Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Evaluating software is a universal and complex problem. The question is: how should software be selected and adopted, or rather, which of the software packages is the most suitable for a specific environment? Extensive research on the evaluation of software has been done, but only a few researchers have considered evaluation of e-learning systems based on three software quality characteristics (i.e. usability, maintainability and deployability) for implementation in third world countries. In this thesis, it will be considered how to use a mixed research methods for the evaluation of free and open source e-learning systems in a developing country. The scope of this investigation is the evaluation of two free and open source e-learning systems at the Open University of Tanzania using 33 stakeholders (some with more and others with less computer expertise). / South Africa

Educators and instructional designers are seeking ways to increase levels of learning. One of the ways this is being done is through cognitive load theory which attempts to reduce cognitive load through a better understanding of working memory and the factors that impact its function. Past studies have found that working memory processes visual and auditory information using separate and non-sharable resources (dual coding theory) and that by properly utilizing multimedia elements, information processing in working memory is more efficient (multimedia learning). What is not known is the effect that instructor-led video, which uses the visual channel but delivers no information, has on the cognitive load of the learner. Further, will the introduction of multimedia elements make the information processing of the learner more efficient? This study examined three ways in which instructional designers may create a more efficient learning environment through a better understanding of multimedia learning. First, by using the theories of multimedia learning, I examined a more efficient use of sensory memory. By minimizing extraneous load, which communication theory calls noise, on working memory through increased utilization of the visual and auditory channels, the effectiveness of instruction was increased. Secondly, the multimedia effect, defined as using visual helps and guides with spoken and written text, was shown to assist working memory in processing new information into existing schema. Last, by using the personalization principle set forth by Clark and Mayer (2008), I used both the video feed and multimedia together to foster a more social or conversational presentation to the learner.

This dissertation explores the experiences of nineteen individuals assigned to six collaborative Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) development teams across four university sites. Based on an analysis of these semi-structured interviews and process artifacts, findings reveal that collaborative MOOC development teams are composed of members with cross-campus affiliations who possess distinct knowledge, skills, and attitudes that—when combined with specific resources—facilitate the interdependence needed to effectively collaborate on MOOC curriculum. This research suggests that process behaviors that cultivate empathy and expedite trust among members positively mediate states that emerge from the diversity of power and affiliations commonly found on MOOC teams. Further, these process behaviors and emergent states are found to have an impact beyond the MOOC itself, on faculty behaviors in the classroom, staff behaviors with regards to future curriculum collaborations, and institutional acceptance and promotion of cross-campus collaborations with regards to online learning and collaborative curriculum development. While existing MOOC research has focused on the historical, pedagogical, and technical aspects of MOOC curriculum development, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of how MOOC teams effectively collaborate to develop curriculum that leverages existing scholarship. This research therefore has implications for advancing scholarship on effective teams, collaborative curriculum design, online learning, and MOOCs, as well as informing practical recommendations for stakeholders engaged in strategically composing and working within collaborative curriculum development teams.

Email communication within a diverse workplace poses intercultural communication challenges (Martin & Nakayama, 2007). This study aims to make a contribution to the literature by examining how these challenges can be addressed through email computer training. For this study, I set out to understand and demonstrate how, within the instructional design process, contextualized curriculum can be created that integrates intercultural competency and email proficiency. This thesis includes a draft of an instructional plan and course outline for an email computer class that focuses on developing intercultural awareness and skills in the context of an email training course. First, I examined email computer curricula, specifically the topics, course goals, and course objectives common to the curricula. As a result of this examination, I discovered that email training is limited to the technical aspects of email communication. Additionally, I surveyed intercultural communication professionals about intercultural topics applicable to email communication. Their survey responses indicated cultural differences account for some, but not all email workplace challenges. For example, they believed it is important to address intercultural elements like low vs. high context when writing an email message, and power distance and levels of formality when writing greetings and closings. Additionally, their feedback indicated that it is important to address direct vs. indirect communication styles when writing the main point and linear vs. circular cognitive styles when organizing text within an email. I incorporated their perspectives in my course outline. Finally, experts from the fields of instructional design, intercultural communication, and computer training reviewed a draft of the plan and outline. Although their feedback indicated that the premise and approach were sound and achievable, they differed in their evaluation of specific elements of the course. In general, their perspectives reflected their professional focus. For example, they either recommended a stronger focus on the technical aspects or a stronger focus on the intercultural aspects of the course design. Detailed comments pertained to the fine-tuning of the objectives, timing of the individual lessons, and other instructional elements needed for any polished professional course outline

