ISTES BOOKS

Preface

Omid Noroozi, Ismail Sahin — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Welcome to the world of technology-enhanced learning, where the boundaries of education are continually expanding, reshaped by the dynamic interplay of pedagogy, learning theories, and cutting-edge technology. In an era characterized by rapid advancements in digital tools, rapid developments of AI, and the ever-evolving needs of learners, this book aims to explore the transformative potential of technology in education. The field of technology-enhanced learning is a captivating intersection where educators, instructional designers, technologists, and learners themselves come together to delves into the myriad ways in which technology is reshaping traditional educational paradigms, democratizing access to knowledge, and enhancing the learning experiences of learners. It has now become clear that technology is not merely a supplemental tool but an integral part of the learning ecosystem. It is important to remember that technology is a tool, a means to an end. The true power of technology-enhanced learning lies not in the devices themselves but in how we leverage them to inspire, engage, and empower learners. This book is a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted world of technology-enhanced learning. From the rise of online learning platforms and the integration of artificial intelligence in education to the gamification of learning and the possibilities of virtual reality, each chapter offers a window into the transformative potential of technology. In this book, you will find insights, best practices, and case studies that will equip you to navigate the ever-changing landscape of education in the digital age.

Developing Graduate Students’ Academic and Workforce Skills: A Framework for Designing a TechnologySupported Graduate Student Peer and Professional Mentoring Program

Abby Rohn McGuire, Revanthsai Gajula — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

This chapter describes the design of a model peer and professional mentoring program based on the Community of Inquiry Framework and centered on academic and professional development for graduate students enrolled in online and hybrid courses in the Master of Science in Administration program at a regional comprehensive university. The peer and professional mentoring program framework is centered on the strategic integration of technology, specified in the program’s design, goals, content, and evaluation plans. The framework is grounded in empirical research and informed by multiple sources of data and a needs analysis. Through technology-supported learning, along with the engagement and leadership of peer and professional mentors, the program centers on supporting and developing students by providing connections to enhance students’ learning experiences, revealing the hidden curriculum, fostering academic support, and developing professional and workforce skills. The design and development of this program provides a research-based, technology-enhanced framework for institutions seeking to design similar programs to support students academically and professionally.

Students’ Perception of Engagement with Technology during COVID-19 Emergency Remote Learning

Lizeng Huang, Chin-Hsuan Wu — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Guided by an engagement framework proposed by Fredricks et al. (2016), this qualitative study investigated four categories of student engagement: cognitive engagement, behavioral engagement, affective engagement, and social engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency remote learning (ERL), and what were students’ perceptions on these four engagements with technology use. The study collected data from six video conference software interviews, and the six participants were purposefully sampled to yield diverse information. The results show that technology has played important roles in student engagement. Technology, on one hand, was perceived to help students’ cognitive processing as well as to connect students and build their sense of belonging. It also served to connect the learning communities and keep students positively emotional engaged. On the other hand, technology was also perceived as a distracting factor for students, hindered the collaboration between students and their professors, and brought negative emotions to students during ERL. This study sheds light on the relationship between technology and student engagement during a special ERL environment, and hopefully it provides implications for future practice and research in an ERL environment context and beyond.

New Literacy Instruction Strategies in the Light of Higher Education Hybridization

Cristina Dumitru — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

The development of e-learning and the massive introduction of distance learning technologies into the educational process are the main trends in the development of education throughout the world. The widespread utilization of digital tools tries to harmonize the educational process by improving the means of planning and organizing the educational process, extending the use of active learning methods and the transition to a personalized and a more effective organization of the educational process. Digitalization is an opportunity for all actors that are participating in the educational process to become co-creators of the educational content. Teachers in the new educational format should have (1) scientific and methodological knowledge to implement educational programs by using distance learning technologies; (2) practical skills to adapt the educational content to the distance teaching, and (3) organizational and technical abilities to connect and interact with students. The amount of content uploaded online every minute is immense, far exceeding the ability of a regular student to process it. The challenge is to practice their literacy skills to help them navigate through this great amount of informational content, to benefit from it and not to be overwhelmed. It is equally important to be able to prevent its dangerous and harmful effects.

Gender Equality in Online Education in Higher Education: A Literature Review

Meinrad Lembuka — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Tanzania embraces online education as the ideal of providing more educational opportunities for minority groups, women and those who cannot access the educational system in the regular way. As learning and technology intersect in tertiary institutions worldwide, implications about the ways women and men engage in online learning environments have become an important issue to examine. The article used a systematic literature review method to assess the gender equality in online higher education in Tanzania. The review has shown that online education offered opportunities for studying without the constraints of time and place, female students were more reflective in their learning, appeared less hesitant to engage in the online environment, felt they had more control over their learning and found the mode a positive experience compared to face to face courses in similar academic area, Also it allowed accessibility for people who are prevented by work and family commitments or by other factors such as disabilities or lack of mobility to attend classes but who enjoy a degree of flexibility in their schedules. However in online education learning process women have more domestic and family commitments than men, often mature women face significant barriers through multiple commitments and have serious financial burdens, unequal distribution of men and women in different subject areas. Also online education has provided for many women, perhaps their only chance to learn when other educational institutions were inaccessible to them. In Tanzania and other developing countries to achieve gender equality in both conventional and online education requires system-wide from National policy framework to institutional level change in the way policies and realistic plans are developed to ensure no one is left behind.

