Internet and Higher Education最新文献

This study investigated the use of instant messaging in the school-to-work transition, a crucial stage of learning and development. Newly graduated health professionals (n = 235) participated either in WhatsApp groups in which moderators shared knowledge and facilitated professional discussions or in the control group. The results show that participants in the WhatsApp groups had markedly higher levels of knowledge, greater resilience as well as lower levels of professional isolation– in comparison with the control group. They also reported less stress when searching for a new job. These findings are affirmed by the qualitative analysis of open survey questions: knowledge acquisition emerged as the main benefit followed by connectedness and professional informational benefits. A further interesting result is that the general, day-to-day use of WhatsApp outside of the intervention was linked to higher levels of resilience.

Another finding is that although the actual (measured) and self-reported frequency of participation in the WhatsApp groups correlated highly, these measures did not predict the outcome variables in the regression analysis. This observation questions the frequency of participation as a proxy for the success of engagement.

The purpose of this study was to examine why college students procrastinated in online courses from a self-regulated learning perspective. A sample of 207 college students participated in this study. Using path modeling, the results showed that students' perceived content relevance and technology usability indirectly predicted academic procrastination through the roles of task value and emotional cost. Conscientiousness was also an important predictor of academic procrastination. Perceived instructor engagement and peer interaction did not predict academic procrastination. These findings revealed that academic procrastination in online courses was a complex phenomenon and stemmed from the interrelationships between college students' perceptions of learning context, personal characteristics, and motivational beliefs. Practical implications for addressing academic procrastination in online courses are discussed in this paper.

This study integrated a systematic analysis of instructional design and a sentiment analysis of student reviews of 18 courses from the Class Central Top 20 MOOCs to analyze the potential connections between instructional design quality and student reviews. The analysis of instructional design quality was based on the ten-principle framework. The results indicated that: 1) the instructional design quality of the highly-rated courses was in the medium-to-upper range; 2) there was a positive correlation between the instructional design quality and MOOCs ranking; 3) student sentiment was much more positive for Humanities courses compared to other subjects; 4) the student sentiment and MOOCs ranking had no significant correlation, but there was a positive correlation between student sentiment and the instructional design quality; and 5) the design of learning activities related to “Collaboration”, “Differentiation” and “Collective knowledge” needed to be improved. The implications for practice and ideas for future research are outlined.

This paper explores the ways in which higher education students search for information in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Data for this study was drawn from verbal reports of nine participants engaged in retrospective think-aloud sessions to solve ten tasks each. The results of the thematic analysis revealed that the participants followed the pattern outlined in literature of connectivism and literacy frameworks. Namely, the participants proceeded with four interrelated steps: locating information, information use, remix and repurpose, and knowledge sharing. Some key themes were observed that differed from previous studies, including meta-search and the frequency of changing search keywords over time. Each difference deserves further consideration. Moreover, the results highlight extreme plagiarism among participants and their low-level competencies to innovatively evaluate and remix online content. This paper argues that critical and cyberliteracy are perhaps the nominated theoretical frameworks for developing information search mechanisms in oppressed societies. Implications for educational practices are discussed.

Video-based online learning is becoming commonplace in higher education settings. Prior studies have suggested design principles and instructional strategies to boost video-based learning. However, little research has been done on different learner characteristics, such as how learners behave, what behavioral patterns they exhibit, and how different they are from each other. To fill this research gap in student-video interaction, we employed learning analytics to obtain useful insights into students' learning in the context of video-based online learning. From 11 log behaviors represented by log data from 72 college students, four behavioral patterns were identified while students learned from videos: browsing, social interaction, information seeking, and environment configuration. Based on the behavioral patterns observed, participants were classified into two clusters. Participants in the active learner cluster exhibited frequent use of social interaction, information seeking, and environment configuration, while participants in the passive learner cluster exhibited only frequent browsing. We found that active learners exhibited higher learning achievement than passive learners.

Virtual reality has been proposed as a promising technology for higher education since the combination of immersive and interactive features enables experiential learning. However, previous studies did not distinguish between the different learning modes of the four-stage experiential learning cycle (i.e., concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation). With our study, we contribute a deeper understanding of how the unique opportunities of virtual reality can afford each of the four experiential learning modes. We conducted three design thinking workshops with interdisciplinary teams of students and lecturers. These workshops resulted in three low-fidelity virtual reality prototypes which were evaluated and refined in three student focus groups. Based on these results, we identify design elements for virtual reality applications that afford an holistic experiential learning process in higher education. We discuss the implications of our results for the selection, design, and use of educational virtual reality applications.

Providing online written feedback for assignments permits the inclusion of digital cues (e.g., emoticons, profile pictures, and informal tone of language) which may improve student perceptions of both feedback and instructor. Using a between groups experimental design, we conducted a series of 2 (Emoticons present/absent) x 2 (Profile pictures present/absent) x 2 (Language formal/informal) ANCOVAs to explore the effect of each cue on student perceptions of feedback and of the instructor (N = 188 university undergraduates). Including emoticons enhanced student perceptions of social presence within the feedback, as well as student ratings of instructor proficiency, accessibility, and personal characteristics. Language formality had no main effect, but interacted with emoticons, such that instructors were perceived to be most proficient when emoticons were embedded within formal language feedback. Our findings suggest that including emoticons in written feedback may improve student perceptions of instructors and feedback, without impacting on the integrity of feedback.

This study examined how the epistemic prompts designed to activate learners' epistemic cognition in sourcing affect their multimodal multiple-document reading (MMDR), considering learners' justification for knowing behaviors, prior knowledge, and gender. Participants were 48 university students, 28 females (58.3%), and 20 males (42.7%). Students were randomly assigned to an experimental group with epistemic-prompts that automatically generate a reflection report in addition to a note-taking function or a control group with a note-taking function only. Results showed that students relied primarily on YouTube videos for their MMDR with higher credibility ratings for the YouTube video than written texts. Besides, epistemic prompting, along with the automatically generated reflection report, enhanced students' scores on constructed-response items for the experimental group and helped them create a coherent mental representation of information from diverse multimodal sources beyond the effect of personal justification and multiple justifications. Implications of the study results are made to enhance students' epistemic cognition during their MMDR.

We demonstrate how motivational and behavioral processes can explain which students may be more likely to select into online (OL) than face-to-face (F2F) courses and also less likely to perform well in OL courses. University students (n = 999) reported their reasons for OL course selection: university constraints, specific need for flexibility, general preference for flexibility, and learning preferences. Compared to F2F students, only OL students with certain self-selection reasons showed differences in motivation, behavior, and performance. Notably, OL students who said they had a specific need for flexibility created by the costs of competing responsibilities spent more time on non-academic activities (e.g., working, commuting), less time on academic activities (e.g., study groups), and ultimately performed worse when compared to F2F peers. These students were especially likely to be women, older, and part-time. We discuss implications for practice and for using demographic characteristics to control for selection effects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the expectations of academic staff to learning analytics services from an ideal as well as a realistic perspective. This mixed-method study focused on a cross-case analysis of staff from Higher Education Institutions from four European universities (Spain, Estonia, Netherlands, UK). While there are some differences between the countries as well as between ideal and predicted expectations, the overarching results indicate that academic staff sees learning analytics as a tool to understand the learning activities and possibility to provide feedback for the students and adapt the curriculum to meet learners' needs. However, one of the findings from the study across cases is the generally consistently low expectation and desire for academic staff to be obligated to act based on data that shows students being at risk of failing or under-performing.