The rise of Artificial Intelligence technology has raised concerns about the potential compromise of privacy due to the handling of personal data. Private AI prevents cybercrimes and falsehoods and protects human freedom and trust. While Federated Learning offers a solution by model training across decentralized devices or servers, thereby…

Collaborative learning provides learners with significant opportunities to collaborate on solving problems and creating better products. There has been a growing utilization of adaptive and intelligent systems to support productive learning while promoting collaborative practices. One of the core capabilities of these adaptive and intelligent…

Deep learning techniques are being unified for decision support in various applications. However, it remains challenging to train robust deep learning models, due to the inherent insufficient labeled data that is usually time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning is a feature representation learning paradigm to learn robust…

Within the broad, interdisciplinary field of adult education, affective aspects of experience and the roles they play in learning have, thus far, not been properly theorized or researched. This dissertation first explores how John Heron's whole person theory (WPT) conceptualizes feeling as an expansive affective capacity at the root of all human…

Living and teaching in Merauke, Papua, Indonesia, the researcher discovered a problem not only with his own teaching methods, but with the methodology used by other faculty at the Bible school where he taught. When the student could not answer simple questions from the Bible, the obvious question became, "Why could they not answer these…

While the challenges of collecting multiple streams of digital trace data are diminishing with the help of the rapid development of learning technologies, the challenges of analyzing and understanding multimodal interactions remain substantial. Diverse multimodal data sources, such as digital tool use, speech, gesture, and more, can make it…

This dissertation investigates how collective process-oriented documentation tools, combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, can enhance knowledge construction in hands-on, open-ended learning environments, such as makerspaces. Through a three-year design-based research, the study developed and tested a collective documentation…

With the widespread use of technology in education, the nature and role of technology in the process of learning are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. There is a need to shift the focus of education technology from innovating around tools to innovating around designing new digital learning environments. Designing digital learning…

This interpretive case study explores how adults within an intentional learning community make meaning of vocational calling (Dewey, 1966), collective learning (Kilgore, 1999), and a sense of place (Low & Altman, 1992) and the interactive and interrelated connections between these constructs. The context for this study was set at a retreat…

Amid a long period of deskilling in art school curricula, craft has been denigrated as inferior to art and confining for artists, but can craft liberate imagination? The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between an adult learner's self-perceived capacity for imaginative expression in representational drawing and the…

Online learning is increasingly prevalent in higher education. The current study explores how learning takes place in online discussions; an activity often found in online courses. Activity Theory is used to understand the contributions of individuals to the process of socially constructing knowledge within small groups. The Community of Inquiry…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

Intercultural competence (IC) is essential for fostering meaningful interactions and understanding in diverse environments, particularly in today's pluralistic societies. The impacts of both intercultural competence and incompetence are profound, shaping relationships and outcomes in various ways. Many definitions of IC emphasize being 'effective'…

This dissertation study was set within a collaborative, discussion-based classroom intervention called Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR). In this study, I aim to examine teacher scaffolding moves, or strategies used to support students' learning, in relationship with student equity in CSR discussions. Equity indicators analyzed include uptake,…

"Vicarious learning" research is a burgeoning area of inquiry, which examines the learning of students who observe and are engaged with video- or audio-taped presentations of other people engaged in learning (Chi et al., 2008). In such studies, the students or "vicarious learners" (VLs) are positioned as indirect participants…