ForWord: A Study on an Interactive Learning Environment in Foreign Language

With constant advances in technology, the world becomes a smaller community each day. In line with its reputation as a cultural melting pot, children of immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the United States today. It\u27s clear that the U.S. needs a strong approach in language education; one that can keep pace with our potential and our lives. Technology can be used to foster student collaboration and shared learning experiences, thereby increasing learner interest, motivation and learning outcomes. ForWord aims to use interaction design in foreign language education to meet this need. ForWord has four main goals: provide a user-friendly online learning environment, promote teacher-student interaction and collaboration, promote student-student interaction and collaboration, and increase learner interest and motivation. This project takes the form of a proof-of-concept web application. The outcome relies heavily on research, design principles, user experience and human-computer interaction theory, and the use of technology to demonstrate the overarching concepts

PENERAPAN KOLABORASI PERKULIAHAN SEBAGAI UPAYA MENINGKATKAN KOMPETENSI PEDAGOGIK DOSEN DAN PRAKTISI MENGAJAR MATA KULIAH ETIKA PROFESI

The purpose of this article was to discusses the application of lecture collaboration as an effort to improve the pedagogical competence of lecturers and teaching practitioners in the Professional Ethics course in the Biology Education Study Program. The research method used is classroom action research, which involves a cycle of planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting in order to improve teaching practices. This research was conducted in the context of the Biology Education Study Program, involving lecturers and teaching practitioners as research subjects. The classroom action research cycle consists of the stages of planning lecture collaboration, implementing lecture collaboration, observing the process and results of collaboration, and reflection to formulate subsequent improvements. The results showed that the application of lecture collaboration was effective in improving the pedagogic competence of lecturers and teaching practitioners. Collaboration allows them to share experiences, knowledge, and effective teaching strategies. In the context of Professional Ethics courses, lecture collaboration also increases student involvement and motivation in learning. These findings support the study's hypothesis and are also in line with the related literature on the benefits of collaboration in education. The implication of this research is the importance of implementing lecture collaboration as an effective teaching strategy in improving the pedagogical competence of lecturers and teaching practitioners, especially in the Professional Ethics course in the Biology Education Study Progra

The development of collaborative learning practices in an online language course

PhD ThesisThe success or failure of a course is, to a great extent, dependent on the level of motivation and commitment of the learners. Such motivation and commitment are, however, difficult to establish and maintain, especially in an on-line course. Social relations within a class, and the willingness of learners to collaborate with each other, have an important role to play, but the constraints of time and distance are obstacles to fostering such social relations among students enrolled in on-line courses. It is not easy to encourage students to be collaborative when they are accessing the course at different times, from different locations. This thesis, however, seeks to demonstrate that the variety and complexity of the technologies used to deliver an on-line learning experience can help to overcome these challenges. When introduced and used in appropriate ways, the software, internet tools, even the data collection program used for statistical analysis can actually encourage and enhance participants' motivation to interact and learn in collaborative ways. This thesis is concerned with an on-line course created and delivered by the researcher, the aim of which was to foster a collaborative learning environment in which participants felt confident enough to share their work with others, and to offer and receive comments on their assignments. The primary aim was therefore not the direct teaching and learning of language, but the fostering of an environment in which the students felt comfortable working with the technology and with each other, as a pre-requisite for the acquisition of language through content-based activities. The study did not dwell on the effects of collaboration on language development but focused, rather, on how individual students collaborate in an online, e-learning course, what forms this collaboration takes, and how the pattern of collaboration changes as the course progresses. This focus allowed the researcher to look at ways collaboration affected the persistence and retention challenges of on-line learning experience. The course was designed for students learning EFL at a university in Korea. It lasts one semester, and is delivered using a virtual learning environment (VLE) program developed by the university. The course consists of 15 units to be completed at the rate of one a week. Each unit focuses on a different topic and consists of a reading passage and a listening exercise. This is followed by some writing activities, including a weekly written report, and recording assignments. The researcher was the instructor for this course, and made special interventions using appropriate technology (sometimes e-mail, other times Skype to make it more personal) to encourage students to work in pairs, and in group discussions, and to post their work in the VLE so that others could read and comment on it. The current study reports on the experience of running the course with one group of 47 Korean university students. Data was gathered from the learners‟ journals, their assignments, feedback and comments posted on the web board, and emails to the instructor. The VLE also recorded statistics showing the students‟ usage of the different components of the course, and how their use of these components changed and fluctuated as the course progressed. The results showed that in the process of completing the course the majority of the learners reported a strong sense of “belonging” to a learning community, developing a close rapport with other learners by sharing their work, exchanging comments and taking part in discussions. Students felt proud of their work as well as of the process of working together with other learners. In particular, the results suggest that opportunities for social interaction and feedback play a crucial role in developing the emotional connection which helps to create a collaborative learning environment and support an effective learning community. The evidence suggests that the appropriate use of technology when delivering an on-line course may, in fact, encourage collaboration because of two phenomena that are not always evident in a traditional, place-based classroom. These are anonymity and reciprocity. Anonymity makes it easier for students to share their work and ideas because, if a contribution is embarrassing, it may have less negative effect than in a face-to-face exchange. Reciprocity refers to the natural inclination of a student, having learned from others in the VLE, to give something back to the community

