<p> People are increasingly looking to online social communities as ways of communicating. However, even as participation in social networking is increasing, online communities often fail to coalesce. Noted success factors for online communities are linked to the community's purpose and culture. They are also related to structures that allow for increased volume of exchange and quality of conversation. Ravelry.com provides a case of a successful, large-scale, online community that has information exchange and conversation as its foci. These activities are supported through the work of thousands of volunteer moderators who sometimes manage groups with more than 3 million members. However, little is known about organizing and supporting volunteer groups to allow for such large-scale growth. </p><p> To find information on moderators' roles and tasks, and how they are supported in the Ravelry community, a study was conducted in 2 sequential phases. Phase I consisted of a survey of 73 moderators who led large, active groups. Phase II consisted of interviews with 8 moderators who led different types of groups within Ravelry, having purposes that range from purely social conversation to technical forums on craft-related work. </p><p> Findings indicated that the tasks moderators performed did not vary greatly, despite differences in their group's purpose and culture. Common among most moderators' duties were encouraging group participation through stimulating discussion or organizing craft-based activities, resolving conflict between group members, and maintaining their site through routine housekeeping tasks. Moderators are motivated to volunteer to do these tasks by love of their group members, and are united by a common interest in their craft. Moderators are most often supported by informal networks of moderators in their own or in similar groups. </p><p> These findings give insight into how to structure large, asynchronous, online conversation-based groups, and how to define a role for people to manage them. It provides an understanding of the work that moderators do, and how their work allows a sense of place to be established for informal learning. </p>

In the aftermath of a violent war waged in the name of fascist utopian visions, German museum educators nonetheless explained the political benefits of technology. They did so in view of the new demands for democracy, but as divided Cold War adversaries as well. Educators in four museums uniquely tailored their national and geopolitical lessons to the publics of Munich, Schwerin, Dresden, and West Berlin. However, the democratic technological societies depicted by the museums all contained similar tensions that did not overcome the problems of fascist politics. By wedding democracy, technology, and education unambiguously together, the aims and exhibitions of technology museums ultimately epitomized the persistent allure of utopia in politics well beyond 1945. To begin with, portraying a straightforward connection between technology and democracy was problematic. When museum exhibitions illustrated the tremendous promise of science and technology for creating the "good life," they focused on the powerful and vast extension of human tool-making capacity. However, modern technological systems were also profoundly destabilizing and de-centering for individual subjects, because they created the possibility of 1984-like political repression, environmental degradation, class division, and, most frighteningly, human annihilation. Also, issues in education posed difficulties for a democracy, since the authority of educators themselves was particularly contested in the aftermath of Nazism and the protests of 1968. Yet technology museums minimized social tensions and maintained the advantages of technology for peaceful, equal relations among liberated peoples, thus deferring the resolution of contradictions to the utopias they depicted. In the end, education in Cold War German technology museums continued to resonate with the utopian impulses of National Socialist politics. However, ideology was not the only thing that made the museums utopian, since technology and education themselves had powerful implications for the relationship among individuals, society, and the world.

Modern computer technology facilitates development of rich learning environments that can enhance a student's ability to learn; however, none of the existing educational software systems can support the drill-and-practice mode of learning through the use of problem sets in routine engineering design domains. This thesis discusses the design of a computer-based system that benefits the instructor and the students in a design course by automating the creation of problem sets and their solution. The system allows the instructor to specify a set of design procedures as the design concept on which the generated problems should test the student. Each design procedure has a set of applicable conditions and these are formulated into a constraint satisfaction problem. Using the solution to this problem, the system then generates several problem descriptions along with their solution. The software, developed on a distributed component architecture model, is a general framework that could support multiple domains.

The emergence of computer-based interactive learning environments has presented us with many unanswered questions. The current research examined learner control in an interactive learning environment from two perspectives. In Part I, three experiments were conducted to compare simulation-based interactive learning with expository learning in learning statistics. In Experiment 1, interactive learning was compared to textbook-based expository learning. Interactive learning was structured in two different ways so that learners received either directive or nondirective guidance while interacting with the simulation. Compared to expository learning, learner control resulted in slightly improved but much more consistent performance on a knowledge test as well as more positive affect towards learning. In Experiment 2, learner control was compared to simulation-based expository learning. In each learning condition, half of the participants were further asked to predict simulation outcomes during the learning process. Interactive learning resulted in significantly higher response accuracy on the knowledge test than did expository learning. It also improved learners performance on a transfer test for those with medium lower cognitive ability. Making predictions was more beneficial for interactive learning than for expository learning. Experiment 3 examined the effects of interactive learning over time. The expository learning group was yoked with the interactive learning group by passively observing their interaction with the simulation. Participants were tested either immediately after learning or after a one-week delay. Performances of the interactive learning group remained stable over this period of time. However, learner control did not improve learners performance compared to expository learning. Reasons for this finding were discussed. In Part II, two iterations of user testing were conducted to examine user interaction with the Connexions Web-based learning environment. User interaction was considered an integral part of learner control in such a complex environment. Usability information gathered from user testing was used to aid the software development effort. The current research supported the idea that learner control can lead to better learning than expository learning but emphasized the importance of learning structure and potential aptitude-treatment interaction in simulation-based interactive learning. These findings have implications for larger-scale interactive learning environments, such as Web-based learning, as well.

Java has become the dominant language for teaching introductory computer science at both the high school and college levels. Yet Java's development tools and syntax often distract beginning students from the programming concepts being taught. To combat this problem, we have implemented DrJava, a pedagogic programming environment, and devised a sequence of language levels for Java, which partition the language into pieces that can be more easily taught at one time. DrJava is a lightweight, yet powerful, Java development environment suitable both for beginners and more advanced developers. The environment provides a simple interface based on a "read-eval-print loop" that enables a programmer to develop, test, and debug Java programs interactively and incrementally. DrJava is freely available under an open source license. This thesis describes DrJava and an implementation framework and conceptual design for language levels in Java.

