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1. Exploring Free Digital Tools in Education

   Mucundanyi, G.; Woodley, X. (January 2021, International journal of education and development using information and communication technology)

   Technology can assist instructional designers and teachers in meeting the needs of learners in traditional classrooms and virtual course environments. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers and instructional designers began looking for resources they could use for hybrid and online course delivery. Many found that the cost of some technology tools was well outside of their financial means to assist them in meeting student learning outcomes. However, some digital tools provide free access for educators and are beneficial to students. In this article, the authors shared five tools they have used in developing and teaching online and traditional technology courses at the college level. They share how they used a learning management system tool, a collaboration tool, a search engine tool, a content creation tool, and a content sharing tool to engage students in their courses. As teachers look for alternatives to use as they move content from classroom teaching to online instruction, this article can help them consider the recommended tools for instruction. Teachers, instructors, and instructional designers may explore the free digital tools in this article and do further research on other digital tools to support student learning in their disciplines. 

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2. Undergraduate Student Learning of Market-Driven Design Topics in a Third-Year Design Course

   Hoffenson, Steven; Pitterson, Nicole (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   Generally, the focus of undergraduate engineering programs is on the development of technical skills and how they can be applied to design and problem solving. However, research has shown that there is also a need to expose students to business and society factors that influence design in context. This technical bias is reinforced by the available tools for use in engineering education, which are highly focused on ensuring technical feasibility, and a corresponding lack of tools for engineers to explore other design needs. One important contextual area is market systems, where design decisions are made while considering factors such as consumer choice, competitor behavior, and pricing. This study examines student learning throughout a third-year design course that emphasizes market-driven design through project-based activities and assignments, including a custom-made, interactive market simulation tool. To bridge the gap between market-driven design and engineering education research, this paper explores how students think about and internally organize design concepts before and after learning and practicing market-driven design approaches and tools in the context of an engineering design course. The central research question is: In what ways do student conceptions of product design change after introducing a market-driven design curriculum? In line with the constructivism framework of learning, it is expected that student conceptions of design should evolve to include more market considerations as they learn about and apply market-driven design concepts and techniques to their term projects. Four different types of data instruments are included in the analysis: Concept maps generated by the students before and after the course, open-ended written reflection assignments at various points in the semester, surveys administered after learning the market simulation tool and at the end of the course, and final project reports in which student teams listed their top 3-5 lessons learned in the course. Using the changes between the pre- and post-course concept maps as the primary metric to represent evolving design conceptions, data from the reflections, surveys, and reports are evaluated to assess their influence on such learning. Because market-driven design is a multi-faceted topic, a market-driven design is hierarchically decomposed into specific sub-topics for these evaluations. These include profitability (which itself encompasses pricing and costs), modeling and simulation, and market research (which encompasses consumers and competition). For each topic, correlation analyses are performed and regression models are fit to assess the significance of different factors on learning. The findings provide evidence regarding the effectiveness of the course’s market-driven design curriculum and activities on influencing student conceptions of design. 

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3. Undergraduate Student Learning of Market-Driven Design Topics in a Third-Year Design Course

   Hoffenson, Steven Pitterson (July 2021, American Society of Engineering Education)

   Generally, the focus of undergraduate engineering programs is on the development of technical skills and how they can be applied to design and problem solving. However, research has shown that there is also a need to expose students to business and society factors that influence design in context. This technical bias is reinforced by the available tools for use in engineering education, which are highly focused on ensuring technical feasibility, and a corresponding lack of tools for engineers to explore other design needs. One important contextual area is market systems, where design decisions are made while considering factors such as consumer choice, competitor behavior, and pricing. This study examines student learning throughout a third-year design course that emphasizes market-driven design through project-based activities and assignments, including a custom-made, interactive market simulation tool. To bridge the gap between market-driven design and engineering education research, this paper explores how students think about and internally organize design concepts before and after learning and practicing market-driven design approaches and tools in the context of an engineering design course. The central research question is: In what ways do student conceptions of product design change after introducing a market-driven design curriculum? In line with the constructivism framework of learning, it is expected that student conceptions of design should evolve to include more market considerations as they learn about and apply market-driven design concepts and techniques to their term projects. Four different types of data instruments are included in the analysis: Concept maps generated by the students before and after the course, open-ended written reflection assignments at various points in the semester, surveys administered after learning the market simulation tool and at the end of the course, and final project reports in which student teams listed their top 3-5 lessons learned in the course. Using the changes between the pre- and post-course concept maps as the primary metric to represent evolving design conceptions, data from the reflections, surveys, and reports are evaluated to assess their influence on such learning. Because market-driven design is a multi-faceted topic, a market-driven design is hierarchically decomposed into specific sub-topics for these evaluations. These include profitability (which itself encompasses pricing and costs), modeling and simulation, and market research (which encompasses consumers and competition). For each topic, correlation analyses are performed and regression models are fit to assess the significance of different factors on learning. The findings provide evidence regarding the effectiveness of the course’s market-driven design curriculum and activities on influencing student conceptions of design. 

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4. Not-so-secret watchers: What students can tell us about teaching

   Laursen, S; Archie, T (March 2025, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Cook, S; Katz, B P; Melhuish, K (Ed.)

   Projects to improve teaching as a means to improve learning need good tools to measure shifts in the use of effective research-based instructional strategies. We describe a survey tool to assess active and collaborative learning practices in college STEM by asking students to report what practices are used commonly in their course. Student reports correlate with their experience of the learning environment, and with their self-reported learning outcomes. Student means by section are corroborated by instructor-reported use of these practices and external observations. 

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5. Concept-Level Design Analytics for Blended Courses

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29736-7_40  

   Albó, Laia; Barria-Pineda, Jordan; Brusilovsky, Peter; Hernández-Leo, Davinia (September 2019, Proceedings of 14th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2019))

   Although many efforts are being made to provide educators with dashboards and tools to understand student behaviors within specific technological environments (learning analytics), there is a lack of work in supporting educators in making data-informed design decisions when designing a blended course and planning learning activities. In this paper, we introduce concept-level design analytics, a knowledge-based visualization, which uncovers facets of the learning activities that are being authored. The visualization is integrated into a (blended) learning design authoring tool, edCrumble. This new approach is explored in the context of a higher education programming course, where teaching assistants design labs and home practice sessions with online smart learning content on a weekly basis. We performed a within-subjects user study to compare the use of the design tool both with and without the visualization. We studied the differences in terms of cognitive load, design outcomes and user actions within the system to compare both conditions to the objective of evaluating the impact of using design analytics during the decision-making phase of course design. 

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