Soft skills are becoming equally crucial as hard skills in today's labour market. In contrast to hard skills which are teachable typically through formal education, soft skills are non-technical and interpersonal, allowing individuals to be able to find and succeed in their studies, jobs, and professional life. Despite the increasing emphasis on soft skills, many universitystudents are either unaware of or neglect enhancing them. Soft skills deficiency among university students has become a significant concern for employers, educators, and policymakers, as it negatively affects students' academic performance and future employment prospects. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions of the demand for soft skills and the possibility and availability of learning opportunities. The expected outcomes intend to provide insights about awareness of soft skills among students and pathways to reduce the soft skills gap through training provisions in higher education settings. Furthermore, it aims to find out how the young generation (mainly Generation Z) would perceive digitalisation and specifically gamification as a solution to facilitate soft skills training. This is a mixed method study, in which, an open survey was the data collection media. The survey was conducted during the spring semester of 2023 and analysed using visualisation and summarisation methods. Based on the outcome of 66 master’s and bachelor's students attending the digitalisation courses in two classes in Sweden, over 50% of the students perceived a lack of soft skills in their curricula. They were also positive toward the use of gamification as an effective digital strategy, recognising it as a powerful tool to facilitate training and developing soft skills as a part of formal learning in higher education. As a suggested approach, gamifying soft skills training potentially creates simulations that mimic real-world situations to allow students to practice and develop their soft skills in a safe and low-stakes training environment. This facilitates training soft skills for better communication and collaboration during their academic journey and after their graduation and to prepare students for successful careers.

In the domain of cybersecurity, machine learning can offer advanced threat detection. However, the volume of unlabeled data poses challenges for efficient data management. This study investigates the potential for active learning to reduce the effort required for manual data labeling. Through different query strategies, the most informative unlabeled data points were selected for labeling. The performance of different query strategies was assessed by testing a transformer model's ability to accurately distinguish tweets mentioning names of advanced persistent threats. The findings suggest that the K-means diversity-based query strategy outperformed both the uncertainty-based approach and the random data point selection, when the amount of labeled training data was limited. This study also evaluated the cost-effective active learning approach, which incorporates high-confidence data points into the training dataset. However, this was shown to be the least effective strategy.

This chapter concludes this book with a comprehensive summary and integrated conclusion based on its contents. Here, we present an application summary for each section, delving into the insightful chapters exploring the application of the Community of Inquiry framework. The summary is followed by the presentation of a thematic analysis of the recommendations presented throughout the chapters, resulting in eight broad themes that encapsulate the essence of the book. Moreover, we address some current challenges and issues associated with the Community of Inquiry framework, emphasizing the need for further investigation in specific areas. By immersing ourselves in the collective insights and implications woven throughout the book, this chapter offers a personalized and synthesized perspective, ultimately paving the way for future research endeavors in this captivating field.

The Design of Digital Learning Environments provides comprehensive guidelines for creating and delivering high-quality online and blended learning experiences in higher education. With increasing numbers of students engaged in partially or fully digital education, graduate students preparing for design, development, or faculty roles need fresh, practical applications of cutting-edge research and theory. This textbook uses the Community of Inquiry framework, an influential and invaluable pedagogical model focused on deep learning, to aid educators in forging meaningful, collaborative connections with students engaged in digitally supported multimodal learning in colleges and universities, MOOCs, and lifelong learning initiatives. Across five parts, the book covers the basic structure, concepts, terminology, and history of the Community of Inquiry; principles for designing and delivering digital courses; design for specific course conditions; applications of learning activities guided by the framework; and current limitations and directions for further research.

This workshop aims to explore speculative fiction as a form of educational enquiry and practice. In this pursuit it draws upon the provocative contention of Ruha Benjamin (2016) that “the facts, alone, will not save us.” Instead, she argues, “social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible” (Benjamin, 2016).The ethical implications of educational technologies (EdTech) from simple classroom tools to almighty platforms are raising increasing concerns. These are postdigital concerns insofar as they are inescapable yet also emergent and ongoing. They are amplified by the power and influence of AI (Bozkurt et al, 2023; Cox et al 2023) with its implications for fraud, scams, surveillance, privacy and more fundamentally encodings of privileged norms of race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on. In addition the material and carbon costs of digital learning may force us to reckon with EdTech as inherently ecologically destructive (Selwyn, 2021).Is this to say that all our futures are grim and that hope has been foreclosed? Or if not, how can we work together to plot our way out of these problems? Indeed, would trying to solve all of this too quickly be part of the problem and start another round of techno-solutionism? One approach that has seen increasing attention is the use of storytelling as a sense-making activity that may allow us to first “stay with the trouble” (Harraway, 2020) and describe it, before rushing to the fix. This recent speculative turn has seen educational researchers attempt to cast themselves as writers of fictions that can explore the multitude of interrelated socio-technical issues that are characteristic of complex contemporary networked learning environments (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2023; Hrastinski, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020; Macgilchrist et al., 2020). It has seen teachers and educators developing or adopting speculative scenarios as tools for students to explore the types of socio-technical entanglements that our world now involves (Krutka et al., 2022).In this workshop participants will co-create speculative fictions that explore hopeful and dystopic possibilities of education. Participants will explore the development of educational fictions based on speculative futuring, of no-yet-ness (Ross, 2017), but also alternative histories that might allow us see the prospective tools of our work, including texts, as neither neutral nor ahistorical. The concept of anti-patterns and deliberately destructive design will be introduced to allow participants to pull on conceptual threads that help unravel education as a relentless and progressive assembly and instead see it as a story that may be unlearned and retold.In summary this workshop provides an invitation to participants to use their deep imaginative capabilities to dream new educational interfaces, via speculative fiction, that allow us to be more awake and alive to ourselves, our students and the communities we serve.

