Search

In this study, the factors affecting personal development and online education of undergraduate computer science students during pandemic lockdown have been investigated. Due to sudden outbreak of Covid-19, undergraduate students were forced to shift to home-schooling, an experience they never tried before. The results of the conducted survey and some academic performance features were combined to identify the factors affecting personal development and online education. Online lecture attendance and having personal timetable were found to be effective factors on personal development. We observe that final year students are more likely to take part in personal development activities. The availability of the technological facilities has direct effect on online course attendance and satisfaction, moreover, there was strong correlation between online education satisfaction and personal development.

In recent years, with the development of science and technology, the education mode has gradually changed from offline teaching to the combination of offline education and online education. Compared with the traditional offline education, the significant advantages of online education are low cost, rich content and flexible use. In this paper, an intelligent textbook based on image recognition technology is designed, which combines online courses with physical textbooks to realize the collaboration of two learning methods. The APP can not only realize the video playback function and other basic functions of the online education platform, but also adopt the image recognition technology, so that users can scan the picture through the APP to watch the explanation video or 3D model projected onto the real picture by AR way. This paper uses SSM framework and OpenCV to build the background, and combined with Objective-C to build an online course APP running on IOS platform. In general, the app not only designs and implements the basic online course learning process, but also realizes the accurate recognition of images by combining the image matching technology based on OpenCV and the perceptual hash algorithm.

The European Union has been encouraging a move towards gender equality since its 6th framework programme. In its 8th programme, H2020, the EU points scientists to documentation outlining the concepts of sex/gender, inviting those applying for funding to state how and why their research will impact gender and how the project will foster gender equality.

The teacher preparation programs in the United States have yet to adequately prepare content teachers to effectively work with linguistically and culturally diverse students. To provide a focused curriculum on emergent bilinguals (EBs) in mathematics education, we designed an asynchronous online mathematics methods course for both preservice and in-service teachers in K-12 grades. This online course is unique in that it focuses on mathematics, EBs, and teacher education simultaneously, while most courses available on teaching EBs are not mathematics content-specific. This chapter describes the theoretical frameworks that guided the online course design along with the contributions of this course to mathematics teacher education regarding teaching mathematics for emergent bilinguals. Our iterative process of conceptualization with the theoretical frameworks, culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy, to develop and revise the online course curriculum provides essential information for mathematics teacher educators.

Under the influence of COVID-19, online learning has become the primary way for students to continue their education. At all stages of online learning, active learning is a useful strategy promoting optimal understanding. However, there is a lack of relevant research on how to evaluate students’ active learning performance. This paper presents an online active learning assessment framework based on the learning pyramid and learning dimension theory. After the division of course modules according to the learning pyramid theory, the active learning assessment is performed from five dimensions: (1) positive attitudes and perceptions about learning; (2) acquiring and integrating knowledge; (3) extending and refining knowledge; (4) using knowledge meaningfully, and (5) productive habits of mind. By identifying patterns from each online course module’s weblog data, instructors can assess students’ active learning conveniently from the beginning to the end of the online course. This study helps instructors understand learners’ learning situations and adopt corresponding strategies to adjust teaching activities to ensure high-quality teaching activities. Simultaneously, learners can also actively change their learning status according to active learning assessment to improve the learning effect.

This chapter describes the process of converting a traditional semester-long graduate seminar, titled Edith Wharton: From Old New York to the Jazz Age, to an online course and provides descriptions of major assignments and outcomes. Organized chronologically, the course begins with Bunner Sisters (1893) and ends with The Children (1928). Using the discussion board as the centerpiece of the class discussions with weekly posts on each primary text, short YouTube lectures for each text, and the course website Desire2Learn, which includes a “Writer’s Corner,” the online course emphasizes student discussion and writing. Especially with its reliance on frequent, informal discussion posts to replace traditional discussion, the online course provides an opportunity to create a classroom space that facilitates the integration of workshop strategies and emphasizes writing as a process to encourage critical reflection on reading, writing, and teaching, so that the redesigned course aligns with new approaches to the graduate seminar.

