Leveraging Multitasking Opportunities to Increase Motivation and Engagement in Online Classrooms

Newer social media have brought about attention deficits brought on by a flood of distractions, such as text messaging, blogging, and browsing on mobile devices and laptops brought into the classroom. It appears that online learning places the same demands on learners' ability to remain on-task and focused. While following up on assessing the benefits of live satellite broadcasts from remote areas of the world, the researchers made several interesting discoveries about the nature of the design of the content management system that delivered the classroom experience. The interface included a means by which students could synchronously chat during the live broadcasts. The ability to multitask appeared to increase participants' engagement in the class and their sense of social presence. The researchers present their results based on the results of a pre and post participant questionnaire to determine how best to sustain student engagement and interaction in a distance-learning environment

Autonomous Seller Agent for Multiple Simultaneous English Auctions

The growth of online auction is due to the flexibility and convenience that it offers to consumers. In the context of online auction, deriving the best reserve price can be associated to the seller's optimization problem. Determining this reserve price is not straightforward due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the auction environment. Setting the price too high will lead to the possibility of no sale outcome. Putting the price too low may produce a sale with less profit due to its lower selling price. We propose a strategy to derive the best reserve price based on several selling constraints such as the number of competitors (sellers), the number of bidders, the auction duration, and the profit the seller desired when offering an item to be auctioned. However, to obtain the best performance, the strategy must be tuned to the prevailing auction environment where the agent is situated. In this paper, we describe our seller agent's performance under varying auction environments. The purpose of the experimental evaluation is to assess the ability of the agent to identify its environments accurately to enable it to come up with the best reserve price