Learning Affordances Research Articles

MOOC teaching assistants’ global-engaged learning in the US and China

How can we create a “global-at-home” learning experience for university students to engage them in serving global professional communities online? This study applied global engagement surveys alongside interviews and focus groups in online contexts to examine engaged learning outcomes of US and Chinese university students who served as MOOC teaching assistants to interact with the course participants from over 50 countries. Findings from pre and post surveys showed that TAs significantly increased their scores on efficacy, political voice, conscious consumption and critical reflection. Further, qualitative analysis showed that TAs worked to adapt their language in their communication with participants, a key aspect of intercultural competence, and that they gained self-efficacy in online communication and in their ability to make a difference. TAs described affordances of online global-engaged learning, including accessibility, time for reflection, lack of implicit bias, creating long-term connections, and reaching large audiences. They also reflected on challenges, including lack of emotional connection, lack of response from participants, language barriers, and perceived lack of expertise. The study offers recommendations for designing online learning and community engagement experiences that can provide opportunities for university students to gain intercultural competence, efficacy, and reflection.

Social virtual reality for L2 Spanish development: Learning how to interact with others in a high‐immersion virtual space

AbstractResearch indicates that high‐immersion virtual reality (VR) has several unique affordances for language learning that contribute to learning outcomes, such as boosting learners’ confidence, engagement, and motivation. However, little is known about the extent to which VR promotes language skills, in particular learners’ verbal interaction using a second language (L2). The present study uses an intervention design to examine the impact of high‐immersion VR on L2 Spanish learners’ interactional development and perceptions of VR experience. Twenty‐six beginning‐level Spanish learners engaged in four social VR sessions over a 2‐week period. Learners’ perceptions of social VR were assessed through surveys and focus group interviews, and their changes in interaction‐involved language performance were evaluated. The results reinforce previous research in showing that learners felt a heightened sense of presence in VR and that interacting in Spanish in the immersive virtual space was more enjoyable and less nerve‐wracking than face‐to‐face conversation, albeit equally beneficial to learning. Quantitative analyses of learners’ interaction revealed significant improvement in terms of their engagement, clarity, and content appropriateness. However, participants reported that technical issues could at times limit the pedagogical usefulness of VR. These findings reinforce the use of social VR in L2 instruction and provide novel insights about performance gains and Spanish L2 pedagogy in a virtual space.

Leveraging affordances of immersive technology-supported collaborative learning (ITCL): A systematic review

Leveraging affordances of immersive technology-supported collaborative learning (ITCL): A systematic review

Pandemic impacts on rural general practice: Trainees and supervision team working and learning together.

To explore the impact of COVID-19 pandemic disruptions on general practice trainees interdependent learning, from the perspectives of trainees and the whole of the practice team. Four rural general practices in Queensland that continued to supervise registrars, junior doctors and medical students through the pandemic. Twenty-three members of the general practice teams, including general practitioners, practice managers, receptionists, practice nurses, registrars, junior doctors and medical students. Audio-recorded semi-structured interviews were conducted with all participants following an initial survey. Thematic analysis and the theory of interdependent learning were used to understand how supervision and training was both disrupted and sustained during the pandemic period. Reporting is informed by the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) guidelines. Learning affordances were transformed by the rapid implementation of physical distancing and other infection control measures. Telehealth consultations and remote working impacted on the interdependent relationship between the work environment, supervision team and trainees. Practice staff identified new ways of working that arose through this period, including changes to practice team roles and the supervisory dynamic that enabled patient care and trainee learning to continue. Social connectedness was important to the trainees and the implications for future training need to be further evaluated.

From teacher-intended to learner-actualised affordances in a WeChat-Supported mobile Chinese language learning environment

This paper draws on the ecological concept of affordance and learner agency to investigate Chinese language learners' actualised (perceived, used or shaped) affordances in a mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) environment. This study took place in a beginner-level Chinese course at a university in Australia. Potential learning affordances were designed and made available through WeChat-supported tasks to extend in-class learning. Qualitative student interviews, WeChat history, student survey and teacher reflective journals were the primary sources of data and thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings identified different levels of learner-actualised affordances (including perceived, used, and shaped affordances) and missed affordances (including those not perceived and those perceived but not used). Additionally, we investigated the distribution of these affordances within two functional types: cognitive and socio-affective affordances. Potential reasons for the missed affordances were explored. This study suggests that beginner-level learners of Chinese can leverage learner agency to understand the teachers' intended educational affordances. To facilitate this understanding, teachers are advised to offer scaffoldings to enhance the visibility of MALL affordances, particularly those related to interactions, multi-modal expressions, and authenticity. This affordance-oriented guidance has the potential to amplify learning opportunities for learners of the Chinese language engaged in MALL.

