Informatics in Education

Preparing students for the workforce is a balancing act that involves theory, practice, and assessment. As students navigate an educational experience that is, however, often distant from real-world needs, it is imperative that academia finds a novel way to bridge the gap. As many organizations utilize open challenges to attract ideas and talent, academia can easily create such bridge, leading to greater engagement, greater student preparation, and a potential employment pipeline. This paper describes the experience of our students and faculty advisors who participated to the NASA SUITS (Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students) Design Challenge. In particular, we review the pedagogical value of the solution that they created and the changes that were implemented in the curriculum of an undergraduate degree program in Information Technology. This open-source, multi-year project is also a flexible platform that can be utilized for engagement in K-12 education as well as graduate research projects.

Online learning has become a widespread method for providing learning at different levels of education. It has facilitated the learning in many ways and made it more flexible and available by providing learners with more opportunities to learn information, further access to different learning resources, and collaboration rather than face-to-face learning. In spite of these benefits and rapid growth of online education, success and persistence in such courses is one the important aspects of online learning research and it relies on different factors. Therefore investigating the reasons of students' dropout of an online education course or program and its contributing factors is essential in this area. One of the most barriers in online learning system is lack of interactions. In learning, interaction between students themselves, with the course content, and course instructors is important for conveying information, enhancing teaching quality, give directions, and many more functions. The aim of this research is to review the literature to propose a clearer picture of studies have been conducted regarding online interaction and factors that impact it in online education systems.