The empirical evidence concerning the question whether an instructor should be presented on online lecture slides is equivocal and two lines of theoretical reasoning exist. On the one hand, the instructor may distract from the content, thereby hampering learning; on the other hand, the instructor may function as a social cue that triggers a more…

Individualized learning support is an essential part of formal educational learning processes. However, in typical large-scale educational settings, resource constraints result in limited interaction among students, teaching assistants, and lecturers. Due to this, learning success in those settings may suffer. Inspired by current technological…

The use of Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) to assess students' experiences, motivation, and emotions by sending signals to students at random or fixed time points has grown due to recent technological advances. Such methods offer several advantages, such as capturing the construct in the moment (i.e., when the events are fresh on respondents'…

Much effort has been put into the design of video lectures, but little attention has been paid to the social environment in which learning takes place. The present study addressed this gap by assigning Chinese undergraduate and graduate students who had passed the College English Test-4 to learn easy or difficult English vocabulary words in three…

The positivity principle states that people learn better from instructors who display positive emotions rather than negative emotions. In two experiments, students viewed a short video lecture on a statistics topic in which an instructor stood next to a series of slides as she lectured and then they took either an immediate test (Experiment 1) or…

This study employed speech-enabled language translation (SELT) technology in lectures presented in English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Previous research had students viewing pre-recorded lectures with incorporated content translations in controlled laboratory settings. In contrast, students in the present study experienced live lectures in…