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Online and open learning has recently been made prevalent in many regions in order to mitigate educational inequality and to enhance students' learning experiences and outcomes. Previous studies showed that students perform differently in the learning process, where cultural differences matter. However, little is known about how cultural differences affect students' learning behavioral patterns. This study applies a lag sequential analysis approach to understand the behavioral patterns in an online six-week course of 262 students from three cultures, namely Confucian (for Chinese students), Arab (for Tunisian students), and Serbian (for Serbian students). This study then discusses the different learning behavior patterns based on the theoretical framework of Hofstede's National Cultural Dimensions (NCD). The obtained results highlighted that students from each culture behave differently due to several interconnecting factors, such as educational traditions. The results also showed that some of the learning behaviors were not in line with their students' cultures based on NCD, calling for further investigation in this regard. Finally, the results pointed out that culture is a complex dimension, and further investigation is needed to understand the other dimensions that may affect online and open learning behaviors.

The current work validated the decomposed theory of planned behaviour (DTPB) with working adults to assess its ability to predict intentions to participate in microlearning and also identify the significant factors that drive microlearning usage decisions. We found that positive attitudes towards microlearning (Attitude), stronger beliefs in others' opinions regarding microlearning use (SN), and stronger perceptions about one's capability to engage in microlearning (PBC), are associated with stronger intentions to participate in microlearning. All decomposed constructs were found to be significant predictors of the respective factors, except superior influence (SI) and resource facilitating conditions. We discuss potential targeted interventions focused on what works best to encourage microlearning adoption. For instance, while reporting superiors have no significant influence over one's microlearning use decisions, the opinions of peers and colleagues positively influence microlearning use. Hence, focusing on embedding community-related aspects into a microlearning design may effectively encourage the use of microlearning.

With advancements made in mobile technology, increasing emphasis has been paid to how to leverage the affordances of mobile technology to improve science learning and instruction. This paper reports on a science curriculum supported by an inquiry-based framework and mobile technologies. It was developed by teachers and researchers in a multiyear program of school-based research. The foci of this paper is on the design principles of the curriculum and its enactment, and the establishment of a teacher learning community. Through elucidating the design features of the innovative curriculum and evaluating teacher and student involvement in science instruction and learning, we introduce the science curriculum, called Mobilized 5E Science Curriculum (M5ESC), and present a representative case study of how one experienced teacher and her class adopted the curriculum. The findings indicate the intervention promoted this teacher's questioning competency, enabled her to interact with students frequently and flexibly in class, and supported her technology use for promoting different levels of cognition. Student learning was also improved in terms of test achievement and activity performance in and out of the classroom. We propose that the study can be used to guide the learning design of mobile technology-supported curricula, as well as teacher professional development for curriculum enactment.

Many countries, regions and education districts in the world have experimented with models of one-device-per-student as an enabler of new or effective pedagogies supported by mobile technologies. Researchers have also designed innovations or interventions for possible adoption by schools or for informal learning. Of critical interest to the community is the question of how the more successful of these top-down or bottom-up models or innovations can proliferate to more usage, adoption and adaptation across levels of the education system. This paper describes a research programme that demonstrates how to make successful research innovations count in practice and that delineates what types of educational R&D involving scaling need to take place to make the critical link to impacting practice. We do this in the context of one such curricular innovation in a Singapore school that moves through the various phases to where the innovation is becoming an integral part of routine classroom practices.

This paper shares the theoretical and methodological frameworks that are deployed in a 3-year study to examine how Singapore primary school students leverage on mobile technology for seamless learning. This notion of seamless learning refers to the integrated and synergistic effects of learning in both formal and informal settings, which is distributed across different learning processes (emergent or planned) as well as across different spaces (in or out of class). Drawing insights from the literature and our study, we assert that we should jettison the technology-centric view to adopt a socio-cultural framework. This move puts us in a better position to make sense of the rich complexities coalescing around the students'" in-situ" use of mobile devices. We also critiqued the adequacy of our people-centred data collection method, in particular, cooperative inquiry in capturing instances of seamless learning. Challenges of operationalising the cooperative inquiry approaches are also detailed in the paper.

