The goals of the study were (a) to compare the instructional effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (VR) versus a desktop slideshow as media for teaching scientific knowledge, and (b) to examine the efficacy of adding a generative learning strategy to a VR lesson. In Experiment 1, college students viewed a biology lesson about how the human…

Mutation, diversity, natural selection and the biology of human pathogens (including antibiotic resistance) are key features of the biosciences curriculum at A Level and undergraduate study. Few resources exist to allow students to engage with these topics in an interactive manner. This paper describes an interactive, online simulation of mutation…

This paper gives a focussed summary of good practice taken primarily from engineers who are responsible for teaching topics related to systems and control. This engineering specialisation allows the paper to give some degree of focus in the discussions around laboratories, software and assessment, although naturally many of the conclusions are…

Students with special needs in mathematics lessons can be specifically supported through virtual reality (VR) if they are offered virtual learning environments that offer real benefits through their implementation in VR. In addition to learning by doing, the visualization of mathematical facts in 3D for the training of imagination can offer added…

Background: Topic of e-learning and virtual university in recent years is one of the important applications of information and communication technology in the world and most famous universities in the field of education development have done important steps. For as much as the importance of learning and development in every community, and to keep…

Laboratories studying the anisotropic rotational diffusion of bromobenzene using nuclear spin relaxation and molecular dynamics simulations are described. For many undergraduates, visualizing molecular motion is challenging. Undergraduates rarely encounter laboratories that directly assess molecular motion, and so the concept remains an…

Minecraft has become well established in the world of education. Around the world, the game is being used in a variety of educational settings for virtual project work and as a virtual world for collaboration and social interaction. Minecraft is an activity players want to talk about. It is a game they want to learn more about. In order to do…

As students increasingly use online chemistry animations and simulations, it is becoming more important to understand how students independently engage with such materials and to develop a set of best practices for students' use of these resources outside of the classroom. Most of the literature examining students' use of animations and…

In this paper, we argue that in order to get a fuller understanding of the complexity of conflict in democratic pedagogies in online and blended learning settings, it is important to know not only how to manage or resolve it, but also how it is triggered and can be avoided. The emancipatory nature of democratic pedagogies fosters differences, and…

Face-to-face training for Extension volunteers is no longer the only viable delivery mode. In times of rapid technological advances, we are faced with a plethora of options for offering volunteers the training and support they need. Zoom, an online videoconferencing platform, can easily be used to engage volunteers in professional development.…

This article describes the implementation and application of a metal deposition and surface diffusion Monte Carlo simulation in a physical chemistry lab course. Here the self-diffusion of Ag atoms on a Ag(111) surface is modeled and compared to published experimental results. Both the thin-film homoepitaxial growth during adatom deposition onto a…

Simulations are an underpinning pedagogy and tradition in some professional fields, such as medicine, yet are seldom used in education. In this study, the author reports on the findings of a reading assessment situation activity that she did with preservice early grade (kindergarten to grade 6) teachers. In addition to giving preservice teachers…

Results from previous studies indicated nursing students needed to further develop critical thinking (CT) especially with respect to employing it in their clinical reasoning. Thus, the study was conducted to support development of students' CT in the areas of inference subskills that could be applied as they engaged in clinical reasoning during…

Computer systems tend to be ubiquitous as they become more integrated in our everyday activities, embedded in tables, shoes, watch and plenty of others connected things (CT). In the e-learning field, the transformations induced by the Internet of Things (IoT) allow individuals to learn whenever they want, accessing a quantity of diverse digital…

The gold standard for identifying more effective pedagogical approaches is to perform an experiment. Unfortunately, frequently a hypothesized alternate way of teaching does not yield an improved effect. Given the expense and logistics of each experiment, and the enormous space of potential ways to improve teaching, it would be highly preferable if…