This article analyses the advertisements inserted in search engines of Spanish academic services websites in 2018 and 2019. Content analysis of these advertisements, conducted through the use of Semrush (Search Engine Optimization SEO and Search Engine Marketing SEM audit platform), shows that a large number of platforms offer to write academic…

Purpose: College students need more support learning to effectively search for and evaluate online information. Without such skills, students are vulnerable to mis- and disinformation that may appear in their search results, Web browsing and social media feeds. This study investigated four short instructional modules four short instructional…

Teaching empirical educational research in higher education involves implementing a very useful web tool for bibliography/scientific literature research, a search engine specifically employed for scientific papers, such as "Google Scholar". The aim of this study is to examine undergraduate students' acceptance of technology, through…

This quantitative case study employs weblog data supplied by six major academic journal publishers, known as HTTP referer [sic] data from Washington State University IP address ranges to reveal the sites that researchers and students use to retrieve academic journal literature. HTTP referrers to academic journal articles were categorized as…

Internet users may fail to recognize how algorithms filter and personalize information. Two studies explored college students' algorithm awareness across varying contexts. Study 1 examined Facebook users' awareness of its algorithms (N = 222). Only about half recognized that Facebook does not show all their friends' posts. These students more…

Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and…

With the introduction of internet as a source of information, parents have observed youngsters' tendency to prefer internet as a source, and almost a reluctance to learn in advance since "you can look it up when needed". Questions arise, such as 'Are these phenomena symptoms of changing beliefs about knowledge and learning? Is it at all…

We present in this paper the results of a second experiment that was recently conducted to evaluate a hybrid recommendation approach in an online learning environment. The approach consists of mixing the two approaches of content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to improve the relevance of the educational resources recommended to…

In general chemistry laboratories, students learn practical laboratory skills through hands-on activities and are exposed to new scientific instruments. However, these instruments are often viewed as black boxes for various reasons, where students do not know how to use them or what the instruments are capable of. This tendency is likely to induce…

Introduction: The understanding of the information-seeking behaviour of international students using social media is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to model the information-seeking behaviour of international students when they use social media to find information. Method: A mixed method approach was employed to collect data…

Introduction: Students increasingly depend on Web search for educational purposes. This causes concerns among education providers as some evidence indicates that in higher education, the disadvantages of Web search and personalised information are not justified by the benefits. Method: One hundred and twenty university students were surveyed about…

Google Scholar and academic library discovery systems are both popular resources among academic users for finding scholarly information. By conducting an online survey with 975 users from more than 20 public research universities across the United States, this study comparatively investigates how and why academic users use these two resources.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of meta-tags by the leading higher educational institutions (HEIs). It explores the various kinds of messages conveyed by HEIs in the meta-description tags of their website homepage. It further examines that whether the messages conveyed by HEIs are in accordance with the prospective…

Information literacy studies have shown that college students use a variety of information sources to perform research and commonly choose Internet sources over traditional library sources. Studies have also shown that students do not appear to understand the information quality issues concerning Internet information sources and may lack the…

The rapid evolution of the Internet, technological innovation and increased flow of information (information overload) has modernized academic libraries and it is difficult to keep up with the virtual delivery of scholarly information. It is to be relevant within this digital economy ecosystem, improvement as change is vital. The purpose of this…