In this research to practice full paper we describe our implementation of CoI (Community of Inquiry). CoI is a framework for designing an effective online learning environment. It originates from Charles Sanders Pierce’s ideas that knowledge can only be created in a community through inquiry. We applied the framework in a highly interactive course that was forced to be held online because of the pandemic. The theoretical core of the course is cognitive psychology, a topic considered difficult to learn in a short time. Besides describing our implementation, we evaluate the results of the students’ inquiries and compare it with results from the previous year when we did not use CoI for this part of the course. Our findings show that the most important instructional strategy is to facilitate for students to work individually according to a scientific inquiry and then, in a community, use the knowledge gained in critical discourse to build an overall understanding. When the students worked according to this, the results exceeded our expectations, both regarding the depth of understanding and ability to apply the knowledge in ongoing course projects. Because more teaching will likely take place at a distance in the future, as a side effect of the pandemic, we believe that this could be a way to meet an increasing demand for online instruction, especially when designing educational settings for complex theoretical content.

This research to practice full paper focuses on gamification in a theoretical university course. Gamification has been applied in many different educational contexts as a means to motivate students to engage with course material. One commonly used gamification element is bonus points. This study aimed to investigate the use of bonus points as a motivator for increased engagement in course activities in a theoretical system development course in higher education. A mixed method approach, based on statistical analysis of course achievement, survey data and student group interviews has been applied to address this aim. According to the results, we found that awarding bonus points in the course seminars had positive effects on students’ learning motivation and engagement, as well as students’ achievements on the final course examination. This study contributes to the current literature of gamification in education by studying the implementation of bonus points in a theoretical course in higher education – two areas where there is currently a lack of studies. Furthermore, practical insights in how to implement a bonus points system in higher education have been highlighted.

Students in Engineering, Computer science and Information systems often experience problems when writing the final examination theses. This paper reports on two cases, applying different strategies, with the ambitions to improve the students' possibilities to write, evaluate and verbally present scientific reports. The first strategy presented concerns using a specific course and the second strategy involves a revision of an entire programme. Using constructive alignment and curriculum theory the two strategies are compared with the purpose of extrapolating specific and general guidelines for how to incorporate scientific communication components in engineering programmes.

The design of patient-centred e-health services embodies an inherent tension between the concerns of clinicians and those of patients. Clinicians’ concerns are related to professional issues to do with diagnosing and curing disease in accordance with accepted medical standards. In contrast, patients’ concerns typically relate to personal experience and quality of life issues. It is about their identity, their hopes, their fears and their need to maintain a meaningful life. This divergence of concerns presents a fundamental challenge for designers of patient-centred e-health services. We explore this challenge in the context of chronic illness and telecare. Based on insights from medical phenomenology as well as our own experience with designing an e-health service for patients with chronic heart disease, we emphasise the importance – and difficulty – of aligning the concerns of patients and clinicians. To deal with this, we propose a set of concepts for analysing concerns related to the design of e-health services: A concern is (1) meaningful if it is relevant and makes sense to both patients and clinicians, (2) actionable if clinicians or patients – at least in principle – are able to take appropriate action to deal with it, and (3) feasible if it is easy and convenient to do so within the organisational and social context. We conclude with a call for a more participatory and iterative approach to the design of patient-centred e-health services.

One of the challenges in being a teacher is to set up an educational setting where the students receive relevant learning opportunities for the specific course, the students' education in general, and for their future. However, efforts to create such educational settings do not always work in the way that faculty has intended. In this paper we investigate one such effort seen from a critical incident perspective. Central to the analysis in this paper is how the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) can provide explanations for the incident. The critical incident can be summarised as students refusing to take part in a non-compulsory, but from the faculty perspective highly educational, activity. We describe the incident in depth, give the background for the educational intervention, and analyse the incident from the perspective of TPB. This paper makes two major contributions to engineering education research. The first is the development of a method for analysing critical teaching and learning incidents using the TPB. The critical incident analysis illustrates how the method is used to analyse and reason about the students' behaviour. Another contribution is the development of a range of insights which deal with challenges raised by learning interventions, especially those involved with acquiring hidden or “invisible skills” not usually seen or acknowledged by students to belong to core subject area of a degree program.

This paper presents a study aimed at exploring the effects of different modality combinations on collaborative task performance and employed joint task-solving strategies in a shared interface. The modality combinations visual/haptic, visual/audio and visual/haptic/audio were compared in an experiment in which users solved a task together, working in pairs in adjacent rooms. The application used contained a flat surface in a 3D interface on which piles of cubes were randomly placed in a grid. The task involved scanning for empty cells and placing continuously falling cubes until all empty cells were filled. The cubes and the flat surface were designed in such a way that they could be felt and heard and thus could be recognized by different kinds of haptic and audio feedback cues. This made it possible to scan the environment and read both absolute and relative positions in the grid. A quantitative analysis of task performance and a qualitative analysis of video recordings and interview data were performed. Results showed that task completion times were significantly faster in the visual/haptic/audio condition compared with the other conditions and that there were also significantly fewer errors, result checks of one’s own actions and double checks of the partner’s actions in the visual/haptic/audio condition than in the other conditions. Qualitative results show that participants work simultaneously to a larger extent in the visual/haptic/audio condition and that less communication occurred in the visual/haptic/audio condition compared with the other conditions. We argue that more modalities improved the awareness of the environment resulting in the participants feeling more confident with their interaction in the environment in the visual/haptic/audio condition. This resulted in improved task performance. The visual/audio feedback was better suited for solving the task than the visual/haptic feedback even though haptic feedback gave a significant added value in the visual/haptic/audio condition.

In this paper a field study of using laser-pointing during multi-disciplinary medical meetings is presented. The pointing behaviour adopted by radiologists and surgeons to communicate about and collaboratively analyse patient data such as CT images today is illustrated based on field observations of pre-operative meetings. In a field test, laser-pointers were introduced in pre-operative meetings. How the dialogue and gesturing changed compared to meetings where laser-pointers were not present were investigated. Results from our study show that the multi-disciplinary medical meetings are clearly affected by the introduction of laser-pointer devices and we believe that the participants would benefit from a future gesturing tool if it was carefully designed. The implementation of an application that provides touch feedback in three dimensions of the anatomical structure of blood vessels as well as tumours is described and related to our results.

In this paper a study is presented which aimed at exploring the effects of audio feedback in a haptic and visual interface supporting collaboration among sighted and people who cannot see. A between group design was used and the participants worked in pairs with one sighted and one blindfolded in each. The application used was a haptic 3D environment in which participants could build composed objects out of building blocks. The building blocks could be picked up and moved around by means of a touch feedback pointing device. In one version of the application, used by half of the groups, sound cues could be used to tell the other person where you were, and to get feedback on your own and the other person’s actions. Results showed that sound cues together with haptic feedback made a difference in the interaction between the collaborators regarding their shared understanding of the workspace and the work process. Especially, sound cues played an important role for maintaining awareness of ongoing work – you knew what was going on, and you got a response on your own actions.