Framework for Enhancing Learning Experience with Wearable Technology in Technical MOOC

The use of wearable technology in education can significantly help educators to engage the students more with the learning. By providing users with hands-free access to contextually relevant knowledge, wearable technologies are poised to inspire a new generation of mobile learning design. However, for educators to harness the pedagogical opportunities of wearable technologies and to implement it in MOOC platform, this paper proposes a framework for enhancing the learning experience in technical MOOC using wearable technology. In addition, we also identify the elements of wearable technology that is suitable to be implemented in teaching and learning, elements of technical MOOC to be combined with wearable technology elements and student engagement elements. The main measurement for enhancing learning experience is based on the level of students’ engagement (measure through course completion) and students’ skill development (measure through direct observation, interview, and questionnaire). The students reflected as fully engaged with the online course when they able to actively participate and complete the course and in contrast, when the students are unable to complete the course, this reflects that they are not engaged with the online learning. Thus, the proposed framework will work as a guideline for lecturers and educators to create effective and engaging MOOC learning design, especially for technical courses

Investigating the Usability of a Head-Mounted Display Augmented Reality Device in Elementary School Children

Augmenting reality via head-mounted displays (HMD-AR) is an emerging technology in education. The interactivity provided by HMD-AR devices is particularly promising for learning, but presents a challenge to human activity recognition, especially with children. Recent technological advances regarding speech and gesture recognition concerning Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 may address this prevailing issue. In a within-subjects study with 47 elementary school children (2nd to 6th grade), we examined the usability of the HoloLens 2 using a standardized tutorial on multimodal interaction in AR. The overall system usability was rated “good”. However, several behavioral metrics indicated that specific interaction modes differed in their efficiency. The results are of major importance for the development of learning applications in HMD-AR as they partially deviate from previous findings. In particular, the well-functioning recognition of children’s voice commands that we observed represents a novelty. Furthermore, we found different interaction preferences in HMD-AR among the children. We also found the use of HMD-AR to have a positive effect on children’s activity-related achievement emotions. Overall, our findings can serve as a basis for determining general requirements, possibilities, and limitations of the implementation of educational HMD-AR environments in elementary school classrooms

Exploring mixed reality in distributed collaborative learning environments

Society is moving rapidly towards a world, where technology enables people to exist in a blend of physical and virtual realities. In education, this vision involves technologies ranging from smart classrooms to e-learning, creating greater opportunities for distance learners, bringing the potential to change the fundamental nature of universities. However, to date, most online educational platforms have focused on conveying information rather than supporting collaborative physical activities which are common in university science and engineering laboratories. Moreover, even when online laboratory support is considered, such systems tend to be confined to the use of simulations or pre-recorded videos. The lack of support for online collaborative physical laboratory activities, is a serious shortcoming for distance learners and a significant challenge to educators and researchers. In working towards a solution to this challenge, this thesis presents an innovative mixed-reality framework (computational model, conceptual architecture and proof-of-concept implementation) that enables geographically dispersed learners to perform co-creative teamwork using a computer-based prototype comprising hardware and software components. Contributions from this work include a novel distributed computational model for synchronising physical objects and their 3D virtual representations, expanding the dual-reality paradigm from single linked pairs to complex groupings, addressing the challenge of interconnecting geographically dispersed environments; and the creation of a computational paradigm that blends a model of distributed learning objects with a constructionist pedagogical model, to produce a solution for distributed mixed-reality laboratories. By way of evidence to support the research findings, this thesis reports on evaluations performed with students from eight different universities in six countries, namely China, Malaysia, Mexico, UAE, USA and UK; providing an important insight to the role of social interactions in distance learning, and demonstrating that the inclusion of a physical component made a positive difference to students’ learning experience, supporting the use of cross-reality objects in educational activities