Notwithstanding the challenges English as a foreign language (EFL) learners face with listening comprehension in conventional classes due to limited authentic listening exposure and low listening engagement, virtual reality (VR), as a recent innovation in educational technology, has provided immersive, interactive listening experiences that engage learners in and expose them to authentic listening activities in a virtual context. However, there is insufficient research on the specific impact of VR-based listening instruction, as well as the impact of blending VR with conventional listening instruction, on EFL learners’ listening comprehension and listening motivated behaviour. To address these limitations in the existing research, this study adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach to explore and compare the impact of VR, blended, and conventional listening instruction on EFL learners’ listening comprehension and listening motivated behaviour. Sixty-nine EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of the VR (23 learners), blended (25 learners), or conventional (21 learners) classes. Pre- and post-treatment assessments were conducted using a listening comprehension test and the listening motivated behaviour scale to collect the required quantitative data. Employing two-way repeated measures ANOVA to examine the quantitative data, the results revealed that the VR and blended groups outperformed the conventional group in terms of listening comprehension and listening motivated behaviour. The blended group, which received a combination of VR-based and conventional listening instruction, experienced the most significant progress from the immersive experiences facilitated by the VR environment. Individual semi-structured interviews were also carried out with some learners experiencing the VR listening instruction to gather the required qualitative data. Adopting thematic analysis to analyse the qualitative data, the results highlighted the learners’ positive attitudes towards and perceptions of the VR listening instruction, which corroborated the quantitative findings of the study. The findings suggested effective and beneficial methods for integrating VR into EFL instruction to enhance EFL learners’ listening comprehension and listening motivated behaviour.

Emerging technology like the Metaverse has shown significant potential in expanding learning opportunities. This includes immersive environments, virtual student-teacher interactions, and diverse locations for learning and teaching. In particular, the Metaverse can enhance different modes of instruction and assessment, a crucial component of effective learning processes. This study explores how pre- service teachers design immersive learning environments through Metaverse-based learning. Eighteen pre-service teachers at a private university in Indonesia participated in a required course and were tasked with Metaverse-based learning projects. They worked in pairs and were divided into two groups. Four pairs designed learning in a low immersion Metaverse environment, while the other four pairs worked on a high immersion Metaverse environment. Their instructional and assessment strategies were graded using rubrics, and their project presentations were recorded for qualitative analysis. The findings revealed that engagement and interactivity, which facilitate understanding and application of learning objectives, were more aligned in the high immersion environment. Additionally, the quality of feedback, a key part of assessment, was rated higher in high immersion environments. From a qualitative perspective about the challenges in designing Metaverse-based learning, while high immersion environments offer advanced features that can enhance learning, they also present complexities that challenge the pre-service teachers' ability to manage and utilize these features effectively. Conversely, low immersion environments, although seemingly less technologically daunting, offer their own key challenges in terms of content integration and platform interconnectedness.

Digital citizenship has become an essential aspect of modern education. As technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous daily, there is a growing need to cultivate digital citizenship skills among students worldwide. Few studies have explored the potential of game-based learning using ubiquitous technologies to enhance digital citizenship education. Game-based learning has emerged as a promising approach to engage learners and promote the development of these crucial competencies. Moreover, ubiquitous learning approaches can provide seamless educational experiences across various contexts and devices. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for designing and implementing a ubiquitous game-based learning system to foster digital citizenship in the Thai educational context. Drawing on existing research, this study analyzed the challenges and opportunities associated with this endeavor, addressing considerations around technology integration, pedagogical design, and implementation strategies. The study revealed that a ubiquitous game- based learning system could leverage AI-powered personalization to tailor learning experiences and provide real-time feedback to cultivate digital citizenship among Thai K-12 students. The findings also provide valuable insights for researchers, educators, and policymakers interested in leveraging innovative learning approaches to nurture digitally literate and responsible citizens in Thailand.