<p> Here we present two intelligent tutoring systems for statics, the sub-discipline of engineering mechanics concerned with the analysis of mechanical systems in equilibrium under the action of forces. These systems are pen-based: one runs on Windows tablet PCs and the other on Livescribe^TM smartpens with specially-designed paper worksheets. It is common for novice students to attempt to solve problems without understanding the fundamental concepts involved. For example, they may attempt to solve a new problem by adapting the solution to an example problem. This approach can lead to errors as novices often categorize problems on the basis of surface similarity rather than the structural&mdash;i.e., conceptual&mdash;similarity. Our new instructional model guides students in explicitly examining the structural elements that govern the solution. For example, before the student draws forces on a free-body diagram, the system requires the student to explicitly identify all <i> interaction points</i>, points at which other objects apply forces to the body. The student must then identify what kind of interaction occurs at each <i>interaction point</i> before representing them by force arrows. The system critiques the student's work for each of these steps and provides appropriate tutorial feedback. This instructional design has a number of benefits. It helps students to identify the structural elements that guide the solution process, which is important for problem-solving transfer. It also enables the system to accurately diagnose student errors. Because each step in the reasoning is explicitly recorded, the system can unambiguously determine the cause of an error and provide focused tutorial feedback. Also, the use of natural pen-based interfaces unburdens the student from extraneous cognitive load inherent in more traditional interfaces. We conducted two studies to evaluate these systems. The first included 43 students enrolled in Statics (ME 10) at UCR, while the second included 10 students enrolled in Introduction to Mechanical Engineering (ME 2). The results suggest that students find the systems to be useful for learning statics. However, the tablet-based system is more effective than the smartpen-based one, with the former leading to large and statistically significant learning gains in the second study.</p>

<p> While questions exist about the effectiveness of online education, it is a growing part of the pantheon of educational choices available to students in America today. Though online education first gained popularity for advanced learners, increasingly at-risk populations are enrolling in online learning environments. Research in K-12 full-time, online learning environments is nearly non-existent. This mixed-methods study investigates student achievement in the full-time, online learning environment and the effect parents have on student success. Descriptive statistics and Pearson's Correlation's found statistically significant relationships between the variables of grade point average and socioeconomic status, family configuration, education of the parent, student grade level, gender and previous online experience. Themes from semi-structured interviews found parents of current or former students in a full-time, online school perceive multiple facets of student success in the online environment. The school can provide support to families by communicating, being transparent with tools, and individualizing instruction. Students must be self-motivated, engaged and participating, and accountable for their own learning. Parents should be available to monitor, mentor, and motivate students.</p>

Asynchronous Learning Environment (ALE) has the capability of providing learning to people anywhere and at any time for both to secure degree and to engage in continuing education throughout their lifetimes. The advance of communications and information technology will make students choose to purchase and enroll in open market, widely available networked courses regardless of institutional affiliation. / Research results have found that success factors for asynchronous learning include whether students felt part of the online learning group, immediate feedback from instructors, automatic self-test, and indicating student's performance and progress in the course. These findings present basic requirement for the design of ALE. This paper explores all aspects of Asynchronous Learning Environment, including the architecture of ALE and complete database design. The modules of ALE include multimedia presentation, identity verification, intelligent agent, automatic test marking, computer conference, chat & whiteboard, and learning scheduling assistance. The purpose of this research is to make ALE a better way of education than traditional education. A database is designed to fully support these ALE functions. / Guidelines of designing ALE are provided with implementation examples of intelligent agents that providing automatic reminders and learning progress report. Conclusion and further works are discussed at the end of the paper. / The design described in this paper is intended for use by engineering courses. But it can be used by courses of other disciplines without much modification.

With the increasing student population at many tertiary level institutions, the management of assignment submissions and results has become a challenging feat. This thesis proposes that one way to address these challenges is to develop methods for automating the submission of assignments to support the administrative effort. This will not only enable many administrative tasks to be automated, but will also support and in some cases, improve the learning experience available to students. / The features of four paperless assignment submission systems are presented, compared and analyzed with the goal of exposing instructors to the varied benefits that such systems can provide, thereby encouraging them to use such systems in their course delivery. / It is also the intent that this thesis will form the basis from which further developmental work will be performed on such systems in general, and on VisualCM in particular. (VisualCM is a paperless assignment submission system currently used within the School of Computer Science at McGill University).

<p> This mixed-method research examines student achievement, student interaction and social elements to determine which elements support online course completion for students in a state virtual school. The quantitative goals seek to find a possible degree of convergence with the course completion average grade. Qualitative data from 10 high school students, their teachers, and quantitative data from their courses were gathered. Quantitative data from the learning management system (LMS) was reproduced, scrubbed of unwanted data, such as dropped students. Mixed method constant comparison was performed to determine a descriptive analysis of three variables: student achievement, student interaction, and social elements. Using the data gathered from the qualitative interviews, a yes or no was assigned to the students for behavioral, cognitive, and social skills. Using descriptive statistics, the skills were compared to the students' course grades. The results revealed a strong pattern match of data for Research Question 1. This data was indicative of the need for behavioral, cognitive, and social skills to complete an online course. Quantitative and teacher data were grouped by themes: asynchronous, administrative, and assessments; synchronous added for teacher data. A constant comparison of data correspondence was performed between the student course average grade, the access data, LMS theme data, and the course average final grade. The investigation of Research Question 2 indicated that the LMS's reporting module can determine interactions to support online course completion by providing average grade analysis along with access analysis and tool usage analysis.</p>