The Impact of Cultural Familiarity on Students’ Social Media Usage in Higher Education

Using social media (SM) in Higher education (HE) becomes unavoidable in the new teaching and learning pedagogy. The current generation of students creates their groups on SM for collaboration. However, SM can be a primary source of learning distraction due to its nature, which does not support structured learning. Hence, derived from the literature, this study proposes three learning customised system features, to be implemented on SM when used in Higher Education HE. Nevertheless, some psychological factors appear to have a stronger impact on students’ adoption of SM in learning than the proposed features. A Quantitative survey was conducted at a university in Uzbekistan to collect 52 undergraduate students’ perception of proposed SM learning customised features in Moodle. These features aim to provide localised, personalised, and privacy control self-management environment for collaboration in Moodle. These features could be significant in predicting students’ engagement with SM in HE. The data analysis showed a majority of positive feedback towards the proposed learning customised SM. However, the surveyed students’ engagement with these features was observed as minimal. The course leader initiated a semi-structured interview to investigate the reason. Although the students confirmed their acceptance of the learning customised features, their preferences to alternate SM, which is Telegram overridden their usage of the proposed learning customized SM, which is Twitter. The students avoided the Moodle integrated Twitter (which provided highly accepted features) and chose to use the Telegram as an external collaboration platform driven by their familiarity and social preferences with the Telegram since it is the popular SM in Uzbekistan. This study is part of an ongoing PhD research which involves deeper frame of learners’ cognitive usage of the learning management system. However, this paper exclusively discusses the cultural familiarity impact of student’s adoption of SM in HE

Examining Occupational Therapy Students’ Responses to Integrative Seminars

The integrative seminar is an innovative teaching-learning approach that focuses on active learning and peer collaboration, characteristics that align with millennial learners’ preferences. The use of integrative seminars has been reported by various health professions with positive outcomes. Course feedback survey data from the first cohort of occupational therapy students who participated in a new four-course integrative seminar series were analyzed. Findings suggest that the format of the courses was engaging for the learners. The students particularly valued the small class; the opportunities for peer collaboration; and the variety of active learning opportunities, including simulations. The students also indicated that the seminars helped them to integrate and apply their learning across the curriculum. In another survey completed near the end of their Level II fieldwork rotations, the students indicated that the seminars contributed to their readiness for fieldwork as well as to the development of their critical thinking, interpersonal skills, and professional identity. The findings from this analysis support the potential value of integrative seminars in occupational therapy education

Industry and faculty surveys call for increased collaboration to prepare information technology graduates

Academic and industry collaborations can help improve computing curricula and student learning experiences. Such collaborations are formally encouraged by accreditation standards. Through the auspices of ACM and IEEE-CS, the IT2017 task group is updating curriculum guidelines for information technology undergraduate degree programs, similar to the regular updates for other computing disciplines. The task group surveyed curriculum preferences of both faculty and industry. The authors, with the group\u27s cooperation, compare US faculty and US industry preferences in mathematics, IT knowledge areas, and student workplace skill sets. Faculty and industry share common ground, which supports optimism about their productive collaboration, but are also distinct enough to justify the effort of actively coordinating with each other

Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Accessible user profile modeling for academic services based on MOOCs

MOOCs are examples of the evolution of eLearning environments, it is a fact that the flexibility of the learning services allows students to learn at their own time, place and pace, enhances continuous communication and interaction between all participants in knowledge and community building, benefits people with disabilities and therefore can improve their level of employability and social inclusion. MOOCs are leading a revolutionary computer and mobile-based scenario along with social technologies that will emergence new kinds of learning applications that enhance communication and collaboration processes, for that reason a strategy of the use of metadata regarding the achievement of accessibility from content to user preferences is presented in this paper, in order to achieve a better accessibility level while designing new learning services for people with functional diversity based upon MOOCs

Social Collaboration Style Preferences and Cognitive Receptivity to Technological Change and Innovation in Open and Distance e-Learning

The proliferation of online courses in open and distance e-learning higher education contexts brought attention to the role of social collaboration activities in enhancing student learning. Constructive social collaboration in an e-learning environment is influenced by the interaction dynamics of the relevant virtual learning community. Social learning involves the acquisition of knowledge and skills relevant to the individual’s unique work or learning context through collaborative endeavours and interactions that often include the use of technological tools such as web-based platforms and social media technological applications. This chapter focuses on how the social collaboration style preferences of members of the virtual learning community relate to their cognitive receptivity to technological change and innovation. The practical implications for virtual learning in open and distance e-learning contexts are outlined

Towards an understanding of the social aspects of sustainability in product design: teaching HE students in the UK and Ireland through reflection and peer learning

This paper presents findings from a doctoral study, which investigated effective methods for teaching social sustainability within product design courses in British and Irish universities. This paper explores approaches for encouraging students to explore the social aspects of sustainable product design through workshops specifically designed to foster deep learning through collaboration, discovery and critical reflection. The importance of deep learning is reflected in both the sustainable design education (O’Rafferty et al., 2008, Griffith and Bamford, 2007) and education for sustainability literature (Warburton, 2003) as important to an understanding of the holistic and complex nature of sustainability. Three 'Rethinking Design' workshops were designed and developed as part of the doctoral main study to introduce students to the wider social aspects of sustainability and these were conducted in five universities in Britain and Ireland. The workshops were developed to foster principles that encourage students to adopt deep learning methods, taking into account the specific learning preferences of the current generation of students to enhance motivational factors such as relevance, appropriate teaching materials and opportunities for collaborative learning. The workshops were tested amongst 150 undergraduate and postgraduate students and found to be successful in fostering deep learning by facilitating learning through discovery, critical reflection, peer learning and creativity leading to an exploration of design thinking solutions

Assessment of co-creativity in the process of game design

We consider game design as a sociocultural and knowledge modelling activity, engaging participants in the design of a scenario and a game universe based on a real or imaginary socio-historical context, where characters can introduce life narratives and interaction that display either known social realities or entirely new ones. In this research, participants of the co-creation activity are Malaysian students who were working in groups to design game-based learning resources for rural school children. After the co-creativity activity, the students were invited to answer the co-creativity scale, an adapted version of the Assessment Scale of Creative Collaboration (ASCC), combining both the co-creativity factors and learners’ experiences on their interests, and difficulties they faced during the co-creativity process. The preliminary results showed a high diversity on the participants’ attitudes towards collaboration, especially related to their preferences towards individual or collaborative work

Agile Learning: Students’ Perceptions of Collaboration

Educators are encouraged to incorporate collaborative learning into their classrooms in order to promote active learning through teamwork. However, students often regard collaboration as lacking coordination and accountability among the team members, thus resulting in fewer opportunities for academic success. Nested within project-based learning, agile learning provides the framework for effective team and workflow regulation which is based on a collaborative, incremental and iterative learning process. With the help of the quasi-experimental method, both quantitative and qualitative data was collected through a series of anonymous surveys. Aimed to investigate whether the incorporation of agile learning has an effect on students’ perception of collaboration opportunities and their academic performance in college-level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, the results of the study indicated that the learners did not perceive a correlation between agile learning and the aforementioned notions. The findings are discussed in relation to the learners’ preferences for learning in foreign language classrooms and their own definition of collaboration which is ultimately reduced to the individual work process

COGNITIVE CLOUD COLLABORATION

Techniques are described for using a cognitive learning instance to learn a user\u27s preferences across a wide range of cloud collaboration services and provide a customized user experience. This customized user experience is then leveraged on the back-end for optimizing cloud resources