Articles
How the faculty of distance education changes
Rosalie Mcguire
Abstract:
How do faculty change as a result of teaching a distance learning course? What new knowledge, skills, and attitudes do they develop as a result of their experience? How does work in distance education affect their teaching, service, and scholarship?
This study looks at how six professors in an Arizona business school changed as a result of teaching via distance. All taught in an international MBA program delivered jointly by Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management and ITESM, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores of Monterrey, Mexico.
Sand Shifting: Curriculum Exploration and evaluation dichotomy
Michele Kelley & Wade Maldonado
Abstract:
This paper argues that a better alignment between curriculum policy and assessment practices has the capacity to change and transform the profile of educational institutions. To achieve this challenge, it advocates for a critical reflection on curriculum and assessment discourse especially by:
- Exploring the curriculum and assessment dichotomy
- Utilising the capacity building logic as a strategy to enhance alignment of curriculum policies and assessment practices
- Adopting curriculum policy and assessment and practices that are congruent with institutional differentiations and contextual dynamics
- Utilising the research logic to inform policy decisions and practices.
A collaborative Model to Filter Java Learning Objects
Kayla Huff
Abstract:
The model enforces a collaborative infrastructure for authoring, searching, recommending and presenting Java source code learning objects. The new model uses two specialized filtering engines which work simultaneously: CollabroSearch and CollabroRecommender to present relevant LOs from presented queries or from the mined text collected from the collaborative chatting channel between users. Experiments on Java source code testbed indicated that the proposed model is able to outperform any primitive collaborative environment that support some searching and discovery primitives such as the I-help system developed by ARIES Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan (http://www.cs.usask.ca:7777/ihelp11/entrance.html) and any of the commercial collaborative environments such as JCE, Centra99, PaceWare, Grooves and Tango. The combination methods of the flexible mixture model (ReccoSearch) is rather preliminary. As a near future work, we plan to explore approximate searching techniques based on query expansion (Fiaidhi, Mohammed, Jaam, Hasnah 2003) as well as to explore different types of recommending algorithms (besides the k-nearest collaborative filtering that we originally used) such as the Item-Basedrecommending algorithm ( Sarwar et al, 2001). The ultimate future goal of this research is to link the RecoSearch system to the POOL of LOs repositories(Hatala and Richards 2002) via utilizing the JXTA APIs (www.jxta.org/) to unable collaborators to search and recommend other LOs from the major repositories available to the academia.
Attitudes towards teaching and learning information and communications technologies in the UK
Lauren Burns
Abstract:
Intensive government funded drives to achieve digital or e-literacy on our college campuses are still regarded with some skepticism among both students and staff.
We are here reporting on a survey of 1400 students at one of the larger UK universities, the University of Westminster in London. We outline student responses to questions about their own learning and their assessment of the value of ICT in helping them to manage their studies. Our results are not surprising, but lead to further insights about how we college teachers can link our efforts to student perceptions of the many initiatives we undertake, especially in using ICT for teaching and learning.