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Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Nursing. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2006. / "A dissertation in nursing." Advisor: Peggy Ward-Smith. Typescript. Vita. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 13, 2007; title from "catalog record" of the print edition. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-119). Online version of the print edition.

The focus of this study is the development of an e-learning training package for the academic staff in King Faisal University (KFU) in Saudi Arabia. Evidence suggests that there is a lack of training for academic staff in Saudi Higher Education on how to integrate e-learning in their teaching. Despite this, very little attention is paid in the research literature to the design and evaluation of e-learning training. There is no clarity therefore about what constitutes effective e-learning training in higher education. This study aimed to design, implement and evaluate a training package for the academic staff. The study was conducted in two phases: 1) identifying the e-learning training needs and preferences of the academic staff in KFU; 2) designing, implementing and assessing a training package based on identified needs and preferences, e-learning training literature and common learning theories in the field. The study was qualitative. In phase one, 69 questionnaires and 17 interviews were analysed. The survey findings showed that the academic staff do suffer from the lack of training. Furthermore, the data showed a disagreement with the existing literature about the factors that limit the academic staff’s use of e-learning. The academic staff’s preferences for their future e-learning training were also determined and used to inform the design of the training package. Key design features of the training package included: covering both technical and pedagogical aspects of Blackboard; using blended delivery and using both cognitive constructivism and social constructivism to underpin its pedagogy. Evaluation data collected from a range of sources suggest that the academic staff responded well to the design features of the training package and that the training had a positive influence on their practice. The study has proposed a model for the design and evaluation of e-learning training in higher education that based on five generic criteria including ownership, intersubjectivity, contextualisation, transformational potential and evidence based.

The shapes of naturally occurring objects characteristically involve spatial events occurring at many scales. This paper offers a symbolic approach to constructing a primitive shape description across scales for 2D binary (silhouette) shape images: grouping operations are performed over collections of tokens residing on a Scale-Space Blackboard. Two types of grouping operations are identified that, respectively: (1) aggregate edge primitives at one scale into edge primitives at a coarser scale and (2) group edge primitives into partial-region assertions, including curved- contours, primitive-corners, and bars. This approach avoids several drawbacks of numerical smoothing methods.

Spoken language is used by people to communicate naturally with one another. A simplistic view of the communication process is as follows. Person A wishes to communicate an idea to person B. The idea, initiated in the mind/brain of person A is encoded into speech signals by means of the person A's speech production mechanism, the vocal apparata in the vocal tract. Various kinds of noise may interfere with the speech signals as they travel to person B. The resulting signal is captured by person B's speech receiving mechanism, the ear. It is then analysed and decoded into a meaningful message by the brain of person B. This thesis concerns itself with the investigation of and attempt to automate the receiving and decoding of English sentences using a machine - that is to perform the task of person B in the above scenario using a computer. The aim is not only to produce a sequence of phonetic sounds, but to look at the problems of building in the 'mind of the machine', a picture of the meanings, intentions, absurdities and realities of the spoken message. The various models, algorithms and techniques of speech recognition and speech understanding systems are examined. Speech signals are captured and digitised by hardware. The digital samples are analysed and the important distinguishing features of all speech sounds are identified. These are then used to classify speech sounds in subsequent spoken words. The way speech sounds are joined together to form syllables and words introduces difficult problems to the automatic recognition process. Speech sounds are blurred, overlapped or left out due to the effects of coarticulation. Finally, natural language processing issues, such as the importance of syntax (the structure) and semantics (the meaning) of sentences, are studied. A system to control and unite all the above processing is considered. The blackboard expert system model of the widely reported HEARSAY-II speech recognition system is reviewed as the system with the best potential for the above tasks. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 1992.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2009. / NOTE: PAGE NUMBERS GO FROM 31 THEN SKIP TO 37. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Carleton University, 1992. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2006. / Includes bibliography.

University, Diss., 2001--Saarbrücken.