Empathic mediators for distance learning courses

Conferência Internacional realizada em Lisboa de 15-16 de novembro de 2018.Online distance learning introduces several challenges, such as the dependence of online tools, the asynchronous communication between teachers and students, and the lack of synchronous social engagement level that inclassroom teaching can leverage. The existence of an online tutor 24 hours/day would be an interesting asset to potentially work as an additional learning support tool. The Virtual Tutoring project aims at the development of solutions involving anthropomorphic 3D avatars that work as both virtual online tutors in the Moodle e-learning platform as well as coaches in a mobile application that interact empathically with the students by predicting their emotional state and selecting appropriate emotion regulation strategies. This paper presents the current status of the project, preliminary evaluations with students, and future developments.This work was developed in the context of the FCT project PTDC/IVC-PEC/3963/2014 with the support of the R&D units of his authors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Social e-learning in topolor : a case study

Social e-learning is a process through which learners achieve their learning goals via social interactions with each other by sharing knowledge, skills, abilities and educational materials. Adaptive e-learning enables adaptation and personalization of the learning process, based on learner needs, knowledge, preferences and other characteristics. In this paper, we present a case study that analyzes the social interaction features of a social personalized adaptive e-learning system developed at the University of Warwick, called Topolor. We discuss the results of a quantitative case study that evaluates the perceived usefulness and usability. The results demonstrate a generally high level of learner satisfaction with their learning experience. We extend the discussion of the results to explore future research directions and suggest further improvements for the studied social personalized adaptive e-learning system

Online IS Education for the 21st Century

Online teaching and learning have become increasingly common in higher educational institutions. These higher educational institutions realize the growing importance of online learning in information systems/information technology (IS/IT) education and are now offering online IS/IT courses and programs to students. However, designing, developing, teaching, and assessing an online IS/IT course effectively is often a challenge. Many IS/IT instructors are new to online teaching and need orientation and training for their own readiness in designing, developing, teaching, and assessing IS/IT courses in the online environment. It is recognized that effective faculty are key to student success in online courses and to the success of online programs (Meyer and Jones, 2012). Therefore, it is imperative that administrators and instructors of IS/IT courses and programs learn more of the best practices of online teaching for high student success. This support to instructors and administrators is the purpose of the Special Issue of the Journal of Information Systems Education

Creating and collaborating: students’ and tutors’ perceptions of an online group project

Although collaboration skills are highly valued by employers, convincing students that collaborative learning activities are worthwhile, and ensuring that the experience is both useful and enjoyable, are significant challenges for educators. This paper addresses these challenges by exploring students’ and tutors’ experiences of a group project where part-time distance learners collaborate online to create a website. Focus groups were conducted with students who had recently completed the project, and discussion forums were used to gather feedback from tutors who supported students and marked their group work. The research showed that students’ attitudes towards the group project on completion were generally favourable. Findings highlighted key aspects for successful online group projects and for motivating students to participate fully. These included: the design of authentic tasks, with skills development relevant to the workplace; careful attention to how the group work is assessed; and enabling students to develop websites they could be proud of. Frustrations for students were associated with the lack of engagement of fellow students and with limitations of the tool provided for building the website. Tutors found marking the work a time-consuming and complex process. Tutors were also unconvinced of the value and fairness of assessing students partly on a group, as opposed to an individual, basis

A social personalized adaptive e-learning environment : a case study in Topolor

Adaptive e-Learning is a process where learning contents are delivered to learners adaptively, namely, the appropriate contents are delivered to the learners in an appropriate way at an appropriate time based on the learners’ needs, knowledge, preferences and other characteristics. Social e-Learning is a process where connections are made among like-minded learners, so they can achieve learning goals via communication and interaction with each other by sharing knowledge, skills, abilities and materials. This paper reports an extended case study that investigated the influence of social interactions in an adaptive e-Learning environment, by analyzing the usage of social interaction features of a Social Personalized Adaptive E-Learning Environment (SPAEE), named Topolor, which strives to combine the advantages from both social e-Learning and adaptive e-Learning. We present the results of a quantitative case study that evaluates the perceived usefulness and ease of use. The results indicated high satisfaction from the students who were using Topolor for their study and helped us with the evaluation processes. Based on the results, we discuss the follow-up work plan for the further improvements for Topolor

