This developmental research adopted an adapted Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) structure to design an e-learning course module and a learning procedure, and embedded a self-regulated learning procedure into the PSI course. A set of self-regulated learning tools were developed and applied in this process. Through this PSI-based course, students learned a comparative culture study topic and learned to develop their self-regulated learning skills. This research also conducted Formative Evaluation. Suggestions from expert review and small group evaluation were used to design and revise this module and learning procedure. Evaluation outcomes from expert review and small group evaluation confirmed that this SRL embedded PSI framework was applicable for this e-learning environment. Implications for future use in both academic and practical areas were discussed. / Ph. D.

e-Learning is an effective medium for delivering knowledge and skills. In spite of improvements in electronic delivery technologies, e-Learning is still a long way away from offering anything close to efficient and effective learning environments. To improve e-Learning experiences, much literature supports simulation based e-Learning. This thesis begins identifying various types of simulation models and their features that induce experiential learning. We focus on designing and constructing an easy-to-use Discrete Event Simulation (DES) tool for building engaging and informative interactive DES models that allow learners to control the models’ parameters and visualizations through runtime interactions. DES has long been used to support analysis and design of complex systems but its potential to enhance learning has not yet been fully utilized. We first present an application framework and its resulting classes for better structuring DES models. However, importing relevant classes, establishing relationships between their objects and representing lifecycles of various types of active objects in a language that does not support concurrency demand a significant cognitive workload. To improve this situation, we utilize two design patterns to ease model structuring and logic representation (both in time and space) through a drag and drop component approach. The patterns are the Delegation Event Model, used for linking between components and delegating tasks of executing and updating active objects’ lifecycles, and the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, used for connecting the components to their graphical instrumentations and GUIs. Components implementing both design patterns support the process-oriented approach, can easily be tailored to store model states and visualizations, and can be extended to design higher level models through hierarchical simulation development. Evaluating this approach with both teachers and learners using ActionScript as an implementation language in the Flash environment shows that the resulting components not only help model designers with few programming skills to construct DES models, but they also allow learners to conduct various experiments through interactive GUIs and observe the impact of changes to model behaviour through a range of engaging visualizations. Such interactions can motivate learners and make their learning an enjoyable experience.

