The evolving landscape of higher education demands integrating advanced technologies to foster engaging and inclusive learning environments. This paper examines the practical integration of Stellarium, a virtual planetarium software, and ChatGPT, an AI conversational agent, in an asynchronous online undergraduate astronomy course. Stellarium…

Students are termed "multitaskers," and it is likely that they easily fall prey to other subjects or topics that most interest them. They occasionally took heed or gave close and thoughtful attention to the lectures they were on. In the current educational system, our young generations receive materials from their leftovers, and their…

Software engineers are tasked with writing functionally correct code of high quality. Maintainability is a crucial code quality attribute that determines the ease of analyzing, modifying, reusing, and testing a software component. This quality attribute significantly affects the software's lifetime cost, contributing to developer productivity and…

In the COVID-19 era, "Yellowdig" (an online discussion board with social media-like features) has increasingly risen to prominence in higher education. Reflecting on a multi-year experiment involving 14 international business and marketing courses, I argue that Yellowdig remains a valuable tool for learning even after returning to…

In this article, we describe a software system for assessment development in online learning environments in contexts where there are robust links to cognitive modelling including domain and student modelling. BEAR Assessment System Software (BASS) establishes both a theoretical basis for the domain modelling logic, and offers tools for delivery,…

This paper studies students engagement in e-learning environments in which students work independently and solve problems without external supervision. We propose a new method to infer engagement patterns of users in such self-directed environments. We view engagement as a continuous process in time, measured along chosen axes that are derived…

Fighter jets are a critical national asset. Because of the high cost of their manufacture and that of their related equipment, both pilots and maintenance personnel must complete intensive training before coming into contact with a jet. Due to gradual military downsizing, one-on-one training is often impracticable, and the level of familiarization…

Intelligent Tutoring System are state of the art in eLearning since the late 1980s. The earliest system have been developed in teams of psychologists and computer scientists, with the goal to investigate learning processes and, later on with the goal to intelligently support teaching and training with computers. Over the years, the eLearning hype…

This paper details the design, development and evaluation of an affective tutoring system (ATS)--an e-learning system that detects and responds to the emotional states of the learner. Research into the development of ATS is an active and relatively new field, with many studies demonstrating promising results. However, there is often no practical…

Aim/Purpose: In this paper, we highlight the need to monitor and diagnose adaptive e-learning systems requirements at runtime to develop a better understanding of their behavior during learning activities and improve their design. Our focus is to reveal which learning requirements the adaptive system is satisfying while still evolving and to…

E-learning is one of the most important learning approaches within which intelligent software agents can be efficiently used so as to automate and facilitate the process of learning. The aim of this paper is to illustrate a comprehensive categorization of intelligent software agent features, which is valuable for being deployed in the virtual…

Educators, policymakers, and the general public agree that social skills should be taught to children. In an effort to bridge this gap between evidence-based social skills training and populations in need, the authors have developed an Intelligent Social Tutoring System (ISTS) that fosters learning through adaptive interaction between the student…

The paper presents a case study of the use of conceptual tutoring software to promote deep learning of the scientific concept of density among 50 final year pre-service student teachers in a natural sciences course in a South African university. Individually-paced electronic tutoring is potentially an effective way of meeting the students' varied…

This paper describes a collaborative educational data mining tool based on association rule mining for the ongoing improvement of e-learning courses and allowing teachers with similar course profiles to share and score the discovered information. The mining tool is oriented to be used by non-expert instructors in data mining so its internal…

Electronic tutors able to respond appropriately to a user's input have been shown to be effective in improving learning in a number of contexts. This study extends this research into the context of conceptual change during in-service science teacher workshops. Quantitative data were collected from 1,049 South African grade 12 physical sciences…