The impact of emotions on student participation in an assessed, online, collaborative activity

There is growing recognition of the importance of emotions in academic online learning contexts. However, there is still little known about the role of emotions in social and collaborative online learning settings, especially the relationship between emotions and student participation. To explore this relationship, this study used a prospective longitudinal research design to follow 46 distance learning students throughout a 3-week assessed, online, collaborative activity. This approach allowed the fluctuating and dynamic aspects of emotions to be explored as well as the relationship between emotions and student participation in the collaborative activity. Self-report data were gathered using a semistructured online diary at five time points throughout the task (once at the start of the collaborative activity, three times during the activity, and the final entry after the activity had finished). Findings revealed that learners generally perceived pleasant emotions (such as relief, satisfaction and enjoyment) to have positive impacts, or no impact, on participation, whereas unpleasant emotions (such as anxiety, frustration, and disappointment) were generally perceived to have negative impacts, or no impact, on participation. Interestingly, however, anxiety, and to a smaller extent frustration, were perceived by a number of students to have positive impacts during the activity. To conclude this paper, implications for educators are highlighted

On the geodeticity of the contour of a graph

The eccentricity of a vertex vv in a graph GG is the maximum distance of vv from any other vertex of GG and vv is a contour vertex of GG if each vertex adjacent to vv has eccentricity not greater than the eccentricity of vv. The set of contour vertices of GG is geodetic if every vertex of GG lies on a shortest path between a pair of contour vertices. In this paper, we firstly investigate the existence of operations on graphs that allow to construct graphs in which the contour is geodetic. Then, after providing an alternative proof of the fact that the contour is geodetic in every HHD-free graph, we show that the contour is geodetic in every cactus and in every graph whose blocks are HHD-free or cycles or cographs. Finally, we generalize the above result by introducing the concept of geodetic-contour-preserving class of graphs and by proving that, if each block BB in a graph GG belongs to a class GBGB of graphs which is geodetic-contour-preserving, then the contour of GG is geodetic