Augmented Reality (AR) has been used in various contexts in recent years in order to enhance user experiences in mobile and wearable devices. Various studies have shown the utility of AR, especially in the field of education, where it has been observed that learning results are improved. However, such applications require specialized teams of software developers to create and maintain them. In an attempt to solve this problem and enable educators to easily create AR content for existing textbooks, the ARTutor platform was developed. It consists of a web-based application that acts as an AR authoring tool, and an accompanying mobile application that is used to access and interact with the educational AR content. In addition, the ARTutor application allows students to ask questions verbally and receive answers based on the contents of the book. This means that the system is suitable for distance learning and promotes self-study and independent learning.
Augmented Reality (AR) has seen a significant increase in applications in a number of fields in recent years. One of the areas in which AR has been applied to is education, most commonly by means of augmenting educational books. The present paper builds on previous work by using an AR authoring environment and a mobile application, developed by the authors, in undergraduate courses at the Eastern Macedonia & Thrace Institute of Technology. Using the authoring tool, the students were able to enhance existing secondary education textbooks by adding digital content to them, and, using the mobile application, view the digital content and retrieve information from the textual content of the books by asking questions in natural language form. At the end of the semester, the students were asked to evaluate the ARTutor platform by means of questionnaires and the SECTIONS framework. This study presents and discusses the results of this evaluation exercise and proposes new directions of the research.
Despite the educational potential of Facebook and Moodle, there are still unanswered questions about their impact on the student learning experience in a well-defined instructional design framework. This study aimed to compare the learning experiences of students who used Moodle (control group) and Facebook (experimental group), in terms of Community of Inquiry presence indicators, i.e., cognitive, teaching, and social presence. Several learning activities for the development of learning environments were carried out by 97 students who were enrolled in instructional media design courses. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analysis indicated that students using either Moodle or Facebook as their learning platform had similar perceptions of teaching and cognitive presence; however, Facebook users had a better social presence in the Community of Inquiry than their Moodle counterparts. Another point worth noting is that the experimental group's female participants had better teaching presence, cognitive presence, and overall learning experience than their male peers.
While “flipping” a classroom has gained attention in K‐12 and Secondary school programs, there has been relatively no explicit focus on its effectiveness as a teaching method for instructional media design courses in Higher Education. The purpose of this quasi‐experimental study was to determine the effectiveness of the flipped classroom approach to teaching instructional media design subjects by comparing students’ academic performance and training satisfaction in traditional lecture‐based instruction with those in a flipped classroom. A total of 128 undergraduate students participated voluntarily and were divided into a control (n = 62) and an experimental (n = 66) group, respectively. The study findings indicated substantial differences in both academic performance and training satisfaction between the two groups, with the students in the experimental group performing significantly better. Specifically, the results showed some determining factors associated with training satisfaction that explain why students in flipped classes achieved notably higher mastery in the learning objectives than their control group peers. This study adds to the literature by providing evidence on how a flipped classroom can potentially benefit students’ academic performance, leading to higher training satisfaction and deeper disciplinary understanding in instructional media design courses.
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