There have been obstacles for individual students to participate in project- based learning, such as the lack of learning engagement and the frustration of encountering difficulties. Therefore, this study proposed a collaborative project-based learning approach with SVVR technology to enhance students' project-based learning outcomes. A quasi-experimental design was conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Two classes students in a university participated in the experiment. On class with 25 students were in the experimental group, and 20 students were in the control group. The experimental group experienced collaborative project- based learning with SVVR, while the control group underwent individual project-based learning with SVVR. The results of this study revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of students' computational thinking and the SVVR project quality. This study highlights the effectiveness of collaborative project- based learning in enhancing students’ computational thinking and creativity.

This study investigated the effects of a technology-assisted intercultural exchange project on the development of foreign language and cultural competences. The participants were Taiwan and Japan university students who were scheduled to utilize online conferencing and digital platforms to communicate. Moreover, an online survey was conducted to collect data from these students. The survey results showed that the participants from both countries shared more similarities than differences. The participants, no matter the highly motivated or the less motivated ones both increased in cultural and communication competences. This study ascertains the benefits of integrating online technologies into intercultural exchange projects.

E-books are becoming a popular medium for delivering learning materials in the globe. The gap between e-books and pedagogical practices has been highlighted since teachers do not generally integrate the e-book tool into their instruction in a way that facilitates student learning. In particular, new pedagogies in language teaching and learning tend to encourage students to acquire knowledge and use the language in real-life situations. Knowledge sharing with collaborative tasks in the class can be useful. Studies on knowledge sharing, specifically in language education, are limited. To this end, this study proposes a knowledge sharing-based e-book system to enhance students’ learning performance in an EFL course. This study adopts a quasi-experimental design. Seventy-one freshmen were recruited from two classes of a freshman English course at a university in northern Taiwan. The implication from this study finding might help teachers to identify suitable technology based on the learning needs of students, and help consider the ability of teachers to adopt appropriate technology and to fit specific learning activities.

Abstract The teaching and learning of algebraic word problems is a basic component of elementary education. Recently, to facilitate its learning, a few approaches for automatically solving algebraic and arithmetic word problems have been proposed. These systems generally use either natural language processing (NLP) or a combination of NLP and machine learning. However, they have low accuracy due to their large feature sets, extracted using limited preprocessing techniques. In this research work, we propose a template‐based approach that was developed by following a two‐step process. In the first step, we predict an equation template from a training dataset using NLP and a classification mechanism. The next step is to instantiate the predicted template with nouns and numbers through reasoning. To validate the proposed methodology, a prototype system was implemented. We then compared the proposed system with the existing systems using their respective datasets and the proposed dataset. The experimental results show improvement in accuracy, with an average precision of 80.6% and average recall of 83.5%.

In this study, 3 Mobile-Assisted Language Learning interfaces are proposed considering the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, Cognitive Load Theory, and the Active/Reflective learning styles. A quasi-experimental design was adopted to compare the effects of 3 smartphone interfaces, namely partial English captions (EG1), full English captions (EG2), and partial English captions with Chinese subtitles (CG), on the cognitive load, learning motivation, and learning anxiety and enjoyment of 119 11th-grade students with different learning styles. It was found that EG2 had significantly higher learning motivation than EG1 and CG. On the other hand, significant interaction between the 3 smartphone interfaces and learning styles was found for the students’ cognitive loads. Further analysis showed that, in EG1, the active-style students’ cognitive load was significantly lower than that of the reflective-style students. In addition, it was found that the active-style students’ learning enjoyment was significantly higher than that of the reflective-style students, while no significant difference was found between the learning anxiety ratings of the students with different learning styles in the 3 groups. Therefore, it is suggested that the role of learning styles needs to be further considered when designing caption interfaces for smartphone applications in the future.

Most existing personalized learning support systems facilitate students' learning by providing learning suggestions or learning content to individual students based on their background or profiles. It is difficult to adapt learning activities to respond to students' ongoing learning performances and status, leading to the limitation in enhancing online personal learning performance and learning attitudes. To address this issue, a mastery learning mechanism was proposed to monitor individual students ongoing learning situations, moreover, students' conceptual learning problems, learning styles and current understanding status were considered for providing effective personalized learning activities. An online personalized learning support system was developed basing on the novel mastery learning mechanism. The experimental results show that the students who learned with our proposed system had better learning attitudes toward the learning activities, better understanding and higher perception of the usefulness of the learning system, and better learning performance of Simple Electricity on Physics course than those who learned with the conventional system.

