7,590 research outputs found

    Distance Education: Methods of Education for Students in Remote Areas of China

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    This paper illustrates that distance education is a useful mechanism of education for students living in remote areas or those who desire a native English-speaking teacher to improve their own language skills. However, it will also show the ways in which distance education is not the perfect solution. This paper will overall find that distance education improves future economic opportunities, causes changes in teacher/student power dynamics, and does, to some extent, increase access to schooling for children living in rural, remote areas

    Maximising Social Interactions and Effectiveness within Distance Learning Courses: Cases from Construction

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    Advanced Internet technologies have revolutionised the delivery of distance learning education. As a result, the physical proximity between learners and the learning providers has become less important. However, whilst the pervasiveness of these technological developments has reached unprecedented levels, critics argue that the student learning experience is still not as effective as conventional face-to-face delivery. In this regard, surveys of distance learning courses reveal that there is often a lack of social interaction attributed to this method of delivery, which tends to leave learners feeling isolated due to a lack of engagement, direction, guidance and support by the tutor. This paper defines and conceptualises this phenomenon by investigating the extent to which distance-learning programmes provide the social interactions of an equivalent traditional classroom setting. In this respect, two distance learning case studies were investigated, covering the UK and Slovenian markets respectively. Research findings identified that delivery success is strongly dependent on the particular context to which the specific distance learning course is designed, structured and augmented. It is therefore recommended that designers of distance learning courses should balance the tensions and nuances associated with commercial viability and pedagogic effectiveness

    Maximising social interactions and effectiveness within distance learning courses : cases from construction

    Get PDF
    Advanced Internet technologies have revolutionised the delivery of distance learning education. As a result, the physical proximity between learners and the learning providers has become less important. However, whilst the pervasiveness of these technological developments has reached unprecedented levels, critics argue that the student learning experience is still not as effective as conventional face-to-face delivery. In this regard, surveys of distance learning courses reveal that there is often a lack of social interaction attributed to this method of delivery, which tends to leave learners feeling isolated due to a lack of engagement, direction, guidance and support by the tutor. This paper defines and conceptualises this phenomenon by investigating the extent to which distance-learning programmes provide the social interactions of an equivalent traditional classroom setting. In this respect, two distance learning case studies were investigated, covering the UK and Slovenian markets respectively. Research findings identified that delivery success is strongly dependent on the particular context to which the specific distance learning course is designed, structured and augmented. It is therefore recommended that designers of distance learning courses should balance the tensions and nuances associated with commercial viability and pedagogic effectiveness

    An information and communications technology (ICT)-enabled method for collecting and collating information about pre-service teachers' pedagogical beliefs regarding the integration of ICT

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    This paper describes a method that utilized technology to collect and collate quantitative and qualitative data about preā€service teachersā€™ use of networked technologies during a 12ā€week undergraduate course, and the impact of this use on their pedagogical beliefs regarding the integration of information and communications technology (ICT). The technologies used captured and analysed studentsā€™ spoken and written communication while engaging in four synchronous online tasks, and also collected evaluation data from online interviews, surveys and diaries. The richness of data afforded by this ICTā€enabled method enabled the research to produce a rich narrative of how the students used the technology and provided evidence of a change in preā€service teachersā€™ pedagogical beliefs during the course

    Learning and Teaching Online Advice for Practitioners: May 2020

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    Map Generation from Large Scale Incomplete and Inaccurate Data Labels

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    Accurately and globally mapping human infrastructure is an important and challenging task with applications in routing, regulation compliance monitoring, and natural disaster response management etc.. In this paper we present progress in developing an algorithmic pipeline and distributed compute system that automates the process of map creation using high resolution aerial images. Unlike previous studies, most of which use datasets that are available only in a few cities across the world, we utilizes publicly available imagery and map data, both of which cover the contiguous United States (CONUS). We approach the technical challenge of inaccurate and incomplete training data adopting state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures such as the U-Net and the CycleGAN to incrementally generate maps with increasingly more accurate and more complete labels of man-made infrastructure such as roads and houses. Since scaling the mapping task to CONUS calls for parallelization, we then adopted an asynchronous distributed stochastic parallel gradient descent training scheme to distribute the computational workload onto a cluster of GPUs with nearly linear speed-up.Comment: This paper is accepted by KDD 202

    The Impact of COVID-19 on Young Children\u27s Education - Exploring the Compatibility of Combining Progressive Education with Online Learning

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    The COVID-19 outbreak at the end of 2019 forced most schools around the world to move their classrooms online. This research takes the progressive education of young children as the basic educational concept and attempts to explore the compatibility of online education and progressive education of young children through interviews with educators in the United States and China. By understanding how online teaching occurred through interviews with early childhood teachers who implemented it during the COVID-19 outbreak, and the decisions and opinions of school administrators, this study compares the different teaching measures taken by early childhood teachers in the United States and China in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak. In addition, the study recommends a progressive education model for online education of young children based on a qualitative analysis of progressive educatorsā€™ and administratorsā€™ reported practices and perspectives
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