Enhancing Learning Through Technology

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE

• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

• CONTENTS

This opening chapter provides an overview of the challenges currently facing educational institutions, particularly universities, with respect to both learners and the array of new and emerging technologies confronting tertiary educators. In addressing these challenges, the perspective taken is an institutional one, illustrating how institutions can act strategically to both encourage innovation and, at the same time, ensure that the technological underpinnings of the learning and teaching environment are stable and supportive. A particular example is used, showing how the development of strategic planning and documentation can guide the three key aspects of governance, policy and process with respect to the use of educational technology.

Traditionally, automation engineering education is one of the hardest education program to teach online because of the need for providing practice & hands-on experiences at a distance. Currently, practical training is still applied on the shop floor to discipline students to empower them with practical experience. How to build up students' practice ability through an e-learning system is an important research issue. To address such issue, this study developed an interactive semantic web based Virtual Reality (VR) system to enhance students' practice abilities. Four kinds of manufacturing technology are established in this system: turning, milling, spraying, and laser marking. This system allows students to select different process parameters to view entire manufacturing processes in real time. This study reports the development such VR e-learning system in teaching automation technology courses. It also discusses how the e-learning system enhances the quality, scale, and breadth of technological education. This study has opened up an opportunity of change to the traditional practical training method. It demonstrates a great enhancement in teaching effectiveness through the use of ICT technologies.

Educators regularly use media to engage and enhance the learning experience for students. Suggested is that the evolving ubiquitous nature of New Media websites such as YouTube provides possibilities for engaging students within a new “Learning Ecology”. A landscape whereby collaborative and (co)creative spaces are emerging for engaging students in the creation, critical assessment and personalization of “New Media” that can be used within teaching and learning.

YouTube, an example of New Media, is a free video-sharing website that has rapidly become a popular way to upload, share, view, and comment on video clips. With more than 100 million people visiting the site per day and more than 65,000 videos uploaded daily, it provides educators with a rich visual resource to engage the net generation student.

However in order for a new learning tool, be it print, multimedia or video to be adopted, educators must be able to conceptualize the possibilities for use within a sound framework. This paper will focus on the educational possibilities of incorporating New Media websites such as YouTube (as an illustrative example of New Media) within a pragmatic framework. Suggestions for the effective incorporation of New Media into the student learning experience will be explored.

This chapter deals with results obtained through active research conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the ‘Surf Equipment, Design Materials and Construction’ course unit. This 2^nd year unit is offered at Edith Cowan (ECU) University (South West Campus) in Bunbury (W.A., Australia) as part of the Surf Science and Technology (SST) course. It aims to engage students in research and technological activities related to design modelling, materials' selection, optimisation procedures, and performance testing when working on their individualised fins and surfboards. So far, only little has been published about the effects of surfboard/fin design and materials on performance and durability, and from this, it is clear that the opinion of various users and designers on the importance of surfboard design features with respect to performance is in conflict. Consequently, the driving force and rationale for this study is associated with four principal issues. The first one looks at the need for technology education to respond in a quicker and more flexible way in order to keep up to date with advances in scientific, technological and industrial fields. The second one deals with the necessity to gain a deeper understanding of Australia's industry needs in order to stay competitive in the worldwide market and prepare a universal ‘generic’ teaching module for teaching, learning and training purposes to address such issues. The third one considers the need to eliminate the use of expensive testing equipment that is not always available in remote campuses, and to devise the test and facilities for carrying out experiments and training exercises from available resources in order to get both reliable and accurate results from a practical point of view. Finally, the fourth one deals with the necessity to better understand the students' diversity and technical decision-making ability and to reflect on it properly in practice in order to make technology education more attractive to a wider student audience. In this study, over the course of several units the students were taught to understand materials, art and design-related features, quality management, standards and safety engineering. After acquiring the necessary skills, they were encouraged to design, produce and test their own fins and surfboards. In an open learning environment they felt free to combine research science with hands-on skills to develop their ideas. The teaching mode involved lecturer's assistance (by face-to-face and/or via websites), including videos and the additional presence of professional shapers. On completion, each student was required to submit an individual project report and prepare materials for a 15 minute debate for sharing ideas, results and achievements with group members. To assist in the analysis of the sample results, and to provide a quantitative comparison of relative importance of each qualitative criterion with respect to other criteria associated with surfboard design features and performance, a statistical method was established. This allowed the results to be discussed from both qualitative and quantitative points of view and to create a mutually involving and stimulating topic for the students and the lecturer. This information assisted in the optimisation of fins and surfboards. The students' attitudes to project-related issues and effectiveness of teaching initiatives were evaluated from pre-tests and post-tests – group design – experiments and surveys. It was found that those students who worked closely with experienced supervisors believed that they were better prepared for solving technically-oriented problems in design and production, and reported more satisfaction with their individually designed surfboards and fins than those relying on web-sites and video links.

