A systematic literature review on the development and use of mobile learning (web) apps by early adopters

Surveys in mobile learning developed so far have analysed in a global way the effects on the usage of mobile devices by means of general apps or apps already developed. However, more and more teachers are developing their own apps to address issues not covered by existing m-learning apps. In this article, by means of a systematic literature review that covers 62 publications placed in the hype of teacher-created m-learning apps (between 2012 and 2017, the early adopters) and the usage of 71 apps, we have analysed the use of specific m-learning apps. Our results show that apps have been used both out of the classroom to develop autonomous learning or field trips, and in the classroom, mainly, for collaborative activities. The experiences analysed only develop low level outcomes and the results obtained are positive improving learning, learning performance, and attitude. As a conclusion of this study is that the results obtained with specific developed apps are quite similar to previous general surveys and that the development of long-term experiences are required to determine the real effect of instructional designs based on mobile devices. These designs should also be oriented to evaluate high level skills and take advantage of mobile features of mobile devices to develop learning activities that be made anytime at anyplace and taking into account context and realistic situations. Furthermore, it is considered relevant the study of the role of educational mobile development frameworks in facilitating teachers the development of m-learning apps

Authoring of Adaptive Single-Player Educational Games

Digital Educational Games, as one of the most important application areas of Serious Games, combine positive properties of digital games, such as strong motivation for players and inherent learning processes, with educational methods and technologies. Adaptive algorithms allow such games to be aligned automatically to the needs of different players, thereby increasing the learning efficacy. However, educational games are among the most complex game production endeavors, since they are often faced with small budget on the one hand and special requirements with impacts on all aspects of game development, from design through programming to asset production, on the other. Authoring tools have been successfully created and used in fields related to Serious Games and educational games, including e-Learning, multimedia, interactive storytelling and entertainment games. These tools incorporate parts of the production workflows in their respective areas and allow all authors, including non-programmers, to create applications. While it appears beneficial to create authoring tools for educational games, we find that authoring tools for educational games have to account for the higher complexity and interactivity of games compared to other forms of multimedia and that they have not been researched thoroughly in the past. These challenges are addressed in this thesis by presenting a concept for an authoring tool for adaptive educational single-player games that accounts for the specifics of educational game development. Major results are an educational game description model, concepts for adaptive control of educational games and author support mechanisms specifically for adaptive educational game authoring. These concepts are implemented in the authoring tool "StoryTec", which is validated in the course of a set of evaluation studies. The novel features of StoryTec include the specific support for adaptive educational games, a concept for structural and interaction templates shown to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the authoring tool, as well as the support for collaborative work. It builds the foundation for a number of current and future research and development projects, including the extension towards authoring of multiplayer games, and is tested and used by over 120 members of an open community

Student production of pencasting e-learning videos: what drives engagement?

This research paper shares innovative practice on a final year undergraduate module at a British university in which students create e-learning videos about key theories and concepts within their disciplinary field, Communication and Media. It analyses two student videos published on a class YouTube channel - one of them the most popular video on the channel, driving thirty times as many subscribers as the other - to develop understanding of factors affecting engagement. The videos use pencasting, an animation technique which has been shown to improve engagement, to visually represent and explain educational concepts and theories. This paper sets out current thinking on video as an educational tool, student video production, and the characteristics of engaging video content. Next, the module and assessment design are shared, together with an outline of teaching to support the pencasting production element. In conclusion, educators are encouraged to consider designing assessments in which students produce e-learning videos about key concepts and theories within their field of study, and five practical suggestions are offered for creators (both students and faculty) to improve engagement (1) create videos with a high proportion of visual representation, focusing on smooth, continuous flow approaches such as pencasting; (2) provide practical value through clear and simple explanation; (3) consider viewer emotional responses to the video; (4) create thumbnails that articulate the visual representation approach employed; and (5) employ an extensive range of tags to improve performance in search results

Personalized Recommender Systems for Resource-based Learning - Hybrid Graph-based Recommender Systems for Folksonomies

