Search Results for
"learning"

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity presents new opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship, yet traditional educational approaches often lack the interdisciplinary and applied focus required to develop these competencies. This study evaluates the impact of an experiential learning workshop that integrated IoT prototyping, AI-based anomaly detection, and cybersecurity principles to promote technical understanding, entrepreneurial thinking, and ethical awareness. Conducted at Godfrey Okoye University, Nigeria, the workshop engaged 476 undergraduate students from diverse academic disciplines in project-based learning activities and collaborative design challenges. Statistical analysis of matched pre- and post-assessments revealed a mean increase of 25.5 percentage points (95% confidence intervals ±4.2%, p<0.001) in quiz performance across all three domains. Regression and exploratory mediation analysis indicated that prior knowledge and engagement with hands-on tasks were significant predictors of learning gains. Qualitative feedback highlighted the perceived value of real-world application, teamwork, and ethical reflection. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of experiential and interdisciplinary educational models in fostering future-ready skills and responsible innovation. This study offers actionable guidance for designing inclusive, scalable technology learning interventions and contributes to advancing Sustainable Development Goal 4 on equitable quality education. © The Author(s) 2025.

This paper analyses the impact of the Project-based Continuous Instructional Planning (PCIP) method on the key and professional competencies of university students, with consideration of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). PCIP is an innovative teaching method that incorporates blended learning strategies into the four-year university curriculum for majors. It integrates Inquiry-Based learning (IBL), Project-Based learning (PBL), Competition-Based learning (CBL) and collaborative teaching and learning. Projects are integrated throughout the four-year curriculum to enhance knowledge acquisition and develop key competencies. PCIP aims to develop sustainable learning competencies such as teamwork, active learning, critical thinking and problem identification and solving. It creates a dynamic closed loop that promotes continuous innovation, from identifying needs to realising value, and lays the foundation for students' future development. Also, PCIP promotes responsible management (RM) and sustainable development, helping students develop managerial competence for ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS). The study was conducted with a sample of 285 E-commerce students and statistical regression analyses confirmed that PCIP effectively enhances critical and professional competencies and that higher-achieving students benefit more. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd

Laboratories play a central role in engineering education. Current technology enables virtual experiences that challenge the traditional concept of teaching laboratories for undergraduate engineering students. Integrating technology, such as virtual laboratories, allows students to learn foundational experimental skills; however, it lacks interaction and collaboration among students, affecting student engagement, self-efficacy, and test anxiety. Pair learning is an approach that enhances interaction and collaboration among students, thereby improving student engagement and self-efficacy while reducing test anxiety. However, the integration of pair learning into virtual laboratories remains understudied. This study aimed to investigate the impacts of pair learning in virtual laboratories on students’ levels of engagement, self-efficacy, and test anxiety. A quasi-experimental investigation was carried out to assess the impacts of the proposed methodology. This research involved forty-seven freshman electrical engineering undergraduates. Data on student engagement, self-efficacy, and test anxiety were gathered using questionnaires in pre-tests and post-tests from two groups: the experimental group, which utilized virtual laboratories with pair learning, and the control group, which utilized virtual laboratories with individual learning. Quantitative analysis findings indicate a significant dissimilarity in student engagement, self-efficacy, and test anxiety levels among the experimental and control groups when utilizing pair learning in virtual laboratories. The findings of this investigation indicate that the implementation of pair learning in virtual laboratories has a beneficial effect on the levels of test anxiety, self-efficacy, and engagement demonstrated by students in engineering education laboratory courses. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025.

STEM education is vitally important to long-term global prosperity, but it is not well understood beyond our metropolitan centres. If STEM education is to uphold principles of equity and inclusion, then robust knowledge of non-metropolitan STEM education is necessary to appreciate unique opportunities and address entrenched disadvantage. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive scoping review of demographics, research methods, teaching approaches and emergent themes in non-metropolitan STEM education research. Following the PRISMA protocol, a 4-phase selection process identified 229 relevant research outputs. Priori and priori coding processes were applied collaboratively. Findings show that research in this field has increased significantly since 2020 and that 75% of all outputs originate from Australia and the USA. Engineering and technology are underrepresented and most research focuses on primary and secondary school contexts. Qualitative and quantitative methods were typically observed in cross sectional, case study and quasi-experimental designs. Themes of relevance, collaboration, student-centred learning and technological support emerged across the 18 STEM instructional approaches. Thematic analyses showed that the core focus on teacher and student traits was supplemented by wider contextual foci, such as culture/ community, metro/non-metro comparison and partnerships. Limitations and directions for future work will be discussed. © 2025 The Author(s)

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology in education, enabling immersive simulations that foster student engagement and improve knowledge retention. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of global trends, research patterns, and challenges related to the integration of VR in educational contexts. Data were collected from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) within the Web of Science Core Collection, including only articles also indexed in Scopus to ensure high-quality and comprehensive coverage. Of the 1220 articles published between 2010 and 2024, 97 met the inclusion criteria based on relevance, accessibility, and methodological rigor. We performed keyword analysis, citation analysis, and thematic mapping using RStudio and the Bibliometrix package. The findings indicate that the United States, China, and the United Kingdom are the most active contributors to VR research in education. VR has been applied across diverse learning modalities, enriching both formal and informal educational environments. However, its widespread adoption faces several barriers, including high implementation costs, health and safety concerns, limited curricular integration, and insufficient educator training. Proposed solutions include strategic partnerships with technology providers and the use of cloud-based infrastructures to reduce costs and complexity. This study offers actionable insights for educators, policymakers, and developers, providing a robust, data-driven foundation for the effective and equitable integration of VR in education. © The Author(s) 2025.

