Background: While a number of learner factors have been identified to impact students' collaborative learning, there has been little systematic research into how patterns of students' collaborative learning may differ by their learning orientations. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate: (1) variations in students' learning orientations by…

This article uses digital traces to help identify students' online learning strategies by making a clear distinction between the descriptive features (the proportional distribution of students' different online learning actions) and quantitative aspects (the total number of the online learning sessions), a distinction that has not been properly…

Adopting an ecological perspective on student learning in blended course designs, this study investigates the quality of 335 undergraduates' experience in a first-year compulsory engineering course. Interrelations amongst cognitive, social, and material aspects of the student learning experience are examined. The cognitive elements include…

This study investigated the extent to which self-report and digital-trace measures of students' self-regulated learning in blended course designs align with each other amongst 145 first-year computer science students in a blended "computer systems" course. A self-reported Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire was used to…

Blended course designs have been increasingly adopted in medical education. However, research on the relations between the key aspects of students' learning experience and their learning outcomes often only measures students' self-reported experience, neglecting what they actually do in learning. This study combined both self-reported and…

This study examines the extent to which the learning orientations identified by student self-reports and the observation of their online learning events were related to each other and to their academic performance. The participants were 322 first-year engineering undergraduates, who were enrolled in a blended course. Using students' self-report on…

One of the major objectives of precision education is to improve prediction of educational outcome. This study combined theory-driven and data-driven approaches to address the limitations of current practice of predicting learning outcomes only using a single approach. The study identified the online learning patterns by using students'…

This study combines research methods from student approaches to learning research and social network analysis (SNA) to examine patterns of students' collaborative learning based on their learning orientations amongst 193 postgraduates enrolled in a blended course. The study identified two distinct learning orientations, namely 'understanding' and…

Learning in blended environments has become a ubiquitous part of student experience in tertiary education worldwide. Although students' perceptions of learning environments are a key element in the learning process, there is a dearth of valid instruments to assess students' perceptions in blended contexts. This study described the initial…

Collaboration is an increasingly important and difficult skill for graduate engineers to develop. While universities provide some measures of collaboration ability of students on graduation, there is still some dissatisfaction with the level of preparedness of students for collaborative activity in the workplace. This paper presents a case study…

First-year university students in an engineering course experienced activities which required them to engage in learning back and forth across physical and virtual learning space. The lecturer had designed a campus-based course with a significant online component involving activities for preparing the class, for use during class and for reflecting…

The use of online learning technologies in experiences of inquiry is increasingly ubiquitous in university contexts. In blended environments, research into university experiences suggests that student approaches to learning are a key determiner of the quality of outcomes. The purpose of this study was to develop relevant measures which help…

Integrating an online component into a university course is typically done to improve the student experience. However the intent of the teacher's blended design may not always align to the students' experience of it. Their experience may be mediated by a number of factors including student perceptions of the online environment and their approach…

University teachers provided first year Arts students with hundreds of cinematic images online to analyse as a key part of their predominantly face-to-face undergraduate course. This qualitative study investigates the extent to which the groups engaged in learning involving their analysis of the images and how this was related to their perception…

Self-regulated learning theories are used to understand the reasons for different levels of university student academic performance. Similarly, learning analytics research proposes the combination of detailed data traces derived from technology-mediated tasks with a variety of algorithms to predict student academic performance. The former approach…