Designing on-demand education for simultaneous development of domain-specific and self-directed learning skills

On-demand education enables individual learners to choose their learning pathways according to their own learning needs. They must use self-directed learning (SDL) skills involving self-assessment and task selection to determine appropriate pathways for learning. Learners who lack these skills must develop them because SDL skills are prerequisite to developing domain-specific skills. This article describes the design of an on-demand learning environment developed to enable novices to simultaneously develop their SDL and domain-specific skills. Learners received advice on their self-assessments and their selections of subsequent learning tasks. In the domain of system dynamics – a way to model a dynamic system and draw graphs depicting the system’s behaviour over time – advice on self-assessment is provided in a scoring rubric containing relevant performance standards. Advice on task selection indicates all relevant task aspects to be taken into account, including recommendations for suitable learning tasks which meet the individual learner’s needs. This article discusses the design of the environment and the learners’ perceptions of its usefulness. Most of the times, the learners found the advice appropriate and they followed it in 78% of their task selections

ReMashed – Recommendation Approaches for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments in Formal and Informal Learning Settings

This article presents the ReMashed system that recommends learning content from emerging information of a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment. ReMashed offers advice to find most suitable learning content for individual competence development of lifelong learners. The ReMashed system was initially designed to offer navigational support to lifelong learners in informal learning settings. In this article we want to discuss its ability to be used also in formal learning settings. For this purpose, we discuss the use of two different recommendation approaches for formal and informal learning within ReMashed

Influence of Past Directors on Lifelong Music Learners’ Motivation and Action

In the context of lifelong learning, it is important to use clear terms for learners to successfully undertake learning. Because lifelong music learners are influenced by past musical experiences, their characteristics are best understood from the viewpoint of their musical experiences. The current study sought to clarify the influence of past directors on lifelong music learners’ motivation and action. In September 2018, a questionnaire survey was administered to 107 singers in five choirs. The survey involved three scales: “The director that most affected the music learner (including their music teacher)”, “Learning motivation” and “Learning action”. These three scales were based on the author’s previous research. The results revealed several main findings. First, the learner’s growth for directors increased the occurrence of introjected regulation. In self-determination theory, introjected regulation indicates that self-determination is low, and is not considered desirable. The current results suggested that introjected regulation was lower for independently practicing singers. On the other hand, director’s advice increased learners’ intrinsic motivation in practice. Thus, the current results suggested that directors’ advice can benefit learners’ practice, rather than determining the direction of their growth. This appears to be a characteristic of music learning. Because singers use voice in chorus, directors must reduce psychological obstacles and provide music for singers. In addition, the current study examined whether learners’ descriptions of previous music directors were positive or negative. The results revealed that directors’ advice in practice led in a positive direction for learners, but differed from self-determination. Kawamura (2004) proposed that directors are likely to provide learners with knowledge in music learning. The current results clarified the challenge in music learning identified by Kawamura, in which the learner and director must work in collaboration. In the current study, the director’s advice in practice appeared to lead to beneficial growth in the lifelong learner. Thus, it may be necessary to examine the perspectives of both learners and directors to promote effective lifelong learning

Editorial: Introduction to the special issue on teaching English reading and writing to young learners

