Facilitating flexible learning by replacing classroom time with an online learning environment: A systematic review of blended learning in higher education

Higher education institutions are trying to provide more flexibility and individualization, which is mainly realized through the use of new technologies and implemented in online or blended learning designs. This systematic review aims to investigate the impact of replacing classroom time with an online learning environment. The meta-analysis (k = 21 effect sizes) applied strict inclusion criteria concerning research design, measurement of learning outcomes and implementation of blended learning. The estimated effect size (Hedge's g) was positive, although not significantly different from zero and the confidence interval [-0.13, 0.25], suggesting that overall differences between blended and conventional classroom learning are small, and, at best, very small negative or moderate positive effects are plausible. This means that despite a reduction in classroom time between 30 and 79 per cent, equivalent learning outcomes were found. Consequently, blended learning with reduced classroom time is not systematically more or less effective than conventional classroom learning.     

‘Teaching’ the path towards university: understanding student access through storied-futures and meritocratic grand narratives

The notion that the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures is another lens through which university underrepresentation should be viewed. A storied lens attends to how futures, like university attendance, are storied during childhood to the extent that some youth imagine, and therefore plan, these futures as natural progression. Such was the case for study participants, indicating that childhood stories contain answers for mitigating social reproduction connected to parental education and cultural forces within the home. Examining social mobility through the underexplored storied-futures grand narrative presents unique solutions that lay hidden within the dominant meritocratic grand narrative.     

The Mystery Room: discovering the flexibility of an information literacy-based educational escape room

Abstract

The Mystery Room is an educational escape room based on information literacy and applied to multiple audiences, including first-year students and library student employees. In this article, we explain how we developed the game, its theoretical underpinnings, and why it’s a flexible workshop for a variety of audiences.     

Quality flaw prediction in Spanish Wikipedia: A case of study with verifiability flaws

In this work, we present the first quality flaw prediction study for articles containing the two most frequent verifiability flaws in Spanish Wikipedia: articles which do not cite any references or sources at all (denominated Unreferenced) and articles that need additional citations for verification (so-called Refimprove). Based on the underlying characteristics of each flaw, different state-of-the-art approaches were evaluated. For articles not citing any references, a well-established rule-based approach was evaluated and interesting findings show that some of them suffer from Refimprove flaw instead. Likewise, for articles that need additional citations for verification, the well-known PU learning and one-class classification approaches were evaluated. Besides, new methods were compared and a new feature was also proposed to model this latter flaw. The results showed that new methods such as under-bagged decision trees with sum or majority voting rules, biased-SVM, and centroid-based balanced SVM, perform best in comparison with the ones previously published.     

Evaluating the international dimension in an undergraduate curriculum by assessing students’ intercultural sensitivity

This formative, outcome-oriented, theory-based evaluation research study assessed the effectiveness of requiring an international (‘I’) course by measuring students’ intercultural sensitivity (IS) at the start and end of a semester. Findings revealed that students’ IS scores did not change regardless of the type of class in which the student was enrolled and were not significantly different based on gender, age, ethnicity, undergraduate classification, or number of ‘I’ courses taken. There were significant differences in IS based on religion, traveling outside the US, participating in a study abroad course, and the number of cultural events in which the student had participated. Regression analysis confirmed that religious affiliation and number of times traveled outside the US were significant predictors of IS. This study is an example of the use of theory-based evaluation in an educational system and provides important insights into what experiences affect college students’ IS.     

提升高职足球教学训练水平的路径研究

作为一项历史悠久的运动,足球运动深受全民喜爱,有着广泛的扩展范围和巨大的影响力。近些年来,高职院校的足球教学取得一定的进步和发展,对于学生身体素质的锻炼起到积极的促进作用。然而,进步并不等同于完美,高职院校的足球教学仍然存在诸多问题,要想提升足球训练水平,必须要解决这些问题,创新教学思想,改善训练方式,保证足球教学的规范性、科学性、系统性,使足球训练具备的提升学生身体协调性的作用充分发挥出来。基于此,本文就如何提升高职足球教学训练水平进行论述。     

中职体育教学中学生团队意识的培养探析

当前,我国社会市场对人才的要求越来越多,而在众多要求中团队精神已经成为学生学习、求职、从事行业工作必备的条件。中职生是一群特殊的群体,其专业学习具有很强的职业性与目的性,在为中职生开展的体育教学中培养学生的团队意识非常重要。本文结合笔者多年的工作实践,探讨中职体育教学培养学生团队意识的策略,以供参考。     

高职医学院校排球课程的现状研究--以福建省四所高职医学院校为例

通过文献资料法、问卷调查法、数理统计法、访谈法等研究方法,对福建省4所高职医学院校的排球课程的现状进行调查分析。研究表明:福建省高职医学院校的排球课程要进一步完善课程设置,加强医体融合的建设,教师要优化教学方法和手段,提高排球课程的吸引力。同时,各高职医学院校应正确认识排球课程改革和发展的影响因素,进一步提升排球课程在人才培养和专业建设中的作用。     

协同搜索过程中用户交流内容与模式研究

[目的/意义]旨在分析协同搜索用户在信息搜索任务过程中的交流内容与模式,从而理解协同搜索用户的关注重点与搜索过程。[研究设计/方法]基于书籍交互检索平台(CLEF-Social Book Search)设计实验,共招募18名被试完成两种搜索任务,通过录音记录对话并对其进行编码和分析,总结交流内容特征和模式。结合任务类型、认知类型组合、服务器记录的搜索交互行为日志以及问卷收集的搜索体验进行了探索分析。[结论/发现]从交流内容上看,协同搜索用户主要理解与评判书目信息、商讨搜索任务计划;比起认知类型不同的用户,相同认知类型的用户在操作交互方面交流更多,在评判决策方面交流较少。交流模式依据讨论内容比重可分为理解评判型、评判主导型、均衡交流型三种,评判主导型用户的任务完成满意度最高。[创新/价值]协同搜索用户的交流反映出搜索过程中需要与同伴商讨协同的焦点,也是需要系统提供协助的重点,给协同搜索系统设计提供一定参考。本研究针对协同搜索的交流内容设计的编码系统对相关的协同交流研究也有借鉴意义。     

Beyond traditional collaborative search: Understanding the effect of awareness on multi-level collaborative information retrieval

Although there has been a great deal of research into Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) and Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS), the majority has assumed that team members have the same level of unrestricted access to underlying information. However, observations from different domains (e.g. healthcare, business, etc.) have suggested that collaboration sometimes involves people with differing levels of access to underlying information. This type of scenario has been referred to as Multi-Level Collaborative Information Retrieval (MLCIR). To the best of our knowledge, no studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of awareness, an existing CIR/CIS concept, on MLCIR. To address this gap in current knowledge, we conducted two separate user studies using a total of 5 different collaborative search interfaces and 3 information access scenarios. A number of Information Retrieval (IR), CIS and CIR evaluation metrics, as well as questionnaires were used to compare the interfaces. Design interviews were also conducted after evaluations to obtain qualitative feedback from participants. Results suggested that query properties such as time spent on query, query popularity and query effectiveness could allow users to obtain information about team's search performance and implicitly suggest better queries without disclosing sensitive data. Besides, having access to a history of intersecting viewed, relevant and bookmarked documents could provide similar positive effect as query properties. Also, it was found that being able to easily identify different team members and their actions is important for users in MLCIR. Based on our findings, we provide important design recommendations to help develop new CIR and MLCIR interfaces.