Good images, effective messages? Working with students and educators on academic practice understanding

Work at Northumbria University has focussed on activity that extends opportunities for students to engage directly with the skills development necessary for sound academic practice. This has included highly visual campaigns on the "Plagiarism trap", providing access to Turnitin plagiarism detection software, guides and sessions to highlight use of associated referencing tools. Sessions on a variety of topics, such as supporting study skills and reading originality reports, have been provided for students on taught, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This provision has included students working on collaborative partners' sites and also those on research programmes. Alongside the activities with students, "designing out" approaches have been embedded in staff development within the educator community at Northumbria. Formative use of Turnitin is integrated throughout programmes and academic practice development is formally recognised within the University Learning and Teaching Strategy's focus on information literacy. This article outlines and reviews these activities in a critical institutional context and evaluates responses from a variety of students and educators to determine how effective these measures have been

Evaluación de los Sistemas e-Learning: Estudio de las publicaciones realizadas en la Web Of Knowledge

El propósito de este estudio es analizar el crecimiento y desarrollo de la literatura sobre la evaluación de los sistemas e-Learning. La bibliografía publicada en 18 de las principales revistas de la base de datos ISI Web of Knowledge fue obtenida, de manera directa, a través de las palabras clave: “model”, “evaluation”, “e-Learning system”, con sus respectivos sinónimos. La información como autor, título, subtítulo, fuente, citas, etc., se registró en MS-Excel (2010) para su análisis e interpretación. El estudio encontró 127 artículos de esta temática, publicados en el período 2008-2012. Además, revela que el 2012 fue el año más prolífico, con 33 artículos. La revista más productiva es Computers & Education, con 15 artículos; se la puede considerar como una revista básica de consulta. Se encontró que Peter Shea y Temi Bidjerano, ambos de Estados Unidos, son los autores que más han publicado y realizado trabajos conjuntos. Podría ser una limitante del estudio que la información que se tomó fue restringida a un período de cinco años, tiempo que de manera general se acepta, en relación a la antigüedad de la producción bibliográfica. El documento proporciona información confiable y auténtica sobre el tema y es el primer estudio de este tipo

The influence of conception paradigms on data protection in E-Learning platforms::a case study

International audienceThe wide adoption of virtual learning environments such as Moodle in numerous universities illustrate the growing trend of e-learning development and diffusion. These e-learning environments alter the relationship between the students and academic knowledge and learning processes considerably stimulating the students' autonomy by making most of the course material freely available at any time while inducing a progressive reduction of physical student-teacher interactions with virtual ones. Recent advances, as proposed in the TeSLA project, even introduces an e-assessment environment. This entire virtual learning framework raises new concerns in terms of privacy, given that such environments are potentially able to track the students, profile their habits, and retrieve personal data. In this paper, we analyze the influence of conception paradigms of e-learning platforms on personal data protection, based on a classification of these platforms in two antagonistic approaches. We illustrate our analysis with a case study of the TeSLA project and examine how the design choices impact the efficiency and legal compliance of personal data protection means. We finally propose alternative designs that could lead to significant improvements in this matter

A Survey of Smart Classroom Literature

Recently, there has been a substantial amount of research on smart classrooms, encompassing a number of areas, including Information and Communication Technology, Machine Learning, Sensor Networks, Cloud Computing, and Hardware. Smart classroom research has been quickly implemented to enhance education systems, resulting in higher engagement and empowerment of students, educators, and administrators. Despite decades of using emerging technology to improve teaching practices, critics often point out that methods miss adequate theoretical and technical foundations. As a result, there have been a number of conflicting reviews on different perspectives of smart classrooms. For a realistic smart classroom approach, a piecemeal implementation is insufficient. This survey contributes to the current literature by presenting a comprehensive analysis of various disciplines using a standard terminology and taxonomy. This multi-field study reveals new research possibilities and problems that must be tackled in order to integrate interdisciplinary works in a synergic manner. Our analysis shows that smart classroom is a rapidly developing research area that complements a number of emerging technologies. Moreover, this paper also describes the co-occurrence network of technological keywords using VOSviewer for an in-depth analysis

A consideration of the use of plagiarism tools for automated student assessment

In this paper, the authors evaluate the flexibility and richness of two well-established text analysis plagiarism tools, through a consideration of the use of plagiarism detection software as a mechanism for the automated assessment of student-created narrative in a virtual learning environment (VLE). The authors are currently engaged in a project creating a prototype VLE, using technologies for multilevel and multiplayer games, based on the inherent support such an environment would provide for constructivist learning, engagement, and contextual socialization. Progress between levels in the VLE will be based on the creation, by the student, of a narrative linking together a number of conceptual elements obtained through game-play at that level. Support for the narrative creation process will help the student to contextualize the conceptual elements, providing the necessary linking elements or themes to enable the student to produce a coherent description of their understanding of the concepts. A particular challenge in such environments is the need for fast, real-time feedback to students to maintain the level of engagement and to support the game-play metaphor. Additionally, the student must be able to make as many attempts to progress as they need and it will be their decision when and how often to submit for assessment. Since the student narrative will be in a textual form and can therefore be related to a sample solution narrative, generated by the author of the level within the learning environment, the idea of using plagiarism detection software as the mechanism for automated comparison and assessment was considered appropriate for investigation. While the limitation of such tools would appear to be that they are seeking direct copies of text elements, the authors wanted to investigate whether they offered sufficient richness and fuzziness to detect common conceptually-linked texts. The initial decision was to experiment with text-analytic tools, since they a- re both widely used and readily available. The tools chosen were TurnItIn, a commercial tool provided to the U.K. higher education community by the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and VALT/VAST, a set of tools created at the Centre for Interactive Systems Engineering at London South Bank University, London, U.K., the workings of which are based on recognized and well-published research. An experiment using a small group of students in a traditional assessment situation was carried out, and is described in detail. The rationale for this approach was that there is not yet a fully working prototype of the VLE in which to carry out such an experiment, but that the conditions necessary to test the hypothesis that plagiarism tools could be utilized for such a purpose could be replicated sufficiently to make such an experiment viable. The results of the experiment demonstrated neither a correlation between the sample solution and student solutions, nor any correlation between the individual student solutions, proving the null hypothesis. This result demonstrates that these tools are not useful for the development of automated assessment within the VLE, and the authors are now giving consideration to the use of lexical analysis/tokenizer and other tools. However, it also suggests that these text-analytic plagiarism tools are too firmly focused on direct copy, which does raise the question of whether or not they offer enough richness and fuzziness to detect a sophisticated plagiarism attempt using, for example, text replacement tools. An ongoing close relationship between research in automated assessment and plagiarism detection is also proposed, to achieve mutual benefit