For students seeking careers not related to the computer sciences, the task of installation, configuration and maintenance of software on business class systems may be an essential skill. Dedicated computers are essential to these kinds of courses, but the constraints of university computer labs prohibit their use. Other solutions exist, but…

A simple computer interface for controlling a compact spectrograph for use as a spectrophotometer in an undergraduate teaching laboratory was developed. The project was implemented on a Raspberry Pi computer which permits the integration of a light source into the software. The interface was written in Python to facilitate modification by the user…

It is important, but very challenging, to design degree programs, so that the sequence of learning activities, topics, and assessments over three to five years give an effective progression in learning of generic skills, discipline-specific learning goals and accreditation competencies. Our CUSP (Course and Unit of Study Portal) system tackles…

An effective learning environment interface (LEI) is a means to enable students to focus on learning and to understand content, while establishing connections and relationships among course activities. Using this fundamental premise, we propose a flexible, user-centered, and seamless LEI which is intended to remediate the fragmented interface…

LOCO-Analyst is a learning analytics tool we developed to provide educators with feedback on students learning activities and performance. Evaluation of the first version of the tool led to the enhancement of the tool's data visualization, user interface, and supported feedback types. The second evaluation of the improved tool allowed us to see…

Higher education's interest in digital content, especially e-books, has gone off the charts. With the rapid acceptance of e-books for pleasure reading, attention has now shifted to e-textbooks and their promise of significant cost savings and cutting-edge features. But getting a good grasp on the fast-moving realm of digital content for higher…

Rough set theory (RST) is an emerging technique used to deal with problems in data mining and knowledge acquisition. However, the RST approach has not been widely explored in the field of academic achievement. This investigation developed an improved RST (IMRST) model, which employs linear discriminant analysis to determine a reduct of RST, and…

Self-explaining, which asks students to generate explanations while reading a text, is a self-constructive activity and is helpful for students' learning. Studies have revealed that prompts by a human tutor promote students' self-explanations. However, most studies on self-explaining focus on spoken self-explanations. This study investigates the…

From a theoretical viewpoint, educational interfaces that facilitate communicative actions involving representations central to a domain can maximize students' effort associated with constructing new schemas. In addition, interfaces that minimize working memory demands due to the interface per se, for example by mimicking existing non-digital work…

While there has been extensive experimental research on haptics, less has been conducted on cross-modal interactions between visual and haptic perception and even less still on cross-modal applications in instructional settings. This study looks at a simulation on the principles of levers using both visual and haptic feedback: one group received…

Learning Analytics can provide powerful tools for teachers in order to support them in the iterative process of improving the effectiveness of their courses and to collaterally enhance their students' performance. In this paper, we present the theoretical background, design, implementation, and evaluation details of eLAT, a Learning Analytics…

This paper introduces Ontoolsearch, a new search system that can be employed by educators in order to find suitable tools for supporting collaborative learning settings. Current tool search facilities commonly allow simple keyword searches, limiting the accuracy of obtained results. In contrast, Ontoolsearch supports semantic querying of tool…

Women's under-representation in fields such as engineering may result in part from female students' negative beliefs regarding these fields and their low self-efficacy for these fields. In this experiment, we investigated the use of animated interface agents as social models for changing male and female middle-school students' attitudes toward…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…

Engaging students in science learning can be challenging, and incorporating new forms of technology into science has been shown to provide creative learning experiences. However most technology enhanced learning and e-Science experiences to date have been designed and run by researchers. There is significant challenge in moving these experiences…