Biochemistry and molecular biology experiment is an important professional basic experimental course for biology majors, which plays a very important role in the cultivation of practical skills of related majors. Network teaching platform can expand the teaching time and space, and provide a public platform for the release of experimental course resources and the reform and innovation of teaching mode. This paper discusses the establishment of network assisted teaching of Biochemistry and molecular biology experiment course under the network environment combined with cloud course platform. Starting from the training objectives of the course teaching, the online course platform is used to promote the reform of practical teaching.

SPOC model is the model of online course opening in the post MOOC era, which has played a good role in promoting the teaching mode reform of Contemporary Colleges and universities. In this paper, through a detailed analysis of the current situation and problems of English translation course in Colleges and universities, and based on SPOC platform, a two-way research on the teaching mode of English translation course is carried out, so as to provide more effective teaching mode improvement strategies for contemporary students’ English translation teaching. The study of English translation course based on SPOC mode can solve the problems and doubts encountered by contemporary students in English translation course, so as to lay a solid foundation for improving students’ English level.

There is a worldwide effort to introduce Computer Science (CS) to students from primary school level through higher education, and this effort has been sustained by the whole education community from teachers to researchers. The paper describes the design decisions and development processes of accessible and inclusive learning resources (LR) suitable for infusing computational thinking (CT) and computing into the STE(A)M, i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and All other disciplines. The developed curriculum supports quality education for all. The developed learning resources have been used in an online course on algorithms and data structures for undergraduate students not majoring in Computer Science. Content, Pedagogies, and technologies will be discussed along with a comparison and a contrast of different learning trajectories.

MOOC is an online course targeted at massive-scale interactive involvement and web-based free access. The student prefers online video lecture. Analyzing the impact of student’s interaction with different learning modes will improve the quality of an online course. The learning model used in this work is an online video course. In this work the authors have proposed features related to the number of time student watches a video, how much time spent on the course and the authors have taken help from secondary features like intermediate quiz performance and attendance in-class lectures. Using these features, the authors want to predict the performance of students in an online course. In this work, the author analyses students’ video watching behaviour with the help of their on click event during the whole online course.

The present article is about the academic partnership between the University of Campinas (Campinas, Brazil) and the Lusofona University (Lisbon, Portugal) for the adoption of a distance-learning methodology to students in the first year of Architecture and Urbanism at UNICAMP during COVID-19 lockdown. The contents from the online course “Drawing for Graphic Diary” were made available to UNICAMP students with minor adaptions.

In addition to subject-specific (or technical) skills, so-called soft skills or 21st Century Skills, should be essential learning outcomes in almost any higher education curriculum. However, only a limited number of learning activities aiming at the development of soft skills are carried out in current higher education curricula. Multiplayer online games are considered as learning tools fostering soft skills. In this study, an elective course designed for teaching soft skills in engineering disciplines using the commercial multiplayer online game EVE Online is evaluated. Presented are the design of the online course, and evaluation results. Evaluation instruments include a questionnaire on social presence, intrinsic motivation, and expectations of students as well as semi-structured interviews. Overall, the evaluation renders multiplayer online games to be promising soft skills learning tools aiming at digital game-savvy students. Further, the evaluation provides guidance for enhancing the course design and thereby contributes to establishing multiplayer online games as learning tools for soft skills.

Under the influence of COVID-19, online education booms in its scale. Quite a lot of teachers and students lack experience in online courses, leading to poor course experience and other problems. This dissertation takes the CAID experimental course as the research object, finding out the influencing factors of online course experience based on the Service Encounter Theory, identifying the key service touch-points according to the Peak-End Rule. We Summarize the online course experience model. Then build an online flipped classroom model, so as to provide ideas for experience optimization of online courses in universities.

In recent years, online and offline hybrid teaching has become a trend of education development. Especially this sudden new crown pandemic has changed many traditional ideas and lifestyles, and also changed the traditional education methods of colleges and universities, making online education platforms and webcasting a major education method in colleges and universities. However, the special practical nature of art practice courses in colleges and universities leads to the situation that its online course building is still in the early stage, which is not rich enough and needs to be further improved.

The Covid19 pandemic has highly impacted on the education system. This paper presents the case of the Online Communication Design course of Universita della Svizzera italiana. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities of adapting a traditional course to a hybrid and then to a fully online course. The research advances the literature on fashion education by discussing the relevance of the updated curricula for fashion students. Moorever, from the analysis of the course outcome, the research suggests practices that positively contributed to reaching the goals of the course and could be adopted in structuring and developing future courses.

