Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use Fink's (2013) taxonomy of significant learning in a retail marketing class to help rural, price-sensitive students develop empathy toward high-end urban customers while becoming self-directed learners. Design/methodology/approach: Using a 16-week pilot course, students developed a gaming prototype and…

Computer games are effective instructional tools used in programming courses to increase students' motivation and engagement. This participatory action research aims to redesign the Object-Oriented Programming course in which the first author is both the instructor and researcher to make it more effective and efficient. In the first step of the…

This paper elaborates on the notion of object-oriented collaborative learning by building on empirical material from two case studies in higher education. Prior empirical findings show how knowledge objects are evolving entities, shaped by the interactions between participants, and how students learn from engaging in knowledge practice that…

This article reports on the design, development, and validation of a new instrument, the Technology-Enabled Active Learning Inventory (TEAL), to measure students' perceptions of active learning in a technology-enabled learning context. By laying the theoretical foundation, a conceptual framework for technology-enabled active learning was…

There is a growing interest in the application of digital games to enhance learning across many educational levels. This paper investigates pre-service teachers' ability to operationalize the learning principles that are considered part of a good digital game (Gee, 2007) by designing digital games in Scratch. Forty pre-service teachers, enrolled…

In this design case, we present an instructional design project that resulted in a French language learning game development system. What we describe here is not the game itself, but rather the pedagogical intervention that created what the design team termed a mobile "application farm," which in turn produced the game. The term…

Software process modeling (SPM) is an important area of software engineering because it provides a basis for managing, automating, and supporting software process improvement (SPI). Teaching SPM is a challenging task, mainly because it lays great emphasis on theory and offers few practical exercises. Furthermore, as yet few teaching approaches…

This paper presents a course design model created in response to the pedagogical challenges inherent in a 'Big Questions' course in the humanities. We conceptualize the model as an Open Dynamic Educational Project (ODEP), namely, a carefully designed learning environment--physical, intellectual, and digital--which comprises "both" a…

Courses in virtual learning environments can leave recently enrolled participants in a state of loneliness, confusion and boredom. What course content is essential in the course, where can more information be found and which assignments are mandatory? Research has stated that learner control and motivation are crucial issues for successful online…

Programming assignments are commonly used in computer science education to encourage students to practice target concepts and evaluate their learning status. Ensuring students are engaged in such assignments is critical in attracting and retaining students. To this end, WebHat, a service-based program evaluation platform, is introduced in this…

An in-depth qualitative study with nine secondary pre-service teachers from an undergraduate "Language and Literacy" class was conducted to examine the potential of simulation using Second Life (SL) in teacher education. Games and simulations were operationally defined in the broadest sense to distinguish key characteristics between…

The author's gaming-simulation course at Western Carolina University has been 30 years in the making. Its structure, content, and instructional methods are heavily influenced by the author's professorial aspirations and experience in the use of simulations. In this brief article, the author shares some of his early use of educational games and…

This article describes the authors' experience of developing a business gaming course for business people in Japan. The course that was developed consists of (a) simple gaming experiments among multiple students using ALEXANDER ISLANDS, a tiny business game on the World Wide Web; (b) lectures to make the students understand the core concepts of…