Esta tese apresenta movimentos e teorias que demandam a mudança de paradigma na educação básica. A adoção de métodos ativos de aprendizagem com uso de tecnologia digital é defendida como oportunidade para concretização da inovação desejada. O problema é definido com a identificação de barreiras para concretização da mudança em escala. A intenção de diferenciar a educação esbarra em limitações na formação e vivência de educadores em relação ao paradigma desejado e ao uso da tecnologia digital. Uma pesquisa ação participante foi conduzida em um centro social, com organização semelhante a uma escola, com objetivo de envolver educadores e gestores locais na construção de instrumentos e na melhoria de práticas educacionais a partir do uso de tecnologias digitais com métodos ativos de aprendizagem. A estratégia proposta foi estruturada sobre quatro elementos que fundamentaram intervenções para mudanças de práticas educacionais: Referencial de Habilidades do Século XXI como possíveis objetivos; aprendizagem por atividades; Rede Social com biblioteca individual no papel de ambiente virtual de aprendizagem; a construção de rubricas por parte dos educadores para detalhar, valorizar e monitorar novas dimensões de avaliação. A partir de uma análise situacional foram propostos ciclos de mudanças de práticas, onde atores locais se envolveram com o planejamento, implementação e análise de mudanças viabilizadas pelo uso de tecnologias digitais e alinhadas com os objetivos priorizados pela equipe local. Estes ciclos incluíram a construção de instrumentos destinados a facilitar e sistematizar as estratégias propostas. Os resultados mostram que as atividades planejadas e desenvolvidas pelos educadores evoluíram ao longo dos ciclos aproximando-se do paradigma desejado. A análise do uso da rede social aponta para o crescimento da autoria e expressão dos alunos, mas não apresenta evidências de interações que promovam a reflexão dos aprendizes autores. As rubricas mostraram-se valiosas para aprendizagem ativa dos educadores, porém apresentaram certa incompatibilidade com práticas construtivistas alinhadas com o paradigma desejado. A estratégia foi eficiente em provocar o desequilíbrio dos educadores e iniciá-los em práticas, reflexões e aprendizagem ativa sobre o paradigma desejado, porém várias limitações são apontadas para o uso da estratégia em grande escala. O desenvolvimento de sistemas digitais específicos para o apoio à mudança desejada é discutido e sugerido para estudos futuros. / This thesis presents moves and theories that ask for change of paradigm on basic education. The adoption of active learning methods with the use of digital technology is thought as an opportunity for the consolidation of the desired innovation. The identification of barriers to consolidate the change in large scale is presented as the research problem. The intention to differentiate education faces a barrier on educators limited education and experience on the desired paradigm as well as on the use of digital technology. An action participatory research was conducted on a social center, structured similar to a regular school, having as goal the engagement of local educators and coordinators on the design of instruments and on the improvement of educational practices enabled by the use of digital technologies with active learning methods. The strategy proposed was based on four elements that influenced the interventions for the change on educational practices: Framework on 21st Century Skills as possible goals; learning by activities; a social network with personal library on the role of digital learning environment; educators building rubrics to design, give value and monitor new dimensions for evaluation. Based on a situational analysis, cycles of change on practices were proposed on a way that local subjects got involved with planning, implementation and analysis of changes enabled by the use of digital technology and aligned with the goals selected by the local educational team. These cycles included the creation of instruments designed to facilitate and systematize the proposed strategies. The results show that the activities designed and implemented by the educators have evolved through the research cycles becoming better aligned with the desired paradigm. The strategy has proved to be efficient to unbalance the educators and start them in practices, reflections and active learning related to the desired paradigm, but in the other hand, some limitations were pointed out when considering the adoption of this strategy in a systemic way. The development of digital systems designed specifically to support the desired change is discussed and suggested for future studies.