Over the past decade, the information systems have successfully shown to be useful towards the provision of support for real-time business processes (e.g. educational processes). The ample understanding and interpretation of the educational models have become closely related to the teaching-learning process and decision-making mechanisms. Moreover, higher educational institutions have been found to seek ways on how to manage and make the best business decisions in alignment with performance of the teachers and students learning outcomes. On the one hand, process mining (PM) has proved to be one of the existing methods that is capable of analyzing the learning activities or processes to provide useful information that can be used to support educational models. On the other hand, this work shows that to address and support the complexities within the education processes, an adequate method and technological support is needed. To this end, this paper proposes an educational process intelligence (EPI) model that is used to provide a contextual-based and informed learning process analysis and decision making through the process mining approach. Technically, the work illustrates the application of the model using data about an online course for university students.

The rapid development of information technology and storage technology provides a realistic possibility for the construction of Japanese interpretation corpus. Based on the platform of antConc, a database retrieval software, this study chooses the 20 representative texts in the Qing Kong corpus This is a Japanese novel. The lines in the novel are processed by data, and a small Japanese Corpus is built to provide useful reference for Japanese classroom teaching.

One important aspect of learning is through verbal interactions with teachers or teaching assistants (TAs), which requires significant effort and puts a heavy burden on teachers. Artificial intelligence has the potential to reduce their burden by automatically addressing the routine part of this interaction, which will free them up to focus on more important aspects of learning. We explore the use of automated question answering methods to power virtual TAs in online course discussion forums, which are heavily relied on during the COVID-19 pandemic as classes transition online. First, we focus on answering frequent and repetitive logistical questions and adopt a question answering framework that consists of two steps: retrieving relevant documents from a repository and extracting answers from retrieved documents. The document repository consists of course materials that contain information on course logistics, e.g., the syllabus, lecture slides, course emails, and prior discussion forum posts. This question answering framework can help virtual TAs decide whether a question is answerable and how to answer it. Second, we analyze the timing of student posts in discussion threads and develop a classifier to predict the timing of follow-up posts. This classifier can help virtual TAs decide whether to respond to a question and when to do so. We conduct experiments on data collected from an introductory physics course and discuss both the utility and limitations of our approach .

Investigating the factors affecting students’ academic failure in online and/or blended courses by analyzing students’ learning behavior data gathered from Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a challenging area in intelligent learning analytics and education data mining area. It has been argued that the actual course design and the instructor’s intentions is critical to determine which variables meaningfully represent student effort that should be included/excluded from the list of predicting factors. In this paper we describe such an approach for identifying students at risk of failure in online courses. For the proof of our concept we used the data of two cohorts of an online course implemented in Moodle LMS. Using the data of the first cohort we developed a prediction model by experimenting with certain base classifiers available in Weka. To improve the observed performance of the experimented base classifiers, we enhanced further our model with the Majority Voting ensemble classifier. The final model was used at the next cohort of students in order to identify those at risk of failure before the final exam. The prediction accuracy of the model was high which show that the findings of such a process can be generalized.

In order to integrate pupils with disabilities into physical education (PE) classes, an online training course has been developed for PE teachers. The goal of the course was to provide knowledge and skills for teachers concerning issues of integration and inclusion of students with different physical and cognitive disabilities. The purpose of the study was to examine the contribution of the course to the teacher’s self-efficacy (SE) for integration of students with various disabilities in PE classes. The research method was to collect background data of about 100 teachers in the course, examining their status of entry in terms of knowledge of the integration of students with disabilities and their ability to resolve various situations and assessing their self-capable perception of the course. Throughout the course, the teachers watched videos and performed various tasks involving disability issues and possibilities for integrating students with disabilities into their classes. At the end of the course, the teachers were given a knowledge test, in which they provided information on the use of their own perception of their own level of knowledge. Findings indicate that the teachers improved their capability for inclusion in general, and also for educating their peers in terms of fitness and motor skills. The teachers reported that they gained their highest SE in the inclusion of children with developmental coordination disorders (mean = 3.6), and that the smallest gain involved the inclusion of those with spinal cord injury (mean = 3.0). The conclusion was that teachers benefited from the online course mostly through reflecting on the knowledge gained from their past experiences.