Teaching professional practice, in the sense of the ability to make sound choices in accordance with what is regarded as expected professional conduct within a discipline, is an important part of the development of future professional practitioners. It concerns the teaching of not only relevant theory but also the explicit and implicit dos and don’ts of professional practice. The teaching of professional skills has gradually shifted from traditional apprenticeship approaches to simulation-based training methods. The role of professional educators, as experienced practitioners, is important in optimizing the use of simulations to bridge the gap between theory and practice. As practices and knowledge exchange differ across professions, this article compares three professional fields to explore teachers’ perspectives on what constitutes good professional practice, and how these perspectives shape their choices in simulation-based training. Comparing the qualities that teachers highlight and their choices in terms of practical training (including the choice of technologies) provides a promising angle for better understanding disciplinary presumptions and propositions regarding simulation-based training. This research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with nine teachers from three Nordic bachelor-level professional education programs in maritime science, nursing science, and biomedical laboratory science. Drawing on practice-based and sociomaterial theories, the analysis highlights the close relationship between the professional qualities that teachers prioritize and their choices of training content and mediums. The findings offer insights into the role of teachers as ‘translators’ of intricate relationships embedded in professional practices. They illustrate how teachers work to adapt these practices into sociomaterial, simulation-based training environments that are aligned with learning objectives, educational practices, professional trajectories, and the expected standards of their respective fields. © The Author(s) 2025.

A collaboration of 26 Dutch universities of applied sciences is working on the development and implementation of the first generation of professional doctoral programs. The distinctiveness of a professional doctoral program has been defined for seven professional domains, including health and well-being as an example. It is described as being an educational program in which candidates learn to intervene in complex practices. They achieve this by developing across four roles: professional, researcher, innovator, and change agent. Each individual domain has its own educational program, including a description of the curriculum, organization, and quality assurance. A core element of the program is learning from and within practice. The learning outcomes are at the heart of the program for candidates. This professional doctorate has been positioned within the international context of comparable doctoral programs. For the implementation and further development, it is important to focus on the impact of this doctoral program, the nature, scope, and extent of supporting evidence in candidates’ portfolios, and further development of the learning environment. © The Author(s) 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the integration of technology into education, leading to a surge in the adoption of online learning. To promote student success, it is essential to understand the factors that affect satisfaction and engagement with online platforms. This study examined the influence of student–teacher relationships (STR), student–student relationships (SSR), perceived ease of use (PEU), and perceived usefulness (PU) on student satisfaction and engagement in virtual learning environments. By incorporating STR and SSR into the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the research aimed to comprehensively understand how interpersonal and technological factors influence these outcomes. Using the Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (TAM), a questionnaire was designed to gather data from 238 Cambodians. The findings confirmed that STR and SSR positively influenced PEU and PU. They also emphasized the significance of these relationships in influencing satisfaction and engagement in online learning. This study offers valuable insights into factors that enhance student satisfaction and engagement with online platforms, informing the development of effective technology-based learning initiatives in higher education and ultimately contributing to student success in online learning environments. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

This study investigates the relationship between presence and learning outcomes in Virtual Reality (VR) environments, with a focus on both cognitive and affective learning. Using the Anne Frank VR House, a virtual replica of a hiding place for a group of Jewish people during World War II, 74 university students explored how the feeling of presence affects knowledge acquisition and perspective-taking. The results showed a significant positive correlation between presence and perspective-taking, but no effect on knowledge acquisition, meaning that a higher sense of presence predicted higher perspective-taking, while knowledge scores did not. These findings highlight VR's potential to create a sense of presence and thus foster emotional engagement in history education, suggesting that empathy-driven learning may be an effective way to engage students with complex socio-political issues beyond factual knowledge. © 2025 The Authors

Background: From the students’ perspective, the research evaluates their views on core competencies and their own developmental needs within pharmaceutical education, attempting to explore potential pathways for optimizing students’ core competencies. This study seeks to enhance students’ core competencies, enrich learning and development theories, and establish a basis and reference for cultivating high-caliber pharmaceutical talents. Methods: Establishing a core competency index system for pharmacy major, a survey questionnaire comprising 41 items across four dimensions (knowledge, skills, abilities, and values) was designed. Using stratified cluster sampling, 919 valid responses were collected. Descriptive statistics, variance analysis, and chi-square test were used to analyze the perceptions of pharmaceutical students on core competencies’ importance for professional growth and their satisfaction with teaching, and to examine disparities in the development of core competencies among different groups of students. Results: The study revealed deficiencies in pharmaceutical students’ core competencies regarding artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical application, medical care, etc. Differential analysis indicated that significant differences across education levels: undergraduates prioritized foundational knowledge and ethical norms, while postgraduates emphasized project-based learning and ability improvement. Students with work or project experience placed higher value on knowledge application, systematic thinking, strategic capabilities, and innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence. Conclusion: This study evaluates pharmaceutical core competency education from the student perspective, revealing their perceptions of developmental requirements. The research proposes an optimization pathway: the curriculum reform of pharmaceutical higher education should be scientific, general, innovative, practical and humanistic, thereby providing a reference for reforming pharmaceutical higher education. © The Author(s) 2025.