This paper proposes the identification and use of principle-based pedagogical patterns to help teachers to translate design principles into actionable teaching activities, and to scaffold student learning with sufficient flexibility and creativity. A set of pedagogical patterns for networked Second language (L2) learning, categorized and undergirded by rapid collaborative knowledge improvement (RCKI) principles, has been extracted and articulated in our school-based research. The patterns are distilled from a series of over 60 Chinese language lessons conducted in real classrooms which are co-designed by teachers and researchers over a 3-year period in Singapore schools. Each principle-based pedagogical pattern is presented succinctly in a simple pattern language. Two classroom scenarios of collaborative activities are elucidated, embodying some of the patterns to provide a more grounded feel of how they are enacted in practice. RCKI principle-based pedagogical patterns inform the design of collaborative language learning activities in networked classrooms. Preliminary findings reveal that principle-based pedagogical patterns provide teachers a workable way to design RCKI activities and enable teachers to adopt, internalize and adapt them in classroom use. (Contains 1 table and 7 figures.)

The notion of a system adapting itself to provide support for learning has always been an important issue of research for technology-enabled learning. One approach to provide adaptivity is to use social navigation approaches and techniques which involve analysing data of what was previously selected by a cluster of users or what worked for previous users or learners of such system and to use such analysis to guide and help the current user. New techniques are now available that rely on emergent or self-organising methods to analyse a large amount of interaction data being generated by large-scale online learning communities, interactions with learning resources or learning management mechanisms. One such technique is swarm intelligence, a set of computing algorithms in the form of multi-agent systems that simulate how swarms of insects or birds move or work. It has been applied to various intelligent functionalities such as adaptive content planning, computer-adaptive testing and assessment paper generation. In this article, we provide a survey of the various approaches in swarm intelligence that explores potential mechanisms to adapt and individualise learning and assessment. We hope that this article can inspire future studies in this exciting area. (Contains 3 tables.)

Recent research has emphasized the importance of reflection for students in intelligent learning environments. This study tries to investigate whether agent prompts, acting as scaffolding, can promote students' reflection when they act as tutor through teaching the agent tutee in a learning-by-teaching environment. Two types of agent prompts are contrasted in this research, both from the perspective of a tutee, and they differ in their specificity. Generic prompts are aiming at eliciting students' double-loop reflection on metacognitive strategies and beliefs. Specific prompts, on the other hand, are to encourage students' single-loop reflection on domain-related and task-specific skills and articulation of their explanatory responses. Our findings suggest that designers of intelligent learning environment should concentrate on fostering students to reflect on their metacognitive strategies and beliefs, and allow students to take responsibility for directing their own learning autonomy. (Contains 4 tables and 6 figures.)

This exploratory study analyzes how students use different communication modes to share information, negotiate meaning and construct knowledge in the process of doing a group learning activity in a Primary Grade 5 blended learning environment in Singapore. Small groups of students interacted face-to-face over a computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology called Group Scribbles (GS) to jointly complete a learning task. The lesson designers attempted to optimize the use of CMC technology and face-to-face (F2F) discussion in students' collaborative learning, with the aim of harnessing the specific features of each medium. Building on notions from communication studies and from interaction analysis, we observed the construction and evolution of the interactions through analyzing the artifacts that were produced by a group of students--in verbal talk, gestures, and sketches drawn and text inscribed in GS. F2F and GS interactions intertwined to support collaborative learning. The findings from this study could inform design aspects concerning integrating and reinforcing the strengths of both communication modes when introducing computer-assisted collaborative learning (CSCL) in a F2F classroom. (Contains 4 figures.)

Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners--indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning, characterised by "seamless learning spaces" and marked by continuity of the learning experience across different scenarios or contexts, and emerging from the availability of one device or more per student. The challenge is to enable learners to learn whenever they are curious and seamlessly switch between different contexts, such as between formal and informal contexts and between individual and social learning, and by extending the social spaces in which learners interact with each other. In this paper, we review the potential of mobile learning research for designing seamless learning environments that can bridge both formal and informal learning, present a research agenda and discuss important methodological issues that concern research into formal and informal learning.

