The relatively low retention rates of learners have an implication that learners might disengage in a MOOC course. Engagement and motivation always go hand in hand. The elaborate design of strategies to trigger and retain learners' motivation is helpful to increase the rates of course completion. To address this, we applied content analysis method to analyze the micro lecture videos of six courses in Coursera according to ARCS model of motivation suggested by Keller. This study reports the categories of the strategies to motivate learner that used in these videos and the differences between Chinese produced and other countries produced video courses. These results inform some suggestions of future design suggestions for Micro instructional videos.
This study aimed to develop a collaborative and manipulative virtual Tangram puzzle to facilitate children to learn geometry in the computer-supported collaborative learning environment with Tablet PCs. In promoting peer interactions and stimulating students’ higher-order thinking and creativity toward geometric problem-solving, we designed a collaborative Chinese Tangram activity with problem-solving learning strategies. Participants are 25 6th graders of a suburb elementary school of Tai-Chung City. The results suggest that children’s competency in rotation and space of shapes had been improved and the scores gap between lower and higher achievers had been narrowed. Such a collaborative Chinese Tangram activity may facilitate peer negotiation, enhance children’s belief toward problem solving, and benefit each child to share resources, and a positive interdependent learning context can naturally be developed.
This paper reports on a study to investigate the effects of collaborative concept mapping in a one-device-per-student (1:1) digital learning environment, as compared with one-device-to-many-students (1:m), in terms of students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention, quality of the concept maps, interactional patterns, and learning perceptions. Guided by the methodology of quasi-experimental research, we adopted Group Scribbles (GS) 1.0 in our empirical study where students carried out collaborative concept mapping activities in two different settings: (a) students working in pairs with one Tablet PC assigned to each of them; (b) multiple students sharing a Tablet PC. In particular, we investigated the students' learning process, identified and compared various interactional patterns exhibited by the student groups who were engaged in both settings, and discussed how such group dynamics might have affected the quality of the student artifacts produced by individual groups.
We explored the use of mobile social software, in the form of a mobile group blog, to assist cultural learning. The potential of using this technology for cultural adaptation among overseas students was examined as those students adapted to the everyday life of studying abroad. Two pilot studies and a successful field study of a mobile group blog as used by U.K. overseas students are reported. A further study with prospective overseas students witnessing this “moblogging” in China revealed the advantages of communicating through this technology as a form of peer-supported preparation for cultural adaptation. Potential advantages for learning a second language, via this system, were highlighted as communication was interwoven with cultural adaptation and exercised in the blog entries. Given mobile Internet, the language experience together with cultural observation impressively supported these students’ growing confidence with time, space, and imagination.
This paper reports a study to investigate the effects of collaborative concept mapping of a 1:1 (one-device-per-student) digital learning environment, comparing with a 1:m (one-device-to-many-students) environment in terms of three aspects: students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention and quality of the concept maps. Participants were 6th-grade students from an elementary school. Guided by the methodology of quasi-experimental research, we adopted Group Scribbles (GS) 1.0 in our empirical study. We evaluated these two settings in the Social Studies course, assessing the quality of the collaboratively constructed concept maps and students' learning attitudes. The results indicated that although little difference in the concept map scores between students engaged in the two settings was found, the standard deviations of the 1:1 groups had been greater than those of the 1:m groups. According to our analysis, the reason of the greater differences in the performances among individual 1:1 group members would be that the levels of group bonding had a greater influence on the effectiveness of their collaborations. Due to space limitations, the interviews and questionnaires data will not present in this paper.
This study attempted to assess public perceptions of and interest in MOOCs by examining how Weibo increases public discussion of MOOCs as well as by interpreting how individual learners talk about their learning experiences. Over 4,000 microblog posts were collected and analysed between 2013 and 2018. The findings showed that Weibo is used as a public service medium to augment the publicity of the MOOC movement and increase the accessibility of MOOC portals. The results also demonstrated that Weibo acts as a space for learners to share their personal learning experiences, which reflect aspects of autonomous, self-regulated, interactive and cooperative learning. By posting on Weibo, close peer connections and learning groups were established to encourage MOOC learning. This study’s findings further the scholarly understanding of how MOOCs are discussed on social media and address an important gap around what is known in one of the largest and most under-researched sites of informal online learning.
Although much attention has been devoted to learning a second language in the authentic language environment, learners still have limited opportunities to stay there for a longer time. The internet has opened up a gateway for learners to a virtual foreign world while mobile technology is bringing more features from the real world. In this study we explored the use of a mobile group, recording and sharing learners’ real experiences in the target culture, and helping learners who are far away from the target language surroundings to enhance the understandings of ‘real’ language use in ‘real’ culture. Two studies were conducted separately with two different groups physically in the learners’ own country and the target language country. The contexts of the real culture have been delivered and discussed within these two groups. Results show a spontaneous shift from using native language to second language in the target culture and students’ learning motivation and language efficacy have been improved.
Training needs reassessment at times requires extra time and effort in asking questions, doing surveys, or doing interviews. By extracting themes and key concepts from trainees’ online narrative feedback after training, this research explored a mixed way of human and computational analysis on trainees’ perception of training deficiencies to weave individual narrative feedback as supplementary features into a semantic knowledge map of training needs. The case study was conducted in an international company with over 100000 employees at dispersed locations. This research provides a method for any specific companies with unique characteristics to construct a dynamic knowledge map, leading to a possible automatic improvement of the training program.
Online video courses allow large-scale distribution of educational resources and thus provide a feasible platform for cross-regional teacher professional development (TPD). However, with most studies focusing on TPD using online video courses in developed countries, less attention was paid to factors influencing the online learning experience of teachers from less developed areas. Therefore, this pilot study aims at exploring predictors of 3471 college teachers' online learning engagement. First, the results of a multivariate linear regression (MLR) revealed that at the individual level, there was a significant positive relationship between teachers' age and learning duration. At the institutional level, participants from the partner institutions had longer learning durations. At the country level, there was a significant positive relationship between country literacy rates and learning durations. Then, another MLR on relationships between self-reported learning perceptions after taking the course and learning durations was conducted. Results showed that learners' prior knowledge was negatively associated with learning durations. There was a significantly positive relationship between "recommend this platform to others" and learning duration. The findings can inform us of the factors that may have been overlooked when supporting college teachers' online professional learning in developing countries.
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