What Factors Make a Multimedia Learning Environment Engaging

The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ engagement with a multimedia enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) environment, Alien Rescue, and to find out in what ways students consider Alien Rescue motivating. Alien Rescue is a PBL environment for students to learn science. Fifty-seven sixth-grade students were interviewed. Analysis of the interviews using the constant comparative method showed that students were intrinsically motivated and that there were 11 key elements of the PBL environment that helped evoke students’ motivation: authenticity, challenge, cognitive engagement, competence, choice, fantasy, identity, interactivity, novelty, sensory engagement, and social relations. These elements can be grouped into 5 perspectives of the sources of intrinsic motivation for students using Alien Rescue: problem solving, playing, socializing, information processing, and voluntary acting, with problem solving and playing contributing the highest level of intrinsic motivation. The findings are discussed with respect to designing multimedia learning environments.

A flawed methodology in the design of Problem Based Learning (PBL) instructional procedure often result in students’ discomfort in working in a PBL environment. As a result, student interest might difficult to sustain, and their intrinsic motivation in learning through the PBL process will be difficult to determine. This paper proposes a fourteen-step PBL instructional procedure which addresses intrinsic motivation within the students’ learning process. This particular case study addressed a course in the first year syllabus of an Electrical Engineering diploma programme. Within this course, this instructional procedure was experimentally tested and compared with Traditional Learning Approaches (TLA). The results indicated that students’ intrinsic motivation level for PBL group exceeded the students’ intrinsic motivation level in the TLA. Therefore, the fourteen-step PBL design proposed, was effective in increasing students’ intrinsic motivation than that of the TLA.

This study explores the arrival of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies in a collaborative Problem-Based Learning (PBL) environment from the perspective of students. It examines the emerging practices students develop individually and in groups as well as the tensions they navigate in response to GenAI’s sudden arrival, its inherent limitations and multifaceted affordances, as well as the evolving landscape of formal and informal rules that frame its use. Grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the study adopts an exploratory research approach, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data from a survey administered to 1st and 5th semester IT students in a systemic PBL university (n = 83). Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and principal component analysis, while qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings indicate a high adoption rate and generally favorable attitudes toward GenAI across both semesters. While 1st semester students were more likely to report no prior experience with GenAI compared to 5th semester students, no notable differences were observed regarding frequency or patterns of use. Overall, the arrival of GenAI manifests in the students’ individual and collaborative study practices by enabling or obstructing both epistemic and pragmatic mediations of the objects. However, these interactions have been found to be accompanied by several tensions– specifically between the mediation of different objects, between students and their project groups, and between students and the rules framing GenAI use, which are discussed and contextualized in light of theory and contemporary research.

Problem-based learning: the story continues to unfold.

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been shown to be effective for promoting student competencies in self-directed and collaborative learning, critical thinking, self-reflection and tackling novel situations. However, the need for face-to-face interactions at the same place and time severely limits the potential of traditional PBL. The requirements of space and for meeting at a specific location at the same time create timetabling difficulties. Such limitations need to be tackled before all potentials of PBL learning can be realized. The present study aimed at designing and implementing an online PBL environment for undergraduate speech/language pathology students, and assessing the associated pedagogical effectiveness. A group of eight PBL students were randomly selected to participate in the study. They underwent 4 weeks of online PBL using Adobe Connect. Upon completion of the experiment, they were assessed via a self-reported questionnaire and quantitative comparison with traditional PBL students based on the same written assignment. The questionnaire revealed that all participating students enjoyed online PBL, without any perceived negative effects on learning. Online PBL unanimously saved the students travel time to and from school. Statistical analysis indicated no significant difference in assignment grades between the online and traditional PBL groups, indicating that online PBL learning appears to be similarly effective as traditional face-to-face PBL learning.