Teacher educators’ distinct and dual task of educating future teachers includes using digital tools to support students’ ongoing learning while exemplifying appropriate teaching strategies where the use of digital tools, such as response systems (RSs), are commonly occurring. RSs have been used in higher education for a long time, and many studies discuss how larger student groups answering multiple-choice questions during lectures contribute to student participation and learning. However, there is limited research on RSs, particularly related to teacher education. Therefore, this interview study aims to explore for what purposes teacher educators use RSs in teaching and what advantages and limitations they experience. In the thematic analysis, we found that the teacher educators used RSs to teach simultaneously as they were role models on how to use digital tools for learning. They used anonymous open-text answers more than multiple-choice questions to support student participation, immediately assess, and provide feedback in both larger and smaller groups. The complexity of time management connected to the use of RSs was highlighted. RSs were also used to initiate discussions with the teacher students about the purposes, advantages, and limitations of using digital tools for learning. 

During teacher education programs, teacher students are expected to develop the digital competence necessary for their future roles as teachers. A vital aspect of this competence involves integrating digital tools into educational activities. Some digital tools, such as response systems, are designed and used to encourage student participation during educational activities. This study explores how teacher students use different functions in various response systems during their student teaching, practically applying what they learned in an ICT course during the teacher education program. Semi-structured interviews were thematically analyzed, with activity theory as a framework to discuss the themes. The findings reveal that while most teacher students used response systems during their student teaching, the extent and manner of use varied significantly. Frequent users reported positive experiences, integrating response systems as part of their teaching strategy, while occasional and non-users faced barriers related to theoretical grounding, relevance to the subject of English, community support, and the division of labor. These results highlight the importance of aligning digital tools with educational objectives and providing teacher students with theoretical and practical support during their training. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on integrating digital tools in teacher education and provides insights into digital competence development within teacher education programs. 

The interest in blended synchronous learning environments has increased dramati-cally since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a key challenge is how to simulta-neously encourage online and onsite student participation. Response systems havebeen found to stimulate student participation in classroom and online education set-tings. This study investigates how online and onsite students participate in blendedsynchronous seminars where a response system is being used. The data comprisesobservations of blended synchronous seminars, students’ written reflections, andstudent interviews, all of which were thematically analyzed. It was found that usinga response system encouraged online and onsite students to participate in variousways. Although online students mostly remained quiet, they perceived to engagethrough listening and thinking, participating in the seminars by absorbing informa-tion, and interacting with the content displayed via the response system. The onsitestudents participated vocally and more spontaneously. All students participated inwritten, anonymous, and game-based modes, suggesting that there were differentand complementary ways for students to participate when using a response system,which extended beyond merely talking or chatting. Notably, most students per-ceived the response system crucial to their participation in the blended synchronousseminars. The findings underscore the importance of encouraging student participa-tion in blended synchronous learning environments, highlighting response systemsas effective tools to encourage onsite and, particularly, online student participation.

The potential of learning analytics (LA) to improve learning and teaching is high. Yet, the adoption of LA across countries still remains low. One reason behind this is that the LA services often do not adequately meet the expectations and needs of their key stakeholders, namely students and teachers. Presently, there is limited research focusing on the examination of the students' expectations of LA across countries, especially in the Nordic, largely highly digitalized context. To fill this gap, this study examines Swedish students' attitudes of LA in a higher education institution. To do so, the validated survey instrument, Student Expectations of Learning Analytics Questionnaire (SELAQ) has been used. Through the application of SELAQ, the students' ideal and predicted expectations of the LA service and their expectations regarding privacy and ethics were examined. Data were collected in spring 2021. 132 students participated in the study. The results show that the students have higher ideal expectations of LA compared to the predicted ones, especially in regards to privacy and ethics. Also, the findings illustrate that the respondents have low expectations in areas related to the instructor feedback, based on the analytics results. Further, the results demonstrate that the students have high expectations on the part of the university in matters concerning privacy and ethics. In sum, the results from the study can be used as a basis for implementing LA in the selected context.

Digital meetings enable opportunity to conduct synchronous engagement in blended and online courses. Such meetings also provide favorable conditions for interaction and collaboration between students and teachers. Unfortunately, digital meetings often tend to be used for one-way communication, like traditional lectures. This chapter outlines the general advantages and limitations of digital meetings as an overview of the differences between synchronous digital and in-person meetings. Principles and guidelines addressing these limitations are presented based on the goal of creating and sustaining a community of inquiry during digital meetings. A study of how teachers perceive and plan for digital meetings in higher education is also presented and discussed from the perspective of Social and Teaching Presence. The chapter also includes a digital meeting template for practitioners to use when preparing and conducting digital meetings.