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In a globally interdependent world, teachers are charged with preparing learners for a complex, interactive world. This educational challenge requires teachers to develop learners with critical, creative and conceptual minds, while still teaching the required content. Therefore developing the individual learner's ability to construct personalised meaning for new concepts is a prerequisite for the classroom. So is the development of the learner's ability to solve increasingly complex problems in the learning area as well as in daily life. This revivefies the question of how to plan, structure and assess in order to accommodate these requirements while enhancing learner abilities and achiement. / Teacher Education / D.Ed. (Didactics)

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Technology Degree in Information Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / One of the fundamental characteristics of technology is its ever-changing nature with the continuous release of new models and products almost on a daily basis. It is interesting to note that these new technologies seem to appeal more to the youth than to the old. This might explain why the content of some Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as films, TV, and games, are sometimes released with well-defined age ratings, in order to provide guidance to parents and guardians on the suitability of such content for their children. What is surprising is that there are age restrictions for the content presented by ICT devices, but devices themselves do not have any defined age restriction. For example, movies which can be played on computers, have a well-defined age restriction; but computers themselves do not have any defined age restriction. This non-definition of age ratings for ICT devices is certainly a general concern, but it is also a major concern for the education domain which needs to determine the minimum age from which learners should be allowed to use ICTs at school. This problem of the non-definition of age ratings for ICT devices serves as a motivation for this study, whose aim is to determine the factors affecting educators’ perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to use ICTs at school. The research objectives unfolding from this aim are: i) To select appropriate theories and models on the factors affecting educators’ perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to use ICTs at school; ii) To design a conceptual model of the factors affecting educators’ perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to use ICTs at school; iii To empirically test the above conceptual model of the factors affecting educators’perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to use ICTs at school; and iv) To make recommendations on the design of eLearning initiatives in schools based on the results of the current study. These four objectives were achieved as follows through the content analysis of existing literature and a survey of 70 primary and secondary school educators from the Camperdown magisterial district in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa: i) Specific personality and child development theories were selected as the theoretical foundation of this study; ii) The conceptual model proposed in this study gave rise to the following hypotheses: The demographics of an educator affect the full functionality, the health, and the self-actualisation of his or her personality as well as his or her perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school. The full functionality, the health, and the self-actualisation of the personality of an educator all affect his or her perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school; iii) The empirical testing of the above hypothesized model yielded the following results: the grade or class taught by an educator is the only demographic factor that affects the full functionality, the health, and the self-actualisation of his or her personality; the subject specialisation of an educator is the only demographic variable that affects his or her perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school; the full functionality, the health, and the self-actualisation of the personality of an educator all affect his or her perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school; and iv) One of the recommendation of this study is that eLearning pilot projects be designed in ways that clearly consider differences between educators from various subject specialisations. This study identified the need for more research on the effect of personality on the perceptions of educators on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs, not only at school as it is the case for this study, but also at home. The main contribution of this research is to have found that educators’ personality has an effect on their perceptions on the age from which learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school, compared to the literature reviewed by this study which seems to be silent on the relationship between the personality of educators and the determination of the age when learners should be allowed to start using ICTs at school.

Lee Yun-wing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-92). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Motivation and Objectives --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of Thesis --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Review of Related Work --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Traditional Education Theory --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Integrative Learning Model --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Problem-Based Learning --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Cognitive Apprenticeship --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Conversational Model --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.5 --- Self-Regulated Learning --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1.6 --- Seven Principles for Good Practice for Education --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- Online Learning Examples --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- Web sites Comparison --- p.30 / Chapter 2.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.38 / Chapter 3 --- An On-line learning model --- p.39 / Chapter 3.1 --- Conceptual Design --- p.39 / Chapter 3.2 --- Software architecture --- p.51 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Authentication --- p.53 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Courseware studying --- p.54 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Quiz retrieval --- p.55 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Performance Monitoring --- p.57 / Chapter 3.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.58 / Chapter 4 --- Demonstration --- p.59 / Chapter 4.1 --- Account Management --- p.60 / Chapter 4.2 --- Courseware --- p.62 / Chapter 4.3 --- Quiz --- p.68 / Chapter 4.4 --- Email address list and newsgroup --- p.76 / Chapter 4.5 --- Instructor Area --- p.77 / Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.80 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.82 / Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusion --- p.82 / Chapter 5.2 --- Future work --- p.85 / Bibliography --- p.87

