This paper presents a tool developed for the purpose of assessing teaching presence in online courses that make use of computer conferencing, and preliminary results from the use of this tool. The method of analysis is based on Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s [1] model of critical thinking and practical inquiry in a computer conferencing context. The concept of teaching presence is constitutively defined as having three categories – design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction. Indicators that we search for in the computer conference transcripts identify each category. Pilot testing of the instrument reveals interesting differences in the extent and type of teaching presence found in different graduate level online courses.

Digital game-based learning is a hot topic of research and development. Since the advent of computer and video games, educators were inherently interested in utilizing the beneficial aspects of computer games for educational purposes. These factors are primarily the intrinsic motivation of games, immersive environments, engaging stories, and an artful balance between challenges and continuously growing abilities. Proponents of computer games delivered a large number of empirical investigations revealing that games may foster the development of abilities and competencies. Besides the advantageous aspects of computer games, a variety of problems were reported by researchers. Due to the high costs of professional game development, many educational games are technologically poor and cannot compete with entertainment games in terms of visual design, possibilities for interactions, or storytelling. Moreover, many current educational games do not incorporate a sound psychological, pedagogical, or didactic background; instead they are focusing on transmission or rehearsal of isolated facts or skills. Finally, such games lack the ability to adapt to individual competencies failing to balance challenge and abilities regarding knowledge or skills. The ELEKTRA project, introduced in this article, aims for addressing these problems relying on an interdisciplinary approach of cognitive science, neuroscience, pedagogy, game design, and game development. The project will develop an adventure game that can keep up with commercial games and that focuses on primarily curriculum-related educational purposes by incorporating a sound psychological and pedagogical framework. Moreover, the project will prove the outcomes of research and development by a comprehensive game demonstrator.

Inaugural Address Symposium Can we support CCSL? Educational, social and technological affordances for learning

The main problem addressed in this paper is how to help learners construct knowledge in exploring existing hypermedia/hypertext based learning resources on the Web. Our approach to this problem is to provide a learning tool, which affords knowledge construction activities involving reflection on the exploration process. In this paper, we describe an interactive history that encourages learners to annotate their exploration history with the reasons why they have explored, which reasons have a great influence on knowledge construction in hyperspace. It also generates a knowledge map from the annotated exploration history, which map spatially represents the semantic relationships among the Web pages explored by the learners. This paper also describes an evaluation with the interactive history system. The results indicate that the system affords rethinking exploration process.

Complex learning: why it matters, what it is and how it may be stimulated & supported in higher education

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