Egon Werlen

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• Professor
• Head of Research Field at Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences

Flexibility in learning provides a student room for volitional control and an array of strategies, and encourages persistence in the face of difficulties. Autonomy in and control over one’s learning process can be seen as a condition for self-regulated learning. There is a number of categories and dimensions for flexible learning; following profess...

The ongoing digitalisation facilitates measuring emotional characteristics of texts (e.g. lexical emotional valence), and emotional face expressions (e.g. facial emotional valence). In this context, a text was lexically analysed with the revised Berlin Af-fective Word List (BAWL-R), and videos of 91 subjects reading this text were analysed with a f...

Measuring emotions non-intrusively via affective computing provides a promising source of information for adaptive learning and intelligent tutoring systems. Using 5 non-intrusive, simultaneous measures of emotions, such systems could steadily adapt to students emotional states. One drawback, however, is the lack of evidence on how such modern meas...

We introduce a database (IDEST) of 250 short stories rated for valence, arousal, and comprehensibility in two languages. The texts, with a narrative structure telling a story in the first person and controlled for length, were originally written in six different languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish), and rated for ar...

A way to help students cope with the demands of self-directed learning in a blended learning environment is toprovide them with appropriate tasks in the online part. The tasks should allow students to complete and monitorthem independently. This works well with closed questions. However, depending on the learning material andthe learning objective,...

Although there is a growing interest in understanding the emotions experienced by computer science students in educational settings, a significant gap persists in the current literature concerning the emotional dynamics and turbulences in long-term team projects. In this qualitative longitudinal study, we aimed to delve into the emotional experienc...

The development of self-directed learning (SDL) skills is crucial in today's rapidly changing environment, driven by digitalisation. Online learning offers opportunities to enhance SDL skills. Initially conceptualised by Malcolm S. Knowles for adult education, SDL involves diagnosing learning needs, setting goals, identifying resources, implementin...

In this study, we used data from 44 undergraduate students from 14 classes to investigate the influence of the emotional states valence and arousal on attention and whether the addition of students' self-evaluation scores makes a difference. There is evidence in the literature that emotional states influence attention, which is defined as the focus...

In online learning environments, closed-ended questions, such as multiple-choice questions, allow learners to receive immediate feedback on their answers. Although open-ended questions may be more appropriate for some learning objectives and materials, providing immediate feedback on open-ended responses remains a challenge. Self-control tasks (SCT...

Owing to a growth in online learning, the interest in automated grading has intensified, especially due to scoring time reduction. The aim of automated grading is to approximate human level scoring. Automated Short Answer Grading (ASAG) is a subfield under automated grading, where the length of the answers ranges from a few words to a few sentences...

A conventional five-week MOOC in English was integrated into a German-language Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) on “Innovations in Digital Learning” as an elective. Overall, the total number of students showed values in the medium to high range for the enjoyment of learning, and perceived learning success. Of the 23 CAS students, 70% received...

The IDEST database contains 250 short texts each in one of six original languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish) and their English translations. The texts are 900-1100 characters long narratives written from the first-person perspective. The database contains ratings for valence, arousal, and comprehensibility of the texts...

In diesem Beitrag berichten wir über die Integration eines MOOCs in einen Lehrgang und die Evaluation dieses MOOCs in Bezug auf die Integration und die Zufriedenheit der Studierenden. Der konventionelle fünfwöchige MOOC in englischer Sprache wurde in einen deutschsprachigen CAS zu Inventionen beim digitalen Lernen als Wahlfach integriert, was den S...

In this pilot study, we investigate emotions in students' texts by assessing valence and arousal. The goal is to find out whether students' texts that are mostly impersonal non-fiction contain emotional information and whether the form and the origin of the text differ regarding emotional information. Students on prolific will annotate 1000 randoml...

Adaptive online tasks require immediate feedback even on open questions. To get this feedback, we relied on students' self-assessment, comparing their answers with sample answers. Our aim is to replace the self-assessment with an automated grading system using NLP. For this purpose, we proposed a deep learning model based on transformers and conduc...

