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In massive open online courses (MOOCs), recommendation relationships present a collection of associations that imply a new form of integration, such as an interdisciplinary synergy among diverse disciplines. This study took a computer science approach, using the susceptible-infected (SI) model to simulate the process of learners accessing courses within networks of MOOC offerings, and emphasized the potential effects of a network structure. The current low rate of access suggests that a ceiling effect influences learners' access to learning online, given that there are thousands of courses freely available. Interdisciplinary networks were created by adding recommended courses into four disciplinary networks. The diversity of interdisciplinarity was measured by three attributes, namely variety, balance, and disparity. The results attest to interesting changes in how the diversity of interdisciplinary knowledge grows. Particularly remarkable is the degree to which the diversity of interdisciplinarity increased when new recommended courses were first added. However, changing diversity implied that neighbouring disciplines were more likely to come to the forefront to attach to the interdisciplinarity of MOOC offerings, and that the pace of synergy among disparate disciplines slowed as time passed. In the absence of domain experts, expert knowledge is not sufficient to support interdisciplinary curriculum design. More evidence-based analytics studies showing how interdisciplinarity evolves in course offerings could help us to better design online courses that prepare learners with 21st-century skills.

The promotion of life skills in learners is especially challenging in distance and online environments where the learners' physical absence from the classroom hinders the evaluation of these types of skills. Due to the great challenges brought about by this physical absence, there is a lack of empirical studies attempting to examine life skills in web-based scenarios. This study therefore aimed to fill the existing gap in operationalizing the role of life skills for online learning through the capability approach (CA). This exploration was conducted under the umbrella of Nussbaum's version of the CA. Specifically, our study contributes by devising an integrative and comprehensive teaching and learning framework for open educational practices based on the CA, and by introducing a new instrument that has been adapted to this context. Methodologically, the design and validation of the instrument involved a four-stage process. First, Nussbaum's list of central human capabilities was operationalized for online learning. Then, in the second stage, a qualitative content validity check was performed to verify whether the instrument was appropriate and comprehensive in terms of what it was intended to measure. The aim of the third and fourth stages was to quantitatively assess the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. For the third stage, the instrument was pre-tested through a modified version of the Q-sort method. In the fourth stage, non-parametric tests were used to validate the internal consistency and content validity of the questionnaire. Thirty experts from the areas of online education, philosophy, and statistics took part in these stages.

Fostering learner agency is a primary goal of Integrative Computer Assisted Language Learning, a type of CALL (Warschauer, 1996) that encompasses networked learning and multimedia, including hypermedia. Although navigation has been a focus of attention in some more established CALL scenarios such as Intelligent Computer Assisted Language learning (ICALL) systems in second language acquisition (SLA) research, much less focus has been on more emerging CALL scenarios such as augmented reality, amongst others. Therefore, if learner agency is to be fostered, identifying how it manifests is important. This study focuses on 'directional agency' (Knight, Barberà and Appel, 2017) which is agency exercised in relation to navigational acts during language learning tasks. Using our own case study data as a starting point (where learners carry out navigation as part of the tasks), the paper draws attention to the somatic acts of navigation while using spoken language as part of the multimodal experiences learners can face. A specific literature review was carried out on other current and emerging CALL scenarios that were considered as cases in order to survey the presence of intentional navigational acts and talk, explore and understand it as a phenomenon in the field and to refine directional agency as a construct. Results suggest that directional agency is present across other CALL scenarios and task types; directional agency can be shared across learners and technological features; there are multiple forms of navigation including embodied navigation and whole or partial human body navigation that can occurr in the same task. Navigational acts can accompany learner-learner talk and they can also form part of learner-computer 'talk'. Learners and computers can act as "semiotic initiators and responders" (Coffin and Donohue, 2014), resembling sequential turn-taking of talk so that both learners and digital technologies can be understood as potential actors in the task discourse.

This paper presents a case study of the co-design process for an online course on Sustainable Development (Degree in Tourism) involving the teacher, two students, and the project researchers. The co-design process was founded on an inquiry-based and technology-enhanced model that takes shape in a set of design principles. The research had two main objectives. Firstly, to identify the moments of change that occur during the co-design process and secondly, to describe the causes and agents that motivate them. This study applied design-based research methodology and used a qualitative approach to collect, analyse, and interpret data. The results show that the co-design methodology led to moderate changes consisting of the progressive construction and refinement of the activities, seeking a sense of continuum throughout by including students' collaboration. The findings also reveal the main role of each of the actors involved. Thus, the teacher focused on basic instructional design related aspects while students focused on improving the use of resources and learning aids. Researchers helped them to embody and achieve the proposed changes and also acted as mediators of pedagogical concepts and vocabulary. CompendiumLD software was a helpful tool to graphically represent and share the prototyping of the activities and to help analyse the design process.

This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors' outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors' roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.

This article describes the development of an application for the grading and provision of feedback on educational processes. The too, named "EduZinc," enables instructors to go through the complete process of creating and evaluating the activities and materials of a course. The application enables for the simultaneous management of two teaching-related aspects: (a) creation of individualized learning products (activities, tests and exams) and (b) automatic grading (for every learning product; automated creation of student, class, and competency-based reports; and delivery of personalized reports to students, instructors and tutors). The system also has a series of warnings in place to notify instructors and tutors when a student is falling behind. As a means to reward the efforts made during the course, the program keeps relevant statistics, notifying when a student is excelling in the course.