This study focuses on the concept of Active Learning (AL) and the related concept Active Leamer Participation (ALP) as it features in the Literacy Learning Programme of the Foundation Phase of Curriculum 2005. The aim of the action research project, conducted at four schools in the Durban district of K waZulu- Natal, was to find a model of AL in order to provide guidance on teaching for ALP. The study involved the researcher working collaboratively with five Foundation Phase educators over a period of four months. Results of the study indicated that teaching in the sequential stages of classbuilding and teambuilding, whole class discussion, group work and individual work increases learners' active participation and ownership in terms of the learning experience. These stages form the model of active learning. Due to the spirit of camaraderie and partnership that developed in each stage, the research team is inclined to call it "The Tirisano Model of Active Learning". / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Didactics)

Made available in DSpace on 2015-08-20T17:10:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2015-04-24. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2015-08-20T17:25:48Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000836075.pdf: 2304574 bytes, checksum: 28700046381df1c737d5bc4e818e4b0b (MD5) / Esta tese tem por objetivo a construção de mecanismos para mensurar o efeito da utilização de dinâmicas de ensino na engenharia de produção. Entre as principais questões envolvendo a educação na engenharia está a incerteza em relação aos efeitos da utilização de práticas de ensino interativas no processo ensino-aprendizagem. A abordagem metodológica utilizada foi a qualitativa, por meio do desenvolvimento de um estudo de caso explanatório do tipo múltiplos, no qual ocorreram aplicações de uma dinâmica de ensino em turmas diversas e tais aplicações foram investigadas por meio de questionários, observação, análise documental, pré e pós-testes. Os questionários aplicados têm como principal referência um modelo teórico-conceitual de avaliação multidimensional, proposto a partir de pesquisa bibliográfica, que avalia a percepção e motivação dos alunos diante da experiência de aprendizagem lúdica. Em complemento, os pré e pós-testes aplicados, buscam evidenciar o incremento da aprendizagem alcançado com a aplicação da dinâmica em questão. As evidências empíricas apontam para o fato de que as atividades lúdicas promoveram nos alunos uma maior motivação para a aprendizagem e que, de fato, houve incremento na aprendizagem. As contribuições originais mais relevantes para a teoria e para a prática são a proposição do modelo teórico-conceitual de avaliação multidimensional, que inclui as dimensões: Atenção, Relevância, Confiança, Satisfação, Interação, dentre outras possíveis; e, do modelo de avaliação, por meio de pré e pós-testes, para a verificação do incremento de aprendizagem. O modelo aqui utilizado permitiu a análise de dinâmicas de ensino na engenharia de produção, mas tem o potencial de ser aplicado em outros conteúdos. Além de avaliar os efeitos da ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / This paper intends to build mechanisms that measure the effectiveness of playful activities in teaching Production Engineering concepts. The uncertainty about this effectiveness regarding these practices in the teaching-learning process is one of the main issues in the engineering education. The methodology used was qualitative, by developing an explanatory case study, applying the case and studying it through observation, surveys, documentary analysis and pre and posttests. The applied surveys are reference of a theoretical-conceptual model regarding multidimensional evaluation, withdrawn from a theoretical background, that assesses the students' perception and motivation in facing the playful experience. On the other hand, pre and posttests point out the learning increase that students acquired with the dynamics. The empirical evidence indicate that the playful activities provided to the students motivation to learn, increasing indeed their learning. The most relevant and original contributions to this theory and its practice are the proposition of a theoretical-conceptual model regarding multidimensional evaluation that includes many dimensions (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction, Interaction, among others) and the assessment model (pretests and posttests) that checks the learning increase. This model allowed the dynamic's analysis in teaching Production Engineering concepts, although it could also be applied in other situations. Besides evaluating the effectiveness of this teaching technique, the suggested model predicates diagnosis and action plans in order to improve instructional design of the playful activity, in view of future applications

abstract: This study investigates the success of a method used to encourage active engagement strategies among community and research faculty in a College of Medicine, and examines the effects of these strategies on medical student engagement and exam scores. Ten faculty used suggestions from the Active Engagement Strategies Website (AESW), which explained four strategies that could easily be incorporated into medical education lectures; pause procedure, audience response system, think-pair-share, and muddiest point. Findings from observations conducted during sessions where an active engagement strategy was implemented and when strategies were not implemented, faculty and student surveys, and exam question analysis indicate faculty members found active engagement strategies easy to incorporate, student engagement and exam score means increased when an active engagement strategy was implemented, and students reported perceptions of attaining a higher level of learning, especially when the pause procedure was implemented. Discussion and implications address low cost and easy ways to provide faculty development in medical education that potentially improves the quality of instruction and enhances student outcomes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Leadership and Innovation 2017

