The ability to design effective technology-enhanced learning (TEL) experiences is a critical skill for university teachers. However, challenges endure on how best to develop university teachers in research-intensive universities to design TEL experiences that meet student, professional, and employer expectations. Having a greater insight of the…

Adaptive learning is an educational method that uses computer algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to customize learning materials and activities based on each user's model. Adaptive learning has been used for more than 20 years. However, it is still unique, and no other system could bring more or even similar capabilities than the ones…

Adaptive Learning, as a new online learning environment, intends to individualize the learning experience for each individual learner. Adaptive Learning suffers many shortcomings, as the date of the publication of this dissertation, however, it is considered the next generation of the learning environment for at least the next twenty years;…

Instructors in STEM classrooms often frame students' interactions with technologies to help them learn content. For instance, in many STEM domains, instructors commonly help students translate physical 3D models into 2D drawings by prompting them to focus on (a) orienting physical 3D models and (b) generating 2D drawings. We investigate whether…

Most Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) research studies have focused on students' demographics, surveys, and retention data, while little attention has been paid to the authentic voices of the learners: the expressions of experiences, perceptions, and emotions in the MOOC students' own words. In this paper, we conducted and analyzed in-depth…

Instructional technologists and faculty in post-secondary institutions have increasingly adopted learning analytics interventions such as dashboards that provide real-time feedback to students to support student' ability to regulate their learning. But analyses of the effectiveness of such interventions can be confounded by measures of students'…

Learning within the sciences is often considered through a quantitative lens, but acquiring proficiency with the symbolic representations in chemistry is arguably more akin to language learning. Representational competencies are central to successful communication of chemical information including molecular composition, structure, and properties.…

The impact of social media, such as Facebook in various fields including education is undeniable. The main objective of this study is to examine the effect of the interaction between students' learning styles and learning approaches on their achievements in the chemistry subject using the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) method through Facebook. The…

Personal response systems ("clickers") have become an important means for instructors to gauge student learning in large lecture classes. In addition to measuring students' performance on a particular question, requesting a measure of mental effort from students allows for richer data concerning student learning. This information can be…

As society's interactions with web technology mature from novelty to familiarity and finally into transparence for users, it becomes important to reexamine what modern students are taking from their experiences with educational technology. Students in a physical chemistry laboratory course interacted with a hypermedia learning environment as part…

There is a huge challenge of high failure rate in physical science across the world and South Africa, in particular at the high school level in recent times. This is in spite of the fact that both the educators and learners go to schools almost on daily basis perhaps doing the same thing in the same way and manner and achieving the same level or…

This paper reports the findings of a study of student attitudes and student improvement in conceptual understanding using conceptests with an electronic response system in lecture courses. Students and instructors valued the feedback and interaction that the response system afforded. For a majority of the chemistry topics studied, student…

Clickers are electronic response devices with which a student can remotely submit responses to questions or problems posed by a teacher. The problems are typically true-false or multiple-choice questions, but can also include numerical problems. Clicker devices are particularly popular in large-enrollment introductory science, technology,…

Learning the wealth of information in metabolic pathways is both challenging and overwhelming for students. A step-by-step guided discovery approach to the learning of the chemical steps in gluconeogenesis and the citric acid cycle is described. This approach starts from concepts the student already knows, develops these further in a logical…

Described is a series of computer tutorials developed to teach students a logical method of problem solving for chemistry. The structure, pedagogy, and problem-solving strategies of the computer software program are described. (CW)