Η ενσωμάτωση των ΤΠΕ στην εκπαιδευτική διαδικασία είναι μια ιδιαίτερα δύσκολη και περίπλοκη διαδικασία. Η προβληματική που αναπτύσσεται στη χώρα μας για την προετοιμασία των εκπαιδευτικών ώστε να χρησιμοποιήσουν αποτελεσματικά τις ΤΠΕ στη διδακτική πράξη ξεκίνησε παρόλα τα προβλήματα με καλούς οιωνούς. Στη συγκεκριμένη μελέτη γίνεται καταγραφή και διερεύνηση των απόψεων εκπαιδευτικών ,που συμμετείχαν στο πρόγραμμα επιμόρφωσης Β΄ Επιπέδου ,αφενός μεν προς την χρήση της Τεχνολογίας Πληροφορίας και Επικοινωνίας (Τ.Π.Ε) στη διδακτική και μαθησιακή διαδικασία και αφετέρου ως προς το πρόγραμμα επιμόρφωσης. Πιο συγκεκριμένα καταγράφονται οι απόψεις των εκπαιδευτικών που συμμετείχαν στην επιμόρφωση γύρω από τι θεωρούν ότι αποκόμισαν από αυτήν, εάν και κατά πόσο άλλαξε η θεώρησή τους απέναντι στη χρήση των νέων τεχνολογιών στην εκπαίδευση, πώς θα αξιοποιήσουν τις γνώσεις που έλαβαν από την επιμόρφωση στη διδασκαλία το μαθήματός τους. Τέλος καταγράφονται οι απόψεις τους για τον τρόπο διεξαγωγής της συγκεκριμένης επιμόρφωσης. / This particular study both investigates and records the opinions expressed by the teachers who participated in the in-service training course (Level B). Firstly we recorded how they feel towards the use of Information and Communication Technology (I.C.T) in the instructive and training process and secondly the evaluation of the course itself. Specifically we investigated how the participants viewed the course and whether it led them to consider the adoption of new technologies in the educational process. Also we investigated how they would implement the acquired knowledge in their teaching environments. Finally, we recorded how they assessed this particular training course.

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εκπονήθηκε στο εργαστήριο Αλληλεπίδρασης Ανθρώπου Υπολογιστή του τμήματος Ηλεκτρολόγων Μηχανικών και Τεχνολογίας Υπολογιστών του Πανεπιστημίου Πατρών. Σα στόχο είχε τη μελέτη της αλληλεπίδρασης σε ομάδες συνεργασίας με τη χρήση φορητών υπολογιστών, και εστίασε στις δυνατότητες που παρέχει ο υπολογιστής ταμπλέτας με σκοπό τη βελτιστοποίηση της ποιότητας διδασκαλίας. Η εφαρμογή η οποία χρησιμοποιήθηκε αρχικά ήταν το Synergo Supervisor Station, το οποίο αποτελεί εργαλείο της γενικότερης πλατφόρμας Synergo. Επανασχεδιάστηκαν ορισμένα τμήματα της διεπιφάνειας της εφαρμογής αυτής αλλά και υλοποιήθηκε ένα νέο εργαλείο για την παρακολούθηση των επιφανειών εργασιών των ομάδων συνεργασίας σε πραγματικό χρόνο. Το εργαλείο αυτό ονομάζεται Synergo Vision και είναι και αυτό μέρος της γενικότερης πλατφόρμας Synergo. Το Synergo Vision μπορεί να λειτουργήσει και αυτόνομα αλλά και ως πρόσθετο στο Synergo Supervisor Station. Με το Synergo Vision ο καθηγητής μπορεί να βλέπει σε πραγματικό χρόνο τους χώρους εργασίας των συνεργαζόμενων ομάδων, τις κινήσεις των μελών κάθε ομάδας, να αποστέλλει δραστηριότητες στις ομάδες, να επικοινωνεί μαζί τους μέσω μηνυμάτων, εκμεταλλευόμενος τις δυνατότητες που του προσφέρει η πένα των υπολογιστών ταμπλέτας αλλά και ο προβολέας σαν εναλλακτική μορφή διαδραστικού πίνακα. Κατά τη διαδικασία ανάπτυξης ακολουθήθηκε επαναληπτική διαδικασία σχεδίασης με διαδοχικούς σχεδιασμούς, υλοποιήσεις και αξιολογήσεις. / This diploma thesis was prepared for the Human – Computer Interaction (HCI) Group of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Patras. The main object of this thesis was the study of the interaction on collaborative groups using portable computers, and focused on the possibilities provided by the tablet computer to optimize the teaching process. The application that was used firstly was Synergo Supervisor Station, which is part of the wider platform Synergo. Some parts of its user interface were redesigned, and a new application was developed for watching the workspaces of collaborative groups in real time. That application is called Synergo Vision and it is part of the wider platform Synergo, as well. Synergo Vision can run as a standalone application and as plug-in for Synergo Supervisor Station. Using Synergo Vision the teacher is able to watch in real time the workspaces of the collaborative groups, the moves of each group member, send activities to the groups, communicate with them using text messages, taking the advantages of the table computers’ stylus and the use of the projector as an alternative form of an interactive whiteboard. During the development phase, we use recursive design with consecutive design, implementation and evaluation strategies.

