Nauman Saeed

Using Learning Styles and Preferences to Incorporate Emerging E-Learning Tools in Teaching

Emerging e-learning tools have the potential to enrich academic environments. However, there is a need to understand the requirements, expectations, and learning styles of the end users before incorporating new tools into courses. This paper presents details of a user study to analyze learning styles and tools preferences of the end users and to explore significant relationships among them. The study outcomes highlight several significant relationships and reveal the tools preferences of various learner types. In contrast with existing studies, our study report balanced or unbiased academic performances across all learner types.

Effects of Cognitive Style on User Acceptance of Blogs and Podcasts

Blogs and podcasts are emerging Web technologies that have been adopted by educators to facilitate on-campus and distance education. However, little is known about user acceptance of these technologies. In this paper, we empirically test a theoretical model to examine the effects of individual’s cognitive style on user acceptance of blogs and podcasts. We incorporated a course blog and series of lecture podcasts in a Web programming course and collected students’ feedback on the technology usage. Empirical findings suggest that individual’s cognitive style has significant effects on user acceptance of blogs and podcasts. However, students with innovative cognitive style are more likely to perceive these technologies as useful and easy-to-use as compared to their adaptor counterparts. Also, innovators perceive podcasts as more useful than blog whilst blog as more easy-to-use than podcasts.

Effect of media richness on user acceptance of blogs and podcasts

Effective communication has long been recognised as a key element in problem solving and decision making within and among organisations including educational institutions. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, the communication choices have also been expanded. Media Richness Theory (MRT) has long been used to examine the effect of traditional and new media on decision making. However, less is known about media richness of Web 2.0 technologies. This paper attempts to examine the media richness capabilities of two popular Web 2.0 technologies, blogs and podcasts, and its effect on user acceptance of these two technologies in Computer Science education. A theoretical model is presented using MRT and technology acceptance model (TAM). Students enrolled in Bachelor / Master of Computer Science programs participated in an online survey that helped in evaluating the proposed model. The study findings confirm the significant effect of media richness on user acceptance of blogs and podcasts but contradict MRT as rich medium (podcast) exerted weaker influence on user acceptance as compared to lean medium (blog).

The impact of student-generated digital flashcards on student learning of constitutional law

ABSTRACT This article describes, evaluates and reflects upon student creation of cloud-based digital flashcards as an authentic formative and summative assessment task designed for the deep learning of constitutional law. The usefulness of digital flashcards in online legal education is explored. The undergraduate law student participants in the study responded differently to the assessment task depending upon the constitutional law topic they were assigned, the perceived relevance of constructing digital flashcards to professional practice and how they reacted to this creative task. Building digital flashcards provides a potentially powerful authentic assessment task for the study of constitutional law provided it is designed to support semester long creation, validation and sharing of digital flashcards that students perceive as professionally relevant and educationally useful. Student recommendations for designing an assessment task involving the creation of digital flashcards are evaluated.