Digital Commons Network^™

Investigating The Effects Of Delivering Content Based On A Waves Learning Progression On Learning Outcomes In An Online High School Physics Unit, Timothy Maley

Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Dissertations

Effective instruction starts with an understanding of the learner’s pre-existing knowledge (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). That being said, online instruction often involves inflexible content presented the same way to each student regardless of their current level of understanding (van Rosmalen, Vogten, van Es, Passier, & Poelmans, 2006).The shortcomings of static instruction are intensified in online high school learning because online learning is often used for remediation and credit recovery for students that have not been successful in their traditional class (Queen & Lewis, 2011). Learning progressions, which are research-based, testable models of how learners develop their understanding of a …

Connecting Online: Can Social Networking And Other Technology Support Doctoral Connectedness?, Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw, Lorene Heuvelman-Hutchinson, Lucinda Spaulding

Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of online doctoral students’ interactions via peer initiated and university initiated technology on their sense of connectedness. The participants of this study were 132 doctoral candidates enrolled in an online Doctor of Education program located in the United States. Findings from this study suggest a non-significant relationship between student interaction via the university sponsored Facebook page and sense of connectedness between peers and faculty; however, candidates who used social networking technologies to interact with peers outside of the classroom reported a higher sense of connectedness than those who did not. …

The Development Of Innovative Online Problem-Based Learning: A Leadership Course For Leaders In European Public Health, Nynke De Jong, Karen D. Könings, Katarzyna Czabanowska

Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice

The shift to a knowledge information society has given rise to a need for lifelong learning programmes. Such programmes are especially relevant for public health professionals, whose dynamic field of practice is subject to changes due to rapidly developing technologies, evolving expectations of the labour market and new health treats. Lifelong learning programmes for public health should address topics like planning, organisation, leadership, teamwork and research methods, and schools of public health should introduce innovative educational approaches that enable professionals to learn from the experiences of others.

This paper describes the rationale for the development of a European online problem-based …

Imagining The Schools Of The Future, Danielle Meloney

Teacher infographics

What will schools look like in 2030? Take a look at this Teacher infographic to find out what a panel of global educators said.

A Bayesian Beta Kernel Model For Binary Classification And Online Learning Problems, Cameron A. Mackenzie, Theodore B. Trafalis, Kash Barker

Cameron A. MacKenzie

Recent advances in data mining have integrated kernel functions with Bayesian probabilistic analysis of Gaussian distributions. These machine-learning approaches can incorporate prior information with new data to calculate probabilistic rather than deterministic values for unknown parameters. This article extensively analyzes a specific Bayesian kernel model that uses a kernel function to calculate a posterior beta distribution that is conjugate to the prior beta distribution. Numerical testing of the beta kernel model on several benchmark datasets reveals that this model's accuracy is comparable with those of the support vector machine (SVM), relevance vector machine, naive Bayes, and logistic regression, and the …

Integrating The Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Course Into The Curriculum: Goals, Benefits And Challenges, Dominique Daniel, Elizabeth W. Kraemer

LOEX Conference Proceedings 2012

This presentation provides a model for the design and implementation of a successful credit-bearing information literacy course that addresses the most common objections against stand-alone library instruction. It emphasizes two key principles, making it relevant to students and university administrators alike: integration into the university general education program, and the contextualization of information-seeking mechanics by introducing students to the economic, political and social context in which information is produced, managed and used. These principles lay the foundation for the development of critical information literacy skills that students can transfer to other courses and beyond. Offering stand-alone instruction while integrating it …

Using Survey Responses To Determine The Value-Added Features Of A Webinar Portal System For Adoption By Natural Resource Professionals, Laurie Gharis, Robert E. Bardon, William Hubbard, Eric Taylor, Grizel Gonzalez-Jeuck

The Journal of Extension

This article presents the findings of a recent survey of natural resource webinar providers. Respondents were asked a range of questions regarding their webinar services. Findings showed that respondents most commonly marketed their webinars through email or websites and targeted an audience of professionals. Respondents noted that the greatest challenge in offering webinars was the time commitment, whereas access to high-quality speakers added the most value to a webinar portal. Although the majority of responding webinar providers do not currently charge for their webinars, over one third noted that they would be willing to pay a fee per participant.

