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

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

Intelligent Video Synthesis Using Virtual Video Prescriptions

This paper presents an approach to the intelligent synthesis of digital video products by the representation of virtual videos using SGML. Virtual videos are defined using a Virtual Video Prescription to specify a generic model of a video production that includes embedded queries for the dynamic retrieval of video content from underlying databases. A detailed example is presented to demonstrate the prescription language syntax and its underlying concepts. 1 Introductio

Overview of the INEX 2007 entity ranking track

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Mapping XML Fragments to Community Web Ontologies

International audienceIn this paper we are interested in the publication and querying of XPath enabled XML resources. More precisely, we want to take advantage of the structure of XML documents (generally described by a DTD) for mapping pieces of information contained in XML fragments to domain specific ontologies. The objective here is to be able to forward user queries to diverse XML repositories while hiding their DTD heterogeneity to the end-user. Our contribution is two-fold : (1) we propose a simple mapping language describing sources by a set of rules relating XPath location paths to the concepts and roles of an ontology and (2) a query rewriting algorithm for translating user queries into queries expressed in an XML query language that are sent for evaluation to XML sources

Focused Search in Books and Wikipedia: Categories, Links and Relevance Feedback

Abstract. In this paper we describe our participation in INEX 2009 in the Ad Hoc Track, the Book Track, and the Entity Ranking Track. In the Ad Hoc track we investigate focused link evidence, using only links from retrieved sections. The new collection is not only annotated with Wikipedia categories, but also with YAGO/WordNet categories. We explore how we can use both types of category information, in the Ad Hoc Track as well as in the Entity Ranking Track. Results in the Ad Hoc Track show Wikipedia categories are more effective than WordNet categories, and Wikipedia categories in combination with relevance feedback lead to the best results. Preliminary results of the Book Track show full-text retrieval is effective for high early precision. Relevance feedback further increases early precision. Our findings for the Entity Ranking Track are in direct opposition of our Ad Hoc findings, namely, that the WordNet categories are more effective than the Wikipedia categories. This marks an interesting difference between ad hoc search and entity ranking.