DTheses (Athabasca University)
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Selected aspects of the experience of being an Ontario Registered Midwife practice partner
No full textIn 1994, Ontario midwives became regulated independent providers of midwifery provincially and organized themselves into practices. At each practice two or more midwives act as partners responsible for overseeing a practice as an independent business. The purpose of this descriptive exploratory study was to describe selected aspects of the experiences of being an Ontario midwifery partner, including the benefits and drawbacks and how decisions are made and conflicts are resolved. Convenience sampling was used to recruit nine participants who met inclusion criteria. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via telephone. Findings revealed partnership benefits and drawbacks, decision-making and conflict resolution strategies and indicated that midwives’ experiences of partnership emerged from having been an associate midwife or past partner. Limitations include a small sample size, a novice researcher and telephone interviewing. Recommendations for further studies emphasized how to best prepare midwives for partnership and the impact of partner workload imbalance on intra-partnership relationships.2010 - 1
Social presence impacting cognitive learning of adults in distanced education (DE)
Get PDFThis study examines evidence that supports the assertion of social presence (sp) theory impacting the community of inquiry for cognitive learning in distance education (DE). This study tested the validity of social presence assertions with respect to developing deep meaningful learning (dml) from the perspective of students engaged in distance education Master’s studies. This study employed a convenient sample of students enrolled at the graduate level; due to limited participation generalizations cannot be made to any population. The mixed method study involved both a quantitative online survey with 36 questions and qualitative follow-up telephone interviews conducted with 4 participants. A target population of 290 participants was obtained resulting in 25 returned surveys. Findings concluded no significant relationship exists between social presence and deep meaningful learning, cognitive learning and building a community of inquiry for deep meaningful learning. Findings strongly suggest social presence acts as a hindrance to deep meaningful learning. The results of the study justify further investigation and future studies are strongly recommended.2011-0
And then there were none: the lived experience of recovering mothers who lose custody of their children
Get PDFoai:dt.athabascau.ca:10791/8There is little known about mothers who are recovering from addictions who lose custody of their children. This hermeneutic thesis, using Canadian phenomenologist Max van Manen’s method and a combination of both scholarly elements and rich storytelling, explores the lived experience of four women recovering from addictions who have lost custody of their children. Using a dual approach of manual and computer-assisted coding, three themes (each with three sub-themes) emerged from semi-structured interviews. The first theme, betrayal, examines three sources of betrayal for the women. The second theme, soul-ache, describes the spaces that a mother finds herself in upon losing custody of her children. The third and final theme, reclamation, follows the mothers as they learn to live again. The findings of this thesis, situated within disciplinary knowledge, extend current knowledge regarding these mothers. The implications arising from this thesis are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided.2011-0
When Online Student Discussions Become Cheating: Perceptions of Academic Integrity
No full textThe primary objective of this study was to investigate the varying perspectives of academic integrity in relation to online learning and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. The study design was an explanatory mixed methods case study that focused on one medium sized Canadian University with students enrolled in a single online distance education course and faculty members from various online distance education courses. Data collection involved close-ended surveys followed by open-ended follow-up questionnaires. Although all participants were offered a choice of follow-up: face-to-face, telephone or online, all chose the online option. Sixty-nine students returned the closed ended survey; six agreed to follow-up. Ten faculty returned the closed-ended surveys; five agreed to the follow-up. Within the student and faculty groups, varying perspectives of what is permissible online and on-campus were held and these perspectives do not always match the institutions’ policies. Themes that emerged from participant’s statements concerned four cultures: institutional, faculty, student and learning. The overarching concept revealed by this study is that because the players participating in these cultures understand academic integrity differently, a dissonance exists that may or may not be resolved. Recommendations include the use of clear communication when expressing policies about the use of sanctioned collaboration and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Education as an intervention directed towards institutions, faculty and students may lessen the gap, but that is a focus for further research. Duplication of this study with a larger population would also be worthwhile.201
Assessing Students' Answers to Open Questions