As the Web increasingly pervades our everyday lives, we are faced with an overload of information. We often learn on-the-job without a teacher and without didactically prepared learning resources. We not only learn on our own but also collaboratively on social platforms where we discuss issues, exchange information and share knowledge with others. We actively learn with resources we find on the Web such as videos, blogs, forums or wikis. This form of self-regulated learning is called resource-based learning. An ongoing challenge in technology enhanced learning (TEL) and in particular in resource-based learning, is supporting learners in finding learning resources relevant to their current needs and learning goals. In social tagging systems, users collaboratively attach keywords called tags to resources thereby forming a network-like structure called a folksonomy. Additional semantic information gained for example from activity hierarchies or semantic tags, form an extended folksonomy and provide valuable information about the context of the resources the learner has tagged, the related activities the resources could be relevant for, and the learning task the learner is currently working on. This additional semantic information could be exploited by recommender systems to generate personalized recommendations of learning resources. Thus, the first research goal of this thesis is to develop and evaluate personalized recommender algorithms for a resource-based learning scenario. To this end, the resource-based learning application scenario is analysed, taking an existing learning platform as a concrete example, in order to determine which additional semantic information could be exploited for the recommendation of learning resources. Several new hybrid graph-based recommender approaches are implemented and evaluated. Additional semantic information gained from activities, activity hierarchies, semantic tag types, the semantic relatedness between tags and the context-specific information found in a folksonomy are thereby exploited. The proposed recommender algorithms are evaluated in offline experiments on different datasets representing diverse evaluation scenarios. The evaluation results show that incorporating additional semantic information is advantageous for providing relevant recommendations. The second goal of this thesis is to investigate alternative evaluation approaches for recommender algorithms for resource-based learning. Offline experiments are fast to conduct and easy to repeat, however they face the so called incompleteness problem as datasets are limited to the historical interactions of the users. Thus newly recommended resources, in which the user had not shown an interest in the past, cannot be evaluated. The recommendation of novel and diverse learning resources is however a requirement for TEL and needs to be evaluated. User studies complement offline experiments as the users themselves judge the relevance or novelty of the recommendations. But user studies are expensive to conduct and it is often difficult to recruit a large number of participants. Therefore a gap exists between the fast, easy to repeat offline experiments and the more expensive user studies. Crowdsourcing is an alternative as it offers the advantages of offline experiments, whilst still retaining the advantages of a user-centric evaluation. In this thesis, a crowdsourcing evaluation approach for recommender algorithms for TEL is proposed and a repeated evaluation of one of the proposed recommender algorithms is conducted as a proof-of-concept. The results of both runs of the experiment show that crowdsourcing can be used as an alternative approach to evaluate graph-based recommender algorithms for TEL

DeLFI 2011 - Die 9. e-Learning Fachtagung Informatik: Poster | Workshops | Kurzbeiträge

