Background: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers found themselves making a rapid and often challenging shift from in-person classroom teaching to teaching in an online environment. As teachers continue to learn about working in this new environment, research in cognitive and learning sciences, specifically findings from cognitive…

Interactive training environments typically include feedback mechanisms designed to help trainees improve their performance through either guided or self-reflection. In this context, trainees are candidate teachers who need to hone their social skills for their future classroom. We chose an interactive virtual training system as the basic research…

Although game-based learning has been increasingly promoted in education, there is a need to adapt game content to individual needs for personalized learning. Procedural content generation (PCG) offers a solution for difficulty in developing game contents automatically by algorithmic means as it can generate individually customizable game contents…

The study investigates the effect of e-learning, blended learning and classroom learning on students' achievement. Two experimental groups together with a control group from Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia were identified randomly. To assess students' achievement in the different groups, pre- and post-achievement tests were used. The…

This paper argues that the emphasis on orchestration as a metaphor for teaching in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments, featured in recent academic discussions, is an opportunity to broaden the scope of the inquiry into educational technology. Drawing on sociological literature and research that investigated the systemic factors that…

The shift towards communicative language teaching in recent decades has created pressure towards individualized pedagogy that arises from the diversity found within any group of learners. One of the richest areas of diversity in target language needs across learners is the lexis of the various discourse communities that different learners are…

The Personal Inquiry project is an investigation into the role that technologies can play in enabling effective inquiry. While it is generally agreed that inquiry-based learning has potential for student learning, especially in science, three main challenges remain. The first is to provide effective support for inquiry learning, for both students…

The idea of the "digital natives", a generation of tech-savvy young people immersed in digital technologies for which current education systems cannot cater, has gained widespread popularity on the basis of claims rather than evidence. Recent research has shown flaws in the argument that there is an identifiable generation or even a single type of…

In this paper, we describe the Mobile-IT Education (MIT.EDU) system, which demonstrates the potential of using a distributed mobile device architecture for rapid prototyping of wireless mobile multi-user applications for use in classroom settings. MIT.EDU is a stable, accessible system that combines inexpensive, commodity hardware, a flexible…

Despite huge efforts to position information and communication technology (ICT) as a central tenet of university teaching and learning, the fact remains that many university students and faculty make only limited formal academic use of computer technology. Whilst this is usually attributed to a variety of operational deficits on the part of…

Describes research that considered the aims and purposes of teaching information technology (IT) in secondary schools through a grounded theory investigation of trainee teachers' experiences and attitudes to their subject. Discusses two approaches to teaching: one focused on the purpose for using IT and used authentic data; and one focused on…

An overview of the experience of the opening two years of an institution-wide project in introducing electronic voting equipment for lectures is presented. Eight different departments and a wide range of group size (up to 300) saw some use. An important aspect of this is the organizational one of addressing the whole institution, rather than a…

Efforts to improve the educational process must focus on those most responsible for implementing it: the teachers. It is with them in mind that we propose a face-to-face computer-supported collaborative learning system that uses wirelessly networked hand-held computers to create an environment for helping students assimilate and transfer…

This paper describes a collaborative action research approach used to explore peer observation of teaching (POT) within the online environment. Although POT has become familiar in face-to-face teaching contexts, little is understood of its potential role in online settings. We conducted "virtual" focus groups to explore the experience…

This paper presents a structured environment for Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation, which we call the Argumentative Learning Experience (ALEX). The system aims to improve understanding of argumentation and to widen and deepen the space of debate among 16-18-year-old students. To use ALEX users make arguments by selecting and…