide a skill classification framework for AR/VR job positions. Furthermore, they present a ranking of the relevant skills for such positions. The paper contributes to the extant literature on curriculum design in degree programs by presenting the popular skills in the AR/VR domain.

The changing nature of education has forced educators to rethink the role of classrooms in student learning. Prior research has shown that the environmental and structural design of education centers impact student learning. With a dozen variables to deal with, classroom designers are faced with the daunting task of selecting one plan from the thousands that are possible. This paper demonstrates how tradespace exploration (TSE), an analytical methodology used by NASA and the DoD to design spacecraft and other complex systems, can be applied to the design of classrooms. To demonstrate the TSE methodology, a predictive model was built based on historical data collected by prior researchers on third and fifth grader test performance and data along 86 descriptive variables that they used to characterize the school and classrooms. An analysis of main effects using a multi-way ANOVA allowed the larger data set to be reduced to 8 composite independent variables that are predictive of student tests scores. This model was then used to generate thousands of possible school and classroom design permutations and predict the resulting student test scores. This allowed the authors to identify the Pareto frontier of designs that yield the greatest benefits for a given investment. The case study described in this paper demonstrates how this approach could be applied to enable decision-makers to identify a more effective allocation of resources or determine when changes in total investment are likely to have a significant impact on desired performance.

Recent studies on language acquisition and motivation have targeted Japanese language learners in a formal educational context, with less attention paid to learners who study Japanese informally. The current study aims to investigate the impact of Japanese animations in the context of informal third language acquisition. It targets the native speakers of Arabic who are interested in learning Japanese as a third language (L3), and investigates the motivations of Arab teenagers and young adults to learn Japanese. Further, the paper also focuses on examining aspects of Japanese language proficiency among teenagers and young adults, including vocabulary enhancement and grammar competence. The methodology used in the current study is twofold: an online survey questionnaire adopted from Armour and Iida (2016), followed by an engaging experiment in which participants were divided into two groups (reality anime group vs. action anime group) in order to examine the effectiveness of anime selection in boosting proficiency level. The findings of the online survey indicate that Arabic native speakers are highly motivated to learn Japanese, while the experiment results confirm that the type of anime and consistency of exposure do support the acquisition process. Further, the study concluded that consumption of anime series contributes to the learning process and facilitates learners' proficiency in general and vocabulary learning in particular. However, it remains unknown whether or not Arabic native speakers' motivations lead to their enrollment into formal Japanese foreign language education. Avenues for future research and implications are also presented toward the end of the paper.