Internet and Higher Education最新文献

Social reading is a common practice in higher education to engage students in critical reading and classroom dialogues around course materials. This paper introduces a study that integrated a social annotation technology and a scaffolding framework to support social reading in undergraduate classrooms. The framework, grounded in the computer-supported collaborative learning literature, specifies three participation roles—namely, facilitator, synthesizer, and summarizer—that have distinct responsibilities in each week's social reading activities. Using Hypothesis, the social annotation technology, we piloted the framework in a fully online undergraduate course. To examine how the framework facilitated social interaction and knowledge construction, we applied social network analysis and content analysis to a rich dataset. Results revealed that the framework fostered active participation in class with students followed the assigned roles properly. This study has practical implications for online teaching and collaborative learning in higher education.

To provide more useful feedback strategies in DGBL, this study investigated the effects of dynamic feedback (feedback contents adjusted to game task difficulty) and static feedback (the same feedback contents for all tasks) on students' learning by using an educational programming game with easy to difficult game tasks. In addition, a lag sequence analysis was used to analyze the behavior patterns of learners. A sample of 105 university students were randomly assigned to four feedback treatment conditions. The results showed that dynamic feedback, with feedback contents appropriately adjusted to the task difficulty levels (i.e., simple hints after easy game tasks and detailed explanations after difficult game tasks), were more effective in enhancing students' learning achievement and gaming engagement. Furthermore, we also found that providing detailed explanations after both easy and difficult game tasks led to a decrease in learners' engagement. The implications of findings and future research directions are discussed.

This study develops a rubric comprising three quality concepts critical to addressing online learning challenges: Scaffolding, which supports student self-regulated learning processes; Student Agency, which promotes student choices and voices; and Social Presence and Interpersonal Interaction, which enhances student connection with peers and instructors. We then examine the extent to which college online courses reflect the three concepts following a 3-point scoring scale (“beginning,” “developing,” or “proficient”) based on observation data collected from 100 randomly selected courses. Our results indicate that about two-thirds of the courses score at or above the developing level, demonstrating some but insufficient incorporation of design features that can enhance the three concepts. While most courses are above the developing level for “Scaffolding,” less than half and less than one-third reach the developing level for the other two concepts. We further identify variations in course design based on instructor characteristics, where female instructors, instructors with higher educational attainment, and instructors teaching fewer credit hours had higher scores.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid shift to online learning, making the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework increasingly relevant for creating meaningful and effective online learning experiences. However, the impact of CoI presences (i.e., teaching, social, and cognitive presence) on students' learning outcomes has been inconsistent in the literature, and a recent meta-analysis has identified a publication bias in this relationship, suggesting the need for a further investigation. This study aimed to enhance our understanding of how the CoI presences influence students' actual learning outcomes by incorporating learner empowerment as an essential learner characteristic. This study was conducted in two undergraduate courses that were abruptly shifted online due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationship between the CoI presences, learner empowerment, and actual learning outcomes. The results show that learner empowerment has a direct and positive impact on students' actual learning outcomes, and partially mediates the relationship between CoI presences and learning outcomes. The findings highlight the significant mediating role of learner empowerment within the CoI framework and offer valuable insights into the design of productive online learning communities.

While giving learners hints is a commonly used scaffolding practice to facilitate learning, previous work questioned the effectiveness of hints. In this study, we examined if prompting learners to reflect along with receiving hints could improve learning outcomes, including immediate and delayed performance, perceived learning, and enjoyment. A field experiment was conducted in a four-week long online master’s degree course on data science where we compared two conditions: a condition with hints and a condition providing reflection prompts along with hints. Results showed that using hints with reflection prompts increased learner performance in delayed knowledge transfer tasks while also increasing learners’ perception of learning. The combination of reflection prompts and hints did not reduce learners’ enjoyment of the tasks, suggesting that the use of hints with reflection prompts is not only an intervention which can improve learning outcomes but is one which will be naturally adopted by learners.

Research in Internet-enabled learning tends to focus on technologies implemented by institutions or staff. In reality, students learn with technologies that go beyond institutional offerings. This misalignment risks universities' approaches to online technologies being partially relevant to student learning. To understand student experiences, we followed hermeneutic phenomenology, interviewing 22 students from three New Zealand universities. Content and thematic analyses showed that students used non-institutional technologies to augment institutional offerings. They experienced institutional technologies as being overloaded with information, and non-institutional technologies as enabling them to process information expediently and take control of their own learning. We also identified differences between high and low-achieving students in technology use, which were associated with motivation, awareness of technologies, and metacognition. Our study highlights the role of non-institutional technologies in learning, which has implications for future research, for the design and implementation of institutional technologies, and for preparing students to learn with technologies.

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that students with effective learning strategies are more likely to have better academic achievement. Existing research has mostly focused on a single course or two, while longitudinal studies remain scarce. The present study examines the longitudinal sequence of students' strategies, their succession, consistency, temporal unfolding, and whether students tend to retain or adapt strategies between courses. We use a large dataset of online traces from 135 students who completed 10 successive courses (i.e., 1350 course enrollments) in a higher education program. The methods used in this study have shown the feasibility of using trace data recorded by learning management systems to unobtrusively trace and model the longitudinal learning strategies across a program. We identified three program-level strategy trajectories: a stable and intense trajectory related to deep learning where students used diverse strategies and scored the highest grades; a fluctuating interactive trajectory, where students focused on course requirements, scored average grades, and were relatively fluctuating; and a light trajectory related to surface learning where students invested the least effort, scored the lowest grades, and had a relatively stable pathway. Students who were intensely active were more likely to transfer the intense strategies and therefore, they were expected to require less support or guidance. Students focusing on course requirements were not as effective self-regulators as they seemed and possibly required early guidance and support from teachers. Students with consistent light strategies or low effort needed proactive guidance and support.

The present study explored how students' sense of belonging and demographic background may predict what one finds helpful in replies to requests for help posted to an online college course discussion forum. We surveyed college students enrolled in an introductory statistics course on their sense of belonging to their course community, as well as how helpful they found 20 examples of replies to requests for help posted to a statistics course discussion forum. We found that students reporting lower belonging to their course community judged help-giving replies to be, on average, less helpful for their learning, when compared to those reporting higher belonging to their course community. Additionally, students reporting lower belonging to their course community had a greater likelihood of mentioning social support as a criterion for effective peer help-giving. These findings point to the importance of exploring how help-giving replies can be structured to attend to the learning needs of students who may feel alienated in classroom environments.

The current study examines the role of cultural capital and techno-capital in the academic social capital formation process, focusing on adult online college students (N = 725) enrolled at a private not-for-profit university in the US. Multiple regression results indicated that cultural capital predicted behavioral integration, an important means through which academic social capital is cultivated; yet, techno-competency, a subscale of techno-capital, predicted the ways in which students perceived their own integration. The findings lend support to the notion that students with higher levels of cultural capital enact academic engagement because they have a better understanding of the “rules of the game,” but techno-capital enables individuals to mobilize a particular set of skills and their socialized understanding of the online context to extract value and realize the benefits from academic engagement.

This paper examines the effect of role assignment strategy on undergraduate students' social presence in asynchronous online discussions. Asynchronous online discussion activities were designed and implemented in an educational technology course. In the experimental groups, participants engaged in online discussion activities designed with the role assignment strategy to support social presence using specific roles (starter, moderator, or summarizer) while the control group participants completed the discussion activities without using the role assignment strategy. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the social presence levels of the experimental group and the control group. Qualitative content analysis of the discussion posts revealed that there were more social presence indicators in the posts of the participants who were assigned roles compared to the ones who did not have roles.