Google is piloting "Learn About," an innovative AI learning tool using the LearnLM AI model. Unlike standard chatbots, "Learn About" offers an interactive approach, incorporating quizzes, lists, and contextual information for a deeper understanding. Currently in limited release, the platform emphasizes reliable educational sources, setting it apart from general AI tools.

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 2:00pm
Location: Duderstadt Center
Organized By: Engineering Education Research

Abstract: Engineering textbooks have problems, and those problems have problems. While they may be complex and time-consuming, textbook problems are “tidy” in that they are well-defined, closed-ended, and decontextualized. In contrast, the practice of engineering is “messy.” The design process is ill-defined, modeling and analysis are open-ended, and the engineered systems affect and are affected by society in positive and negative ways. In this talk I frame the messiness of engineering as an important part of the conversation about DEI in engineering. By exposing students to the messiness of engineering throughout their undergraduate education, instructors can better prepare students for their careers; help students to reflect upon their views and biases; and present engineering as socially constructed, instead of inherently upholding a white supremacist culture. I will then present the SHUTTLE Lab’s design-based research approach to putting some of this messiness back into engineering science courses. Specifically, I will describe our work addressing the messiness of mathematical modeling. We are focused on the professional skill of engineering judgment, and are simultaneously creating open-ended modeling problems, studying emerging engineering modeling judgment, and training faculty to notice and respond to their students’ displays of engineering judgment.

Bio: Aaron W. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering and a Core Faculty member in Engineering Education Research at the University of Michigan. His design-based research focuses on how to re-contextualize engineering science engineering courses to better reflect and prepare students for the reality of ill-defined, sociotechnical engineering practice. Aaron holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Michigan and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was an instructor in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Outside of work, Aaron enjoys collecting LEGO NASA sets, camping, and playing disc golf.

Muuvment, a social impact platform based in Bermuda, in partnership with the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Department of Education and the Ministry of Education, is announced the educational launch of the Bermuda Environmental Action [BEA] programme. A spokesperson said, “The BEA programme is designed to increase understanding of environmental issues and inspire the community […]

Google’s new AI-powered ‘Learn About’ experiment will adapt to users’ interests and learning goals, per the company, but it is not yet publicly available in India

It is well-known that podcasting is huge these days. But you might not realize how many educational podcasts are out there.

By educational, we mean shows that focus on some super-focused topic, like a specific period of history or an academic discipline. For instance, there are at least 15 or 20 active podcasts about linguistics, and there are several podcasts out there about conversational Latin (and we were pretty sure that was a dead language that was no longer spoken).

A Podcast for Every Discipline? The Rise of Educational Audio

Learn the intricacies of RSS feeds and podasting in the RSS Learning Center.

RSS Educational Articles

Learn the intricacies of RSS feeds and podasting with RSS and Podcasting Videos

RSS Educational Videos

ANIC Calls for Immediate Action Following Disturbing Survey Findings on Discrimination in Australian Educational Institutions

(Telecompaper) MTS Belarus, in cooperation with the Belarusian Ministry of Education and Unicef, has started a project to develop recommendations for schools...

Helen J. DeWaard, Canadian Journal of Learning Technology, Nov 13, 2024

I enjoyed the lavish illustrations in this article, a rarity in academic publications. After anm introductory section, the paper offers what is essentially a dialogue around the topic of sharing and openness in education. This bit from  the abstract resonated most with me: "It is becoming ever more important to share expertise as practitioners, researchers, and theorists in the field of education by making explicit what is often tacit and unspoken, and when sharing knowledge, reflections, and actions. By actively thinking-out-loud through blogs, social media, and open scholarly publications, educators can openly share details of what, how, and why they do what they do." This is the space where OLDaily operates - a somewhat middle ground between full academia on the one hand and the popular press on the other.

Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, Nov 13, 2024

Interesting commentary on the state of research in educational technology today and what's missing. What's missing? Research that links theory through technology to needs and practices (so I summarize). Thus, Alexandra Mihai looks for "insights into how educational technology can enhance the learning process" and "how technology can contribute to addressing the increasing diversity of our learner population." Mihai also considers the impact of AI on the research process, suggesting "it's so important to maintain our agency in the research and writing process." I don't think education as a discipline has come to terms enough with how people actually learn, which (to me) explain the persistence of the sort of teacher- and institution-focused approaches Mihai asks for here.

In order to reduce the challenges encountered by learners and educators in engaging in educational activities, this paper classifies learners' roles in virtual learning communities, and explores the role of behaviour characteristics and their positions in collaborative knowledge construction networks in promoting the process of knowledge construction. This study begins with an analysis of the relationship structure among learners in the virtual learning community and then applies the FCM algorithm to arrange learners into various dimensional combinations and create distinct learning communities. The test results demonstrate that the FCM method performs consistently during the clustering process, with less performance oscillations, and good node aggregation, the ARI value of the model is up to 0.90. It is found that they play an important role in the social interaction of learners' virtual learning community, which plays a certain role in promoting the development of artificial intelligence.

Aim/Purpose: This paper provides a general-purpose categorization scheme for assessing the utility of new and emerging three-dimensional interactive digital environments (3D-IDEs), along with specific pedagogic approaches that are known to work. It argues for the use of 3D-IDEs on the basis of their ludic appeal and ability to provide intrinsic motivation to the learner, and their openness that allows the learner to gain a more holistic understanding of a topic. Background: Researchers have investigated the affordances, benefits, and drawbacks of individual 3D-IDEs, such as virtual worlds, but teachers lack a general-purpose approach to assessing new 3D-IDEs as they appear and applying them to teaching practice. Methodology: The categorization scheme is based on the analysis, reflection, and comprehension of the research on limitations, challenges, and opportunities for teaching in virtual environments by Angel Rueda, Valdes Godines and Guzmán Flores; the scheme is discussed in terms of an experiment to trial virtual genetics labs in Second Life. Contribution: The paper describes a general-purpose approach to applying existing and new 3D virtual spaces to education, shows a worked example of the use of the categories, and describes six approaches to consider in applying these technologies. Findings: 3D-IDEs are categorized in terms of the way in which they interface with the user’s senses and their ability to provide ‘immersion’; two forms of immersion are examined: digital perceptual immersion – the generated sense of reality – and ludic narrative immersion – a less cognitive and more emotional engagement with the learning environment. Recommendations for Practitioners: Six specific forms of pedagogy appropriate for 3D-IDEs are examined and discussed, in terms of the affordances and technology required, as assessed by the categorization scheme. More broadly, the paper argues for a change in the assessment of new digital technologies from the technology’s features to its affordances and the pedagogies it can support. Recommendation for Researchers: The paper offers a practical approach to choosing and using 3D-IDEs for education, based upon previous work. The next step is to trial the scheme with teachers to ascertain its ease of use and effectiveness. Impact on Society: The paper argues strongly for a new approach to teaching, where the learner is encouraged to use 3D-IDEs in a ludic manner in order to generate internal motivation to learn, and to explore the topic according to their individual learning needs in addition to the teacher’s planned route through the learning material. Future Research: The categorization scheme is intended to be applied to new technologies as they are introduced. Future research is needed to assess its effectiveness and if necessary update the scheme.