The use of mobile technology can help extend children's learning spaces and enrich the learning experiences in their everyday lives where they move from one context to another, switching locations, social groups, technologies, and topics. When students have ubiquitous access to mobile devices with full connectivity, the in-situ use of the mobile devices in different contexts may allow students to make connections to what they learn in the classroom with their daily life experiences outside the classroom. This article proposes mobile technology-supported seamless learning to illustrate how learning occurs seamlessly across time and places mediated by mobile devices. The authors' approaches to nurturing a seamless learning environment are also discussed. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

With the mass adoption of mobile computing devices by the current school generation, significant opportunities have emerged for genuinely supporting differentiated and personalized learning experiences through mobile devices. In our school-based research work in introducing mobilized curricula to a class, we observe one compelling mobilized lesson that exploits the affordances of mobile learning to provide multiple learning pathways for elementary grade (primary) 2 students. Through the lesson, students move beyond classroom activities that merely mimic what the teacher says and does in the classroom, and yet they still learn in personally meaningful ways. In deconstructing the lesson, we provide an in-depth analysis of how the affordances of mobile computing enable personalized learning from four facets: (a) allowing multiple entry points and learning pathways, (b) supporting multi-modality, (c) enabling student improvisation in situ, and (d) supporting the sharing and creation of student artifacts on the move. A key property of mobile technology that enables these affordances lies with the small form factor and the lightweightness of these devices which make them non-obtrusive in the learning spaces of the student. This article makes a contribution on the design aspects of mobilized lessons, namely, what the affordances of mobile technologies can enable. (Contains 2 tables and 9 figures.)

This article examines the potential of mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology to support knowledge building in formal and informal settings. Desktop-based knowledge building tools have limited affordances of supporting one-to-one access, learning "in situ," and seamless integration in and out of school environments. In this initial study, we explore how recent advances of mobile and Web 2.0 technologies can be utilized to support seamless knowledge building processes and to enhance contextualized learning experiences across multiple locations. Using design research as a methodological framework, we analyzed current practices and configurations of mobile learning in one primary school in Singapore, and codesigned a learning scenario with teachers toward seamless knowledge building experiences. The artifacts of primary grade 4 students created in the Google Maps space were analyzed to examine the knowledge building processes based on a location-based mobile learning scenario. We conclude by discussing both possibilities and challenges of knowledge building using mobile Web 2.0 technologies based on our early experiences. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

This paper discusses an innovative blended learning strategy which incorporates online discussion in both in-class face to face, and off-classroom settings. Online discussion in a face to face class is compared with its two counterparts, off-class online discussion as well as in-class, face to face oral discussion, to examine the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed strategy. By integrating online discussion into the flow of the classroom, learners are given dedicated time to foster a habit of critical thinking, reflection and articulating these online, which can subsequently seed further in-class oral discussions, and off-class online discussions. It is found that in-class, online discussion can provide a wider spectrum of discussion perspectives, equalise participation in discussion, and promote cognitive thinking skills and in depth information processing. However, the lack of face to face interactions and the need for sufficient time to do online postings pose challenges in implementing online discussion for face to face classroom learning. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

This paper describes the design of a technology platform for supporting content-independent collaborative mobile learning in the classroom. The technical architecture provides mechanisms for assigning different content or materials to students and then guiding them to form groups with other students in which the combination and integration of their content satisfies some pre-assigned critera or goal. The uniqueness of this lies in the dynamic forming of collaborative groups rather than having fixed or preassigned groupings of students for doing collaborative work. We present the theoretical underpinnings of our approach, the initial design of the software and the iterative cycles of a Design-based Research (DBR) approach that tries out the continuously being-refined design with primary school students. Feedback and data collected from observing students' actual learning behaviors and motivations in the cycles were used to propose a new cycle of the system and user-interface redesign. Such school-based trials provided demonstrations of the platform in supporting two content-specific learning applications, namely in mathematics and Chinese language learning activities in a primary school setting. They show the enactment of collaborative scaffolding comprising peer, technological and teacher scaffolding in supporting the students' formation of groups, and their collaboration and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]