In this paper, a mobile competition game was developed in the form of a competitive board game for engaging students in learning local cultural. The students were asked to learn with the mobile game by throwing a dice to determine their moves on a tablet computer. Each move of the mobile game was related to a real-world observation task or an online information-searching question. The former aimed to guide the students to acquire knowledge and gain experiences via observing real-world targets, while the latter aimed to help the students obtain supplementary materials from the web. An experiment was conducted to collect feedback from students. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach significantly prompted the students' interests in learning local culture.

Computer programming is an important competence for engineering and computer science students. Teaching and learning programming concepts and skills have been recognized as being a big challenge to both teachers and students. Accordingly, researchers have indicated that 'learning strategy,' 'lack of study' and 'lack of practice' are the causal attributes of success or failure in a computer programming course. Therefore, to cope with this problem, an interactive test system is proposed to enhance students' learning outcomes in computer programming courses in this study. An experiment has been conducted on a college computer programming course to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can benefit the students in enhancing their programming skills. In addition, the students' attitudes toward learning computer programming were improved.

Owing to the popularity of mobile, wireless communication and sensing technologies, issues related to contextual mobile learning have widely been discussed in recent years. In the meantime, researchers have indicated the importance of developing effective strategies for guiding students to learn in context-aware learning environments. In this study, a progressive prompt-based context-aware learning approach is proposed to improve the learning performance of students. An experiment was conducted on a natural science course of an elementary school to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. From the experimental results, it is found that the proposed approach could effectively enhance the learning achievement of the students in comparison with the conventional context-aware learning system with single-stage prompts. It is also interesting to find that the proposed approach, by providing more challenging tasks, encouraged the students to put more effort into examining the contextual information and interpreting the learning content.

In this study, a computerized collaborative concept-mapping approach is proposed. To evaluate the effectiveness of this innovative approach, a learning activity has been conducted on an elementary school natural science course. Two hundred and twenty fifth graders from seven classes were divided into an experimental group, in which the students learned with the proposed approach, and a control group, in which the students learned with conventional computerized concept map approach. From the experimental results, it was found that the students in the experimental group had significantly better learning achievement than those in the control group. Furthermore, the cognitive load of the experimental group students were significantly lower than the ones in the control group, implying that computerized collaborative concept-mapping approach not only reduced the cognitive load, but also improved the learning achievements of the students.

Literature has shown that reflection is one of the important factors in learning, and u-learning can enhance learning performance, motivation and efficiency. This study applied reflection prompts to improve learners' reflection levels and learning satisfaction for a plant species observation activity in a context-aware u-learning environment. Due to the complexity of the plant species observation and the screen size limitation of mobile devices, the use of text-based reflection prompts, which was wildly adopted by previous research, is rather insufficient. This study therefore designed a video-based reflection prompt strategy in which the QR Code technique was used to locate learners' locations for providing a timely and adequate guidance. An experiment was conducted for evaluating the effectiveness of the developed learning system with 70 participants. Experimental results showed that learners' reflection levels were significantly improved with the use of video-based reflection prompt strategy, but there was no significant difference in learning satisfaction.

In recent years, the evolution of information technologies has made lots of changes on human activities, such as working, playing, and learning. Furthermore, the learning environment has been changed. Most of the u-learning systems are implemented with RFID as the location-aware technology and some of them even do not provide collaborative instant support. In the study, we propose a collaborative ubiquitous learning platform (CULP) which uses low-cost cell phones with embedded cameras and Internet service to support ubiquitous learning. CULP is able to provide instant support for learners in the collaborative ubiquitous learning activity, that is, learners can receive help from right persons via the hints given by the learning system when encountering problems during their learning activities. Experimental results on a Personal Computer-Assembling course showed that, with the assistance of the new learning platform, the learning efficiency of the students was significantly improved, moreover, most of the students had positive attitude toward the use of CULP.

