Web-Based Two-Tier Diagnostic Test and Remedial Learning Experiment

Offering a series of diagnosis and individual remedial learning activities for a general class by means of web and multimedia technology can overcome the dilemma of conventional diagnosis and remedial instruction. The study proposes a three-layer conceptual framework and adopts a two-tier diagnostic test theory to develop a web-based two-tier diagnostic test and remedial learning management system called “the Dr. System.” The study also designs the two-tier diagnostic test items of electro-magnetic concepts and the related multimedia remedial learning materials based on the theory of modular course for the purpose of investigating the remedial learning effects. In addition, the study helps the participants eliminate their misconception through a quasi-experiment at an elementary school in a metropolitan area of northern Taiwan. The results show that the learners of the experimental group who received the treatment under the Dr. System performed significantly better than those who took the traditional remedial class. The study also indicates that the web-based two-tier diagnostic test helps us understand learners’ misconceptions. As a result, it also provides learners useful remedial multimedia materials, which are necessary for them to eliminate their individual misconceptions in the remedial learning process.

The ART (Activities, Resources, Technological Supports) in On-Site and Online Learning, and Students’ Perceptions of Acquisition of Thinking and Team-Building Skills

The efficacy of different modes of instruction delivery, whether on-site, online, or a combination, continues to be debated in academic circles. This chapter takes a somewhat different view from most other research and compares students’ perceptions of support provided in the acquisition of various thinking and team-building skills, as a consequence of the integration of various activities, resources, and technologies (ART) used in an upper level Distributed Computing (DC) course. The findings indicate that students perceived strong support for their acquisition of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) and team-building skills (TBS) from the offline resources, but moderate support from the online resources and technologies provided in the course, which was in opposition to the grades received. A deeper analysis of the results pointed, among other things, to the use of cases as being most supportive of the acquisition of the higher-order thinking skills and of team-building skills.

Coping with Accessibility and Usability Challenges of Online Technologies by Blind Students in Higher Education

This study examined the usability challenges and emotional reactions blind college students experienced in accessing educational materials and communicating with professors and colleagues through online technologies. A case study approach was adopted. Five students were interviewed regarding their online learning experiences using Blackboard, a popular Course Management System. Analysis of the interviews revealed that the blind students found Blackboard poorly accessible, which affected their academic achievements. However, despite their frustrations and feelings of marginalization, the study also showed that the blind students were motivated and optimistic of their successes. The research suggests that academic administrators and CMS designers work jointly with adaptive software developers to create enhanced user interfaces, ensure universal access and usability of online technologies, and reduce educational inequities and frustrations encountered by blind students.

Revealing Student Blogging Activities Using RSS Feeds and LMS Logs

Blogs are an easy-to-use, free alternative to classic means of computer-mediated communication. Moreover, they are authentically aligned with web activity patterns of today’s students. The body of studies on integrating and implementing blogs in various educational settings has grown rapidly recently; however, it is often difficult to distill practical advice from these studies since the application contexts, pedagogical objectives, and research methodology differ greatly. This paper takes a step toward an improved understanding of employing blogs in education by presenting a follow-up case study on using blogs as reflective journals in an undergraduate computer-science lab course. This study includes lessons learned and adaptations following from the first-time application, the underlying pedagogical strategy, and a detailed analysis and discussion of blogging activity data obtained from RSS feeds and LMS logs.

Development of Adaptive Kanji Learning System for Mobile Phone

This paper describes an adaptive learning system based on mobile phone email to support the study of Japanese Kanji. In this study, the main emphasis is on using the adaptive learning to resolve one common problem of the mobile-based email or SMS language learning systems. To achieve this goal, the authors main efforts focus on three aspects: sending the contents to a learner following his or her interests, adjusting the difficulty level of the tests to suit the learner’s proficiency level, and adapting the system to his or her learning style. Additionally, this system has already been evaluated by the learners and the results show that most of them benefited from the system and would like to continue using it.