We aimed for this special issue to offer up empirically supported advice to teachers for tackling some of the challenges in teaching reading and writing to young English as a second (L2) or foreign language (FL) learners. These challenges teachers face when providing instruction to young learners include cognitive development, motivation, attention, strategy use, and assessment (Nunan, 2011). It is now well understood that the teaching of reading and writing to young learners can no longer be equated with the teaching of adult learners (Cameron, 2001). In terms of cognitive development, language learners need to go through significant developmental changes in their learning journey from infancy to adulthood (Richardson, 2019). These differences in language learners’ cognitive development call for a need to design language learning tasks and materials that can fit the developmental stages of learners (Teng, 2020a). Language learner motivation can decline over time due to a lack of clarity in the goals of language learning and potential feelings that effort invested in learning the language has not paid off (Linse & Nunan, 2006). Furthermore, as young learners tend to have short attention spans, activities that can maintain their motivation and involvement are essential (Fenyvesi, 2020). Language learning strategy researchers have focused their attention on adult learners; however, we believe they should begin considering young learners’ language use and learning preferences, as this knowledge could help inform teachers’ instruction (Plonsky, 2019). To provide proper instruction, an educator of young learners must understand these needs. This requires the construction of appropriate language assessment tools, which will allow teachers to gauge learners’ strengths and weaknesses; doing so can further facilitate teacher scaffolding and other forms of feedback (Ma & Bui, this issue). Despite the acknowledged impact that these issues have on the teaching of reading and writing to young learners, we are still lacking in empirical evidence to support many creative and pedagogical decisions made in the young learner classroom (Cameron & McKay, 2010). Our intention in this special issue was to further focus language researchers’ attention on the young learner classroom and to encourage a rethinking of classroom practices for teaching reading and writing

A new multi-agent approach for generating feedbacks base on Multiple Choice Questions

Most intelligent tutorial systems promote the learning and resolution of exercises based on feedback in the form of advice, remarks, explanation…To always remain in self-assessment, our approach offers a new type of feedback in the form of multiple-choice questions applied in the field of algorithms (language c, java ...) dedicated for beginners in programming. The approach is based on the multi-agent model to have interaction between learners without the help of the teacher. There are three types of agents in our work, there is the learner agent who represents the learner, there is also the feedback agent who sends the MCQs to the learners who made mistakes and finally, the controller agent feeds the base of multiple-choice questions based on feedback from learners. The controlling agent compares the instructions of the learners with the instructions of the correct model based on the AST abstract syntax tree and detects errors which will be proposed as erroneous items (distractors) for the learners. We can say that this type of feedback is not direct like other work (advice, comments, explanation ...) but we always remain in the evaluation: MCQ, exercise ... As perspectives, we will focus mainly on the classification of LO learning objects in the form of an ontology to facilitate the use of data and the generation of multiple-choice questions at different levels. And also, we aim to develop a suitable platform which allows to define the agents and the messages to be exchanged between them to set up our system

MyLearningMentor: a mobile App to support learners participating in MOOCs

MOOCs have brought a revolution to education. However, their impact is mainly benefiting people with Higher Education degrees. The lack of support and personalized advice in MOOCs is causing that many of the learners that have not developed work habits and self-learning skills give them up at the first obstacle, and do not see MOOCs as an alternative for their education and training. My Learning Mentor (MLM) is a mobile application that addresses the lack of support and personalized advice for learners in MOOCs. This paper presents the architecture of MLM and practical examples of use. The architecture of MLM is designed to provide MOOC participants with a personalized planning that facilitates them following up the MOOCs they enroll. This planning is adapted to learners' profiles, preferences, priorities and previous performance (measured in time devoted to each task). The architecture of MLM is also designed to provide tips and hints aimed at helping learners develop work habits and study skills, and eventually become self-learners.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Project TIN2011-28308-C03-01, the Regional Government of Madrid project S2013/ICE-2715, and the postdoctoral fellowship Alliance 4 Universities. The authors would also like to thank Israel Gutiérrez-Rojas for his contributions to the ideas behind MLM and Ricardo García Pericuesta and Carlos de Frutos Plaza for their work implementing different parts of the architecture

Machine translation for everyone: Empowering users in the age of artificial intelligence