Aim/Purpose: This research aims to describe and demonstrate the results of an intervention through educational robotics to improve the computational thinking of student teachers. Background: Educational robotics has been increasing in school classrooms for the development of computational thinking and digital competence. However, there is a lack of research on how to prepare future teachers of Kindergarten and Elementary School in the didactic use of computational thinking, as part of their necessary digital teaching competence. Methodology: Following the Design-Based Research methodology, we designed an intervention with educational robots that includes unplugged, playing, making and remixing activities. Participating in this study were 114 Spanish university students of education. Contribution: This research helps to improve the initial training of student teachers, especially in the field of educational robotics. Findings: The student teachers consider themselves digital competent, especially in the dimensions related to social and multimedia aspects, and to a lesser extent in the technological dimension. The results obtained also confirm the effectiveness of the intervention through educational robotics in the development of computational thinking of these students, especially among male students. Recommendations for Practitioners: Teacher trainers could introduce robotics following these steps: (1) initiation and unplugged activities, (2) gamified activities of initiation to the programming and test of the robots, (3) initiation activities to Scratch, and (4) design and resolution of a challenge. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers could examine how interventions with educational robots helps to improve the computational thinking of student teachers, and thoroughly analyze gender-differences. Impact on Society: Computational thinking and robotics are one of the emerging educational trends. Despite the rise of this issue, there are still few investigations that systematize and collect evidence in this regard. This study allows to visualize an educational intervention that favors the development of the computational thinking of student teachers. Future Research: Researchers could evaluate not only the computational thinking of student teachers, but also their didactics, their ability to teach or create didactic activities to develop computational thinking in their future students.

Aim/Purpose: One of the main objectives of higher education institutions is to provide a high-quality education to their students and reduce dropout rates. This can be achieved by predicting students’ academic achievement early using Educational Data Mining (EDM). This study aims to predict students’ final grades and identify honorary students at an early stage. Background: EDM research has emerged as an exciting research area, which can unfold valuable knowledge from educational databases for many purposes, such as identifying the dropouts and students who need special attention and discovering honorary students for allocating scholarships. Methodology: In this work, we have collected 300 undergraduate students’ records from three departments of a Computer and Information Science College at a university located in Saudi Arabia. We compared the performance of six data mining methods in predicting academic achievement. Those methods are C4.5, Simple CART, LADTree, Naïve Bayes, Bayes Net with ADTree, and Random Forest. Contribution: We tested the significance of correlation attribute predictors using four different methods. We found 9 out of 18 proposed features with a significant correlation for predicting students’ academic achievement after their 4th semester. Those features are student GPA during the first four semesters, the number of failed courses during the first four semesters, and the grades of three core courses, i.e., database fundamentals, programming language (1), and computer network fundamentals. Findings: The empirical results show the following: (i) the main features that can predict students’ academic achievement are the student GPA during the first four semesters, the number of failed courses during the first four semesters, and the grades of three core courses; (ii) Naïve Bayes classifier performed better than Tree-based Models in predicting students’ academic achievement in general, however, Random Forest outperformed Naïve Bayes in predicting honorary students; (iii) English language skills do not play an essential role in students’ success at the college of Computer and Information Sciences; and (iv) studying an orientation year does not contribute to students’ success. Recommendations for Practitioners: We would recommend instructors to consider using EDM in predicting students’ academic achievement and benefit from that in customizing students’ learning experience based on their different needs. Recommendation for Researchers: We would highly endorse that researchers apply more EDM studies across various universities and compare between them. For example, future research could investigate the effects of offering tutoring sessions for students who fail core courses in their first semesters, examine the role of language skills in social science programs, and examine the role of the orientation year in other programs. Impact on Society: The prediction of academic performance can help both teachers and students in many ways. It also enables the early discovery of honorary students. Thus, well-deserved opportunities can be offered; for example, scholarships, internships, and workshops. It can also help identify students who require special attention to take an appropriate intervention at the earliest stage possible. Moreover, instructors can be aware of each student’s capability and customize the teaching tasks based on students’ needs. Future Research: For future work, the experiment can be repeated with a larger dataset. It could also be extended with more distinctive attributes to reach more accurate results that are useful for improving the students’ learning outcomes. Moreover, experiments could be done using other data mining algorithms to get a broader approach and more valuable and accurate outputs.

