Small private online courses (SPOCs) have influenced teaching and learning in China's higher education. Learning management systems (LMSs) are important components in SPOCs. They can collect various data related to student behavior and support pedagogical interventions. This research used feature engineering and nearest neighbor smoothing models…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning applications. This article examines the word cloud, a toolkit often used to scaffold teaching and learning for reflection, critical thinking, and content learning. Addressing the issues in traditional word clouds, semantic word clouds have been…

In conventional laboratories, engineering students must attend in person to conduct experiments with real equipment in a physical place, where their work is mainly assessed through self-reports and attendance records. By comparison, online labs can record and analyze students' activities and behaviors automatically. Thus, this article proposes a…

The COVID-19 pandemic has suspended physical classes and influenced students from underprivileged groups more seriously due to their poor living conditions and digital disadvantages. To understand the impact of the constrained learning, we conducted a study on game-based learning to examine the effectiveness of computer-aided and autonomous…

This paper presents a method to design high-quality 3D equipment for virtual laboratories. A virtual control laboratory is designed on large-scale educational purpose with merits of saving expenses for universities and can provide more opportunities for students. The proposed laboratory with more than 30 virtual instruments aims at offering…

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…

Teachers' online discussion text data shed light on their reflective thinking. With the growing scale of text data, the traditional way of manual coding, however, has been challenged. In order to process the large-scale unstructured text data, it is necessary to integrate the inductive content analysis method and educational data mining…

Mobile learning is an emerging trend that brings many advantages to distributed learners, enabling them to achieve collaborative learning, in which the virtual teams are usually built to engage multiple learners working together towards the same pedagogical goals in online courses. However, the socio-technical mechanisms to enhance teamwork…