Professional vision of classroom management comprises the competence to recognize relevant classroom management events and interactions and to interpret them in a theory-based manner (Gold et al., 2016; Sherin & van Es, 2009). Promoting this competence is a main goal of teacher training. The effectiveness of video-based learning arrangements to promote this competence has already been confirmed (Steffensky & Kleinknecht, 2016). However, there is a lack of digital learning opportunities that offer individually adaptable learning paths (Bremer, 2009) to take different performance levels and learning tempi of pre-service teachers into account (Landenfeld et al., 2019). This article therefore describes the development of a digital, video-based learning module to promote the professional vision of relevant classroom management events. It was developed according to proven media-psychological design principles and subjected to usability testing. Representing the potential user groups, two student teachers (novices) and twelve seminar leaders (experts) worked on at least one part of the digital learning module and evaluated its usability in terms of content, operability, and aesthetics. A qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts and notes revealed that design and content of the module were evaluated as aesthetic and meaningful. Additionally, statements on module length, video analyses, support elements, feedback, operating elements, and design aspects were extracted. Based on these findings, the video analyses were modified, and the module was revised. In addition to the possibility of using the digital learning module for the competence development of pre-service teachers, the obtained findings are useful for the construction of future video-based learning modules.
Purpose: This paper provides an overview of studies that integrate adult learners’ perceptions on e-Learning courses related to healthcare, by identifying and describing characteristics and key factors of these courses and by delineating factors that should be considered when designing e-Learning courses for healthcare practitioners. Methods: A scoping review was conducted of studies evaluating university level e-Learning courses in healthcare disciplines (2010–2020), following the PRISMA-ScR method for data identification, screening, selection and extraction. The data was prepared according to the study, participants, and course characteristics as well as the evaluation of learners’ success, engagement and perceptions. Findings: Of the 246 identified studies, 12 met the inclusion criteria for this study. The evaluation of the e-Learning courses in the sample was generally positive for both online and hybrid models for all outcome variables. Three factors influencing the structure, process and outcome quality of e-learning courses stood out: the functionality of the learning management system (LMS) (i.e., structure quality); the importance of real-time interaction and feedback (i.e., process and outcome quality); and the influence of initial expectations on process and outcome quality. Originality: A substantial body of research has addressed issues related to outcomes and course design across e-Learning courses. Yet, there is no consensus on what can be defined as a successful, high-quality e-Learning course from an adult learner’s perspective. This research highlights factors to consider when designing e-Learning courses for healthcare practitioners that integrates the adult learner’s perspective.
This special issue includes scientific articles and practical reports related to the digital networked infrastructure for education, formerly called the National Education Platform. The issue gives an impression of the breadth of projects and approaches that deal with questions of digital education, the necessary competencies for the future of digital collaboration and many other topics as part of the funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The aim is both to update the level of information on the initiative among the professional community and to highlight the existing potential for further research and development in this context.
Nowadays, there are many online courses like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) available from different providers (e.g. edX, Coursera, openHPI, OpenWHO, iMOOX). To support learners, aggregators like Class Central or MOOChub were established. These aggregators hold catalogs with the offerings of the providers making them a central entry point for the users. Such catalogs are based on metadata, which needs to be formatted in a proper way. This metadata can then be used for filtering courses and recommendation engines also. With more and more emerging AI-based recommendation services for learning opportunities and learning path assistants, the need for well-maintained and meaningful metadata is growing massively. In this paper, we report on our research about different systems for categorizing the fields of study, topic, or subject, which can be used to enhance existing metadata formats. An overview of field of study categorization systems of different entities (e.g. international, national, and private organizations) is given. The systems are compared regarding their usefulness in metadata formats for the description of courses. The results are utilized to refine our own metadata format and represent a further step towards a standardized metadata format for courses and automatically generated metadata.
Virtual worlds (VWs) have been present in higher education for more than a decade but have regained substantial traction in recent years as a result of COVID-19 and the metaverse hype. Nonetheless, facilitating peer exchange and social interaction in VWs in higher education has not been sufficiently researched nor is specific design knowledge available. Therefore, we derive design principles systematically by collecting design requirements based on scientific contributions on VWs, encompassing the instructor viewpoint, before turning them into meta-requirements that we then merge to design principles. We translate these into tangible design features instantiated in a genuine VW teaching unit with master students. The evaluation in focus group interviews after the application of our design knowledge demonstrates the theoretical and practical value of our contribution to strengthening social interaction in distance learning settings from teachers’ and learners’ perspectives.