Inquiry-based learning has proven to be a successful instructional strategy that enhances the effectiveness of learning across disciplines, especially in science curricula, and has gained popularity in education and global research. One of the reasons for its success in digital learning settings can be ascribed to how easily electronic learning env...

To capitalise on the omnipresence and educational capabilities of technology in the 21st-century classroom, the careful selection and utilisation of appropriate instructional strategies are essential in the pursuit to present learning environments that can accommodate and differentiate support for individual students’ learning needs. Inquiry-based...

Kurze, einfache Darstellung einer deutschen Übersetzung der System Usability Scale (SUS).

Politics is emotional. So far, relatively few studies investigated the emotional content in parliamentary speeches. In this study, we analysed emotional valence and arousal of German and French speeches of a Swiss cantonal parliament and whether we can use them to predict the membership of parliamentarians to one of two groups: those who won more o...

Die meisten Menschen erfassen in einem Gesicht innerhalb von Millisekunden wichtige Informationen. Wir erkennen sehr schnell wie es unseren Mitmenschen geht und welche Emotionen in ihrem Gesicht gezeigt werden. Die dazu gehörigen Gesichtsregungen können heute auch mit Webcams und künstlicher Intelligenz in Echzeit erkannt werden. Allerdings entspre...

Viele Studien, insbesondere neuere, zeigen einen positiven Zusammenhang zwischen interaktiven Lernumgebungen und selbstreguliertem Lernen. Wir gehen dabei davon aus, dass selbstreguliertes Lernen in Online-Lernumgebungen vor allem dort eine positive Wirkung zeigt, wo vermehrt Interaktionsmöglichkeiten vorhanden sind und diese auch genutzt werden. U...

In the context of adaptive learning designs, we are interested in gaining insight into the influence that mood and curiosity exert on effort and performance. The influence of mood on executive functions is explained best with the mood-as-information theory. Mood is linked to curiosity, which can be seen as a kind of intrinsic motivation. Epistemic...

In this study, we examined how precisely a sentiment analysis and a word list-based lexical analysis predict the emotional valence (as positive or negative emotional states) of 63 emotional short stories. Both the sentiment analysis and the word list-based analysis predicted subjective valence, which however was predicted even more precisely when b...

This study investigated the measurement of students’ emotional states during a common learning activity, digital reading of factual texts. The objective was to compare emotional selfreports with automated facial emotion recognition. The latter promises non-intrusive measurements of emotions, which could inform adaptive learning systems. We used an...

The continuous measurement of learning behavior or learning outcome by appropriate sensors is fundamental for the implementation of technology-based adaptive learning courses. An adaptive system needs such learning data to adapt the instruction to the needs of students. Depending on the learning objective, the sensors use information generated with...

Eye tracking and facial expression recognition are nowadays well consolidated techniques for which reliable and relatively inexpensive hardware and software tools are available. A natural application of these tools is within the field of e-learning and e-education technologies. A student or an exam taker might therefore be monitored during a (e-)cl...

Emotions guide our actions and have a profound influence on how we approach, experience and later remember information. This chapter provides an overview of the role of emotions in reading and describes how emotional processes differ across digital and print texts. After introducing what emotions are and how they can be measured, we discuss the inf...

Il monitoraggio ha messo in luce come in generale ci sia stata un’accoglienza positiva sia da parte degli studenti sia da parte dei docenti dell’innovazione didattica introdotta. Pur con i comprensibili timori iniziali, i docenti hanno accolto con entusiasmo la possibilità di sperimentare una metodologia didattica innovativa, nella speranza di intr...

The purpose of this exploratory study is to rate and categorize emotional characteristics of short texts (900-1100 characters) with the aim to create a balanced database for research. Two different procedures were applied to evaluate valence and arousal of 24 German texts written by Swiss volunteers, 19 texts written by Catalan/Spanish and 35 texts...

The goal of this work is to experimentally investigate the influence of screen size on emotions while reading texts with different emotional content. We had 102 college students read three texts with different emotional content (neutral, negative, positive) on three randomly assigned screen sizes (laptop, tablet, smartphone). After each text, the p...

Previous research shows that scaffolding is an effective method to foster learning in technology-enhanced learning environments demanding self-regulation. This study considers the option of using a scaffold in an online learning environment working with a partner to solve a multiple-choice assessment. A scaffolding sequence was designed in which su...