Aim/Purpose: This article explores the critical need for adaptable educational models in times of crisis, focusing on strategies to overcome infrastructural and digital inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: By examining a case study of an offline digital library project implemented in South Sudan, this paper seeks to examine the impact of an offline digital educational solution for low-resource and crisis situations. Methodology: The authors utilize a mixed-methods approach, integrating both qualitative interviews and quantitative data analysis, to evaluate the use and impact of the SolarSPELL Initiative’s offline digital libraries in South Sudan. Contribution: This study contributes to our understanding of digital and information literacy within crisis contexts, highlighting the vital role of localized, offline content. Findings: The findings demonstrate that offline digital solutions can effectively mitigate educational disruptions by providing an accessible means to continue education during emergencies. Recommendations for Practitioners: Recommendations for practitioners include the adoption of robust offline digital learning solutions to promote educational continuity. Recommendation for Researchers: The authors recommend that researchers continue investigating the potential of offline digital educational solutions for low-resource and crisis situations. Impact on Society: Ultimately, this article finds that offline digital libraries, when paired with skill-building, are a viable means to lessen digital disparities and promote educational continuity in times of crisis and beyond. Future Research: The study suggests further exploration into the long-term impacts of such interventions on learning outcomes.

Aim/Purpose: The teaching of appropriate problem-solving techniques to novice learners in undergraduate software development education is often poorly defined when compared to the delivery of programming techniques. Given the global need for qualified designers of information technology, the purpose of this research is to produce a foundational template for an educational software development methodology grounded in the established literature. This template can be used by third-level educators and researchers to develop robust educational methodologies to cultivate structured problem solving and software development habits in their students while systematically teaching the intricacies of software creation. Background: While software development methodologies are a standard approach to structured and traceable problem solving in commercial software development, educational methodologies for inexperienced learners remain a neglected area of research due to their assumption of prior programming knowledge. This research aims to address this deficit by conducting an integrative review to produce a template for such a methodology. Methodology: An integrative review was conducted on the key components of Teaching Software Development Education, Problem Solving, Threshold Concepts, and Computational Thinking. Systematic reviews were conducted on Computational Thinking and Software Development Education by employing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) process. Narrative reviews were conducted on Problem Solving and Threshold Concepts. Contribution: This research provides a comprehensive analysis of problem solving, software development education, computational thinking, and threshold concepts in computing in the context of undergraduate software development education. It also synthesizes review findings from these four areas and combines them to form a research-based foundational template methodology for use by educators and researchers interested in software development undergraduate education. Findings: This review identifies seven skills and four concepts required by novice learners. The skills include the ability to perform abstraction, data representation, decomposition, evaluation, mental modeling, pattern recognition, and writing algorithms. The concepts include state and sequential flow, non-sequential flow control, modularity, and object interaction. The teaching of these skills and concepts is combined into a spiral learning framework and is joined by four development stages to guide software problem solving: understanding the problem, breaking into tasks, designing, coding, testing, and integrating, and final evaluation and reflection. This produces the principal finding, which is a research-based foundational template for educational software development methodologies. Recommendations for Practitioners: Focusing introductory undergraduate computing courses on a programming syllabus without giving adequate support to problem solving may hinder students in their attainment of development skills. Therefore, providing a structured methodology is necessary as it equips students with essential problem-solving skills and ensures they develop good development practices from the start, which is crucial to ensuring undergraduate success in their studies and beyond. Recommendation for Researchers: The creation of educational software development methodologies with tool support is an under-researched area in undergraduate education. The template produced by this research can serve as a foundational conceptual model for researchers to create concrete tools to better support computing undergraduates. Impact on Society: Improving the educational value and experience of software development undergraduates is crucial for society once they graduate. They drive innovation and economic growth by creating new technologies, improving efficiency in various industries, and solving complex problems. Future Research: Future research should concentrate on using the template produced by this research to create a concrete educational methodology adapted to suit a specific programming paradigm, with an associated learning tool that can be used with first-year computing undergraduates.