Productive use of learning resources in an online problem-based learning environment

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an important and effective learning technique. The increasing speed and capacity of computing and wireless communication and the decreasing costs of hardware components has made mobile personal computing a viable platform solution to the barriers incurred in the typical PBL process. Wireless infrastructures are becoming a standardized commodity. This paper deals with the development of various design principles, and methods that emphasize the effective integration and utilization of mobile solutions to construct efficient, robust, and reusable software modules in the context of a university's learning environment in computer engineering. A mobile personal software system framework has been developed and prototyped. The system framework supports several important factors involved in a PBL environment, such as resource sharing, cross-functional teamwork, and efficient information distribution. A mixture of modern personal pocket and tablet PCs, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology is used for the platform

Background:Knowledge of community medicine is essential for health care professionals to function as efficient primary health care physicians. Medical students learning Community Medicine as a subject are expected to be competent in critical thinking and generic skills so as to analyze community health problems better. However, current teaching by didactic lectures fails to develop these essential skills. Problem-based learning (PBL) could be an effective strategy in this respect. This study was hence done to compare the academic performance of students who were taught Community Medicine by the PBL method with that of students taught by traditional methods, to assess the generic skills of students taught in a PBL environment and to assess the perception of students toward PBL methodology.Materials and Methods:This study was conducted among seventh-semester final-year medical students between June and November 2014. PBL was introduced to a randomly chosen group of students, and their performance in an assessment exam at the end of postings was compared with that of the remaining students. Generic skills and perception toward PBL were also assessed using standardized questionnaires.Results:A total of 77 students took part in the brainstorming session of PBL. The correlation between self-assigned scores of the participants and those assigned by the tutor in the brainstorming session of PBL was significant (r = 0.266, P = 0.05). Out of 54 students who took part in the presentation session, almost all 53 (98.1%) had good perception toward PBL. Demotivational scores were found to be significantly higher among males (P = 0.024). The academic performance of students (P < 0.001) and success rates (P = 0.05) in the examination were higher among students who took part in PBL compared to controls.Conclusion:PBL helped improve knowledge of students in comparison to those exposed only to didactic lectures. As PBL enabled students to identify the gaps in their knowledge and enhanced their group functioning and generic skills, we recommend PBL sessions: They would help optimize the training in Community Medicine at medical schools. Good correlation of tutor and self-assessment scores of participants in the brainstorming session suggests that the role of tutors could be restricted to assessment in presentation sessions alone. Demotivation, which hinders group performance in PBL, needs to be corrected by counselling and timely feedback by the tutors.

In a traditional classroom environment, instructor enthusiasm has been shown to enhance student’s emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. Additionally, emotional response theory argues that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of an instructor will induce positive emotional states in learners, which in turn, enact learners’ approach behaviours in the learning process. Therefore, should a pedagogical agent convey enthusiastic behaviours in a multimedia learning environment? Literature and theoretical reviews offer two competing views. The first view, based on emotional response theory, predicts that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of a pedagogical agent can induce higher positive emotions in learners, which in turn, enhance affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. However, the second view, based on cognitive load theory, suggests that pedagogical agent enthusiasm may increase extraneous cognitive load (additional processing in the mind), which negatively impact emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. To investigate the effects of agent enthusiasm, seventy-two university freshmen interacted with either an enthusiastic agent or a neutral agent (operationalized through vocal tones, facial expression, gestures, and remarks) that simulates the instructional role of a virtual tutor that delivers narrative demonstrations on how to predict the outputs of C-Programming algorithms. The results of our study showed that pedagogical agent enthusiasm significantly enhanced emotion, intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions, and cognitive outcome. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that the facilitating effects of agent enthusiasm on intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions of the learning environment, and affective perceptions of the pedagogical agent were fully mediated by a learner’s positive emotion, thus demonstrating that the framework of emotional response theory can be applied to learner-agent interaction in a multimedia learning environment. Implications and suggestions for future research related to pedagogical agent enthusiasm are discussed in this paper.

Problem Based Learning (PBL) makes use of real-life scenarios to stimulate students' prior knowledge and to provide a meaningful context that is also related to the student's future professional work. In this article, Paternity testing is presented using a PBL approach that involves a combination of classroom, laboratory, and out-of-class activities: in relation to a fictitious newborn found on the Campus, students design a PCR based protocol to determine their own genotype for two markers. Pooled class genotypes serve to calculate allelic frequencies and to assess Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Individual results are also evaluated for possible paternity. The goals of the activity and how each step in the process relates to learning outcomes are presented. Classroom discussions, group discussions, tutorial sessions, wiki sites, laboratory activities, and individual reports sum up the situations, in which the students' process of learning and learning outcomes can be evaluated.

