This study investigated whether the use of a gamified mobile learning app influenced students' academic performance and boosted their engagement in the subject. Created to better engage students in lecture content, the app was used to deliver multiple-choice content-based quizzes directly to students' personal mobile devices post-lecture and pre-tutorial. After measuring the relationships between students' app usage and their engagement, retention and academic achievement in the subject, it is suggested that following the app's introduction, student retention rates and academic performance increased, and there was a positive correlation between students' scoring highly on the app and achieving higher academic grades. While the app's affordances for learning are promising, the causal relationship between the app usage and improved student outcomes requires further investigation. Conclusions made in the context of the wider scholarship of mobile app enhanced learning and applied game principles in HE.

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Indigenous Australians are underrepresented and considerably disadvantaged within the Australian system of higher education. The various measures taken by Australian universities over the past decades have produced varying levels of success in increasing Indigenous participation and completion rates. In order to continue improving Indigenous Australian participation in higher education, it is important to understand the current patterns of participation and factors within universities that are associated with participation and success. In this article we analyse higher education student and staff statistics available from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and information sourced from the web sites of 40 Australian universities to examine correlations between various Indigenous student support mechanisms and Indigenous students' higher education participation rates. Our results indicate that there is a dual system of Indigenous higher education, with one group of universities excelling at attracting Indigenous students, and a different group of universities demonstrating high Indigenous student completion rates. We argue that challenges remain in determining how to increase commencements at universities with high Indigenous completion rates without compromising entrance requirements or further diluting the level of student support, and how to increase completion rates at universities with higher numbers of Indigenous students.

In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into how participants' usage and perception of social media in their online learning experiences differed and why. We identified that, although some participants benefitted from social media by crediting it, for example, with networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, others objected or refused to engage with social media, perceiving it as a waste of their time. We make recommendations for the usage of social media for educational purposes within MOOCs and formal digital learning environments.

This article presents the results of a systematic critical review of interdisciplinary literature concerned with digital text (or e-text) uses in education and proposes recommendations for how e-texts can be implemented for impactful learning. A variety of e-texts can be found in the repertoire of educational resources accessible to students, and in the constantly changing terrain of educational technologies, they are rapidly evolving, presenting new opportunities and affordances for student learning. We highlight some of the ways in which academic studies have examined e-texts as part of teaching and learning practices, placing a particular emphasis on aspects of learning such as recall, comprehension, retention of information and feedback. We also review diverse practices associated with uses of e-text tools such as note-taking, annotation, bookmarking, hypertexts and highlighting. We argue that evidence-based studies into e-texts are overwhelmingly structured around reinforcing the existing dichotomy pitting print-based ('traditional') texts against e-texts. In this article, we query this approach and instead propose to focus on factors such as students' level of awareness of their options in accessing learning materials and whether they are instructed and trained in how to take full advantage of the capabilities of e-texts, both of which have been found to affect learning performance.