Protein production, thriving on the chemical fixation of nitrogen in fertilizers and intensive use of agricultural and livestock practices, significantly compromises environmental sustainability. The need for alternative food resources to meet the raised demand due to the fast-growing global population has turned pressing. Diazotrophic cyanobacteria, capable of converting atmospheric nitrogen into bioavailable forms, offer promise in sustainable protein production, bypassing traditional inefficiencies. Such microorganisms’ potential might be fully exploited if the production process is well-characterized and controlled. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the specific effects of light and temperature on the growth dynamics of Nostoc PCC 7120 by using photorespirometry. The study aims to retrieve kinetic parameters essential for predictive modeling in industrial applications. The optimal light intensity (376 µmol m-2 s -1 ) was estimated, as well as the optimal temperature. The latter showed to be dependent on culture conditions: under nitrogen-fixing conditions, it drops from 30 to 27 °C, highlighting temperature-driven effects based on the nitrogen source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the amount of time spent learning (or time-on-task), the quality of learning time has a real influence on learning performance. Quality of time in online learning depends on students' time availability and their willingness to devote quality cognitive time to learning activities. However, the quantity and quality of the time spent by adult e-learners on learning activities can be reduced by professional, family, and social commitments. Considering that the main time pattern followed by most adult e-learners is a professional one, it may be beneficial for online education programs to offer a certain degree of flexibility in instructional time that might allow adult learners to adjust their learning times to their professional constraints. However, using the time left over once professional and family requirements have been fulfilled could lead to a reduction in quality time for learning. This paper starts by introducing the concept of quality of learning time from an online student-centred perspective. The impact of students' time-related variables (working hours, time-on-task engagement, time flexibility, time of day, day of week) is then analyzed according to individual and collaborative grades achieved during an online master's degree program. The data show that both students' time flexibility (r = 0.98) and especially their availability to learn in the morning are related to better grades in individual (r = 0.93) and collaborative activities (r = 0.46). (Contains 1 figure.)

In this paper, we have developed a classification model for online learning environments that relates the Instructors Overall Performance (IOP) rating (according to students' perceptions) with the course characteristics, students' demographics and the effectiveness of the instructor in his/her teaching roles. To that end, a comprehensive Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) instrument is proposed, which includes not only conventional teaching elements, but also items that encourage twenty-first century skills. The goal of the study is twofold: (i) to quantify the extent to which the selected variables explain the IOP rating, and (ii) determine which teaching and non-teaching variables most affect the IOP rating. The best performing classifier achieved a competitive accuracy, highlighting that the selected variables mainly determine the IOP values. Other important findings include: (i) the IOP value is mainly influenced by the effectiveness of the instructor in his/her teaching roles; (ii) teaching strategies that involve the cooperation between the technical and pedagogical roles should be promoted; (iii) the pedagogical role has the highest impact on the final IOP value; and (iv) the most influential demographic variable is the student's status (working commitments and family responsibilities).

The topic of online instructors' roles has been of interest to the educational community since the late twentieth century. In previous studies, the identification of online instructors' roles was done using a top-down (deductive) approach. This study applied a bottom-up (inductive) procedure to examine not only the roles of online instructors from a student perspective, but also how well these roles are implemented in practice. In the first stage, roles were defined using factor analysis on a sample of 925 students. A questionnaire was created after an extensive literature review and in-depth interviews with experts. The methodology detected six roles: pedagogical, course designer, social, life skills promoter, technical, and managerial. In the second stage, students' scores were projected over those factors to obtain the instructors' performance in each role (the significance of the results was assessed using non-parametric tests). Main findings included: (i) the emergence of a new role, the life skills promoter; (ii) online scenarios becoming more transparent and intuitive due to syllabus design; (iii) the consideration of more audio-visual resources by instructors in asynchronous learning environments; and (iv) the value of offering guidelines to students for collaborative activities to reduce the level of frustration with these activities.

Learner agency, the capability of individual human beings to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference in their lives (Martin, 2004), is instrumental in second language learning because attainment is only arrived at by learner choice (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). If attainment is understood as learner engagement in synchronous, collaborative, spoken interaction which is thought to lead to gains in second language acquisition (SLA), then design considerations that harness learners' agency towards that end is important. This study explores the relationship between learner agency and two different task types, namely an information-gap task and an opinion-sharing task in two peer-to-peer synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) spoken interaction events. Students' choices and how students act on these choices during tasks are analysed using a discourse analysis approach. Audio recordings of four dyads as cases were examined using three analytical dimensions: language functions of verbal interaction, cognitive processing and social processing. The results show that most learners used their agency to reconfigure the tasks from spontaneous to planned interaction, with some choices and actions relating to technology impacting detrimentally on interaction time in the target language. The different tasks were found to filter and channel different types of agency that learners could exercise, namely representational, organisational, and strategic agency as speech acts, and directional agency as a physical act. These types consisted of different natures and purposes and are presented as a framework. The information-gap task supported strategic agency and an opinion-sharing task supported personalisation and identity construction or representational agency.

Connectivist learning is interaction-centered learning. A framework describing interaction and cognitive engagement in connectivist learning was constructed using logical reasoning techniques. The framework and analysis was designed to help researchers and learning designers understand and adapt the characteristics and principles of interaction in connectivist learning contexts. In this study empirical evidence to support and further develop this framework is presented. This study analyzed 6 weeks of data harvested from the daily newsletter, Twitter, and a Facebook group in a well-known cMOOC led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. These text transcripts were analyzed using a deductive approach of qualitative content analysis. This study revealed the main activity patterns of participants as they engage in four levels of interaction (operation interaction, wayfinding interaction, sensemaking interaction, and innovation interaction) during the MOOC. Generally the framework serves as a conceptual model to understand and to analyze the interaction in this cMOOC, although some implied interaction is hard to recognize and categorize. The relationship of the four levels of interaction and the role of each element in the framework were explored with the intent of offering the framework as a conceptual and analytic tool to guide both researchers and practitioners in designing and studying connectivist learning.