Get PDFA number of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) exist on the market today. A subset of a LMS is the component in which student assessment is managed. In some forms of assessment, such as open questions, the LMS is incapable of evaluating the students’ responses and therefore human intervention is necessary. This study leverages the research conducted in recent studies in the area of Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction and Information Retrieval in order to provide a fair, timely and accurate assessment of student responses to open questions based on the semantic meaning of those responses. A component-based system utilizing a Text Pre-Processing phase and a Word/Synonym Matching phase has been developed to automate the open question assessment process. A small sample of student responses were tested against the system revealing areas in which the system could be improved.2010-1
The Isolation of Online Adjunct Faculty and its Impact on their Performance
No full textUsing a grounded-theory, qualitative research approach, this thesis examines the experiences of 28 adjunct faculty members at Beckwith University, exploring their views on whether periodically meeting face to face with management and peers has the potential to affect their motivation on the job and consequently the quality of education they provide to students. A few management representatives also shared their perspectives on the phenomenon; this enabled the researcher to compare the views of these two populations on whether face-to-face contact among faculty enhances teaching performance. The results of this study suggest a few concerns that online schools must address in their efforts to improve adjuncts’ sense of affiliation and loyalty to their institution – which in turn will positively affect student retention levels. The main issues of concern to adjunct faculty are: (a) inadequate frequency and depth of communication, regardless of the means used, i.e., whether online or face to face; (b) lack of recognition of instructors’ value to the institution; and c) lack of opportunities for skills development.200
Pathfinding Strategy for Multiple Non-Playing Characters and Agents in a 2.5D Game World
Get PDFThis essay focuses on pathfinding in a 2.5D game world for Non-playing Characters (NPC) and agents. The primary focus is to investigate and determine the optimal pathfinding strategy based on several measures such as steps and time taken to reach the goal. For this investigation the most popular pathfinding algorithms and interaction schemes will be analyzed and tested using standard analysis techniques and test applications. The result of this analysis and testing is that it is shown that the A* algorithm is optimal using the Manhattan distance heuristic. Unfortunately, our testing did not reveal an optimal choice among the three interaction scheme that was tested which were cooperative, non-cooperative and competitive.2009-0
Factors Affecting Implementation of Educational Media Casting As an Instructional Resource in Distance Education
No full textThis study examined the factors affecting the implementation of podcasting within a post secondary educational institution. The institution in the present investigation is a member of iTunes University and has provided faculty with the option of creating an educational media cast of content for delivery of course materials. Despite the services and support available, the inception of this technology has not been ubiquitous throughout various schools within this institution. A mixed methods approach was used to identify factors that faculty members used when making decisions to implement educational media casting. It was believed that one significant factor would be an individuals’ comfort level with technology. This was measured in an online survey. The results obtained suggest that time is the most critical factor that will affect decisions on implementation of this technology.200
Mobile Collaborative Information System Using Distributed Database Architecture
Get PDFThis thesis examines the feasibility of communal information sharing between mobile devices using a distributed architecture for the underlying database topology, through research aimed at satisfying two primary objectives: i. Examination and review of available technologies and products currently supporting distributed mobile database functionality, and ii. Development of a prototype groupware solution utilising distributed database synchronisation to implement information- sharing functions.2009-1
A Study on Reputation Systems in Internet Market
Get PDFTrust and reputation is considered a significant part of the Internet marketing. They are tightly coupled and platform-independent components that allows communications being carried out during processes between participants. Internet transactions or interactions involve anonymity of participants, which are more risky on account of uncertainty about the quality of service or identity of service providers. Reputation system is a mechanism to determine who is trustworthy and induce Internet marketing’s participants to maintain a good reputation while performing Internet activities. We consider that the evaluation of service provider’s reputation or participant’s honesty and responsibility constrained in some way by three factors, they are service quality, transaction time, and dollar value involved in the transaction(s), we called them as triple constraint. Although, there has been considerable theoretical research and practical implementation work done in trust or reputation on Internet marketing, very little research done to pinpoint the relationship between trust and reputation with this triple constraint, especially when trust decay and time decay factors involved in the reputation evaluation process. We propose and investigate a novel dynamic trust and reputation framework based on the three factors mentioned above to reflect the more realistic reputation of the service providers in the Internet market. The proposed system model has been verified through a series of simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate decay factors into reputation evaluation process. The simulation experiments results have indicated that reputation systems can signal current level of reputation of being evaluated service providers and can be benefit only if the providers have performed certain number of Internet transactions or services.2009-0