This article discusses paradoxes that, in theory and in practice, hinder the deployment of inclusive education. The first type of paradox is related to the confrontation between the humanist ideals conveyed by inclusive approaches and contemporary political discourses. These difficulties are linked to (1) the very concept of inclusion; in which…

Interacting with practitioners and understanding multiple, contradictory, and complex perspectives is an important skill for effectively managing terrestrial resources in the 21st century. Addressing these needs requires innovative approaches in higher education that elevate student learning outcomes and emphasize the affective learning domain…

A hands-on symmetry project is proposed as an innovative way of teaching point groups to undergraduate chemistry students. Traditionally, courses teaching symmetry require students to identify the point group of a given object. This project asks the reverse: students are instructed to identify an object that matches each point group. Doing so…

Current trends in e-Learning focus mainly on personalizing and adapting the learning environment and learning process. Although their increasingly number, theses researches often ignore the concepts of capitalization and reuse of learner experiences which can be exploited later by other learners. Thus, the major challenge of distance learning is…

Group and team tasks are the culminating outputs of student learning in team and collaborative learning environments. How they are conceived and designed, therefore, can directly determine the success of the pedagogical strategy. A key design issue for creating effective tasks is how best to focus student knowledge, observation, and analysis…

In the current time of globalization, collaboration among people in virtual environments is becoming an important precondition of success. This trend is reflected also in the educational domain where students collaborate in various short-term groups created repetitively but changing in each round (e.g. in MOOCs). Students in these kind of dynamic…

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

Thirteen years ago, 276 bachelor's-granting colleges and universities inaugurated a new approach to assessing college quality by participating in the first national administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This report summarizes what was learned over the NSSE's first 13 years, why the survey is being updated, and new…

Antibiotic resistance, genetically modified produce, avian flu, and invasive species persistence are just a few scientific issues pulled from the headlines that affect society on a daily basis. Understanding these issues requires knowledge of evolutionary processes. Educating students about evolution may never have been as necessary as it is…

An emerging trend in classrooms is the use of networked visual argumentation tools that allow students to discuss, debate, and argue with one another in a synchronous fashion about topics presented by a teacher. These tools are aimed at teaching students how to discuss and argue, important skills not often taught in traditional classrooms. But how…

Why not combine the use of technology with the excitement of a scavenger hunt that moves middle-level students out into the "wilds" of their school campus to classify plants? In the lesson plan described here, students embark on a botanical scavenger hunt and then document their findings using a digital camera. This project was designed to allow…

As collaborative learning in general, and pair programming in particular, has become widely adopted in computer science education, so has the use of pedagogical visualization tools for facilitating collaboration. However, there is little theory on collaborative learning with visualization, and few studies on their effect on each other. We build on…

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners' interactions is a…

This article proposes a categorization model for online distance education environments, based on two different aspects: interaction and content. The proposed categorization, which was based on the experience acquired in developing, implementing, and operating different remote training courses, is aimed at providing evidence to help educational…

This article presents a five-tiered taxonomy that describes the nature of participation in, and learning through, asynchronous discussion. The taxonomy is framed by a constructivist view of asynchronous discussion. The five tiers of the taxonomy include the following: (a) passive participation, (b) developmental participation, (c) generative…