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A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the "language of instruction," used for interacting with course materials, and one's preferred language as the "language of participation," used for interaction with peers and facilitators, is preferable to "English only" for participation in a MOOC. The Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC included seven teams of facilitators, each catering for a different language community. Facilitators were responsible for promoting active participation and peer tutoring. Comparing language groups revealed a series of predictors of intention to learn, some of which became apparent in the first days of the MOOC already. The comparison also uncovered four critical factors that influence participation: facilitation, language of participation, group size, and a pre-existing sense of community. Especially crucial was reaching a sufficient number of active participants during the first week. We conclude that multilingual facilitation activates participation in MOOCs in various ways, and that synergy between the four aforementioned factors is critical for the formation of the learning network that supports a social dynamic of active participation. Our approach suggests future targets for the development of the multilingual and community potential of MOOCs.

Educators of all sectors are learning designers, often unwittingly. To succeed as designers, they need to adopt a design mindset and acquire the skills needed to address the design challenges they encounter in their everyday practice. Human-centred design (HCD) provides professional designers with the methods needed to address complex problems. It emphasizes the human perspective throughout the design lifecycle and provides a practice-oriented approach, which naturally fits educators' realities. This research reports the experiences of educators who used HCD to design ICT-based learning activities. A mixed-methods approach was used to gauge how participating educators experienced the design tasks. The perceived level of difficulty and value of the various methods varied, revealing significant differences between educators according to their level of knowledge of pedagogy frameworks. We discuss our findings from the vantage point of educators' pedagogical beliefs and how experience shapes these. The results support the idea that HCD is a valuable framework for educators, one that may inform ongoing international efforts to shape a science and practice of learning design for teaching.

Recommender systems provide users with content they might be interested in. Conventionally, recommender systems are evaluated mostly by using prediction accuracy metrics only. But, the ultimate goal of a recommender system is to increase user satisfaction. Therefore, evaluations that measure user satisfaction should also be performed before deploying a recommender system in a real target environment. Such evaluations are laborious and complicated compared to the traditional, data-centric evaluations, though. In this study, we carried out a user-centric evaluation of state-of-the-art recommender systems as well as a graph-based approach in the ecologically valid setting of an authentic social learning platform. We also conducted a data-centric evaluation on the same data to investigate the added value of user-centric evaluations and how user satisfaction of a recommender system is related to its performance in terms of accuracy metrics. Our findings suggest that user-centric evaluation results are not necessarily in line with data-centric evaluation results. We conclude that the traditional evaluation of recommender systems in terms of prediction accuracy only does not suffice to judge performance of recommender systems on the user side. Moreover, the user-centric evaluation provides valuable insights in how candidate algorithms perform on each of the five quality metrics for recommendations: usefulness, accuracy, novelty, diversity, and serendipity.

Designing learning opportunities is an integral part of the work of all educators. However, educators often lack the design skills and knowledge that professional designers have. We thus need more empirical research on the "demand side": how do educators design technology-enhanced learning activities, and how do we provide them with actionable knowledge that helps them design from a (human-centred) design perspective? The present study addresses both questions by analysing how in-service educators perceived and accomplished an (heuristic) evaluation design task as part of a design process to conceptualise a learning activity using information and communication technologies (ICT). Following a mixed-methods approach, we collected the heuristic evaluation protocols produced by the participants and their comments. The data shows that educators failed to perceive the task as actionable knowledge. To remedy this, we propose a set of design tasks that would provide the needed scaffolding to include the concept of design principles as part of educators' learning design processes; empowering them to assess both existing learning activities and ICT tools as well as their own designs.

People recommenders are a widespread feature of social networking sites and educational social learning platforms alike. However, when these systems are used to extend learners' Personal Learning Networks, they often fall short of providing recommendations of learning value to their users. This paper proposes a design of a people recommender based on content-based user profiles, and a matching method based on dissimilarity therein. It presents the results of an experiment conducted with curators of the content curation site Scoop.it!, where curators rated personalized recommendations for contacts. The study showed that matching dissimilarity of interpretations of shared interests is more successful in providing positive experiences of breakdown for the curator than is matching on similarity. The main conclusion of this paper is that people recommenders should aim to trigger constructive experiences of breakdown for their users, as the prospect and potential of such experiences encourage learners to connect to their recommended peers.

