38,511 research outputs found
Assessment of online reflections: engaging english second language (ESL) students
Online discussion boards are increasingly being used by tertiary educators as a tool for encouraging greater student interaction and developing learning communities. In particular, educators who have adopted a learner-centered, socio-constructivist approach to teaching have sought to facilitate collaborative learning in which students reflect upon and share their experiences and perspectives, and construct knowledge together through developing shared meanings. In this paper, the findings of an electronic survey of the perceptions of 70 distance education EFL and ESL students concerning a compulsory assessment item involving contribution to an online course discussion board are presented. The study revealed that the majority of the students enjoyed the assessment item and agreed that posting to the online course discussion board had allowed them to achieve a range of cognitive and social learning outcomes, as well as, to develop some important graduate skills. In particular, ESL students reported the benefits of posting to the discussion board in terms of sharing their experiences with others and reducing the feeling of isolation. Further, when considering social outcomes, ESL students perceive the discussion board provided them with an opportunity to meet and develop a closer relationship with other students in the course and encouraged them to keep up with their studies
Use and perceptions of second life by distance learners: comparison with other communication media
Research has demonstrated that the use of communication media in distance education can reduce the feeling of distance and isolation from peers and tutor, and provide opportunities for collaborative learning activities (Bates, 2005). The use of virtual worlds (VW) in education has increased in recent years, with Second Life (SL) being the most commonly used VW in higher educationĀ (Wang & Burton, 2012). There is a paucity of information available on studentsā use and perceptions of SL in relation to other online communication media available to the distance learner. Consequently, in the study described here, this area was explored with a group of students registered in a part-time distance education Masterās program at a large UK University open to international students. A self-completion survey was designed to assess studentsā use and perceptions of using SL compared with other communication media. The majority of students rated SL lower than other forms of communications media such as email, WebCT discussion boards, Skype, and Wimba for facilitating communication, promoting the formation of social networks, fostering a sense of community, and benefiting their learning.Ā It is possible that the results of this study were influenced by the lower frequency of use of SL in this program compared to other work reported on this subject. Further work is required to evaluate the effect of frequency of use of SL and availability of alternative communication media on studentsā use and perceptions of this virtual world
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Postgraduate blogs: beyond the ordinary research journal
The study described in this paper investigated ways in which keeping a research journal as a blog rather than as a paper document influenced the postgraduate student research experience. Four blogs (three individual and one collaborative blog) initiated by three research students were used as the corpus of data. The three individual blogs acted as alternatives to the traditional research journal. The analysis indicated that blogs can promote a community where students are encouraged to reflect and share ideas, skills and research life idiosyncrasies. Blogs also acted as memory repositories and encouraged collaboration amongst the research students
Politeness and face in digitally reconfigured e-learning spaces
This paper has two starting points. The first is a theorization about the way in which ārhetorical spaceā is reshaped in asynchronous, online, learning environments. In particular, an asynchronous bulletin- board (ABB) discussion offers both opportunities and constraints for teaching and learning. The learning that occurs will be affected by the affordances implicit in the design of the conversational space itself and the communicative practices engaged in by both teachers and students. The second starting point is a small case study, utilizing action research and discourse analytical strategies, whose research participants were the author and students involved in ādeliveringā and āreceivingā an online education course at post-graduate level using asynchronous discussion. The course, taught in English, had a mix of Chinese students (for whom English was an additional language) and native English speakers. The paper will report on studentsā perceptions of what worked for them and what didnāt in respect of this elearning environment. It will also use concepts such as politeness, face and positioning to analyse aspects of the participantsā communicative practices and will draw conclusions from these in respect of how successful learning can occur in elearning environments with multicultural and multilingual students. It will make connections between the findings of this case study and other research on asynchronous, web-based learning and will makes some suggestions about what is needed in respect of the future research agenda
5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity
LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to
wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single
cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a
single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging
trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of
machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind
are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism.
2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage
(CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous
following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be
spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of
strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and
the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to
deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported
by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design
targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the
obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will
develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming
needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups.
Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better
suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission
setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The
integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network
will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To
ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems
for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring
Cognitive and Social Help Giving in Online Teaching: An Exploratory Study
While literature suggests that college students may be less reluctant to seek help in online rather than traditional courses, little is known about how online instructors give help in ways that lead to increased student help seeking and academic success. In this study, we used theories and research on learning assistance and scaffolding, teacher immediacy, social presence, and academic help seeking to explore through a cross-case study design how three online instructors differed in their use of cognitive and social supports and how those differences related to student perceptions of support, help seeking, and performance. Primary data sources included all course postings by the instructors, interviews with the instructors, observational ļ¬eld notes on course discussions, student interviews, and ļ¬nal student grades. Archived course documents and student discussion postings were secondary data sources. Data analysis revealed that while all instructors provided cognitive and social support, they varied in their level of questioning, use of direct instruction, support for task structuring, and attention to group dynamics. This variation in teaching presence related to differences across the courses in student perceptions of support, student help seeking in course discussions, and ļ¬nal course grades. Implications for online teaching and suggestions for further research are offered
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Investigating design features of a computer-mediated communication system
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is increasingly used in higher education, but it is not without problems. The effectiveness of CMC depends on many factors, including the characteristics of CMC systems themselves. The research reported here therefore aimed to investigate how an educational CMC system might be improved, in order to support learning more effectively.
The main context for the research was distance learning at the UK Open University (OU). A two-stage, mixed methods research approach was adopted. In the first stage, interviews and observations were carried out to explore the benefits and problems experienced by users. This revealed two major issues: information overload and lack of social presence. Information overload relates to usersā problems dealing with large numbers of messages. Social presence relates to the need for users to feel connected with each other.
The second stage investigated system features aimed at addressing these issues, implemented in a prototype computer conferencing system. Features to address overload included branched message threading and user recommendations. Features to address social presence were ārĆ©sumĆ©sā and instant messaging. These features were evaluated using questionnaires, with several cohorts of students in an OU course.
Students expressed approval of the features, although some features were not widely used. Students preferred branched threading to chronological threading because branching helped them to follow āconversationsā. Students were uncomfortable recommending messages, feeling that the value of a message would vary between people. They were also uncomfortable using instant messaging to contact others whom they did not know. However, the awareness aspect of instant messaging provided a sense of solidarity.
The research demonstrated that the problems of overload and lack of social presence are significant, and each has social aspects which must be addressed. Studentsā relationships with each other affect whether and how they use the features of CMC systems. We can conclude that particular attention must be paid to the social aspects of online communication, both when designing educational CMC systems and when considering how they are used. To maximise the benefits for learning, students need to feel comfortable with each other online, and there are few short cuts to achieving this
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Communication aspects of virtual learning environments: perspectives of early adopters
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are increasingly used in higher education to support communication and collaboration among students. However, there is little research into the effectiveness of VLE communication tools, and how they might be improved. This paper reports findings from interviews with teaching staff at UK universities who were early adopters of VLEs. The interviews revealed how these staff used VLE communication tools, what benefits and problems they experienced, and how VLEs might be improved to provide better support for collaborative learning
Making the Connection: Mooreās Theory of Transactional Distance and Its Relevance to the Use of a Virtual Classroom in Postgraduate Online Teacher Education
This study explored the use of the Web-based virtual environment, Adobe Connect Pro, in a postgraduate online teacher education programme at the University of Waikato. It applied the tenets of Mooreās Theory of Transactional Distance (Moore, 1997) in examining the efficacy of using the virtual classroom to promote quality dialogue and explored how both internal and external structural elements related to the purpose and use of the classroom affected the sense of learner autonomy. The study provides an illustration of the complexity of the relationship that exists between the elements of Mooreās theory, and how the implementation of an external structuring technology such as the virtual classroom, can have both positive impacts (dialogue creation) and negative impacts (diminished sense of learner autonomy). It also suggests that, although Mooreās theory provides a useful conceptual ālensā through which to analyse online learning practices, its tenets may need revisiting to reflect the move toward the use of synchronous communication tools in online distance learning
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