Editorial Overview

Abstract

In order to design and manage more learner-centered Instructional systems, the needs and active involvement of students must be addressed. Sub-systems for promoting active learning need to be properly designed to create learning communities that integrate educational technology with quality pedagogy. In this issue, we feature a set of six papers that report on findings of research that focus on innovations such as student feedback, artificial intelligence (AI)-based conversation-based assessment (CBA), discussion groups, collaborative learning, and other aspects of effective and synergistic learning communities. This issue concludes with two papers that discuss programs that deal with the instruction of languages. In this case, the learning communities are undergraduate students from Ecuador and third-grade students from Qatar. The first two papers focus on two innovative ways of increasing student participation in learning communities. The lead paper deals with a peer critique program for graduate students. The main objective of the research is to determine the quality of the feedback that is provided in the peer review. Both the benefits and problems associated with the feedback are observed and analyzed. The paper also provides lessons learned for the re-design of peer critique programs. The second paper discusses a digital version of the CBA program for undergraduate students. In this study, a CBA system was deployed with Google Chat to support formative assessment. For faculty involved in AI-based tools such as Rasa, this paper is must reading. The next paper describes a high school learning community that tested an online experimental instructional intervention that is designed to foster intrinsic motivation. This experiment integrated active learning elements such as collaborative teamwork engagement and a student response system that addressed student questions. The fourth paper provides a report about an experiment designed to compare various ways of using group discussion to help pre-service non-traditional special education elementary school teachers to study and explore metacognition as a learning tool. The group discussion among the career-oriented learning community members was achieved via virtual simulation. The next two papers address similar types of instructional content, namely learning languages (in this case, English and Arabic). However, the members of the learning Editorial