The World Wide Web, online course material, electronic databases, and e-books present a unique challenge to traditionally approached curriculum delivery. With the Millennial student in mind teaching focus is no longer on how knowledge should be transferred, but how knowledge should be managed.

Making in education is an emergent practice focusing on learners as creators of things in a collaborative fashion while promoting knowledge construction through technology, design, and creative self-expression. Teachers’ (n=33) opinions about making were studied using an online questionnaire after they had attended an online course for professional development about making in education. The results suggest that there exists a group of educators who consider making as a promising approach in education and want to promote its use in schools. peerReviewed

The number of higher education and K-12 institutions that offer programs and courses online is on the rise, which has led to an increased need for educators equipped with the prerequisite knowledge, skills, and attributes/abilities to effectively teach an online course (Allen & Seaman, 2014, 2015). However, educators are skeptical of online teaching and many are resistant to it altogether (Allen, Seaman, Poulin, Taylor Straut, 2016). As such, it is imperative that educators overcome their skepticism of online teaching by examining their own assumptions and exploring the various roles required of them in the online learning environment. This chapter describes the multiple roles of an online educator under the following four dimensions: 1) pedagogical, 2) social, 3) managerial, and 4) technical (Berge, 1995; Bonk, Kirkley, Hara, & Dennen, 2001), and provides best practices for educators to fulfill each role in the online learning environment.

In an online course, student feedback is used widely in order to enhance the quality of teaching and learning process by improving the teacher-student relationship. If a lecturer wants to get a summary of these comments, the lecturer has to manually read and summarize all these comments. However, dealing with a very large number of comments is difficult. In this paper, we proposed an approach for topic detection for online course feedback by adopting Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The course feedback from the website of Coursera (i.e., Machine Learning course) is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

There is a global interest in artificial intelligence to support online learning, but little increase in support for online professors, teachers and tutors (instructors). Over time, more students join online learning, but instructors have no equivalent increase in support to manage their online classes, leaving students under-served. This is evidenced by the number of students who dropout or fail online courses, blaming the “lack of support” from instructors. Interactions in such courses generate considerable quantity and diversity of data, allowing the extraction of pedagogically relevant information. However, instructors do not master the techniques and technologies needed to do it, and it is not practical to train them to do so. In this work, we propose an authoring tool (called T-Partner) that implements a process we created to deal with educational data. The objective is to support instructors making informed pedagogical decisions to manage their online course. T-Partner promotes the cooperation between artificial and human intelligences, however we do not know the appropriate balance between these “intelligences”. We then created two versions of the T-Partner to help instructors to: (1) find relevant pedagogical situations occurring within their online courses; (2) understand these situations; (3) create interventions (study plans, for example) to address these situations; (4) monitor and evaluate the impact of these interventions. We evaluated if both versions allowed instructors to make pedagogical decisions and their perceptions regarding this support to decision-making. The results show that both versions brought benefits to pedagogical decision-making, and were positively perceived by the participants.

The analysis of the theoretical base allows us to examine the features of studying a foreign language as a whole, as well as the peculiarities of teaching a second foreign language, and thereby provides independent work on learning for the effectiveness and success of the entire educational process and formulates the principles of independent work of a student while studying a second foreign language in the conditions of distance educational process because of shortage of academic hours. A developed online course on the Moodle platform has demonstrated high efficiency and revealed potential, which was confirmed by the results of final tests of experimental groups, compared with the results of control groups.

This work presents a novel approach for employing conversational agent technology in the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), aiming to support learners that work in groups to sustain productive forms of peer dialogue. An exploratory study is presented featuring 56 undergraduate computer science students, who interacted with a conversational agent in the context of an online course. The study investigates the practicability of using configurable conversational agents to provide collaborative learning support and serves as an opportunity to compare two intervention strategies: (a) converging agent interventions, presented in the form of tips relating closely to the topic of the activity and (b) diverging agent interventions, which do not relate directly to the activity topic and pose new domain-relevant questions. The study findings suggest that a convergent agent is often perceived as more helpful by the students. A discourse analysis also reveals a series of interesting interaction patterns, facilitating improvements in the design of future conversational agent systems.

