1,720,959 research outputs found
Principles of E-learning Systems Engineering
No full textThe book integrates the principles of software engineering with the principles of educational theory, and applies these principles to the problems of e-learning development. It presents both strong practical and strong theoretical frameworks for the design and development of technology-based materials and environments which are intended to have teaching, training, or educational value. It brings together a complete range of specific theories and detailed techniques for the design, development, and delivery of learning activities and materials for presentations, training courses, and academic lessons
Synthesis report on assessment and feedback with technology enhancement
No full textThis report has been commissioned by The Higher Education Academy (The Academy) in January 2010. The report addresses the main questions an academic audience is likely to have about assessment and feedback with technology enhancement by reference to evidence-based, widely available and peer-reviewed materials and papers available on technological support and enhancement for assessment and feedback. Of the 142 references which were recommended, the report reviews the 124 which were accessible, of which 67.7% were peer-reviewed, 28.2% provided quantitative data, and 18.5% provided experimental designs or statistical analyses. Most references focused on the reaction of students and teachers to the use of technology for assessment and feedback. Although it may be ideal to have high-quality evidence before implementing a new assessment approach, in the absence of this level of support, the insights and advice of reputable authors are valued by other practitioners and their messages have impact. The report provides a detailed introduction to and summary of references useful to practitioners on technology-enhanced assessment applicable to Higher (and Further) Education in a UK context. Some of the messages that are supported by evidence in the recommended literature include: Assessment for learning shows an effect size of between 0.34 and 0.46; Tutors can use technology-enhanced methods to implement effective learning designs that would not otherwise be possible because of factors such as time constraints, student numbers and geographical or temporal distribution; Effective regular, online testing can encourage student learning and improve their performance in tests; Student retention and inclusion can be increased by using technology-enhanced methods. Exam anxiety can also be reduced; Using technology-based methods does not disadvantage women or older students; Automated marking can be more reliable than human markers and there is no medium effect between paper and computerized exams; The success of assessment and feedback with technology enhancement lies with the pedagogy rather than the technology itself; technology is an enabler; Technology-enhanced assessment is not restricted to simple questions and clear-cut right and wrong answers, much more sophisticated questions are being used as well; Modern technology can be matched to the learning characteristics of the contemporary learner; The design of appropriate and constructive feedback plays a vital role in the success of assessment, especially assessment for learning. The literature offers detailed guidance on designing effective feedback such as conditions, research-backed principles and a typology, as well as specific advice for the design of audio feedback and peer assessment; What the characteristics of useful technologies to use for assessment and feedback are; Taking a team approach to the creation of technology-enhanced assessment and feedback is valuable because successful implementation requires skills in the application of technology and how to use to the technology itself as well as learning and the subject content; Staff development and support are vital when introducing and developing assessment and feedback with technology enhancement; Testing the assessment and feedback to ensure it is reliable and valid and piloting it with people who are similar to or understand the targeted students are important stages in the development process. A good reporting system can help academics see and analyse the results (including student answers) and will help refine the assessment and feedback; It is important to prepare students to take the assessments that use technology enhancement by practising with similar levels of assessment using the same equipment and methods. This is similar to being able to practise on past papers; The reports generated by many technology-enhanced assessment systems are very helpful in checking the reliability and validity of each test item and the test as a whole. In conclusion, the references that were recommended to us are clearly having an impact on current practice and are found valuable. We would welcome more high-quality statistical studies that offer evidence to support the lessons that practitioners have learned from experience
JISC Report on E-Assessment Quality (REAQ) in UK Higher Education
No full textCommissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in 2008, the ‘Report on Summative e-Assessment Quality (REAQ)’ project surveyed quality assurance (QA) activities commonly undertaken in summative e-assessment by UK Higher Education (HE) practitioners and others. The project focused on what denotes high quality in summative e-assessment for the interviewees and the steps that they take to meet their own standards. An expert panel guided the project. What denotes high quality summative e-assessment Expert opinion focused, in this order of priority, on: • Psychometrics (reliability, validity), • Pedagogy (mapping to intended learning outcomes), and • Practical issues (security, accessibility). What ‘high quality’ meant to our interviewees depended on the role they played in the process of creating and using e-assessments. They listed the following matters, in this order of volume: • Using the medium to give an extra dimension to assessment, including creating e-assessments that are authentic to the skills being tested; • Issues around delivery including security, infrastructure reliability, and accessibility; • Fairness and ease of use; • Supporting academic, managerial, and organisational goals; • Addressing the intended learning outcomes; and • Validity and reliability, mainly in their ‘non-psychometric’ senses. Interviewees with the role of learning technologist (or similar roles designed to aid academics in the use of e-assessment) used these terms in their psychometric senses. Interviewees focused on the e-assessment issues that were foremost in their mind. As processes to deliver e-assessment are rarely embedded in institutions at present, interviewees described spending time and effort on practical issues ensuring that e-assessments would work effectively. Many of the quality characteristics identified by the interviewees as important in summative e-assessment are measured by psychometrics. Although some academics use these measures, the report suggests that more could benefit from using psychometric evaluation. Steps needed to produce high quality e-assessment Expert opinion focused on: • Establishing sets of steps to follow for both content and quality management; • Identifying, using, and developing relevant standards for both content and quality management; • Identifying metrics for both content and process; and • Capability maturity modelling as an encapsulation of these three essential elements of a quality management process. Interviewee comments fell under a variety of rules of thumb or suggestions for useful steps, such as: noting that the effort needed to write e-assessments, their marking Final Report, May 2009 ii schemes, and to construct feedback is front-loaded; starting with easier questions and making later questions more difficult; checking assessments with subject matter experts and high performers; identifying ‘weak’ questions and improving or eliminating them; reviewing question content to ensure syllabus coverage; getting help for academics who usually have very limited knowledge of psychometrics; attending to security; and using accessibility guidelines. In summary: • Heuristic steps for both content and quality management, and • Accessibility standards. Many interviewees assumed that e-assessments were: • Valid if they were created by the academics responsible for the course, and • Subject to the same quality assurance processes as traditional assessments as well as those required specifically for e-assessment. The report questions these assumptions. Recommendations The report makes a number of recommendations to support academics creating high quality summative e-assessments, including: • A toolkit for the end-to-end process of creating e-assessment should be developed. • A practical guide to the steps involved in creating and maintaining an e-assessment system. • Guidelines for the quality assurance of e-assessments. • Psychometric measures for assessing the quality of item banks rather than individual questions, for assessing, tracking, and reporting the quality of banked items during their lifecycle of use. • Development and extension of existing psychometric theory to include multi-staged and optional stepped constructed response questions. • Workshops and support materials to disseminate good practice in the use of psychometrics for selected response items and for questions employing constructed responses. • Workshops and support materials to disseminate good practice in question creation and meeting educational needs beyond simple selected response items, possibly subject based. • Accessibility and user interface guidelines for deploying e-assessment, in particular addressing the use of browsers. • Guidelines for the use and role of MathML for expression recognition in e-assessments. • A repository of exemplars of good practice for both selected response and constructed response questions. • JISC and other community calls for and sponsorship of e-assessment bids should consider where and how bidders should incorporate appropriate psychometric measures in their proposals. • Commercial vendors should improve the accessibility of their psychometric reports to all stakeholders, possibly simplifying them to encourage take-up of their contents
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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