A strategic priority for university educators is to ensure graduates have developed a range of transferable skills. An important skill required by employers is the development of digital capabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the move of courses into blended formats which provided an opportunity for educators to redesign their modules to…

Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students' use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

Microscopy skills are critical for many aspects of biology, yet they are notoriously difficult to teach, especially to large classes. We trialled the use of widescreen monitors with touch-screen capability connected to compound microscopes in an introductory-level plant biology lab. Working in teams, students used the screens to interpret,…

This study examined some of the methodological approaches used by students to construct causal maps in order to determine which approaches help students understand the underlying causes and causal mechanisms in a complex system. This study tested the relationship between causal understanding (ratio of root causes correctly/incorrectly identified,…

The focus of research into the use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) in the classroom has been largely in relation to teacher-pupil interaction, with very little consideration of its possible use as a tool for pupils' collaborative endeavour. This paper is based upon an ESRC-funded project, which considers how pupils use the interactive…

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have been widely introduced to English primary schools (5-11 years) in the last decade and this has generated much research interest. In the past, research has focused on IWB-use in teacher-led sessions, attending particularly to the nature of teacher-pupil interaction at the IWB and the apparent motivational…

This paper is a study on the interaction patterns of distance learners enrolled in the Mathematics and Physics programmes of Universiti Sains Malaysia in the videoconferencing learning environment (VCLE). Interaction patterns are analysed in six randomly chosen videoconferencing sessions within one academic year. The findings show there are more…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…