This licentiate thesis focuses on the development of the idea process in art education using digital peer feedback. In the school subject visual art, the visual idea process, e.g., when students sketch their ideas, is an important phase in a project. When an idea takes form, there is the possibility for considering the idea in a new way, for others to study and discuss it, and most importantly, for generating new ideas. By digitally sharing their visual idea process and providing feedback, students can become more aware of their own and others' creative processes. Peer feedback in this thesis leans on two theories. The first is self-regulated learning, meaning that students formulate goals and identify needs (both their own and others’) when learning. In the feedback activity, the student is responsible for their own idea and for the visual feedback given to other students. They also receive valuable input when providing feedback. The second feedback theory is social constructivism and the zone of proximal development, i.e., the difference between what students accomplish in learning with the help of others and what students accomplish by themselves. In this study it is shown (by focusing on the social aspects of peer feedback) that when students help others, they develop their own products far more than they might have done if working individually. On two occasions, I observed and investigated how students (an eighth-grade and sixth-grade class) developed and digitally shared visual ideas supported by digital peer feedback. Thematic analysis was used on data gathered on both occasions (i.e. in both iterations of the study) to identify different types of feedback provided by students. In the first iteration, the feedback was in written form, and through analysis, five themes were created that described different types of peer feedback. In the second iteration, feedback was provided using various visual techniques, and through the analysis, four themes were formed. In each iteration of the study, four categories were created to describe the degree of change between the first and final sketches. The results suggest that using digital tools and peer feedback activities in visual art could help improve students’ abilities to develop ideas. The methodological contribution of this research is its new use of peer feedback using visual feedback. With this form of feedback, students stayed within one medium, using a sign system to communicate visual solutions on the sketches of other students. At the same time, they received practical tips and direct advice that they could immediately apply to their sketches. 

This article focuses on developing the idea process in visual art education by using digital peer feedback. In the school subject visual art, the visual idea process, e.g. when students sketch their ideas, is an important phase in a project. When an idea takes form, there is the possibility for considering the idea in a new way, for others to study and discuss it, and most importantly, for generating new ideas. By digitally sharing their visual ideas and providing feedback, students might become more aware of their own and others' processes. This study aimed to explore how eighth-grade students develop and share visual ideas supported by digital peer feedback. Thematic analysis was used to identify different types of feedback provided by students. A qualitative survey was used to investigate student perceptions of the feedback. Many students appreciated receiving feedback from peers. Some students made significant or minor changes to their visual ideas based on the peer feedback, while other students abandoned their initial sketches and created entirely new ones, or did not make any changes to their initial idea. These results suggest that giving and receiving peer feedback is something that needs to be practiced in different specific school subjects. 

This article focuses on visual peer feedback, the idea process in visual arts education, and how this process was shared digitally. In the study, sixth-grade students gave each other visual feedback on their sketches in an assignment in pictorial composition. Visual feedback is understood here as direct interaction with copies of the original composition, given by adding and/or revising elements, which differs from traditional peer feedback that is mainly textual. The aim of the study was to investigate how students can develop their idea process by giving and receiving visual peer feedback, and how students can share their ideas and the feedback digitally. Thematic analysis was used to identify different techniques of visual communication given in the feedback, and a survey was used to map how the students perceived the feedback process. Most students engaged in the feedback process by reusing the objects or the shapes of the objects in the original sketch in new compositions using various techniques like cutting, sketching, and coloring. Most students found the peer feedback activity useful and appreciated studying and developing the work of their peers.

DET HÄR KAPITLET tar upp hur strukturerad kamratåterkoppling kan utveckla elevernas visuella idéer i bild med hjälp av digitala verktyg. Det undervisningsupplägg som presenteras är en uppgift där eleverna gör självporträtt i form av fotografiska stilleben och ger varandra återkoppling redan under skissarbetet och inte på den färdiga produkten. Två typer av återkoppling diskuteras, visuell och textbaserad. Båda modellerna är fördelaktiga att använda för att stärka elevernas idéutveckling vilket framhävs i grundskolans kursplan för bildämnet. 

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the paradigm shift it is able to create have been the centre of attention among education researchers, following recent developments in the area of AI in education. AI has the potential to enable new forms of learning, but also poses some challenges and risks. While it is well-established that information technologies can be used to promote inter-personal connections between learners, between learners and teachers, and inside learning communities, such educational relationships can be significantly impacted by the introduction of AI in education settings.

Education fiction, also known as social science fiction, has recently been employed by researchers in an effort to produce fiction that speculates about the future and inform better decisions for today. This paper analyses education fiction to explore how educational relationships might change in a future infused by AI. Following recent publications that utilise education fiction to speculate about the future, the authors of this paper thematically analysed 98 stories written by researchers, dealing with speculations around AI in applied education settings. The focus of this thematic analysis is on two themes: human relationships mediated by AI, and blurred boundaries between humans and computers in education settings.

