This paper presents an educational setting that attempts to enhance students' understanding and facilitate students' linking-inferencing skills. The proposed setting is structured in three stages. The first stage intends to explore students' prior knowledge. The second stage aims to help students tackle their difficulties and misconceptions and…

For a basic foundation in computer engineering, universities traditionally teach synchronous sequential circuit design, using discrete gates or field programmable gate arrays, and a microcomputers course that includes basic I/O processing. These courses, though critical, expose students to only a small subset of tools. At co-op schools like…

An e-learning discussion forum, an essential component of today's e-learning systems, offers a platform for social learning activities. However, as learners participate in the discussion forum, privacy emerges as a major concern. Privacy concerns in social learning activities originate from one learner's inability to convey a desired presentation…

The majority of an engineer's time in the software industry is spent working with other programmers. Agile methods of software development like eXtreme Programming strongly rely upon practices like daily meetings and pair programming. Hence, the need to learn the skill of working collaboratively is of primary importance for software developers.…

This paper discusses the proposed model of the collaborative virtual learning system for the introductory computer programming course which uses one of the collaborative learning techniques known as the "Think-Pair-Share". The main objective of this study is to design a model for an online learning system that facilitates the…

This research focuses on the development and implementation of an adaptive learning and grading system with a goal to increase the effectiveness and quality of feedback to students. By utilizing various concepts from established learning theories, the goal of this research is to improve the quantity, quality, and speed of feedback as it pertains…

Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is not an easy subject to learn. There are many challenges confronting students when studying OOAD. Students have particular difficulty abstracting real-world problems within the context of OOAD. They are unable to effectively build object-oriented (OO) models from the problem domain because they…

The paper presents the facilities offered by the open learner model maintained in the web-based, adaptive, activity-oriented learning environment SCALE (Supporting Collaboration and Adaptation in a Learning Environment), in order to guide online students who become disengaged and support their reengagement. The open learner model (OLM_SCALE)…

While Web 2.0 has no universal definition, it always refers to online interactions in which user groups both provide and receive content with the aim of collective intelligence. Since 2005, online software has provided Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, for little or no charge, that were formerly available only to wealthy organizations. Academic…

In this research, we examine the design, construction, and implementation of a dynamic, easy to use, feedback mechanism for social software. The tool was integrated into an existing university's online learning community (OLC). In line with constructivist learning models and practical information systems (IS) design, the feedback system provides…

This paper describes a methodology for use in teaching an introductory Database Management System (DBMS) course. Students master basic database concepts through the use of a multiple component project implemented in both relational and associative data models. The associative data model is a new approach for designing multi-user, Web-enabled…

Parameter passing is the mechanism by which various program modules share information in a complex program; this paper was a study of novice programmers' understanding of the parameter construct. The bulk of the data was collected from interviews with eight college students enrolled in a state university introductory computer programming course.…

Providing detailed, constructive and helpful feedback is an important contribution to effective student learning. Quality assurance is also required to ensure consistency across all students and reduce error rates. However, with increasing workloads and student numbers these goals are becoming more difficult to achieve. An automated feedback…