Background: During the past decade, the increasingly heterogeneous field of learning analytics has been critiqued for an over-emphasis on data-driven approaches at the expense of paying attention to learning designs. Method and objective: In response to this critique, we investigated the role of learning design in learning analytics through a…

Background: Leaderboards are among the most popular gamification elements in education. Some studies have implemented leaderboards and reported their individual effects on students' learning. Despite the emergence of relevant empirical studies, most of the existing reviews have only investigated the holistic impact of gamification. No previous…

Background: Learning analytics (LA) collects, analyses, and reports data from the learning environment, to provide evidence of the effects of a particular learning design. Learning design (LD) outlines the conceptual framework for a meaningful interpretation of Learning analytics data. Objectives: The study aims to identify the most relevant…

Background Study: As interest in programming education continues to grow, more educators are incorporating programming into K-12 classrooms. There is evidence that programming can help develop essential skills for future societal advancement, known as 21st century skills. However, there has been limited research into which sub-skills of 21st…

Background: Automatically graded programming assignments provide instant feedback to students and significantly reduce manual grading time for instructors. However, creating comprehensive suites of test cases for programming problems within automatic graders can be time-consuming and complex. The effort needed to define test suites may deter some…

Background: Emotional design of multimedia lessons involves adding features that are intended to increase learner enjoyment and promote learning--such as adding narrative, anthropomorphizing non-human elements, and using warm colours. Objective: The present study extends this work to examine the potential of Japanese animation (anime) for…

Background: Online interaction in blended learning is leveraged through social presence and convergence. However, little systematic work currently exists on how researchers have explored these challenges in higher education institutions and no studies have synthesised these challenges. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to give a novel…

Background: Skill integration is vital in students' mastery development and is especially prominent in developing code tracing skills which are foundational to programming, an increasingly important area in the current STEM education. However, instructional design to support skill integration in learning technologies has been limited. Objectives:…

Background: It is crucial to use innovative tools to gain clinical reasoning skills through experiential learning in pharmacy education, and one of the most effective tools used in this is virtual reality. However, the lack of research that empirically demonstrates the instructional principles of virtual environment design, especially in the…

Background: Zoomorphism, an obverse of conventional anthropomorphism, has been shown in many cases to be a powerful tool with respect to the metaphorical use of animals. Objectives: This study introduced zoomorphism into the instructional video design of pedagogical agents (PAs). Method: We first developed three image sets, each of which…

Background Study: Asynchronous online discussions are vital venues for collaborative knowledge construction. However, the lack of appropriate instruction designs poses challenges in promoting deep and substantive engagement with the core subject matter. This paper explores how to enhance adult students' knowledge construction in the context of…

Background: Research on cognitive effects of educational games in general shows promising results. However, there are large variations in learning outcomes between individual educational games. Research on the design process and different design elements of educational games has led to some interesting directions, but some design aspects remain…

The instructional effects of customization features in child learning games have rarely been examined. This value-added study addresses the existing gap with regards to user-initiated cosmetic customization of environment elements (i.e., non-avatar customization). Participants (N = 143; M[subscript age] = 9.41) studied a biological topic for about…

Background: How to improve learning with online multimedia lessons has attracted widespread concern. Prior studies have attempted to help students learn by breaking a video lesson into several segments. However, there has been a debate about whether learners can use pause time effectively and whether prompting them to engage in different types of…

Background: Driven by the ongoing need to provide high-quality learning and teaching, universities recently have shown an increased interest in using learning analytics (LA) for improving learning design (LD). However, the evidence of such improvements is scarce, and the maturity of such research is unclear. Objectives: This study is aimed to…