The fictions written by researchers touch upon the affective benefits of a network that is created between computers and humans, as well as between humans, mediated by computers. AI tools are presented as trusted allies or even friends of the students, nurturing a more welcoming approach to the introduction of AI in learning communities. AI seems to be useful in situations where group skills are necessary, as it appears to act as a facilitator and a mentor, helping students develop teamwork skills and scaffolding communication between peers and between humans and computers. In contrast, certain stories highlight the potential dangers in the development of core writing or thinking skills, if students were to outsource related tasks to AI tools. Therefore, an over-reliance on AI tools could have unintended consequences for learners.

These findings point to the need for sustaining discussions around digital tools and human relationships, especially since AI develops and becomes more useful to a wider audience. The paper also suggests that speculative education fiction can help us imagine different scenarios and outcomes of using AI in learning. As AI becomes more prevalent in education, it is important to think about how to use it in ethical and beneficial ways that respect the values and goals of education.

In this article, we explore how the recently revived approach of social science fiction can be used as a creative and critical method to imagine and discuss the future of artificial intelligence in education (AIED). We review one hundred social science fiction stories written by researchers and analyse how they depict the potential role of AI in teaching and learning. Through a thematic analysis, we identify four main themes and several sub-themes that highlight the hopes and concerns that the researchers express for the future of AIED. Although the fictions present imaginative scenarios of anticipated AIED futures already present in the literature, they also feature creative illustrations of how such futures may materialise. We observe that social science fiction can be valuable in approaching the complex and uncertain landscape of AIED while stimulating reflection and dialogue. We conclude by suggesting some directions for further research and practice using this emerging approach of storytelling.

Before the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, work and education on the university campus were considered superior to equivalent activities conducted digitally or remotely. Despite being significantly digitally mature, many organizations did not consider or even permit digital or hybrid participation in meetings and education. In March 2020, the lockdown following the pandemic caused the transition of many organizations and most universities to online-only operation in record time. Often, this occurred while maintaining quality and production, even if some aspects relating to the user experience were lost. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how digitalization following the pandemic influenced and transformed the digital work environment in higher education. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, provided the experiences and data for this article. In conclusion we distinguished different phases of digital work and education before, during and after the pandemic: 1. The Pre-Pandemic Phase, 2. The Emergency Remote Phase, 3. The New Normal, 4. The Slow Acceptance Phase, and 5. The Dividing Phase, or what we refer to as The 'New' New Normal. In this phase it looks like it will be a battle between three perspectives; those who are looking to get back to the pre-pandemic conditions, those living in The New Normal, and those actively analyzing the lessons learned and aiming for The Thoughtful Blended Phase. Analyzing these five phases we discern that the implications for the future will be heavily dependent on the following aspects: management commitment and support; well-functioning technology and support organization; understanding the effects digitalization will have on culture, organization and well-being; increasing interest in participating in pedagogical development; new designs needed for hybrid work and education; the need to rethink structure and contents of meetings; and paying extra care and attention to the psychological well-being of staff and students.

This chapter discusses the collaboration from three different perspectives: a digital learning activity in pair programming, a communication suite and competence development for instructors. It focuses on group work, and more specifically, in-depth group work conducted over a longer time period. Text-based discussion forums have been used in education ever since the term "online education" was introduced. It is a powerful tool in that discussions can be conducted across time and space. Loepp and Weber suggest that instructors need to be careful in how to introduce and use a communication suite, to create boundaries and manage expectations regarding when the instructor is available and encourage students to get to know each other in the team space prior to formal class activities. Collaborative writing is an emerging topic that has been simplified by tools, such as Google Docs and shared Word documents.

Designing Courses with Digital Technologies offers guidance for higher education instructors integrating digital technologies into their teaching, assessment and overall support of students. Written by and for instructors from a variety of disciplines, this book presents evaluations that the contributors have implemented in real-life courses, spanning blended and distance learning, flipped classrooms, collaborative technologies, video-supported learning and beyond. Chapter authors contextualize their approaches beyond simple how-tos, exploring both the research foundations and professional experiences that have informed their use of digital tools while reflecting on their successes, challenges and ideas for future development.

Purpose: Lesson study is one of the most adopted models of teacher professional development. However, as education has become increasingly digital, this study aims to investigate the use of digital tools to support teacher professional development in lesson studies. Design/methodology/approach: This article systematically reviews journal articles on the use of digital tools to support teacher professional development in lesson studies. Findings: While the lesson study model is typically based on the premise that teachers prepare and observe a lesson at a school, the reviewed research suggests that digital tools open new ways to conduct lesson studies. Six themes on the use of digital tools to support teacher professional development in lesson studies are identified: analyzing videos from the teachers' classrooms, analyzing external video resources, fictional animations as a complement to videos, structured digital lesson study work, hybrid teacher collaboration and digital teacher collaboration. Opportunities for further research are suggested. Practical implications: The identified themes can inspire practice on how to use digital tools to support teacher professional development in lesson studies. Originality/value: Little attention has been paid to the use of digital tools to support teacher professional development in lesson studies.