Aim/Purpose: The objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of educational games on learning computer programming. In particular, we are examining whether allowing students to manipulate the underlying code of the educational games will increase their intrinsic motivation. Background: Young students are fond of playing digital games. Moreover, they are also interested in creating game applications. We try to make use of both of these facts. Methodology: A prototype was created to teach the fundamentals of conditional structures. A number of errors were intentionally included in the game at different stages. Whenever an error is encountered, students have to stop the game and fix the bug before proceeding. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate this approach. Contribution: This research investigates a novel approach to teach programming using educational games. This study is at the initial stage. Findings: Allowing the programming students to manipulate the underlying code of the educational game they play will increase their intrinsic motivation. Recommendations for Practitioners: Creating educational games to teach programming, and systematically allowing the players to manipulate the gaming logic, will be beneficial to the students. Recommendation for Researchers: This research can be extended to investigate how various artificial intelligence techniques can be used to model the gamers, for example, skill level. Impact on Society: The future generations of students should be able to use digital technologies proficiently. In addition, they should also be able to understand and modify the underlying code in the digital things (like Internet of Things).This research attempts to alleviate the disenchantment associated with learning coding. Future Research: A full scale evaluation – including objective evaluation using game scores – will be conducted. One-way MANOVA will be used to analyze the efficacy of the proposed intervention on the students’ performance, and their intrinsic motivation and flow experience.

Aim/Purpose. This study seeks to determine the impact of a card game intervention in improving the English verbal communication of nursing students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Background. Many international students studying in Australia experience setbacks in their university studies due to English language difficulties. This paper outlines how an educational card game designed can be played by nursing students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds as an intervention for their English verbal communication development. Methodology. The study used a descriptive qualitative approach to analyse the learning experiences of forty-five (N=45) nursing students from CALD backgrounds undertaking their second semester at a metropolitan university in Victoria, Australia after being introduced to an educational card game developed by the first author. The card game was designed to explore the use of English pragmatic markers, which are words, phrases, or verbal cues that signal or emphasise the intentions of the speaker. Following the intervention, participants were queried in a survey about their experiences with English language speaking and how the game improved their verbal communication skills. Contribution. This paper provides knowledge about how a game can be designed to enhance the English verbal communication skills of nursing students from CALD backgrounds which could help them in their clinical placements and their adjustment into Australian society. Findings. Three intertwining themes that emerged from the data analysis were education content, skills development, and fun and creativity. These themes signify the importance of providing opportunities for learners to creatively practise the educational content in simulative contextualised situations within a safe, comfortable, and inclusive learning environment. Recommendations for Practitioners. Educators still need to consider the importance of inclusivity of students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds as part of successful integration into the culture of their host countries. Recommendations for Researchers. The findings emphasise the need for educators and researchers to understand the challenges facing these students in relation to marginalisation and discrimination and how they can design an intervention that is engaging and inclusive. Impact on Society. The findings also put forward the awareness of pragmatics as part of both English language learning and integration into the society of a host country as students learn how to express intention appropriately in various interactions. Furthermore, the themes presented in this paper suggest that not only should an educational game or an intervention contain relevant educational content and practical activities for skills development, but they must also be enjoyable by encouraging creativity and social interaction. Future Research. The results of this study also open possible future studies that involves the adaptation of a digital version of the card game or possible implementation of the game in other health professional programs in universities and other educational institutes.