Η προοδευτική στροφή των σχολικών προγραμμάτων έχει αναδείξει τη σημασία αξιοποίησης των κειμένων μαζικής κουλτούρας στη γλωσσική διδασκαλία (Alvermann et al. 1999˙ Stevens 2001˙ Morrell 2002). Στην παρούσα εργασία θα διερευνηθεί σε ποιο βαθμό μαθητές/τριες της Ε’ και ΣΤ’ Δημοτικού έχουν πρόσβαση σε μέσα (τηλεόραση, ραδιόφωνο, υπολογιστής κ.ά) τα οποία είναι φορείς κειμένων μαζικής κουλτούρας και σε ποιο βαθμό προτιμούν δραστηριότητες που εμπεριέχουν κείμενα μαζικής κουλτούρας (ακρόαση τραγουδιών, παρακολούθηση τηλεοπτικών προγραμμάτων, πλοήγηση στο διαδίκτυο, ανάγνωση εξωσχολικών εντύπων, παρακολούθηση θεατρικών παραστάσεων και κινηματογραφικών ταινιών). Παράλληλα, θα μελετηθεί αν και σε ποιο βαθμό οι προτιμήσεις των παιδιών επηρεάζονται από διάφορους κοινωνικούς παράγοντες, καθώς και αν σχετίζονται με τις σχολικές επιδόσεις του/της μαθητή/τριας στο γλωσσικό μάθημα. Επιπλέον, διερευνάται αν και σε ποιο βαθμό οι προτεινόμενες διδακτικές πρακτικές από το ισχύον αναλυτικό πρόγραμμα και το διδακτικό υλικό για το γλωσσικό μάθημα στο δημοτικό σχολείο αξιοποιούν και βρίσκονται σε αντιστοιχία με τις προτιμήσεις και τις καθημερινές εμπειρίες των μαθητών/τριών από τον ευρύτερο κοινωνικοπολιτισμικό τους χώρο. Τέλος, γίνεται σύγκριση των όσων καταδεικνύουν τα αποτελέσματα της έρευνάς μας με τις ισχύουσες διδακτικές πρακτικές στην Ελλάδα, όπως περιγράφονται σε σχετικές έρευνες. H συλλογή των δεδομένων πραγματοποιήθηκε με τη συμπλήρωση ερωτηματολογίων από τους/τις μαθητές/τριες. Η έρευνα διεξήχθη σε πέντε δημόσια σχολεία του νομού Αχαΐας, τα οποία λειτουργούν σε περιοχές με διαφορετικό κοινωνικό επίπεδο. Σύμφωνα με τα αποτελέσματα, τα παιδιά της Ε’ και ΣΤ’ Δημοτικού φαίνεται να δίνουν ιδιαίτερη έμφαση στην οπτική και ακουστική διάσταση των κειμένων μαζικής κουλτούρας. Φαίνεται να προτιμούν λιγότερο τα έντυπα κείμενα μαζικής κουλτούρας, τα οποία έχουν τη δυνατότητα να συνδυάζουν μόνο τον γραπτό λόγο και την εικόνα, ενώ υπάρχει η τάση να προτιμούν τραγούδια και κείμενα της τηλεοπτικής μαζικής κουλτούρας, τα οποία έχουν τη δυνατότητα να συνδυάζουν σύγχρονους σημειωτικούς τρόπους της ψηφιακής τεχνολογίας, όπως εικόνα, κίνηση και ήχο. Το γεγονός αυτό μας οδηγεί στο συμπέρασμα ότι ανάμεσα στο ισχύον διδακτικό υλικό και τις εξωσχολικές πρακτικές γραμματισμού των παιδιών υπάρχει μια σημαντική αναντιστοιχία (Luke 2004). / -

