Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society

Second Cover

2023-05-12T20:40:29+00:00

Student engagement in online learning during COVID-19

2023-04-30T20:36:25+00:00

Online teaching and learning have become the novel norm amidst COVID-19 pandemic crisis across the world. The educational institutions across the world have switched to online mode of instruction to continue to provide education. Thus, research on effectiveness of online teaching and factors affecting the student’s engagement in a virtual classroom has gained importance. Students during pandemic are learning at home and lack motivation and confidence in their academic life. The present study aimed to analyse the student engagement and the factors that affect the student engagement in online learning environment. The study employed a quantitative research design to collect data from 600 students attending online classes in schools and colleges of Bangalore, India. The study found that there is a positive correlation between students’ intrinsic motivation and student engagement. Student engagement increases as the academic pressure or tension decreases. The core findings of the study showed that interest towards learning, perceived competence, and perceived choice of students determines student engagement in online classroom. Almost 33.7 % variance in student engagement is because of students’ intrinsic motivation. Future researchers may explore external factors affecting student engagement. Student engagement is significant for meaningful learning in online learning environment.

Development of online system checkable for Japanese writing tasks

2023-04-30T20:36:24+00:00

Online learning environments have attracted attention of many educators especially in recent years since COVID-19 is still ongoing situation. Meanwhile, the various resources are becoming more and more available in online. In this study, some available online resources were used to create the system checkable for some writing abilities and the depth of understanding for Japanese writing tasks. The system was also made to provide some evaluation scores without depending the number of characters. The demonstration of system were given after the integration and implementation of some modules customized using online resources. The data sheet in the system finally saved the written content for 67 students. The writing task was given as the writing of summarization for what a student understand in a class. The following features were demonstrated from the analytical findings of online system developed in this study. The effectiveness of some available online resources was indicated through the demonstration of system checkable for some writing abilities and the depth of understanding for Japanese writing tasks. It was definite that the system was also made to provide some evaluation scores without depending the number of characters.

A Framework for Empowering Women of Terengganu via Hybrid English Language Community Based Learning

2023-04-30T20:36:23+00:00

The Malays are Terengganu's largest ethnic group, accounting for over 95% of the population. English language is treated as a foreign language and rural cultural settings affect English language proficiency. This project offers a successful ongoing community-based model of partnership between university and several women local authority units addressing the issue of anxiety to speak in English. Five women leaders and twenty members of the community, together with three experts were included to develop the model via face-to-face and online teaching and learning sessions. Soft systems methodology (SSM) was applied to tackle the issue of empowering women in Terengganu by improving their English language communication skills. At the end of the SSM process, the Empowering Women of Terengganu via English Language Learning Framework was introduced as a clear guide for the application and implementation of English communication modules. It is believed that SSM can help instructors and policy makers of Malaysian organisations in making a sound judgement in cultivating English Language in hybrid method, and help to develop Terengganu women’s potential to be more confident in using English.

Online tutoring system for programming courses to improve exam pass rate

2023-04-30T20:36:23+00:00

University students enrolled in the first year of the Computer Science degree may have problems approaching programming, negatively affecting their study during the course. Tutoring programming projects are very important in helping students with difficulty in learning by providing the right approach to study, improving their knowledge and skills in computing. The aim of this work is to realize a new Java Programming tutoring online course that allows students to have an effective online tool to achieve the learning goals of the course and this will enhance the programming exam pass rate. The course we have designed consists of tools to help students with video tutorials, self-assessment quizzes, code evaluations and exercises to solve using an online Java editor. Because the Moodle platform lacks tools to check the quality of the code syntax, a new software was created. It performs a syntax analysis of the Java code and, as a tutor, automatically provides feedbacks and tips to the students to improve the quality. For each online tool the immediate feedback technique is used to amplify students’ engagement. A Clustering Machine Learning technique is performed to identify different students’ behaviors. A correlation between them and the final performance showed the most influential features of the completed activities. Quantitative analysis highlighted the effectiveness of the tutoring system and the online course designed in this work to enhance the final exam pass rate. At the end, students filled a questionnaire to report their perception and satisfaction about the course.

An Exploratory Study of Learner Characteristics, Perception of Interaction, and Satisfaction in Online Consumer Finance Courses

2023-04-30T20:36:21+00:00

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of learner characteristics on online interaction, the relationship between online interaction and learner satisfaction, and variances in online interaction across different courses. Three types of online interaction were studied: learner-instructor interaction, learner-learner interaction, and learner-content interaction. To achieve the goals of this study, a survey was sent out to students enrolled in three online consumer finance courses at a large research university. Findings reveal that females rated the instructor-student interaction higher than males. Student-content interaction correlated the most with learner satisfaction. Learner-instructor and learner-learner interaction varied significantly among the three courses, while no statistical difference was found in learner-content interaction across the courses. This study provides insights for instructors, instructional designers, and administrators to implement and improve their design of different types of interaction in online courses to enhance learner satisfaction and the quality of online courses.