This chapter investigates tag visualization for tag-enabled web applications. We propose an approach which allows users to adjust different settings, such as formulae, number of font sizes and number of tags, so as to improve the tag cloud quality. A series of experiments about the visualization effects are conducted. Based on the experimental results, some recommendations on choosing the formulae, number of font sizes and number of tags are made.

The use of Learning Objects (LOs) promises to increase the effectiveness of learning by making contents more readily available, by reducing the cost and effort of producing quality content, and by addressing the need for greater adaptability to fit the unique needs of learners and to enable greater flexibility for customization of learning. A key issue in the diffusion of LOs is preparing teachers to integrate them into lesson planning and teaching practice. This key factor is often neglected in practice and leads to teachers feeling more puzzled than attracted by repositories of LOs. This paper proposes to explicitly prepare teachers on this activity starting from the beginning of pre-service teacher training. This will cultivate a positive attitude and start a constructive tradition in the sharing of educational material at the early stage of teaching training. Critical reflection has a central role to the success of the diffusion of LOs and helps teachers to better understanding the potential of peers' educational material and producing effective and easily re-usable LOs. This paper provides a discussion of the role of Learning Objects in the context of teacher training. The overall objective is to emphasize on the importance early introduction of LOs concepts and suggest an approach to teacher preparation on LOs based on our collective experiment results over the past three years. Central of the approach is a description of the characteristics of the preparation program and the conceptual framework of approach.

The potential and shortcomings of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software have been widely discussed. This chapter focuses on a selection of software reviewed and chosen for use in a CALL lab at one institution. The types of software, the reasons for their selection, and the challenges involved in their commissioning and usage is discussed.

Measurement of student learning, and the necessity for such benchmarked measurement for all stakeholders is described, particularly in the context of developmental English writing and reading courses taught within the institution. Accountability for learning,a the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in learning, as well as the merits of using a cumulative assessment model are explored.

The chapter concludes by suggesting that computer mediated learning, used appropriately, in conjunction with face to face contact, although initially labor intensive, can be effective and efficient.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate how electroencephalography (EEG) can be used as an effective tool to provide valuable insights into the development of listening strategies to be implemented in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environments. This chapter will first briefly outline the problems and benefits of teaching ‘listening’ in CALL environments, followed by an explanation of how brain imaging technology has recently been incorporated into the study of cognitive approaches to language learning. It will then describe the procedure of our present study, in which EEG technology has been incorporated into ‘listening’ and ‘shadowing’ (the simultaneous action of repeating exactly what the students hear immediately upon hearing it) tasks in order to investigate various factors that affect Japanese students' listening processes. The findings of this study suggest that the EEG recordings give an objective indicator which reflects students' mental condition. The results also provide instructors with more detailed information on what kinds of listening practices should be introduced to the classroom and what further work is needed for individual students.

This chapter focuses on a collective of five international secondary school communities' perceptions regarding technology-led teaching and learning during and after the enforced schools closedown in Hong Kong in 2003, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS. The study initially investigates the response to this real life scenario of what happens when, instead of planning for systemic ICT adoption in the school curriculum, a crisis propels the providers and the learners into total dependency on technology to sustain the system. The study investigates the changes teachers had to make in teaching and learning activities and the demands this placed on them. It also reviews the reactions of students and parents to these changes during the crisis and provides an examination of the changes that have occurred in one of the schools through the views of the school community over the last four years since the closedown. The chapter explores the principal lessons learnt and how these relate to theory and research in practice; and the longer term impact of the SARS induced closedown on the use of ICT in these schools.

