As long as the free market has reigned, private sector firms have confronted a produce-or-perish existence. For a host of reasons, public organizations increasingly face these competitive pressures as well. But public organizations in the most unexpected of places have answered the call to evolve productively with fantastic success. Unfortunately, public schools can rarely be counted among them. Faddish acronym school improvement plans always offer grand results and almost never deliver upon such promises. Understandably, the farther public educational quality slides into decline, the sharper the urge to grope for radical reform plans. This book, in contrast, argues that a key element of reform has remained in plain view for decades but has gone unmentioned, unmeasured, and unused in reform plans: student engagement. More specifically, quantifying how the instructional time is passed provides not only a sound proxy to educational quality, but is shown to be tightly linked to the test score needle. Of course, the differences across school types and geographies are pronounced. Mindful of such differences, this book discusses each school type according to the hard numbers across buildings.

Web 2.0 and blended learning technologies are reshaping and reframing the practice of teaching and learning in higher education. This volume critically examines new research on how e-learning technologies are being used in higher education to increase learner engagement and retention.

Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement analyzes the psychological, social, and academic phenomena comprising engagement, framing it as critical to learning and development. Drawing on positive psychology, flow studies, and theories of motivation, the book conceptualizes engagement as a learning experience, explaining how it occurs (or not) and how schools can adapt to maximize it among adolescents. Examples of empirically supported environments promoting engagement are provided, representing alternative high schools, Montessori schools, and extracurricular programs. The book identifies key innovations including community-school partnerships, technology-supported learning, and the potential for engaging learning opportunities during an expanded school day. Among the topics covered: Engagement as a primary framework for understanding educational and motivational outcomes. Measuring the malleability, complexity, multidimensionality, and sources of engagement. The relationship between engagement and achievement. Supporting and challenging: the instructor’s role in promoting engagement. Engagement within and beyond core academic subjects. Technological innovations on the engagement horizon. Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement is an essential resource for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in child and school psychology; social work; educational psychology; positive psychology; family studies; and teaching/teacher education.

Digital classrooms have become a common addition to curriculums in higher education; however, such learning systems are only successful if students are properly motivated to learn. Optimizing Student Engagement in Online Learning Environments is a critical scholarly resource that examines the importance of motivation in digital classrooms and outlines methods to reengage learners. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as motivational strategies, learning assessment, and student involvement, this book is geared toward academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the importance of maintaining ambition among learners in digital classrooms.

Through the lens of sensory affect, this book offers a new way of thinking about day-to-day teaching and student engagement within learning spaces in design education. The book examines the definitions, concepts, ideas, and overlaps of a repertoire of learning spaces prevalent in higher education and addresses the pedagogical gap that exists between broader learning structures and spaces, and the requirements of specialist design education. Recognising that mainstream teaching environments impact upon design studio learning and student engagement, the book positions creative learning spaces at the heart of practice-based learning. It defines the underlying pedagogical philosophy of a creative learning space in design education and reports on how practical strategies incorporating sensory affect may be implemented by educators to foster better student engagement in these spaces within higher education. Bringing much-needed attention to specialist design teaching and learning spaces in higher education, this book will be of interest to educators, researchers, and post-graduate students immersed in design education, pedagogy, and learning spaces more broadly.

The delivery of quality education to students relies heavily on the actions of an institution’s administrative staff. Effective teaching strategies allow for the continued progress of modern educational initiatives. Student Engagement and Participation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications provides comprehensive research perspectives on the multi-faceted issues of student engagement and involvement within the education sector. Including innovative studies on learning environments, self-regulation, and classroom management, this multi-volume book is an ideal source for educators, professionals, school administrators, researchers, and practitioners in the field of education.

This book gathers a collection of high-quality peer-reviewed research papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Data and Information Sciences (ICDIS 2021), held at Raja Balwant Singh Engineering Technical Campus, Agra, India, on May 14 – 15, 2021. In chapters written by leading researchers, developers, and practitioner from academia and industry, it covers virtually all aspects of computational sciences and information security, including central topics like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data. Highlighting the latest developments and technical solutions, it will show readers from the computer industry how to capitalize on key advances in next-generation computer and communication technology.

This book presents original research on analytics and context awareness with regard to providing sophisticated learning services for all stakeholders in the eLearning context. It offers essential information on the definition, modeling, development and deployment of services for these stakeholders. Data analysis has long-since been a cornerstone of eLearning, supplying learners, teachers, researchers, managers and policymakers with valuable information on learning activities and design. With the rapid development of Internet technologies and sophisticated online learning environments, increasing volumes and varieties of data are being generated, and data analysis has moved on to more complex analysis techniques, such as educational data mining and learning analytics. Now powered by cloud technologies, online learning environments are capable of gathering and storing massive amounts of data in various formats, of tracking user-system and user-user interactions, and of delivering rich contextual information.

As face-to-face interaction between student and instructor is not present in online learning environments, it is increasingly important to understand how to establish and maintain social presence in online learning. Student-Teacher Interaction in Online Learning Environments provides successful strategies and procedures for developing policies to bring about an awareness of the practices that enhance online learning. This reference book provides building blocks to help improve the outcome of online coursework and discusses social presence to help improve performance, interaction, and a sense of community for all participants in an online arena. This book is of essential use to online educators, administrators, researchers, and students.

While online learning was an existing practice, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated its capabilities and forced educational organizations to swiftly introduce online learning for all units. Though schools will not always be faced with forced online learning, it is apparent that there are clear advantages and disadvantages to this teaching method, with its usage in the future cemented. As such, it is imperative that methods for measuring and assessing the effectiveness of online and blended learning are examined in order to improve outcomes and future practices. Measurement Methodologies to Assess the Effectiveness of Global Online Learning aims to assess the effectiveness of online teaching and learning in normal and pandemic situations by addressing challenges and opportunities of adoption of online platforms as well as effective learning strategies, investigating the best pedagogical practices in digital learning, questioning how to improve student motivation and performance, and managing and measuring academic workloads online. Covering a wide range of topics such as the future of education and digital literacy, it is ideal for teachers, instructional designers, curriculum developers, educational software developers, academics, researchers, and students.