Learning contradictions: does student social interaction occur in the middle of e-Learning?

2023-04-30T20:36:22+00:00

During the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, distance learning is known to provide new numerous opportunities, in the interaction patterns between learning actors, in Indonesia. The inter-group competitive and collaborative learning methods have also been identified as options for increasing interaction, by paying attention to students’ self-concepts. Based on being quantitative explanative, this research aims to determine the influence of both learning methods and the role of students’ self-concept, on the interactions between members and groups. This research used non-parametric quantitative methods so moreover, 62 students were selected and divided into 2 classes, namely the control and experimental groups, each with 38 & 24 respondents, respectively. To determine the effect of competitive and collaborative methods between groups, as well as self-concept on students’ social interactions, the authors use a two-way ANOVA test. The results showed that there was an influence of using collaborative learning methods on students with low self-concept towards their social interactions. However, there was no influence of students’ self-concept toward their social interactions.

The Coursera Community Framework: exploring the MOOC as a Community of Practice

2023-05-03T09:41:37+00:00

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have increasingly become an important element for individuals’ learning and development. However, MOOCs mainly concentrate on duplicating knowledge instead of constructing it. This research aims to explore the structure of the MOOCs for fostering the knowledge construction in which educational professional build, develop, share one another’ learning and reflections. This research focused on Coursera, a particular MOOC community, by drawing on the concepts of community of practice (CoP) as a theoretical lens. Three types of data were collected. The archival data consisted of the top and selected posts from online discussion forums, and the elicited data which was derived from over 60 interviews with Coursera learners. Meanwhile, field note data was extracted from 160 days of interaction with the participants. A qualitative research method using a netnographic methodology was employed. The findings contribute to the body of knowledge construction and online communities by providing an understanding of the domain, community and practice elements. The study on other elements such as the reinforcement of identity, formation of warrants and identification of mechanisms for legitimate peripheral participation can help to interpret the constitution of CoPs in MOOC. This research developed a Coursera community framework that generally makes a MOOC community more energetic to construct knowledge.

Key issues and pedagogical implications in the design of Digital Educational Escape rooms

2023-05-03T20:36:26+00:00

Educational Escape rooms are game-based environments that may involve students of all school orders in engaging learning experiences. COVID-19 pandemic has increased the proliferation of escape rooms in a digital format whose use appeared meaningful for their generative effects on knowledge acquisition and on 21st century skills development. Nevertheless, the design of educational escape rooms is an essential process requiring a deep knowledge of both game design principles and learning design approaches. Moreover, teachers and educators willing to design and to experiment escape rooms with their students need to know how to connect these principles belonging to apparently distant fields and to balance them, to make these learning environments effective from an educational point of view and, at the same time, highly and intrinsically motivating.

The aim of this contribution is to focus on the design related aspects of educational digital escape rooms, providing a pedagogical foundation and discussing implications for learning. A Design-Based Research (DBR) has been conducted, involving two cohorts of undergraduate students who attended the Game-based learning course in the last two academic years. The educational escape rooms designed by them in the two editions of the course, corresponding to two iterations of a DBR cycle, were compared to investigate if the progressive enhancement of the design approach has affected the quality of the realized educational escape rooms.

From evaluation of DEERs designed by students a taxonomy was derived that, listing the main design characteristics for the development of DEERs, can be used as a tool...

A phenomenological study of first-grade teachers’ lived experiences of major challenges facing online education

2023-05-12T20:40:29+00:00

Recruiting a qualitative phenomenological approach, the present study aimed to reflect on the first-grade teachers’ lived experiences of the major challenges facing online education in Iran’s primary schools in the academic year 2020-21. The total number of participants was 10 first-grade teachers working in primary schools in the city of Yazd, Iran, selected using the purposive sampling method. The data collection tool was also a semi-structured interview, whose outcomes were analyzed via the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) developed by Smith et al. (1997). To determine the validity of the data obtained, the opinions of some qualitative researchers and participants, were exploited. Coding was further performed and then compared by the researcher and one other expert in qualitative research. Ultimately, the first-grade teachers’ lived experiences of online education were delineated and developed into 7 main themes and 30 sub-themes. Accordingly, the main themes of “evaluation”, “uncertainties and limitations”, “emerging issues”, and “interactions”, were established with reference to the first research question, focused on the online education challenges perceived by these teachers. Then, the main themes of “creative adaptability” and “production and exploitation” were created in response to the second research question about teachers’ strategies adopted to cope with online education challenges. The main theme of “experience formation grounds”, comprised of the sub-themes of “specific grounds” and “general grounds”, was further achieved concerning the third research question, namely, the grounds of teachers’ experience formation.