Philosophy of science can enrich teachers’ understanding of core aspects of nature of science (NOS). However, philosophy of science is often conceptually demanding, and so a significant attempt and investment of time is required on behalf of people with no formal training in it. Philosophy of science can be made more accessible to science teachers, by making its topics explicitly related to some general NOS aspects. Thus, philosophy of science could become more meaningful to them, as it would be directly linked to the topics they teach, and it might thus contribute to an improvement of their own NOS understandings. An online course was designed with the aim to provide a comprehensive presentation of key topics in philosophy of science to science teachers. In each class of the course, topics from philosophy of science were explicitly linked to general NOSK or NOSI aspects. This chapter presents an overview of the structure, content, and aims of that course.

Suppose you developed a blended learning concept, also known as “flipped classroom”, where your students can access content and continue learning at home, in addition to learning in a classroom. Now you just finished this course for the first time using the Moodle platform, and you would like to revise how it went and what aspects could still be improved. You are especially interested in when the students learned, how often they learned, whether they used all the provided resources, and how well they performed. This recipe offers an example how a teacher can gain insights into students’ behavior in an online platform during the course. Using a tool for visualizing learning activities assists teachers to get a better overview of typical patterns in students’ learning and performance. This can help to further improve the course content and your teaching methods.

At present, the development of intelligent education is in full swing. As the cornerstone of intelligent education, intelligent learning is the inevitable trend of learning mode transformation driven by the wave of intelligent education. The purpose of this paper is to study the construction and application of online course teaching in the intelligent learning environment. Firstly, it studies the technical support of intelligent learning environment and the teaching application of intelligent learning environment. Secondly, it discusses cloud computing technology, Internet of things technology and learning analysis technology. The questionnaire is based on the actual learning experience of students. The questionnaire is divided into four dimensions: perceived usefulness (5 items), perceived ease of use (4 items), course satisfaction (6 items) and learning interaction (6 items). The purpose of the questionnaire survey is to obtain students’ learning experience comprehensively and truly, and to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the research model. The experimental results show that the scores of the two dimensions of the questionnaire design are all around 4.20, with an average of 4.23, which shows that students have a good evaluation of the online learning environment based on the research model, recognize its convenient use of platform functions, effectively obtain learning information, present clear and accurate content, and communicate with teachers and peers flexibly.

In order to attain a good user experience in e-assessment systems, learners should be aware of how they are progressing in the courses and they should feel motivated and engaged. The goal of this paper is to propose an e-assessment system, that aims to increase the self-awareness of learners about the courses’ progress that they are taking, and also to improve the learner’s motivation and engagement. While designing the system, two major design challenges have been identified and addressed. The design challenges include, informing the learners about their progress and making the learners feel motivated to work harder and enhance their learning of the course contents and learning activities. The proposed system informs the learners about their progress and aims to keep them motivated by providing them with minimum grade predictions for the next learning activity they would perform, during the semester of an online course. The learners are also informed of their risk of failing the course throughout the semester. Also, to keep the learners motivated and engaged personalized suggestions are provided by the teachers to enhance the learning of the course. The user experience evaluation of LIS highlights that it has helped the learners to enhance their learning experiences.

Most current practices for measuring, credentialing, and accrediting achievement are opaque and analog. This makes them expensive, inefficient, and entrenched, characteristics that in turn obstruct innovation and other necessary developments in education and educational technologies. This chapter describes general and specific responses to these achievement problems. These responses represent a trend towards capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning. This trend is part of a larger movement in educational technology towards a focus on the context in which learning takes place and the contexts to which the resulting knowledge might transfer. These trends are increasingly important because new technologies (and particularly digital networks) can provide useful information about the context in which learning took place and the context in which evidence of that learning was gathered. Including information about context makes it possible to capture, recognize, and endorse a much broader range of learning and to do so in a much broader range of settings. After summarizing broader responses to problematic achievement practices, this chapter delves into a more specific response in the form of open digital badges. Examples from one digital badge system developed by the authors for an open online course are presented to illustrate new ways of capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning.

