Exploring the virtual classroom: What students need to know (and teachers should consider)

Technological improvements in many countries have meant that institutions offering distance education programmes now have more options available to them to communicate and interact with their students, and increasingly, attention is being turned to the potential of Web2 technologies to facilitate synchronous interaction. This study explores the affordances and limitations of an online virtual classroom, Adobe Connect Pro, when used in the learning programmes of two groups of undergraduate and postgraduate education students. Results indicate that while both groups gained value from using the classroom, they also found it a completely new environment, and one to which many had trouble transferring the interaction and communication skills developed in other contexts. The reasons for this related to three specific areas of knowledge – technical, procedural and operational, that were identified as being critical to student performance in this environment. The study suggests that educators and course designers need to embed strategies into their online offerings to enable students to develop these, if they are to gain substantial benefit from the availability of virtual classrooms. Additionally, the study identified that when making design decisions about online learning environments, it is very much a matter of horses for courses when selecting tools for specific purposes. While the virtual classroom proved useful for developing social connection and a sense of community, it may not be so beneficial for supporting deeper learning

CONTEXT-APPROPRIATE IMPLEMENTATION OF BLENDED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN WESTERN BALKANS

This paper discusses the challenges of context-appropriate implementation of blended learning in contemporary higher education. The faculty analyzed is of economics and management. Having in consideration that the 21st century professors are facing a continuous challenge to co-create a learner-friendly class environment, and maximize the educational outcomes, special attention has been paid to the blend composed for contemporary teaching, learning and communication; accompanied by existing ICT disruptive technologies and E-learning platforms, combined with the traditional educational processes and vehicles. Crucial challenge in this context is designing the optimal mix of applicable disruptive technologies, having in mind constricted funding, high competitiveness in the higher education, specific student profile etc. The blended learning ‘mashup’ investigated from theoretical and practical point of view has been sustainably implemented in a Western Balkan’s higher education institution for several academic years. Some key findings and lessons learned in this context are presented further in the paper

FinLLMs: A Framework for Financial Reasoning Dataset Generation with Large Language Models

Large Language models (LLMs) usually rely on extensive training datasets. In the financial domain, creating numerical reasoning datasets that include a mix of tables and long text often involves substantial manual annotation expenses. To address the limited data resources and reduce the annotation cost, we introduce FinLLMs, a method for generating financial question-answering data based on common financial formulas using Large Language Models. First, we compile a list of common financial formulas and construct a graph based on the variables these formulas employ. We then augment the formula set by combining those that share identical variables as new elements. Specifically, we explore formulas obtained by manual annotation and merge those formulas with shared variables by traversing the constructed graph. Finally, utilizing GPT-3.5, we generate financial question-answering data that encompasses both tabular information and long textual content, building on the collected formula set. Our experiments demonstrate that synthetic data generated by FinLLMs effectively enhances the performance of several large-scale numerical reasoning models in the financial domain, outperforming two established benchmark financial question-answering datasets.Comment: Under submission of IEEE Transaction

Issues and considerations regarding sharable data sets for recommender systems in technology enhanced learning

Drachsler, H., Bogers, T., Vuorikari, R., Verbert, K., Duval, E., Manouselis, N., Beham, G., Lindstaedt, S., Stern, H., Friedrich, M., & Wolpers, M. (2010, 28 September). Issues and Considerations regarding Sharable Data Sets for Recommender Systems in Technology Enhanced Learning. Presentation at the 1st Workshop Recommender Systems in Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL) in conjunction with 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010): Sustaining TEL: From Innovation to Learning and Practice, Barcelona, Spain.The presentation is based on the positioning paper of the dataTEL Theme Team of the STELLAR Network of Excellence (http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/groups/9405/datatel/) that addresses the lack of educational data sets in TEL and present ideas to overcome this situation. The accompanying paper: Issues and Considerations regarding Sharable Data Sets for Recommender Systems in Technology Enhanced Learning, can be found at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770509 and a pre-print is available in our Dspace repository and at scribd. The presentation starts with a description of the current situation where almost none educational data sets are publicly available. This is a strange situation as plenty of data is saved on a daily base in LMS like Moodle, Blackboard. In other domains like e-commerce it is a common practice to use publicly available data sets from different application environments (e.g. Yahoo, MovieLens) in order to evaluate algorithms and create new data products. These data sets are for instance used as benchmarks to develop new recommendation algorithms and compare them to other algorithms in certain settings. Recommender systems are also increasingly applied in Technology Enhanced Learning field but it is still an application area that lacks such publicly available data sets. Although there is a lot of research conducted on recommender systems in TEL, they lack data sets that would allow the experimental evaluation of the performance of different recommendation algorithms using comparable, interoperable, and reusable data sets. This leads to awkward experimentation and testing such as using data sets from movies in order to evaluate educational recommendation algorithms.Stella