Learners on the periphery: lurkers as invisible learners

Lurkers, who are also known as silent learners, observers, browsers, read-only participants, vicarious learners, free-riders, witness learners, or legitimate peripheral participants (our preferred term), tend to be hard to track in a course because of their near invisibility. We decided to address this issue and to examine the perceptions that lurkers have of their behaviour by looking at one specific online learning course: CLMOOC. In order to do this, we used a mixed methods approach and collected our data via social network analysis, online questionnaires, and observations, including definitions from the lurkers of what they thought lurking was. We then analysed the data by using social network and content analyses and interpreted the research findings using the concept Community of Practice, with the Pareto Principle used to delimit types of learner. Our research findings revealed that lurking is a complex behaviour, or set of behaviours, and there isn’t one sole reason why lurkers act the ways that they do in their respective communities. We concluded that for a more participatory community the more active, experienced or visible community members could develop strategies to encourage lurkers to become more active and to make the journey from the periphery to the core of the community

Blogs: A tool to facilitate reflection and community of practice in sports coaching?

A reflective approach to practice is consistently espoused as a key tool for understanding and enhancing coach learning and raising the vocational standards of coaches. As such, there is a clear need for practical tools and processes that might facilitate the development and measurement of “appropriate” reflective skills. The aim of this preliminary study was to explore the use of online blogs as a tool to support reflection and community of practice in a cohort of undergraduate sports coaching students. Twenty-six students (6 females, 20 males) reflected on their coaching practice via blogs created specifically for reflection. Blogs were subjected to category and content analysis to identify the focus of entries and to determine both the emergent reflective quality of posts and the extent to which an online community of practice emerged. Findings revealed that descriptive reflection exceeded that of a critical nature, however, bloggers exhibited a positive trajectory toward higher order thinking and blogs were an effective platform for supporting tutor-student interaction. Despite the peer discourse features of blogs, collaborative reflection was conspicuous by its absence and an online community of practice did not emerge

Giving voice to students and teacher: Uncovering collaboration difficulties and coping strategies in asynchronous online discussion

Asynchronous online discussions such as forums, social networking sites and wikis have been widely used in various educational institutions. Some even utilise asynchronous online discussion as assessment of coursework. It is indicated in numerous studies that asynchronous online discussion can improve student-student or student-teacher interactions in ESL learning. Nevertheless, little attention is paid to the voices of the participants. Using narratives, this paper explores students' and teacher's collaboration difficulties and coping strategies in asynchronous online discussion. Participants include a university lecturer who teaches English for Specific Academic Purposes and three undergraduate students who major in Accounting, Finance and Business Studies, ranging from intermediate to advanced proficiency in English. The subjects took part in asynchronous online discussion for four weeks. Focus group interview and one on one interview were conducted. The narratives have implications for the design and implementation of asynchronous online discussion in ESL classroom

Evaluating students pattern of interaction in online courses

The primary focus in the research of online learning is interaction, which is central to an educational experience (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005). Although interaction alone does not represent participation (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000), however interaction could promote participation and engage students in learning (Hrastinski, 2009). Researchers have widely agreed that in an e-learning environment, students could learn better by participating (Hrastinski, 2009). As distinguished by Moore (1989) that there are three dimensions of interaction in an e-learning environment: learner-instructor, learner-content and learner-learner. It has been suggested that participation of a student can be measured by accumulating the interactions that occurred in an e-learning forum (Davies & Graff, 2005; Lipponen et al., 2003). One of the key challenges in e-learning is to encourage participation (Bento & Schuster, 2003), which means that students need to be encouraged to interact online. By participating, students will find themselves taking part in the learning process. Vonderwell and Zachariah (2005) noted that through interactions, students will become interdependent, able to share learning goals and information, creating path towards effective learning. Previous research had indicated that participation when measured as interaction with peers and instructors, stimulated and encouraged perceived learning (Hrastinski, 2008)

ONLINE WRITELOGUE EFFECTIVENESS IN THE STUDENTS’ MASTERY OF THE REDUCED RELATIVE CLAUSES

In this pandemic Covid-19 situation, all teaching learning activities are done online from the elementary school up to the universities. What the writers would do is actually implementing a blended learning, but Covid19 makes it impossible so that it is done fully online. Thus, this study would find out that the full-online platform writelogue with its module can improve the students’ ability in using the reduced relative clauses. This module in which the students learn the NP pattern ‘HN (Head Noun) + reduced relative clauses’ is one of a number of NP patterns in the writers’ multi-year research. Using the accessibility of the Learning Manangement System, the writelogue, the students did the pre-test, the exercises and the post-test. Besides, they filled out the questionnaire concerning the usability of the writelogue in terms of language, exercises, tutorial video, and technical operation. The results show that the online writelogue course enhances the pre-test scores of the students in their post-test result, and the students find the benefits of the writelogue course to their learning the reduced relative clause on line