An Exploratory Study of Students’ Perceptions of Learning Management System Utilisation and Learning Community

Blackboard Learn is one of the learning management systems (LMSs), which is used in teaching to manage user learning interventions and assist in the planning, distribution and evaluation of a specific learning process. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the functionalities of Blackboard Learn were used in online courses and how students perceived the benefits of using them. Also, the study was to investigate how students’ perceptions of teaching, cognitive and social presences within the Community of Inquiry and perceived benefits of using Blackboard Learn were related to their learning efforts. The results revealed that students who consider Blackboard tools more beneficial on their learning are most likely to have higher perceptions of teaching presence. Moreover, students’ learning efforts were increased primarily by students’ perceptions on perceived benefits of using Blackboard and secondarily by students’ perceptions of social presences. In conclusion, utilising LMS tools effectively in online courses can benefit students’ course work and would motivate them to put more efforts on their learning

The Impact of High-Fidelity Simulation on Nursing Students’ Flexible and Reflective Thinking in Higher Education

This study evaluated the effect of high-fidelity simulation with both mannequins and live actors on flexible and reflective thinking of nursing students. Students enrolled in an undergraduate nursing program were recruited to participate in this study. Ninety students, all female, completed both pre- and post-surveys. The researchers conducted a paired samples t-test to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in students’ level of flexible thinking before and after they experienced the high-fidelity simulation. Moreover, we conducted multivariate correlational analysis to examine the relationships between flexible thinking and reflective thinking. In general, statistical results in this study provide empirical support for the values of clinical simulation and debriefing on nursing students’ flexible and reflective thinking. High-fidelity simulation can expose students to controlled and dynamic clinical environments, allowing them to attempt the transfer of theory to practice, learn from collaborative and active learning tasks, and be open-minded to multiple perspectives and in diverse situations. We conclude that critical reflection is an important piece of development in flexible thinking and reflective learning. During the time of post-simulation interactions, students are encouraged to reflect objectively on their performance in each scenario. The input from peers and instructors provides students with the opportunity to assess their personal ability to transfer theory to practice and evaluate if the theory design of the course is providing them with the needed information to care for the clients presented in the clinical simulation scenarios

Team Members’ Perceptions of Online Teamwork Learning Experiences and Building Teamwork Trust: A Qualitative Study

Teamwork factors can facilitate team members, committing themselves to the purposes of maximizing their own and others\u27 contributions and successes. It is important for online instructors to comprehend students\u27 expectations on learning collaboratively. The aims of this study were to investigate online collaborative learning experiences and to identify important factors that were crucial for building teamwork trust. A qualitative research method was utilized in the study. Data were collected from students\u27 responses of three open-ended questions and interviews. The results indicated that students who enjoyed working in the group setting had a good relationship with their team members and they trusted their team members. In contrast, the questionable behaviors of members (lack of communication and low level of individual accountability) were negative factors of their teamwork experiences. In addition, students considered individual accountability, familiarity with team members, commitment toward quality work, and team cohesion were important factors for building trust with team members. Quantitative analyses confirmed that teamwork trust was correlated significantly with two of the important factors for building trust indicated by team members: familiarity with members (r = .74) and team cohesion (r = .79). Implications and recommendations for future research were also discussed

Unwrap Citation, Altmetric, and Mendeley Status of Highly Cited Articles in the Top-tier Library and Information Science Journals

