The Impact Of Changing Technology: The Case Of E-Learning

For centuries, education has relied on classroom methods, but technology-enhanced learning can potentially bring about a revolution in learning, making high-quality, cost-effective education available to a greater number of people. The basic advantages of e-learning include anytime-anywhere access to learning, cost reductions, ability to reach larger markets, more effective learning with personalized instructions, and flexibility. For the full potential of e-learning to be realized, however, the content, services, and systems from different suppliers all need to work together. This paper provides an overview of the benefits and limitations of e-learning as well as its cost-effectiveness. The continual advances in information technology as well as software-based training and education are rapidly offering a cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional face-to-face learning. With the introduction of e-learning, students are empowered to embark on active, independent learning. They can access course information and perform research with the help of this virtual space provided using the Internet. Consistency, fast deployment, and simple evaluation are all attractive features of e-learning, but the most compelling reason to consider the introduction of e-learning may be the significant reduction in costs associated with education. Once developed, the online guidance component can be used many times with minimal costs. Students can also go through the training process repeatedly to ensure maximum effective learning

Sustainable Higher Education Development through Technology Enhanced Learning

[EN] Higher education is incorporating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at a fast rate for different purposes. Scientific papers include within the concept of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) the myriad applications of information and communication technology, e-resources, and pedagogical approaches to the development of education. TEL¿s specific application to higher education is especially relevant for countries under rapid development for providing quick and sustainable access to quality education (UN sustainable development goal 4). This paper presents the research results of an online pedagogical experience in collaborative academic research for analyzing good practice in TEL-supported higher education development. The results are obtained through a pilot implementation providing curated data on TEL competency¿s development of faculty skills and analysis of developing sustainable higher education degrees through TEL cooperation, for capacity building. Given the increased volume and complexity of the knowledge to be delivered, and the exponential growth of the need for skilled workers in emerging economies, online training is the most effective way of delivering a sustainable higher education. The results of the PETRA Erasmus+ capacity-building project provides evidence of a successful implementation of a TEL-supported methodology for collaborative faculty development focused on future online degrees built collaboratively and applied locally.This research was co-funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus+ KA2 project "Promoting Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Azerbaijani Universities (PETRA)" project number 573630-EPP-1-2016-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP.Orozco-Messana, J.; Martínez-Rubio, J.; Gonzálvez-Pons, AM. (2020). Sustainable Higher Education Development through Technology Enhanced Learning. Sustainability. 12(9):1-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093600S113129Abdullah, F., & Ward, R. (2016). Developing a General Extended Technology Acceptance Model for E-Learning (GETAMEL) by analysing commonly used external factors. Computers in Human Behavior, 56, 238-256. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.036Becker, H. J., & Ravitz, J. (1999). The Influence of Computer and Internet Use on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Perceptions. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 31(4), 356-384. doi:10.1080/08886504.1999.10782260Mumford, S., & Dikilitaş, K. (2020). Pre-service language teachers reflection development through online interaction in a hybrid learning course. Computers & Education, 144, 103706. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103706Lee, D., Watson, S. L., & Watson, W. R. (2020). The Relationships Between Self-Efficacy, Task Value, and Self-Regulated Learning Strategies in Massive Open Online Courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 23-39. doi:10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4389Passey, D. (2019). Technology‐enhanced learning: Rethinking the term, the concept and its theoretical background. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(3), 972-986. doi:10.1111/bjet.12783Lai, Y.-C., & Peng, L.-H. (2019). Effective Teaching and Activities of Excellent Teachers for the Sustainable Development of Higher Design Education. Sustainability, 12(1), 28. doi:10.3390/su12010028Lee, S., Lee, H., & Kim, T. (2018). A Study on the Instructor Role in Dealing with Mixed Contents: How It Affects Learner Satisfaction and Retention in e-Learning. Sustainability, 10(3), 850. doi:10.3390/su10030850“Continuous Improvement in Teaching Strategies through Lean Principles”. Teaching & Learning Symposium, University of Southern Indiana http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12419/455The DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems Success: A Ten-Year Update. (2003). Journal of Management Information Systems, 19(4), 9-30. doi:10.1080/07421222.2003.11045748Goodman, J., Melkers, J., & Pallais, A. (2019). Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education? Journal of Labor Economics, 37(1), 1-34. doi:10.1086/698895Alexander, J., Barcellona, M., McLachlan, S., & Sackley, C. (2019). Technology-enhanced learning in physiotherapy education: Student satisfaction and knowledge acquisition of entry-level students in the United Kingdom. Research in Learning Technology, 27(0). doi:10.25304/rlt.v27.2073How Can Adaptive Platforms Improve Student Learning Outcomes? A Case Study of Open Educational Resources and Adaptive Learning Platforms https://ssrn.com/abstract=3478134Sun, A., & Chen, X. (2016). Online Education and Its Effective Practice: A Research Review. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 15, 157-190. doi:10.28945/3502EU Commission https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/digital-education-action-plan_enEssence Project https://husite.nl/essence/Orozco-Messana, J., de la Poza-Plaza, E., & Calabuig-Moreno, R. (2020). Experiences in Transdisciplinary Education for the Sustainable Development of the Built Environment, the ISAlab Workshop. Sustainability, 12(3), 1143. doi:10.3390/su12031143Kurilovas, E., & Kubilinskiene, S. (2020). Lithuanian case study on evaluating suitability, acceptance and use of IT tools by students – An example of applying Technology Enhanced Learning Research methods in Higher Education. Computers in Human Behavior, 107, 106274. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2020.10627