This chapter presents a case study of knowledge management (KM) in curriculum teaching and learning in distance education in Guangdong Radio & TV University. With action research and systematic analysis methods, we set up a few objects and value propositions of the initiative, which was set up to improve teaching and learning, to enhance the quality of the curriculum, and to extend learning support. The framework consists of technology tools, an online community, instructional design, information resources, and KM, etc. We apply data mining tools to discover behavioural characteristics. Tacit knowledge shared by the virtual community was emphasized. A few strategies for KM in the curriculum development in distance education will be discussed.

This chapter reviews published research on information and communication technologies (ICT) in post-secondary education since 1998 and identifies the extent to which this research addresses government policy, indicating areas in which further research would be beneficial to meet the challenges contained in government reports. The chapter is written to inform government agencies and researchers of the gaps in the research to date. The published papers were wide-ranging, informative and enriching in scope and evidenced the important role of ICT in post-secondary education. The majority of publications were based on empirical inquiry of successful small-scale case studies to guide present and future practice, though less research was evidenced to support other government directives, for example, the role of ICT in cross-institutional collaboration and the role of ICT to support sharing of teaching and resources. There was limited research on theoretical inquiry, providing original perspectives, ideas and ideals to shape future thinking and few cross-sector and inter-institutional studies identifying the role of ICT to improve teaching and learning. It was concluded that future research would benefit from a greater balance between empirical research and theoretical enquiry and to identify more strategically significant cross-institutional research to support the government's vision of making Hong Kong a regional education hub.

This paper presents a theoretical model and a pilot implementation of the National Learning Objects Repository for Cyprus (NLORC). The NLORC provides a web-based application allowing indexing, uploading and downloading of e-learning resources, creation and modification of Learning Objects (LOs) and querying. Two alternative database designs are considered and briefly discussed herein. The first design is a relational database design whereas the second design is an object-oriented one. The implementation described herein utilizes concepts from both designs. Although the relational database design is adopted, the choice of implementing the NLORC using Ruby on Rails framework provides the functionality of object-oriented implementation. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is the novel theoretical model and the system implementation, which enjoys the advantages emanating from the utilization of object-oriented features. The proposed database application has been designed based on existing LO Metadata Standards and a survey we carried out amongst University professors in Cyprus. The results of this survey are also presented in this paper.

E-learning, applied to distant learning and face-to-face learning, inevitably includes the delivery and publicizing of copyrighted content between educators and learners. We regard the compliance with copyright law as an important consideration in the current phase of e-learning. Taiwan is no exception; most colleges have been developing their respective e-learning resources in recent years for improving competitiveness in the information era. The most common measure is publicizing instructional digital content written by the faculty on the Internet. This will encounter potential copyright infringements, since most colleges in Taiwan do not have a legal service of copyright counseling and/or authorization. On the other hand, the current Taiwan copyright law has not yet included clear regulations for fair use of digital content for educational purposes, whereas in some countries such regulations have been reinforced, such as the TEACH Act of the United States. As a result, major college teachers in Taiwan usually confuse the fair use on the Internet with the fair use in classroom presentation. This can be shown by a questionnaire survey we have done at our school for this study aimed at evaluating the faculty's recognition of fair use of other persons' digital content. The result shows broad dispersion of their recognition of fair use and clearly implies risk of copyright infringements. The result is further analyzed to locate the most misunderstood cases of fair use. The criteria for fair use on the Internet for non-profit, educational uses are suggested by the authors according to the current Taiwan copyright law in conjunction with the ideas in the TEACH Act. Based on our understanding of digital copyright laws and the technical-protection mechanisms in the Blackboard learning system, we provide a selection of common e-learning conducts with advices to approach fair use in educational institutions.