Citation count is a quantitative method of measuring the impact of a research work. A higher citation count may indicate that the research work receives more attention among peers which could mean that the research contributes value to that discipline of literature. Citation count sums the number of times that an article is referenced by other authors. Tracking citations is important; however, the citation impact only tells a part of the story from academic researchers who conduct and publish research works. The impact of the publication on leisure readers and non-publishing readers are ignored. Furthermore, it is difficult to set a standard impact measurement across disciplines. Research showed that articles in the hard sciences (e.g. chemistry, biology) tends to gain more citations than in soft sciences (e.g. social science, psychology) (Harzing, 2010; Nederhof, 2006). Even in the same field, articles that focus on praxis often receive less citation count than those that focus on theories. However, articles that focus on practice are valuable, and should be a part of the academic landscape (Akers, 2017). Finally, measuring the value of a newly published article with citation count can be difficult, since citations grow gradually over the years. The emergence of electronic publications and web technology allows people to view a research output by the amount of attention it receives. Web-based tools such as F1000, PLos, Altmetric, Plum Analytics, CiteULike, and Mendeley collect a publication’s output through a variety of online sources. These usage statistics such as number of views, downloads, mentions, etc., disclose the popularity or influence of a publication to some degree (Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014). Mendeley readership — a feature of Mendeley Web powered by Scopus —allows researchers to monitor the impact as well as the usage of their scholarly work (Bonasio, 2014). Altmetric attention score (AAS) generates a research impact score by weighting the attention that an article receives from social media, blogs, news, and other online sources. AAS presents a quick, UNWRAP CITATIONS, ALTMETRIC SCORE, AND MENDELEY READERSHIP STATUS 3 multifaceted way to demonstrate the value of a research that is arguable more robust than citation count (Huang, Wang, & Wu, 2018). Since works in the arts and humanities typically do not receive as many citations as other disciplines, the traditional bibliometric may not be a good indicator of research impact — AAS is more considerable in fields that measure researcher and reader behaviors like searching, reading, and sharing (Cho, 2017). As an increasing amount scholars and researchers in academic disciplines create their online research profile on academic network (e.g. Academia, ResearchGate, Linkedln, Mendeley) or share their research via social media, the online attention has become a valuable aspect and a non-delay algorism to measure research impacts (Aharony et al., 2019; Garcovich, Ausina Marquez, & Adobes Martin, 2019)

Evaluation of iTunes University Courses Through Instructional Design Strategies and m-Learning Framework

As mobile learning technology promotes learning accessibility and flexibility, students benefit from social interactivity and connective learning process which will also foster students’ performance and satisfaction on learning content. The primary purpose of this research was to evaluate iTunes U courses based on instructional design strategies and the m-learning framework. A total of 27 iTunes U courses were selected and evaluated based on the following criteria: (a) The course is provided by institutions of higher education; (b) the course should include instructional design components. The results revealed that all courses scored notably higher means on Content Chunking and Objective and Content Structure. However, all courses were rated low mean scores on the Instructional Strategies categories of the following attributes: Learning Engagement, Feedback, and Evaluation. Moreover, the results revealed that all courses scored notably higher means on one of the m-learning framework which is Customisation and were rated low mean scores on the Conversation attribute. The overall conclusion of this study is that the selected iTunes U courses showed some strengths but considerable weaknesses in meeting the instructional design strategies and m-learning framework. Recommendations are provided for turning mundane courses into dynamic, user-friendly ones where students are excited about their learning

Learning technology acceptance and continuance intention among business students: The mediating effects of confirmation, flow, and engagement

The emergence of mobile applications has opened the door to a new kind of information and communication technology tool and educational support which is vital for students’ positive learning behaviours. The aims of this study were to examine the effects of three mediators (confirmation, flow, and student engagement) on students’ learning technology acceptance and information systems continuance intention, and to explore the functions of these variables in the mediating process between learning technology acceptance and continuance intention. Using PROCESS macro program where the bootstrap confidence interval was adopted, a parallel multiple mediation model and a serial multiple mediation model were tested. Two of the three proposed hypotheses were supported. Business students’ confirmation and flow, elicited by the m-learning app, were two mediating factors with high ratios (0.6655, 95% CI = 0.2635 to 0.6085) of the overall indirect effect to the total effect, which related to students’ decisions in continuous usages of the technology. We concluded that the continuous use of the m-learning app was driven not only by students’ flexible thinking skills in accepting new learning technology, but also by a set of cognitive attributes reflecting users’ positive experiences with the system