Emerging Learning Perspectives: Technology as the driving force

The great advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have made it possible for individuals to live, learn, work, communicate and undertake leisure activities in a different and better way. In addition, the current world order requires quality systems which are efficient, accurate, and fast for operation and service delivery. For this reason, technologies and especially the ICTs open up new horizons that provide avenues and strategies leading to the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. In education, some of the emerging perspectives considered in the paper include: the changing learning environments, learner profiles, and roles of the teacher; adoption and integration of educational technologies; emphasis on quality; and the institutional ranking systems. Technology isbeing used to enhance learning as well as facilitate teaching in the classroom and virtually at a distance across all disciplines and levels. The impact of technology on the quality of education delivery has been tremendous. The development of self -learning instructional materials and use of learner/content management systems through blended and e-learning have enhanced the quality, structure, delivery, monitoring, evaluation, flexibility and access to content. By levering into the multiple technological tools that are available for teaching and learning today, we are better equipped to enhance learning and teaching at the same time. However, despite the positive impact, there are issues and challenges which must be addressed, ranging from costs associated with development and maintenance of infrastructure, sustainability especially with the high rate of obsolescence and training of staff to acquire the appropriate skills, to changing the mind-set of those responsible for the provision of education to accommodate and appropriately invest in emerging trends. Examples used in the paper are drawn mainly from our experiences through interactions with colleagues from different institutions and within our work environments. Key words:Education technology, Quality, Emerging perspective

Information Access Using Neural Networks For Diverse Domains And Sources

The ever-increasing volume of web-based documents poses a challenge in efficiently accessing specialized knowledge from domain-specific sources, requiring a profound understanding of the domain and substantial comprehension effort. Although natural language technologies, such as information retrieval and machine reading compression systems, offer rapid and accurate information retrieval, their performance in specific domains is hindered by training on general domain datasets. Creating domain-specific training datasets, while effective, is time-consuming, expensive, and heavily reliant on domain experts. This thesis presents a comprehensive exploration of efficient technologies to address the challenge of information access in specific domains, focusing on retrieval-based systems encompassing question answering and ranking. We begin with a comprehensive introduction to the information access system. We demonstrated the structure of a information access system through a typical open-domain question-answering task. We outline its two major components: retrieval and reader models, and the design choice for each part. We focus on mainly three points: 1) the design choice of the connection of the two components. 2) the trade-off associated with the retrieval model and the best frontier in practice. 3) a data augmentation method to adapt the reader model, trained initially on closed-domain datasets, to effectively answer questions in the retrieval-based setting. Subsequently, we discuss various methods enabling system adaptation to specific domains. Transfer learning techniques are presented, including generation as data augmentation, further pre-training, and progressive domain-clustered training. We also present a novel zero-shot re-ranking method inspired by the compression-based distance. We summarize the conclusions and findings gathered from the experiments. Moreover, the exploration extends to retrieval-based systems beyond textual corpora. We explored the search system for an e-commerce database, wherein natural language queries are combined with user preference data to facilitate the retrieval of relevant products. To address the challenges, including noisy labels and cold start problems, for the retrieval-based e-commerce ranking system, we enhanced model training through cascaded training and adversarial sample weighting. Another scenario we investigated is the search system in the math domain, characterized by the unique role of formulas and distinct features compared to textual searches. We tackle the math related search problem by combining neural ranking models with structual optimized algorithms. Finally, we summarize the research findings and future research directions

Academic staff development in the area of technology enhanced learning in the UK HEIs

