Opportunities for adult learners through integrated e-learning

The distance learning environment has a major contribution to make to the educational requirements of the 21st century by encouraging the acceptance of lifelong learning (LLL). Keeping pace with changes in technology and meeting the increasing demands of the knowledge based economy requires a highly skilled and educated workforce. The solution would then have to be to foster educational opportunities which would invariably lead to continuing education through the concept of LLL. Avenues would then point to integrated elearning with its egalitarian environment of open access and greater opportunities for the learners particularly the adult learners. The integrated e-learning opportunities would be able to satisfy the students’ need for convenient offerings and at the same time maximize the use of online teaching technologies, facilities and resources reducing presence in a classroom environment. Arguably traditional classroom methods present an important presence in the teaching-learning process but the use of technology presents the challenges of the future. Technology has now integrated into higher education and this paper attempts to explore the opportunities and challenges that online learning in general and Open University Malaysia in particular face in implementing lifelong learning to cater to the adult learners. (Abstract by author

Teaching by Design (TbD) through Cognitive Tutors for the adult learners

Designing the online teaching is very important in order to make the online learning more effective and engagin

Weblog : an alternative platform to deliver formal lifelong learning

Weblogs (or blogs) usually contain diary style content, with updates posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order controlled by a single author. The blogs can be publicly accessed by anyone or by invitation from the blog’s author. The content or use of a blog is the choice of the author and may include news, updates, articles, and reflections. The small but developing literature on web logging underscores its potential as an effective learning resource for use in higher education. Some advantages of blog for learning include assisting students to become subject-matter experts through a process of regular scouring, filtering and posting, increasing student interest and ownership in learning, giving students legitimate chances to participate and acculturating them into a community of practice and providing opportunities for diverse perspectives. However, the use of the blog for formal lifelong learning is very much limited as the open universities prefer to use their own learning management systems or other online platforms to deliver the teaching and learning activities. This paper contributes to these discussions through a case study of the author's experience with the on-going development of an educational blogging resource for use in an undergraduate IT subject. Using the instructional strategy of independent study and indirect instruction to support the learner-centered pedagogies, the author believe the elements of content, interactivity, collaboration and assessment are the pillars to make an education-based blog for adult learners to support their self-managed learning. Detailing the theoretical aims, design, implementation and students’ evaluation of the blog, the paper puts forward the argument for the educational use-value of blogging as a platform to support self-managed learning for adult learners in the formal lifelong learning environment. (Abstract by author

Teaching and learning via chatbots with immersive and machine learning capabilities

Chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chats or both. Chatbots are designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner. Chatbots with artificial intelligence technology can be used to teach the students by turning a lecture in a series of messages to make it look like a standardised chat conversation. The paper describes the development of intelligent chatbots that had been built for Java programming course. Most of the learning courseware/systems to learn Java programming language are merely repository of static and monotonous contents such as hyperlinked online tutorials, video lectures, etc. In order to address these shortcomings, seven text-based conversational chatbots for the students to learn Java in an interactive and engaging manners had been built. Each of these chatbots focuses on different programming concepts or constructs. These chatbots support learning of Java via problem-solving steps through “learning by doing”. The unique features of these chatbots are (i) The chatbots are self-contained, interconnected and are able to initiate a learning process for a particular learning outcome and provide feedback to a student as they are working through problems; (ii) These chatbots are able to engage the learners’ in the “one-toone” session of the problem-solving process for more than one-hour through conversing with a student; and (iii) It supports immersive learning in order simulate the realistic scenarios and environments that give learners the opportunity to practice skills and interact with the simulated tutor. These chatbots acquired its intelligence through a hybrid approach that combines pattern-matching technique and machine learning algorithm in order to formulate its responses. The feedback from the students who used these chatbots and the effect of these chatbots on the students’ understanding of the subject matter were favourable as discussed in the paper. (Abstract by author

Enriching Blended Pedagogy Through Piagetian Learning Model: A Case Study

Teaching and learning process is one of the important components in the principles of effectiveness for serving adult learners as proposed by Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, US. The exemplary practices of this teaching and learning process can be implemented through various strategies by an university specialized in open & distance education or e-learning. This paper discusses of how blended learning pedagogy coupled with Piaget model can be designed to support the teaching and learning process in the distance education. Our aim to incorporate Piaget learning thoughts in blended pedagogy is to promote the cognitive development of the learner that will lead to the good understanding of a technical or computing subjects. (Author's abstract

Web-based instruction for adult learners : an asynchronous delivery model for formal lifelong learning