Classroom discourse analysis has contributed to understandings of the nature of student-teacher interactions, and how learning takes place in the classroom; however, much of this work has been undertaken in teacher-directed learning contexts. Student-centred classrooms such as problem-based learning (PBL) approaches are increasingly common in professional disciplines such as the health sciences and medicine. With the globalisation of education, health science and medical education, PBL classrooms are often sites of considerable linguistic and cultural diversity, yet little is known from a classroom discourse perspective about the language demands of PBL. This paper examines the ways in which the students and tutor negotiate and construct meanings through language in one first year physiotherapy PBL tutorial at an Australian university, with a particular focus on the ways in which the discourse is regulated in a student-centred learning environment. The analysis of the classroom discourse is underpinned by Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. The findings provide a description of the linguistic resources students draw on to co-construct and negotiate knowledge, as well as show how the tutor, with minimal strategic interventions, scaffolds the students’ learning. The findings also suggest that the PBL environment can be a challenging one for students whose cultural and language backgrounds are different from that of the classroom.

Critical thinking is widely considered an important competency to acquire in education. Learner exposure to problems and collaboration has been shown to help in improving critical thinking processes. These elements are contained in a learner-centered learning environment, such as problem-based learning. In addition to critical thinking, higher order thinking skills also contain elements of PBL. However, the definitions of HOT and critical thinking are often poorly defined and overlapping. Therefore, this SJR research aims to investigate how HOTs and critical thinking are conceptualized in a PBL environment. Another objective of this study was to review the evidence of the effectiveness of the PBL environment in developing HOTs and critical thinking. The results showed that from various references, it was found that the focus of the study was more on the process of critical thinking rather than critical thinking disposition (i.e., the tendency or willingness to engage in critical thinking). Furthermore, despite the positive effects of PBL on HOTs and critical thinking, limitations in the findings include the lack of clarity and consistency in how researchers conceptualize and measure these forms of thinking, both HOTs and critical thinking. In addition, important components of PBL are often overlooked. Finally, the study also identified various design issues in the effects study, such as the lack of a control group, which makes the results of the investigation questionable.

Problem-Based Learning has provided a strategy for curriculum development and delivery for decades. The focus of Problem-Based Learning on a central problem which drives the learning as well as the need for a “real world” context which engages and challenges the student to take ownership of their learning is a strategy that lends itself to the adoption of Virtual Reality. The implementation of Virtual Reality into a Problem-Based Learning environment provides student with challenges with confronting design management but also forecasts what environments they will work in as graduates and professionals. The following chapter reports on the implementation of Virtual Reality into a Problem-Based Learning initiative.

How, where and why GIS is taught has been debated heavily in the geography literature. This article is a contribution to that debate, because it offers a new perspective from which to teach GIS: problem-based learning. In a problem-based learning classroom, theoretical foundations and the real world of problems are understood as constitutive of one another, rather than theory being prioritised over the real world of experience. In this paper, the author describes an introductory-level GIS class in which GIS was taught with a problem-based learning pedagogy. The problem around which the class focused was a proposal to add a new school district in the San Antonio, Texas metropolitan region. This article describes the class, including the nature of the problem and the way GIS skills were sequentially taught and integrated into the analysis of that problem.

Student retention is an issue that gathers increasing attention within the engineering education community. This is mainly due to the increasing need for engineers, paired with untenable dropout rates of 50%-60% in engineering programmes at many universities all over the world (1-3). Until recently, Aalborg University (AAU) had avoided this development, even compared with other Danish universities (4). The common sense logic had been that Aalborg University adheres to a problem-based learning (PBL) approach, which inherently combats dropout. A very recent largescale English investigation about retention and dropout states that this is more than common sense logic: 'High-quality, student-centred learning and teaching is at the heart of improving the retention and success of all students. Academic programmes that have higher rates of retention and success make use of group-based learning and teaching, and varied learning opportunities, including real-world learning and work placements' (5). Lately, however, we have started to see some AAU dropout rates at 30% and several research projects have been initiated to investigate this apparent paradox. As our initial studies also have shown, retention and dropout are phenomena with a complex causality of a practical, academic, pedagogical and social nature (4,6). A particular area of interest is, however, the extent to which our pedagogical PBL model has an impact on these new trends and whether it should be modified. As an important step in this area, this paper evaluates existing literature to research state-of-the-art methods of addressing retention, dropout and PBL learning environments.