The funding program "Nationale Bildungsplattform" by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research aims to develop prototypes of an education-sector-spanning, transdisciplinary meta platform that offers access to teaching and learning formats. This article takes up the sometimes controversial discussion on this initiative and discloses the associated media pedagogical and user-centered work. First, basic pedagogical assumptions and considerations for a digital networked infrastructure for education are outlined. In addition, user requirements are presented, derived from qualitative interviews with people interested in studying. Further, these requirements are condensed into a rough structure of such a networked infrastructure. Certain components are referenced and explained in a usage scenario. The results are summarized, compared to the identified points of criticism, and further fields of discussion are named.
Pedagogical conversational agents (PCAs) in virtual worlds are increasingly used in the field of education. This is evidenced by the trend of increased publications in this area. This systematic literature review examines research contributions that study the implementation of PCAs in virtual worlds to promote learning in higher and further education. We exploratively identify the following design categories: Embodiment and character, the PCA's adaptation to learners’ feelings and their role as mentors, the application of gamification, communication technologies, privacy, and the existence of design knowledge. We reduced the 668 articles found to 45 coded articles. From the results of our research foci, we derived future research streams. The results show research gaps in privacy, the existence of design principles, and more advanced communication technologies. Finally, we conclude that the potential of using PCAs in virtual worlds has not yet been exploited and should be investigated more structured and more deeply.
With the current development of a central (digital) networked infrastructure for education, the Federal Republic of Germany aims to technically connect the multitude of existing educational platforms and offerings in order to enable broad, easy-to-use, personalized, and self-governing access to lifelong education and to facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders. Regarding the latter, a key challenge is to identify suitable technologies, and to evaluate, technically connect, and didactically use them thoroughly. In the present case study, we examined social virtual reality (VR) as a technology for scientific collaboration by carrying out a virtual scientific conference to assess perceived task-technology fit and technology acceptance. Participants (N = 31) reported a medium to high perceived fit, ease of use, and usefulness for social VR, resulting in a high behavioral intention for future use of the technology. In line with previous approaches to integrate task-technology fit and technology acceptance theory, the applied technology's fit predicted perceived ease of use and usefulness to result in a higher intention to use social VR. Overall, social VR appears suitable and sufficient for collaboration at scientific gatherings and is, therefore, to be considered a component of the emerging (digital) infrastructure (called “Digitale Vernetzungsinfrastruktur für die Bildung”). However, in line with previous research, the results point to the need for further development of social VR with regard to both technology and design to further enhance its suitability and convenience.
The concept of sharable LOs has been around for decades, but implementing repositories, guaranteeing interoperability, managing metadata, and achieving organizational and financial sustainability has proven challenging. The realization that there will likely never be a universal Learning Management System (LMS) made the idea of universally shareable content appear even more illusionary on the one hand, but on the other hand also led to the development of learning system interoperability standards. The paper proposes to use either tool-interoperability or self-sovereignty as key technologies for establishing near-universal content repositories.
This paper describes the conception, development, and evaluation of a peer support web application for university students. The main goal of uniMatchUp! is to help students in finding appropriate academic support and learning groups by providing Group Awareness (GA) information about various aspects of fellow students that are useful for online learning. The study contributes to a better understanding of the use of GA tools in the university context and reveals that active engagement with the application, in the form of contributed questions and answers, is positively associated with study satisfaction. During the interaction with uniMatchUp!, cognitive GA information (contribution quality) was considered more relevant than behavioral (amount of participation), and emotional (well-being) GA information about other students. The findings also provide potentials for improvement, which can shape the further development of uniMatchUp! and future applications.
In November/December 2020, one of the first scientific conferences per Social Virtual Reality (SocialVR) was held. The conference, which lasted several weeks, addressed the anchoring of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies in vocational education. The focus was also on examining the suitability of the immersive medium as an educational technology for the conference setting. This paper describes the conception and implementation of the conference with regard to the special characteristics of SocialVR. Furthermore, the results of the evaluation are presented, which explores the question of what strengths and weaknesses SocialVR has in store for online academic conferences.
Gazing into a crystal ball, the author presents his thoughts on how tertiary learning could look in the future. Based on today's emerging technology, future reports and many discussions with colleagues he summarizes five possible characteristics of a university study programme in 2040: Study advisory BOTs, micro masters and nano degrees, ubiquitous individualized learning, learning groups and blockchain technology. In the second part, he focuses on the impact on learning management systems, which will be more customizable, interactive, interoperable, and increasingly reduced to its primary task: managing learning.
The current generation of learning management systems (LMS) is essentially determined by a so-called transmission model of education, which has to be rethought in terms of lifelong learning due to the requirements of the digitalized society for the growing generation as well as for the adult generation. Technologies of AI and learning analytics enable the transition to concepts of hybrid course designs, to concepts of active learning and to new approaches of measuring individual study progress and designing personalized learning support. In three examples, this article explains how approaches to personalization are implemented in projects at the the Research Cluster D²L² “Digitalization, Diversity and Lifelong Learning. Consequences for Higher Education.“ of the FernUniverität in Hagen and refers to the implication for a next generation LMS that arise from educational perspectives.
