Online video lectures have been considered an instructional media for various pedagogic approaches, such as the flipped classroom and open online courses. In comparison to other instructional media, online video affords the opportunity for recording student clickstream patterns within a video lecture. Video analytics within lecture videos may provide insights into student learning performance and inform the improvement of video-assisted teaching tactics. Nevertheless, video analytics are not accessible to learning stakeholders, such as researchers and educators, mainly because online video platforms do not broadly share the interactions of the users with their systems. For this purpose, we have designed an open-access video analytics system for use in a video-assisted course. In this paper, we present a longitudinal study, which provides valuable insights through the lens of the collected video analytics. In particular, we found that there is a relationship between video navigation (repeated views) and the level of cognition/thinking required for a specific video segment. Our results indicated that learning performance progress was slightly improved and stabilized after the third week of the video-assisted course. We also found that attitudes regarding easiness, usability, usefulness, and acceptance of this type of course remained at the same levels throughout the course. Finally, we triangulate analytics from diverse sources, discuss them, and provide the lessons learned for further development and refinement of video-assisted courses and practices.

During the last few years, the focus of computer science education (CSE) in primary and secondary schools (shortly K-12) have reached a significant turning point. This study reviews the published papers on the field of K-12 computing education in order to summarize the findings, guide future studies and give reflections for the major achievements in the area of CSE in K-12 schools. 47 peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed, based on a categorization of their main elements. Programming tools, educational context, and instructional methods are the main examined categories of this research. Results of this survey show the direction of CSE in schools research during the last years and summarized the benefits as well as the challenges. In particular, we analyzed the selected papers from the perspective of the various instructional methods aiming at introducing and enhancing learning, using several programming tools and educational context in K-12 CSE. Despite the challenges, the findings suggest that implementing computing lessons in K-12 education could be an enjoyable and effective learning experience. In addition, we suggest ways to facilitate deep learning and deal with various implications of the formal and informal education. Encouraging students to create their own projects or solve problems should be a significant part of the learning process.

Various aspects of computational thinking (CT) could be supported by educational contexts such as simulations and video-games construction. In this field study, potential differences in student motivation and learning were empirically examined through students’ code. For this purpose, we performed a teaching intervention that took place over five weeks, with two-hour sessions per week, plus two more weeks for the pretest and post-test projects. Students were taught programming concepts through a science project; one group represented the function of a basic electric circuit by creating a simulation, while the other group represented the same function by creating a video game in which a player should achieve a score in order to win. Video game construction resulted in projects with higher CT skills and more primitives, as measured through projects’ code analysis. Moreover, the video-game context seems to better motivate students for future engagement with computing activities.

This article investigates the uses and gratifications of the popular social networking site Facebook. In the exploratory stage, 70 users generated phrases to describe the manner they used Facebook. Interestingly, some users not only described the uses, but also mentioned how they perceive these uses. These phrases were coded into 14 items and clustered into four factors. The principal component analysis that was conducted in the third stage of the study, which was addressed to 222 Facebook users, verified the validity of the four factors: Social Connection, Social Network Surfing, Wasting Time and Using Applications. Previous user studies on Facebook have examined the immediate social effects of this popular social networking site, but they have not regarded emerging uses of the platform, such as gaming and applications, which do have a social component as a feature and not as a core principle. The ‘Wasting Time’ factor and the growth of ‘Using Applications’ factor indicate that Facebook has already become an integral part of daily computing routine, alongside with the rest of the entertainment desktop and web applications.

Many educational organizations are employing instructional videos in their pedagogy, but there is a limited understanding of the possible video formats. In practice, the presentation format of instructional videos ranges from direct recording of classroom teaching with a stationary camera, or screencasts with voice-over, to highly elaborate video post-production. Previous work evaluated the effectiveness of several production styles, but there has not been any consistent taxonomy, which would have made comparisons and meta-analyses possible. Therefore, we need a taxonomy of instructional video formats that facilitates the understanding of the landscape of available instructional video production styles. For this purpose, we surveyed the research literature and examined contemporary video-based courses, which have been produced by diverse educational organizations and teachers across several academic disciplines. We organized instructional video styles in two dimensions according to the level of human presence and to the type of instructional media. In addition to organizing existing instructional videos in a comprehensive way, the proposed taxonomy offers a design space, which should facilitate choice, as well as the preparation of novel video formats.