Re-examining Infrastructure: Considerations for How Non-Instructional Interventions Can Support Teaching and Learning Affordances in Online Learning Environments

Re-examining Infrastructure: Considerations for How Non-Instructional Interventions Can Support Teaching and Learning Affordances in Online Learning Environments

How Do Nature-Based Outdoor Learning Environments Affect Preschoolers’ STEAM Concept Formation? A Scoping Review

This scoping review examined the impact of nature-based outdoor learning environments on the formation of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) concepts in preschoolers. Preschool age (3–5 years) is the time when physical interaction with surrounding built environments increases, and spontaneous learning from the environment intensifies—making it an ideal age range to promote nature-based informal learning. An outdoor learning environment can influence STEAM concept formations of preschoolers with an intentional design that offers STEAM learning affordances. Despite the rising interest in early STEAM education, there is still limited literature on how the outdoor environment may influence STEAM learning behaviors of preschoolers (3–5 years old). This scoping review intended to evaluate the existing knowledge regarding the physical factors contributing to STEAM learning affordances in an outdoor environment for children aged three to five. The review included studies from the last twenty years. This scoping review was conducted following the criteria outlined in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). For this scoping review, 843 citations were discovered across four databases (JSTOR, Scopus, EBSCOhost, and Web of Science), ProQuest, and Google Scholar, and 31 articles were considered eligible for inclusion. The paper synthesized those 31 studies to identify the key STEAM learning behaviors of children and STEAM-activity-supportive settings that may positively influence preschoolers’ STEAM concept development.

Affordances of Mobile Devices and Their Effect on Content Retention: A Conceptual Review

Content Retention in education is very important especially when the content learned is to be applied in life after school. Students in school are also expected after a period of lessons to sit for examinations for assessment of retained knowledge. This makes retention of subject content the key to a successful performance and life after school. This paper highlights ways the affordances of mobile devices can enhance content retention in mobile learning for better academic performance. A theoretical literature review was done to discuss common affordances of mobile learning. The affordances were categorized based on two notable features of mobile devices which are portability or ubiquity and connectivity and applications. The paper discussed how portability and ubiquity make it easy for learning to be enhanced in various ways. This feature allows the learner to be continuously exposed to the learning content and engage in spaced practice in learning that enhances content retention. Connectivity and application also facilitate creative learning collaboration, and experiential learning. This also makes it easy for the learner to customize their learning style and contextualize the information thereby improving cognitive retention. Communication and collaboration in education make learning socio-constructive. The paper concludes that as far as learning is concerned learners have the ultimate control in exploiting all affordances of mobile devices available for productive learning.

Storytelling for personal connection: A pedagogical strategy to localise fashion education

The 2015 student protests, #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, gave rise to the call to decolonise curricula and end the dominance of Western ideologies in South African higher education (HE). The argument put forward in this paper is the need to shift from a traditional approach to a humanised pedagogical approach, wherein students frame knowledge around individual experiences to construct personal and shared understanding. Although limited scholarship around decolonising South African fashion HE exists, such scholarship does not focus on storytelling and circle learning as pedagogical strategies. To address this research gap, narrative humanism, referred to in this research as storytelling, and circle learning are put forward as pedagogical strategies to integrate student identities for personal connection in South African fashion HE. This paper aims to explore the affordances of storytelling and circle learning to decolonise South African fashion HE. Through qualitative action research, two teaching and learning interventions, termed the pilot and main studies, were designed and applied with fashion students at a South African HE institution. Data collection entailed semi-structured student questionnaires, artefacts, and a reflective research journal. To analyse the data, content analysis was employed. The findings reveal that, irrespective of cultural lived experiences or diverse backgrounds, storytelling afforded a decolonised approach in terms of inclusivity, collaboration, and a safe environment for socially engaged dialogue and peer feedback. Similarly, circle learning seemed to reduce teacher-student power relations and contrasted traditional modes of delivery. Circle learning appeared to encourage meaningful, engaged participation, affording a progressive pedagogical strategy to accommodate student and teacher voices in open dialogue. This paper contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning in that storytelling and circle learning are suitable pedagogies to decolonise fashion education in the Global South.