Purpose: An issue that has received limited attention is how teachers make informed decisions when designing learning activities, which makes effective use of resources and technologies. The aim of this paper is to explore how teachers suggest informing their designs for learning. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on documentation from workshops where adult education teachers were encouraged to suggest how a design for learning can draw on what is known, how the design can be evaluated and how the design and lessons learned can be shared. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings: Most teachers did not explicitly suggest how to inform their designs for learning, although some suggested to draw on learning theories. The teachers were able to provide many examples of how their designs for learning could be evaluated based on student perceptions and assessment. They primarily suggested to discuss and share their designs and lessons learned at the school. Practical implications: The workshop format could be adapted and used in practice. Originality/value: Relatively little attention has been paid to how teachers inform their designs for learning. A key challenge for teachers is to understand design for learning as an informed practice, which could be integrated as part of their daily work.

This paper is a response and considers practical and design implications of the article, The process of designing for learning: understanding university teachers’ design work by Bennett et al. (Educ Technol Res Dev 65:125–145, 2017). Bennett et al. guide us in better understanding teachers’ design practices and in discussions on how such practices could be improved. A key contribution of the article is presenting a descriptive model of the design process. As such, the article is focused on teachers’ current design work, while giving more limited attention to how teachers’ design practice could be improved. When looking forward, this response emphasizes that teachers should be encouraged to inform their designs for learning and iteratively improve their designs based on reflection and evaluation. If teachers take time to look into what is known and deliberately learn more along the way through reflection and evaluation, they will improve their understanding of how to design for learning.

The chapter discusses the "Collaborative Writing in the Classroom" is written by Angel Fan and Angela Daly. It "Virtual Teams", by Ann-Sofie Hellberg and Jonas Moll, discusses virtual student teams in a project course. Different tools provided by the learning management system, such as whiteboard, chat, file sharing and videoconferencing, are used. Higher education is becoming increasingly digital. Digital technologies are widely used, both as a complement to campus education and in distance education. In "Knowledge Construction Through Blogs", Maria Limniou discusses how students create blog posts and exchange views with other students. The aim is to support students to construct knowledge collectively and to develop their digital capabilities. In "Digital Collaboration Tools", Eric Loepp and Nicole Weber discuss how a communication suite that includes whiteboard, chat, file sharing and videoconferencing is used at their university. Collaborative writing is an emerging topic that has been simplified by digital shared documents, such as Google Docs and shared Word documents.

Postdigital fiction speculates on what could be and can be created to conduct and present research in engaging ways. Such fiction is both speculative and informed but to varying degrees. Fiction that leans towards being speculative imagines what could be in free and creative ways while not being confined to academic formality. More informed fiction uses research, experience, or other sources as a basis for creating fiction. Postdigital fiction is commonly used to explore education futures.

Online tutors play a critical role in e-learning and need to have an appropriate set of skills in addition to subject matter expertise. This paper explores how digital badges can be used to encourage the development of online tutoring skills. Based on previous research, we defined three digital badges, which are examples of essential tutoring skills.These skills were self-assessed during two weeks by online tutors in K-12 mathematics, who also wrote a self-reflection based on their experience. The digital badges motivated tutors to reflect on online tutoring practices. The tutors described that they gained a more detailed understanding of the tutoring process when continuously analyzing ongoing conversations. However, it was a challenge for the tutors to balance the private activity, reflection on tutoring skills, and the social activity, communication with the K-12 students. It is essential to take into account when tutors will have time to reflect, for example, by scheduling time for reflection or enabling opportunities for reflection that is flexible in time. A challenge for further research is to better understand the potential benefits of different types of badges

Many studies have focused on professional development within schools, while this article focuses on ICT (information and communications technology) professional development across schools. The aim of this article is to explore how the encouragement of communities and networks might contribute to ICT professional development across schools in close physical proximity. The study is based on a two-year action research project and interviews with the participants of a lead teacher community across five schools. Although the lead teachers and school leaders played a central role, ICT professional development was dependent on a complex interplay of different types of communities and networks, both within, across and outside the schools. This study illustrates how ICT professional development occurred in both expected and unexpected ways and emphasises the need for professional development to take account of the complex needs of teachers, rather than being a 'one size fits all'.

Although we know that asking questions is an essential aspect of onlinetutoring, there is limited research on this topic. The aim of this paperwas to identify commonly used direct question types and explore theeffects of using these question types on conversation intensity, approachto tutoring, perceived satisfaction and perceived learning. The researchsetting was individual online synchronous tutoring in mathematics. Theempirical data was based on 13,317 logged conversations and aquestionnaire. The tutors used a mix of open, more student-centredquestions, and closed, more teacher-centred questions. In contrast toprevious research, this study provides a more positive account indicatingthat it is indeed possible to train tutors to focus on asking questions,rather than delivering content. Frequent use of many of the questiontypes contributed to increased conversation intensity. However, therewere few question types that were associated with statisticallysignificant effects on perceived satisfaction or learning. There are nosilver bullet question types that by themselves led to positive effects onperceived satisfaction and learning. The question types could be used byteachers and teacher students when reflecting on what types ofquestions they are asking, and what kind of questions they could be asking.

