A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

Location-based and contextual mobile learning. A STELLAR Small-Scale Study

This study starts from several inputs that the partners have collected from previous and current running research projects and a workshop organised at the STELLAR Alpine Rendevous 2010. In the study, several steps have been taken, firstly a literature review and analysis of existing systems; secondly, mobile learning experts have been involved in a concept mapping study to identify the main challenges that can be solved via mobile learning; and thirdly, an identification of educational patterns based on these examples has been done. Out of this study the partners aim to develop an educational framework for contextual learning as a unifying approach in the field. Therefore one of our central research questions is: how can we investigate, theorise, model and support contextual learning

Leading schools in the digital age: A clash of cultures

A cultural gap is widening in English secondary schools: between a twentieth-century ethos of institutional provision and the twenty-first century expectations and digital lifestyles of school students. Perhaps disaffected by traditional teaching methods and the competitive target culture of schools, many students have turned to social networking through the cluster of computer-based applications known as Web 2.0. Here, they can communicate, share and learn informally using knowledge systems their elders can barely understand. Some of their contemporaries have turned away altogether, rejecting school and contributing to record levels of truancy and exclusion. This paper identifies a set of challenges for school leaders in relation to the growing digital/cultural gap. The government agenda for personalised learning is discussed, alongside strategies which schools might adopt to support this through the use of ICT, and both figure in scenario projections which envision how secondary education could change in the future. The paper concludes by recommending three priorities for school leaders

New Media Art/ New Funding Models

Investigates the current state of funding for new media artists, with an emphasis on the support structures for innovative creative work that utilizes advanced technologies as the main vehicle for artistic practice

Pblcloud Virtual Patient Simulator: Enhancing Immersion Through Natural Language Processing

PBLCLOUD VIRTUAL PATIENT SIMULATOR: ENHANCING IMMERSION THROUGH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Pierre Martin M.Ed.(1), Lisa DelSignore M.D.(2), and Traci A. Wolbrink M.D. M.P.H.(2) (1)Yale School of Medicine (2)From the Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, Perioperative and Pain Management, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. (Sponsored by JH, Department of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine) Virtual patient simulation has been utilized to teach interviewing skills, often employing selection-based methods (e.g., multiple-choice lists and menu-based prompts) to simulate doctor-patient conversations. Users have evaluated these systems as inauthentic, which can diminish user immersion (influenced by control, realism, distraction and sensory factors) and, in turn, negatively affect skill acquisition, mastery and transfer. Our objectives were to design and develop PBLCloud, a scenario-based and highly interactive platform that uses natural language processing to support a more realistic doctor-patient conversation and create an immersive clinical learning environment. PBLCloud was developed utilizing an iterative design thinking process and its initial evaluation involved a mixed methods approach. We recruited a convenience sample of 11 participants: three (27%) fourth-year medical students from Harvard Medical School as well as two (18%) residents, four (36%) fellows and two (18%) attendings from Boston Children’s Hospital. There were two rounds of formative evaluation testing with eight participants in Round 1 and three participants in Round 2. Each participant completed a semi-structured think–aloud protocol exploring our pilot case, 10-item system usability scale (SUS) and 10-item open-ended questionnaire. The chat-based functionality provides users with computer-generated context-specific responses during the historical encounter. Users have the opportunity to perform physical examinations, review incorporated multimedia, order and interpret diagnostic investigations, order therapeutic interventions that have appropriate effects on patient vitals and laboratory data, formulate and refine a differential diagnosis, receive just-in-time feedback regarding user-initiated actions and complete embedding learning exercises. 73% of participants strongly agreed that PBLCloud was useful (i.e., it is clinically-oriented, realistic, provides helpful feedback and is widely applicable) and 64% of participants strongly agreed that their experience with the system was enjoyable (i.e., it is relevant with an engaging interface). It was deemed to be more interactive and engaging than other simulators and 82% of participants were very interested in utilizing the system in the future. The average SUS score for Round 1 and 2 were 79.7 ± 12.0 and 82.5 ± 19.8 respectively. Areas of improvement were identified, in particular, the unsatisfactory response accuracy of the chat-based functionality. Future work will include the investigation of various strategies to optimize the platform’s natural language processing algorithm as well as the formal evaluation of the system’s validity, reliability, level of induced user immersion and educational impact. We anticipate that PBLCloud will serve as a cost-effective and scalable approach for the instruction and assessment of clinical reasoning

A Simple Web Platform Solution for M-Learning

Nowadays the role of educational platforms is more than obvious, thanks to websites and modern platforms like Microsoft SharePoint designed for e-learning. We consider that the next generation of learning platforms will be m-learning platforms. These kind of platforms offer first of all mobility for the potential users of PDAs, pocket PCs, smart phones and other modern mobile devices, discovered and developed in last years. One of the most important aspect of these manners of e-learning is the display mode. Classic systems like personal computers have a bigger screen, modern portable devices have a few inches screens and the problem is to adapt the structure of websites and platforms for pocket PC screens and in the same time to develop the capability to produce same experience and usefulness to all users.Platform, M-learning, Discussion Forum, Search Engine, JavaScript, IIS, Port Forwarding