Weakly Supervised Multimodal Affordance Grounding for Egocentric Images

To enhance the interaction between intelligent systems and the environment, locating the affordance regions of objects is crucial. These regions correspond to specific areas that provide distinct functionalities. Humans often acquire the ability to identify these regions through action demonstrations and verbal instructions. In this paper, we present a novel multimodal framework that extracts affordance knowledge from exocentric images, which depict human-object interactions, as well as from accompanying textual descriptions that describe the performed actions. The extracted knowledge is then transferred to egocentric images. To achieve this goal, we propose the HOI-Transfer Module, which utilizes local perception to disentangle individual actions within exocentric images. This module effectively captures localized features and correlations between actions, leading to valuable affordance knowledge. Additionally, we introduce the Pixel-Text Fusion Module, which fuses affordance knowledge by identifying regions in egocentric images that bear resemblances to the textual features defining affordances. We employ a Weakly Supervised Multimodal Affordance (WSMA) learning approach, utilizing image-level labels for training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of evaluation metrics and visual results when compared to existing affordance grounding models. Furthermore, ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Code:https://github.com/xulingjing88/WSMA.

Optimizing affordances of high immersive virtual reality for language learning

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) technology has enjoyed a hype in the past years that made many realize the huge opportunity VR technology poses for language learning. Nevertheless, there has been a significant lack of research publications investigating the use of VR for language learning. In 2021 and 2022, however, we have seen a drastic change with a multitude of new research projects reported. In this article, we first present which common VR application features offer affordances for second language learning and then survey to what degree these features have been adopted in the reviewed studies. The main investigated affordances of VR that we identified to be beneficial to language learning are its presence, interactivity, embodiment, and emotional connection. Finally, we offer an outlook for researchers and developers to adopt and implement VR features for future language learning applications.

Evaluating the Technical Quality and Pedagogical Affordances of an English Language Learning (ELL) Website Using a Methodological Framework

Websites are commonly regarded as valuable educational resources that extend beyond the confines of the traditional classroom setting. The primary challenge lies in the identification of reputable online sources. The aforementioned concept underscores the imperative necessity of conducting website evaluations. The use of methodological frameworks as an evaluative instrument can effectively examine the potential of a website within a specific context, as frameworks possess descriptive qualities. Despite the extensive body of studies done concerning website evaluation, there are still a significant number of unresolved issues. Therefore, in order to address these significant deficiencies, this qualitative study aims to evaluate the efficacy of an English Language Learning (ELL) website by examining its technical and pedagogical dimensions. The LearnEnglish Kids website was chosen due to its adherence to all of the screening criteria. The evaluation process was conducted in accordance with the methodological framework. Despite the limitations identified, the LearnEnglish Kids proves to be a suitable English Language Learning (ELL) website for integration within the Malaysian educational context. The examination of the six evaluation aspects provides a comprehensive guide for the Ministry of Education in the development of open educational resources (OER) for primary school students in Malaysia.

Revisiting technology-assisted language learning affordances for language components: a decade survey

ABSTRACT Given the important technology-assisted language learning (TALL)-empowered affordances, a comprehensive understanding of how these TALL tools facilitate learning across different language components, e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, could not only present the panoramic scenery of the subject matter but also inform pedagogy for applied linguistics researchers and practitioners. Despite the increasing attention being paid to the affordances of a particular TALL platform, there is still a lack of more holistic research practice to the affordances for the five language components. To bridge the gap, this study aims to systematically and quantitively revisit the TALL-empowered affordances with respect to these language components. To this end, a total of valid 201 articles published from 2010 to 2023 were selected and coded based on the proposed inclusion/exclusion criteria. Results revealed that different TALL platforms (viz. computer, mobile, tablet, virtual reality, and robot) help improve students’ language learning performance and efficacy among the five language components. The implications of the study, in perfect tune with the distance language learning experiences in the post COVID-19 pandemic era, justify the need to take full advantage of the TALL affordances and accelerate the move toward a more technology-friendly field of study.

