Preface

Byron Bunt is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education of the NWU, South Africa, and is part of the Research Unit Self-Directed Learning. He is the subject leader for History Education. His research niche encompasses cognitive education and game-based learning (GBL), specifically focusing on developing students’ creative and critical thinking via gamification approaches. He has published in the fields of History Education and GBL. He is the author of several chapters in scholarly books and articles in renowned academic journals. In addition, he has begun a project involving a self-developed trading card game called ‘Dogs of War’, which will be used within his history classroom to develop his students’ SDL abilities. Another research project focuses on using open educational resources (OERs) and games to develop board and card games in the history class, eventually culminating in uploading them as OERs to an online repository. He also completed a project that used a mobile gaming app called ‘Habitica’, which involved an intervention where students had to role-play in the history classroom to form habits of mind.

Divan Jagals is a senior lecturer in the field of Curriculum Studies, Philosophy and Research Methodology in the School of Professional Studies in Education at the Potchefstroom campus of the North-West University. He has 16 years of educational experience in both secondary and tertiary education, in contact, blended and distance education contexts. He is also an editorial board member of a number of international journals, and he is the recipient of several research grants for national and international research projects. The most recent project involvements include the facilitation of metacognitive awareness through a personalised and adaptive online learning platform using adaptive prompts to promote self-directed learning, as well as a project set towards developing a self-transcendent philosophy of self-directed learning. He was also selected as one of three research fellows to complete a 4-month research fellowship under the guidance of the UNESCO Chair for Personalised and Adaptive Distance Education at the Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences. He has published research on worldviews and their connection with the affective domain through metacognitive awareness in several national and international research journals and (co-)-authored numerous academic book chapters and presented research findings on metacognition, philosophy and self-directed learning at various national and international conferences. He acts as a supervisor for postgraduate students who conduct research in the field of self-directed learning and metacognition. He holds a Doctorate in Mathematics Education, and his research interests include the facilitation of metacognitive awareness to understand and promote self-directed learning.