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This paper investigates the impact of designing and implementing a Flipped Classroom (FC) learning design at primary and secondary education schools as part of teachers’ professional development. During a bottom-up procedure, 376 teachers who participated in a middle-scale seminar for this model were trained in “flipped classroom strategy” with the same blended learning model. In the first phase, they proposed their flipped classroom lesson plans and in the second phase they analyzed them in a peer-review processing. As a result, we have created and propose a learning design template in LAMS available for teachers to author and implement a flipped classroom lesson with the aim of active participation instead of a passive experience.

Big Data Analytics can help teachers to make better and informed decisions. Several recent articles in the field of technology enhanced learning concern this potential, yet little is known about how teachers actually make use of Big Data Analytics in their school to support themselves and their students. To compensate for this gap, this paper focuses on the actual uses of Big Data Analytics by active schoolteachers. Thirty teachers who live in Greece participated in survey about their usage of (a) Big Data analytics and (b) online learning environments which capture student data. The data were analysed using mixed methods. Main findings reveal that the schoolteachers are storing and actively using student data as well as Big Data which involve the support of the teaching-learning process. Also, it became clear that teachers use Big Data Analytics for two main distinctively different purposes: to cover teaching-learning aspects and to complete administrative tasks. Finally, it emerged that a small number of teachers is archiving digital multimedia. Consequently, a need arises for appropriate analytics and relevant privacy frameworks. Other practical implications of the findings of this work touch upon the design of teachers ‘development programs in Big Data and their analytics.

By definition, technology seeks to exploit scientific knowledge in order to serve today’s practical human needs. The promotion of IT-related technologies such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing and the Internet of Things (UMI) is a matter of great concern to the scientific community due to their diffusion in all areas of human activities. The educational community recognizes the above technologies as a tool that can be used to improve the quality and effectiveness of the education, while, at the same time, is facing the challenge to highlight ways to utilize the technical characteristics of UMI technologies in order to lead to learning, not just the information accessibility. The presented research contains a proposal for the exploitation of innovative technologies in the field of education and presents the results of its implementation. More specifically, it is a proposal to use UMI technologies in the field of formal Secondary Education based on educational scenarios. Additionally, it is investigated if using UMI while teaching the 15–17-year-old students provides learning- not only ubiquitous access to information- and if it serves as a motivator for choosing a career in science and technology.

The majority of existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) support collaborative learning through unstructured, general purpose collaboration workspaces that provide educators with semantically poor low-level data about learners’ interactions. Educators in turn, labour to process and interpret this kind of data, and consequently, are not able to intervene effectively in the collaboration process. To overcome this limitation, we used Learning Activity Management System (LAMS), an activity-based LMS, integrating in it some activities to be implemented with Synergo, a collaborative concept mapping specific tool with a structured interface. A case study of using this compound learning environment is presented in this paper. This case study is used to investigate what will be the benefit for educators and learners from such an approach. In this context we designed a particular collaboration script to also test the hypothesis that scripts support the acquisition of cognitive skills. A pre-test for validity and reliability of the script has been performed in order to understand and experiment with the technical’s aspects of the integration of the two e-learning collaborative systems and to investigate the students’ opinions.

Creating a course is a demanding process that presupposes the scientific knowledge and various technical skills on effectively delivering content. Contemporary Learning Management Systems (LMSs) do not adequately support the structural appropriateness of content, despite being able to provide the lesson. Moreover, they are not readily capable of determining learning outcomes – the essential factor against which the effectiveness of a lesson is validated. The authors propose and describe the Learning Outcomes Design Authoring Tool (as of now LeODAT), which is a web-based tool conceived and constructed to support correct coding and authoring of a course by additionally creating descriptors for its learning outcomes. Furthermore, LeODAT comes along with a number of pedagogical theories, organized as Taxonomies of Learning Domains. LeODAT is designed to be used as a standalone application or as a service into worldwide popular LMSs, such as Moodle, LAMS etc.

This paper reports on work undertaken within a pilot study concerned with the design, development, and evaluation of online computer science training courses. Drawing on recent developments in e-learning technology, these courses were structured around the principles of a learner-oriented approach for use with adult learners. The paper describes a methodological framework for the evaluation of three main educational issues involved in the learning process of Web-based computer science training courses, and analyzes the results of this study with the aim of providing an improved learning design, and environment, for these courses. The findings highlight a number of potential barriers to learning and indicate the failed indicators that need to be improved in order to enhance effective performance. The authors give their views both on ways to improve the proposed learning environment and on the need for an optimal balance between asynchronous and synchronous activities, enhanced collaboration, and interactions among adult learners and e-tutors.

A study was conducted on the pedagogical use of App Inventor (AI) - an open-source web application that allows novices to create software applications for the Android platform-to support students in developing fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts and critical thinking skills. A total of 35 students from four different secondary classes in Chios Island, Greece, were invited to participate in the study. In a 4-week trial teaching, students worked in pairs, sharing a mobile device to learn about topics in CS and how to program. The pre- and post-tests showed a statistically significant growth in students' domain knowledge and in their engagement. The semi-structured interviews with the teachers who participated showed that the students and the teachers perceived positively the effectiveness of the pedagogical designs on the use of programming of mobile devices to foster students' development of fundamental programming concepts through AI.

Educators usually face difficulties while authoring the learning outcomes of a lesson. The well-designed learning outcomes are a key-factor in creating an efficient educational process, and, on the other hand, the dearth of such services is one of the main/common reasons for the failure of, most otherwise, well-established courses. The available LMSs, though, do not sufficiently support the learning outcomes creation. In this paper, the Learning Outcomes Authoring Tool (LOAT), a web based tool that comes to overcome this common addressed issue is presented, along with its architecture. The novelty of LOAT is that it applies emergent web technologies, initially designed for advanced web environments, to support (non-specialist) educators in creating effective learning courses. More over LOAT comes along with a number of pedagogical theories, organized as Taxonomies of Learning Domains. LOAT is designed so that it can be used as a standalone application or as a service into worldwide popular LMSs, such as Moodle, LAMS etc.