Formative evaluation and learning analytics for agile teaching

The agile manifesto provides a framework for software development in which customer comes first. Here we will describe a teaching experience based on agile principles that puts students at the center of a strategy that, through the use of fit learning analytics, is able to optimize the potential of a class and its individual students. We used project-based learning and formative evaluation as agile teaching best practices, evaluating student progress based on learning objectives submitted and evaluated asynchronously. The time when every objective is submitted and the time taken to pass it are the essential data points that will be leveraged to evaluate class progress, and the impact of specific measures taken to improve it, in-class or from one course to the next. Measures taken through three years with the same methodology prove that agile teaching can work, but it needs measurements for diagnosis and subsequent interventions to reach its full potential

Pemetaan Fungsi Platforn E-Portofolio Untuk Perkuliahan di Jurusan Kurikulum dan Teknologi Pendikan Fakultas llmu Pendidikan Universitas Negeri Jakarta

he purpose of this study is the to Mapping the three characteristic of the e- portfolios platform. This research was conducted by the design and development research method by using two methodologies: (1)Tool Use, (2) Model Development. This study collecting various types of platforms specialized to the development e- portfolios and will do a mapping of the function of the platform that has been ellected. To achieve the goal the first year will be used Expert Reviews surveys method The experts will give ratings to the three pieces of E-portfolio Platform installedin www.eportofolio.ac.id, namely Elgg, Moodle and Mahara. Based on these results, the researchers conclude Mahara Platform is the appropriate platform to be used in the learning process. It is supported ratings obtained from the experts

Question Generation for French: Collating Parsers and Paraphrasing Questions

This article describes a question generation system for French. The transformation of declarative sentences into questions relies on two different syntactic parsers and named entity recognition tools. This makes it possible to further diversify the questions generated and to possibly alleviate the problems inherent to the analysis tools. The system also generates reformulations for the questions based on variations in the question words, inducing answers with different granularities, and nominalisations of action verbs. We evaluate the questions generated for sentences extracted from two different corpora: a corpus of newspaper articles used for the CLEF Question Answering evaluation campaign and a corpus of simplified online encyclopedia articles. The evaluation shows that the system is able to generate a majority of good and medium quality questions. We also present an original evaluation of the question generation system using the question analysis module of a question answering system

Building and exploiting context on the web

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New concepts integration on e-learning platforms