abstract: Deep learning architectures have been widely explored in computer vision and have depicted commendable performance in a variety of applications. A fundamental challenge in training deep networks is the requirement of large amounts of labeled training data. While gathering large quantities of unlabeled data is cheap and easy, annotating the data is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. Thus, developing algorithms that minimize the human effort in training deep models is of immense practical importance. Active learning algorithms automatically identify salient and exemplar samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and can augment maximal information to supervised learning models, thereby reducing the human annotation effort in training machine learning models. The goal of this dissertation is to fuse ideas from deep learning and active learning and design novel deep active learning algorithms. The proposed learning methodologies explore diverse label spaces to solve different computer vision applications. Three major contributions have emerged from this work; (i) a deep active framework for multi-class image classication, (ii) a deep active model with and without label correlation for multi-label image classi- cation and (iii) a deep active paradigm for regression. Extensive empirical studies on a variety of multi-class, multi-label and regression vision datasets corroborate the potential of the proposed methods for real-world applications. Additional contributions include: (i) a multimodal emotion database consisting of recordings of facial expressions, body gestures, vocal expressions and physiological signals of actors enacting various emotions, (ii) four multimodal deep belief network models and (iii) an in-depth analysis of the effect of transfer of multimodal emotion features between source and target networks on classification accuracy and training time. These related contributions help comprehend the challenges involved in training deep learning models and motivate the main goal of this dissertation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2018

Submitted by Simone Souza (simonecgsouza@hotmail.com) on 2017-07-14T14:44:35Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2014_Wenderson Alves de Oliveira.pdf: 4994346 bytes, checksum: 2cdedf6f20a8919d75286fea5159c21d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Jordan (jordanbiblio@gmail.com) on 2017-07-26T17:20:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2014_Wenderson Alves de Oliveira.pdf: 4994346 bytes, checksum: 2cdedf6f20a8919d75286fea5159c21d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-26T17:20:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DISS_2014_Wenderson Alves de Oliveira.pdf: 4994346 bytes, checksum: 2cdedf6f20a8919d75286fea5159c21d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-17 / Atualmente, o contexto da Física para o ensino médio tem priorizado a aprendizagem de conceitos que estejam relacionados com a prática e com o cotidiano dos alunos. A proposta deste trabalho está voltada a aplicações da Física para alunos do ensino médio utilizando-se de técnicas da Aprendizagem Ativa. A Aprendizagem Ativa, por sua vez, está baseada nas premissas de que a aprendizagem é, por natureza, um esforço individual, e também que pessoas diferentes aprendem de maneiras diferentes. Relacionado a isto, atividades realizadas em sala de aula, como debates, gincanas, jogos e trabalhos em grupo geram um ambiente motivador e direcionado à potencialização da aprendizagem do aluno. O trabalho foi desenvolvido na Escola Estadual Estevão Alves Corrêa, situada em Cuiabá – MT, durante os anos de 2012 e 2013. Como estratégias da Aprendizagem Ativa, utilizamos experiências virtuais de Eletromagnetismo para turmas do 3º Ano; “Gincana do Conhecimento” sobre Leis de Newton e Energia Mecânica para uma turma do 1º Ano; antecipação dos conceitos de Potência e Energia Elétrica para alguns alunos do 2º Ano em suas residências, e práticas experimentais de Óptica para turmas do 2º ano. O desenvolvimento dessa metodologia busca melhorar o rendimento nas avaliações dos alunos, estimular capacidades pessoais como observação, concentração, criatividade, e a prática experimental. A comparação dos resultados obtidos com os do ensino convencional evidenciou que as estratégias utilizadas neste trabalho melhoram o aprendizado. / The context of Physics for High School has nowadays prioritized the learning of concepts related to the practice and the daily life of students. The purpose of this work is to focous on concepts and applications of Physics for High School students by using Active Learning techniques. The Active Learning methodology is based on the premise that the learning process is, by nature, an individual effort, and also that different people learn from different ways. In this context, activities in classroom such as debates, competitions, games, and group work generate a motivating environment and direct the enhancement of student learning. The study presented here was conducted at the Escola Estadual Estevão Alves Corrêa, located in Cuiabá – MT, alone the years of 2012 and 2013. We have used Active Learning strategies, such as virtual Electromagnetism experiences for the third year, “Knowledge Bowl " on Newton's laws and Mechanical Energy for the first year, anticipation of the concepts of potency and Energy for some secondary students at their homes, and experimental Optical practices for the second year. The goal of this methodology is to improve the performance of students on assessments, encourage personal skills, such as observation, concentration, creativity, and trial practice. Comparisons between the obtained results to the standard education have shoos evidences that the strategies used in this study enhance the learning process.

