Search results

Interactive storytelling is a powerful tool for improving children's development of essential skills and general knowledge. As an informal learning method, interactive storytelling provides life experience and promotes the use of vocabulary and communication skills. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, a storytelling tool was developed to help kindergarteners create stories. This tool included an instrument used to measure four characteristics of four‐ to five‐year‐old children: general knowledge, creativity, self‐confidence and between the children and the technology to assess a child's progress. Moreover, there is a pressing need to better understand and improve upon this educational innovation. Therefore, this paper proposed the child interactive storytelling (CIS) framework.

The developed interactive storytelling tool helped instructors as well as parents to perceive the child's progress through multiple use of the tool. Experiments indicated that teachers' evaluations of their children with those measured from the developed tool were aligned which indicates that the interactive storytelling tool is valid. Moreover, the proposed CIS framework for formalizing the design of interactive storytelling tools can be used in educational interventions for children.

The proposed CIS framework can guide both research and practice in the design, development and evaluation of effective and useful CIS environments.

This study aims to explore the opportunities offered by interactive and situated learning (e-learning and m-learning) in support of education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment.

The paper illustrates the development of an online portal and a mobile app aimed at promoting students’ motivation and engagement with sustainability in design, and discusses the outcomes of their testing, investigating users’ acceptance, comparing academic results and analysing feedback.

The findings add empirical evidence to the view that information and communication technology-enhanced pedagogies can substantially contribute to the agenda of sustainability in higher education, primarily due to their affordance of interactive communication and contextualisation of knowledge, while guaranteeing flexible time and pace of learning.

The study solely focused on the development and testing of e-learning and m-learning tools to foster students’ competence of sustainability in design studio work. The tools trialled were mostly at their prototypical stage and their testing included a relatively short-term evaluation and a narrow, self-selected, user base. However, the approach and findings are felt to be applicable to a much wider range of educational contexts.

Interactive and situated pedagogical methods and tools have the potential to prompt a departure from transmissive educational models, encompassing at once theoretical, experiential and analytic learning processes. This is of value to education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment due to the requirement to holistically consolidate multi-/inter-/trans-disciplinary knowledge into a coherent design whole.

This paper aims to evaluate the students’ perception of their learning experiences concerning serious gaming and gamification instructions and determines whether they were motivated enough and engaged during the educative process in a resource-poor context. Moreover, the study evaluated the impact of interactive instructional environment outcomes in terms of students’ perceptions of the learning catalysed by gamified systems, particularly in enhancing attitude change coupled with knowledge acquisition.

This study used a qualitative research design technique to collect the data. A total of 108 first year secondary school students participated in a sexual health literacy course that lasted for a five-week learning period. Using a cluster-sampling technique, three classes were randomly assigned to serious gaming, gamification and teacher-centred instructions. Individual face-to-face interviews were used to assess students’ perceives required satisfaction with three instructions. Data were audio-recorded, and coding analysis was used using NVivo software facilitated qualitative data analysis.

The results show that serious gaming and gamification instructions trumped the traditional teacher-centred instruction method. While intervention students were all positive about the serious gaming and gamification instructions, non-intervention students were negative about conservative teacher-centered learning whose limited interactivity also undermined learning relative to the two innovative interventions.

As a justification to limit face-to-face classes, this study may be useful during an emergency phenomenon, including the current situation of amid COVID-19. The implementation of serious gaming and gamification as remotely instructional options could be among the measures to protect educational communities through reducing close-proximity, and eventually, control contamination and the spread of viruses.

The application of serious gaming and game elements should not be conceptualised as universal but context-specific. This study shows that particularism is essential to optimise the results in terms of coming up with a specific design based on the scope of evaluation for positive results and develop an intervention that will work, especially in the resource-poor context of the developing world.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the new collaborative learning methods and tools used by elite FIFA referee technical instructors, referees and assistant referees to master the Laws of the Game. These tools allow instructors to learn through practical exercises off the field of play, while they carry out activities in a participative context in which they can share and improve their knowledge regarding the Laws of the Game and consequently the interpretations and the considerations soccer referees throughout the world use to make decisions on the field of play.

In this work, we assess a collaborative learning experience that took place during the annual FIFA FUTURO III courses that FIFA provided to FIFA referee technical instructors from its six confederations between 2013 and 2015, where 48 referee technical instructors selected from 211 national associations participated. These instructors constitute the elite of FIFA’s professional training and development chain. They teach other referee technical instructors who will then instruct international referees and assistant referees all over the world with the aim of achieving uniformity when applying the Laws of the Game.

The course participants showed a high degree of satisfaction with respect to these materials and methods, especially regarding the possibilities they offer for organizing group discussions and for “learning by doing,” and a lack of skills in ICT management has been detected for some participants, who have shown a willingness and interest to improve their skills in this field.

The training and education of soccer referees is one of the most heterogeneous training processes in the world. This complex task is even more difficult because of the growing demand for video technology in referee decision making where successful teamwork requires a high level of communication and agreement among its members.

With 211 associations, FIFA is one of the largest organizations in the world. In international competitions such as the FIFA World Cup, the referees’ decisions are analyzed by media, thousands of fans and millions of viewers. Preparing new professionals for match analysis, interpretation of Laws of the Game and working in a team is a priority for FIFA and the world of soccer.

