Towards the Situated Engagement Evaluation Model (SEEM) : making the invisible visible

This thesis explores the multifaceted concept of engagement within online learning environments. Key research aims are to suggest approaches and an extendable model for evaluating, monitoring and developing understanding of online learner engagement. The overall intention is to offer educators insight, practical guidance and tools for supporting timely intervention in fostering learner engagement. This thesis reviews the major theoretical perspectives on learning and highlights the role of student engagement in relation to the research literature. It discusses the limitations of the methods applied in current research and attempts to address this problem by crossing the disciplinary boundaries to draw together a range of perspectives and methodologies. A review of the literature provides a foundation for a learner engagement evaluation model that employs a variety of evaluation methods and accommodates the possible diversity of learning experiences. The proposed ‘Situated Engagement Evaluation Model’ (SEEM) is positioned to reflect the wide theoretical perspective of social learning. It constitutes a comprehensive system of intertwined components (Learning Content; Pedagogical Design Elements; Learning Profiles; and Dialogue and Communication) that learners may interact with, and integrates dynamically changing preferences and predispositions (e.g. cultural, emotional, cognitive) potentially informative in engagement studies. Prior to (and independently of) the development of SEEM, four empirical studies were conducted and reported here. These explored patterns of online engagement with respect to learning content, learning profiles, patterns of communication and elements of pedagogical design. Studies were then revisited to evaluate the usefulness of SEEM for monitoring and evaluating student engagement, and to discuss its potential for guiding intervention to improve learning experiences. The practical relevance for integrated and automated implementation of SEEM in online learning is considered further

Sustainable eLearning in a Changing Landscape: A Scoping Study (SeLScope)

The report begins by exploring the concept of sustainable e-learning - defining it and establishing its characteristics in the context of Higher Education. To ensure a sound and systematic process, the review is informed by a five-phase methodological framework for scoping reviews by Arksey and O'Malley (2005). Examples and perspectives on the concept of sustainable e-learning are summarised and key factors impacting on sustainability are abstracted. highlights potential gaps and suggests directions for further research on the topic

Integrating social software into course design and tracking student engagement : early results and research perspectives

The uptake of social software is becoming more widespread in many sectors of education and organizational development. However, there is little empirical research on the impacts of adopting these technologies, and so it is difficult to determine appropriate pedagogic models and whether or not the desired learning outcomes are being realized. This paper reports early findings of an ongoing pilot study which is based on the concept of collaborative learning and supported by means of social software. It describes the educational philosophy behind the study and the teaching techniques used. The application of various features of social software, including blogs, file management and personalization, are discussed, as well as the different techniques for facilitating and measuring the level of student engagement with social software. The results indicate that student engagement with social software can be shaped by course design and activities that integrate educational technology into the course structure

Evaluation of social interaction features in topolor - a social personalized adaptive e-learning system

Here we present a case study that analyses the social interaction features in Topolor, an adaptive personalized social e-learning system. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the perceived usefulness and usability. The results show a considerably high satisfaction of the students. We discuss the evaluation results and outline the plan for improvement

THE TRAILS OF PERSILES AND SIGIZMUNDA" AND "THE BROTHES KARAMAZOV" - NOVELS ABOUT THE BLESSED MARRAIGE

Сопоставление последних, итоговых созданий Сервантеса и Достоевского – романов «Странствия Персилеса и Сихизмунды» и «Братья Карамазовы» - никогда не проводилось ни в российском, ни, насколько известно, в испанском и мировом литературоведении. Между тем такое сопоставление выявляет очень важные типологические черты сходства. Основная тема этих романов – духовное преображение человека подлинной христианской любовью. Оба писателя воплощали здесь свою мечту об идеальном романе и шли на сложный жанровый эксперимент, создавая произведения, в процессе чтения которых духовно преображался бы и читатель.The comparison of the last works of Cervantes and Dostoevsky - “The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda” and “The Brothers Karamasov” – is innovative in Russian, Spanish and world literary criticism. Meanwhile such analysis reveals many common features in the poetics of these novelsThe comparison of the last works of Cervantes and Dostoevsky - “The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda” and “The Brothers Karamasov” – is innovative in Russian, Spanish and world literary criticism. Meanwhile such analysis reveals many common features in the poetics of these novels