Online courses often select asynchronous tools for teamwork as it allows temporal freedom for students who might come from different time zones or have busy schedules. These solutions work better with larger groups, where due to the quantity of participants, it is easier to get replies faster. In this study, we investigate challenges that arise in asynchronous discussions with small group (4–5 participants). Empirical data was collected from the UNIPS pedagogical employee training online course Becoming a Teacher and its teamwork period, where Google Docs was used as a discussion platform by 42 students. We observed that (1) discussion activity peaked around deadlines (2) students often came online in vain as their team members had not replied yet and (3) when students were online simultaneously, they were not able to take advantage of this by engaging in synchronous communication. As solutions, we propose improving the synchrony of the communication via more structured instructions and increasing the affordances of the communication tools.

The article considers the current state of open online courses in the educational process. The organizational and technical conditions for the implementation of the educational program in a network form have been developed using the online course of the National Platform for Open Education. The rights and duties of the consumer institution on the use of open online courses are defined. The administrative-legal field for all participants of the educational process, organized in a network form, is concretized. The necessity of creating a coordinating group on open education in the university is substantiated. Requirements for online courses are revealed. The results of a pedagogical experiment on the organization of training and the conduct of reflexively evaluative activities of students after completing the online course are described. The evaluation of the adequacy of the proposed organizational and technical conditions for the implementation of the educational program in a network form was carried out using an online course.

Students from Gen Z ask for being independent as well as guided by the adults in their learning experience, especially when learning is aimed at making better future career and development choices. Self-regulated online learning can effectively answer this need. While its definition, advantages and phases have been debated in the literature, self-regulated online learning still lacks an in-depth analysis. In this paper, we adopt an action research approach to provide a design framework for an online course specifically oriented at supporting students in their job-related choices. From a theoretical point of view, we use a framework based on the Pintrich’s self-regulated learning approach. From a practice point of view, we provide a set of recommendations to design effective self-regulated online learning experiences.

The research reported on in this paper presents exciting possibilities to explore how innovative technologies are used to facilitate learning in a Massive(ly) Open Online Course (MOOC). The paper shows how opportunities with regard to e.g. e-books and technologies enhanced learning are being used in ever-changing educational environments, towards the future of open access to education and learning, specifically in an Open and Distance e-Learning (ODeL) environment. The significance of the paper lies in presenting original work contributing to debate in the fields of ODeL and higher education, closing research gaps relevant to innovative technologies and learning, with potentially useful content for the audience, particularly facilitators, including examples of practice regarding massive participation. Although established constructivist or instructionist approaches are usually adopted in pedagogies for innovative technologies, questions are also asked, making the underlying assumptions and theory informing the paper evident. A diversity of research methods implemented regarding MOOCs included data and learning analytics, case studies utilizing user statistics and survey data to examine students’ experiences, and investigating models of co-located MOOC study groups, using quasi-experimental comparisons. Discussion and analysis of results in the environment of MOOCs discover lessons learned from the affordances and acceptance of established and innovative technologies and learning for retention and success. Conclusions propose implications regarding MOOCs, including approaches to in pedagogies for innovative technologies. MOOCs’ success depends on how well challenges to the future of MOOCs, regarding models towards the scholarship of teaching and learning applied to large cohorts, are managed.

Improvement students’ information literacy should be an integral part of their university education. Online courses are used to educate hundreds of students. This paper presents knowledge and skills assessment of Masaryk University students in information literacy and its improvement after their completion of an online Course of work on information. We found improvement in both self-assessment and objective assessment in different media and information literacy competencies (access, evaluation, and creation of information). Results show topics that should be highlighted in the course because of weak results in pretests (library services, narrowing of a topic, self-presentation, and visualization). The correlation between self-assessment and objective assessment was found in eight of the twelve thematic areas. All topics had statistically important improvements of results. The smallest differences showed parts of the e-course that can be focused in order to improve the course including search query, search engines, suitability of the information resource, and social networks.

According to Wolf (Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 17(2), 2006), a modicum of technological skill, active administrative support, motivated faculty, and the intent to create a specific online course are all requirements for developing online courses. An online learning initiative at a community college considered models such as the technology-adoption lifecycle to identify a target group of potential participants for what they saw to be a means of creating a culture that would support the expansion of quality online courses; they developed a purposeful initiative to train faculty to create and teach online course sections. This chapter discusses critical components that contributed to the ongoing success of this initiative such as the mentor-mentee relationship, and how student engagement and producing a well-crafted online course were non-negotiable goals.

