Online Courses Accessible to College Students With Disabilities

More students can attend colleges and universities from a distance due to broader access and technological advances. Therefore, facilitators are facing the challenge of providing more accommodations and modifications to nontraditional students. The provision of these special services, which have traditionally been provided by special educators, are receiving limited attention. Special educators are educated to make these adjustments on an individual basis in the elementary and secondary levels. However, this has not been the traditional role of the university professor. With today's mass enrollments in online courses, procedures for providing accommodations to all students have become a significant challenge. This chapter will review research on online course design and implementation to address the needs of students with disabilities.

Towards Disability-Aware Social Media-Enriched Virtual Learning Environments

The increasing use of social media brings about the need to consider learners with disability when designing learning environments incorporating social learning. Additionally, there is need for educational institutions to consider social media-enriched learning environments. By default, designers and developers of virtual learning environments tend to design for learners without disabilities. The consequences for learners with disabilities are enormous. This chapter aims to propose a disability-aware approach to designing social learning environments that advocates that stakeholders consider the needs of learners with disabilities throughout development. The challenges that learners with disabilities face when interacting with learning systems are reviewed, and a disability-aware approach to designing social learning environments is presented, examining how this could be practically implemented. The opinions and recommendations of 48 students with disabilities from two universities in the United Kingdom and Canada are presented.

An Effective Pedagogy Toolkit for Learning in an Intelligent Virtual Environment

Throughout the progression of the pedagogy, educators are striving hard to bring up the systems centering on effective learning. This omnipresent trend has led to the ontogeny of innovative and culmination of many congregation technologies such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP) ensuing as intelligent virtual learning environment (IVLE). Technology-enhanced encyclopedism can facilitate pupils with influential and high-quality learning experiences as compared to the traditional learning approach. This chapter portrays learning in intelligent virtual environment as an effective pedagogy approach. The pedagogic tool developed by the authors captures text written in English as an input and creates the envisioned virtual setting. The ability of natural language interface (NLI) for VR-based learning systems is the most significant attainment of the present work, which brings a novel perspective in the field pedagogy.

A Survey on the Use of Adaptive Learning Techniques Towards Learning Personalization

E-learning has a great impact on learners today. E-learning supports enhancing learner knowledge anytime, anywhere with lesser efforts than traditional models. In these situations, nonlinear approaches often modify teaching and learning strategies according to students' needs, and hence, automated machine-guided approaches seem useful in the name of adaptive learning. It identifies individual learner styles and provides the most suitable strategy that fits each learner as a case of personalization. Adaptive learning uses personalization for continuously improving student outcomes. Personalized learning takes place when e-learning systems use educational experience supporting desires, objectives, endowments, and curiosities of each individual learner. This work has reviewed the recent developments in the problem area of learning personalization through adaptive learning. Then the solution domain methods are compared to identify the knowledge and technology gap from their limitations. These analyses help to identify research potentials in learning technology for future works.

Concept Maps as a Technique for Organizing, Analyzing, and Transforming Knowledge

The chapter begins with the origins of concept maps as a tool to promote constructivist learning, an educational philosophy and practice, and is followed by a concept map taxonomy. A definition of concept maps is provided and the main differences between Mind Maps©, Thinking Maps®, and Concept Maps are discussed with Thinking Maps classified as a type of concept map that is separate and different from both other maps. The chapter then offers a second definition of the term “concept maps,” with a detailed discussion of Thinking Maps resulting in a new taxonomy of knowledge or concept maps. The authors then investigate integrating concept maps with cognitive styles theory to determine if concept mapping might have a neuro-psychological basis and if mapping theory can be related to different academic fields and professions. The chapter concludes that the use of concept mapping can promote more holistic and effective teaching, learning, and practice in STEM education.

Education and Altruism and the Competence That Students Do Not Know They Possess

The term altruism in Italian contains semantic root “other” that means the one who is distinct from itself. Its meaning indicates love towards one's neighbor, more particularly, the attitude of one who directs his work towards the goal of achieving the good of others (or if you prefer, to find the own good in the good of others). Educating the students requires a particular educational-training plan. The school is responsible of this type of education, which is not only necessary within the class, but it is the necessary attitude to face the increasingly complex social problems of our time. The self-centered culture is infusing in everyone the convinction that people do not need a community anymore, promoting the abandonment of feelings, and of the sharing of relationships with the neighbor. The path to take is based on the education to the developmet of pro-socal competences, bringing into play the community as a relationship founded on the research of the common welfare.

Comprehensive Marketing Intensity Indicator for Higher Educational Institutions

Higher educational institutions (HEI) have lately involved the marketing approach both locally and globally. While almost all HEI now involve marketing of education service, there is no comprehensive assessment indicator available for the marketing intensity. Marketing intensity as a new term is the holistic involvement of an organization into marketing not reflected solely by monetary variables. The chapter attempts to bring the term marketing intensity into the discussion of HEI and to build a comprehensive marketing intensity indicator, which may be easily used to compare HEI with respect to marketing intensity. The chapter presents the conceptual and theoretical model of the indicator.

Transformational Teacher Leadership

Transformational leadership along with change theory have become increasingly popular concepts within the field of educational leadership and administration during the last 20 years. This chapter examines the growth and popularity of transformational leadership, its relationship to organizational change, and the practical and theoretical justifications for its use as a relevant form of teacher leadership from a global and cross-cultural perspective. Emphasis is placed on discussing transformational teacher leadership practices as core strategies for modern educators in the process of overseeing teaching and learning objectives, contributing to school improvement and students' educational attainment, and managing essential change processes within globalized educational environments.

Ushering Change in 21st Century Schools and Who Should Lead

In the fast-paced field of education, change in school settings has reached its momentum and the debate on who is supposed to lead the change in school settings has been intensified. Leading change in a 21st century school engages the school principal, teachers, students, the community, and the government. In driving the change, a learner's achievement should be the ultimate goal for every school leader, since learning is the core business of every educational institution. Beyond the school community, parents and people in the community have a major role to play in their child's education, success of implementing change in school, as well as government providing sponsorship/strategic support to facilitate teaching and learning. In light of this collaboration in making schools better, this research has chosen qualitative methods to explore teacher's understanding in Northern State Malaysia of the role of school principals, teachers, students, the community, and the government in leading change in 21st century school settings.

Knowledge Management in University-Software Industry Collaboration

The university-software industry collaboration relationship has been represented a key resource, to the extent that together they can more easily promote technological development that underpins innovation solutions. Through a literature review, this chapter aims to explore the concepts and the facilitator or inhibitor factors associated with the collaboration relationships between university and software industry, taking knowledge management into account. This chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, the authors briefly introduce university, software industry, and knowledge management. The following section, based on the literature reviewed, provides a critical discussion of the university-software industry collaboration relationship, knowledge management in knowledge intensive organizations or community, and knowledge management in collaboration relationship between these two types of industries. Finally, in the rest of the sections, the authors point to future research directions and conclude.