Le cadre général de cette thèse est l'indexation sémantique et la recherche d'informations, appliquée à des documents multimédias. Plus précisément, nous nous intéressons à l'indexation sémantique des concepts dans des images et vidéos par les approches d'apprentissage actif, que nous utilisons pour construire des corpus annotés. Tout au long de cette thèse, nous avons montré que les principales difficultés de cette tâche sont souvent liées, en général, à l'fossé sémantique. En outre, elles sont liées au problème de classe-déséquilibre dans les ensembles de données à grande échelle, où les concepts sont pour la plupart rares. Pour l'annotation de corpus, l'objectif principal de l'utilisation de l'apprentissage actif est d'augmenter la performance du système en utilisant que peu d'échantillons annotés que possible, ainsi minimisant les coûts de l'annotations des données (par exemple argent et temps). Dans cette thèse, nous avons contribué à plusieurs niveaux de l'indexation multimédia et nous avons proposé trois approches qui succèdent des systèmes de l'état de l'art: i) l'approche multi-apprenant (ML) qui surmonte le problème de classe-déséquilibre dans les grandes bases de données, ii) une méthode de reclassement qui améliore l'indexation vidéo, iii) nous avons évalué la normalisation en loi de puissance et de l'APC et a montré son efficacité dans l'indexation multimédia. En outre, nous avons proposé l'approche ALML qui combine le multi-apprenant avec l'apprentissage actif, et nous avons également proposé une méthode incrémentale qui accélère l'approche proposé (ALML). En outre, nous avons proposé l'approche de nettoyage actif, qui aborde la qualité des annotations. Les méthodes proposées ont été tous validées par plusieurs expériences, qui ont été menées et évaluées sur des collections à grande échelle de l'indice de benchmark internationale bien connue, appelés TRECVID. Enfin, nous avons présenté notre système d'annotation dans le monde réel basé sur l'apprentissage actif, qui a été utilisé pour mener les annotations de l'ensemble du développement de la campagne TRECVID en 2011, et nous avons présenté notre participation à la tâche d'indexation sémantique de cette campagne, dans laquelle nous nous sommes classés à la 3ème place sur 19 participants. / The general framework of this thesis is semantic indexing and information retrieval, applied to multimedia documents. More specifically, we are interested in the semantic indexing of concepts in images and videos by the active learning approaches that we use to build annotated corpus. Throughout this thesis, we have shown that the main difficulties of this task are often related, in general, to the semantic-gap. Furthermore, they are related to the class-imbalance problem in large scale datasets, where concepts are mostly sparse. For corpus annotation, the main objective of using active learning is to increase the system performance by using as few labeled samples as possible, thereby minimizing the cost of labeling data (e.g. money and time). In this thesis, we have contributed in several levels of multimedia indexing and proposed three approaches that outperform state-of-the-art systems: i) the multi-learner approach (ML) that overcomes the class-imbalance problem in large-scale datasets, ii) a re-ranking method that improves the video indexing, iii) we have evaluated the power-law normalization and the PCA and showed its effectiveness in multimedia indexing. Furthermore, we have proposed the ALML approach that combines the multi-learner with active learning, and also proposed an incremental method that speeds up ALML approach. Moreover, we have proposed the active cleaning approach, which tackles the quality of annotations. The proposed methods were validated through several experiments, which were conducted and evaluated on large-scale collections of the well-known international benchmark, called TrecVid. Finally, we have presented our real-world annotation system based on active learning, which was used to lead the annotations of the development set of TrecVid 2011 campaign, and we have presented our participation at the semantic indexing task of the mentioned campaign, in which we were ranked at the 3rd place out of 19 participants.

Esta tese apresenta movimentos e teorias que demandam a mudança de paradigma na educação básica. A adoção de métodos ativos de aprendizagem com uso de tecnologia digital é defendida como oportunidade para concretização da inovação desejada. O problema é definido com a identificação de barreiras para concretização da mudança em escala. A intenção de diferenciar a educação esbarra em limitações na formação e vivência de educadores em relação ao paradigma desejado e ao uso da tecnologia digital. Uma pesquisa ação participante foi conduzida em um centro social, com organização semelhante a uma escola, com objetivo de envolver educadores e gestores locais na construção de instrumentos e na melhoria de práticas educacionais a partir do uso de tecnologias digitais com métodos ativos de aprendizagem. A estratégia proposta foi estruturada sobre quatro elementos que fundamentaram intervenções para mudanças de práticas educacionais: Referencial de Habilidades do Século XXI como possíveis objetivos; aprendizagem por atividades; Rede Social com biblioteca individual no papel de ambiente virtual de aprendizagem; a construção de rubricas por parte dos educadores para detalhar, valorizar e monitorar novas dimensões de avaliação. A partir de uma análise situacional foram propostos ciclos de mudanças de práticas, onde atores locais se envolveram com o planejamento, implementação e análise de mudanças viabilizadas pelo uso de tecnologias digitais e alinhadas com os objetivos priorizados pela equipe local. Estes ciclos incluíram a construção de instrumentos destinados a facilitar e sistematizar as estratégias propostas. Os resultados mostram que as atividades planejadas e desenvolvidas pelos educadores evoluíram ao longo dos ciclos aproximando-se do paradigma desejado. A análise do uso da rede social aponta para o crescimento da autoria e expressão dos alunos, mas não apresenta evidências de interações que promovam a reflexão dos aprendizes autores. As rubricas mostraram-se valiosas para aprendizagem ativa dos educadores, porém apresentaram certa incompatibilidade com práticas construtivistas alinhadas com o paradigma desejado. A estratégia foi eficiente em provocar o desequilíbrio dos educadores e iniciá-los em práticas, reflexões e aprendizagem ativa sobre o paradigma desejado, porém várias limitações são apontadas para o uso da estratégia em grande escala. O desenvolvimento de sistemas digitais específicos para o apoio à mudança desejada é discutido e sugerido para estudos futuros. / This thesis presents moves and theories that ask for change of paradigm on basic education. The adoption of active learning methods with the use of digital technology is thought as an opportunity for the consolidation of the desired innovation. The identification of barriers to consolidate the change in large scale is presented as the research problem. The intention to differentiate education faces a barrier on educators limited education and experience on the desired paradigm as well as on the use of digital technology. An action participatory research was conducted on a social center, structured similar to a regular school, having as goal the engagement of local educators and coordinators on the design of instruments and on the improvement of educational practices enabled by the use of digital technologies with active learning methods. The strategy proposed was based on four elements that influenced the interventions for the change on educational practices: Framework on 21st Century Skills as possible goals; learning by activities; a social network with personal library on the role of digital learning environment; educators building rubrics to design, give value and monitor new dimensions for evaluation. Based on a situational analysis, cycles of change on practices were proposed on a way that local subjects got involved with planning, implementation and analysis of changes enabled by the use of digital technology and aligned with the goals selected by the local educational team. These cycles included the creation of instruments designed to facilitate and systematize the proposed strategies. The results show that the activities designed and implemented by the educators have evolved through the research cycles becoming better aligned with the desired paradigm. The strategy has proved to be efficient to unbalance the educators and start them in practices, reflections and active learning related to the desired paradigm, but in the other hand, some limitations were pointed out when considering the adoption of this strategy in a systemic way. The development of digital systems designed specifically to support the desired change is discussed and suggested for future studies.