The need for change within the Further Education sector in line with technological developments in our current society was apparent within my teaching practice. This led to a number of thoughts about virtual learning environments and its application within the teaching role. The role of the computer as a real socio-cultural learning environment was explored to examine if this environment could be nearer to the concrete experiential and situated learning environment that students came from at an early age. It was hoped that this would be a different learning environment that would start slowly and grow in an organic way. It involved the growth of a very different culture of learning, a learning environment that may include a different literature and with different ways of thinking about what is to be learned and how to learn it. It was also hoped that the virtual learning environment would provide a very powerful strategy to allow the operation of the principle of variation and selection which it needed within the college Learnwise Educational system. Education should shift from individual, technology-free cognition to a resourceful collaborative learning, and distributed intelligence. Learners should be empowered through thoughtful and innovative use of technologies, and benefit from social distributions of cognitions. Salomon et al.'s (1998) commented that education should pay more attention to the "effects of" technology rather than the "effects with" technology, so that autonomous performance may be achieved. The attempt of the first part of the research has been to investigate a student-centred strategy in a computer supported collaborative learning environment to see whether this kind of higher-order knowledge can be distributed among peers and environment. The starting point of the second part of my research focussed on the links between constructivist theory and knowledge management in relation to college teaching practice. Since this research formed part of a whole college restructuring of teaching and learning, a baseline for current practice was necessary. Literature concerning the use of technology was explored in order to benchmark where the college was at the start of the research. As a result of this initial investigation, a survey of current college practice resulted in a paper being accepted by the HE Academy at their 8th Annual Conference in 2007. Page 6 Results from this research indicated that, although the college displayed similar results to other FE establishments, it was imperative that a move to a new building with a digital environment philosophy required more than merely a physical move. As a result, research into emerging technologies was deemed to be important if the college was to take advantage of a new digital teaching concept. Investigation into collaborative tools and Web 2.0 techniques was seen as appropriate at this stage. The study of computer-supported collaboration included the study of this software and social phenomena associated with it. Through this element of research it was hoped to investigate these collaborative techniques in the light of constructivist theories in order to develop an appropriate and effective digital teaching model. Expanding the research to explore portal technologies, with a particular focus on the integration of teaching practice, would hopefully highlight a possible path connecting current practices to an educational portal and illuminate the benefits and challenges of such an endeavour. Acquiring and deploying Web-based collaborative functionality within an organisation has become a strategic move to improve relationships between employees, partners and customers. The ultimate aim of the research and hence the thesis being addressed, will be to show that it is possible to create a “Learning or College Gateway” as a solutions framework that helps improve education by integrating the tools staff and students already use and puts them to work connecting people with the information and processes they need to teach, learn and manage more effectively. This will create a powerful educational portal that enables the people throughout the college to share information and work together on activities from a single point of access. The gateway will therefore use innovative collaboration and communications technologies to help staff get more out of existing applications using familiar tools and extending the value of investment made in existing learning environment technologies. The aim of the research was partly answered by using project based scenarios which gave some staff a new insight into the use of ICT. However, those involved in projects were generally the more pro-active teachers. A slightly different approach is needed and College Management has been advised to explore the use of an interactive college intranet and a dedicated eLearning team as a possible way forward.