This work describes a cooperative programming learning system (CPLS) based on a novel constructivist approach. This system embeds various constructivist elements within functions to support each phase of the information process that allows students to construct programming skills through knowledge, tasks, and assessment domains. The CPLS comprises a discussion forum, programming editing forum, design forum with structure charts, project management, project guidance, performance demonstration, and peer assessment models. Effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated based on an experiment involving 54 undergraduate students in a private university in Taiwan. Learning effectiveness is analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficients. Analytical results indicate that students using this CPLS more frequently could learn programming skills more easily. Efforts are underway to incorporate more pedagogical models in the proposed system, as well as improve the system interface and functions.

In English courses, it is very important to assign proper articles to individual students for training their reading ability. This study proposes an innovative approach for developing reading material recommendation systems by eliciting domain knowledge from multiple experts. An experiment has been conducted to evaluate the performance of the approach; moreover, a comparison on the existing approaches is given to show the advantages of applying the innovative approach.

For teaching the computer architecture, especially in the course of "Introduction to the Computer Sciences", it is a good practice for a student to assemble and re-assemble a set of personal computer system by himself. We called the practice PC-DIY lab. In our experiences, most of the students like the PC-DIY lab very much since they can touch and see each components of a computer system and learn how to put them together correctly. However, it is unlikely to assign one teaching assistant for each student when the practice class is going on. It is usually the case that only one or two teaching assistants are available. Therefore, the students are usually not able to get prompt supports when they encounter some problems during the practice. To cope with this problem, a Collaborative Ubiquitous Learning Platform (CULP) is designed and developed for assisting the students during the PC-DIY lab.

Web-based programming has become a popular and vital issue in recent years. The rapid growth of various applications not only demonstrates the importance of web-based programming, but also reveals the difficulty of training relevant skills. The difficulty is owing to the lack of facilities such as online coding, debugging and peer help to assist the students in promoting their cognitive development in web-based programming. To cope with these problems, in this paper, a web-based programming assisted system, “WPAS”, is proposed, which is able to support five programming activities with various difficulty levels of cognition based on Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy. WPAS provides online coding, debugging and annotation tools to conduct the training and peer assessment for web-based programming. Experimental results of 47 undergraduate students show that the innovative approach is helpful to the students in improving their cognitive development in Web-based programming. In addition, according to the results of the questionnaire, most of the participants perceived the ease of use and usefulness of the proposed system. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers could design Web-based programming activities supported by the WPAS system to improve students’ cognitive development in web-based programming.

The subject materials of most enterprise e-training programs were mainly developed by employees of the enterprises; therefore, it becomes a challenging issue to efficiently and effectively translate the knowledge and experiences of the employees to computerized subject materials, especially for those who are not an experienced teacher. In addition, to develop an e- training course, personal ignorance or incorrect concepts might significantly affect the quality of the course if only a single employee is asked to develop the subject materials. To cope with this problem, a multi- expert e-training course design model is proposed in this paper. Accordingly, an e-training course development system has been implemented. Moreover, a practical application has showed that of the novel approach not only can improve the quality of the e- training course, but also help the experts to organize their domain knowledge.

In recent years, with great innovation and advance of those wireless communication and sensor technologies, a new research issue in education has been popularly discussed, that is, how to develop a brand-new learning environment so that the students can learn anywhere and anytime in the real world. Thus, in order to construct a sound and adaptive e-learning environment, some factors such as personal contexts, learning activity and environmental contexts are included for further consideration. Meanwhile, for the sake of effective management and deployment of learning resource as well as understanding learner's context better, in this study we attempted to propose an extension of SCORM/IMS standards concerning learning resource reused and shared, as well as learner's physiological and psychological conditions in the context. Finally, a set of tools are presented to demonstrate the use in the new standards.

In recent years, researchers have attempted to apply network techniques to the development of computer-assisted learning systems. They have also attempted to develop more effective programs to test and improve the learning performance of students. However, the most conventional testing systems present only a score as a test result, which is not capable of providing advice to the students. To cope with this problem, we propose a gray forecast approach for modeling the relationships among the subject concepts and the test items. These relationships are then employed to diagnose the student learning problems. A testing and diagnostic system based on our approach has, therefore, been implemented. Some experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach in enhancing the students' learning performance, making it highly promising for further study

To accurately analyze the problems of students in learning, the composed test sheets must meet multiple assessment criteria, such as the ratio of relevant concepts to be evaluated, the average discrimination degree, difficulty degree and estimated testing time. In this paper, a heuristic approach is proposed to improve the efficiency of composing near optimal test sheets from very large item banks to meet multiple assessment criteria. From the experimental results, we conclude that our novel approach is desirable in composing near optimal test sheets from large item bank and hence can support the need of diagnosing student learning problems.