High-Dimensional Data Stream Classification Via Sparse Online Learning, Dayong Wang, Pengcheng Wu, Peilin Zhao, Yue Wu, Chunyan Miao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The amount of data in our society has been exploding in the era of big data today. In this paper, we address several open challenges of big data stream classification, including high volume, high velocity, high dimensionality, and high sparsity. Many existing studies in data mining literature solve data stream classification tasks in a batch learning setting, which suffers from poor efficiency and scalability when dealing with big data. To overcome the limitations, this paper investigates an online learning framework for big data stream classification tasks. Unlike some existing online data stream classification techniques that are often based on first-order …

University Professors’ Perceptions About The Impact Of Integrating Google Applications On Students’ Communication And Collaboration Skills, Jacqueline L. Cahill

Journal of Research Initiatives

A qualitative research study was conducted and data were collected by interviewing university professors on their perceptions about the impact of integrating Google Apps, as a means of classroom instructional delivery, on students’ communication and collaboration skills. The participants consisted of eight university professors from a major university, who integrate, or had previously integrated at least two Google Apps Education Edition collaborative tools into their instructional strategies. The result of this study has the potential to benefit universities that are debating on whether utilizing teaching collaborative technology skills, as an instruction tool, would engage students and enhance their communication skills. …

Comfort Food For All: The Scalability Of Lms-Embedded Librarianship, Beth E. Tumbleson, John J. Burke

LOEX Conference Proceedings 2012

Embedded librarianship provides information literacy instruction right where students prefer to do course related research: online. The learning management system (LMS) provides an effective arena for librarians to collaborate with professors and reach students with library services alongside course content. How scalable, though, is this service so that it can meet the needs of all students? Presenters will share data from a 2011 international survey, material from the professional literature, and the experiences of LMS embedded librarians to help answer this question. Time will be spent discussing how to reorganize information literacy efforts and workflow within the library to address …

Co-Teaching A Grand Challenge Course: Using Digital Media And Collaborative Teaching Strategies For Effective Online Learning And Transliteracy Skills, Mona Anne Niedbala, Adam Moore, Stefanie Metko

LOEX Conference Proceedings 2012

The presentation illustrates the partnership between an education librarian, a School of Education faculty member, and a graduate student in the School of Library and Information Science, and their use of multiple media platforms for teaching a web-enhanced Grand Challenge course about social justice issues in education.

As a first-year course, Grand Challenge is designed for students to discuss and find creative solutions to global issues while addressing general education learning outcomes such as examining human differences and developing effective writing and information literacy skills. The presentation provides an example of an innovative teaching partnership based on the backward design …

Online Transfer Learning, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jialei Wang, Bin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates a new machine learning framework of Online Transfer Learning (OTL), which aims to attack an online learning task on a target domain by transferring knowledge from some source domain. We do not assume data in the target domain follows the same distribution as that in the source domain, and the motivation of our work is to enhance a supervised online learning task on a target domain by exploiting the existing knowledge that had been learnt from training data in source domains. OTL is in general a challenging problem since data in both source and target domains not …

Review Of Virtual Schooling And Student Learning, Michael K. Barbour

Education Faculty Publications

A new report compares the performance of Florida Virtual School (FLVS) students with students in traditional brick-and-mortar schools and concludes the FLVS students perform about the same or somewhat better on state tests and at a lower cost. The report claims to be the first empirical study of K-12 student performance in virtual education. This is not correct, and the report in fact confirms the findings and repeats the methodological flaws and limitations of previous research. The report’s findings fail to account for the potential bias of student selectivity in the FLVS sample, the potential impact of regression effects, differential …

“If You Build It, They Will Use: Creating And Sharing Open Educational Resources To Advance Information Literacy”, Philip Russell

Conference Papers

Since 2010, the library at the Institute of Technology Tallaght (ITT Dublin) in South County Dublin, Republic of Ireland, has been developing a suite of interactive online information literacy tutorials covering research, referencing, plagiarism and core academic skills. These open educational resources (OERs) provide users with a vibrant, challenging learning environment and facilitate flexible, 24/7, independent learning. The learning objects are accessible via multiple delivery platforms and are available for reuse under Creative Commons licence via national and international teaching and learning repositories.

