Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

From Telecourses to Online Courses: A Story of Redesign

This case deals with the redesign of a standard telecourse – printed material, professional studio video recordings and phone tutoring – into an online course. The redesign involved an adjunct professor in the Humanities having some experience in distance education but little with learning technologies. It was a two-year project including the grant application process. […]

Download Report: Gaming and Gamers

49% of American adults ever play video games, and 10% consider themselves gamers. Public attitudes toward games – and the people who play them – are complex and often uncertain. Pew Research Center

What’s Happening in ‘Their Space’? Exploring the Borders of Formal and Informal Learning with Undergraduate Students of Education in the Age of Mobile Technologies

The changing nature of teaching and learning in an age of accessible technologies provides challenges and opportunities for the design of learning events. Working with a sample of undergraduate students of education in one UK higher education institution we use an exploratory, qualitative approach to investigate students’ spontaneous uses of their mobile devices in their […]

Carnegie Mellon University Makes Facial Image Analysis Software Available To Researchers

Fast, Powerful Software Is Efficient Enough To Run on Smartphones Carnegie Mellon University

MOOCs and crowdsourcing: Massive courses and massive resources

Premised upon the observation that MOOC and crowdsourcing phenomena share several important characteristics, including IT mediation, large-scale human participation, and varying levels of openness to participants, this work systematizes a comparison of MOOC and crowdsourcing phenomena along these salient dimensions. In doing so, we learn that both domains share further common traits, including similarities in […]

Logic & Proofs: Computer-Supported Learning and the Philosophy of Mathematics

Wilfried Sieg arrived at Carnegie Mellon University in 1985 to help found the CMU Philosophy Department. He was its head from 1994 to 2005. Today, Sieg remains a central figure in the department and is one of the world’s foremost experts in areas ranging from proof theory and computer-assisted education to the history and philosophy […]

A Comparative Study of Competency-Based Courses Demonstrating a Potential Measure of Course Quality and Student Success

While competency-based education is growing, standardized tools for evaluating the unique characteristics of course design in this domain are still under development. This preliminary research study evaluated the effectiveness of a rubric developed for assessing course design of competency-based courses in an undergraduate Information Technology and Administrative Management program. The rubric, which consisted of twenty-six […]

Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus

This is a “best practices” article focused on sharing six new academic scheduling strategies recently employed by the BYU Salt Lake Center to optimize course offerings and increase enrollments. These strategies are generalizable to other academic programs that help extend academic programs at a distance, including online courses. The Center is an extended campus in […]

Theories and Applications of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) : The Case for Hybrid Design

Initial research on learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs) primarily focused participation patterns and participant experiences. More recently, research has addressed learning theories and offered case studies of different pedagogical designs for MOOCs. Based on a meta-analysis and synthesis of the research literature, this study develops a conceptual model of prominent theories and applications […]

Portfolio, text, data, page

A Learning Analytics Methodology for Detecting Sentiment in Student Fora: A Case Study in Distance Education

Online fora have become not only one of the most popular communication tools in e-learning environments, but also one of the key factors of the learning process, especially in distance learning, as they can provide to the students involved, motivation for collaboration in order to achieve a common goal. The purpose of this study is […]