Pei-Chen Sun

The design of instructional multimedia in e-Learning: A Media Richness Theory-based approach

The rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has made e-Learning become an important learning method. There has been a considerable increase in the needs for multimedia instructional material in e-Learning recently as such content has been shown to attract a learners attention and interests. The multimedia content alone, however, does not necessarily result in significant positive learning performance and satisfaction. Moreover, it is expensive to design and develop multimedia instructional material. There is a lack of extant research to address the critical issue of how to develop effective multimedia instructional content that leads to desirable learning performance and satisfaction. The objective of our paper is to propose and empirically test a model that examines the impact of the fitness of instructional content and media on a learners performance and satisfaction. Our research finds that whether it is learning score as an objective measure or learning satisfaction as a subjective measure, the course unit with high uncertainty and equivocality in content needs high richness media representation. On the other hand, it is ineffective to use high richness media to promote learning performance.

The essential applications of educational robot: Requirement analysis from the perspectives of experts, researchers and instructors

Abstract Robots can benefit education in many ways, and robotics holds great promise as a learning technology. However, the use of robots in education remains largely unknown to both researchers and educators. Many educators and developers have questions regarding the essential applications for robots used in education. Thus, this study aims to identify the essential applications of educational robots. To gain insight from the perspectives of researchers, experts and educators, we investigate the requirements of educational robots in all levels of education through 3 approaches: systematic literature review, expert interviews and instructor surveys. We review the extant literature that addresses the use of robots in education and adopted data from one of them, and conduct interviews with industry experts, scholars and instructors. We also conduct an online survey that invites instructors from six different levels of education to respond. We find the following to be the top five essential applications for educational robots: language education, robotics education, teaching assistance, social skill development and special education, and guided learning through feedback.