«Преступление и наказание» в творческой биографии Ф.М. Достоевского

Crime and Punishment, that became the confession of Dostoevsky himself and that opens his “Pentateuch”, marks a cardinal transformation of the writer’s creative principles. For the first time, the artistic task was to show the path of a person (and not just any person, but a person who has committed a mortal sin) to salvation, and both protagonists, Raskolnikov and Sonya, arrive at salvation through each other. Thus, the novel implements a key principle of Dostoevsky’s poetics as formulated by S. Bocharov: for Dostoevsky, a person before God is always a person before another person. For the first time, the protagonist is an ideologue, and a discussion between him and God begins. Thus emerge two crucial structuring principles of Dostoevsky’s great novels: the epiphany (of Christ) and a dialog (of characters with God and of characters with each other on the Glad Tidings). The dialog is developing in time and stops at the moment of crucial transition of a person into another existential state. The artistic time changes; the novel has several types of time: “the gray time” of Raskolnikov’s dream of his childhood when his protest combined with compassion is born; the novel’s time of the Gospels and the Old Testament touching on the eternal; the past that determines the present, and the novel’s future that anticipates the empirical time. The novel itself emerges into the “greater time” and engages in a dialog with Hamlet, Macbeth, Le Père Goriot, and other masterpieces of world literature. A system of doubles appears, but they are not a hero’s copies “with the opposite sign” (like Golyadkin Sr. and Golyadkin Jr.), they are alternative paths toward the light (or away from it). Major points of convergences (and divergences) with the genre of tragedy become apparent.В романе «Преступление и наказание», ставшем исповедью самого Достоевского и открывающем его «пятикнижие», произошло кардинальное преображение  его творческих принципов предшествующего периода.Впервые была поставлена художественная задача – показать путь человека (и не просто человека, а свершившего смертный грех) к спасению, причем оба героя, Раскольников и Соня,  приходят к спасению друг через друга – т.е. осуществляется один из главных принципов поэтики Достоевского, сформулированный С. Бочаровым: у Достоевского человек перед Богом это всегда человек перед другим человеком. Впервые главным героем становится идеолог – и начинается дискуссия между ним и Богом. Возникают, таким образом, два основных структурообразующих принципа великих романов Достоевского: явление (Христа) и диалог (персонажей с Богом   и друг с другом о Благой вести). Диалог развивается во времени и прекращается в мгновение решающего перехода человека в иное бытийное состояние. Изменяется художественное время – в романе несколько типов времени: «серенькое время» сна Раскольникова о детстве, где зарождается его протест, слитый с состраданием; евангельское и ветхозаветное время романа, соприкасающееся с вечностью; прошлое, определяющее настоящее, и романное будущее, опережающее эмпирическое время. Происходит выход  самого произведения в «большое время» – оно вступает в своего рода диалог с «Гамлетом», «Макбетом», «Отцом Горио» и другими мировыми шедеврами. Возникает система двойников – не копий героя «с обратным знаком» (как Голядкины старший и младший), но как альтернативных путей к свету (или от него). Явными становятся существенные сближения (но и расхождения) с жанром трагедии

Social personalized adaptive e-learning environment : Topolor - implementation and evaluation

This paper presents a quantitative study on the use of Topolor - a prototype that introduces Web 2.0 tools and Facebook-like appearance into an adaptive educational hypermedia system. We present the system design and its evaluation using system usability scale questionnaire and learning behavior data analysis. The results indicate high level of student satisfaction with the learning experience and the diversity of learning activities

BlogForever: D2.5 Weblog Spam Filtering Report and Associated Methodology

This report is written as a first attempt to define the BlogForever spam detection strategy. It comprises a survey of weblog spam technology and approaches to their detection. While the report was written to help identify possible approaches to spam detection as a component within the BlogForver software, the discussion has been extended to include observations related to the historical, social and practical value of spam, and proposals of other ways of dealing with spam within the repository without necessarily removing them. It contains a general overview of spam types, ready-made anti-spam APIs available for weblogs, possible methods that have been suggested for preventing the introduction of spam into a blog, and research related to spam focusing on those that appear in the weblog context, concluding in a proposal for a spam detection workflow that might form the basis for the spam detection component of the BlogForever software

ACQUA: Automated Community-based Question Answering through the Discretisation of Shallow Linguistic Features

This paper addresses the problem of determining the best answer in Community-based Question Answering (CQA) websites by focussing on the content. In particular, we present a novel system, ACQUA (http://acqua.kmi.open.ac.uk), that can be installed onto the majority of browsers as a plugin. The service offers a seamless and accurate prediction of the answer to be accepted. Our system is based on a novel approach for processing answers in CQAs. Previous research on this topic relies on the exploitation of community feedback on the answers, which involves rating of either users (e.g., reputation) or answers (e.g. scores manually assigned to answers). We propose a new technique that leverages the content/textual features of answers in a novel way. Our approach delivers better results than related linguistics-based solutions and manages to match rating-based approaches. More specifically, the gain in performance is achieved by rendering the values of these features into a discretised form. We also show how our technique manages to deliver equally good results in real-time settings, as opposed to having to rely on information not always readily available, such as user ratings and answer scores. We ran an evaluation on 21 StackExchange websites covering around 4 million questions and more than 8 million answers. We obtain 84% average precision and 70% recall, which shows that our technique is robust, effective, and widely applicable