Doing Being on Social Media

The present study set in Denmark explores how social media use may help to facilitate English as a second language (L2) development by means of social media literacy socialization. The data consisted of English language Ariana Grande (AG) fan TikToks made over the course of a year by a Danish girl, aged 11–12, and semi-structured interviews. Findings show that through the participant’s focus on creating a popular fan persona, she was socialized into the fan community and thereby encountered affordances for language learning and opportunities to develop her critical and digital social media skills. She communicated in English daily with fellow fans, sought English language information related to content and editing, developed a growing awareness of the language conventions in the space, and was very invested in her engagement (Norton, 2013). The study also showed that while the focus on obtaining a popular identity guided much of the participant’s engagement and thereby provided language learning affordances, it eventually resulted in a decrease in her postings and, by extension, in fewer learning opportunities. Implications for the L2 classroom are suggested.

Examining the affordances of Massive Open Online Practical (MOOP) platforms for individual and collaborative learning

Purpose - This paper aims to explore the affordances of Massive Open Online Practical (MOOP) platforms in individual and collaborative learning. The purpose of this exploration is to enhance our understanding of MOOP platforms in achieving success in individual and collaborative learning.Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative data is collected by a survey of 37 undergraduate students in China. This paper extracts the affordances of MOOP platforms identified from participant feedback.Findings - this paper identifies 8 themes of MOOP affordances for individual and collaborative learning, among which the affordances for individual learning includes: practicality, informing, motivation, and efficiency; The affordances of collaborative learning includes share resources, learning pathway, synthesis, monitoring and assessment. In addition, this study provides insights into the complexity of individual and collaborative learning, and also provides advice for the future of MOOP platforms.Originality/value - This study has analyzed a unique set of data to elucidate the experiences of participants in MOOP platforms and contributed by exploring future impacts.

It’s All in the Design - the Learning Design: Comparing Active Learning Affordances within VLEs

Using a cross-case thematic comparison of Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) studies we focused on distinctions among student reactions to validate the design of a browser-based virtual field experience. Results show that addressing higher-order learning through a given technology in the learning design creates comparable student responses to those received from more immersive experiences. This suggests that more democratized

PRIMP: PRobabilistically-Informed Motion Primitives for Efficient Affordance Learning From Demonstration

PRIMP: PRobabilistically-Informed Motion Primitives for Efficient Affordance Learning From Demonstration

SGSIN: Simultaneous Grasp and Suction Inference Network via Attention-Based Affordance Learning

SGSIN: Simultaneous Grasp and Suction Inference Network via Attention-Based Affordance Learning

Short Videos on Social Media as Catalysts for English Language Learning Beyond the Classroom

The demand for technology supports and engaging students in their second language beyond the classroom has caused an uptrend of using technology media, especially short videos on social media. In this current investigation, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) research approach is used in order to analyse the features, prospects, pitfalls, and approaches connected with social media, short video use in grasping English language. Altogether, the observations indicate that the students improve their language proficiency vocabulary and speaking and listening as they watch short videos on the apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels. However, there are problems in the integration of these tools such as issues concerning the content accuracy, distraction, and the inconsistency in educational content used. The paper also underscores significant responsibility of teachers in selecting and presenting quality content, as well as developing learners’ digital competencies to realise necessary learning affordances of these technologies. In overcoming these challenges, educators are in a better position to assist the students to overcome the challenges and use the short videos for learning a language. The results also present hypotheses for further research: the outcomes of the study also indicate the conditions under which the number of videos will give the best result and possible long-term effects of its using on the language achievement.

Exploring learner engagement with languages (LX) within and beyond the English classroom

Given the complex language repertoire of a large number of students within Austrian schools, particularly in lower secondary schools, it would be critically important to understand their practices, attitudes, and beliefs towards the multiple languages they encounter in their different areas of life. In this study I redefine and expand on the construct of engagement with language to incorporate an investigation of the different languages (hereafter LX) that learners come into contact with in and outside of school. I propose the construct of ‘engagement with LX’ to depict how learners utilize, reflect on, and relate to the LX in their repertoires in all contexts of their lives, including English as a language of formal foreign language instruction. Participants in this study were nine learners from the same English class in an Austrian middle school. Data for this study were collected using a biodata questionnaire, classroom observations, video-audio recordings of the lesson, and semi-structured interviews. Findings revealed the complexity of learners’ multilingual lives within and beyond the classroom, as well as the interconnections between these domains. Findings have also shed light on the ways learners’ engagement with LX beyond the classroom can support their learning in the English classroom, and the kind of affordances for language learning they perceive across their multiple contexts. The study also offers practical implications in terms of how teachers can engage with learners’ whole LX repertoire to support their learning process.