The learning experience has evolved into the virtual world of the Internet, where learners have the possibility to shift from face-to-face learning environments to virtual learning environments supported by technologies. This concept, called e-learning, emerged in the early 1960s where a group of researchers from the Stanford University, USA began experimenting different ways to publish and assign learning content using a computer. These experiments were the beginning that led to the creation of countless learning platforms, initially constructed in standalone environments and later ported to the Internet as Webbased learning platforms. As initial objectives, these learning platforms include a collection of features to support instructors and learners in the learning process. However, some of these platforms continued to be based on an old instructor-centered learning model and created a collection of outdated technologies that, given the current need to a learner-center learning model and the existence of Web 2.0 technologies, become inadequate. As a solution to address and overcome these challenges, a friendly user interface and a correct root incorporation of Web 2.0 services a platform designed to focus the learning experience and environment personalization into the learner is needed to propose. In an operating system (OS) context the graphic user interface (GUI) is guided by a collection of approaches that details how human beings should interact with computers. These are the key ideas to customize, install, and organize virtual desktops. The combination of desktop concepts into a learning platform can be an asset to reduce the learning curve necessary to know how to use the system and also to create a group of flexible learning services. However, due to limitations in hypertext transfer protocol-hypertext markup language (HTTP-HTML) traditional solutions, to shift traditional technologies to a collection of rich Internet application (RIA) technologies and personal learning environments (PLEs) concepts is needed, in order to construct a desktop-like learning platform. RIA technologies will allow the design of powerful Web solutions containing many of the characteristics of desktop-like applications. Additionally, personal learning environments (PLEs) will help learners to manage learning contents. In this dissertation the personal learning environment box (PLEBOX) is presented. The PLEBOX platform is a customizable, desktop-like platform similar to the available operating systems, based on personal learning environments concepts and rich Internet applications technologies that provide a better learning environment for users. PLEBOX developers have a set of tools that allow the creation of learning and management modules that can be installed on the platform. These tools are management learning components and interfaces built as APIs, services, and objects of the software development kit (SDK). A group of prototype modules were build for evaluation of learning and management services, APIs, and SDKs. Furthermore, three case studies were created in order to evaluate and demonstrate the learning service usage in external environments. The PLEBOX deployment and corresponding features confirms that this platform can be seen as a very promising e-learning platform. Exhaustive experiments were driven with success and it is ready for use.A experiência de aprendizagem baseada em tecnologias evoluiu para o mundo virtual da Internet, onde os alunos têm a possibilidade de mudar uma aprendizagem presencial em sala de aula para uma aprendizagem baseada em ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem suportados por tecnologias. O conceito de e-learning surgiu nos anos sessenta (1960) quando um grupo de investigadores da Universidade de Standford, nos Estados Unidos, começaram a experimentar diferentes formas de publicar e atribuir conteúdos de aprendizagem através do computador. Estas experiências marcaram o começo que levou à criação de inúmeras plataformas de aprendizagem, inicialmente construídas em ambientes isolados e depois migradas para a Internet como plataformas de aprendizagem baseadas na Web. Como objectivos inicias, estas plataformas de aprendizagem incluem um conjunto de recursos para apoiar professores e alunos no processo de aprendizagem. No entanto, algumas destas plataformas continuam a ser baseadas em velhos modelos de aprendizagem centrados no professor, criadas com base em tecnologias ultrapassadas que, dadas as necessidades actuais de um modelo de aprendizagem centrado no aluno e da existência de tecnologias baseadas na Web 2.0, se tornaram inadequadas. Como abordagem para enfrentar e superar estes desafios propõem-se uma plataforma focada na personalização do ambiente de aprendizagem do aluno, composta por uma interface amigável e uma correcta incorporação de raiz de serviços da Web 2.0. No contexto dos sistemas operativos (SOs) o graphic user interface (GUI) é desenhado tendo em conta um conjunto de abordagens que detalha como as pessoas devem interagir com os computadores. Estas são as ideias chave para personalizar, instalar e organizar áreas de trabalho virtuais. A combinação do conceito desktop com uma plataforma de aprendizagem pode ser um trunfo para reduzir a curva de aprendizagem necessária para saber como utilizar o sistema e também para criar um grupo de serviços flexíveis de aprendizagem. No entanto, devido as limitações em soluções tradicionais hypertext transfer protocol - hypertext markup language (HTTP - HTML), é necessário migrar estas tecnologias para um grupo de tecnologias rich Internet application (RIA) e conceitos presentes em ambientes personalizados de aprendizagem (personal learning environment - PLE) para construir uma plataforma baseada em ambientes de trabalho virtuais de aprendizagem. As tecnologias RIA irão permitir a criação de soluções Web poderosas que contêm muitas das características disponíveis em aplicações desktop. Adicionalmente, o conceitos de PLE irá ajudar os alunos a gerir os seus próprios conteúdos de aprendizagem. Nesta dissertação, com base nas características apresentadas anteriormente, é apresentada a personal learning environment box (PLEBOX). A plataforma PLEBOX é uma solução de aprendizagem parametrizável com um ambiente de trabalho semelhante aos sistemas operativos actuais, baseando-se em personal learning environments e tecnologias RIA que fornecem um melhor ambiente de aprendizagem para os seus utilizadores. Os programadores da PLEBOX têm ao seu dispor um conjunto de ferramentas que permitem a criação de módulos de aprendizagem e administração que podem ser instalados na plataforma. Estas ferramentas são componentes de aprendizagem e interfaces construídos como APIs, serviços e objectos do software development kit (SDK). Foi construído um conjunto de módulos com o objectivo de avaliar e demonstrar os serviços de aprendizagem, os serviços de gestão, APIs e SDKs. Para além disso, foram criados três casos de estudo para avaliar e demonstrar a utilização dos serviços de aprendizagem em ambientes externos. O desenvolvimento efectuado até ao momento na PLEBOX e respectivos recursos confirma que esta plataforma pode ser vista com uma promissora plataforma de aprendizagem (e-learning), totalmente modular e adaptativa. Realizaram-se experiências exaustivas para testar a plataforma e estas foram realizadas com sucesso num ambiente real, estando assim a plataforma pronta para exploração real