UNDERSTANDING INSTRUCTORS\u27 SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE COURSE DESIGN ACTIVITY

I come to this dissertation with my experiences on synchronous courses as a student and an instructional designer. Through these direct experiences I have come to realize the benefits of synchronous online courses as a course delivery format, and observed the difficulties of designing and delivering synchronous online courses. I have come to recognize the limited support of synchronous online course design. Even though there is an increased interest and use of synchronous courses, existing studies on synchronous online courses are limited, and offer little practical support to instructors about synchronous course design. The purpose of this study is to understand synchronous course design activities in order to support instructor’s effort to develop their own synchronous courses. To achieve this purpose, this dissertation looks at how five instructors design their synchronous online course with two goals: first, to identify design constraints and second, to capture the design experience and knowledge embodied in the synchronous course design cases. With a multiple case study approach, I collected data though interview, course materials and website resources about course design environments from five instructors. I analyzed the data with constant comparative method and activity system analysis. As a result, this dissertation identified various design constraints that emerged in the overall synchronous online course design process. I identified 48 design constraints and categorized those into eight categories: adaptation of synchronous course formats; converting existing face-to-face courses; instructor (designer) characteristics; learner characteristics; technology; organizational rules; environmental and cultural factors; and physical learning environments. In addition, I wrote five design cases about participants’ synchronous course design experiences. Each synchronous course design case includes information about the designer, the design situation, related design strategies, design tensions, and identified solutions to specific tensions. Specifically, I describe how the design constraints interact with one another and how interactions lead to further design tensions, and instructors’ solutions to those tensions. I will present common characteristics of synchronous course design, and implications for both designing synchronous online courses and supporting synchronous online course design at universities

Interactionist Qualitative Research as a Semiotic Mediation Activity

In this article, we introduce qualitative research from an interactionist perspective. We specifically explore qualitative research itself as a semiotic process with associated actions. This enables researchers to make sense of human interactions in the world rather than solely focusing on semiotic analysis of qualitative data. We introduce Peirce’s semiotics and Vygotsky’s mediated action as tools for conceptualizing qualitative research in a semiotic mediation process. Understanding qualitative research as a semiotic mediation can help social scientists better understand their own role in research, while vicariously gaining experiences about human interactions that they later present to others

Narrative Inquiry With Activity Systems: A Story About Net Neutrality

The goal of this article is to introduce activity systems as a methodological tool in narrative inquiry to gain a holistic understanding of socially shared experiences from an examination of documents. The research question was how can qualitative researchers use activity systems as a tool for engaging in narrative inquiry of socially shared experiences to uncover new meanings by constructing a story? In this article, we share a sample analysis of our experience relying on documents and media as a form of narrative to begin to understand the socially shared human activity associated with net neutrality and its potential impact on U.S. residents. We end this article with reflections of lessons learned from our activity systems guided story construction process

Initial Approach to Collect Small Unmanned Aircraft System Off-Nominal Operational Situations Data

NASA is developing the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management research platform to safely integrate small unmanned aircraft operations in large-scale at low-altitudes. As a part of this effort, small unmanned aircraft system off-nominal operational situations data collection process has been developed to take lessons learned and to reinforce operational compliance. In this paper, descriptions of variables used for digital data collection and an online report form for collection of observational data from the operators (contextual data) are provided. They are used to collect off-nominal data from the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management National Campaign in 2017. The digital data show that 2 out of 118 campaign operations (1.7%) encountered loss of navigation. Since the campaign aircraft used Global Positioning System for navigation, it is likely that unobstructed view of the sky at the campaign locations contributed to this small number. Also, 4 out of 47 operations (8.5%) encountered loss of communications. A relatively short distance between ground control system and aircraft, ranging from 2300 feet to 4200 feet, likely contributed to this small number. There was no data to identify the loss of communications condition, aircraft received signal strength, for the remaining 71 operations suggesting that some operators may not be monitoring unmanned aircraft communications system performance or monitoring it with different parameters. For the contextual data, due to the low number of total reports during the campaign, no significant trends emerged. This is an initial attempt to collect contextual data from small unmanned aircraft operators about off-nominal situations, and changes will be made to the future data collection to improve the amount and quality of the information

Initial Approach to Collect Small Unmanned Aircraft System Off-Nominal Operational Situations Data

NASA is developing the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management research platform to safely integrate small unmanned aircraft operations in large-scale at low-altitudes. As a part of this effort, small unmanned aircraft system off-nominal operational situations data collection process has been developed to take lessons learned and to reinforce operational compliance. In this paper, descriptions of variables used for digital data collection and an online report form for collection of observational data from the operators (contextual data) are provided. They are used to collect off-nominal data from the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management National Campaign in 2017. The digital data show that 2 out of 118 campaign operations (1.7%) encountered loss of navigation. Since the campaign aircraft used Global Positioning System for navigation, it is likely that unobstructed view of the sky at the campaign locations contributed to this small number. Also, 4 out of 47 operations (8.5%) encountered loss of communications. A relatively short distance between ground control system and aircraft, ranging from 2300 feet to 4200 feet, likely contributed to this small number. There was no data to identify the loss of communications condition, aircraft received signal strength, for the remaining 71 operations suggesting that some operators may not be monitoring unmanned aircraft communications system performance or monitoring it with different parameters. For the contextual data, due to the low number of total reports during the campaign, no significant trends emerged. This is an initial attempt to collect contextual data from small unmanned aircraft operators about off-nominal situations, and changes will be made to the future data collection to improve the amount and quality of the information

L2 (IM)POLITENESS IN THE SYNCHRONOUS CHAT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LEARNERS

Participation in interactive games, especially those in immersive environments, is often employed in learning contexts to stochastically develop L2 learners’ language ability. However, typical measures of language ability often do not reflect pragmatic competencies. This study juxtaposes two elementary school ESL learners’ language ability, and facility with the media, with their politeness measures. Data was collected from out-of-school gameplay chat in a virtual environment designed for elementary school learners. Results suggest learners can express pragmatic miscues to interlocutors in the lean media of synchronous chat

Recent Developments and Challenges on Machining of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composite Laminates

In recent years, composites have attracted a great deal of interest because they lack the limitations of metallic and polymer materials. Although carbon-fiber- reinforced plastics (CFRPs) of the various composites exhibit superior properties, this machining has been challenging because the materials are anisotropic and non-homogeneous. The machining characteristics of CFRPs have been studied for over a decade. Recent studies have used advanced machining techniques to increase productivity and quality. Developments in sensing and computing technologies have been exploited to derive monitoring and diagnostic systems based on artificial intelligence. Although several reviews of CFRP machining have been published, they focused on predictive models or experimental studies on machining mechanisms and characteristics. Here, we review the current state-of-the-art research on advanced technologies and monitoring systems to guide future studies

Net Neutrality and Its Implications to Online Learning

In this article, we studied net neutrality as a complex sociocultural phenomenon that can affect the works of distance education scholars and online learners. We decided to take part in this research because many distance education scholars and learners take net neutrality for granted. We engaged in a qualitative investigation of US public documents and explored the effects of net neutrality and public digital access, which can influence learner engagement with online educational materials. We focused on identifying tensions in the discourse about net neutrality, especially surrounding the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) 2015 Open Internet Order. Our research question was: How do the complexities involved in the net neutrality debate in the United States affect public access to online information and services, and what implications does this hold for online learning? We relied on activity systems as an analytical framework for making sense of net neutrality