Learning-related Soft Skills Among Online Business Students in Higher Education: Grade Level and Managerial Role Difference in Self-Regulation, Motivation, and Social Skill

The purpose of the study was to investigate how undergraduate and graduate business management students, as well as those who had a managerial role in their career and who did not, differ on levels of soft skills (SRL strategies, motivation, and social skills) after gender was controlled. Moreover, we intended to investigate how well soft skills factors influence business students’ successes in an online learning environment after students’ individual characteristics and learning characteristics were controlled. To serve this purpose, this study conducted MANCOVA and hierarchical multiple regression analyses on data collected from 162 students in fully online business courses. First, the results of the study indicated that graduate students had higher level of soft skills than undergraduate students, especially in self-regulation and motivation. Likewise, students with managerial experiences demonstrated a higher level of soft skills. Next, hierarchical regression analysis revealed that the final regression model with all soft skills factors included could predict approximately 34% of the variance in students learning outcomes to a statistically significant level. In addition, goal setting, self-efficacy, and social skills were found to be significant predictors. We suggest that instructors and instructional designers should realize that soft skills are important contributor to the learning outcomes. Therefore, mechanisms to enhance student soft skills should be embedded into the online course in order to improve student learning outcomes. This should be especially a priority for undergraduate online courses because undergraduate students do not demonstrate higher soft skills compared to graduate students

Collaboration Factors, Teamwork Satisfaction, and Student Attitudes toward Online Collaborative Learning

This study examined online courses with collaborative learning components from 197 graduate students across three consecutive academic years. A student attitude survey containing 20 items and a student teamwork satisfaction scale containing 10 items on a 5-point Likert-type scale with three open-ended questions regarding their online collaborating experiences were collected during the final week of each semester. Results revealed that the three extracted online collaboration factors (Team Dynamics, Team Acquaintance, and Instructor Support) from the student attitude survey had moderate to high degrees of correlation with teamwork satisfaction. Results also revealed that the three collaboration factors accounted for 53% of the variance in online teamwork satisfaction. In addition, results from both surveys and open-ended questions revealed students favored working collaboratively in an online environment

Exploring factors influencing minority students’ perceived learning in collaborative Wiki-based learning environments

This study examined the factors affecting minority students’ learning experience in Wiki-based environments. These factors included perceived collaborative learning, sense of community, Wiki self-efficacy, and perceived learning experience. The relationships of these factors were explored. The participants were 45 African American students enrolled in two undergraduate-level management courses in which Wiki was used to facilitate the process of group work. A mixed methods approach was applied to analyze the collected data. Results indicated that sense of community and collaborative learning significantly contributed to perceived learning in Wiki-based environments. However, Wiki self-efficacy was not a good predictor of perceived learning. Most of the minority students were positive about their group learning experience that involved collaborative processes as well as the development of knowledge and skills. Emotional support and support for cognitive or meta-cognitive processing were identified as factors that had potential influences on Wiki based collaborative group learning

Learning Chinese Through a 21st Century Writing Workshop with the Integration of Mobile Technology in a Language Immersion Elementary School

Digital mobile devices such as iPads have been around for many years and have been more and more popular in K-12 classrooms. Research has pointed out the advantages of using iPads in classrooms to enhance teaching, engage learning, and promote learning outcomes. iPads have been proved to be a useful and powerful digital mobile device in language learning including speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether a technology integrated 21st century writing workshop had an influence on the ability and attitude towards writing in Chinese for second graders enrolled in the Mandarin Chinese program in a language immersion elementary school. Twenty-four students participated in the study. Recording technology (iPad recording app), an iPad camera, and the Book Creator App were integrated into the 21st century writing workshop. A pre-survey, post-survey, and observation were used to collect data. The results of the study confirmed that writing barriers decreased when the Chinese immersion program students utilized iPads in the writing workshop. Also, the writing ability and attitudes of the Chinese immersion program students improved after the completion of their 21st century writing workshop