It is the first time that collaborative learning methods are used with interactive multimedia tools that facilitate collaborative work in the training environment of soccer referee instructors, international soccer referees and assistant referees. This paper establishes a basis and a reference for future research on the effectiveness of the new collaborative technologies used by FIFA for the training of international referees and assistant referees in general.

This paper discusses an evaluation study of WISDeM, an interactive Distance Learning Tool. It covers the evaluation rational, details of usability evaluation, designing the evaluation, the objectives and respondents, the study, the raison d’être for the questions asked and basic assumptions, what needed to be evaluated, the execution of the evaluation, its results and conclusions. The evaluation results indicated that Communication Preference and Learning Styles matching between a computer interface and the student user is likely to enhance his/her ability for memory rehearsal, learning and knowledge recall more effectively than without it.

Todd Wilson, manager of partner development at Educational Technology Corp., needed to determine the targeting, positioning, and selling strategy for its innovative Interactive Mathematics software for the college market. This required determining what types of colleges to target and which stakeholders to focus on within institutions. His task was complicated by the unclear objectives of nonprofit institutions and the differing motivations of teachers, students, and college administrators in adopting software-based learning technology. Highlights the difficulties in innovation adoption within large nonprofit institutions and the challenges in marketing to institutions with complex decision-making processes, multiple influencers, and conflicting motivations.

Tangible physical maps which are enhanced by new digital forms of interaction can become an invaluable asset for learning geography in an embodied way. The purpose of this work is to evaluate an interactive augmented three-dimensional (3D) tangible map on which students interact and travel with their fingers.

A total of 58 fourth-grade students from eight elementary schools participated in the study. The participants played with the FingerTrips environment in 24 sessions and in groups of two or three. Each session lasted for about 20-25 min. After completing the interactive game, the students answered a questionnaire concerning their attitudes toward the tangible environment and participated in a short interview.

Students’ responses revealed that FingerTrips managed to transform the experience of meeting new places, understanding spatial relations and learning geography. Students supported that such an approach is closer to their interactive experiences and expectations, and exploits embodied learning affordances to achieve enjoyable learning. Students identified their finger-based trips as an effective and intriguing static haptic guidance that helped them learn more effectively.

The specific approach has two distinctive characteristics. First, a new interaction style on the map is suggested, the use of trips with fingers. Students have to follow predefined engraved paths on the 3D terrain to sense distances and changes in altitude and “touch” the topology asked to understand and explore. Second, it is examined whether a low fidelity interactive 3D terrain, which can be easily reconstructed and reprogrammed by primary school students, can become a useful canvas for learning geography.

This study examined the impact of cultural differences (individualism‐collectivism) on potential users' receptivity towards distance learning. Using a sample of 424 students enrolled in two northeastern universities, we addressed three research questions: Would an individual's culture affect his or her receptivity towards distance learning? Would an individual's culture affect his or her preference for particular distance learning media? Would an individual's culture affect his or her preference for distance learning in a particular course type? Findings reveal that an individual's culture affects his or her overall attitude towards distance learning. Specifically, we found that individualists' motives and communication patterns are in synch with distance learning as a medium of instruction or communication; whereas collectivists' motives and communication patterns shun any form of mediated instruction or communication as in distance learning. Implications and direction for future studies are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse some effective e-tools and interactive tasks to enhance language acquisition and competence building in today’s English for specific purposes (ESP) students in higher education programmes.

There are countless learning methods, often supported by the access of ubiquitous learning materials, which improve students’ engagement, group interaction and independent learning skills in foreign language learners. More frequently, students become successful, independent and cooperative creative learners by means of participating in multimodal virtual learning platforms that would help them to improve a variety of competences. This study is based on English applied to social work, a compulsory subject offered either in a blended (b-learning) or a distance (d-learning) learning environment as part of the degree in social work. It combines its correspondent course book with digital content and multimedia tasks.

Results suggest that a ubiquitous practice for ESP b/d learners can be innovative and successfully competence-addressed when implementing interactive learning tasks that can combine individual and group work inside and outside the classroom hours.

The challenge of this research is to integrate a ubiquitous learning approach so that students would interact more and, consequently, enhance their communicative language skills, both in b-learning and d-learning environments.

In the literature on complaint management the importance is acknowledged of learning from complaints. Still, the concept of organisational learning has not yet been embedded in the field of complaint management. Therefore, this paper aims to adjust a general model for organisational learning to the concept of complaint management in order to make it operational for this field.

The notion of organisational learning in combination with complaint management is modelled as a system. This system enabled us to analyse the practices of handling and analysing complaints within six Dutch service organisations and to assess the potential of these organisations for organisational learning.

The results of the paper categorise a variety of complaint management practices along two elements of organisational learning: triggers and modes of learning (i.e. informational learning or interactive learning).

Further research should include the applicability of the learning model to different sectors or organisations.

This collection of practices can be used as a managerial guideline for improving the processes of learning from complaints.

This paper contributes to embedding the concept of organisational learning in the field of complaint management.