Language learning and translation have always been complementary pillars of multilingualism in the European Union. Both have been affected by the increasing availability of machine translation (MT): language learners now make use of free online MT to help them both understand and produce texts in a second language, but there are fears that uninformed use of the technology could undermine effective language learning. At the same time, MT is promoted as a technology that will change the face of professional translation, but the technical opacity of contemporary approaches, and the legal and ethical issues they raise, can make the participation of human translators in contemporary MT workflows particularly complicated. Against this background, this book attempts to promote teaching and learning about MT among a broad range of readers, including language learners, language teachers, trainee translators, translation teachers, and professional translators. It presents a rationale for learning about MT, and provides both a basic introduction to contemporary machine-learning based MT, and a more advanced discussion of neural MT. It explores the ethical issues that increased use of MT raises, and provides advice on its application in language learning. It also shows how users can make the most of MT through pre-editing, post-editing and customization of the technology

Selecting ELL Textbooks: A Content Analysis of Ethnicity Depicted in Illustrations and Writing

In an effort to respond to the need for culturally appropriate English Language Learning(ELL) resources for adolescent immigrants, the researchers gathered 64 textbooks actually in use in eight Milwaukee middle schools to analyze their content for the range of diversity of ethnicity depicted in illustrations and written text. The eight school settings selected provided a broad range of materials to analyze. In addition, these materials reflect both public and Catholic teachers’ resource selection in predominantly Latino and Southeast Asian American classroom contexts. The settings were chosen with the advice of administrators and teachers as schools they perceived to be of greatest need for ELL curriculum and instruction development. Based upon their findings, the researchers draw some initial conclusions and recommendations for the selection of culturally appropriate textbooks that fit the cultural contexts of the learners. Finally, the study provides as appendices the bibliography of textbooks under analysis and sample coding instruments used to analyze the content of these textbooks

METODE SUGGESTOPEDIA DENGAN TEKNIK BERMAIN PERAN ATAU ROLE PLAYING DALAM PEMBELAJARAN KETERAMPILAN BERBICARA BAHASA INDONESIA SISWA SEKOLAH DASAR

Suggestopedia is learning apps on the advice of pedagogy, which was developed to help students reduce the sense that they will not succeed in learning, which is expected to resolve the problems of the limitations of learning, including learning a second language. One technique that can be applied with this method is the technique of role playing or playing a role. Role playing can be useful to spur verbal fluency and practice the skills of learners in particular, especially in learning to speak properly in Indonesian. Aspects of their speaking ability that can be sharpened with this technique is the vocabulary , comprehension , grammar and fluency In addition, students also become reluctant and embarrassed again if you have to use the Indonesian language when communicating with teachers and classmates during language learning Indonesia

A critical examination of the effectiveness of faculty-based student learning support

This thesis presents an investigation into the effectiveness of faculty-based student learning support and comprises three volumes. Volume 1 provides an overview of the background literature, research methodology, ethical and reliability considerations linked to two projects whose overarching theme is the support and improvement of the student experience. The overview begins with an outline of the aim of this thesis, followed by a synopsis of the literature concerning student support in higher education and the use of technology to support learners. The methodological framework is then discussed and a brief introduction to the projects is provided. The overview concludes with an exploration of the effectiveness of faculty-based student learning support and the presentation of a new blended approach to the organisation, delivery and typology of advising. This seeks to demonstrate the strength of a blended approach and thus makes a contribution to the practice, theory and method of supporting student learning. Volume 2 discusses the Advice Shop project and considers the processes, methods and ethics of this student learning support. A summary of eight interventions is presented together with details of how the project was subsequently rolled out across the University. A consideration of the organisational model and personnel involved in student advising is also offered. The volume concludes with student and staff feedback and a discussion of how the project aims have been achieved. Evidence of the research output and components of practice relating to Project 1 can be found in Volume2 Part 2. Volume 3 presents a discussion of Project 2 - the use of technology to support learners. The project presents two technology-enhanced interventions - an electronic student attendance monitoring scheme, and the development of two online learner support tools using QuestionMark Perception as the delivery software. The methods and ethical considerations used to establish and implement these interventions are present together with feedback from students and staff. The volume concludes with a discussion of how the aims of the project have been achieved. Evidence of the research output and components of practice relating to Project 2 can be found in Volume 3 Part 2