A study on computing and e-learning in the perspective of distributed models

The wide use of e-technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of the population, especially with the aim of reintegrating excluded individuals back into society through education. This is particularly true for people with different types of disabilities who may have difficulties while attending traditional on-site learning programs that are typically based on printed learning resources. The creation and provision of accessible e-learning contents may therefore become a key factor in enabling people with different access needs to enjoy quality learning experiences and services. Another e-learning challenge is represented by m-learning (which stands for mobile learning), which is emerging as a consequence of mobile terminals diffusion and provides the opportunity to browse didactical materials everywhere, outside places that are traditionally devoted to education. Both such situations share the need to access materials in limited conditions and collide with the growing use of rich media in didactical contents, which are designed to be enjoyed without any restriction. Nowadays, Web-based teaching makes great use of multimedia technologies, ranging from Flash animations to prerecorded video-lectures. Rich media in e-learning can offer significant potential in enhancing the learning environment, through helping to increase access to education, enhance the learning experience and support multiple learning styles. Moreover, they can often be used to improve the structure of Web-based courses. These highly variegated and structured contents may significantly improve the quality and the effectiveness of educational activities for learners. For example, rich media contents allow us to describe complex concepts and process flows. Audio and video elements may be utilized to add a “human touch” to distance-learning courses. Finally, real lectures may be recorded and distributed to integrate or enrich on line materials. A confirmation of the advantages of these approaches can be seen in the exponential growth of video-lecture availability on the net, due to the ease of recording and delivering activities which take place in a traditional classroom. Furthermore, the wide use of assistive technologies for learners with disabilities injects new life into e-learning systems. E-learning allows distance and flexible educational activities, thus helping disabled learners to access resources which would otherwise present significant barriers for them. For instance, students with visual impairments have difficulties in reading traditional visual materials, deaf learners have trouble in following traditional (spoken) lectures, people with motion disabilities have problems in attending on-site programs. As already mentioned, the use of wireless technologies and pervasive computing may really enhance the educational learner experience by offering mobile e-learning services that can be accessed by handheld devices. This new paradigm of educational content distribution maximizes the benefits for learners since it enables users to overcome constraints imposed by the surrounding environment. While certainly helpful for users without disabilities, we believe that the use of newmobile technologies may also become a fundamental tool for impaired learners, since it frees them from sitting in front of a PC. In this way, educational activities can be enjoyed by all the users, without hindrance, thus increasing the social inclusion of non-typical learners. While the provision of fully accessible and portable video-lectures may be extremely useful for students, it is widely recognized that structuring and managing rich media contents for mobile learning services are complex and expensive tasks. Indeed, major difficulties originate from the basic need to provide a textual equivalent for each media resource composing a rich media Learning Object (LO). Moreover, tests need to be carried out to establish whether a given LO is fully accessible to all kinds of learners. Unfortunately, both these tasks are truly time-consuming processes, depending on the type of contents the teacher is writing and on the authoring tool he/she is using. Due to these difficulties, online LOs are often distributed as partially accessible or totally inaccessible content. Bearing this in mind, this thesis aims to discuss the key issues of a system we have developed to deliver accessible, customized or nomadic learning experiences to learners with different access needs and skills. To reduce the risk of excluding users with particular access capabilities, our system exploits Learning Objects (LOs) which are dynamically adapted and transcoded based on the specific needs of non-typical users and on the barriers that they can encounter in the environment. The basic idea is to dynamically adapt contents, by selecting them from a set of media resources packaged in SCORM-compliant LOs and stored in a self-adapting format. The system schedules and orchestrates a set of transcoding processes based on specific learner needs, so as to produce a customized LO that can be fully enjoyed by any (impaired or mobile) student.

Effective E-learning distributed environments should promote high cooperation. Workflow techniques can certainly contribute to such effectiveness as the creation and delivery of learning contents are typically accomplished by groups of individuals executing specific and predefined sequences of activities. Reusable learning objects (RLO or LO) also play an important role in this context as learning content is broken into smaller parts to facilitate deployment and execution assignment. Additionally, some LO may require high levels of computation as in the case of simulations in hemodynamics in a fluid mechanics course. In order to cope with such an application, we envisioned a workflow-based learning management system (LMS) using Web services as the communication infrastructure allied to the computational power of the Grid.

Adaptation to learners’ learning styles can help education systems improve learning efficiency and effectiveness. This research orientation has been studied by many researchers lately, but most of the existing education systems lack adaptation in which every learner is delivered the same learning content. Moreover, many researchers concluded that it is worth applying automatic identification of learning style because of its advantages in precision and time savings. In our study, we concentrate on two main technologies to implement adaptation in education systems: semantic web and intelligent agents. Using ontology with the Semantic Web services makes it faster and more convenient to query and retrieve educational materials. Intelligent agents can provide the learners with personal assistants to carry out learning activities according to their learning styles and knowledge level. In this paper, we present a domain ontology that is suitable for adaptive e-learning environments. The ontology describes the learning objects that compose a course as well as the learners and their learning styles. We also present a multi-agent e-learning system that supports pre-defining and re-examining students’ learning styles during the course for better personalization. In the system, the learning style of each learner can be identified automatically and dynamically. We used a new literature-based method that uses learners’ behaviors on learning objects as indicators for this task. The evaluation showed a high precision in detecting learning styles and in delivering learning materials. Together with the mentioned benefits, this result indicates that our e-learning system is capable of wide use. !

Modes of Information Delivery in Radiologic Anatomy Education: Impact on Student Performance

In today's world, WWW as a platform to deliver instruction enables e-learning systems to manage a large quantity of different digital content. Teachers contribute their expert knowledge and students contribute their investigation works, tasks, etc. As a consequence of this, the content repository grows with a lot of information. Then, an urgent need exists to retrieve the specific information they really need through e-learning systems. reusable learning object (LOs) concepts and standards for their application represent an advantage for knowledge management systems for e-learning systems. Users are able to manage and reuse content according to their needs without interoperability problems. However, the quality of the LOs content is not guaranteed. This paper attempts to analyze what must be considered to knowledge management for e-learning systems together with LOs and standars implication. A definition of LOs is proposed and quality criteria are suggested to evaluate LOs according to their characteristics and specific contexts.

Most promising methods to deliver effective education at distance are rapidly emerging and evolving as e-learning systems. To support diverse teaching and learning paradigms, e-learning content has to be more than static online text and lackluster material. It is imperative to create a dynamic interaction between e-learning content and users. Technological advances offer new paradigms in distance education and strengthened the distance learning approach on e-learning systems’ usability and overall user experience. Distance learning is a cognitive and repetitive task, requiring learners’ attention as well as their interest. It is imperative to create a dynamic interaction between e-learning content and users. Therefore, content as well as delivery have to be supported in a highly personalised manner by e-learning systems. In this paper, the authors present a system which compiles feedback related to the behavioural state of the user (e.g. level of interaction and attention) in the context of reading an electronic document; this is achieved using eye-blink measures to identify alertness and responsiveness to the e-learning material. The real-time vision-based system used a novel evaluation approach to identify the level of alertness by performance correlated against user physiological properties (e.g. eye-blink parameters). Finally, the authors present an innovative interaction and alertness measure experiment to exemplify learner’s responsiveness to the online material presented. Therefore, when delivering content, in addition to the pragmatic functionality of an e-learning system the visual interactivity experience is emphasized as a significant feature for effective content development and delivery. This trend includes but is not limited to e-learning it can be used for microlearning, personalized learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) content development.