Learning and teaching have been influenced greatly by the rapid development of technology. For instance, through the use of soft computing techniques, it would be possible to create an artificially intelligent autonomous tutor agent, which can ease the burden on teachers and enhance learning outcomes through its more personalised interaction with students. Providing students with automated guidance, such as directing students through the most appropriate content sequence is one aim of online tutoring systems. However, in most of the available tutoring systems, users neither have the ability to adjust the tutor agent’s autonomy level nor fully control the rules applied by the tutor agent. Thus, this thesis has sought to overcome these shortcomings by proposing a system called the ‘Adaptive Course Sequencing Approach’ (ACSA) which enables students to adjust the autonomy level of the tutor agent and gives teachers the ability to directly communicate with the tutor agent to create the sequencing rules and alter them at any time during the learning experience. This is achieved with fuzzy logic, which has the capability of producing human-readable sequencing rules as well as managing the uncertainty of measuring some students’ levels of knowledge. We hypothesise that by equipping intelligent educational environments with adjustable autonomy mechanisms, the students’ learning outcomes will be enhanced. This research was divided into seven phases and involved a large number of participants (1725 in total) to assess the need for adjustable autonomy mechanisms in online tutoring systems and to explore the way of providing these mechanisms in ACSA, thereby demonstrating the hypothesis by two empirical experiments. The results showed that applying adjustable autonomy mechanisms significantly improved the students’ learning outcomes and that the students who adjusted the autonomy level more than once performed slightly better than those who adjusted it once only. In addition, applying the collaborative-driven agent method, which relies on machine learning to generate and optimise the sequencing rules, led to improving the students’ learning outcomes and highly satisfying the teachers.

Research into school-based and real-life technological problem solving has shown it to exist in a range of forms and draw upon a number of constituent processes and knowledge types. While this has given much needed insight into what happens when pupils undertake such problem solving in classrooms, there is little understanding about the relationship between these constituent elements and pupil performance on problem solving tasks. Moreover, such tasks are often still undertaken individually within schools. This thesis builds directly on this by offering a definition for classroom-based technological problem prior to developing a mixed-method approach that allowed the problem solving activity of four high performing groups to be compared with that of four low performing groups. Single gender groups of approximately four pupils worked through a well-defined cantilever problem task in three Scottish technology education classrooms. The group performance was determined by outcome. Findings from the comparative analysis revealed differences in three key areas. Firstly, higher-performing groups naturally employed better process-management strategies including use of planning, role and task allocation with lower levels of tension between group members. Secondly, higher-performing groups made more use of reflection in which reasoning was verbalised, with the potential to promote better shared understanding between group members during the solving process. Thirdly, higher-performing groups exhibited a greater level of tacit-procedural knowledge within their final solutions. Additionally, there was evidence that lower-performing groups were less affected by the competitive task dynamic, and were not always as comprehensive in transferring prior understanding to the problem solving context. These findings were largely consistent between groups and form a basis upon which approaches to pedagogy and assessment can be considered and developed to raise the capability and performance of those pupils who find such problem solving more challenging. Moreover, the findings pertaining to process management and the nature of reflection have wider implications for learning and teaching in related areas of STEM Education.

The work reported in this dissertation investigates the potential for embedding Computerised Adaptive Testing (CAT) in students' and tutors' educational experiences. It seems that the tailored assessments that CAT can provide would be of real educational value in a range of contemporary Higher Education settings, however the resource requirements of some forms of CAT are prohibitive for making CAT assessments available to students across their studies. A form of CAT that is less resource intensive than other forms, the Flexilevel test, was selected for this programme of research to investigate its effectiveness in real educational contexts and explore possible applications for the approach. Ten empirical studies and a real data simulation study were conducted to test the effectiveness of the approach. It was found to show statistically significant correlations with other forms of assessment - in particular conventional Computer Based Testing (CBT) assessments, which is commonly used in contemporary educational settings. Another strand of work concerned the attitudes of stakeholders to the approach. Part of this work was carried out through the empirical studies, and further studies including interviews were also undertaken to explore the views of academic staff and students to the use of the Flexilevel test. Both groups were positive about the use of the Flexilevel test and this was taken to support the idea that academic staff and students would accept the use of the Flexilevel test in their educational experiences. In terms of both effectiveness and the acceptability of the approach to academic staff and students, the Flexilevel test was found to be a good candidate for embedding CAT in real educational contexts in Higher Education.