Since their initial launch, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have experienced explosive growth as a method of online distance learning. As of 2017, the MOOC landscape has ballooned to almost 10,000 courses offered by more than 800 universities worldwide. From an instructor’s perspective, the biggest draws to such an online platform are the scalability and openness. The benefits are equally attractive from a learner’s perspective as these courses lack prerequisites, are highly flexible, and provide access to education from top university professors. While the term MOOC was initially coined in Canada, Canadian universities have lagged behind their American counterparts in the market. On February 2018, in partnership with the MacPherson Institute and Labster virtual labs, we launched DNA Decoded on Coursera. Aimed at demystifying the complex topic of DNA to a lay audience, our course was just the fourth to be launched by McMaster University. In developing DNA Decoded, we incorporated several novel approaches including the use of gamified elements to promote engagement with content. In this paper, we explore the MOOC design process from an instructor’s perspective and evaluate the performance of the course 6 months postlaunch.

This chapter describes the Hostos Online Learning Assessment (HOLA) Task Force: what it is and why it is important for encouraging technology adoption, change, and community building. HOLA comprises members from across campus, with participation by library and academic faculty as well as educational technology staff. The HOLA Task Force is charged with evaluating the effectiveness of resources provided to those engaged in online learning. Their work also includes investigating the perceptions of students toward their experiences learning content, accessing the requisite technology, and being active in an online course, and faculty perceptions about the benefits and potential drawbacks of hybrid and asynchronous teaching. Their findings have been disseminated at professional conferences and in print.

In the last few years, the platforms for online learning, such as MOOCs, are becoming more and more popular. Particularly, in fields like computer science, students very often choose this way, instead of official programs, to complete their formation. In this context, universities must adapt to changes in order to offer the kind of formation that is demanded nowadays. In this article we present CiDAEN, and online course in data science and cloud applications that is offered from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). We describe how it has been implemented in a public university through a non-official program. We also share our (successful) experience, describe the methodology, the tools, and the importance of communication channels in maintain the interest of students.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are delivered through dedicated platforms that provide educational opportunities to a large number of learners around the globe. The discussion forum is a key part of a MOOC platform. Structured communication between learners or between learners and instructors can take place through the forum. This communication has been shown that can have strong learning impact. Teaching Assistants (TAs) have a crucial role coordinating and supporting learners within a MOOC forum. In this paper, we investigate the impact a forum design can have on the TA’s effectiveness while supporting the learners of a MOOC. Towards this objective, a mixed-methods study was performed on two MOOCs delivered through the OpenEdX platform. The goal was to reveal any design issues initially through a participatory ethnographic study and complementarily through a formal usability evaluation. Moreover, through interviews with the TAs, problems they faced while supporting learners were confirmed. The results of this study indicate that the OpenEdX forum design faces a variety of issues that need to be considered by course designers. Such issues cause various problems to teaching assistants, hindering effective support to learners and therefore affecting the learners’ experience. It is further expected that the findings of this study may contribute to effective re-design of MOOC platform forums, more effective and efficient TA interventions and ultimately to improved learning.

This study explores using process mining techniques for analysis of Moodle logs. This topic is very interesting because the use and applications of e-learning solutions have been rising for last decade in the Czech Republic in both academic and commercial area. This study explores using process mining techniques to discover student’s activities, navigation paths, and behavior in LMS Moodle. Data from 701 students from Silesian University in Opava, School of Business Administration in Karvina who followed an online course called “Informatics for Economists I” was used. The events log is from the winter semester of the academic year 2016/2017 and consists of 32 984 events, 33 activities which were conducted by 701 students. It was applied process mining techniques that are implemented in a tool called Disco by Fluxicon. The reader should learn from this study about current promising techniques for analyzing data from e-learning systems and especially about using process mining techniques for Moodle events log analysis.

