Social media usage has become a daily habit for the younger generation. It can have positive effects on educational processes, but it also raises concerns about harmful content, such as fake news or hate speech. Fake news is often distributed with the intention to manipulate the public opinion by propagating disinformation. This includes the…

Field trips provide real-world learning opportunities in biology education as they promote knowledge about nature among other things. As biodiversity is declining knowledge of species is important for understanding and appreciating the natural world and its implications. Many field guides are digitally available, but differences from traditional…

It started with a simple little filler in "USA Today" 25 years ago. It showed a broken student desk with cobwebs on it and offered data on "average yearly absences" in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Assessing my own data, I verified that they were on point and proceeded to discuss why this was a major hurdle for our…

Purpose: The digital transformation and the increased use of technologies have changed the world of work severely. With it, collaboration and cooperation methods among employees. Therefore, new ways of working together must be applied to work in an international and digital working environment. For Vocational Education and Training (VET),…

The research focused on digital learning environments has identified various challenges for learners, such as technical problems, lack of community, motivation, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and social anxiety. Social anxiety is conceptualized as an emotional disorder that may impede achievement in higher education. The project reported here…

In recent years, COVID-19 policy measures massively affected university teaching. Seeking an effective and viable way to transform their lecture material into asynchronous online settings, many lecturers relied on prerecorded video lectures. Whereas researchers in fact recommend implementing prompts to ensure students process those video lectures…

In this paper, we present didactical, technical, and interaction design aspects of a learning environment for training academic text reading skills in higher education that is currently being developed. The concept is built on experience gained from a gamified learning environment for academic abilities in the domain of German orthography…

Although it is a highly developed industrial country and generally known as technologically savvy, Germany lags internationally in digital transformation. Moreover, Germany's progress in Higher Education (HE) is uneven since 16 federal states have responsibility for education, including Higher Education. The pandemic has reinforced the importance…

Promoting research knowledge and skills (RKS) is an important task of teacher training programmes. One way of fostering RKS is through research-based learning (RBL). However, student teachers often struggle with the acquisition of RKS and do not benefit from RBL like students of other study programmes. This paper suggests e-learning as one part of…

Due to the pervasiveness of online technology, especially social media and social networking sites (SNS) like Twitter and Facebook were are surrounded by a constant stream of information about other individuals. On the other hand, even though distance and online learning has become mainstream, there are still concerns leveled at many of these…

Numerous effective digital learning environments have evolved over the last few years built around video examples that follow an introduction phase and are often supplemented by prompts. The learning mechanisms behind these components remain subject to open questions, though. We thus conducted an online experiment with university students (N =…

This article describes the initiative to establish a European network for undergraduate research (UR). This began with national initiatives in Germany and the United Kingdom, dating back 10 to 20 years. A strong impetus was given by the European project on digital UR (2021-2023), which also was a response to COVID-19 and extended the possibilities…

The COVID-19 pandemic put academic institutions around the world in the difficult position of suddenly having to organize many lectures and examinations over online channels only, due to students' physical access to their campus buildings being restricted. While the search for possible solutions to this problem was often challenging, this…

Purpose: Online education enables location-independent learning, potentially providing university students with more flexible study programs and reducing traffic-related CO2 emissions. This paper aims to examine whether online education can contribute to university-related sustainable everyday mobility, with particular consideration given to…

Advanced learning technologies have become a focal point in recent educational research, holding the promise of enhancing students' self-regulated learning (SRL) by facilitating various processes of planning, monitoring, performing, and reflecting upon learning experiences. However, concerns have arisen regarding the efficacy and design of…