Assessing Social Media Preferences and Developing Digital Health Care Transition Education Materials for Emerging Adults with Sickle Cell Disease: A Mixed Method Pilot Study

The goal of this paper is to develop a system, referred to as the Management System for Merging Learning Objects (msMLO), which offers an approach that retrieves learning objects (LOs) based on students’ learning styles and term-based queries and produces a new outcome. The first step ranks LOs using a unified learning style model and creates better LOs by merging the top-ranked LOs. The second step maps LOs onto a hierarchy of concepts to avoid including duplicated topics in the merged LO. Fifty-six students were randomly split into experimental and control groups. The experimental group browsed the LOs retrieved by the msMLO based on the students’ learning styles, term-based queries and merge functionality, whereas the control group browsed the LOs retrieved based on the students’ learning styles and term-based queries. The results demonstrated that the experimental group improves their learning performance, thus msMLO is a promising approach.

PurposeThis exploratory research seeks to clarify the role of cultural organisations as knowledge-intensive public organisations (KIPOs) and the trend of digital content creation in museum sectors and national strategies through a country case study. It aims to provide a deeper understanding and analysis of museums' roles as KIPOs, specifically focusing on their digitalisation and digital content development for service delivery. Digital technology utilisation in the museum sector has amplified the significance of digital content, not only because of the increasing use of digital technologies among the public but also because it provides attractive new content to appeal to customers, as well as more efficient knowledge management and knowledge reproduction tools for KIPOs. Thus, this paper analyses digital content creation in the museum sector and policy frameworks to provide insights into the role of museums as KIPOs by utilising digital technologies.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted literature review on six keywords, combination of “cultural institution”, “museum”, “digitalization”, “digital content”, and “ICT” to understand the digitalisation of museums amongst academic papers, then used a case study to figure out the common issues as well as case-specific features of these digital offerings through analysis of the digital platforms of museums. Specifically, we choose the case of South Korea, its national strategies and budget allocations and the museum sectors in the country. Thus, the secondary data analysis was provided by the official channels, such as documents from government agencies, media sources, such as articles from newspapers and magazines and academic works of literature, such as papers in scientific journals.FindingsThis paper reveals the research trend in museums' digitalisation, especially through the case study, how the South Korean government has argued digital content development in museum sectors through their national strategies and budget allocations, and the trend of museums' digital offerings since 2021. This paper thus presents a novel contribution to the field by delving into the research trend in digitalisation and digital content development in the museum sector and analysing the South Korean government's national strategies and budget allocation in this context. The literature review shows that the digitalisation of museums has increased research interest in the last few years in limited areas. South Korea has allocated budgets and policies to encourage digital content creation in museums, and this study identifies an increase in digital content creation in the museum sector.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper chose one-country case study, that of South Korea; thus, there are representative limitations and thus in terms of generalisation of the results. Further research with case studies from other countries and comparative studies are required.Practical implicationsThis study highlights the importance of digitalisation and digital content development in the museum sector through government policies, strategies and financial investment.Social implicationsIt highlights the importance of digitalisation and the introduction of digital contents amongst museums to gain new visitors and change the relationship between the institutions and the customers.Originality/valueIt deals with the digitalisation of museums as KIPOs and it is a new and relevant topic per se. This study enhances the understanding of the museum sector’s digital content development and national policies to support its activities. It provides insights into the utilisation of digital technologies in cultural institutions for digital service delivery in public organisations.

This chapter aimed to understand how learning style and learning skills differ among three countries—Japan, Thailand, and the United States—as viewed through Kolb's experiential learning theory. The study consisted of 300 undergraduates, with 100 freshmen from each country. Results indicated that Japanese students depended the most on a feeling mode rather than a thinking mode, followed by Thai students; Americans, in contrast, strongly preferred to learn from a thinking mode. Of the 12 learning skills analyzed, nine differed by both learning style (converging or diverging) and country, while three were affected only by country. Thais showed the highest level of most learning skills, Americans were in the middle, and Japanese exhibited the lowest level of all 12 skills. A converging learning style influenced learning skill development more than a diverging learning style. This study offers theoretical and practical implications.

