Web-based writing support: making it useable for distance teachers

This paper considers the issues that distance teachers in higher education who are not writing specialists face in supporting their students’ academic writing development. We discuss the usefulness of open web-based writing support resources, and propose the need for a system that serves as an interface with these resources. Such a system should help teachers to make quick selections of materials that can be offered to students to address specific problems in the students’ assignments. We consider principles for the design of such a system, based on the experience of building and testing a small prototype for tutors on an Open University Masters in Education course

How students with intellectual disabilities evaluate recommendations from internet forums

Social networks enable people with intellectual disabilities (ID) to participate actively in society and to promote their self-determination. However, concerns have been raised regarding the potential limitations of people with ID to deal with untrustworthy information sources on the Internet. In an experiment, we assessed how adult students with ID evaluated recommendations in Internet forums authored by either self-reported experts or by users under pseudonyms who supported their claim either with documentary sources or their personal experience. We compared the performances of students with ID to that of students of similar ages but higher educational levels (chronological age-matched control group) and to younger students with similar verbal mental age (verbal mental age-matched control group). Participants were asked to evaluate to what extent a fictitious user should follow particular recommendations given in a forum and to justify their evaluations by writing a message to the fictitious user. Students with ID, as opposed to the two control groups, recommended the forum advice to a higher extent regardless of authorship and evidence used, and they included in their messages to the fictitious user a higher number of opinions and information sources not present in the forum without linking them to the actual discussion. The pattern of results suggested that students with ID have a limited ability to evaluate recommendations in forums and that they do not necessarily present a delay in the development of these abilities, but rather an atypical development. Finally, we discussed the potential implications for teaching digital literacy to students with ID.This research was funded by a grant from the Spanish Secretaría General de Universidades (EDU2014-59422)

The difference between presence-based education and distance learning

Attempts to define distance learning always involve comparisons with presence-based education, as the latter is the most direct reference that the former has. It is on this basis that the convergent points, similarities and differences of the two types of approach are established. This article opens with such a comparison, before going on to focus mainly on distance learning and to examine methodological strategies that should be borne in mind when implementing an e-learning system

ENHANCING OMANI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ WRITING AND STUDY SKILLS: DISCUSSION FORUM MODULE

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a study conducted among first-year Foundation Program English Language (FPEL) students, English teachers and FPEL course coordinators at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman with the aim to examine the use of Moodle forums for advancing writing and study skills of the students in higher level FPEL courses by participating in asynchronous discussions, interacting with other students and/or the teacher, and exchanging ideas by posting comments. In addition, students’, teachers’ and course coordinators’ perceptions about the discussion forum as an activity in an e-learning environment that can successfully contribute to FPEL curriculum writing and study skills goals and teaching approaches were examined with regard to the attainment of learning outcomes (LOs). Data were collected by interviewing teachers and course coordinators, conducting an online survey for students, monitoring students’ participation in forum activities and analyzing the policy documents related to writing and study skills components of FPEL 0560 course. The results of the study corroborate some significant findings of the previous work in the field, and clearly demonstrate that Moodle forums support writing fluency, allow students more time for developing ideas and working on their writing and study skills’ assignments. Additionally, forums foster a sense of purpose and community, as well as contribute to communication skills’ development of language learners through online language learning environment by responding to online assignments, inviting feedback, commenting on/grading other students’ comments, seeking and providing help with purposes of enhancing, reinforcing and researching.

Exploring EFL Students’ Critical Thinking in Academic Speaking Class

Impelementasi kemampuan berpikir kritis untuk mahasiswa dapat dilakukan melalui keterampilan produktif, salah satu keterampilan produktif yang dapat mengaplikasikan kemampuan berpikir kritis ada keterampilan berbicara dalam bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa asing. Kemampuan berpikir kritis pada keterampilan berbicara dapat dilakukan melalui presentasi. Mahasiswa diharapkan mampu mempresentasikan infromasi yang telah didapat dengan tujuan menentukan keputusan yang akan dilakukan. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif untuk mendeskripsikan bagaimana mahasiswa mengeksplorasi kemampuan berpikir kritis melalui PowerPoint dan mengaplikasikan kemampuan berpikir kritis di dalam kelas Academic Speaking. Penelitian ini dilakukan di salah satu kelas Academic Speaking di UNESA dan menjadikan 8 hasil PowerPoint mahasiswa sebagai objek penelitian. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kemampuan berpikir kritis tereksplorasi pada hasil PowerPoint mahasiswa melalui metode paraphrase dan merangkum. Selain itu, mahasiswa dapat mengaplikasikan kemampuan berpikir kritis pada kelas Academic Speaking melalui membaca artikel yang akan dipresentasikan dan mempertimbangkan isi artikel yang akan dipresentasikan

