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How to teach memristors in school

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A memristor is the fourth fundamental electrical element, next to resistor, capacitor and inductor.
This element has attracted the interest of the scientific and engineering communities during the
last few years, due to the construction of such a dev…

A Survey of the Collaboration Rate of Authors in the E-Learning Subject Area over a 10-Year Period (2005-2014) Using Web of Science

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Partnership is one of the mechanisms of scientific development, and scientific collaboration or co-authorship is considered a key element in the progress of science. This study is a survey with a scientometric approach focusing on the field of e-learning products over 10 years. In an Advanced Search of the Web of Science, the following search formula was used: TS=(“m-learning” OR “mlearning” OR “mobile learning” OR “online learning” OR “virtual learning” OR “distance learning” OR “electronic learning”). The study was limited to 2005-2014, and the document type was limited to paper. A total of 4292 documents were found, to which 12362 authors contributed. The articles were evaluated individually   and their information was entered into Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for analysis using the collaborative coefficient formula. In the Computers and Education journal, articles with two authors are the most frequent. The United States, with the highest production of articles in the field of e-learning, tends to produce articles with two authors. In 2014, the most productive year, articles with three authors were more frequent. The highest collaborative coefficient is in 2005 and 2014. Our findings show that despite the need for research activities as a team, the authors in the field of e-learning tend to publish their papers alone or in a team of two.

Student Voices on the Roles of Instructors in Asynchronous Learning Environments in the 21st Century

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This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors’ outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors’ roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.

Networked Scholarship and Motivations for Social Media use in Scholarly Communication

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Research on scholars’ use of social media suggests that these sites are increasingly being used to enhance scholarly communication by strengthening relationships, facilitating collaboration among peers, publishing and sharing research products, and discussing research topics in open and public formats. However, very few studies have investigated perceptions and attitudes towards social media use for scholarly communication of large cohorts of scholars at national level. This study investigates the reasons for using social media sites for scholarly communication among a large sample of Italian university scholars (N=6139) with the aim of analysing what factors mainly affect these attitudes. The motivations for using social media were analysed in connection with frequency of use and factors like gender, age, years of teaching, academic title, and disciplinary field. The results point out that for the most used tools the influence of the variables examined was higher in shaping scholars’ motivations. In fact, frequency of use, age, years of teaching, and disciplinary field were found to be relevant factors especially for LinkedIn and ResearchGate-Academia.edu, while gender and academic title seemed to have a limited impact on scholars’ motivations for all social media sites considered in the study. Considerations for future research are provided along with limitations of the study.

Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Scaffold Online Tutoring

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Tutoring involves providing learners with a suitable level of structure and guidance to support their learning. This study reports on an exploration of how to design such structure and guidance (i.e., learning scaffolds) in the Chinese online educational context, and in so doing, answer the following two questions: (a) What scaffolding strategies are needed to design online tutoring, and (b) How should different levels of scaffolding intensity be emphasized in different stages of online tutoring in such educational contexts? A model for online tutoring using the Community of Inquiry framework was developed and implemented in this study. It focused attention on both the critical role of the tutor in online learning and the importance of scaffolding in online tutoring. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data, including questionnaires, interviews, and content analysis. In considering the variation of scaffolding throughout the online course, results showed that: (a) As long as a high degree of social presence is established in the initial phase, scaffolds for social presence can be withdrawn gradually throughout the course; (b) High-intensity teaching presence is much more important in the mid-phase of the course than in other phases; (c) “Discourse facilitation” should be emphasized for teaching presence in the mid-phase, while “direct instruction” scaffolding is needed in the last phase; and (d) The greatest need for scaffolding of cognitive presence occurs in the final phase of the course.

A Team of Instructors’ Use of Social Presence, Teaching Presence, and Attitudinal Dissonance Strategies: An Animal Behaviour and Welfare MOOC

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This case study examined a team of instructors’ use of social presence, teaching presence, and attitudinal dissonance in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Animal Behaviour and Welfare (ABW), designed to facilitate attitudinal learning. The study reviewed a team of six instructors’ use of social presence and teaching presence by applying the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, as well as the establishment of attitudinal dissonance within the announcements and discussion forums. The instructors entered the MOOC as a collaborative facilitation team and created a highly balanced manner of communication and positive atmosphere within the course. The instructional design focused on creating an informative and knowledgeable network of global learners that would agree that animal welfare was a critical social issue in today’s society. These course goals and facilitation intentions were demonstrated through a high number of social and teaching presence indicators, with a significant use of all social presence, teaching presence, and attitudinal dissonance categories in evidence. The results present a review of an instructional team’s facilitation that focused on shaping attitudes about the topic of animal behaviour and welfare within a MOOC. We conclude by providing insights into instructional design and facilitation of MOOCs in general or attitudinal learning specifically.