The purpose of the research was to investigate the effectiveness of using multimedia as a means of teaching physical science to learners. The underlying theoretical assumption was that a multimedia presentation would help to reduce the cognitive load experienced by learners when they learn physical science content, compared to a traditional mode of presentation, and that this reduction may have a positive effect on the ease with which they master the content. Physical science learners in Grade 11 viewed a presentation consisting of multimedia screens and screens depicting the learning content in a traditional layout – in order to compare the level of knowledge gained as well as the cognitive load experienced for the multimedia and traditional instructions. Pre- and post-test questionnaires were used to determine the knowledge gained, while cognitive load was measured using a dual-task methodology. A multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyse the data. The results did not reveal a statistically significant increase in knowledge gained via the multimedia approach when compared to the traditional mode of instruction, but when focussing the analysis on learners with a lower-knowledge base in physical science though, statistically significant results were found. However, no significant results were found to support the hypothesis that multimedia would help to reduce learners’ cognitive load. It was concluded that the multimedia design principles are more effective in increasing knowledge for physical science learners of low-knowledge than traditional instructional designs. / Psychology / M.Sc. (Psychology)

E-learning has become the new paradigm for modern teaching moreover, the technology allows to break the resurrection of time and place by enabling people to learn whenever and wherever they want. In information system research, learners' acceptance of e-learning can be predicted and explained using technology acceptance models. This research developed enhanced technology acceptance model to explain students' acceptance of learning management systems (LMSs) in Saudi Arabia. The research model aims to investigate the viability of TAM constructs in a nonwestern country. Moreover, due to the cultural impact of the Saudi Arabian culture towards genders, the research addresses the moderating effect of gender towards LMSs acceptance. The developed model variables identification focuses on two motivation aspects, extrinsic and intrinsic. The developed model consisted of ten variables in total, which can be categorised into three groups. First, the extrinsic variables consisting of information quality, functionality, accessibility, and user interface design. Second, the intrinsic variables are consisting of computer playfulness, enjoyment, and learning goal orientation. Third, the TAM variables consisting of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and behavioural intention. Moreover, to validate and examine the developed model, a questionnaire tool was developed for data collection. Furthermore, the data was collected from electronically from three universities over six weeks. The research findings supported the developed model. Additionally, the identified variables were good critical in predicting and explaining students' acceptance of LMSs. The research applied structural equation modelling for statistical analysis using IBM AMOS. The research results confirmed the applicability of the developed model to explain the Saudi students' acceptance of LMSs. The developed model explained high variance among the dependent variables outperforming the excising models. The research improved the explanatory power of the TAM model through the identified variables. Furthermore, the research results showed that the extrinsic variables were stronger predictors of students' perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and behavioural intention. In addition, the results showed that males and females perception towards the LMS was significantly different. The male students' acceptance towards LMSs was higher than females. Moreover, enjoyment was the stronger determinant of females' behavioural intention.

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allows massive volume of registrants to enrol in these MOOCs. This research aims to offer MOOCs registrants with automatic content related feedback to fulfil their cognitive needs. A framework is proposed which consists of three modules which are the subject ontology learning module, the short text classification module, and the question answering module. Unlike previous research, to identify relevant concepts for ontology learning a regular expression parser approach is used. Also, the relevant concepts are extracted from unstructured documents. To build the concept hierarchy, a frequent pattern mining approach is used which is guided by a heuristic function to ensure that sibling concepts are at the same level in the hierarchy. As this process does not require specific lexical or syntactic information, it can be applied to any subject. To validate the approach, the resulting ontology is used in a question-answering system which analyses students' content-related questions and generates answers for them. Textbook end of chapter questions/answers are used to validate the question-answering system. The resulting ontology is compared vs. the use of Text2Onto for the question-answering system, and it achieved favourable results. Finally, different indexing approaches based on a subject's ontology are investigated when classifying short text in MOOCs forum discussion data; the investigated indexing approaches are: unigram-based, concept-based and hierarchical concept indexing. The experimental results show that the ontology-based feature indexing approaches outperform the unigram-based indexing approach. Experiments are done in binary classification and multiple labels classification settings . The results are consistent and show that hierarchical concept indexing outperforms both concept-based and unigram-based indexing. The BAGGING and random forests classifiers achieved the best result among the tested classifiers.