There are many adults with low mathematical/statistical knowledge who would like to enhance that understanding. There are insufficient teachers to respond to the level of need and so innovative solutions must be found. In the UK, the Ufi Charitable Trust has funded a project to develop a free open online course to offer motivated adults access to powerful ideas. We reflect on the tensions and compromises that emerged during its design. More specifically, referring to data collected from users, we consider the challenge of developing resources that will support heterogeneous students from unknown backgrounds, who may have already been failed by the conventional educational system and who will have no interactive tutor support within this course.

In the Moroccan context, universities have put digital transformation at the heart of their projects of development thanks to a wide range of hybrid learning, Small Private Online Course and Massive Open Online Courses. On the one hand, the purpose of using these devices consist in helping improve their performance and in enhancing their attractiveness. On the other hand, it aimed at meeting the increasingly diverse student’s needs, thanks to an infrastructures reorganization and a renovated pedagogy. Casablanca University Hassan II supports teachers in their efforts to improve the learning of their students via the establishment of e-learning training workshops. In this context, the present work focuses on the formulation of an accompanying model for the adoption of a techno-pedagogical innovation by teachers. Subsequently, we examine the contributions of this model via the evaluation of the digital strategy for the teaching in the Hassan II University of Casablanca.

How can design thinking be taught in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)? The research team took an iterative approach at designing an online course about the design research phase and built a prototype MOOC for testing. We applied three measurement tools (Course Evaluation Survey, Skill Confidence Rating, Qualitative Interviews) and categorized the collected feedback. This process resulted in 57 iteration tasks, which were implemented in the public version of the MOOC. From over 5000 participants, 3034 learners participated actively in the public MOOC. 84.75% of survey participants were satisfied with the MOOC. In this chapter, we describe the iteration process and first results from the public MOOC.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘Work and Technology on Human Terms’ (www.onhumanterms.org ) was launched in July 2017 with the aim to contribute to safer and healthier workplaces by increasing the knowledge about how products, systems, and work organizations can be designed on human terms. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a first evaluation of the MOOC. The online course was used in four different university courses in Ergonomics in Sweden, two given at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg and two given at Linkoping University. The MOOC material was used in different ways in the courses: (1) suggested voluntary, alternative material for the students’ self-studies, (2) scheduled activity for self-studies with appointed chapters, and (3) mandatory, selected course material being discussed in follow-up seminars. Data for the evaluation was collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with students and teachers. The results showed that the MOOC served as a repetition of lectured material and gave increased understanding of the theories. The recorded interviews with practitioners and researchers in the MOOC highlighted the importance of the subject in real working life. The knowledge tests were appreciated as rehearsal of understanding. However, the MOOC in parallel with the other course material was also considered to be too much work by some students. A recommendation is to carefully consider how to use and integrate the MOOC as a meaningful, individual, theoretical learning activity for the students. Thereby the lectures in classroom could focus more on discussions and problem-solving regarding the topics and less on basic theory.

Mass open online courses (MOOC) are popular recently. Their advantages are obvious: training at any time, from anywhere in the world, from the best teachers, with the help of quality content. But is it possible to learn practical skills through the MOOC? The express-course “2D + 3D design in AutoCAD” proved that it is possible. However, for this purpose, when developing video lessons, practical exercises and tests, it is necessary to take into account the basic principles of effective learning in distance learning. Students of the course for a short time (6 weeks) master the skills of working with the program, learn basic commands and opportunities. At the 7th week, a contest of creative works performed in AutoCAD is held. The level of these works amazes and motivates the new launches of the course. The fact is that with distance learning there are certain advantages, but disadvantages are inevitable. The article describes the experience and conclusions that will help readers in developing their MOOCs.

3D printing technology is developing rapidly. Its application covers more and more areas due to increasing quality, functionality and affordability of 3D printers. Mastering of 3D printing becomes recommended and expected in growing number of professions. This article presents innovative approach to development and providing of knowledge resources for end-users from educa-tion, healthcare, design and SMEs sector who wish to use 3D printing in their professional practice.

The aim of this paper is to present the first outcomes of an international project titled “Development of innovative Training contents based on the applicability of Virtual Reality in the field of Stroke Rehabilitation”. Particularly two aspects were described: (1) recognition of educational needs of medics who support neurological patients in their rehabilitation process, (2) the concept of structure and contents of an e-learning course about this topic.