Die 9. Tagung der Fachgruppe „E-Learning“ in der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. vom 5. - 8. September 2011 in Dresden setzt eine inzwischen gute Tradition wissenschaftlicher Diskussionen in diesem Fachgebiet fort. Erneut konnten interdisziplinäre Partner gewonnen werden, um unter dem Dach einer Veranstaltung mit dem Titel „Wissensgemeinschaften 2011“ unterschiedliche Facetten des Lernens mit elektronischen Medien gemeinsam zu diskutieren. Das betrifft Themenbereiche wie Wissensmanagement, Werkzeuge und Technologien für e-Learning, didaktische und technische Aspekte des Einsatzes elektronischer Hilfsmittel oder auch kooperatives Wirken in verschiedenen Arbeitsfeldern. Diese Teiltagungen - 16. Europäische Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft „GMW 2011“, - 9. E-Learning Fachtagung Informatik der Gesellschaft für Informatik „DeLFI 2011“ und - 14. Tagung Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien: Virtual Enterprises, Communities & Social Netorks „GeNeMe 2011“ haben mit jeweils eigenen Experten aus einer großen Zahl von Angeboten zu wissenschaftlichen Fachbeiträgen die wertvollsten ausgewählt und präsentieren diese in eigenen Tagungsbänden. Der vorliegende Band enthält darüber hinaus gehende Arbeiten, die der Teiltagung „DeLFI“ zuzuordnen sind. Dies sind vor allem Beiträge aus den Workshops: - Mobile Learning: Einsatz mobiler Endgeräte im Lernen, Wissenserwerb sowie der Lehr-/Lernorganisation - Lerninfrastruktur in Schulen: 1:1-Computing - Web 2.0 in der beruflichen Bildung aber auch die angenommenen Short Papers, Demonstrationen und Poster. Mit der Tagung „Wissensgemeinschaften 2011“ in Dresden wurde ein Ort gewählt, der in einer wachsenden Region ein Zentrum für Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur bildet und dieser Tagung das nötige Ambiente verleiht, an dem die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Wissenschaft und Forschung auf einem hohen Niveau stattfindet und die Technische Universität eine Vorstufe zur Anerkennung auf Förderung im Rahmen der Exzellenzinitiative erreicht hat. Der besondere Dank gilt den Autoren für die eingereichten Beiträge sowie dem Programmausschuss für deren Begutachtung. Natürlich gilt dieser Dank auch den Sponsoren, Ausstellern und Gestaltern der Pre-Konferenz-Aktivitäten. Ferner möchten wir allen danken, die die Vorbereitung und Durchführung unterstützt haben, besonders den Studierenden der Fakultät Informatik der TU Dresden und Schülern der Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sprachenakademie (EWS) Dresden. Dresden, September 2011 Holger Rohland, Andrea Kienle, Steffen Friedric

Map out the best BI tool and SPC software for a case company: selection and rationalization process

Business Intelligence (BI) is about delivering relevant and reliable information to the right people at the right time to make better decisions faster. To do this, I require methods and programs to collect unstructured data, convert it into information, and present it to improve business decisions. There are many types of BI tools available on the market that perform these tasks. On the other hand, Statistical Process Control (SPC) is used to control the process with the help of statistical tools and techniques. It helps me monitor and control the process, reduce variations in the process, improve product quality, and so on. In this thesis, my main goal is to find the best BI tools and SPC software for Valmet Automotive, a Finland-based automobile manufacturing company. Valmet Automotive is one of the world's top producers of automobiles and batteries. Our organization uses BI and SPC tools for data analysis, visualization, and processing. Nevertheless, we have faced challenges in employing these instruments at various periods. I started this thesis to find possible BI and SPC technologies for our organization so that we can solve the problem. Every software must satisfy ISO 9000-3, an international software development and quality assurance guideline. Furthermore, every software must maintain ISO-9126, a quality model that determines the evaluation of software quality. My software selection processes are based on ISO 9000-3 and ISO-9126. My first goal was to find the best BI tools and SPC software for our organization based on its specific needs. Therefore, to map out potential BI and SPC tools, I picked 30 BI tools and 13 SPC software from the huge amount of similar software in the market. At this point, all the needed map-out criteria and software names were organized in Excel, and I evaluated each tool on a scale of 5 for each criterion. I used math to get the total weighted score for each tool. Furthermore, I used mathematical computation methods to complete the procedure. After completing the whole procedure in Excel, I enlisted the assistance of code. Consequently, I used the Python programming language to calculate the overall score. After computation, using Python visualization libraries, I identified the top five BI tools out of thirty and the top three SPC tools out of thirteen SPC software. In the case study, I also found the best BI tool and SPC software for our company by using visualizations. In the findings, Microsoft Power BI was the best BI tool, and SPC for Excel was the best SPC software for our case company. Therefore, our case company, Valmet Automotive, chose Microsoft Power BI as its leading BI solution. In addition, the research involved a comprehensive statistical analysis, including descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, hypothesis testing, and regression analysis, to examine the selection process of SPC tools and BI tools in the case company. Mostly, the methods and calculations are done for our case company's best tool selection. However, in the future, any company that needs good quality BI tools or SPC software can follow my methodology and calculation methods to select the best BI tools and SPC software available on the market at that time for their needs

Reimagining Nabokov

In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together. “It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives… this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov’s literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity” • Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton Universit