Diffusion of e-learning as an innovation and economic aspects of e-learning support structures

Meanwhile, many universities and educational institutions have implemented an e-learning center or some similar, often smaller institutional units in order to support the usage of new media in teaching and learning processes [1]. This paper addresses questions around the installation of such e-learning support structures at different levels of an institution and also looks at the diffusion of e-learning as an innovation in educational institutions

How the Russian Orthodox Church Views the Russian World

The cultural concept of a “Russian world” (Russian: “russkiy mir”) plays an increasingly important role today, and is not limited to political discourse. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which officially joined the “Russian World” foundation in 2009, has frequently referred to Russkiy mir in recent discourse. The term “Russian world” refers to a culture that differentiates itself from Western culture and is superior to it. Despite ROC usage of the term, understanding of Russkiy mir is diffuse. There are still some semantic constants which occur repeatedly. The most significant of these are a) the historical aspect, b) religion or religious origin, c) values, and d) supranational character. The Russkiy mir concept has gained even more significance during the latest event in Ukraine

Design of a group oriented, decentralised learning environment

The paper presents the design of a group oriented virtual learning setting where learning takes place in three levels: individual learning, group learning and inter-group communication processes. This communication takes place via standard internet services

What 1990 Meant for My Country...

When I started thinking about what to write in this essay, my first thought was: I am probably from the country that was affected most of all by the events of 1998-1990. I am German, and I live in Germany, the country through which the East-West-divide went, most visibly through Berlin in form of the wall. But after a short time, I thought of the countries on which I concentrate most in my research—Russia and Ukraine, on the one hand, and Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the other hand. Thirty years ago, they all belonged to larger countries, which do not exist anymore, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. I do not want to enter a competition regarding which country was more affected, and whether the split of a larger country into smaller ones has a larger effect than the unification of two countries into one. What is important, however, is to note that in both cases of break-ups, war was involved: for the years 1991-1995 in former Yugoslavia, and on a lesser level, in different regions for different periods of time, in the former Soviet Union, most significantly in the war still going on in Eastern Ukraine

An algorithm for the rapid numerical evaluation of Bessel functions of real orders and arguments

We describe a method for the rapid numerical evaluation of the Bessel functions of the first and second kinds of nonnegative real orders and positive arguments. Our algorithm makes use of the well-known observation that although the Bessel functions themselves are expensive to represent via piecewise polynomial expansions, the logarithms of certain solutions of Bessel's equation are not. We exploit this observation by numerically precomputing the logarithms of carefully chosen Bessel functions and representing them with piecewise bivariate Chebyshev expansions. Our scheme is able to evaluate Bessel functions of orders between $0$ and 1\sep,000\sep,000\sep,000 at essentially any positive real argument. In that regime, it is competitive with existing methods for the rapid evaluation of Bessel functions and has several advantages over them. First, our approach is quite general and can be readily applied to many other special functions which satisfy second order ordinary differential equations. Second, by calculating the logarithms of the Bessel functions rather than the Bessel functions themselves, we avoid many issues which arise from numerical overflow and underflow. Third, in the oscillatory regime, our algorithm calculates the values of a nonoscillatory phase function for Bessel's differential equation and its derivative. These quantities are useful for computing the zeros of Bessel functions, as well as for rapidly applying the Fourier-Bessel transform. The results of extensive numerical experiments demonstrating the efficacy of our algorithm are presented. A Fortran package which includes our code for evaluating the Bessel functions as well as our code for all of the numerical experiments described here is publically available

Efficient eLearning course design and media production

AKUE is developed by the e-learning centre of the University of Frankfurt, studiumdigitale, and is a procedure to assure high quality levels of e-learning course design and digital media production. The name AKUE stands for the German words for analysis, concept, implementation and evaluation and describes the four phases of the process. Background of AKUE is the fact, that costs and benefits of e-learning courses are difficult to be quantified. Therefore so called procedure (or process) models are applied in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of e-learning courses. This paper presents the process and steps of AKUE and gives examples for its application

New format for online courses: the open course "Future of Learning"

Since 2007 the concept of open online courses came up leading to many discussions of this new format in blog posts and articles especially in the US and Canada. 2011, the first German open online course was started addressing the Future of Learning. The article discusses the concept of open online courses, the experiences with the first German course, and gives some perspectives on further developments which partly were implemented in a new course that was just started in 2012

Perspectives on the educational market: universities between virtual campus and education brokers

Nowadays information and communication technologies are affecting many aspects of our daily life. Sitting at our home computer we can order products, book flights, transfer money, buy and sell stocks and take online classes of educational institutions at the other end of the world. Maybe one day we will be able to pick any graduate business course at any institution that we like and combine credits of several online universities. Major changes are happening on the educational market. How will the educational market look like in 10 or 20 years? Which path will the traditional universities go from now on and where will they end? And: what are the factors that influence this shift? These are the questions which are addressed in this paper. Some of the analysis presented in this paper is based on papers published by the German Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Heinz Nixdorf Stiftung (Encarnacao/Leidhold/Reuter 2000) and on some English authors (i.e. Daniel 1998) and it summarizes some of their ideas