•Hints increased delayed transfer task performance only with reflection prompts.•Hints with reflection prompts also increase immediate transfer task performance.•Reflection prompts did not decrease ...learners’ enjoyment.
While giving learners hints is a commonly used scaffolding practice to facilitate learning, previous work questioned the effectiveness of hints. In this study, we examined if prompting learners to reflect along with receiving hints could improve learning outcomes, including immediate and delayed performance, perceived learning, and enjoyment. A field experiment was conducted in a four-week long online master’s degree course on data science where we compared two conditions: a condition with hints and a condition providing reflection prompts along with hints. Results showed that using hints with reflection prompts increased learner performance in delayed knowledge transfer tasks while also increasing learners’ perception of learning. The combination of reflection prompts and hints did not reduce learners’ enjoyment of the tasks, suggesting that the use of hints with reflection prompts is not only an intervention which can improve learning outcomes but is one which will be naturally adopted by learners.
Abstract Team cohesion is critical in driving successful outcomes for teams in collaborative learning settings. It shapes team behaviour, fostering shared perceptions, group synchrony and a common ...goal-oriented approach. This affinity becomes evident in dynamic interactions, offering insights into team behaviour through interaction data analysis. Interpreting interaction data proves complex, hampering our understanding and insights into shared team perceptions and task cohesion development. This paper used temporal motif analysis to examine the changes in team members’ cohesive perceptions and behaviours, including task cohesion, performance outcomes, engagement and group synchrony. Trace data from an online work-integrated learning environment captured learning behaviours, while responses to a questionnaire at different stages of a study program captured task cohesion and cohesive perceptions. The findings reveal teams with strong task cohesion and high performance tend to share similar cohesive perceptions driven by interdependent interactions. Conversely, teams with different cohesion perceptions have lower interaction interdependence and poorer performance. Through analysing team interaction data, this study uncovered key insights to promote positive adjustments aligning team perceptions, enhancing collaborative learning and offering support for improved performance, engagement and synchrony among teams, ultimately benefiting learning outcomes and the cultivation of skills and competencies.
One of the striking differences between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and previous innovations in the education technology field is the unprecedented interest and involvement of the general ...public. As MOOCs address pressing problems in higher education and the broader educational practice, awareness of the general public debate around MOOCs is essential. Understanding the public discourse around MOOCs can provide insights into important social and public problems, thus enabling the MOOC research community to better focus their research endeavors. While there have been some reports looking at the state of the MOOC‐related research, the analysis of the public debate surrounding MOOCs is still largely missing. In this paper, we present the results of a study that looked at the content of the public discourse related to MOOCs. We identified the most important themes and topics in MOOC‐related mainstream news reports. Our results indicate that coverage of MOOCs in public media is rapidly decreasing: by the middle of 2014, it decreased by almost 50% from the highest activity during 2013. In addition, the focus of those discussions is also changing. While the majority of discussions during 2012 and 2013 were focused on MOOC providers, the announcements of their partnerships, and million dollar investments, the current focus of MOOC discourse seems to be moving toward more productive topics focused on the overall position of MOOCs in the global educational landscape. Among different topics that this study discovered, government‐related issues and the use of data and analytics are some of the topics that seem to be growing in popularity during the first half of 2014.
This paper examines the discrete learning strategies employed within a massive open online course and their relationship to the student learning experience. The theoretical framework centered on the ...Community of Inquiry model of online education, which outlines the three critical dimensions (presences) of student learning experience: teaching, social, and cognitive presence. The Community of Inquiry survey instrument, administered as the part of the post-course survey, was used to measure student perceived levels of the three presences. Cluster analysis revealed three different groups of students with unique study strategies: limited users, selective users, and broad users. The strategies adopted significantly differed in student use of available tools and resources, final course grade, as well as the perceived levels of cognitive presence. The results also indicate there were significant differences regarding student commitment to learning, motivations and goals for enrolling in a MOOC, as well as goal orientation, approaches to learning, and the use of different study strategies. Implications for research and practice of online learning are further discussed.
•We examined student study strategies within MOOCs based on interaction log data.•Cluster analysis revealed three groups: limited, selective, and broad users.•Differences in final grades and pre- and post-course surveys answers were examined.•We observed differences in final grades and perceived levels of cognitive presence.•We observed differences across factors such as motivation and goal orientation.
The field of learning analytics was founded with the goal to harness vast amounts of data about learning collected by the extensive use of technology. After the early formation, the field has now ...entered the next phase of maturation with a growing community who has an evident impact on research, practice, policy, and decision-making. Although learning analytics is a bricolage field borrowing from many related other disciplines, there is still no systematised model that shows how these different disciplines are pieced together. Existing models and frameworks of learning analytics are valuable in identifying elements and processes of learning analytics, but they insufficiently elaborate on the links with foundational disciplines. With this in mind, this paper proposes a consolidated model of the field of research and practice that is composed of three mutually connected dimensions - theory, design, and data science. The paper defines why and how each of the three dimensions along with their mutual relations is critical for research and practice of learning analytics. Finally, the paper stresses the importance of multi-perspective approaches to learning analytics based on its three core dimensions for a healthy development of the field and a sustainable impact on research and practice.
