The use of social media platforms for foreign language learning in adult and community education

The ubiquity of digital technologies in everyday life have transformed the landscape of education. Emerging digital tools are often used to facilitate teaching and learning in a range of ways, arguably providing opportunities for inclusion and access to diverse sources of information and knowledge. The advent of social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp has attracted scholarly attention both in terms of the ways in which people communicate in everyday life as well as in their potential in language learning settings. Although a lot of research has been conducted on the use of social media in higher education, there is no evidence on the impact of these digital platforms in the Adult and Community Learning (ACL) context. This thesis contributes to the under-researched field of ACL by investigating the use of Facebook and WhatsApp by two groups of language learners in an adult education centre in the UK. It explores the opportunities that social media (in this case, Facebook and WhatsApp) can provide in terms of student-to-student and teacher-to-student interaction and also points to their limitations. Following a case study design, pre- and post-questionnaires, online observation, and semi-structured interviews were used to elicit data for the study. A key methodological contribution of this thesis is the systematic combination of two analytical frameworks (i.e. the Community of Inquiry framework, and the framework for the analysis of sharing practices) to analyse teachers’ and learners’ online contributions. This study examines students’ perceptions of using these digital platforms for language learning purposes and provides an empirical account of the extent to which (and how) learners and teachers interact with each other in these online environments. The analysis pointed to a mismatch between students’ perceptions of the benefits of digital platforms for language learning and their online behaviour and foregrounded the importance of a set of contextual factors in the effective use of social media affordances for language learning

Predicting the Evolution of Communities with Online Inductive Logic Programming

In the recent years research on dynamic social network has increased, which is also due to the availability of data sets from streaming media. Modeling a network\u27s dynamic behaviour can be performed at the level of communities, which represent their mesoscale structure. Communities arise as a result of user to user interaction. In the current work we aim to predict the evolution of communities, i.e. to predict their future form. While this problem has been studied in the past as a supervised learning problem with a variety of classifiers, the problem is that the "knowledge" of a classifier is opaque and consequently incomprehensible to a human. Thus we have employed first order logic, and in particular the event calculus to represent the communities and their evolution. We addressed the problem of predicting the evolution as an online Inductive Logic Programming problem (ILP), where the issue is to learn first order logical clauses that associate evolutionary events, and particular Growth, Shrinkage, Continuation and Dissolution to lower level events. The lower level events are features that represent the structural and temporal characteristics of communities. Experiments have been performed on a real life data set form the Mathematics StackExchange forum, with the OLED framework for ILP. In doing so we have produced clauses that model both short term and long term correlations

Accessible learning, accessible analytics: a virtual evidence café

Learner accessibility is often thought of in terms of physical infrastructure or, in the case of online learning, guidelines for web design. Learning analytics offer a new set of possibilities for identifying and removing barriers to accessibility in learning environments. This is not simply a matter of designing analytics tools to be more accessible, for example by catering for learners who need extra time to respond, reducing cognitive load, or choosing an appropriate colour palette. When it comes to increasing access to learning opportunities for people with disabilities, solutions must be developed in the field of learning analytics. This workshop is a step towards developing those solutions. It will take the form of an evidence café, a structured event in which participants will be split into groups to discuss technical and pedagogic approaches to accessibility, as well as the barriers faced by disabled students and educators, and the associated challenges faced by those who design and research learning analytics. The intended outcomes of this workshop are to raise awareness of accessible learning and accessible analytics, and to build a community of researchers to lead future development in the area of accessible analytics

Guidance on how Learning at Scale can be made more accessible

While learning at scale has the potential to widen access to education, the accessibility of courses offered on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms has not been researched in depth. This paper begins to fill that gap. Data was gathered using the participatory ‘Evidence Café’ method. Thematic analysis identified characteristics of accessible courses on these platforms. These characteristics include elements of both technology and pedagogy. Capturing and analysing expert insights enables this paper to provide guidance on how online courses can be made more accessible. The findings suggest that course production teams need to work collaboratively with providers to address issues of accessibility and involve learners in design, testing and evaluation. Well-designed tutor-supported activities that follow web accessibility and usability guidelines are needed, as well as educator training on accessibility

A Data-Driven Approach for Analyzing Healthcare Services Extracted from Clinical Records

