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…

In contrast to normative ethics, which emphasizes determining whether a person or action is good or bad and developing codes to govern individual behaviors, applied ethics focuses on the application of ethics to real-world problems and contexts of practice (Ethics Unwrapped, n.d.). In design-oriented disciplines such as instructional design and…

Mathematical writing in school is difficult to teach. Reasons include that it is a domain in which there are rules for some parts of the writing like for example mathematical notation while others must be negotiated locally in the classroom. Writing is also seldom separated from the process of solving mathematical problems, creating a situation…

One hundred years ago, Paul Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy independently proposed that living organisms interact with their environment through systems. In the century that has followed, systems thinking and modeling have grown in tandem with discovery of the vast complexity of the universe at microscopic through astronomic levels. As our…

This qualitative case study aimed to explore how novice instructional designers solved a real-world problem by proposing an instructional design model in Second Life. Twenty-one novice instructional designers who enrolled in a Distance Education course were tasked with proposing an instructional design model to solve the high drop-out rate problem…

There is a mismatch between established practice in Learning Design and the increasingly complex nature of the challenges the world is facing. This article connects Learning Design to complexity science so learners can be better equipped to create a thriving future. Learning Design methods have traditionally leant heavily upon the reduction of…

In this article, we present research on eight kindergarten and eight first-grade students' understandings of the arithmetic properties of commutativity, additive identity, and additive inverse during a classroom teaching experiment, selected from a larger study that included 88 students. In this study, we explore the students' types of…

The present study aimed to describe teachers' instructional flows when implementing a mathematical problem-posing task using scriptwriting technique. With matchsticks, a growing pattern that increases by a constant unit was created and presented to the teachers as a problem-posing situation. We analyzed the instructional flows in 50 scripts,…

Despite the efforts of instructional design (ID) to solve real-life problems, it remains challenging to adapt and be flexible in such situations. In particular, problems that require simultaneous knowledge of multiple domains and contexts are more challenging to solve because real-life problems do not reconstruct the learned experience. This is…

The emerging field of social entrepreneurship seeks to address social challenges in environments where traditional public sector institutions are weak or absent. With its explicit focus on solving problems, social entrepreneurship is inherently interdisciplinary. A well-designed undergraduate course in social entrepreneurship can enhance…

Various theories and models discuss how instructional designers can develop systems that allow learners to engage in problem-solving. To date, many of these theories and models that guide design often describe how learners engage in meaning-making within a situated context; however, they do not address strategies instructional designers can use to…

The goal of this article is to propose a framework for understanding the nature of "how people construct problems" by interacting with situations and subsequently to offer implications for instructional design and future research. We propose that people must interactively frame the components of a situation in order to establish the…

Background: Educational technologies typically provide teachers with analytics regarding student proficiency, but few digital tools provide teachers with process-based information about students' variable problem-solving strategies as they solve problems. Utilising design thinking and co-designing with teachers can provide insight to researchers…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to teachers. Teachers need a creative way to continue the engaged teaching process under the constraints of physical separation, emotional anxiety, and insecurity. Technology teachers who develop students' technology literacy or skills should be aware of the importance of integrating…

In summer 2020, Northeastern University developed a fully online curricular pathway for incoming fall first-year undergraduate students who could not learn in residence. This pathway included 18 Global Challenge (GC) courses, each designed around project-based learning (PBL), grounded in a complex problem defined by Northeastern University…