This paper outlines the development of these OERs and how the creation of these learning tools has …

Introducing Breakouts, Diane Powers Dirette

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

No abstract provided.

Cost-Sensitive Online Classification, Jialei Wang, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Both cost-sensitive classification and online learning have been extensively studied in data mining and machine learning communities, respectively. However, very limited study addresses an important intersecting problem, that is, “Cost-Sensitive Online Classification". In this paper, we formally study this problem, and propose a new framework for Cost-Sensitive Online Classification by directly optimizing cost-sensitive measures using online gradient descent techniques. Specifically, we propose two novel cost-sensitive online classification algorithms, which are designed to directly optimize two well-known cost-sensitive measures: (i) maximization of weighted sum of sensitivity and specificity, and (ii) minimization of weighted misclassification cost. We analyze the theoretical bounds of …

The Use Of Digital Technology In Extension, Kristin Woods, James C. Langcuster

The Journal of Extension

This Commentary describes how andragogy has evolved with the emergence of digital technology. The information can be used by Extension educators to merge technology with traditional adult education theory. Knowles' assumptions of adult learners are discussed as they relate to an online learning environment. The role of Extension educators as facilitators of self-directed learning via the Internet is of specific interest to field specialists.

A Socratic Café For Critical Inquiry, Jody Piro, Gina Anderson

Jody Piro

This presentation will explore the completed research inquiry that developed from our overt attempt to promote critical thinking in an online forum. The implications for advancing critical inquiry in online formats for interdisciplinary university content areas will be addressed. The objectives of this session are twofold: 1) to introduce participants to the nine intellectual standards (Elder & Paul, 2007) used to analyze the critical thinking and Socratic questioning in our research, and 2) to discuss the structuring of critical analysis in participants' own classrooms. Participants can expect to participate in a cooperative learning activity to practice the use of Intellectual …

Distance Learning Best Practices And Collective Bargaining, Michael M. Mcdermott

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

No abstract provided.

An Exploratory Multi-Case Study Of The Perceptions And Views Of Academic Faculty Union Members Relative To Online Distance Education, Collective Bargaining & Related Policy, Dianne A. Wright, Damon A. Davis

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

No abstract provided.

Trait Emotional Intelligence (Ei) And Job Satisfaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Faculty That Teach Online, Mary Cooley

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

While the construct of emotional intelligence (EI), has been researched and discussed for nearly 25 years, most research of this variable has been done within traditional learning and workplace environments, namely face-to-face settings (Rudestam & Schoenholtz-Read, 2009), not the online learning environment, where, over the last ten plus years, education has largely been focused (Allen & Seaman, 2013). Mortiboys (2012), along with Powell and Kusuma-Powell (2010), found that successful college faculty tend to possess high levels of trait EI in traditional or face-to-face classroom settings, and yet, to date, very few similar studies have been conducted with faculty teaching in …

Online Probabilistic Learning For Fuzzy Inference System, Richard Jayadi Oentaryo, Meng Joo Er, San Linn, Xiang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online learning is a key methodology for expert systems to gracefully cope with dynamic environments. In the context of neuro-fuzzy systems, research efforts have been directed toward developing online learning methods that can update both system structure and parameters on the fly. However, the current online learning approaches often rely on heuristic methods that lack a formal statistical basis and exhibit limited scalability in the face of large data stream. In light of these issues, we develop a new Sequential Probabilistic Learning for Adaptive Fuzzy Inference System (SPLAFIS) that synergizes the Bayesian Adaptive Resonance Theory (BART) and Rule-Wise Decoupled Extended …

Reflections On An Inherent Tension Between Peer Collaboration And Individual Assessment In Online Professional Learning, Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, Leena Vainio

Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young

In this paper, the authors reflect on potential tensions between peer learning among adult students and current forms of assessment in two professional learning contexts: one in Finland, and one in Australia. The two groups participated separately in online and face to face learning that required them to gather data, reflect, communicate and try out new strategies in their workplaces. Formal learning outcomes and assessment were expected.