Cancer remains one of the major public health challenges worldwide. After cardiovascular diseases, cancer is one of the first causes of death and morbidity in Europe, with more than 4 million new cases and 1.9 million deaths per year. The suboptimal management of cancer patients during treatment and subsequent follows up are major obstacles in achieving better outcomes of the patients and especially regarding cost and quality of life In this paper, we present an initial data-driven approach to analyze the resources and services that are used more frequently by lung-cancer patients with the aim of identifying where the care process can be improved by paying a special attention on services before diagnosis to being able to identify possible lung-cancer patients before they are diagnosed and by reducing the length of stay in the hospital. Our approach has been built by analyzing the clinical notes of those oncological patients to extract this information and their relationships with other variables of the patient. Although the approach shown in this manuscript is very preliminary, it shows that quite interesting outcomes can be derived from further analysis. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Acute thoracoabdominal and hemodynamic responses to tapered flow resistive loading in healthy adults

We investigated the acute physiological responses of tapered flow resistive loading (TFRL) at 30, 50 and 70% maximal inspiratory pressure (PImax) in 12 healthy adults to determine an optimal resistive load. Increased end-inspiratory rib cage and decreased end-expiratory abdominal volumes equally contributed to the expansion of thoracoabdominal tidal volume (captured by optoelectronic plethysmography). A significant decrease in end-expiratory thoracoabdominal volume was observed from 30 to 50% PImax, from 30 to 70% PImax, and from 50 to 70% PImax. Cardiac output (recorded by cardio-impedance) increased from rest by 30% across the three loading trials. Borg dyspnoea increased from 2.36 ± 0.20 at 30% PImax, to 3.45 ± 0.21 at 50% PImax, and 4.91 ± 0.25 at 70% PImax. End-tidal CO2 decreased from rest during 30, 50 and 70 %PImax (26.23 ± 0.59, 25.87 ± 1.02 and 24.30 ± 0.82 mmHg, respectively). Optimal intensity for TFRL is at 50% PImax to maximise global respiratory muscle and cardiovascular loading whilst minimising hyperventilation and breathlessness

Effect of portable noninvasive ventilation on thoracoabdominal volumes in recovery from intermittent exercise in patients with COPD

We previously showed that use of portable noninvasive ventilation (pNIV) during recovery periods within intermittent exercise improved breathlessness and exercise tolerance in patients with COPD compared with pursed-lip breathing (PLB). However, in a minority of patients recovery from dynamic hyperinflation (DH) was better with PLB, based on inspiratory capacity. We further explored this using Optoelectronic Plethysmography to assess total and compartmental thoracoabdominal volumes. Fourteen patients with COPD (means ± SD) (FEV1: 55% ± 22% predicted) underwent, in a balanced order sequence, two intermittent exercise protocols on the cycle ergometer consisting of five repeated 2-min exercise bouts at 80% peak capacity, separated by 2-min recovery periods, with application of pNIV or PLB in the 5 min of recovery. Our findings identified seven patients showing recovery in DH with pNIV (DH responders) whereas seven showed similar or better recovery in DH with PLB. When pNIV was applied, DH responders compared with DH nonresponders exhibited greater tidal volume (by 0.8 ± 0.3 L, P = 0.015), inspiratory flow rate (by 0.6 ± 0.5 L/s, P = 0.049), prolonged expiratory time (by 0.6 ± 0.5 s, P = 0.006), and duty cycle (by 0.7 ± 0.6 s, P = 0.007). DH responders showed a reduction in end-expiratory thoracoabdominal DH (by 265 ± 633 mL) predominantly driven by reduction in the abdominal compartment (by 210 ± 494 mL); this effectively offset end-inspiratory rib-cage DH. Compared with DH nonresponders, DH responders had significantly greater body mass index (BMI) by 8.4 ± 3.2 kg/m2, P = 0.022 and tended toward less severe resting hyperinflation by 0.3 ± 0.3 L. Patients with COPD who mitigate end-expiratory rib-cage DH by expiratory abdominal muscle recruitment benefit from pNIV application. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Compared with the pursed-lip breathing technique, acute application of portable noninvasive ventilation during recovery from intermittent exercise improved end-expiratory thoracoabdominal dynamic hyperinflation (DH) in 50% of patients with COPD (DH responders). DH responders, compared with DH nonresponders, exhibited a reduction in end-expiratory thoracoabdominal DH predominantly driven by the abdominal compartment that effectively offset end-expiratory rib cage DH. The essential difference between DH responders and DH nonresponders was, therefore, in the behavior of the abdomen