The Impact of new technologies on distance learning students: Bibliography

This bibliography comprises 75 annotated references to books and articles about distance education and e-learning research and practice. URLs are included in cases where online resources exist for individual entries. The selected literature was identified in different European language regions including English, German, Hungarian, and Italian. The bibliographic entries are clustered into six thematic groups: Major classical studies, Impact of technology on student achievement, Reviews of the literature, Identification of issues, Methodology, Bibliographies

The impact of new technologies on distance learning students

This book "The impact of new technologies on distance learning students" addresses a crucial dimension of educational provision: the expenditure on educational technology of the 27 Ministries of Education in the European Union and of Ministries of Education and Higher Education throughout the world, for their schools, colleges and universities. If it cannot be proved that there is an impact of technology on learning and if it cannon be proved that this impact is beneficial then this expenditure is without justification. As recently as 2005 the World Bank claimed ‘The positive impact of ICT use in education had not been proven. In general, and despite thousands of impact studies, the impact of ICT use on student achievement remains difficult to measure and open to much reasonable debate.' The book takes a different approach to other studies in the field in that it concentrates on the impact of technology on learning in adult education, lifelong learning and distance education. In this context it has a special focus on distance education. Much previous work in the field has focused on the impact of technology on learning by children in schools. The book has a matrix structure. One branch of the matrix is provided by studies of the five forms of distance education technologies used in the study: distance education systems electronic distance education (usually referred to as e-learning), synchronous e-learning the se of the World Wide Web on- campus and mobile learning. The other branch of the matrix is supplied by two studies of the impact of technology on learning by men and women and by younger and older learners. This book was published with the assistance of the European Commission through its Leonardo da Vinci programme

An OER Recommender System Supporting Accessibility Requirements

Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs

Die Auswirkungen neuer Technologien auf Studierende an Fernuniversitäten: Bibliographie

Die vorliegende Bibliographie umfasst 75 kommentierte Einträge zur Fernstudien- und eLearningforschung und -praxis. Soweit Online-Quellen zu einzelnen Einträgen existieren, sind entsprechende Verweise mit aufgeführt. Die ausgewählten Literaturbeiträge wurden in verschiedenen Sprachräumen, darunter Englisch, Deutsch, Italienisch und Ungarisch, zusammen getragen. Die bibliographischen Einträge sind in sechs Gruppen eingeteilt: • Klassische Studien • Auswirkungen des Technikeinsatzes auf studentische Leistungen • Übersichtsartikel • Betrachtungen einzelner Phänomene • Methodische Beiträge • Bibliographien allgemei

DALIA FAIR Open Educational Federation: Aggregation, Harmonisation, Curation, and Quality Assurance with DALIA

As a funding measure of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and from the EU's Development and Resilience Facility, the project “DALIA - Knowledge-Base for FAIR data usage and supply" not only creates technical bridges between NFDI consortia but also an evolving approach that contributes to transdisciplinary community building in the long term. By harmonising, networking and making visible teaching and learning materials for the development and promotion of data literacy, the project makes an important contribution to education, training and cultural change

Survey vs Scraped Data: Comparing Time Series Properties of Web and Survey Vacancy Data

This paper studies the relationship between a vacancy population obtained from web crawling and vacancies in the economy inferred by a National Statistics Office (NSO) using a traditional method. We compare the time series properties of samples obtained between 2007 and 2014 by Statistics Netherlands and by a web scraping company. We find that the web and NSO vacancy data present similar time series properties, suggesting that both time series are generated by the same underlying phenomenon: the real number of new vacancies in the economy. We conclude that, in our case study, web-sourced data are able to capture aggregate economic activity in the labor market.JRC.I.1-Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluatio

Status and Developments of eLearning in the EU10 Member States: Cases of Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia

This article summarises research carried out 2006-2008 by IPTS (Institution for Prospective Technological Studies) in collaboration with a consortium of experts from 10 new nember states, lead by ICEGEC. The project aimed to gather information on eLearning developments, to assess drivers and barriers and to suggest implications for policy and research in the 10 new member states that joined the European Union in 2004. Three different examples of countries (Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia) demonstrate that while the group is not homogenous commonalities can be detected. Reports show that all the EU10 countries have been catching up with the older member states in ICT penetration and skills, but large digital divides remain due to regional, social and economic divides. Educational institutions are equipped with ICT, but not always at the same level in classrooms as in EU15. Universities are using ICT in education, but mostly for material provision purposes. Enterprises seem to have higher usage of eLearning solutions than in EU15, but these are not equally available for all employees. Lack of focus and coordination in policies to support eLearning developments has been assessed to be a major barrier for developments in eLearning. In general, EU10 seems to be facing similar challenges to other European countries, although specific efforts are needed to help close the large divides and to engage people in lifelong learning with the new opportunities ICT could provide.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Ethical and Privacy Issues in the Design of Learning Analytics Applications

Issues related to Ethics and Privacy have become a major stumbling block in application of Learning Analytics technologies on a large scale. Recently, the learning analytics community at large has more actively addressed the EP4LA issues, and we are now starting to see learning analytics solutions that are designed not only as an afterthought, but also with these issues in mind. The 2nd EP4LA@LAK16 workshop will bring the discussion on ethics and privacy for learning analytics to a the next level, helping to build an agenda for organizational and technical design of LA solutions, addressing the different processes of a learning analytics workflow

Best Practices

The widespread diffusion of mobile technologies in all the EU countries offers an opportunity to develop policies aimed at participation and social inclusion, considering that the use of mobile devices transcends age, social status, economic level, gender and ethnic origins. Although the scientific community has highlighted that mobile learning could be a suitable Methodology to support lifelong learning (LLL), national policies have not yet taken any significant steps to integrate LLL and mobile technologies. This integration could have a positive effect on several indicators, such as the participation rates in education2, the skill level of teachers/trainers in the use of ICTs, the diffusion of mLearning. The MOTILL project, funded by the European Commission within the National Lifelong Learning Strategies, fulfils this need for integration by developing a common framework that involved educational research centres and both public and private agencies engaged in the sector of education and training