A Code Tagging Approach to Software Product Line Development:An Application to Satellite Communication Libraries

International audienceSoftware product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company's coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry- university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight grade satellite communica- tion software libraries

Implementering av PICC-line – en kvalitativ studie av anestesisykepleieres erfaringer

PICC-line, a peripherally inserted central venous catheter has been implemented by several Norwegian hospitals in recent years. Nurse Anesthetists play an important role in this process, and have been given new tasks as a result of PICC-line implementation. This study aimed to describe Nurse Anesthetists’ experiences with implementation of PICC-line in hospital. A qualitative design, the data are based on three focus groups interviews with fifteen nurse anesthetists. The interviews were analyzed using a hermeneutic approach. Being a PICC-line nurse led to a feeling of competence, independence, motivation and meaningfulness. The implementation required good structure and organization, as well as enthusiasm. Collaboration and support influenced the implementation process. Good organization and enough available personnel, as well as good collaboration and support from the Anesthesiologists and the management are essential for a successful implementation

How Does Leadership Structure Affect the Bottom Line?

Key Findings Investment in High-commitment HR practices lead to key employee-based outcomes. When companies invest in employees with a system of high-commitment HR practices (see examples of these practices below) they are able to build a workforce with higher human capital and motivation to exert discretionary effort for the benefit of the organization. In particular, higher use of these high-commitment HR (HCHR) practices were significantly related to higher levels of employee education, company tenure/experience, collaboration, and helping behaviors. Higher employee human capital and motivation are resources that lead to competitive advantage. In return, these employee outcomes appear to be key organizational resources for driving competitive advantage. Specifically, higher levels of employee company tenure (i.e., firm-specific experience and knowledge), collaboration, and helping behaviors were all significantly related to higher company sales growth and perceived performance (performance relative to competitors as rated by the company CEO). Leaders make a diff in the extent to which these employee-based resources lead to competitive advantage. In general, these employee-based resources were related to higher performance, but CEOs with greater levels of human capital seemed to be able to leverage these resources for even greater performance. Compared to companies with CEOs with less experience, companies with CEOs with higher average industry and company experience and higher levels of employee human capital and motivation had significantly higher performance, suggesting that CEOs with higher experience seem to understand how to take advantage of the employee-based resources that have been built through the investment in HCHR practices

Motivational Aspects of Teacher Collaboration

The mutual dependency of teacher collaboration and motivation has emerged as a promising research field. This article now sets out to systematically review peer-reviewed articles on the interconnection of these concepts. It looks at main findings, identifies ambiguities and contradictions in the constructs and highlights their contested nature. It is shown that many studies use different theoretical approaches and conceptual operationalizations. This leads to inconsistent empirical findings. In addition, teacher collaboration is often perceived as a threat to teacher autonomy. This is surprising considering that both teacher collaboration and teacher autonomy positively affect teacher motivation according to many empirical findings

Collaboration and motivation in an online learning environment: students’ perceptions of collaborative activities and attitudes towards online learning

The report about distance learning in higher education in Portugal (2009) states that only a small percentage of HE enrolments are in DL courses, that the demand for the modality is growing, and that the Portuguese research in DL needs development, to support innovation in the modality. This study aimed to identify the collaborative activities that the 122 students enrolled in Masters’ courses between 2009-2012, in two Portuguese Universities, considered more motivating, their preferred type of assignment, the tools’ perceived ease of use, the social and cognitive aspects of teamwork, the tutor’s influence on teamwork and preferred team organization. The results indicate that the students feel comfortable participating, interacting and debating and that some collaborative activities such as designing projects, simulations, problem-based activities, discussions and written reports are more motivating than others. The results also show that the students have positive attitudes towards online learning, that online trust takes time to develop, that both face-to-face meetings and videoconference increase trust, though time flexibility is a practical advantage of online collaboration and that the way that collaborative assignments are designed can facilitate or hinder adequate collaboration

Internal marketing, collaboration and motivation in service quality management

School of Managemen

Enhancing knowledge management in online collaborative learning

This study aims to explore two crucial aspects of collaborative work and learning: on the one hand, the importance of enabling collaborative learning applications to capture and structure the information generated by group activity and, on the other hand, to extract the relevant knowledge in order to provide learners and tutors with efficient awareness, feedback and support as regards group performance and collaboration. To this end, in this paper we first propose a conceptual model for data analysis and management that identifies and classifies the many kinds of indicators that describe collaboration and learning into high-level aspects of collaboration. Then, we provide a computational platform that, at a first step, collects and classifies both the event information generated asynchronously from the users' actions and the labeled dialogues from the synchronous collaboration according to these indicators. This information is then analyzed in next steps to eventually extract and present to participants the relevant knowledge about the collaboration. The ultimate aim of this platform is to efficiently embed information and knowledge into collaborative learning applications. We eventually suggest a generalization of our approach to be used in diverse collaborative learning situations and domains