{"title":"Exploring Student and Supervisor Interaction During the SciPro Thesis Process: Two Use Cases","authors":"Preben Hansen, H. Hansson","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2017040103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2017040103","url":null,"abstract":"Common problems identified by students during their interaction with supervisors are too little instructions as well as infrequent and insufficient supervisor feedback. The SciPro system has been developed to tackle these problems. This paper describes, analyze and discuss the interaction between students and supervisors using the SciPro system. Through two use cases involving two supervisors and 38 bachelor and master students, the authors show that the structure implemented in SciPro supports and allows for different pedagogical approaches and supervision styles. Ten different types of interactions in the thesis process are identified. In order to explain why some students do not complete within the timeframe, the authors identify six categories of problems: 1 language skills, 2 inability to apply research methods, 3 ability for self-study, 4 lack of creativity, 5 limited knowledge about how to write academic work, and 6 lack of motivation. The collaborative stage of group-supervision may be one possible way to deal with the different type of support for the process of managing student theses.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116497512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning Styles in the e-Learning Environment: The Approaches and Research on Longitudinal Changes","authors":"Pavel Doulik, J. Škoda, I. Šimonová","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2017040104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2017040104","url":null,"abstract":"The paper focuses on the field of learning styles in e-learning. The study is structured in two main parts: 1 a brief overview of traditional approaches to learning styles is presented and their role in the process of instruction is set; this part results in the reflection of current state, when learning styles are considered within e-learning; 2 results of meta-analysis dealing with learning styles in the e-learning environment are introduced focusing on two periods 2001-2007, 2008-2014 and journals in selected databases ProQuest Central, Elsevier Science Direct and ERIC. Totally 5,361 papers were collected and structured according to three criteria: 1 time period, 2 relevancy of information sources and 3 relevant key words. Collected data underwent the chi-squared test for independence and the analysis of adjusted residuals on the significance level a=0.05. No statistically significant changes were discovered in the research sample, however, some shifts were detected in this field. Finally, the results were discussed and relating conclusions provided.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128453055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shuyue Hu, Y. Cai, Ho-fung Leung, Dongping Huang, Yang Yang
{"title":"Integrating User Reviews and Ratings for Enhanced Personalized Searching","authors":"Shuyue Hu, Y. Cai, Ho-fung Leung, Dongping Huang, Yang Yang","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2017040106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2017040106","url":null,"abstract":"With the development of e-commerce, websites such as Amazon and eBay have become very popular. Users post reviews of products and rate the helpfulness of reviews on these websites. Reviews written by a user and reviews rated by a user reflect the user's interests and disinterest. Thus, they are very useful for user profiling. In this study, the authors explore users' reviews and ratings of reviews for personalized searching and propose a review-based user profiling method. To satisfy a user's basic information needs, expressed in the form of a query, they also propose a priority-based result ranking strategy. For evaluation, they conduct experiments on a real-life data set. The experimental results show that their method can significantly improve retrieval quality.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125180792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Benneaser, J. Jayakumar, V. Thavavel, M. Arumugam, K. J. Poornaselvan
{"title":"Design of Open Content Social Learning based on the Activities of Learner and Similar Learners","authors":"J. Benneaser, J. Jayakumar, V. Thavavel, M. Arumugam, K. J. Poornaselvan","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2017040105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2017040105","url":null,"abstract":"Teaching and learning are increasingly taking advantage of the rapid growth in Internet resources, open content, mobile technologies and social media platforms. However, due to the generally unstructured nature and overwhelming quantity of learning content, effective learning remains challenging. In an effort to close this gap, the authors designed and built an Open Content Social Learning OCSL system that compares different pedagogical strategies and algorithms intended to improve learning. Their results have shown increased effectiveness when recommending learning activities in a pedagogically appropriate order based on learning goals, historical learning preferences, and behaviors from other learners who had similar goals.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124197057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revealing Learner Interests through Topic Mining from Question-Answering Data","authors":"Yijie Dun, Na Wang, Min Wang, Tianyong Hao","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2017040102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2017040102","url":null,"abstract":"In a question-answering system, learner generated content including asked and answered questions is a meaningful resource to capture learning interests. This paper proposes an approach based on question topic mining for revealing learners' concerned topics in real community question-answering systems. The authors' approach firstly preprocesses all questions associated with learners. Afterwards, it analyzes each question with text features and generates a weight feature matrix using a revised TF/IDF method. In order to decrease the sparsity issue of data distribution, the authors employ three concept-mapping strategies including named entity recognition, synonym extension, and hyponym replacement. Applying an SVM classifier, their approach categorizes user questions into representative topics. Three experiments are conducted based on a TREC dataset and an actual dataset containing 1,120 questions posted by learners from a commercial question-answering community. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method compared with conventional classifiers as baselines.