Plagiarism is a common problem in education, and detecting it is a very difficult task if a marker is responsible for marking only some of the scripts. The situation becomes worse for distance learning as some students are allowed to submit assignments after the due dates and markers may have to mark assignments over quite a long period of time. They might forget ‘similar’ scripts that they marked some time before. This chapter introduces an integrated online assessment system for markers to detect plagiarism of program codes in a more structured, less computational and more flexible way. We propose a new algorithm using parse tree for detecting plagiarism of programming codes. The use of parse tree introduces a structured and systematic way for detecting similarities among computer programs. The assessment system provides multiple features to aid in the effective marking of assignments, such as plagiarism detection, automatic program testing and students performance statistics. The aim of these features is to relieve the burden of teaching staff and provide an alternative way to paper-based marking.

This chapter presents an Internet experiment in which untrained subjects were asked to defined pairs of terms and their relation to each other using the Internet as their resource. It surveyed variations in the ways people understand and perceive meanings of “research” and “experiments”, and the Internet concepts of “online game” and “web game”. The chapter should be of interest to all online educators, be they from business, law, art or science disciplines.

Interaction in different forms is beneficial to the learning experience and the overall effectiveness of learning. Levels of interactivity can be interpreted into various aspects. Many scholars identify various types and different levels of interactivity (Jonassen, 1988; Rhodes & Azbell, 1985; Schwier & Misanchuk, 1993; Sims, 1994). Sims (2001) identifies four levels of interactivity in the context of the e-learning environment. They include: learner and learner; learner and teacher; learner and content; and learner and interface. This chapter discusses the level of learner-content interactivity.

Since learner-content interactivity in e-learning is basically a two-way communication process between a learner and learning materials in various formats by using multimedia technology, it is important to focus on both components as potential sources to promote students' engagement. Multimedia learning content can arouse learners' interest and motivation at the beginning of participation in e-learning. It also prevents learning from becoming boring because learners must stay alert and play an active role in their learning process. With good instructional design strategies and adequate technological resources, e-learning can provide a high level of learner-content interactivity that can motivate learners to engage in their learning. By engaged in e-learning, learners are actively involved in the process of creating, problem solving, reasoning and evaluation. This chapter investigates the impact on e-learning materials and evaluate how to promote students' motivation and participation in e-learning.

The Chapter evaluates the success in using multiple choice tests (MCT) to support student learning on the law degree at the University of Westminster. Law is a subject which does not encourage the use of MCTs as a type of summative assessment as it is difficult to set up questions that test the application of the law. However, MCTs are very useful for testing knowledge on a formative basis.

The numbers entering higher education in the UK have grown dramatically over the last few years. The numbers of students studying the law of contract, a foundation subject, have grown from a cohort of about 200 students in 2000/2001 to a cohort of 450 students in 2005/2006. The summative assessment regime has remained constant in that it is composed of an essay worth 30% of the final mark and a closed book examination worth 70%. It has been noted that students were failing in the exam usually because although they absorbed the basic rules of law, they had not learnt or understood enough basic case law. Formative assessment has been embedded in the module to endeavour to remedy the fall in pass rates. In addition to a ‘mock exam’, a formative test was introduced midway through the first semester (the midsessional) in order to identify those students whose understanding of the topic was questionable. Initially this was taken as a paper MCT, but with the introduction of the Blackboard learning system, the test was moved to an on line format. This was done to ease the marking burden on staff and also to ensure that tutorial time was not lost. The informal feedback on the midsessional tests suggested that the students wanted further tests to use in their revision. In 2005 three more short MCTs were introduced on popular exam topics. There was a correlation between those students who attempted the tests and those students who were successful in the exam. The average mark obtained on the module improved by over 2% and the numbers of failures decreased.

The tests were repeated again in 2006 and the data was analysed to ascertain whether the pass rates were being affected by the use of the tests. All students were emailed a short questionnaire regarding their use of the tests. The feedback from those questionnaires was analysed and some conclusions drawn as to the future role that MCTs will have on the module.

The following sections are included:

• AUTHOR INDEX