Learning management systems (LMS) take on a variety of tasks in the support of face-to-face higher education: from course organization to the distribution of learning media and provision of learning activities. Depending on the requirements of the educational institution, LMS cover these areas directly or integrate, at least interact, with external systems. On an individual level, further applications are used, for example from the areas of personal knowledge management, social media or communication systems. On an abstract level, all these applications form a network of applications, sometimes more and sometimes less well integrated, which are used in teaching and learning scenarios as needed. What role will the LMS play in the future in such a network of distributed applications, which is potentially expanding as a result of new developments? Will it remain the central hub of teaching and learning processes that it is today in many educational institutions, or will it disappear or merge into so-called Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLE) as decentralized applications become increasingly interconnected? This article discusses possible answers and consequences for the further development of LMS in the field of face-to-face teaching in higher education, taking into account the current societal conditions.
Library services are essential for teaching. These services should be better integrated as part of a redesign of an LMS. This applies to both the catalogs, databases and media provided by the library, as well as the possibilities of literature and information management. If you look beyond the library to other areas of the economy, the question arises to what extent you can learn from other industries. In various economic sectors, the customer relationship is maintained and intensified via the customer account. Particularly noteworthy are the customer accounts of banks and insurance companies. The online bank account offers a variety of functions that are relevant to the customer relationship. These can serve as a model for integrating the library into an LMS. The involvement of librarians to support literature research is also useful.
Learning Management Systems (LMS), as the most widely used online learning systems in formal education, confront all learners with the same learning environment, although the learning-relevant characteristics of the learner are by no means homogeneous. In this article, we highlight ways in which LMSs, by linking institutional data sources and analytics tools, can provide personalized learning environments that adaptivly adjust to learners' needs and learning progress. In future adaptive personalized learning environments, the LMS as we know it today will merely be a building block within an open, modular, and distributed system architecture. We propose a five layer architecture that fits into the existing IT landscape of educational institutions and enables the coexistence of different components and paths for processing, storing, and analyzing data for the adaptation of personalized learning environments. The components in each layers can be complemented or replaced by other systems and services as long as the interfaces of the neighboring layers can still be served. This allows not only a step-by-step construction of a complex system landscape, but also a distribution of the computing load and multiple use of resources and services.
The need to be competitive in a fast-changing global job market will likely lead to an increased demand for “just-in-time” educational experiences. Parallel to developments in the medical sector with virtual patient records, the paper presents a model for storing and managing educational data gathered along a lifelong learning journey, such as transcripts, artifacts, and performance analytics. Using the concept of Social Linked Data (“SOLID”), the learners instead of the educational institutions would have sovereignty over their own data, while transactional fingerprints would be used to guarantee data integrity using a federated blockchain.
Developments in the Smart Home sector are increasingly supporting users in their everyday lives and at home. The devices are intelligent, networked and integrated into the environment. With Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), systems have recently made their way into the living room at home. However, the part of formal and informal learning with Intelligent Personal Assistants is not yet exhausted. Yet, IPAs offer an innovative approach to rethink for example classic learning methods with flashcards or partner learning. Are they feasible to support learning at home? IPAs can be used to provide knowledge and can be used for a variety of ways for assessment. This article presents an IPA using the wide-spread Amazon Echo as a realization of a virtual learning partner. Therefore, the prototype combines aspects from the domain of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and the domain of Learning Analytics with the help of a Learning Record Store (xAPI). The presented prototype was evaluated according to the Technology Acceptance Model. The articles closes with conceivable scenarios how IPAs will be able to adapt the physical environment according to the learning goal.
We report on the usage of an audience response system ("clickers") in an introductory math course, both in terms of practical usage and in terms of answer distributions, test-theoretical properties and clustering of questions. We give examples of the questions ("items") that we used and their associated properties. We found the system to deliver meaningful and reliable results regarding the conceptual learning of the students, and we found these benefits to be robust independent of the particulars of the instructional setting. Finally we found that peer instruction can make clicker usage even more meaningful, as the discrimination of questions increases after discussions between learners.
An important challenge of higher educational institutions is the inclusion of non-traditional learners. The following paper presents a project, which researched the challenges and special needs of student top athletes. First the paper will present the results of a qualitative study about the challenges and conditions of their study programs and commitments of student top athletes at the University of Applied Science Mittweida. Based on this results a blended learning scenario in combination with the flipped classroom has been introduced and tested.
