In 2014, researchers at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement in Postsecondary Education's First in the World program to do research aimed at understanding how games can be used to cultivate college knowledge and…

Learning technologies are now commonplace in education, and generate large volumes of educational data. Scholars have argued that analytics can and should be employed to optimize learning and learning environments. This article explores what is really meant by "analytics", describes the current best-known examples of institutional…

Various types of structured data collected by learning management systems such as Moodle have been used to improve student learning outcomes. Learning analytics refers to an assortment of data analysis methods used for this task. These methods typically do not consider unstructured data such as blogs, discussions, e-mail, and course messages.…

The increasing availability of digital data in higher education provides an extraordinary resource for researchers to undertake educational research, targeted at understanding challenges facing the sector. Big data can stimulate new ways to transform processes relating to learning and teaching, and helps identify useful data, sources of evidence…

Data-informed instructional methods offer tremendous promise for increasing the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and schooling. Yet-to-be-developed data science approaches have the potential to dramatically advance instruction for every student and to enhance learning for people of all ages. Next steps that emerged from a recent National…

This article aims at clarifying and conceptualizing game-based learning (GBL) in order to pinpoint directions for practices and research. The authors maintain that GBL should be conceptualized toward the transformation of a textbook-learning culture. The authors emphasize the importance of a paradigm shift in learning and a reorientation in…

This article reflects on the landscape of ICT-mediated learning research in Singapore schools over the past 12 years. This ICT (information and communications technology) journey is situated in the context of the Singapore education Masterplans and the inception of substantive research funding in this area of work since 2003. The article questions…

The authors examined articles published in the "Journal of Computing in Higher Education" between 2003 and 2012 with the purpose of determining the main themes of these articles, the types of research published, the major contributing authors, and the most-cited articles. An analysis was made of 129 original papers published by…

The theme of this article is that educational technologists are particularly bad at remembering the lessons from the past. We fail to remember what went before--whether the projects were successes or failures. This article explores why this might be, why in particular we fail to profit from failures, and what steps we might take to help…

In this regular feature of "Educational Technology," Michael F. Shaughnessy and Mark Viner present their interview with Curt Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University and President of CourseShare; and Elaine Khoo, Research Fellow at the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton,…

J. Michael Spector's academic preparation was in philosophy--epistemology and logic, primarily. His dissertation was on skepticism in modern philosophy, and that led him to a deep-seated appreciation for classical skepticism. The word "skeptic" is derived from the Greek word "skepsis," which means investigation. While the…

The status of educational technology research in a VUCA world is examined. The acronym, VUCA, stands for "Volatility" (rapidly changing contexts and conditions), "Uncertainty" (information missing that is critical to problem solving), "Complexity" (multiple factors difficult to categorize or control), and…

This article analyzes articles published in the "Journal of Educational Computing Research" ("JECR") from 2003 to 2012. The authors analyzed the articles looking for trends in article types and methodologies, the most common topics addressed in the articles, the top-cited articles, and the top authors during the period. The…