An experimental field study at a German university was conducted in order to test the effectiveness of an integrated learning environment to improve the acquisition of knowledge about empirical research methods. The integrated learning environment was based on the combination of instruction-oriented and problem-oriented design principles and…

Investigations of the relationships between contexts in which learning occurs and students' behaviours, cognitions and motivations may further our understanding of how instruction is related to students' development as self-regulated learners. In this study, student self-regulated learning strategies in problem-based learning and project-based…

A principal goal of higher education is to prepare students for the real-world challenges they will encounter upon graduation in their everyday life, in their work and in society. While discipline specific content knowledge is an important component of a college education, a 2010 survey of employers conducted for the Association of American…

Objective: To develop a totally online reality-based course that engages students and enables the development of enhanced teamwork and report-writing skills. Setting: Outbreaks of infectious diseases impacts upon commerce, trade and tourism as well as placing strains on healthcare systems. A general course introducing university students to…

This case-study compared traditional, face-to-face classroom-based teaching with asynchronous online learning and teaching methods in two sets of students undertaking a problem-based learning module in the multilevel and exploratory factor analysis of longitudinal data as part of a Masters degree in Public Health at Maastricht University. Students…

A growing literature exploring large-scale, identity-based political violence, including mass killing and genocide, debates the plausibility of, and prospects for, early warning and prevention. An extension of the debate involves the prospects for creating educational experiences that result in more sophisticated analytical products that enhance…

Open education, as embodied in open educational resources (OER) and OpenCourseWare (OCW), has met and dealt with several key problems. The movement now has a critical mass of available content. Leveraging no small amount of funding and associated development, open education has the tools to collect, disseminate, and support the discovery of open…

As part of an instrumentation course, a problem-based learning framework was selected for laboratory instruction. Two acquisition chains were designed to help students carry out realistic instrumentation problems. The first tool is a virtual (simulated) modular acquisition chain that allows rapid overall understanding of the main problems in…

Developing reflective teachers who will be committed to their professional mission and whose own development will represent a value is an important objective of the professional training of future teachers. This article deals with an evaluation of the module of instruction in teacher training that was directed at raising students' awareness of the…

Background: Education is aimed at students reaching conceptual understanding of the subject matter, because this leads to better performance and application of knowledge. Conceptual understanding depends on coherent and error-free knowledge structures. The construction of such knowledge structures can only be accomplished through active learning…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) in higher education based on a large sample of first-year undergraduates from two programmes at a Hong Kong University (n=132). One programme uses an entirely problem-based approach to learning, whilst the other uses traditional methods.…

Despite the national strategies and major efforts to promote pedagogical use of ICTs in education, training programs for in-service teachers have often failed to develop sustainable pedagogical practice. For sustainable development, teachers need to be offered opportunities to explore the role of technology in relation to their concept of language…

This study investigates how blending of different instructional approaches with technology affects students' engagement. A computer networks course was designed and implemented for the first eight weeks of the semester as a lecture-based blended learning environment and for the second eight weeks of the semester as a problem-based blended learning…

In programming courses, teaching students who have varied levels of knowledge and skills the requisite competencies to perform in real-world software development teams is indeed difficult. To address this problem, this paper proposes a community of practice (CoP) approach and provides some guidelines to simulate a real-world CoP in a blended…

The growing need for intercultural literacy in an increasingly interconnected and computer-mediated world contrasts with the dearth of investigation in best practices when designing simulations aimed at improving intercultural communication. Synthetic cultures inspired by real-world cultural traits, problem-based learning, and a social…