Search

The widespread use of technology has facilitated many changes in the education sector including higher education. Academic institutes are concentrating their efforts on measuring the level of stude...

Educational technology has emerged as a necessary tool for classrooms in the developing world. Educational technology is the considered implementation of appropriate tools, techniques, or processes that facilitate the application of senses, memory, and cognition to enhance teaching practices and improve learning outcomes. It is defined as “the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.” This research intends to identify educational technologies that are popular around the world and elaborate upon them. The research project further used a case study to sample schools in Fiji to determine their use of educational technologies in the Fijian classroom. Various uses, benefits, implementations, and challenges were identified together with the limitations of how educational technologies’ relevance to the Fijian classroom could be affected. The findings indicate that the Fijian classroom is not quite ready to completely embrace educational technologies into their operations given the challenges are few but immense. Questions suggesting future activities were also identified.

The social characteristics of students have in recent studies shown to be highly influential in their learning and achievement (academic and non-academic). Of the many characteristics, proactivity has been seen to be an essential attribute for success in areas such as workforce, health and education sectors. This research paper considers the possible association between proactivity and gender. Three measures of proactivity namely proactive personality, proactive confidence and proactive behaviour were used. The analytics and tests showed that the proactivity levels do not differ between genders, at least in the unique settings of South Pacific. The results were attributed to the Pacific way of life and the unique culture and tradition of the South Pacific region.

The Pacific Island communities face challenges such as digital divide, shoestring budgets, and escalating costs in the delivery of quality education to their people. In addition, the widely scattered nature of islands and communities requires proper communication infrastructure for learners to access education. This chapter heralds the emergence of mobile learning (mLearning) initiatives in higher education in the Pacific region. As a case study, the study focuses on the introduction of mLearning at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in the Pacific which developed a fit-for-purpose mLearning infrastructure that primarily utilized the short message service (SMS) for its delivery and services. The USP hosts an in-house setup open-source SMS gateway that facilitates its custom-made SMS services such as course notifications, exam timetable information, and online quizzes. More recently with the proliferation of smartphones in the Pacific, USP has invested largely on web-based services and mobile apps. The chapter presents the recent journey into the use of smartphones and tablets to access education and promotes lifelong and life-wide learning in the Pacific.

The breaking down of a particular problem through problem decomposition has enabled complex problems to be solved efficiently. The two major problem decomposition methods used in cooperative coevolution are synapse and neuron level. The combination of both the problem decomposition as a hybrid problem decomposition has been seen applied in time series prediction. The different problem decomposition methods applied at particular area of a network can share its strengths to solve the problem better, which forms the major motivation. In this paper, we are proposing a combination utilization of two hybrid problem decomposition method for Elman recurrent neural networks and applied to time series prediction. The results reveal that the proposed method has got better results in some datasets when compared to its standalone methods. The results are better in selected cases for proposed method when compared to several other approaches from the literature.

The use of mobile devices for learning is gaining popularity in the Pacific region. This new educational paradigm referred to as mobile learning or m-learning enables students to learn at their own pace and time. With the rapid growth of this new paradigm and adoption by higher education institutes in the learning and teaching pedagogy, it is important that the students ICT competency and mobile learning readiness is known. Therefore, this case study investigates the secondary school student’s ICT competency and mobile learning readiness in the Pacific Islands. The findings of this study indicated that the students had moderate ICT competency however they were ready to learn with mobile devices. In addition to this, a significant number of students have already begun to use their mobile devices for learning purpose.

The emergence and advancement of Information Communication Technologies have transformed facilitation and content delivery in higher education worldwide. The Pacific region is no exception, the most commonly owned used tool amongst the people are the mobile phones. The extensive use of mobile phones in the Pacific is making a niche of its own in the education landscape. This paper explores the readiness and perception of students using mobile devices for learning in the Pacific. An exploratory research design was conducted whereby an online questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. The results revealed that students welcomed the idea of using smart phones for learning. However, the readiness of students for mobile driven education is dependent on various factors which are explored in this paper. In addition to this, majority of the students perceived that using the mobile devices for their higher education learning is a good idea.