A Cognitive Apprenticeship Approach For Teaching Abstract And Complex Skills In An Online Learning Environment, Reinaldo Fernandez

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Undergraduate courses such as mathematics, science, and computer programming require high levels of decision making, concentration, and cognitive demand. Researchers in the field of instructional design are interested in effective instructional strategies that can aid practitioners in teaching such abstract and complex skills.

One example of an instructional strategy that has proven effective in teaching these skills is cognitive apprenticeship (CA). While CA has been applied to courses such as mathematics and computer programming in face-to-face and blended learning environments, there is little evidence of the advantages of applying CA in a fully online computer programming course. Specifically, the introductory …

Imagining A Twenty-First Century Strategy, Marcia Bost

English Dissertations

This dissertation argues that a diversity of epistemology within the field of rhetoric and composition can encourage Imagining as a strategy to negotiate the conundrums and binaries of the post-everything era, especially in negotiating the social presence of online learning. I trace Imagination from Enlightenment Pedagogy, which privileged the individual, unteacheable genius, to the conflation of invention and Imagination and the disappearance of both in current-traditional, modern, and postmodern pedagogy. Underlying this disappearance seems to be a distrust of Imagination, as exemplified by Kenneth Burke. I suggest that strategy of Imagining, rather than the faculty of Imagination, is needed—a move …

An Investigation Of The Soar Study Strategy For Learning From Multiple Online Resources, Tareq Daher

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation investigated the effects of the SOAR study strategy for learning from multiple online resources. SOAR includes the components of Selection, Organization, Association, and Regulation. In past research, the effects of SOAR training were investigated with one online resource and with students studying provided or partially provided materials following training. This dissertation examines the effects of SOAR when learning from multiple online resources and when students create their own study materials following training and thus addresses this research gap. One hundred thirty-four (134) college students were assigned randomly to the control or experimental groups. All students participated in online …

Online Multiple Kernel Regression, Doyen Sahoo, Steven C. H. Hoi, Bin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Kernel-based regression represents an important family of learning techniques for solving challenging regression tasks with non-linear patterns. Despite being studied extensively, most of the existing work suffers from two major drawbacks: (i) they are often designed for solving regression tasks in a batch learning setting, making them not only computationally inefficient and but also poorly scalable in real-world applications where data arrives sequentially; and (ii) they usually assume a fixed kernel function is given prior to the learning task, which could result in poor performance if the chosen kernel is inappropriate. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a novel …

Evaluation Of The Eorganic Webinar Program, Alice Krinsky Formiga, Alexandra Stone, Debra Heleba, John Mcqueen

The Journal of Extension

eOrganic evaluated webinars on organic agriculture topics to assess the size and composition of the audience, how attendees heard about webinars, webinar quality and utility, whether participants use other eOrganic resources, and the impact on farmer and advisory practices. Results showed that eOrganic webinars reached their target audience. An average of 97% of respondents indicated that the webinars improved their understanding of the topics to some degree, and 96% intended to apply information to their work to some degree. Follow-up surveys on a subset of webinars revealed that they influenced changes in farming and advisory practices.

Family Presence During Resuscitation Of Adults: The Impact Of An Online Learning Module On Critical Care Nurses' Perception And Self-Confidence, Kelly Powers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Family presence during resuscitation (FPDR) involves offering family members the option to remain with their loved one who is undergoing life-saving measures. FPDR has been shown to enhance comfort and facilitate grieving, and 90% to 100% of patients and family members support it as an option. However, critical care nurses are not fully supportive of FPDR and approximately only one-third implement it in their care of patients. The perceived risks of FPDR are cited as a primary reason for lack of support and implementation. Yet, the perceived risks have not been proven, while the benefits have been established in research. …

Collaborative Online Multitask Learning, Guangxia Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Kuiyu Chang, Wenting Liu, Ramesh Jain

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the problem of online multitask learning for solving multiple related classification tasks in parallel, aiming at classifying every sequence of data received by each task accurately and efficiently. One practical example of online multitask learning is the micro-blog sentiment detection on a group of users, which classifies micro-blog posts generated by each user into emotional or non-emotional categories. This particular online learning task is challenging for a number of reasons. First of all, to meet the critical requirements of online applications, a highly efficient and scalable classification solution that can make immediate predictions with low learning cost is …