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129473978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conceptual Design Model of Instructional Interfaces: Courseware for Inclusive Education System (IID4C) Distance Learning","authors":"Abdulrauf Tosho, A. A. Mutalib, S. Salam","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2016100106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2016100106","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes an ongoing study related to a conceptual design model, which is specific to instructional interface design to enhance courseware usage. It was found that most of the existing courseware applications focus on the needs of certain target with most of the courseware offer too little to inclusive learners. In addition, the use of structure, layout, and navigation to improve the courseware instructional interfaces as part of usability strategies was also problematic for developers. Thus, this study aims at creating an alternative instructional interface as part of usability strategies for inclusive education systems called Instructional Interface Design for Courseware IID4C. It is proposed as guidance for the developer to refer to. The study used comparative analysis technique to determine the elements of the model. In the end, this study finds that the IID4C model is useful for information accessibility and contributes to the designing of instructional courseware. Future works are to evaluate the proposed model among disabled and non-disabled learners.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125530695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BIOMIND Portal for Developing 21st Century Skills and Overcoming Students' Misconception in Biology Subject","authors":"Rian Vebrianto, R. U. Rery, Kamisah Osman","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2016100105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2016100105","url":null,"abstract":"This research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of BIOMIND portal in enhancing students' 21st century skills and overcoming their misconceptions in Biology subject. 118 Indonesian high school students were involved in this quasi-experimental study. The experimental group underwent learning experiences using BIOMIND portal whereas the control group experienced conventional learning approaches. The effectiveness of the BIOMIND portal was measured based on the students' 21st century skills development and their level of misconceptions. There were significant differences in the 21st century skills development found between the experimental group and the control group. In addition, this research has found that the BIOMIND portal could overcome misconceptions among students due to the trainings given during interventions. This study concluded that teaching and learning using BIOMIND portal has brought positive impacts especially in developing the 21st century skills and overcoming students' misconceptions in Biology subject.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"364 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123554597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jose Maria Cela-Ranilla, L. M. Molías, M. G. Cervera
{"title":"Learning Patterns as Criterion for Forming Work Groups in 3D Simulation Learning Environments","authors":"Jose Maria Cela-Ranilla, L. M. Molías, M. G. Cervera","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2016100103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2016100103","url":null,"abstract":"This study analyzes the relationship between the use of learning patterns as a grouping criterion to develop learning activities in the 3D simulation environment at University. Participants included 72 Spanish students from the Education and Marketing disciplines. Descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests were conducted. The process was analyzed by means of teamwork measurements and the product was analyzed by assessing the final group performance. Results showed that learning patterns can be an effective criterion for forming work groups, especially when the students do not know each other.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133348625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of a Scaffolded Assessment Intervention on Students' Academic Achievement in Web-based Peer Assessment Activities","authors":"Chien I. Lee, Ya-Fei Yang, Shin-Yi Mai","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2016100104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2016100104","url":null,"abstract":"Web-based peer assessment has been considered an important process for learning. However, students may not offer constructive feedback due to lack of expertise knowledge. Therefore, this study proposed a scaffolded assessment approach accordingly. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the quasi-experimental design was employed to investigate the effects of scaffolded assessment for self-critiques and peer assessment on students' learning effectiveness in the web-based assessment activities. A total of ninety 7th graders participated in the experiment, and divided into three groups with or without the scaffolding critique. The results show the use of the scaffolded assessment in the web-based peer assessment activities did not show a significant difference in the students' learning effectiveness. Even though the results show that learning effectiveness of the participants in the two experimental groups is significantly enhanced, there is no significant effect of providing the scaffolded assessment on the participants' learning effectiveness in the three groups. In addition, the participants showed a positive learning attitude toward the web-based assessment activities and agreed that the activities could enhance the participants' interactions between the peers and instructor.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128594216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dynamic Group Formation based on a Natural Phenomenon","authors":"Amina Zedadra, Y. Lafifi, Ouarda Zedadra","doi":"10.4018/IJDET.2016100102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/IJDET.2016100102","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a new approach of learners grouping in collaborative learning systems. This grouping process is based on traces left by learners. The goal is the circular dynamic grouping to achieve collaborative projects. The proposed approach consists of two main algorithms: 1 the circular grouping algorithm and 2 the dynamic grouping algorithm used to update groups. The circular grouping is a novel algorithm to group learners based on their learning and collaborative traces. So, the aim is to form heterogeneous groups based on their profiles. The dynamic grouping algorithm is based on the behavior of penguins when they are moving in the winter season to secure their lives. The new proposed approach used the same behavior of penguins' colony. The proposed approach was applied on a collaborative learning system called LETline 2.0 http://www.labstic.com/letline/. The developed system was experimented at an Algerian university. After the experiment, the authors observed that their system groups automatically the learners into homogeneous groups and improves their cognitive profiles.","PeriodicalId":298910,"journal":{"name":"Int. J. Distance Educ. Technol.","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123731737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}