The great challenges of the 21st Century – global warming, financial crises, and pandemics, to name a few – require concerted efforts among peoples to find solutions. A central goal of university education is to ensure quality learning for graduates to prepare them to face and help overcome these world challenges. To achieve this, universities must help students develop cultural sensitivity and understanding so that they can work in multidisciplinary, multicultural teams. Furthermore, students must learn how to deploy technology and use their creativity and critical problem-solving skills to provide workable solutions. Most importantly, graduates must have high ethical standards and intrinsic motivation to improve the welfare of humankind and serve contemporary societies.
The adoption of information technology (IT) in education (e-learning) to help students achieve knowledge and skills outcomes has continually increased and is generally accepted as effective. Yet less has been written about deploying e-learning to enhance student learning where affective outcomes are concerned. The urgency of educating our next generation to develop a desire to act in the best interests of humanity is becoming more acute. This Research Topic aims to address the gap in the literature concerning the use of IT to help students achieve attitudinal outcomes. The editors are principal investigators on two collaborative projects that make use of IT to help students attain affective outcomes pertaining, respectively, to academic integrity and ethics and to working in multicultural and multidisciplinary virtual teams.
The first project, named AIE-AR, effectively makes use of augmented reality (AR) and mobile technologies to help reinforce students’ awareness of the abstract concepts of academic integrity and ethics (AIE). Since its inception in 2014, some 9,000 students have explored one or more AR ethical learning trails; a total of 12 such trails have been established, mostly in Hong Kong, with the latest one going live in March 2020 at Silliman University in the Philippines. The second project, CCGame deploys innovative and motivating technologies together with gamification to prepare students to work in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams that only meet online. In the project, tertiary students around the world are deliberately put into teams in which all members are of diverse backgrounds and previously unknown to each other. In order to win the “game” the teams have to complete a series of online tasks, from strategising to answering questions on the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A multi-modal data collection approach is adopted in both projects to collect evidence on their effectiveness and impact on student learning. The success of these two projects, involving a total of eight institutions (five in Hong Kong, two in India and one in the Philippines) inspired us to develop this proposal to explore this area further.
While papers relating to these two projects are expected to be contributed to the Research Topic, we also welcome other contributions on the use of IT to help students achieve attitudinal outcomes. These may consist of case studies, work in progress, or other research related to the theme. We envisage that the papers submitted will help establish that through careful design and deployment, IT can be used to help students’ attainment of attitudinal outcomes.
The great challenges of the 21st Century – global warming, financial crises, and pandemics, to name a few – require concerted efforts among peoples to find solutions. A central goal of university education is to ensure quality learning for graduates to prepare them to face and help overcome these world challenges. To achieve this, universities must help students develop cultural sensitivity and understanding so that they can work in multidisciplinary, multicultural teams. Furthermore, students must learn how to deploy technology and use their creativity and critical problem-solving skills to provide workable solutions. Most importantly, graduates must have high ethical standards and intrinsic motivation to improve the welfare of humankind and serve contemporary societies.
The adoption of information technology (IT) in education (e-learning) to help students achieve knowledge and skills outcomes has continually increased and is generally accepted as effective. Yet less has been written about deploying e-learning to enhance student learning where affective outcomes are concerned. The urgency of educating our next generation to develop a desire to act in the best interests of humanity is becoming more acute. This Research Topic aims to address the gap in the literature concerning the use of IT to help students achieve attitudinal outcomes. The editors are principal investigators on two collaborative projects that make use of IT to help students attain affective outcomes pertaining, respectively, to academic integrity and ethics and to working in multicultural and multidisciplinary virtual teams.
The first project, named AIE-AR, effectively makes use of augmented reality (AR) and mobile technologies to help reinforce students’ awareness of the abstract concepts of academic integrity and ethics (AIE). Since its inception in 2014, some 9,000 students have explored one or more AR ethical learning trails; a total of 12 such trails have been established, mostly in Hong Kong, with the latest one going live in March 2020 at Silliman University in the Philippines. The second project, CCGame deploys innovative and motivating technologies together with gamification to prepare students to work in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams that only meet online. In the project, tertiary students around the world are deliberately put into teams in which all members are of diverse backgrounds and previously unknown to each other. In order to win the “game” the teams have to complete a series of online tasks, from strategising to answering questions on the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A multi-modal data collection approach is adopted in both projects to collect evidence on their effectiveness and impact on student learning. The success of these two projects, involving a total of eight institutions (five in Hong Kong, two in India and one in the Philippines) inspired us to develop this proposal to explore this area further.
While papers relating to these two projects are expected to be contributed to the Research Topic, we also welcome other contributions on the use of IT to help students achieve attitudinal outcomes. These may consist of case studies, work in progress, or other research related to the theme. We envisage that the papers submitted will help establish that through careful design and deployment, IT can be used to help students’ attainment of attitudinal outcomes.