Purpose. The role of emotions while processing information on digital devices is an upcoming issue in reading research. The results of actual research are rather heterogeneous. One reason could be found in the individual differences of emotional empathy. We assume that differences in emotional reactions can be based on various levels of empathy. Th...

This contribution to a workshop presents the design of an experiment about the influence of cognitive load and emotional reactions on reading performance, and how our measuring system works (feasibility). In the experiment we used an Eye Tracker (SMI RED500), software to measure facial emotional expressions - FACS (FaceReader of Noldus) and psychop...

The objectives of this research with 8th grade students are to find different groups of Internet use and to analyse the influence of their Internet use on computer and information literacy (CIL). Data for this paper are from the sample collected for ICILS 2013 in Switzerland. The values for CIL are part of the international study, the Internet use...

Swisscom bietet Medienkurse für Schülerinnen und Schüler der Ober- und der Mittelstufe an. In der Oberstufe werden neben einem Basismodul (Faszination Neue Medien) Module zu Recht im Internet, soziale Netzwerke, sicheres Surfen und Cybermobbing angeboten. Für die Mittelstufe sind vier Module im Angebot: Medienkonsum, Surfen im Netz, Community und I...

INTRODUCTION: The objective is to introduce a new tool for prompting sequences in a Technology Enhances Learning Environments (TELE) and to present results of the first implementations. There are two research questions: How is OPeL accepted by the learners? Does OPeL enhance the performance of the learners? OPeL includes the self-estimation of one...

Link zur Zeitschrift: http://www.organisator.ch/mod_pdfbit/index.asp?cat=2014&mag=2014-07-08

Media literacy is a critical issue when learning within technology enhanced learning environments (Buckingham, 2013; Hobbs & Jensen, 2009; Simon, Kosnik, Rowsell, & Williamson, 2013). It is still debated controversial how to integrate it in curricula. Within our research we have noticed, that also short interventions, if they are interesting enough...

he European Conference on Educational Research 2013 (ECER 2013) "Creativity and Innovation in Educational Research"

DIGITAL AND INFORMATION LITERACY BETWEEN FORMAL AND INFORMAL LEARNING CONTEXTS Digital and information literacy (DIL) represents a fundamental literacy for today's and tomorrow's citizens. Active citizens should be able to use digital technologies in their profession, as a means to connect with their communities, and as a productive tool for their...

Swisscom bietet Medienkurse für Schülerinnen und Schüler der Oberstufe an. Neben einem Basismodul (Faszination Neue Medien) werden Module zu Recht im Internet, soziale Netzwerke, sicheres Surfen und Cybermobbing angeboten. In einer Stichprobe von 175 Schülerinnen und Schüler (SuS) wurde vor Beginn des Kurses sowie einen Monat nach Ende des Kurses e...

Based on Reinmann-Rothmeier’s (2003) classification of e-learning environments (distribution, interaction, collaboration) and the conclusion of Bernacki et al. (2010) that increased e-learning online activity needs opportunity and propensity, we hypothesised that e-learning instruction approaches and self-regulated learning predict the online learn...

Die Swisscom bietet Medienkurse für Schülerinnen und Schüler der Oberstufe an. Neben einem Basis- modul werden Module zu Recht im Internet, soziale Netzwerke - Cybermobbing und sichere Surfen an- geboten. Ein Teil der Schülerinnen und Schüler füllte zu Beginn und am Ende des Kurses einen Frage- bogen zu diesen Themen aus. Der vorliegende Bericht ev...

Selbstreguliertes Lernen bildet eine wichtige Voraussetzung, um die eigene Lernentwicklung in den verschiedenen Lebensphasen gestalten zu können. Die Basis dazu wird schon im Kindes- und Jugendalter gelegt.

835 Jugendlichen aus einer Risikopopulation im Alter von 10 bis 20 Jahren (32% weiblich) wurden in rund vier Jahren drei bis vier Mal befragt. In Publikationen finden sich für alle drei Problembereiche oft folgende vier Verläufe: 1) keine bzw. wenige Probleme (stabil tief), 2) zunehmende Probleme, 3) abneh¬mende Probleme und 4) chronische Probleme...