As e-learning continuously gains the interest of the scientific community, industry, and government, a wide variety of learning technology products have been incorporated into the marketplace. Advances in information and communication technologies are in favor of the incorporation of innovative services and functionalities in such systems, though content creation and delivery remain the two key factors in any e-learning system. Therefore, in this chapter, we present the design and implementation of a tool targeted at building and accessing learning objects and online courses through the Web. This tool aims to facilitate instructors and trainers to easily develop accessible, reusable, and traceable learning content that can meet their distant students’ needs for anytime and anyplace learning. Learners are able to access learning content, in addition to consulting, at any time, reports on their interactions within a course and get support by subject experts. Furthermore, all users can request to upgrade their role in the system and, thus, actively participate in the learning process. Special attention has been paid on the utilization of reliable and qualitative open source technologies and Web standards so that the proposed solution can form an easily accessible system.

E-learning is developed fast due to the internet. E-learning is the delivery of learning content via all electronic media, including Internet, satellite broadcasting, interactive TV, etc. The use of the classic index in different worlds universities has been replaced with an electronic index. This has meant that all writing evidence that has been taken so far should be replaced with the so-called electronic archive. Thousands of wood materials like papers and books will be saved through the electronic index. The electronic index should resolve the issue of signatures, mainly to be implemented the digital signature that will confirm authorship of the professor and will not allow falsification. The administration work would be facilitated. Keywords: e-learning, electronic index, actors, subjects, students, UML diagrams.

The advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has brought new opportunities for learning. Tanzania is adopting the new technologies in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through e-learning and m-learning. However, delivery of learning contents is becoming a challenge for HEIs due to the constraints in resources and network bandwidth. This study discussed learners’ perceptions on using e-learning applications and mobile devices for learning in three HEIs in Tanzania. Findings show that majority of the students own more than one mobile devices which can be used as a tool for facilitating the learning process. It is suggested that in order to improve e-learning content delivery and accessibility under limited resource settings, HEIs in developing countries should make an effective use of emerging mobile computing technologies which are relevant to their respective environments.

Intelligent learning systems provide relevant learning materials to students based on their individual pedagogical needs and preferences. However, providing personalized learning objects based on learners’ preferences, such as learning styles which are particularly important for the recommendation of learning objects, re-mains a challenge. Recommending the most appropriate learning objects for learners has always been a challenge in the field of e-learning. This challenge has driven educators and researchers to implement new ideas to help learners improve their learning experience and knowledge. New solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we propose and develop a new personalization approach for recommendation that implements the adaptation of learning objects according to the learners’ learning style mainly focused on the use of a chatbot, named LearningPartnerBot, which will be integrated into the Moodle platform. We use the Felder-Silverman Learning Styles Model to determine learners’ learning styles in order to recommend learning objects, and also to overcome the cold start problem. A chatbot is an automated communication tool that attempts to imitate a conversation by detecting the intentions of its user. The proposed LearningPartnerBot should be able to answer learners’ questions in real time and provide a relevant set of suggestions according to their needs.

Higher education models appear to be not entirely designed to support students in facing severe challenges, such as failure in exams and dropping out of school. To solve these challenges, several models of learning styles have been proposed, under the premise that these studies contribute to improving the student's learning experience. This research aims at quantifying the impact of learning styles (learning preferences/dimensions) on students' academic performance from a higher education institution. Ninety-six undergraduate students were surveyed during the 2018-2019 school year and randomly divided into two groups: control (CG) and experimental (EG). The learning preferences of the students were identified using the Unified Learning Style Model (ULSM) instrument. Subsequently, the level of students’ knowledge concerning the course was determined employing a pre-test exam. As a following step, the students of the EG consulted the learning objects designed considering different learning styles. The CG attend their lessons in a face-to-face environment; both groups answered a post-test exam to assess their learning. The learning styles' effect -learning objects were designed to cover several learning styles- on academic performance is quantified employing an ANOVA analysis. The results differ from those postulated in previous researches based on the ULSM since there is no statistical evidence that learning styles influence students' academic performance. Therefore, it is necessary to explore other cognitive and affective factors that make the student's learning experience efficient and effective.