In this article, we focus on the cognitive presence element of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Cognitive presence consists of four categories: Triggering Event, Exploration, Integration, and Resolution. These categories have been described as phases following an idealized logical sequence, although the phases should not be seen as immutable. Few studies have empirically examined how the four categories develop over time during the inquiry process. This article uses learning analytics methods to study transitions between the categories in K-12 online mathematics tutoring. It was statistically most probable that the tutoring sessions started with Triggering Event (95%) and then transitioned to Exploration (51%). The transitions from Exploration to Integration (18%) and Integration to Resolution (21%) achieved statistical significance but were less likely. In fact, it was more likely that the tutoring sessions transitioned from Integration to Exploration (39%) and Resolution to Exploration (36%). In conclusion, the findings suggest that the idealized logical sequence is evident in the data but that other transitions occur as well; especially Exploration recurs throughout the sessions. It seems challenging for students to reach the Integration and Resolution categories. As the CoI framework is commonly adopted in practice, it is important that tutors and educators understand that the categories of cognitive presence will often not play out in idealized ways, underlining their role in supporting how the inquiry process unfolds. In order to gain an improved understanding of the inquiry process, future research is suggested to investigate how the presences and categories of the CoI framework develop over time in different educational settings.

The use of online technologies has made education more accessible. In online education, there are increased expectations for students to be self-directed and take responsibility for their learning. Research has also shown that students can benefit from learning from each other. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how students support their own and other students’ process of inquiry in online text-based tutoring sessions. To enable the analysis of the conversations, a coding scheme for transcript analysis of online tutoring was introduced based on the Relationship of Inquiry framework, which is an adaptation of the Community of Inquiry framework.

This thesis consists of four papers. The first paper focuses on the development of the RoI coding scheme, which is used in two of the following papers. In the second paper, the coding scheme is further revised regarding the aspect of students’ teaching presence and how it connects to students’ support of their own and other students’ inquiry process. In the third paper, students’ support of their own and other students’ process of inquiry in online text-based tutoring sessions is studied further, and their messages are analyzed with the revised coding scheme. The fourth paper adopts an inductive approach and analyzes how students take responsibility for their own and their peers’ problem-solving through thematic analysis. 

The findings show that in online tutoring sessions, students may spontaneously take on the role of a tutor. Through their expressions of teaching presence by, for example, explaining their issues and their previous steps, or answering other students’ questions and giving suggestions, students support their own as well as other students’ inquiry process. The findings indicate that students acquire metacognitive development, through self- and co-regulation, with their expressions of teaching and cognitive presence. Furthermore, the findings show that the coding scheme with fixed categories may not show the full picture of interactions in an online learning environment. Additional analysis reveals that students’ expressions focus on different levels of learning while supporting the problem-solving process. Lastly, this thesis offers guidance on how to create online tutoring sessions where students take responsibility for their learning and are encouraged to help one another. 

Online tutoring has been found to have a positive impact on student learning in STEM education. The aim of this study was to explore how and to what extent students supported their own and other students' processes of inquiry during online tutoring. More specifically, question and answer sessions (Q&As) were studied, and online tutoring transcripts were analyzed using the Relationship of Inquiry coding scheme adapted from the Community of Inquiry framework. The students interacted voluntarily with each other and with the teachers. The results show that the students supported both their own process of inquiry as well as other students' process of inquiry. Furthermore, the results indicate that students acquired metacognitive development through self- and coregulation when they expressed teaching presence. Overall, we conclude that Q&As have the potential to support student learning when working on assignments in STEM education.

This paper examines students’ Teaching presence in online one-to-one tutoring sessions guided by the Community of Inquiry framework. The Community of Inquiry is a framework for structuring and describing the process of a meaningful online educational experience through three interdependent elements, Teaching, Social, and Cognitive presence. The framework is widely recognized and utilized in online education, but the aspect of students’ involvement with Teaching presence has received limited attention. This study aims to address this gap by examining how students express Teaching presence in online tutoring sessions.  Using transcript coding, 66 tutoring conversations were analyzed, totaling 6,532 individual messages. The results are that 1,050 messages included students’ Teaching presence, demonstrating their active involvement in designing, facilitating, and directing the tutoring sessions. Students took responsibility for structuring the sessions, seeking feedback, reflecting on solutions, and clarifying misunderstandings. The findings also highlight the intertwined nature of Teaching presence and Cognitive presence, emphasizing the importance of students’ active engagement in the learning process.

In this paper, we begin our process of incorporating an AI bot in an online chat tutoring setting as a support for the tutor. We explore how an AI bot could give suggestions for tutor messages, although the human tutor will control how to communicate with the student. Tutoring, an important dimension of networked learning, has long been seen as a beneficial approach to students’ learning. An AI bot has the potential to aid tutors in the tutoring process and contribute to the scalability. The present pilot study was conducted in the tutoring setting of the Math Coach program. In the program, teacher students aid students from upper primary school to upper secondary school in mathematics through an online text-based chat system. Llama2 was used as a large language model (LLM), fine-tuned for Swedish comprehension utilizing the Math Coach system's chat logs. Four coaches, teacher students at a technical Swedish university and active in the Math Coach program, were invited to interact with the AI bot and participate in a group discussion. The coaches interacted individually with the AI bot while the chat conversation was displayed on a monitor so all participants could discuss the interaction while it took place. A semi-structured interview approach was taken and the participants were also encouraged to 'think aloud' about their experience. In the discussions, the coaches expressed surprise by the AI's social aspect. They perceived the AI bot as friendly with a positive attitude and were especially surprised by its ability to correctly place appropriate emojis. The coaches agreed that the AI was able to ask both appropriate and helpful questions and share some good guidance for how to proceed in the problem-solving process. However, they felt that the AI bot was not able to offer sufficient mathematical guidance, oftentimes the AI bot was confidently wrong. It also wrote too long messages, which humans would typically separate into several chat messages, and did not wait for a response but instead moved too quickly towards the solution. Moving forward we plan to address the effects of improved prompts on the AI bot and continue finetuning the LLM. We will continue to conduct pilot studies and eventually conduct more large-scale empirical studies.

