Introduction Experience is considered as an essential element in adult education and many researchers have considered it as an important element (Boud and Miller (1996b), Brookfield (1995) and Usher, Bryant and Johnston (1997) cited in Merriam, 2001) as it carries with it a rich resource for adult learners. Experience appeared to be highly influenced by historical as well as sociocultural facto...

We conducted an experiment to describe how social learners use information about the relation between payoffs and behavior. Players chose between two technologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better because its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two groups: 1) individual learners who knew their realized payoffs after each choice and 2) social learne...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are successful in delivering educational resources to the masses, however, the current retention rates — well below 10% — indicate that they fall short in helping their audience become effective MOOC learners. In this paper, we report two MOOC studies we conducted in order to test the effectiveness of pedagogical strategies found to be beneficial in the tradi...

The interaction behaviours of successful, high-achieving learners when using a Learning Management System (LMS) are different than the behaviours of learners who are having more difficulty mastering the course material. This paper explores the idea that conventional Learning Management Systems can exploit data mining techniques to predict the success or failure of students without requiring the...

We discuss the co-evolutionary learning method, applied to human learning, as a means toward a mediated, competitively motivated, educational environment on the Internet. This method was developed in our work with machine learners, where we have been examining environmental characteristics that enable successful and effective learning through “self-play” in games. Critical features include the ...

One major aspect of successful language acquisition is the ability to generalize from properties of experienced items to novel items. We present a computational study of artificial language learning, where the generalization patterns of three generative models are compared to those of human learners across 10 experiments. Results suggest that an explicit representation of word categories is the...

To be successful university learners, first year students need to develop skills in self directed learning. This encompasses a range of cognitive and meta-cognitive skills including generating one’s own learning goals, planning how to tackle a problem, evaluating whether learning goals have been met, and re-planning based on this evaluation. Based on qualitative analysis of online learning logs...

Previous research on cross-situational word learning has demonstrated that learners are able to reduce ambiguity in mapping words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across learning events. In the current experiments, we examined whether learners are able to retain mappings over time. The results revealed that learners are able to retain mappings for up to 1 week later. However...