Dialogues and Perception of Intersubjectivity in a Small Group

The core value of Web 2.0 lies in its potential for building technologies that are open, decentralized, and shared. This paper designs group activity to facilitate knowledge building and move on learning management system to web 2.0 paradigms with computer supported collaborative learning in a small group. The “give-take” metaphor for knowledge construction in a small group discourse only interprets the solo voice phenomenon in asynchronous forums. Tumultuous, parallel, and connected voices in synchronous conferencing need alternative metaphors to understand the self and the other in a personified way. This paper represents discourse evidence of emerging meaning making, expertise commentary, self-identity, and collective confirmation as a process in small group collective knowledge-building.

Mobile Learning Management Systems in Higher Education

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are widely used in Higher Education offering important benefits to students, tutors, administrators and the educational organizations. On the other hand, the widespread ownership of mobile devices has lead to educational initiatives that investigate their potential as the means to change the way that students interact with their tutors, their classmates, the learning material, the administration services and the environment of their educational institute. This mainly aims to support the continuation of these interactions not only outside the classroom, but also beyond desktop restrictions, towards to a truly constant and instant access from anywhere. As a result, the development of mobile LMS (mLMS) is important for the deployment of feasible mobile-supported educational services in Higher Education. In this book chapter, we address the issue of designing mLMS for Higher Education by studying and applying the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 to a widely used existing LMS, namely, the Moodle.

Incorporating “World View” into the LMS or CMS is Best

“Linguistic relativism” leads people of different cultures to define, explain, and even see reality in images framed by their diverse languages. The most readily available and commonly used online educational materials are often scaffolded in unyielding structures shrouded in American standards and expectations. These Americano-centric course management and learning management systems render subject matter design and delivery, as well as assignment formulation, scheduling, and grading, difficult for educators who understand the importance of imbuing their materials with atypical alternative views of reality expressed in the worldviews of languages and cultures beyond the borders of the United States.

Building and Maintaining Human Capital with Learning Management Systems

In this chapter, the authors examine how building, integrating and maintaining human capital with Learning Management Systems acts as an enabler for the management if intellectual capital within multinational organizations. They draw upon learning theory and training practices to demonstrate that human capital is best viewed through a competence lens; that is, accounting for human capital should focus on matters of individual and organizational competence, and that the development of human capital is, in essence, an exercise in competence development, which involves training and learning. This, then, is this chapter’s point of departure in understanding how IT-based systems can enable training and foster learning, thereby building an organization’s human capital.

Plagiarism Detection Tools in Learning Management Systems

The main objectives of this chapter are to review the state-of-the art in plagiarism detection methods, discuss the most popular software tools available on the market and describe the new open architecture for plagiarism detection tools. The proposed architecture emphasizes the extensibility feature that allows it to be easily adapted for handling new types of assignments in the future. This chapter shows how the proposed architecture was implemented in a desktop application and a server-side plug-in for the Moodle course management system. An extended set of user trials is provided to support the proposed solutions. This set includes extensive tests for intra-corpal and internet plagiarism searches, tests with non-English assignments and promising results on cross language plagiarism detection.

Knowledge Access and Interaction Evolution in Virtual Learning Communities

Interaction among members in Virtual Learning Communities influences the communities’ evolution. Starting from this consideration, this chapter provides a discussion on the more widely used software systems that support interaction between virtual communities’ members and virtual learning environment underlining the advantages and the disadvantages considering the several processes that characterize the VLCs. Moreover in education environments interactions are important in order to facilitate the learning process, and this chapter describes how the intelligent agent approaches can bean interesting alternative to a human facilitator. The analysis of intelligent agents describes how they allow both analysing interaction and improving the level of participation of members of a Virtual Learning Community.

Benchmarking Online Learning Practices in Higher Education

Colleges and Universities across the United States have experienced an unprecedented growth in the availability of and demand for online courses and degree programs in the recent years. However, this medium for instructing is still relatively new compared to other traditional forms of instruction. Therefore, an overall lack of research on the online medium exists. This study benchmarks the practices of colleges and universities in the tri-state area of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia on factors that contribute to the selection of Course Management Systems (CMS), the availability and/or requirements for instructor training, and the evaluation or lack thereof of online courses. A total of thirty institutions participated in this mixed methods study.

Online Support for Students’ Writing Skills Development in a Technical Communication Introductory Module

This chapter explores the development of online support for writing skills in one technical communication module taught at the University of Limerick. It demonstrates the need for writing support by exploring the many complexities of teaching and learning writing skills. Central to the discussion is the principle of process, rather than product, orientation. Students on the module have been surveyed over the past two years to determine their attitudes to, and perceptions of, their writing strengths and weaknesses. The chapter outlines and exemplifies the types of writing-problems students and instructors identify. Online support is posited as an intervention which facilitates autonomous learning. The chapter concludes by discussing how online resources, and especially the university virtual learning environment, Sakai (called Sulis at University of Limerick), can support students. It also suggests related research opportunities, especially in the area of using Web 2.0 technologies to foster autonomy.

Effects of Feedback on Learning Strategies in Learning Journals

Feedback on learning strategies is a promising instructional support measure. However, research on the expertise reversal effect suggests that if instructional support measures are provided to expert learners, these learners would have to integrate and cross-reference redundant instructional guidance with available knowledge structures, resulting in less available resources for effective learning processes. Thus, feedback might be detrimental for learners who possess high-quality learning strategies. Against this background, the authors used an online learning management system to employ a feedback procedure that included highly elaborated feedback on learning strategies in a learning journal. The effects of this feedback procedure were tested in a field study using a within-subject design with the factor feedback (no vs. yes). Participants were 246 university students who wrote journal entries over an entire term. The results show that providing feedback to low expertise learners is effective, whereas the effectiveness of feedback is reversed regarding high expertise learners.

A Case Study of Infusing Web 2.0 Tools for Blended Learning

In the era of Web 2.0, students are not restricted to search and collect information from existing Internet resources. They are expected to be able to collaborate, create, and share new information on the Web through different tools. On the other hand, students of this era are also familiar with sharing multimedia contents on the Internet. We can also observe that presentations are not limited to face-to-face and university students should be able to present virtually using multimedia technology. It seems that Web 2.0 tools open another space for the assessment modes for teachers. This study aims to describe an innovative practice of having two groups of student teachers conducting a virtual presentation about their final assignments, which could either be videos or other digital formats. One group of students was final year undergraduate while another group consisted of post-graduate Diploma of Education student teachers. For the purpose of the study, the virtual presentation materials were uploaded to a learning management system (LMS) platform to enable the two different classes to comment each other’s work within one week. Thereafter, the data collected from tracked statistics provided by the learning platform and students’ reflections of this interclass activity were analyzed and compared with each other. It was found that most of the participants were positive about this new presentation approach and ready to accept it as a part of the assessment. However, the undergraduate students were more active in participating in virtual presentations of both classes. Furthermore, their attitudes were influenced by the tutors’ participation. Thus, it is suggested that tutors involved in virtual presentations should play an active role and give encouragement to their students regularly.