Can questions sent to Open-Educational-Resource (OER) websites such as Ask-An-Expert serve as indicators for students’ interest in science? This issue was examined using an online questionnaire which included an equal number of questions about the topics “space” and “nutrition” randomly selected from three different sources: a 5th-grade science textbook, the “Ask-An-Expert” website, and questions collected from other students in the same age group. A sample of 113 5th-graders from two elementary schools were asked to rate their interest level in finding out the answer to these questions without knowledge of their source. Significant differences in students’ interest level were found between questions: textbook questions were ranked lowest for both subjects, and questions from the open-resource were ranked high. This finding suggests that questions sent to an open-resource could be used as an indicator of students’ interest in science. In addition, the high correlation of interests expressed by students from the two schools may point to a potential generalization of the findings. This study contributes by highlighting OER as a new and promising indicator of student interest, which may help bring “student voices” into mainstream science teaching to increase student interest in science.

Transforming a school from traditional teaching and learning to a one-to-one (1:1) classroom, in which a teacher and students have personal digital devices, inevitably requires changes in the way the teacher addresses her role. This study examined the implications of integrating 1:1 computing on teachers’ pedagogical perceptions and the classroom’s educational discourse. A change in pedagogical perceptions during three years of teaching within this model was investigated. The research analyzed data from 14 teachers teaching in a junior high school in the north of Israel collected over the course of three years through interviews and lesson observations. The findings show that the 1:1 computing allows teachers to improve their teaching skills; however, it fails to change their fundamental attitudes in regard to teaching and learning processes. It was further found that the use of a laptop by each student does not significantly improve the classroom’s learning discourse. The computer is perceived as an individual or group learning technology rather than as a tool for conducting learning discourse. An analysis of the data collected shows a great contribution to collaboration among teachers in preparing technology-enhanced lessons. The findings are discussed in terms of Bruner’s (Olson & Bruner, 1996) “folk psychology” and “folk pedagogy” of teachers and “the new learning ecology” framework in 1:1 classroom (Lee, Spires, Wiebe, Hollebrands, & Young, 2015). One of the main recommendations of this research is to reflect on findings from the teaching staff and the school community emphasizing 1:1 technology as a tool for significant pedagogical change. It seems that the use of personal technology per se is not enough for pedagogical changes to take place; the change must begin with teachers’ perceptions and attitudes.

This study seeks to explore what factors influence students’ ICT use and web technology competence. The objectives of this study are the following: (a) To what extent do certain elements of Rogers’ (2003) Diffusion of Innovations Theory (DOI) explain students’ ICT use, (b) To what extent do personality characteristics derived from the Big Five approach explain students’ ICT use, and (c) To what extent does motivation explain students’ ICT use. The research was conducted in Israel during the second semester of the academic year 2013-14, and included two groups of participants: a group of Educational Technology students (ET) and a group of Library and Information Science students (LIS). Findings add another dimension to the importance of Rogers’ DOI theory in the fields of Educational Technology and Library and Information Science. Further, findings confirm that personality characteristics as well as motivation affect ICT use. If instructors would like to enhance students’ ICT use, they should be aware of individual differences between students, and they should present to students the advantages and usefulness of ICT, thus increasing their motivation to use ICT, in the hopes that they will become innovators or early adopters.

These dynamics manifest in various ways, influencing interactions, decision-making and overall outcomes.

Should institutions be indebted to political agendas, or be upholders of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry?

The 28 workshops and eight regional training sessions across 17 states are free to attend, making them accessible to professionals across the country.

Children's Geographies; 12/01/2023
(AN 174964058); ISSN: 14733285
Academic Search Premier

The post PEN America Index of Educational Gag Orders was curated by information for practice.

The post Sociodemographic trends in special educational needs identification in Wales was curated by information for practice.

Abstract The work of educational measurement is a highly collaborative endeavor that brings together professionals from many disciplines. While the introduction of the “Foundational Competencies in Educational Measurement” acknowledges this, the explanation of the framework itself falls short in acknowledging the competencies and skills of those from disciplines other than psychometrics, such as content development […]

The post Commentary: What Is the Breadth of “Educational Measurement?” was curated by information for practice.

A series of educational modules has been developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to help students in professional schools – law, public policy, medicine, journalism, and business – understand science and its role in decision making.