EduTutor

The system architecture and its main characteristics are described in detail. EduTutor focuses on subjects for the first cycle of studies of the Portuguese primary education system, between the first and the fourth year. Its purpose is to facilitate the perception of the learning process of each student, individually, in a virtual environment, and as a study guide. Furthermore, this intelligent tutor system was designed and its architecture was prepared for being easily integrated in higher levels of studies, different subjects, and different languages. EduTutor was validated with a large set of real cases and is being used, with success, in the Aulanet LMS platform.

An Educational Game Helping Learners to Distinguish Similar Chinese Characters while Minimizing Human Efforts in Game Content Creation

One of the difficulties in learning Chinese Characters is distinguishing similar characters. Usually similar characters have quite different meanings. This can cause misunderstanding and miscommunication in daily life. It is thus important for students learning the Chinese language to be able to distinguish similar characters and understand their proper usage. In this chapter, the authors propose some educational games to train students to distinguish similar characters. As Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software, the proposed educational games can reduce the workload of teachers for delivering language lessons. By applying Computer Assisted Item Generation (CAIG) technique, a large amount of assessment items can be generated efficiently. The authors propose a method to identify similar Chinese characters such that the game content creation can be made automatic thus minimizing the human efforts. Learners need to understand the concepts rather than memorize the answers in order to perform well in the games. This results in a high replay value for the proposed educational games.

Ontologies in Intelligent Learning Systems

The intelligent learning systems provide a direct customized instruction to the learners without intervention of human tutor on the base of Semantic Web resources. The principal role ontologies play in these systems is as an instrument for modeling learning process, learner, learning objects, and resources. In the chapter, a variety of relationships and conceptualizations of ontologies used in the intelligent learning systems are investigated. The utilization of domain and application ontologies in learning object building and knowledge acquisition is represented. The conceptualization of domain ontologies in e-learning is presented by the upper levels of its taxonomies. Moreover, a method and an algorithm intended for generation of application ontologies of structural learning objects (curriculum, syllabus, topic plan, etc.) are developed. Examples of curriculum and syllabus application ontologies are given. Further these application ontologies are used for structural learning object generation.

E-Learning in Engineering Education

Attaining excellence in technical education is a worthy challenge to any life goal. Distance learning opportunities make these goals easier to reach with added quality. Distance learning in engineering education is possible only through successful implementations of remote laboratories in a learning-by-doing environment. This paper presents one such technology to carry out laboratory experiments from remote locations. The technology is demonstrated by handling the web interface, which supports the remote experimentation on communication circuits, power system and an embedded board. The implemented system environment facilitates users to perform the experiment remotely and efficiently using only a commonly available, user-friendly web browser. It describes the ongoing research in this area exploiting current telematics techniques, which supports remote experimentation with real hardware via the Internet.

Building Integrated E-Learning Environment Using Cloud Services and Social Networking Sites

Cloud computing technologies, although in their early stages, have managed to change the way applications are going to be developed and accessed. These technologies are aimed at running applications as services over the internet on a flexible infrastructure. Microsoft Office applications, such as Word processing, Excel spreadsheet, Access database and many more can be accessed through the Internet, even though the files and applications are housed in the cloud. Cloud computing provides a low cost solution to academic institutions for their researchers, faculty, and students. This setup provides an additional benefit because all these browser-based applications can also be accessed through mobile devices in addition to being available to a variety of laptop and desktop computers, provided Internet access is available. At the same time, the massive growth of social networking sites (SNS) among today’s college students is increasing the number of higher education instructors that are combining distance education delivery with SNS. To take advantage of cloud computing and social networking sites, this chapter presents an integrated solution that provides learners with a comprehensive and feature rich environment for building and utilizing applications and can be used for building a virtual environment both for teaching and learning. The authors present an interactive tool that can be used for science education; they combined various technologies to achieve this goal. The environment and the design proposed can also be used as a platform for exploring and sharing new ideas as well as for designing, modifying, and monitoring educational or course contents. In this design under the same environment the authors also allow integration of different pedagogical approaches to both learning and teaching.