Examining MOOCs: A Comparative Study among Educational Technology Experts in Traditional and Open Universities

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The proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in recent years has generated much debate. MOOCs have been presented as technology-based educational practices, but many researchers question if this kind of open courses really respects some of the consolidated principles behind the education offered at universities. In light of this situation, consulting the teachers most closely tied to this type of course can provide an authoritative view of the issue and can allow the most important elements to be highlighted in order to carry out further research. Using a qualitative methodology based on an open questionnaire, this work presents the opinions and perceptions of teachers/lecturers in educational technology regarding these new courses key elements. These key elements are analysed through analysing its controversial definition, their pedagogical advantages and limitations, the functions of a tutor in a MOOC and their assessment (or accreditation). In addition, a comparison is made between the contributions of teachers from a traditional university with a face-to-face model and those from a distance university, which is based entirely on a virtual training offer and which has a greater possibility of coming into direct competition with these Massive Open Online Courses.

The RISE Framework: Using Learning Analytics to Automatically Identify Open Educational Resources for Continuous Improvement

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The RISE (Resource Inspection, Selection, and Enhancement) Framework is a framework supporting the continuous improvement of open educational resources (OER).  The framework is an automated process that identifies learning resources that should be evaluated and either eliminated or improved.  This is particularly useful in OER contexts where the copyright permissions of resources allow for remixing, editing, and improving content.  The RISE Framework presents a scatterplot with resource usage on the x-axis and grade on the assessments associated with that resource on the y-axis.  This scatterplot is broken down into four different quadrants (the mean of each variable being the origin) to find resources that are candidates for improvement.  Resources that reside deep within their respective quadrant (farthest from the origin) should be further analyzed for continuous course improvement.  We present a case study applying our framework with an Introduction to Business course. Aggregate resource use data was collected from Google Analytics and aggregate assessment data was collected from an online assessment system.  Using the RISE Framework, we successfully identified resources, time periods, and modules in the course that should be further evaluated for improvement.

Review and Content Analysis of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance/Distributed Learning (2000–2015)

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This paper presents a review of distance education literature published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance/Distributed Learning (IRRODL) to describe the status thereof and to identify gaps and priority areas in distance education research based on a validated classification of research areas. All articles (N = 580) published between 2000 and 2015 were reviewed for this study. An analysis of abstracts using the text-mining tool Leximancer over three 5-year periods reveals the following broad themes over the three periods: the establishment of online learning and distance education institutions (2000–2005), widening access to education and online learning support (2006–2010), and the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OER) (2011–2015). The analysis auf publication and authorship patterns revealed that IRRODL is a very international journal with a high impact in terms of citations.

Giant Jupiter

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Space Science Image of the Week: Look up to see the target of our future Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer shine at its brightest this week

Giant Jupiter

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Space Science Image of the Week: Look up to see the target of our future Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer shine at its brightest this week

Alert, Canada

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Earth observation image of the week: a Sentinel-1 radar image of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme

Hamiltonian for the Zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function

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Author(s): Carl M. Bender, Dorje C. Brody, and Markus P. Müller

A Hamilonian with PT-symmetry invariant properties is investigated as a candidate for an operator that has eigenvalues corresponding to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function.


[Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 130201] Published Thu Mar 30, 2017

Hamiltonian for the Zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function

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Author(s): Carl M. Bender, Dorje C. Brody, and Markus P. Müller

A Hamilonian with PT-symmetry invariant properties is investigated as a candidate for an operator that has eigenvalues corresponding to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function.


[Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 130201] Published Thu Mar 30, 2017

ATV-3 docking

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Operations image of the week: Mission controllers monitoring the approach and docking of ATV Edoardo Amaldi with the International Space Station this week in 2012