Opportunities for supporting physician continuing professional development (CPD) may exist through careful instructional design and creative use of information and communication technology. The overarching goal of this study was to explore the learning experiences and outcomes of cardiologists participating in a web conference (“webinar”) series to understand the factors that can support webinars in being an appealing and satisfying CPD medium for these learners. Acknowledging that a pedagogically-based framework for program design is a cornerstone of effective CPD (Hutchinson & Estabrooks, 2009; Inan & Lowther, 2007; Casimiro, MacDonald, Thompson, & Stodel, 2009), this study used the W(e)Learn Framework (MacDonald, Stodel, Thompson, & Casimiro, 2009) as a process guide and quality standard for program design, development and delivery. Cardiologists voluntarily participated in an educational webinar series in which they shared their observations and experiences. Informed by the results of a systematic review of physician eLearning design preferences, this dissertation serves as a mechanism to learn about how webinars can be implemented to support learning and practice change within a population of highly specialized physician learners. Methodological approaches included a systematic review of literature examining physician preferences for eLearning design, a case study of webinar implementation, and interviews with cardiologists who participated in the webinars. The findings of the systematic review, the case study and the interviews aligned to characterize key considerations in webinar implementation. Webinar designers must carefully determine program structures, content, and media to create a satisfying learning experience. Cardiologists seek a webinar experience that responds to their professional reality of competing priorities, complex patients, and ambiguous clinical questions. They seek a mix of evidence-based, authentic and challenging content, delivered by credible content experts. The study found that purposefully designed webinars can be a satisfying learning experience for cardiologists with the potential to influence changes in knowledge and practice. The use of an instructional design framework may structure and enrich webinar implementation; this dissertation encourages their use.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / This thesis reports on the development and testing of a framework for making sense of the collective professional learning of primary Science and Technology teachers in an elearning mediated context. Web-based networks and collaboratories are playing an increasingly prominent role in private and public sector knowledge building and innovation. In Education, online communities now frequently support teachers’ professional learning. However, despite the pervasiveness of this network zeitgeist, such studies rarely describe or analyse (let alone theorise) teachers’ collective learning, focusing paradoxically instead on the learning of individuals, albeit in group contexts. Without a clear understanding of collectivity, the design of initiatives for systemic professional renewal is significantly impeded. This investigation addresses this urgent need to describe, analyse and theorise teachers’ collective learning. Serendipitously, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, DESCANT (SciTech), provided a context that confronted those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges necessary to make collective learning both possible and likely. Cohorts of primary Science and Technology teachers, supported by consultants, Education Department officers and University researchers, worked together, in networked ways, to conceive, prototype and trial an e-learning environment for the professional development of cohorts of their peer teachers. Democratic participation was assured, a generative theory of learning adopted and pragmatic steps taken so as to establish a principled, yet experimental, trial for studying collective learning. Group learning at every stage of this process was documented, and examined for ethical, theoretical and pragmatic evidence of collectivity. That is, judgements were made as to whether the learning that occurred at each stage of the project could be understood as a complex, dynamic learning ecology. The study’s findings reveal that collective professional learning did occur, to a greater or lesser extent, at every stage of the DESCANT process. Furthermore, the collective learning of these teachers could be well described and explained by considering how those ethical, theoretical and pragmatic challenges - the pillars of the learning ecology framework developed here - were met. The account makes clear just how complex, dynamic, highly nuanced and ecological in nature collective learning is. It was then a small step to theorise systemic professional renewal in terms of collective conceptual movements on an adaptive (learning) landscape and, in the light of what occurred, to extrapolate, speculatively, from the generative theoretical pillar with which the study began. Of course, this study has acknowledged limitations. Nevertheless, its successful small-scale piloting of a learning ecology framework for making sense of collective, networked professional learning demonstrates that the framework has a range of epistemic benefits - not least, internal and external coherence. As well, it provokes thinking about key characteristics of networked approaches to collective professional learning. Above all, this study suggests the worth of continuing to test and refine this learning ecology framework in those diverse settings where systemic renewal is critical.

Opportunities for supporting physician continuing professional development (CPD) may exist through careful instructional design and creative use of information and communication technology. The overarching goal of this study was to explore the learning experiences and outcomes of cardiologists participating in a web conference (“webinar”) series to understand the factors that can support webinars in being an appealing and satisfying CPD medium for these learners. Acknowledging that a pedagogically-based framework for program design is a cornerstone of effective CPD (Hutchinson & Estabrooks, 2009; Inan & Lowther, 2007; Casimiro, MacDonald, Thompson, & Stodel, 2009), this study used the W(e)Learn Framework (MacDonald, Stodel, Thompson, & Casimiro, 2009) as a process guide and quality standard for program design, development and delivery. Cardiologists voluntarily participated in an educational webinar series in which they shared their observations and experiences. Informed by the results of a systematic review of physician eLearning design preferences, this dissertation serves as a mechanism to learn about how webinars can be implemented to support learning and practice change within a population of highly specialized physician learners. Methodological approaches included a systematic review of literature examining physician preferences for eLearning design, a case study of webinar implementation, and interviews with cardiologists who participated in the webinars. The findings of the systematic review, the case study and the interviews aligned to characterize key considerations in webinar implementation. Webinar designers must carefully determine program structures, content, and media to create a satisfying learning experience. Cardiologists seek a webinar experience that responds to their professional reality of competing priorities, complex patients, and ambiguous clinical questions. They seek a mix of evidence-based, authentic and challenging content, delivered by credible content experts. The study found that purposefully designed webinars can be a satisfying learning experience for cardiologists with the potential to influence changes in knowledge and practice. The use of an instructional design framework may structure and enrich webinar implementation; this dissertation encourages their use.

