Research has illustrated the role visual design plays in effective communication and instruction. However, more research has yet to investigate how online course designers (i.e., anyone who designs online courses) add visual appeal to online courses. This study explored the visual design process in online course development. It examines how…

Adult learners are a significant proportion of distance learners and many of these students are working mothers. Several instructional design models center the learner, and this requires understanding the learner needs, strengths, and context. There is a gap in the literature describing the experience of modern working mother students in distance…

Although satisfaction with academic experience in the context of higher education has been an area of research for nearly 40 years, it is still unclear how pedagogical practices in the development of thinking skills are related to students' satisfaction. This study aims to investigate the relationships between students' satisfaction and the levels…

This article proposes a comprehensive AI curriculum tailored for young learners aged 11 to 14, emphasizing a humanistic approach. We review other AI curricula proposals for children and young people and underline that they focus primarily on AI's technological benefits and on learning coding and logic. Our curriculum explores human cognition that…

Second-order covariation is a form of mathematical reasoning that needs to be characterized both concerning students' cognitive processes and the design of tasks that promote it. This contribution aims to shed light on these two issues by comparing data related to the same learning experiment performed in two different learning environments:…

The digital transformation challenges teachers to constantly keep up to date with new technologies, often leading to a lack of time for further training and uncertainty in using these technologies. To address these challenges, this conceptual paper introduces the Teacher Copilot, a training and assistant system based on Large Language Models (LLM)…

The purpose of this study is to develop and examine the psychometric properties of the Online Course Overload Indicator (OCOI) and the Student Mental Fatigue Survey (SMFS). The OCOI was designed to measure students' perceptions of cognitive overload in online courses. The SMFS was used to assess students' perceptions of mental fatigue while taking…

The present study involved an experimental inquiry wherein the researcher examined the possible impact of "textual cues" and "summarising scaffolding" on cognitive load, mental model, and learning performance. The study was conducted on a sample of 122 primary school pupils from Hyderabad, India. It commenced on 20 January 2021…

Offering online courses can be seen as a way of enhancing the three essential "presences" (teaching, cognitive, and social) of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. Creating and enhancing cognitive, teaching, and social presences require an innovation for teachers during planning, implementing, and evaluating their online courses. As…

This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…

Echoing the increasing emphasis on STEM literacy, computational thinking has become a national priority in K-12 schools. Scholars have acknowledged abstraction as the keystone of computational thinking. To foster K-12 students' computational thinking and STEM literacy, students' ability to think abstractly should be enhanced. However, the existing…

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of curricular organization on student cognitive load and student performance in online learning environments. The findings of this study contribute to the development of usable instruction design principles for online education. This research study used the lens of cognitive load theory to…

Three-dimensional (3D) digital anatomical models show potential to demonstrate complex anatomical relationships; however, the literature is inconsistent as to whether they are effective in improving the anatomy performance, particularly for students with low spatial visualization ability (Vz). This study investigated the educational effectiveness…

This study explored the interaction between cognition and emotion in blended collaborative learning. The participants (n = 30) of this study were undergraduate students enrolled in a 16-week course on information technology teaching. These students were divided into six groups of five people each. The behavior modes of the participants were…

With the increase in online course enrollments each year, there is a continued examination of online course persistence, particularly in accelerated online courses. This examination of online course persistence has typically examined individual learner factors as contributors to persistence. However, research examining the institutional and…