When asked to predict how they will perform on an upcoming exam, students are often poorly calibrated, typically in the direction of overpredicting their performance. Research shows that low-performing students’ calibration tends to remain poor across multiple tests over the course of a semester. We tested whether these students remain confident in these erroneously high grade predictions across the semester or whether their confidence wanes, suggesting some degree of metacognitive awareness. In two studies, students made grade predictions prior to taking four in-class exams and then rated their level of confidence in their predictions. Results from both studies showed that miscalibration and confidence remained stable across tests, suggesting that low-performing students continued to believe that they would perform well on upcoming exams despite prior evidence to the contrary.

Logic based methods for learning from structureddata is limited w.r.t. handling large search spaces,preventing large-sized substructures from beingconsidered by the resulting classifiers. A novelapproach to learning from structured data isintroduced that employs a structure transformationmethod, called finger printing, for addressing theselimitations. The method, which generates featurescorresponding to arbitrarily complex substructures, isimplemented in a system, called DIFFER. The methodis demonstrated to perform comparably to an existingstate-of-art method on some benchmark data setswithout requiring restrictions on the search space.Furthermore, learning from the union of featuresgenerated by finger printing and the previous methodoutperforms learning from each individual set offeatures on all benchmark data sets, demonstrating thebenefit of developing complementary, rather thancompeting, methods for structure classification. 

The protection of students' privacy in learning analytics (LA) applications is critical for cultivating trust and effective implementations of LA in educational environments around the world. However, students' privacy concerns and how they may vary along demographic dimensions that historically influence these concerns have yet to be studied in higher education. Gender differences, in particular, are known to be associated with people's information privacy concerns, including in educational settings. Building on an empirically validated model and survey instrument for student privacy concerns, their antecedents and their behavioral outcomes, we investigate the presence of gender differences in students' privacy concerns about LA. We conducted a survey study of students in higher education across five countries (N = 762): Germany, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Using multiple regression analysis, across all five countries, we find that female students have stronger trusting beliefs and they are more inclined to engage in self-disclosure behaviors compared to male students. However, at the country level, these gender differences are significant only in the German sample, for Bachelor's degree students, and for students between the ages of 18 and 24. Thus, national context, degree program, and age are important moderating factors for gender differences in student privacy concerns.

This study examines the influence of educational culture on the integration of campus and digital education in traditional higher education institutions. Educational culture encompasses shared norms, values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices shaping the educational environment. Focus group discussions were conducted with teachers, students, and educational leaders at a Swedish technical university. Five focus groups, each with two interview sessions, involved 32 participants representing diverse university roles and disciplines. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed to analyze the data. The analysis identified seven themes that address educational culture. It was clear that the participants did not perceive university cultures but rather viewed that each faculty member or group/department had specific unique conditions and preferences that formed their culture. At the same time, a university-wide key driver identified was effectiveness and streamlining rather than educational innovation. While digitalization trends and the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated digital education, clear guidance, actionable steps, improved conditions for teachers, and student-driven approaches are needed to ensure educational quality by integrating campus and digital education.

It has been emphasized that students and teachers have dissimilar ideas about how mobile phone use could be utilized and limited. Moreover, these differences have been identified as a crucial problem that has caused conflicts in education. In order to resolve the problem, research has stressed that it is very important to increase teachers’ knowledge about how mobile phones can be used in students’ work. However, the topic of how teachers could increase their understanding related to students’ ideas has remained largely unexamined. Thus, this pilot study explores the following research questions using cultural-historical activity theory and qualitative methods: How is teachers’ possibility knowledge influenced when they are exposed to students’ ideas about how mobile phones could be both supportive and problematic in school activities? What are the similarities and differences between the students’ ideas that have, and have not, influenced the teachers’ possibility knowledge of mobile phone use? The results show how the teachers’ possibility knowledge increases concerning the features that could be both supportive and problematic and must be limited by rules and a division of labor. Moreover, it transpires that the teachers’ possibility knowledge is not always affected. It appears that the teachers’ understanding is influenced if they can relate the students’ ideas to the teachers’ division of labor. These results could be used by schools to resolve problems caused by the different ideas of students and teachers regarding mobile phone use. The results could also be used when implementing mobile phones in educational research.

