Effects of computer-supported collaboration script and incomplete concept maps on web design skills in an online design-based learning environment

Web design skills are an important component of media literacy. The aim of our study was to promote university students’ web design skills through online design-based learning (DBL). Combined in a 2x2-factorial design, two types of scaffolding were implemented in an online DBL environment to support the students through their effort to design, build, modify, and publish web sites on processes and outcomes measures, namely collaboration scripts and incomplete concept maps. The results showed that both treatments had positive effects on collaborative (content-related discourse quality, collaboration skills, and quality of published web sites) and individual (domain-specific knowledge and skills related to the design and building of websites) learning outcomes. There was synergism between the two scaffolds in that the combination of the collaboration script and incomplete concept maps produced the most positive results. To be effective, online DBL thus needs to be enhanced by appropriate scaffolds, and both collaboration scripts and incomplete concept maps are effective examples

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Mobile Training Context for In-Service Teachers: Methods of Training and Task Practice to Enhance E-Content Production Skills

Mobile training is one of the modern training systems resulting from the integration of innovations in information and communication technology (ICT), which can be used to solve the problems of traditional training in educational institutions. Therefore, it is important to study the design variables of such training that enhance its effectiveness. Thus, the present study aims to design a mobile training context (MTC) and to investigate the effect of interaction between the training method, i.e., whole task (WT) versus part task (PT), and the task practice method, i.e., massed practice (MP) versus distributed practice (DP), on the skills of e-content production of 52 public education teachers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, through using the semi-experimental approach and the factorial design (2 × 2). Furthermore, an application-oriented knowledge test was used to measure the participant teachers’ skills through their application of 208 items related to e-content design, production, and publishing. Findings showed the effectiveness of part-task training (PTT) compared to whole-task training (WTT) and the effectiveness of the massed practice method (MPM) compared to the distributed practice method (DPM). In addition, there was a preference for the massed practice for part-task (MPPT) treatment in comparison to other treatments. This result encourages the possibility of providing a successful MTC for training in different skills. However, further research is still required to optimize the expected future potential of the mobile training context