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Blended pedagogy is an important delivery mechanism for open and distance learning. Here, face-to-face meetings in the blended pedagogy model remain as an important platform for teaching and learning. While there are many instructional techniques employed in faceto- face meetings, there is an urgent need to determine how face-to-face interactions in the blended pedagogy can be elevated to boost students' learning. This paper investigates whether productive failure (PF) as an instructional strategy boosts students' understanding of the subject matter in a face-to-face tutorial. PF instructional design advocates the delaying of support for learners during learning. The more they struggle, and even fail, while trying to master new information, the better they are likely to recall and apply that information later. Current research on the impact of PF treatments has shown that effective learning is achieved when learners are presented with a cycle of low structure, high structure and low structure activities. PF instructional design has been used successfully, especially in secondary schools in which learners have regular contact with the instructor. It is unknown whether the use of PF instructional design among adult learners in face-to-face interaction will yield such a positive effect. Can PF instructional design be used in tutorials that cater for adult learners resulting in fruitful learning outcomes? This paper reports an initial study of a quasi-experiment that compares a “productive failure” instructional design with a traditional “lecture and practice” instructional design for a 2-hour tutorial session attended by adult learners. A total of 17 adult learners participated in the study. Learners experienced either a traditional lecture and practice teaching cycle or a PF cycle, where they solved complex problems in small groups without the provision of any support or scaffolds up until a consolidation lecture by their teacher during the last hour of the tutorial. Findings suggest that learners from the PF condition produced a variety of problem models and methods for solving the problems but were unsuccessful in their efforts, be it in groups or individually. They also reported low confidence in their solutions. Despite failing in their group and individual problem-solving efforts, learners from the PF condition performed better than their counterparts from the lecture and practice condition on both knowledge and higherorder application problems based on the post-test. Implications of PF instructional design for adult learners based on these findings are presented.

This paper investigated the effect of productive failure (PF) as an instructional strategy in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) groups using Facebook and a discussion forum. PF is an instructional mode design that advocates the delaying of support for the learners during learning — the more they struggle, and even fail, while trying to master new information, the better they are likely to recall and apply that information later. PF has been used successfully in the classroom. However, it is not known whether the use of a PF instructional modewith adult learners in CSCL groups such as Facebook and discussion forums will produce such a positive effect. A discussion forum is an important platform used to deliver teaching and learning via the Web, while the use of social media, especially Facebook, for teaching and learning has gained prominence lately. This paper reports an initial study that compares a ‘productive failure’ instructional design in CSCL groups through Facebook and a discussion forum. Five Facebook and five discussion forum groups participated in the study. Both groups solved ill-structured complex problems in small groups without the provision of any support or scaffolding from their instructors. The findings suggest that the Facebook groups produced a variety of scope for discussion and deliberation for solving the problems and were more successful in sustaining the discussion compared to the discussion forum groups. Facebook groups also had a higher critical thinking ratio than the discussion forum groups. Based on these findings,the implications of a PF instructional design for adult learners are presented.

Asynchronous online discussion forums play an important role in adult online courses, and have many possible functions. Our experience in using the discussion forums in online courses for task-based collaborative discussion has led us to many questions about the optimal ways of using online discussion to support collaborative learning, such as how should instructors structure online discussions in a way that it promotes collaborative learning? What should instructors do to enhance learners' reflective thinking, critical thinking, or problem solving in online collaborative discussions? The challenges of using forum in learning have also been highlighted by many researchers. In this paper, we present a so-called “smart” discussion forum to support, monitor and facilitate task-based collaboration for the learning process of adult learners to advance their development of critical thinking.

Mixed-initiative interaction is a naturally-occurring feature of human-human interactions. It is characterised by turn-taking, frequent change of focus, agenda and control among the "speakers". This human-based mixed-initiative interaction can be implemented through mixed-initiative systems. This is a popular approach to building intelligent systems that can collaborate naturally and effectively with people. Mixed-initiative systems exhibit various degrees of involvement with regards to the initiatives taken by the user or the system. In any discourse, the initiative may be shared between either, a learner and a system agent, or between two independent system agents. Both the parties in question establish and maintain a common goal and context, and proceed with an interaction mechanism involving initiative taking that optimises their progress towards the goal. However, the application of mixed-initiative interaction in web-based learning is very much limited. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a web-based learning system through mixedinitiative system known as JavaLearn. JavaLearn allows the interaction between the system (in the form of a software agent) and the individual learner. Here, the system supports the learning through a problem solving activity by demanding active learning behaviour from the learner with minimal natural language understanding by the agent and embodies the application-dependent aspects of the discourse. It guides the learner to solve the problem by giving adaptive advice, hints and engages the learner in the real time interaction in the form of "conversation". The principal features of this system are it is adaptive and is based on reflection, observation and relation. The system acquires its intelligence through the finite state machine and rule-based agents.