Web-based Instruction (WBI) is becoming a favored teaching and learning option in higher education. Unfortunately, the effects of WBI on success, perception and gender have not been clearly demonstrated or sufficiently addressed, especially for adult learners who are engaged in the formal lifelong learning via the popular asynchronous WBI (A-WBI). This paper attempts to address the following objectives: (i) to propose a framework for A-WBI to deliver lessons to adult learners who are enrolled in formal lifelong learning; (ii) to implement the proposed framework; (iii) to explore adult learner perceptions of A-WBI and of how gender influences their perception; (iv) to explore the influence of A-WBI on the adult learner summative assessment (final examination component); and (v) o analyze the relationship between adult learner interaction with A-WBI and their final examination marks. Objectives (i) and (ii) are achieved by using the design and implementation approach while objectives (iii), (iv) and (v) are achieved by an interpretive case study methodology approach. The findings indicate: (i) moderate learner responses for the use of A-WBI when studying have led to poor performance in the summative assessment among adult learners; (ii) female learners are the high-risk group in A-WBI; and (iii) quality interaction in the A-WBI discussion forum has a strong relationship with learner final examination scores. The paper concludes with discussions on the findings and recommendations. (Abstract by author

Web-based learning through mixed-initiative interactions : design and implimentation

Mixed-initiative interaction is a naturally-occurring feature of human-human interactions. It characterize by turn-taking, frequent change of focus, agenda and control among the “speakers”. This human-based mixed-initiative interaction can be implemented through a mixed-initiative systems which are a popular approach to building intelligent systems that can collaborate naturally and effectively with people. Mixed-initiative systems exhibit various degrees of involvement in regards to the initiatives taken by the user or the system. In any discourse, the initiative may be shared between either, a learner and a system agent, or between two independent system agents. Both the parties in question establish and maintain a common goal and context, and proceed with an interaction mechanism involving initiative taking that optimizes their progress towards the goal. However, the application of mixed-initiative interaction in web-based learning is very much limited. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a web-based learning system through mixedinitiative system known as JavaLearn. JavaLearn allows the interaction between the system (in the form of a software agent) and the individual learner. Here, the system supports the learning through a problem solving activity by demanding active learning behaviour from the learner with minimal natural language understanding by the agent and embodies the application-dependent aspects of the discourse. It guides the learner to solve the problem by giving adaptive advice, hints and engage the learner in the real time interaction in the form of “conversation”. The principal features of this system are: It is adaptive and are based on reflection, observation and relation. The system acquires its intelligence through the finite state machine and rule-based agents. (Abstract by authors

The impact of delayed instructional support on adult learners in the ODL context

This paper investigated whether productive failure (PF) as an instructional strategy boosts students’ understanding on the subject matter in a face-to-face tutorial. PF instructional design advocates the delaying of support for the learners during the learning. This paper reports an initial study of a quasi-experimental that compares a ‘‘productive failure’’ instructional design with a traditional ‘‘lecture and practice’’ instructional design for a 2-hour tutorial session attended by adult learners. A total of 17 adult learners participated in the study. Learners experienced either a traditional lecture and practice teaching cycle or a PF cycle, where they solved complex problems in small groups without the provision of any support or scaffolds up until a consolidation lecture by their teacher during the last hour of the tutorial. Findings suggest that learners from the PF condition produced a variety of problem models and methods for solving the problems but were unsuccessful in their efforts, be it in groups or individually. Despite failing in their group and individual problem-solving efforts, learners from the PF condition performed better than their counterparts from the lecture and practice condition on both knowledge and higher order application problems based on the post-test. (Abstract by authors

Mastering New Information through Facebook and a Discussion Forum: A Comparative Analysis

This paper investigated the effect of productive failure (PF) as an instructional strategy in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) groups using Facebook and a discussion forum. PF is an instructional mode design that advocates the delaying of support for the learners during learning — the more they struggle, and even fail, while trying to master new information, the better they are likely to recall and apply that information later. PF has been used successfully in the classroom. However, it is not known whether the use of a PF instructional mode with adult learners in CSCL groups such as Facebook and discussion forums will produce such a positive effect. A discussion forum is an important platform used to deliver teaching and learning via the Web, while the use of social media, especially Facebook, for teaching and learning has gained prominence lately. This paper reports an initial study that compares a ‘productive failure’ instructional design in CSCL groups through Facebook and a discussion forum. Five Facebook and five discussion forum groups participated in the study. Both groups solved ill-structured complex problems in small groups without the provision of any support or scaffolding from their instructors. The findings suggest that the Facebook groups produced a variety of scope for discussion and deliberation for solving the problems and were more successful in sustaining the discussion compared to the discussion forum groups. Facebook groups also had a higher critical thinking ratio than the discussion forum groups. Based on these findings, the implications of a PF instructional design for adult learners are presented. [ABSTRACT BY AUTHORS