This paper reports on a study on staff development in the area of technology enhanced learning in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that took place in November 2011. Data for this study were gathered via an online survey emailed to the Heads of e-Learning Forum (HeLF) which is a network comprised of one senior member of staff per UK institution leading the enhancement of learning and teaching through the use of technology. Prior to the survey, desk-based research on some universities’ publicly available websites gathered similar information about staff development in the area of technology enhanced learning. The online survey received 27 responses, approaching a quarter of all UK HEIs subscribed to the Heads of e-Learning forum list (118 is the total number). Both pre-1992 (16 in number) and post-1992 Universities (11 in number) were represented in the survey and findings indicate the way this sample UK HEIs are approaching staff development in the area of TEL. The survey’s main research question was ‘what provision do UK HEIs make for academic staff development in the area of technology enhanced learning’. Twelve questions, both closed and open-ended, were devised in order to gather enough information about how staff development needs in the area of technology enhanced learning are addressed by different UK institutions. Following the justification of the adopted research methodology, the findings from the online survey are analyzed and discussed and conclusions are drawn

Using ODL and ICT to develop the skills of the unreached: a contribution to the ADEA triennial of the Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning

Innovation in technology is occurring at rapid pace thus shrinking the distances and making information and knowledge more than ever accessible to everyone irrespective of where the person resides. This paper consists of four main articles. The first one deals with technological trends. The second one focuses on the deployment and use of open and distance education mode in rural areas by documenting initiatives that embrace information and communication technologies (ICTs). Due to challenges faced in rural areas only a few success stories/cases currently exist and some of these are cited in this article. The challenges faced in the deployment of ICT enhanced ODL have been highlighted as well as the potential of developing and delivering effective and relevant ODL programmes in rural areas in order to ensure that issues of educational equity and social exclusion rural communities are adequately addressed. ICTs in ODL are perhaps the greatest tool to date for self-education and value addition to any community’s development efforts, yet poor rural communities particularly in Africa do not have the necessary awareness, skills or facilities to enable themselves to develop using ICTs. Inadequate ICT infrastructures in rural areas remain a major source for the digital divide in Africa and for under-performance of distance learners. The third one analyses the support provided to ODL learners who often encounter difficulties in completing their studies through the distance education mode due to loneliness, uncertainties and de-motivation. ICT has not been able to sufficiently support distance learners in overcoming those obstacles efficiently. An investigation regarding those learning supports has been conducted in ten distance learning institutions, along with an intensive literature review with the aim of understanding the high percentage of dropout rates of distant learners. The learners’ interactions have been scrutinized through content analysis of their synchronous exchanges, during a completely online course. After taking into account the limited technical and human resources in Africa, a technological virtual environment along with a pedagogical framework has been proposed with the aim of giving adequate educational support to them. The fourth article has explored The Open University (UK) and its efforts to use new technologies to deliver online courses to difficult-to- reach learners in prison environments. The case study analysed here is an international course (called, B201- Business Organisations and their environments) which also touches an African cohort of learners. The implications for designing and delivering online ODL to the complex unreachable environments of prisons anywhere, and particularly in Africa, have been discussed

The future of technology enhanced active learning – a roadmap

The notion of active learning refers to the active involvement of learner in the learning process, capturing ideas of learning-by-doing and the fact that active participation and knowledge construction leads to deeper and more sustained learning. Interactivity, in particular learnercontent interaction, is a central aspect of technology-enhanced active learning. In this roadmap, the pedagogical background is discussed, the essential dimensions of technology-enhanced active learning systems are outlined and the factors that are expected to influence these systems currently and in the future are identified. A central aim is to address this promising field from a best practices perspective, clarifying central issues and formulating an agenda for future developments in the form of a roadmap

Technology-enhanced Personalised Learning: Untangling the Evidence

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the practical implementation actually works: Even in countries such as the U.S., which lead the way in using techology in classroom settings, hardly any evaluation studies have been done to prove the effectiveness of technology-enhanced personalised learning. In the light of the above, the authors make recommendations for actions to be taken in Germany to make best use of the potential of technology in providing individual support and guidance to students

School use of learning platforms and associated technologies

Study of benefits and effective use of learning platforms in schools based on 12 case studie

Final report of work-with-IT: the JISC study into evolution of working practices

Technology is increasingly being used to underpin business processes across teaching and learning, research, knowledge exchange and business support activities in both HE and FE. The introduction of technology has a significant impact on the working practices of staff, often requiring them to work in a radically different way. Change in any situation can be unsettling and problematic and, where not effectively managed, can lead to poor service or functionality and disenfranchised staff. These issues can have a direct impact on institutional effectiveness, reputation and the resulting student experience. The Work-with-IT project, based at the University of Strathclyde, sought to examine changes to working practices across HE and FE, the impact on staff roles and relationships and the new skills sets that are required to meet these changes