JCAL special issue on multimodal learning analytics [editorial]

Editoria

Exploring the Lived Experiences of Teachers When Enrolled in an Asynchronous Certification Program: A Phenomenological Study

This phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of teachers when enrolled in an asynchronous pre-service educator certification program. This study was guided by John Keller’s theory of motivation, as it explained the motivational factors that influence the Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) model for teachers who have completed an asynchronous educator certification program. A qualitative hermeneutical phenomenology design was combined with snowball and convenience sampling to enroll 10 participants from a school district in the Midwest. Responses from semi-structured individual interviews and a focus group with five participants were collected, and program description letters were obtained from all participants. The coding of all transcriptions helped in determining the study’s themes and subthemes. The themes identified in this study were lifestyle preference for asynchronous learning, procrastination of asynchronous learning, program competencies, technology challenges, community of the program, meaningless peer communication, external factors for self-motivation, and human connection. The findings of this study are relevant as they revealed the common experiences of pre-service teachers enrolled in the asynchronous educator certification program. The study\u27s conclusions included the communication and procrastination challenges participants faced and their motivations to overcome them and continue their program

Embodiment Analytics Of Practicing Teachers In A Virtual Immersive Environment

Interactive training environments typically include feedback mechanisms designed to help trainees improve their performance through either guided or self-reflection. In this context, trainees are candidate teachers who need to hone their social skills for their future classroom. We chose an interactive virtual training system as the basic research environment to investigate the embodiment of the trainees. Using tracking sensors and improvements for existing gesture recognition utilities, we created a gesture database and used it for the implementation of our real-time feedback application. We also investigated multiple modalities of feedback including visual and haptics. This paper describes the context in which the utilities have been developed, the importance of recognizing nonverbal communication in the teaching context, the means of providing automated feedback associated with nonverbal messaging, and a series of preliminary studies developed to inform the research. Results from the conducted studies indicate the positive impact of the proposed feedback application