This PhD thesis is a theoretical and practical study concerning the user model for adaptive e-learning systems. The research activity is two-fold. It firstly explores the personality aspect in the user model which has been overlooked in the previous literature on the design of adaptive e-learning systems, in order to see whether learners with different types of personality would have different effects on their learning performance with adaptive e-learning systems. And secondly, it investigates how to embody the personality features in the current user model, proposing that the inclusion of the personality in the user model for adaptive e-learning systems would lead to better learning performance. The thesis has considered the personality aspect in four parts. PART I reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on adaptive e-learning systems from which the main research questions are constructed. It explains how this study derives an overarching model for the inclusion of personality type in effective e-learning systems. PART II consists of the experiments, which explore empirically the importance of identifying the personality in the user model for adaptive e-learning and its effect in individual learning. That is, the main theme of the thesis hypothesises that different personality type’s influence performance with e-learning systems. PART III shows the effects of personality type on groups of learners performing collaborative learning activities. It suggests practical implications of designing collaborative learning technologies in conjunction with the personality feature. Finally, PART IV includes personality in the proposed user model and tests the primary hypothesis that “the personality may influence the learning performance of students using adaptive e-learning systems”.

This thesis describes the evaluation of several computer supported martial arts learning environments. These learning environments were designed, developed and implemented for practitioners of Rough and Tumble (RAT), a South African martial art, originally as a result of an increasing number of RAT practitioners relocating to other countries and yet wishing to continue their learning and practise of RAT. This project revolves mainly around the effectiveness evaluation of whether RAT martial arts knowledge, skills and attitudes can be learned in computer supported learning environments. The research is situated within design research and has pragmatic goals to provide a computer supported learning environment for the learning of RAT. Furthermore the design research was conducted to derive design principles for future design and development efforts. A brief account of the literature is provided, covering three main learning paradigms, with a focus on behaviourism and constructivism, followed by a description of issues in the computer supported learning field, an explanation of various definitions of martial arts and how the term is delimited in this study, and an overview of various evaluation paradigms. This account revealed inadequacies of the theories and terminology described pertaining to this study, resulting in the combined use of various underlying theoretical approaches to guide this research. These approaches include the eclectic-mixed methods-pragmatic paradigm as the overarching framework, a social constructivist learning approach, cognitive flexibility theory, Bloom’s Taxonomy, the RAT approach to martial arts learning and teaching, and a mixed methods research design. Two main components were developed as solutions, which included the development of a computer martial arts resource, the RAT CD-ROM, and four online courses, the RAT Online courses. Data were collected using a number of research instruments, such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, records, expert reviews and learner artefacts in an attempt to understand the data from multiple viewpoints and develop a more reliable depiction of evaluation events. The data were analysed using mainly qualitative coding in software, expert rating diagrams, basic frequency statistics, and martial arts assessments of physical performances. These analyses revealed that although there is significant work involved in mixed methods research and there are issues such as participants not meeting task deadlines, technology failures, software usability issues, and small participant numbers, the research approach has contributed to the pragmatic goal of providing computer supported learning environments to RAT practitioners, who otherwise would not have been able to participate in RAT. In addition a number of design principles for the creation of RAT computer supported learning environments were derived from this research, including the use of social constructivism, cognitive flexibility theory, Bloom’s Taxonomy, multiple contextual training, and using computers as learning and knowledge construction tools. These underlying theoretical principles translate to more practical procedural principles, such as amongst others, to design computer supported learning environments incorporating tools to enable knowledge construction and collaboration, provide learning designs that are complex and authentic, encourage multiple representations of learner knowledge, take on a mentor role as online course facilitator, and to build problem solving activities into the learning design. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.