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The aim of software engineering education is to educate students in software technologies, developments, procedures, and scientific practices to enable them to cope with industrial demands. However, the implementation of software engineering education in traditional university classrooms is restricted by the semester structure, making it difficult to achieve a proper learning balance between theory and practice. To balance theoretical and practical learning, prior studies have indicated that flipped learning is a suitable classroom setting for students and teachers. In a flipped learning environment, it is important to enhance and capture students’ learning performance before the class to facilitate teachers and students in proceeding with in-class instruction and learning. In this study, an e-book system named BookRoll was applied to support software engineering education in a flipped learning setting. The proposed approach supports and facilitates out-of-class and in-class learning by providing reading and learning analytic functions for teachers and students. To evaluate the proposed approach, two classes of students were allocated to an experimental group and a control group to participate in an experiment. In the flipped learning process, the experimental group was supported by the BookRoll system, while the control group did not use the BookRoll system. The results revealed that the proposed approach not only promoted students’ learning achievements in software engineering education but also improved their learning motivation, attitude, and problem-solving ability. The reading behavior analysis further indicated that reading time was a statistically significant predictor of learning achievement.

Recently, the development of local cultural features and tourism has become important in Taiwan. To support local cultural education, relevant studies have developed outdoor learning approaches and integrated mobile technology to connect real-world and digital-world learning resources. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned developments are usually suitable for a specific learning process and activity. In other words, students may lack the motivation to engage in the same learning process repeatedly after participating in the learning activity. Therefore, to promote students’ local cultural learning, this study developed a game-based local cultural learning application based on the social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) principle. To investigate the effect of the proposed approach on students’ learning performance with regard to local culture, a quasi-experiment was conducted on a society course at a Taiwanese elementary school. The experimental-group students learned with the proposed approach, while the control-group students learned with the conventional mobile learning approach. The experimental results showed that, compared with the conventional mobile learning approach, the proposed approach significantly improved the students’ learning achievement, learning retention, and learning motivation. Moreover, it was also found that most students showed positive perceptions toward the usage of the proposed application.

The current study aimed at investigating how mobile seamless technology can be used to enhance the pragmatic competence of learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). 34 overseas CSL learners participated in this study. They were randomly assigned into two groups: the classroom group, executing language tasks in fake contexts in a traditional classroom; and the real-world group, executing identical tasks in real world with the support provided by a mobile seamless learning platform (MOSE). All the CSL learners were asked to make a plan of receiving a friend abroad after collecting the information about the shops or stores in the neighborhood of the campus. Both quantitative (Mandarin communication performance test) and qualitative data (videos recorded during the learning process) were collected and analyzed in this 4-week study. The analytical results show that both groups made significant improvements in the test-based Mandarin communication performance. However, according to the qualitative data, the CSL learners in the real-world group made significantly fewer errors when executing language tasks than did those in the classroom group. Furthermore, they did not depend on their first language to communicate with the people they visited in the real world and they had more peer cooperation with the support provided by the MOSE platform compared with those in the classroom group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One goal of e-learning is to enhance the interoperability and reusability of learning resources. However, current e-learning systems do little to adequately support this. In order to achieve this aim, the first step is to consider how to assist instructors in re-organizing the existing learning objects. However, when instructors are dealing with a large number of existing learning objects, manually re-organizing them into appropriate teaching materials is very laborious. Furthermore, in order to organize well-structured teaching materials, the instructors also have to take more than one factor or criterion into account simultaneously. To cope with this problem, this study develops a wiki-based teaching material development environment by employing enhanced particle swarm optimization and wiki techniques to enable instructors to create and revise teaching materials. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach is efficient and effective in forming custom-made teaching materials by organizing existing and relevant learning objects that satisfy specific requirements. Finally, a questionnaire and interviews were used to investigate teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the environment. The results revealed that most of the teachers accepted the quality of the teaching material development results and appreciated the proposed environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]