This paper presents the results of a natural experiment investigating the effects of instructional conditions and experience on the adoption and sustained use of a learning tool. The experiment was ...conducted with undergraduate students, enrolled into four performing art courses (N = 77) at a research intensive university in Canada. The students used the video annotation software CLAS for course-based self-assessment on their performances. Although existing research offers insights into the factors predicting students' intentions of accepting a learning tool, much less is known about factors that affect actual adoption and sustained tool use. The study explored the use of CLAS amongst undergraduate students in four courses across two consecutive semesters. Trace data of students' tool use, graph-based measures of metacognitive monitoring, and text cohesion of video annotations were used to estimate the volume of tool use and the quality of the learning strategy and learning products created. The results confirmed that scaffolding (e.g., graded activity with instructional feedback) is required to guide students' initial tool use, although scaffolding did not have an independent significant effect on the quantity of tool use. The findings demonstrated that the use of the tool is strongly influenced by the experience an individual student gains from scaffolded conditions. That is, the students sustained their use of the learning tool in future courses even when the tool use was not graded nor was instructional feedback provided. An important implication is that students’ tool use is not solely driven by motivation – rather, it is shaped by instructional conditions and experience with the tool use.
•Existing research indicates that students' tool use is driven by assessment.•Current study looked at the effects of assessment and experience on tool use.•Students (N = 77) were requested to use a video annotation tool for self-assessment.•In contrast to existing research, the study found that assessment had no effect.•Experience however, developed in assessed conditions, had a significant effect.
This study presents an evaluation of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) survey instrument developed by Arbaugh et al. (2008) within the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The study reports ...the results of a reliability analysis and exploratory factor analysis of the CoI survey instrument using the data of 1487 students from five MOOC courses. The findings confirmed the reliability and validity of the CoI survey instrument for the assessment of the key dimensions of the CoI model: teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Although the CoI survey instrument captured the same latent constructs within the MOOC context as in the Garrison's three-factor model (Garrison et al., 1999), analyses suggested a six-factor model with additional three factors as a better fit to the data. These additional factors were 1) course organization and design (a sub-component of teaching presence), 2) group affectivity (a sub-component of social presence), and 3) resolution phase of inquiry learning (a sub-component of cognitive presence). The emergence of these additional factors revealed that the discrepancies between the dynamics of the traditional online courses and MOOCs affect the student perceptions of the three CoI presences. Based on the results of our analysis, we provide an update to the famous CoI model which captures the distinctive characteristics of the CoI model within the MOOC setting. The results of the study and their implications are further discussed.
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•We evaluated the Community of Inquiry (CoI) instrument within the MOOC context.•Results indicated a good fit of the original three-factor structure of CoI instrument.•Results also indicated the optimal fit of the six-factor model.•Additional factors captured the unique characteristics of the MOOC setting.•We provide an updated CoI model which emphasizes the specifics of the MOOC context.
Reference to teachers as agents of change has become commonplace in the education literature, including change toward more inclusive practice in response to the changing demographic of schooling. ...Yet, little is known about how teacher agency relates to (1) their understanding of, and commitment to any given change agenda and (2) the institutional and social structures through which they are able to access knowledge and resources within and beyond their schools. This study combined social and epistemic network analysis to examine teachers’ understanding of change and their sense of agency as they use their social networks to mobilise support for furthering change that matters to them. Our study is the first to apply this learning analytic approach in a real setting context. We used theories of teacher agency and inclusive pedagogy to interpret teachers’ social interactions in light of the extent to which they seek to make a difference toward greater inclusion. We collected data with an online log completed by teachers and other staff in two schools in Sweden over 6 months. The findings suggest that teachers understanding of change is embedded in their day-to-day activities such as student support, lesson planning, improvement of programs, and working conditions. Teachers tend to exercise agency toward inclusion when they seek to support student learning and well-being. When teachers act as agents of change, their social networks are bigger, more diverse and more collaborative than in situations in which they act as role implementers. We discuss substantive and methodological implications of these findings.
Background: Maintaining cohesion is critical for teams to achieve shared goals and performance outcomes within a work-integrated learning (WIL) environment. Cohesion is an emergent state that ...develops over time, representing the synchrony of different behavioural interactions. Cohesive teams will exhibit such phenomena by their temporal coordination of micro-level relations. Objectives: The primary aim of this study is to examine the cohesion of teams in learning environments using a learning analytics approach. Method: This study examines teams from higher education who participate in a WIL environment platform working in teams to develop their collaborative problem-solving skills. Here we show that temporal network motifs can be used as a proxy to measure cohesion. Results and Conclusions: We illustrate three clusters represented by team learning behaviours and found that each cluster has distinctive interactions with learning resources, performance outcomes, temporal network motif group characteristics and emergence over time using learning analytics. Implications: Applying temporal motifs as an analytics-based measure of cohesion is a starting point for understanding how cohesion develops over time without relying on surveys. We anticipate that the same approaches can be applied in most learning management systems containing trace data of teams and their interactions with learning resources to understand cohesion.
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