A current popular paradigm in e-learning is that of the "learning object". Broadly de-fined, a learning object is a reusable piece of educational material intended to be strung together with other learning objects to form larger educational units such as activities, lessons, or whole courses. This aggregating of learning objects together is a recursive process small objects can be combined to form medium sized objects, medium sized objects can be combined to form large objects, and so on. Once objects have been com-bined appropriately, they are generally serialized into content packages, and deployed into an online course for delivery to learners.<p>Learning objects are often stored in distributed and decentralized repositories throughout the Internet. This provides unique challenges when managing the history of such an ob-ject, as traditional versioning techniques (e.g. CVS, RCS, etc.) rely on centralized man-agement. These challenges have been largely ignored by the educational technology community, but are becoming more important as sharing of learning objects increases.<p>This thesis explores these issues by providing a formal version model for learning ob-jects, a set of data bindings for this model, and a prototype authoring environment which implements these bindings. In addition, the work explores the potential benefits of ver-sion control by implementing a visualization of a learning object revision tree. This visualization includes the relationship between objects and their aggregates, the struc-tural history of an object, and the semantic changes that an object has undergone.

A current popular paradigm in e-learning is that of the "learning object". Broadly de-fined, a learning object is a reusable piece of educational material intended to be strung together with other learning objects to form larger educational units such as activities, lessons, or whole courses. This aggregating of learning objects together is a recursive process small objects can be combined to form medium sized objects, medium sized objects can be combined to form large objects, and so on. Once objects have been com-bined appropriately, they are generally serialized into content packages, and deployed into an online course for delivery to learners.<p>Learning objects are often stored in distributed and decentralized repositories throughout the Internet. This provides unique challenges when managing the history of such an ob-ject, as traditional versioning techniques (e.g. CVS, RCS, etc.) rely on centralized man-agement. These challenges have been largely ignored by the educational technology community, but are becoming more important as sharing of learning objects increases.<p>This thesis explores these issues by providing a formal version model for learning ob-jects, a set of data bindings for this model, and a prototype authoring environment which implements these bindings. In addition, the work explores the potential benefits of ver-sion control by implementing a visualization of a learning object revision tree. This visualization includes the relationship between objects and their aggregates, the struc-tural history of an object, and the semantic changes that an object has undergone.

Medical education has been the subject of ongoing reform since the second part of the 18th century (Papa & Harasym, 1999). Most recently, medical education has been redefined to include a broad set of competencies over and above traditional expertise. In an attempt to facilitate this approach, different instructional models have been proposed. Most of these seek to foster learner engagement and active participation and promote life-long learning. Nevertheless, there is no consensus amongst medical educators about the optimal way to teach future physicians. Despite the efforts of both researchers and local champions, instructional innovations frequently fail. Fullan (2001) ascribes this to faulty assumptions on the part of planners as well as to the inherent complexity of the organizations involved, further stating that effective change requires some degree of reculturing. This study examines the process of educational change in an undergraduate medical course over a three-year period. Formerly taught exclusively by large class lectures, the course was redesigned to include a blend of e-learning and Team-Based Learning (TBL). The process of change is described and viewed in parallel from the perspectives of both student and teacher while uncovering contextual and process elements that contributed to the outcome. Shifting student attitudes to teaching and learning were identified over time, suggesting that these evolve in parallel to faculty experience implementing a new teaching strategy. Van Melle (2005) has suggested that acceptance of educational innovation is dependent on the environment and organizational context. The results of this study highlight the importance of these factors in the successful introduction of a new instructional paradigm as well as the value of longitudinal evaluation of instructional changes in order to better understand their transformational potential. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-24 10:02:24.877

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Online multimedia education systems traditionally tend to consist almost exclusively of multiple choice or numeric response style questions. However, many curricula such as math, physics, and chemistry typically involve students completing large, complex, multi-step problems where the process used to solve the problem is more important than the final answer. Current online multimedia systems are generally insufficient to model or assess problems like these. In this thesis, I address this issue by implementing a Process Analyzer and its authoring tool. The Process Analyzer aims to improve student problem solving skills by acting as a self-tutoring tool that can analyze a students problem-solving process and adapt accordingly, providing corrective guidance hints if necessary. Secondly, it provides instructors with an in-depth analysis of the process or thinking steps that students are using to solve complex problems. Instructors can therefore assess students based on their problem-solving process, and not just their final answer. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems