In relation to the constructivist learning theory, understanding what a student may already know in order to use this knowledge as a scaffold for further education is imperative. The online classroom offers a unique and challenging environment for the evaluation of a student’s previous knowledge, especially in the field of geosciences where knowledge may be associated with geographic affiliation. An individual’s geological and meteorological sense of place may play an important role in evaluating a student’s previous knowledge in this field of study. To test this hypothesis, students in an online master’s program were given pre-knowledge surveys to evaluate their previous knowledge in Meteorology and Geology, as well as Geological and Meteorological sense of place surveys (Clary, R.M., and Wandersee, J.H., 2006; Clary, R.M., Wandersee, J.H., and Sumrall, J.L., 2013). Students were then categorized by geographic regions within the United States. Students were also given interest surveys at the end of their first year in the Masters program, and selected students were interviewed during their capstone field experience at the end of the second year of the program. Results suggest that there were subtle differences between regional groups of students throughout the study. More pronounced differences were noticed in the Meteorological pre-surveys than the Geological pre-surveys. Both sense of place surveys also indicated differences across regions, but the Meteorological sense of place survey showed greater regional differences when individual questions were analyzed. Interestingly, the participants who were interviewed at the end of the Masters program showed more geologically specific attachments as opposed to meteorologically specific attachments to areas that they considered to be “home.” The importance of moving and traveling throughout one’s life also became evident during the analysis of the interviews. Overall, this study of an online Master’s program concludes that geographic differences and moving/travel experiences among students matters to education in an online setting. The study emphasizes the importance for online instructors to evaluate teaching techniques based on geological and meteorological sense of place. By taking this into account in an online classroom, geographic disparities could be minimized and content interest levels could be increased.

Nuotolinio mokymo(si) dizainas kaip vizualios informacijos pateikimo forma atlieka svarbų vaidmenį naujos informacinės visuomenės kūrimesi, naujų, netradicinių mokymo(si) formų, būdų atsiradime, jų vystymosi procese. Dalyko mokytojo pamokos atsiranda elektroninės erdvės terpėje. Pedagogui rūpi kaip ir kokiais būdais pateikti tą informaciją, kad sėkmingai vyktų realus ir kokybiškas mokymo(si) procesas. ). Kūrėjui būtina įvertinti būsimo mokinio tiek poreikius, tiek aplinką, tiek tos aplinkos galimybes veikti sukurtoje mokymosi aplinkoje. Harmonijos pažinimas bei supratimas yra tarsi atramos taškas, nuo kurio prasideda vizualinis dizainas plačiąja prasme. Visa tai sudaro problemiškumo pagrindą. Tyrimo tikslas — nustatyti suaugusiųjų mokinių ir mokytojų nuostatas į elektroninės vizualinės mokymo(si) terpės dizainą, kurios yra susijusios su asmens pasaulio pažinimu ir suvokimu, amžiaus raida, psichologinėmis savybėmis. Tyrimo uždaviniais siekėme apžvelgti filosofinėje, pedagoginėje, psichologinėje, metodinėje literatūroje informacinės visuomenės kūrimo tendencijas, veiksnius įtakojančius elektroninės mokymo(si) terpės vizualios informacijos vartotoją, išsiaiškinti reikalavimus keliamus dizainui elektroninių mokomųjų programų kūrimui Lietuvoje bei nustatyti suaugusiųjų mokinių ir mokytojų nuotolinio mokymo(si) terpės dizaino ypatumus bei jo pasirinkimą lemiančius veiksnius. Tyrimo objektas — elektroninė nuotolinio mokymo(si) terpė. Hipotezė — nuotolinio mokymo(si) elektroninės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The design of distance teaching and learning as the presentation form of visual information is significant in the development of new information society, in the coming forms and ways of novel, unconventional teaching and learning, and in their developmental process. The lessons of diverse subject teachers are placed in the electronic environment. It is important for an educator how to present that information in order to achieve successful and quality teaching and learning process. The creator has to evaluate the needs of the learner, the environment, and the environmental potential to operate in the created learning medium. The cognition as well as perception of harmony is the base for the visual design in a broad sense. That constitutes the problematic basis. The aim of the research is to ascertain the attitudes of both teachers and learners towards the design of electronic visual teaching and learning environment, which are related to the personal knowledge and perception of the world, age range, psychological features. Through the objectives of the research we attempted to review the creation tendencies of the information society in philosophical, pedagogical, psychological and methodological sources, the factors influencing the user of the visual information of the electronic teaching and learning environment, to find out the requirements for the creation of electronic teaching programmes in Lithuania and establish peculiarities of distance teaching and learning... [to full text]

The first aim of this PhD Thesis is devoted to the study of geodesic distances defined on a subdomain of a Carnot group, which are bounded both from above and from below by fixed multiples of the Carnot–Carathéodory distance. Then one shows that the uniform convergence, on compact sets, of these distances can be equivalently characterized in terms of Gamma-convergence of several kinds of variational problems. Moreover, it investigates the relation between the class of intrinsic distances, their metric derivatives and the sub-Finsler convex metrics defined on the horizontal bundle. The second purpose is to obtain the integral representation of some classes of local functionals, depending on a family of vector fields, that satisfy a weak structure assumption. These functionals are defined on degenerate Sobolev spaces and they are assumed to be not translations-invariant. Then one proves some Gamma-compactness results with respect to both the strong topology of L^p and the strong topology of degenerate Sobolev spaces.