Informatics in Education

Technology-enhanced learning generally focuses on the cognitive rather than the affective domain of learning. This multi-method evaluation of the INBECOM project (Integrating Behaviourism and Constructivism in Mathematics) was conducted from the point of view of affective learning levels of Krathwohl et al. (1964). The research questions of the study were: (i) to explore the affective learning experiences of the three groups of participants (researchers, teachers and students) during the use of a mobile game UFractions and an intelligent tutoring system ActiveMath to enhance the learning of fractions in mathematics; and (ii) to determine the significance of the relationships among the affective learning experiences of the three groups of participants (researchers, teachers and students) in the INBECOM project.

It is important today to prepare pre-service teachers to integrate social media tools into their lessons and to teach them how to use social media as a learning environment for educational context. Based on this, an undergraduate course was designed to fulfil this need. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the behaviours and perceptions of 27 pre-service teachers enrolled to a 14-week social-media enriched blended course. Facebook was used to support an out-of-class teaching and learning process. During the course, students developed educational content and were informed on how to use social media as a learning environment in an educational context. After implementation, they were asked to respond to an open-ended questionnaire related to the 14-week course process and social media usage in lessons. According to the findings, pre-service teachers stated that the use of social media tools, in addition to face-to-face learning, can enhance the dissemination of announcements, communication between students and instructor, the sharing of instructional activities, discussions, and the use and creation of multimedia tools and applications 24x7, by extending the limits of normal class hours. Most also stated that they would use Facebook for material and announcement sharing once they were in-service teachers. In addition to Facebook, they emphasised that they would also use Prezi, Glogster, MindMeister and Edmodo for their lessons and that they had learnt new concepts and social media tools during the course. They also suggested increasing the number of course hours and reducing course content per course session.

The purpose of this study was to examine students' experiences using Facebook as a learning management system during a course. The study participants were 18 junior education faculty students attending a compulsory distance education undergraduate course delivered by the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department at a university in Turkey. Upon completion of the 14-week Facebook-based course, participants were requested to answer nine open-ended questions. The results of content analysis show some advantages and some problematic aspects to using Facebook as a learning management system (LMS). Most students were satisfied with their learning experience using Facebook. The students favoured some features and situations, while other students saw the same things as being problematic. They also appreciated the sharing of course materials, instant messaging, opportunity to upload files, having discussions and getting instant notifications. A few students had negative thoughts about sharing materials in terms of accessing pre-uploaded files. However, their thoughts about synchronous and asynchronous communication were all positive. In particular, all students favoured the instant Facebook communications with their instructor and engagement in discussions. Almost half of the students had positive thoughts about the usefulness of Facebook in education. When these positive thoughts were examined, the students were found to consider that Facebook could be used as a LMS because it has many similar features.

This paper proposes a student-oriented approach tailored to effective collaboration between students using mobile phones for language learning within the life cycle of an intelligent tutoring system. For this reason, in this research, a prototype mobile application has been developed for multiple language learning that incorporates intelligence in its modeling and diagnostic components. One of the primary aims of this research is the construction of student models which promote the misconception diagnosis. Furthermore, they are the key for collaboration, given that students can cooperate with their peers, discuss complex problems from various perspectives and use knowledge to answer questions and/or to solve problems. Summarizing, in this paper, a mobile tutoring framework, built up in the context of student collaboration, is presented. Collaborative student groups are created with respect to the corresponding user models. Finally, the prototype was evaluated and the results confirmed the usefulness of collaborative learning.