Barriers to learning online experienced by students with a mental health disability

Online education is widely regarded as increasing accessibility to higher education to individuals with disadvantage and disability, including those with a mental health disability. However, the learning challenges these students experience within the online learning environment are not well understood. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to better understand the barriers to learning that these students face in this environment. A qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 students revealed three major learning barriers: (a) impact of impairment, (b) personal and situational circumstances, and (c) learning environment. These barriers were found to have wide-ranging consequences for the students’ ability to fully engage in study and their overall wellbeing. The findings lend insight into the low retention rates for this cohort of students and the learning barriers that need to be addressed by online education providers to better enhance the educational experience of these students.     

Deciphering the diplomatic archives of fifteenth-century Italy

This article examines the repercussions of the explosion of paper documents generated by new developments in diplomatic practice in Italian city-states between 1450 and 1500. With the proliferation of resident ambassadors whose daily duties centered around writing and receiving letters and other documents, a flood of written material was produced. The management and archiving of all this material triggered the formation of new institutions, of new methods of working, and of new personnel. Though the results of the efforts at archiving were often fitful and incomplete, the governments of the Italian peninsula henceforth sought to collect, control and preserve diplomatic documents so that they could be referenced in the future.

Morphological Decomposition in the Recognition of Prefixed and Suffixed Words: Evidence From Korean

Korean has visually salient syllable units that are often mapped onto either prefixes or suffixes in derived words. In addition, prefixed and suffixed words may be processed differently given a left-to-right parsing procedure and the need to resolve morphemic ambiguity in prefixes in Korean. To test this hypothesis, four experiments using the masked priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted. Results showed that suffixed primes facilitated responses to their stem targets regardless of the lexicality or interpretability of the primes. In contrast, prefixed primes had a significant effect only when they were real words, and not when they were either interpretable or noninterpretable prefixed pseudowords. These results suggest that there may be two different processing mechanisms for derived words in Korean. One is prelexical morphological decomposition for suffixed words, and the other is the supralexical analysis for prefixed words where decomposition occurs only after the whole word has been accessed.     

Redesigning a General Education Science Course to Promote Critical Thinking

Recent studies question the effectiveness of a traditional university curriculum in helping students improve their critical thinking and scientific literacy. We developed an introductory, general education (gen ed) science course to overcome both deficiencies. The course, titled Foundations of Science, differs from most gen ed science offerings in that it is interdisciplinary; emphasizes the nature of science along with, rather than primarily, the findings of science; incorporates case studies, such as the vaccine-autism controversy; teaches the basics of argumentation and logical fallacies; contrasts science with pseudoscience; and addresses psychological factors that might otherwise lead students to reject scientific ideas they find uncomfortable. Using a pretest versus posttest design, we show that students who completed the experimental course significantly improved their critical-thinking skills and were more willing to engage scientific theories the general public finds controversial (e.g., evolution), while students who completed a traditional gen ed science course did not. Our results demonstrate that a gen ed science course emphasizing the process and application of science rather than just scientific facts can lead to improved critical thinking and scientific literacy.     

Knowledge management in a decentralized global financial services provider: a case study with Allianz Group

We first introduce the overall approach to knowledge management taken by Allianz Group. We then present two specific solution approaches within Allianz Group. The first approach is focused on knowledge sharing across different lines of businesses and various organizational entities within Allianz. The approach is implemented through the new organizational role of centers of competence. The second approach is focused on improvements of knowledge-workers day-to-day tasks involving document and expert search from various information sources. Here, we report the setup and the results from a pilot study. The aim was to evaluate the implications of different search and retrieval tools on workflow within a representative everyday business environment. Different available information resources with their corresponding security infrastructure were taken into account. The pilot implementation was accompanied by an empirical survey on usage characteristics and usability experiences by the participating knowledge workers.     

Ethical dilemmas on social media: Swedish secondary teachers’ boundary management on Facebook

With the aim of contributing to the research about the educational use of social media, the paper explores teachers’ experiences of ethical dilemmas on Facebook. The paper draws upon focus group interviews with Swedish secondary teachers. Two main categories of ethical dilemmas, related to the border between private and professional, are detected. The dilemmas concern (1) teachers’ moral responsibility for pupils’ actions and (2) how teachers appear on social media. Different boundary work practices created and used by teachers are identified. The main conclusion is that, by having contact with pupils in a virtual social arena originally intended for private use, teachers’ use of social media brings to fore and intensifies deep-rooted ethical questions about what the teacher role is and should be. Teachers’ participation on social media such as Facebook compels them to reflect upon and position their preferred teacher role in these new social arenas.     

The effect of narrative-based E-learning systems on novice users’ cognitive load while learning software applications

Educational technology research and development - When novice users try to learn to use a software application that includes a variety of high element interactivity tools, the complex structure of...     

Analysis of anticipation by 3D motion capturing – a new method presented in karate kumite

Anticipation is an important performance factor in karate kumite. A new approach analysing anticipation in realistic combat situations by motion capturing with a high temporal resolution is presented. The advantage of this approach is that both karate athletes interacting sports specific can be recorded synchronously; thus, the presented method has the potential to analyse visual information pickup due to coordination pattern of interaction between real athletes. The aim is to demonstrate the usability of the current method for anticipation research and to investigate if the distance between two athletes and their attacking technique play a role in the reaction of the defending athlete. Furthermore, relevant cues lying within each attacking technique and little individual differences are shown. Four male karate athletes took part in this study. Logistic regression indicated that both factors (distance × attacking technique) play a significant role in reaction. However, a correlation between these factors shows that only the attacking technique is a good predictor for reaction. Results show that the attacking technique jabbing punch (jap. Kizami-Zuki) was easier to anticipate than the attacking techniques reverse punch (jap. Gyaku-Zuki) and the round kick (jap. Mawashi-Geri).