Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Facilitation Matters: Instructor Perception of Helpfulness of Facilitation Strategies in Online Courses

Online course facilitation is critical to the success of online courses. Instructors use various facilitation strategies in online courses to engage students. One hundred instructors were surveyed on their perception of helpfulness of twelve different facilitation strategies used in online courses to enhance instructor presence, instructor connection, engagement and learning. Instructors’ timely response to questions […]

Open to Open? An Exploration of Textbook Preferences and Strategies to Offset Textbook Costs for Online Versus On-Campus Students

As open textbook initiatives are on the rise, a burgeoning literature has begun exploring student perceptions of openly licensed textbooks used in higher education. Most of this research has lacked consideration of potential differences in the perceptions of online and on-campus students and has failed to include a control group of students using traditional textbooks. […]

Tracking Students’ Mental Engagement Using EEG Signals during an Interaction with a Virtual Learning Environment

Monitoring students’ level of engagement during learning activities is an important challenge in the development of tutoring interventions. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using electroencephalographic signals (EEG) as a tool to monitor the mental engagement index of novice medicine students during a reasoning process. More precisely, the objectives were first, to track […]

Measuring the Performance of e-Primary School Systems in Bangladesh

The government of Bangladesh (GoB) recently have introduced the concept of Digital Bangladesh. Education is one of the most vital sectors to make the digital nation. For that reason, the GoB has started to convert primary to e-primary schools. The main objective of this study is to investigate the current Information and Communication Technology (ICT) […]

An Empirical Investigation into Examination of Factors Influencing University Students’ Behavior towards Elearning Acceptance Using SEM Approach

There are several reasons why most of the universities implement E-learning. The extent of E-learning programs is being offered by the higher educational institutes in the UAE are evidently expanding. However, very few studies have been carried out to validate the process of how E-learning is being accepted and employed by university students. The study […]

Assessing the cognitive and communicative properties of Facebook Reactions and Likes as lightweight feedback cues

The emergence of Facebook Reactions provides new opportunities to explore the nature of paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs; lightweight one-click social media response cues). Guided by adaptive structuration theory and the concept of cognitive automaticity, a survey of 255 individuals aged 18–24 assessed the cognitive processes and communicative meanings associated with the provision of Facebook Reactions […]

Predicting academic success in higher education: literature review and best practices

Student success plays a vital role in educational institutions, as it is often used as a metric for the institution’s performance. Early detection of students at risk, along with preventive measures, can drastically improve their success. Lately, machine learning techniques have been extensively used for prediction purpose. While there is a plethora of success stories […]

Attrition in Online and Face-to-Face Calculus and Precalculus Courses: A Comparative Analysis

A multitude of online courses are available that provide opportunities for students to meet their higher education needs, goals, and desires in a nontraditional school setting. But, from a content specific perspective, how are students performing in online courses compared to their face-to-face counterparts? This study seeks to examine the attrition rates of online calculus […]

Applying collaborative cognitive load theory to computer-supported collaborative learning: towards a research agenda

Research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has traditionally investigated how student-, group-, task-, and technological characteristics affect the processes and outcomes of collaboration. On the other hand, cognitive load theory has traditionally been used to study individual learning processes and to investigate instructional effects that are present during individual learning (e.g., expertise reversal effect). In […]

A MOOC on universal design for learning designed based on the UDL paradigm

This article presents the design and pilot of an open online course, based on the principle of universal design for learning (Center for Applied Special Technology, 2011), to promote inclusive virtual education as an improvement transferable to other contexts. The course constitutes the first massive open online course (MOOC) training proposal of the University of […]