For over a decade, educational researchers and practitioners have been exploring how innovative means could be integrated into traditional learning in order to enrich learning experience and enhance learning effectiveness. Enabled by these innovative means, brand new learning environments can be created to better support teaching and learning activities in different subject disciplines at different levels. They emphasize learning flexibility, effectiveness, efficiency, engagement, and reflectiveness, where both formal and informal learning are integrated. It is believed that learning experience can be enriched and that learning effectiveness can be enhanced, through the adaptation of individual learning traits and preferences, increased degree of engagement, timely feedback and guidance, and provision of media-rich contents. Along with the advent of mobile and smart devices, the learning environments would operate on huge heterogeneous network infrastructures which provide augmented experiences that can mobilize learning activities, encourage interactive collaborations through social media, and at the same time facilitate the collection of learning-related data for analytic purposes. All these are actively investigated by educational researchers and practitioners in the field. This thematic series publishes the latest research findings and share good practices on the future learning environments, from both pedagogical and technological perspectives.
Guest editors:
Simon K.S. Cheung, The Open University of Hong Kong
Lam For Kwok, City University of Hong Kong
Kongkiti Phusavat, Kasetsart University, Thailand
Harrison Yang, SUNY Oswego, USA