How Do Students Respond to Microlearning?

Microlearning is a way of teaching and delivering content to learners in small, very specific bursts. The learners are in control of what and when they’re learnin

Interactive Textbooks: What the Future Holds

Many educational publishing companies are creating digital textbooks, and like their traditional print counterparts, e-texts can be expensive. The common complaint about commercial textbooks is their high cost. Between 2006 and 2016, the prices of textbooks used in higher education increased by 73 percent (Senack & Donoghue, 2016)

Design Implications of Changing Student Demographics

Many non-traditional higher education institutions have built their cyber security and computer science programs {CSCS) to cater to the needs of adult, working learners. Focusing on this demographic has implications for course and program design. Design approaches have therefore focused on strategies aimed at translating knowledge into learning nuggets specific to the adult learner, enabling day one job-readiness upon graduation. Recently, there has been increased focus on CSCS education at the high school level. The computer science for all initiative was announced recently by US President Obama, and there have been increased creativity on the part of higher education institutions to expand CSCS programming to high school learners. Some of these have, and continue to take place through the college credit plus initiative. With the shift to meet the needs of this changing demographic, two of the key questions for success are: (i) what efficient and effective design strategies should be employed by higher education institutions to ensure success for high school learners, without losing existing approaches that prepare adult learners for job readiness? (ii) And to what extent do these strategies influence success for both adult and high school learners?https://fuse.franklin.edu/ss2016/1032/thumbnail.jp

How to Create and Sustain Meaningful Discussions in Online Courses?

While taking online courses students are required to participate in online discussions. These are often mandatory activities that count towards the course final grade. Even though, in many occasions, online students find this requirement dreadful and unproductive. A case study has been conducted with a postgraduate educational technology online course at a large university in the United States. This course offers two innovative strategies to overcome this issue and concomitant evidence of effectiveness

Results of a Successful Redesign of an Introductory Statistics Course: Improved Student Performance, Retention, and Course Satisfaction

https://fuse.franklin.edu/ss2016/1043/thumbnail.jp

Statistical Strategies: Meeting the Needs of Struggling Math Students through Self-Guided Interactive Multimedia

As part of the MATH 215 redesign, we developed weekly web-based interactive multimedia lectures, based on the 12 principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2001). The goal of our research study was to determine, using formative evaluation, if these multimedia pieces were useful and if they should continue to be used.https://fuse.franklin.edu/ss2016/1044/thumbnail.jp

An Interactive Multimedia Instructional Program on Statistics: An Instance of Design-Based Research

Students’ fail or demonstrate slow progress in research methods and basic statistics courses if they have difficulty on identifying different types of variables. A web-based interactive multimedia instructional program for bringing them up to speed on this topic was designed and evaluated for effectiveness with 90 undergraduate college students. A significant effect of this program on students’ knowledge gain was determined. Careful consideration of the elements that made the teaching principles effective was taken by: (1) grounding the instructional design approach in cognitive psychology; and (2) collecting empirical data to validate the program features and instructional design methods used