Purpose The digitalization of society places new demands on education. It is apparent since most countries have introduced curricula requirements to digitalize teaching. This study examines the organizational support teachers need to digitalize teaching. The study is being conducted in Sweden because they have experienced challenges with the introduction of new national digitalization requirements. Thus, this study explores the following research question: What organizational support do Swedish teachers describe they need to meet the curriculum requirements for digitalization? Design/methodology/approach Cultural-historical activity theory and qualitative methods have been used to explore the research aim and answer the question. Findings The results show that teachers need organizational support to gain equal and easy access to digital tools. Moreover, digital tools in an organization must be relevantly related to the requirements. Teachers also need support to increase their knowledge as well as the knowledge of the students. Also, organizations must support teachers by distributing the work of digitalization clearly and reasonably. These results, thus, show that teachers cannot be solely responsible for meeting these curriculum requirements. They need organizational support in the process. Originality/value The study reveals teachers' recurring problems concerning digitalized education and their need for organizational support. Thereby, the knowledge can be used to avoid similar problems, in organizations on different society levels. This contribution is useful for organizations, politicians, school leaders, principals and teachers who are introducing 1:1 and new curriculum requirements for digitalization of education.

Today’s teachers are constantly faced with challenges. Society is changing, which places new demands on the content of education and teachers’ knowledge. Many countries have introduced digital competence to their curricula to prepare students for the digital society. However, integrating technology to fulfill these obligations can be difficult for teachers. The integration can be challenging as teachers must know how to meet the curriculum requirements and the needs of the students in the local context.

This dissertation aims to increase understanding of how technology teachers learn about technology integration to meet their teaching needs based on specific challenges. The aim is investigated with a two-part intervention process based on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and qualitative methods. The first part considers how technology teachers want to integrate technologies to satisfy their teaching needs and how these visions change when confronted with students’ visions of technology integration. The second part explores how technology teachers are challenged in their obligation to fulfill the curriculum requirements and the organizational support they need to handle the situation. The intervention then examines how these challenges stimulate the technology teachers’ knowledge of technology integration. Finally, the second part investigates how students’ visions of technology integration stimulate the technology teachers’ knowledge of students’ needs.

The results show that the technology teachers expanded their knowledge as the intervention continued. Teachers were stimulated by the challenges they experienced in teaching and the visions of students. The technology teachers initially wanted the students to use mobile phones for documentation. They also wanted to introduce rules that mobile phones could only be used for school tasks. When the technology teachers got to know the students’ visions, they expanded their knowledge of what mobile phone software they could use, its objective, and necessary rules. The technology teachers also learned how to develop tasks for students, including the use of mobile phone software. However, it remains unclear why the technology teachers wanted to include certain software but not other software. Therefore, it was essential to develop the methodology to understand the phenomenon in the second part.

The second part of the intervention process shows that the participating teachers were challenged by unequal access to digital tools and that they had digital tools that were irrelevant to their teaching objectives. The teachers called for a division of labor in the municipality where the responsibility could be more clearly divided between various positions such as principals and IT staff. The technology teachers later addressed most of these challenges as they learned how to meet the digitalization requirements. With the help of students’ visions, they expanded their knowledge of which digital tools could be used for teaching. The data collection method was developed with a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to understand which collection of digital tools the technology teachers wanted to use and regulate. The dissertation contributes new perspectives to CHAT interventions by adopting the TAM model.

The knowledge from this research can be helpful for researchers, municipalities, and schools that need to develop teachers’ knowledge based on teachers’ and students’ needs and curriculum requirements. This knowledge can also be used for national development efforts to develop teachers’ knowledge based on local needs. Hopefully, the methodological contribution also can inspire other professional groups to understand how they learn about technology integration.

This paper engages with how students use multimodality on mobile devices as support for school assignments. The broader aim of this pilot study is to explore understanding of teachers' and students' expressed experiences of students' multimodal mobile use. Focus group interviews and multimodal analysis have allowed investigation of the following research questions: - What experiences do teachers and students express from students' multimodal mobile use related to school assignments? - Which advantages and disadvantages have teachers and students expressed concerning students' multimodal mobile use as support for school assignments? The results show that students and teachers have many different experiences of students' multimodal mobile use related to school assignments. However, the use is limited in several ways. To a large extent teachers and students have expressed that multimodal mobile resources can be used advantageously by students to support school assignments for several purposes. Among disadvantages identified mobile device multimodality in some respects can be disruptive. The result also indicates that different multimodal mobile media have specific possibilities for supporting students' learning as it is related to school assignments.

Students and educators sometimes hold beliefs about intelligence and learning that lack scientific support, often called neuromyths. Neuromyths can be problematic, so it is important to find methods to correct them. Previous findings demonstrate that textual refutations are effective for correcting neuromyths. However, even after correction, erroneous information may continue to influence reasoning. In three experiments, we investigated whether feedback could be used to update students’ and educators’ beliefs and influence their reasoning about neuromyths. Across all experiments, the results showed that both students and educators held erroneous beliefs about learning and memory that could be updated after receiving feedback. Feedback also increased students’, but not teachers’, reasoning accuracy. The results demonstrate that feedback can be used to update beliefs in neuromyths, but these beliefs may influence reasoning even after correction.