Since the last decade, computer-assisted testing has proven to be an efficient and effective way to evaluating students' learning status such that proper tutoring strategies can be adopted to improve their learning performance. A good test will not only help the instructor evaluate the learning status of the students, but also facilitate the diagnosis of the problems embedded in the students' learning process. One of the most important and challenging issues in conducting a good test is the construction of test sheets that can meet various assessment requirements. A previous study has indicated that selecting test items to best fit multiple assessment requirements can be formulated as a mixed integer programming model. The problem is known to be NP-hard in the literature and, hence, computational challenges hinder the development of efficient solution methods. As a sequel, we instead seek quality approximate solutions in a reasonable time. Two approximation methods based upon a genetic approach are developed. Statistics from a series of computational experiments indicate that our approach is able to efficiently generate near-optimal combinations of test items that satisfy the specified requirements or constraints.

The popularity regarding wireless communications is such that more and more WAP sites have been developed with wireless markup language (WML). Meanwhile, to translate hypertext markup language (HTML) pages into proper WML ones becomes imperative since it is difficult for WAP users to read most contents designed for PC users via their mobile phone screens. However, for those sites that have been maintained with hypertext markup language (HTML), considerable time and manpower costs will be incurred to rebuild them with WML. In this paper, we propose an intelligent WAP site management system to cope with these problems. With the help of the intelligent management system, the original contents of HTML Web sites can be automatically translated to proper WAP content in an efficient way. As a consequence, the costs associated with maintaining WAP sites could be significantly reduced. The management system also allows the system manager to define the relevance of numerals and keywords for removing unimportant or meaningless contents. The original contents will be reduced and reorganized to fit the size of mobile phone screens, thus reducing the communication cost and enhancing readability. Numerical results gained through various experiments have evinced the effective performance of the WAP management system.

In developing a tutoring system, one of the most difficult tasks is to collect tutoring knowledge from multiple educators, especially courses in which the contents change frequently, due to the advent of new technologies. We propose a Web-based intelligent tutoring strategy construction system, which is able to elicit, analyze, and integrate tutoring knowledge from multiple educators systematically. Experiments on two courses have been performed to evaluate the time, completeness, and accuracy improvement in constructing tutoring knowledge bases with our approach. According to the experimental results, it can be inferred that for most cases, our approach achieves desirable performance.

Expert systems have been successfully applied to a wide variety of application domains. to achieve better performance, researchers have tried to employ fuzzy logic to the development of expert systems. However, as fuzzy rules and membership functions are difficult to define, most of the existing tools and environments for expert systems do not support fuzzy representation and reasoning. Thus, it is time-consuming to develop fuzzy expert systems. In this article we propose a new approach to elicit expertise and to generate knowledge bases for fuzzy expert systems. A knowledge acquisition system based upon the approach is also presented, which can help knowledge engineers to create, adjust, debug, and execute fuzzy expert systems. Some control techniques are employed in the knowledge acquisition system so that the concepts of fuzzy logic could be directly applied to conventional expert system shells; moreover, a graphic user interface is provided to facilitate the adjustment of membership functions and the display of outputs. the knowledge acquisition system has been integrated with a popular expert system shell, CLIPS, to offer a complete development environment for knowledge engineers. With the help of this environment, the development of fuzzy expert systems becomes much more convenient and efficient. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Knowledge acquisition is known to be a critical bottleneck in building expert systems. Many researchers of this field have focused on the approach of developing methodologies or systems to automate the knowledge acquisition process and have achieved good results. Some reports show that missing implicit knowledge has significant affects on the performance of expert systems. The author resolves the consistency problem in the process of knowledge elicitation. The author analyzes each possible inconsistent condition that may arise in eliciting implicit expertise, and then proposes a consistency test to help the experts to cope with the problem.>