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Pedagogy for Quality Education: Insights and Prospects

Dippi Verma, Santosh Satyanarayan Baheti, Rameesha Kalra — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Due to digitization and technological enhancement, there has been immense transformation worldwide in the last several decades, and education is also not an exception. With this, the philosophy of the education sector has also changed substantially. Technology Enhanced Learning is the application of communication and information to enhance the outcome of teaching and learning(Shen & Ho, 2020). It disrupts the conventional education system and innovation adoption to attain quality education. The Chapter reviews the past 20 years of research on TEL and identifies the performance of research, influential authors, and documents. It also analyses the prominent themes. In addition, the paper also discusses some of the pedagogical models integrating technology.

Effects of Blended Learning Approach on English Performance of Students at Primary Level

Muhammad Hafeez, Samikshya Bidari, Zahid Zulfiqar — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

The objective of this quasi-experimental study was to determine the effects of blended learning on the English performance of grade 3 primary students. The students were evaluated in three areas of linguistic proficiency in English: comprehension, verb usage, and punctuation. The respondents were divided into two groups: Experimental 30 students and control 19 students from grade three. A pre-test was administered at the start of the study and a post-test after 6 weeks of teaching using blended and traditional methods, respectively. Three hypotheses and three research questions were formulated to find the effects of blended learning approach on students’ performance in English at the primary educational level. The results were analyzed using SPSS-25 and the findings showed significant improvement in the students' English skills through blended learning approach. The study recommends that advanced technological tools must be used to improve the academic performance of the learners.

Using Multi-Stakeholder Perspectives to Enhance Integration of Mobile Technology for Students with Communication Needs

Kathryn Lubniewski, Lori Price, Yao Du, Nikita Soni — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Digital technology is increasing rapidly in educational environments for students. Teachers, special educators and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are adopting and using mobile applications creating a demand for robust apps that support evidence-based practice, and can be integrated flexibly into a variety of environments with diverse populations and their specific educational goals. SLPs are not only using mobile technology in practice, but contributing to the design of mobile applications (apps) by influencing the design of apps, and by designing apps themselves. This chapter explores how SLPs implement, design and develop effective speech therapy apps using perspectives from multiple stakeholders including teachers, students, clinicians, parents, technologists, and institutions. These insights and processes were gathered using 50 semi-structured interviews with SLPs, SLP app designers, and designers, which were transcribed, coded, and analyzed via template analysis and thematic analysis. From the data, teachers and key stakeholders will be able to generalize and apply the information to their classroom and students.

Social Constructivist Learning Principles for Designing Online Learning Environment

Yusufu Gambo — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

There are several challenges confronting educational institutions, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the transition from in-class teaching and learning to an online learning environment, and supporting, engaging, and motivating distant, remote, and isolated students in an online learning environment. Online learning systems may identify and collect students' real context of learning situations and interactions with the learning environment. The online learning environment can be supported using social constructivist learning for an active online learning engagement. However, there is a scarcity of a well-defined methodology for deriving social constructivist learning principles that can guide the design of an online learning environment for authentic learning experiences. This chapter explored the goal, principles, and framework of constructivist theory. After that, compared with the attributes of social constructivist learning to develop the learning principles. These thematic learning principles are multi-perspectives, collaborative, contextual, and reflective and can support active and authentic learning experiences in an online learning environment. These learning principles are useful for learning designers and those supporting students' active learning process in an online environment for personalized and inclusive learning experiences.

The Impact of Virtual Flipped Learning on Gifted and Non-Gifted Students’ Motivation from L2 Motivational SelfSystem Lens: Does Giftedness Cause Distinct Motivation?

kamal Heidari — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

COVID-19 has borne drastic effects on different areas of society, including the education area, in that it brought virtual education to the center of attention, as an alternative to in-person education. In virtual education, the importance of flipped learning doubles, as students are supposed to take the main responsibility of teaching/learning process; and teachers play merely a facilitative/monitoring role. Given the students’ responsibility in virtual flipped learning, students’ motivation plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of this learning method. The L2 Motivational Self-System (L2MSS) model is a currently proposed model elaborating on students’ motivation based on three sub-components: ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience. Drawing on an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research design, this study probed the effect of virtual flipped learning (via SHAD platform) on 112 gifted and non-gifted students’ motivation based on the L2 MSS. This study uncovered that notwithstanding the point that virtual flipped learning improved both gifted and non-gifted students’ motivation, it differentially affected their motivation. In other words, gifted students mostly referred to ideal L2 self, while non-gifted ones referred to ought-to L2 self and L2 learning experience aspects of motivation.

Integration of Mentimeter into the Classroom: A Scoping Review

Fatemeh Ranjbaran, Abdullah Al-Abri, Hadi Sobhanifar — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0300

The rapid development in technology and information has inspired educators to explore innovative technological resources and assets to promote the quality of teaching and learning. Student Response Systems (SRS) have been acknowledged as having a significant influence on student engagement, motivation, and overall achievement. This scoping review investigated the integration of Mentimeter in the educational context to determine its effectiveness for both teaching and learning processes. The included studies were screened for only those that investigated the use of Mentimeter in the classroom, while including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, short articles, book chapters, and review articles from 2015 to 2022 that were available in English without limitation on discipline. The 57 publications that met the eligibility criteria were coded for various characteristics, the most significant of which are discipline, geographical region, publication type, research method and outcomes. Our results reveal the numerous merits gained from integrating Mentimeter in educational settings, including: 1) benefits not only to enriching student-centered pedagogy, but also encapsulating a diverse audience of cultural backgrounds and competencies; 2) providing immediate feedback for anonymous student responses; 3) enhancing student motivation; 4) engaging students’ active participation. The results of this study provide initiatives for teachers and educational researchers to conduct further research on various educational technology platforms, and highlight the advantages of integrating technology into the educational setting. While teachers and practitioners persevere to transform the learning experience through technology, we emphasize the necessity for continuous research to investigate different learning platforms that considerably improve learning outcomes.