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training tutors in content knowledge of a particular domain versus training them in tutoring skills of pedagogical knowledge when tutoring on a complex tutee task. Forty-seven tutor--tutee pairs of fourth-year secondary school students were created and assigned to one of the two treatments. Twenty-two tutors received training in content knowledge and the other twenty-five tutors in tutoring skills. Tutors formulated written feedback immediately after the training. Tutees first interpreted the tutor feedback and then used it to revise their research questions. The results showed that tutors trained in tutoring skills formulated more effective feedback than tutors trained in content knowledge. In addition, tutees helped by tutoring-skills tutors found the feedback more motivating than those helped by content-knowledge tutors. However, no differences were found in tutee performance on revision. The findings are discussed in terms of the set-up of this study and implications for improving the effectiveness of peer tutoring.

This study examined the use of weblogs as a means to promote student teachers' reflective practice. The assumption was explored that weblogs are suitable tools to support and stimulate reflection on action in teacher training and consequently to enhance the students' ability to reflect. Three groups of student teachers used weblogs to reflect on teaching practice during an 8-week internship. Students were asked (a) to reflect on their own teaching experiences and (b) to provide peer feedback. Analyses of the student contributions show that weblogs are useful for reflection on critical incidents in the classroom and that they can stimulate interconnectivity in groups of students. However, weblogs do not incite deep reflection or spiral reflection, which can only be the result of explicit instruction. This exploratory study further shows that large-scale quantitative research is needed to support the premise that weblogs are suitable tools for reflection. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

The intent of this study was to investigate how to maximize the chances of success of an educational innovation--specifically one based on the implementation of the educational modeling language called EML. This language is both technically and organizationally demanding. Two different implementation cases were investigated, one situated in an institution for higher professional education that caters for on-campus students; the other in an institution for higher, open distance education, that serves off-campus, home-based students. Diffusion-innovation theory is used as the backdrop for the analysis. It helps us to understand why the implementations failed and what measures might be taken to avoid future failure in similar situations. (Contains 3 tables.)

Describes the Virtual Company, a learning environment developed by the Open University (Netherlands) that is modeled after real companies to bridge the gap between learning and working by situating learning in a real-life business setting. Discusses problems in higher education, demands of society, and results of a pilot study. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the concept of a Virtual Company--a collaborative, distributed learning environment built on the notions of competence-based, constructivist, open learning, and distance education. It features an authentic, role-playing game that is strongly modeled upon the functional structures of real-life companies. Outlines the set-up of a Virtual Company in the Netherlands, focusing on the underlying educational principles. (Author/AEF)

Byline: Lou A.M.P. Slangen, Peter B. Sloep This paper examines how the learning environment in primary education can be enhanced by stimulating the use of innovative ICT applications. In particular, this discussion focuses on mind tools as a means of leveraging ICT for the development of cognitive skills. The stimulating effect of mind tools on the thinking skills and thinking attitudes of students is examined. The various types of mind tools and a number of specific examples are closely examined. We consider how mind tools can contribute to the establishment of an ICT-rich learning environment within the domain of technology education in primary schools. We illustrate two specific applications of such mind tools and discuss how these contribute to the development of thinking skills.

Many current authors point toward the heightening of networked individualism and how this affects community creation and engagement. This trend poses strong challenges to the potential beneficial effects of collective intelligence. Education is one of the realms that can strongly suffer from this globalized individualism. Learning is deeply enhanced by social interactions and losing this social dimension will have long-lasting effects in future generations. Networked learning is also a by-product of our societal context, but not per se individual. Our paper presents a case—the HANDSON massive open online course (MOOC)—in which a purposely designed learning environment fosters the emergence of a kind of collective intelligence which, by the learners own accord, brings about a heightened sense of community. The MOOC’s design managed to enable individual learning paces without killing the social dimension. Thus, we argue that when learning together intentionally and informally in networked online environments, small and temporary communities (pop-up communities we call them) will form. This nascent sense of community is a first step that will ultimately contribute to the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]