Mining question-answer pairs from web forum: a survey of challenges and resolutions

Internet forums, which are also known as discussion boards, are popular web applications. Members of the board discuss issues and share ideas to form a community within the board, and as a result generate huge amount of content on different topics on daily basis. Interest in information extraction and knowledge discovery from such sources has been on the increase in the research community. A number of factors are limiting the potentiality of mining knowledge from forums. Lexical chasm or lexical gap that renders some Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) less effective, Informal tone that creates noisy data, drifting of discussion topic that prevents focused mining and asynchronous issue that makes it difficult to establish post-reply relationship are some of the problems that need to be addressed. This survey introduces these challenges within the framework of question answering. The survey provides description of the problems; cites and explores useful publications to the reader for further examination; provides an overview of resolution strategies and findings relevant to the challenges

Creating a therapeutic community in an adolescents' online support forum for depression

A research report submitted to the Discipline of Psychology. Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education (Educational Psychology) 19 March 2014Literature shows that adolescents experiencing emotional distress do not often seek support in the form of therapy, and are thus at greater risk for experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts. As such, adolescents require varying sources of support. Owing to evidence suggesting that adolescents prefer seeking support from their peers, with online forums being popular sources of support, it becomes relevant to consider how it is that such media are used to create supportive environments. In light of this, I use conversation analysis to examine how users interactionally create a therapeutic community through their actions and practices in an adolescents’ online support forum for depression. My findings show that the forum is interactionally organised in such a way that a series of recurrent actions and practices that the users exhibited while co-creating a supportive environment could be grouped together to form a typical overall sequential structure. It further showed how the success or failure of particular practices that the literature seems to treat as “good” or “bad”, in counselling terms, is a contingent outcome of the particular details and circumstances of their production. Furthermore, my data provide empirically-grounded accounts for previous findings showing that the action of displaying sympathy yields both positive and negative reactions

Perceptions of the students’ learning and evaluation process in an e-learning course in food preservation technology: a study case in a food consumption msc

Food Preservation Technology is a main module within a course integrated in a Master of Science program in Food Consumption at Universidade Aberta, Portugal. The pedagogical model adopted at Universidade Aberta encourages open practices such as teamwork and participation at the forums for learning exchange. E-learning and b-learning tools are increasingly used in the actual global world, providing the students with a great opportunity to study from distance and submit their digital works or assignments for evaluation. However, in this case the distinctive evaluation of each student and classification with the respective grade may seem to be a significant problem for the teachers. During this module for each assignment topic, every student chose a different subject related to their professional or academic interests. This gives the student a chance to improve scientific knowledge within each topic and to further explore the proposed subject. Herein we have analysed how the different assignments that students completed within this module can reflect students’ commitment to study and actively seek for their own knowledge. Besides, the following points were also taken into consideration: (1) the difficulties that a teacher might have when evaluating students’ submitted assignments; (2) the tools that the teacher has to differentiate the quality of different assignments; as well as (3) the description of how grades can be differentiated between the students. The assignments were both teamwork and individual work that resulted from previous learning activities. In this paper, we have thus tried to understand the main limitations that students have to overcome while working on the evaluation assignments. The analytical data retrieved from the assignment’s forums reveal that only a very small part of information exchanged has a constructive nature and adds value to the work to be done. From the analysed data of the works presented by the students, it is evident that they did not use an accurate bibliographical state-of-the-art list. We also debate the teamwork evaluation process within the e-learning system and its relationship with the contemporary state-of-the-art of each discussed theme, namely Drying and water activity control, Chemical preservation, Curing, Pickling, Smoking, Fermentation, Modified atmosphere, High pressure processing, Ohmic heating, Irradiation, Membrane processing, Pulsed electric fields, and Microwave processing.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio