Badges in education are an increasingly popular phenomenon, and a variety of questions exists as to the abilities and effectiveness of badges. In this study, the effect of digital badges within a Moodle-based online homework system was studied for an undergraduate general physics course at a large research-based university in northeast Taiwan. One…

The recent pandemic necessitated a migration to online instruction leading to concerns regarding the integrity of online assessments as a result of the presence of fee-based websites that disseminate answers to students. We validated this concern by evaluating student performance on an online quiz where some of the questions had easily searchable…

Students face several challenges when learning through traditional teaching settings. They need to accumulate huge amounts of factual knowledge from the courses, and to keep up-to-date with the prolific growth in health knowledge. Lack of awareness about digital technologies and non-exposure to digital-friendly environments have made learning even…

Research on impact in student achievement of online homework systems compared to traditional methods is ambivalent. Methodological issues in the study design, besides of technological diversity, can account for this uncertainty. Hypothesis: This study aims to estimate the effect size of homework practice with exercises automatically provided by…

Self-directed learning is learning in which the conceptualization, design, conduct and evaluation of new content is directed and driven by the learner itself. This is an essential skill for students in the 21st century. Many large undergraduate courses use an online homework system to engage the whole class in the course material simultaneously. A…

The online homework system WeBWorK has been successfully used at several hundred colleges and universities. Despite its popularity, the WeBWorK system does not provide detailed metrics of student performance to instructors. In this article, we illustrate how an analysis of the log files of the WeBWorK system can provide information such as the…

The emergent COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019 has affected the whole world in a short time. Therefore, schools have been closed worldwide, and online learning opportunities have been exploited. Although lessons are taught online, problems have been experienced about measuring and evaluating lessons. This quasi-experimental…

Flipped classrooms represent a new instructional paradigm for presenting K-12 instruction. Whereas in traditional classrooms new content is taught during the school day and application activities are assigned for homework, in flipped classrooms students are expected to acquire new content by working through assigned tasks at home prior to the next…

The use of online homework systems that require the purchase of an access code has become widespread. The purpose of this study is to examine student experiences with and perceptions of online homework systems with access codes. Postsecondary students (N = 966) completed a survey about the financial costs, perceptions of quality, engagement with,…

The logistics and cost of running large class tutorials to improve learning for students in high enrolment courses raise questions about whether the associated effort and cost are worthwhile. The option to replace these class activities with online homework with its promise of built-in feedback is attractive. Using an activity theory lens and an…

In Malaysia, the new teaching model of a flipped classroom is emerging in higher education with the aim of promoting student-centred learning. Hence the main purpose of this study is to identify the students' acceptance level, their perceptions, and the impact of their initial exposures to the flipped classroom model. With this in mind, a survey…

This study provides empirical evidence related to two critical assumptions in the student engagement literature in higher education--namely, the malleability of study effort and the causality of the relationship between study effort and student outcomes. We merged student-level administrative data on dormitory assignments, study effort in a hybrid…

GitHub is increasingly finding a role in academia to both encourage reproducible computational research and to foster a collaborative environment. We show that employing GitHub as an implementation of version control in engineering-related fields reinforces the 'design-build-evaluate' way of thinking and prepares students with skills they can use…

This study explores contradictions that emerge when utilizing a flipped classroom approach to university mathematics education. The work uses Activity Theory and its principle of dialectical contradiction as a theoretical framework to identify and analyse contradictions that arise in flipped mathematics classrooms for engineering students. Data…

This paper describes a reading assignment that resulted in students completing 80-90% of the assigned reading in a content-heavy science course taught in a flipped format. Students reported almost unanimously that the assignment was valuable in helping them learn the material, and a majority reported that other professors should adopt a similar…