abstract: In recent years, machine learning and data mining technologies have received growing attention in several areas such as recommendation systems, natural language processing, speech and handwriting recognition, image processing and biomedical domain. Many of these applications which deal with physiological and biomedical data require person specific or person adaptive systems. The greatest challenge in developing such systems is the subject-dependent data variations or subject-based variability in physiological and biomedical data, which leads to difference in data distributions making the task of modeling these data, using traditional machine learning algorithms, complex and challenging. As a result, despite the wide application of machine learning, efficient deployment of its principles to model real-world data is still a challenge. This dissertation addresses the problem of subject based variability in physiological and biomedical data and proposes person adaptive prediction models based on novel transfer and active learning algorithms, an emerging field in machine learning. One of the significant contributions of this dissertation is a person adaptive method, for early detection of muscle fatigue using Surface Electromyogram signals, based on a new multi-source transfer learning algorithm. This dissertation also proposes a subject-independent algorithm for grading the progression of muscle fatigue from 0 to 1 level in a test subject, during isometric or dynamic contractions, at real-time. Besides subject based variability, biomedical image data also varies due to variations in their imaging techniques, leading to distribution differences between the image databases. Hence a classifier learned on one database may perform poorly on the other database. Another significant contribution of this dissertation has been the design and development of an efficient biomedical image data annotation framework, based on a novel combination of transfer learning and a new batch-mode active learning method, capable of addressing the distribution differences across databases. The methodologies developed in this dissertation are relevant and applicable to a large set of computing problems where there is a high variation of data between subjects or sources, such as face detection, pose detection and speech recognition. From a broader perspective, these frameworks can be viewed as a first step towards design of automated adaptive systems for real world data. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2013

abstract: We solve the problem of activity verification in the context of sustainability. Activity verification is the process of proving the user assertions pertaining to a certain activity performed by the user. Our motivation lies in incentivizing the user for engaging in sustainable activities like taking public transport or recycling. Such incentivization schemes require the system to verify the claim made by the user. The system verifies these claims by analyzing the supporting evidence captured by the user while performing the activity. The proliferation of portable smart-phones in the past few years has provided us with a ubiquitous and relatively cheap platform, having multiple sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone etc. to capture this evidence data in-situ. In this research, we investigate the supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques for activity verification. Both these techniques make use the data set constructed using the evidence submitted by the user. Supervised learning makes use of annotated evidence data to build a function to predict the class labels of the unlabeled data points. The evidence data captured can be either unimodal or multimodal in nature. We use the accelerometer data as evidence for transportation mode verification and image data as evidence for recycling verification. After training the system, we achieve maximum accuracy of 94% when classifying the transport mode and 81% when detecting recycle activity. In the case of recycle verification, we could improve the classification accuracy by asking the user for more evidence. We present some techniques to ask the user for the next best piece of evidence that maximizes the probability of classification. Using these techniques for detecting recycle activity, the accuracy increases to 93%. The major disadvantage of using supervised models is that it requires extensive annotated training data, which expensive to collect. Due to the limited training data, we look at the graph based inductive semi-supervised learning methods to propagate the labels among the unlabeled samples. In the semi-supervised approach, we represent each instance in the data set as a node in the graph. Since it is a complete graph, edges interconnect these nodes, with each edge having some weight representing the similarity between the points. We propagate the labels in this graph, based on the proximity of the data points to the labeled nodes. We estimate the performance of these algorithms by measuring how close the probability distribution of the data after label propagation is to the probability distribution of the ground truth data. Since labeling has a cost associated with it, in this thesis we propose two algorithms that help us in selecting minimum number of labeled points to propagate the labels accurately. Our proposed algorithm achieves a maximum of 73% increase in performance when compared to the baseline algorithm. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2013