A total of 1352 adolescents were interviewed by computer-assisted self-administered interview to examine differences and similarities between Swiss and non-Swiss migrant boys and girls, concerning well-being (depression, anxiety), self-esteem and self-efficacy, relationship with parents, delinquency and health-related behaviour such as substance us...

Background: Problematic behaviour follows different trajectories. The influences on the development and the course of problems are not the same for every trajectory. Method: We analyzed a sample of 835 youths (32% females) between 11 and 25 years (average 15.6) with an elevated risk to develop (further) psychic, behaviour and/or substance abuse pr...

Introduction: There exists several screening tools but only for specific risks such substance use, suicidalitiy etc. As psychosocial problems are not uniformly distributed among young people it is necessary to identify those young people who are at risk to develop clinical symptoms or at risk do get disintegrated in school or vocational training. M...

Zusammenfassung Erschreckende Szenarien hinsichtlich der Zunahme von Übergewicht und Adipositas in der westlichen Welt werden in den letzten Jahren in der Presse und in wissenschaftlichen Artikeln dargestellt. Der vorliegende Artikel versucht die Diskussion zu versachlichen, indem er zeigt, dass diese Zunahme zum einen auf einem veränderten Schwell...

Die Kohortenstudie (supra-f) ist die Weiterführung des supra-f Projektes. Das supra-f Projekt besteht aus differenzierten Unterstützungsangeboten für Jugendliche in Risikosituationen. Unter Risikosituationen sind weitgehend externale, aber auch internale Auffälligkeiten zu verstehen. Das Projekt startete 1999 mit Beteiligung von zwölf Zentren. Die...

Es gibt kaum evaluierte Interventionsprogramme im Bereich der sekundären Suchtprävention. Deshalb hat das Bundesamt für Gesundheit (BAG) im Jahr 1999 eine Machbarkeitsstudie durchführen lassen. Aus dieser Machbarkeitsstudie ist supra-f entstanden, ein nationales Sucht-Präventions-For-schungsprogramm zur sekundären Sucht-prävention. supra-f umfasst...

Illness is rarely considered a “risk factor” in adolescence. This study tests illness, suicidality and substance use as outcome measures in a path analysis of 1028 Swiss adolescents in secondary prevention programs. The model showed that negative mood (depression and anxiety) predicted two paths. One path led from negative mood to suicidality and f...

As there have been few science-based evaluations of secondary prevention programs, the Federal Office of Public Health in Switzerland carried out a national program evaluation at 12 sites in the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland to study the question, “What works in secondary prevention?” These 12 centers offer different forms of ass...

This research has tested a social disintegration model in conjunction with risk and protection factors that have the power to differentiate relative, weighted interactions among variables in different socially disintegrated groups. The model was tested in a cross-sectional sample of 1082 at-risk youth in Switzerland. Structural equation analyses sh...

It is difficult to draw causal conclusions about the effectiveness of secondary prevention programs for adolescents at risk, when the programs use a variety of different interventions. The Action Plan is an instrument that is designed to make collection of such data possible. This allows calculating different kinds of intervention patterns for each...

THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS ON CANNABIS CONSUMPTION The debate concerning consumption and psychosocial harm iscontroversial. New findings on cannabis consumption by youthare nurturing the debate. Epidemiological studies show thatconsumption in the 1990s was increasing and there are no signsof change. But epidemiological data for the last...

The debate concerning consumption and psychosocial harm is controversial. New findings on cannabis consumption by youth are nurturing the debate. Epidemiological studies show that consumption in the 1990s was increasing and there are no signs of change. But epidemiological data for the last 40 years teach us that there are ups and downs in rates of...

Die Arbeit behandelt Phänomene der Dissoziation im Zusammenhang mit Kreativität sowie den psychologischen Konzepten Depression, Ängstlichkeit und Psychotizismus. Kreativität (d.h. Inspiration) geschieht in einem Zustand kortikal schwacher Aktivation mit flachen Assoziationshierarchien und ungelenkter Aufmerksamkeit (≅ Primärprozessdenken). Solchen...