This research study delves into the multifaceted realm of social presence in online education, encompassing the existence and manifestation of social presence indicators in students' engagement with discussion boards within asynchronous online courses. Social presence manifests when individuals perceive themselves to be simultaneously present with others through a communication medium, thereby cultivating a shared sense of togetherness. The dissertation addresses the impact of course disciplines, exploring the significant influence of both STEM and non-STEM courses on the manifestation of social presence indicators. Furthermore, the study delves into the influence of course duration on the social presence level, unveiling critical insights into the challenges posed by prolonged courses on sustaining student engagement and interaction.This study, randomly selecting sample from Coursera, employed a methodology, encompassing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, to assess social presence within online courses. The approach consisted of five key stages, involving Python-based web crawling, manual keyword identification, data processing, statistical analysis using R, and qualitative exploration. The insights obtained offer valuable suggestions for enhancing social presence in future online educational settings. While acknowledging certain limitations regarding sample size and keyword identification, the study provides valuable contributions to the evolving landscape of online education research, offering practical implications for course design and facilitation in promoting an enriched and engaging online learning environment. / Communication Sciences

Group work and online discussions are not new terms in education and are important activities for Information Systems students. It has become important because it encourages creative thinking and provides more efficient problem-solving approaches. Online social networking sites, like Facebook, have pedagogical potential and the consideration of its academic application should not be ignored by lecturers or students. The main problem identified in this thesis is that the awareness and application of the emerging pedagogical potential of online social networking sites, like Facebook, especially for the purpose of group work and online discussions, is limited among Information Systems lecturers and students. The purpose of this study is to determine the level of awareness and application of Facebook as an academic tool by Information Systems lecturers and students, and whether it can enhance the learning experience of students, related to the effectiveness of group work and online discussions. The perceptions of both Information Systems lecturers and students were recorded by means of questionnaires and interviews. It was found that most lecturers and students were aware of Facebook’s pedagogical potential. However, the consideration and application of Facebook as an academic tool, by lecturers and students, are limited. From a cultural perspective, it was found that students from a private institution, where no Learning Management System was implemented, as well as black students, showed increased levels of utilisation and performance, in terms of enhanced learning experienced, on the academic groups on Facebook. The researcher developed a model for the academic application of Facebook for Information Systems students, based on the Task-Technology Fit and the Social Software Performance Model theories. This study concludes with the recommendation that Information Systems lecturers and students should become increasingly aware of and consider the pedagogical potential of Facebook as a supplementary tool and with suggestions for future research. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Informatics / unrestricted

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Functional programming (FP) has progressively become more prevalent and techniques from the FP paradigm has been implemented in many different Imperative object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. However, there is no indication that OOP is going out of style. Nevertheless the increased popularity in FP has sparked new discussions across the Internet between the FP and OOP communities regarding a multitude of related aspects. These discussions could provide insights into the questions and challenges faced by programmers today. This thesis investigates these online discussions in a small and contemporary scale in order to identify the most discussed aspect of FP and OOP. Once identified the statements and claims made by various discussion participants were selected and compared to literature relating to the aspects and the theory behind the paradigms in order to determine whether there was any discrepancies between practitioners and theory. It was done in order to investigate whether the practitioners had different ideas in the form of best practices that could influence theories. The most discussed aspect within FP and OOP was ​immutability and state​ relating primarily to the aspects of ​concurrency ​ and ​performance​ . This thesis presents a selection of representative quotes that illustrate the different points of view held by groups in the community and then addresses those claims by investigating what is said in literature. It was shown that there were no direct discrepancies between the practitioners and the theory.

The development of Web 2.0 has resulted in the generation of a vast amount of online discussions. Mining and extracting quality knowledge from online discussions is significant for the industrial and marketing sector, as well as for e-commerce applications. Discussions of this kind encapsulate people's interests and beliefs and hence, there is a great interest in acquiring and developing online discussion analysis tools. The objective of this thesis is to define a model which represents online discussions and facilitates their analysis. We propose a graph-oriented model. The vertices of the graph represent postings. Each posting encapsulates information such as the content of the message, the author who has written it, the opinion polarity of the message and the time that the message was posted. The edges among the postings point out a "reply-to" relation. In other words they show which posting replies to what as it is given by the structure of the online discussion.The proposed model is accompanied by a number of measures which facilitate the discussion mining and the extraction of knowledge from it. Defined measures consist in measures that are underlined by the structure of the discussion and the way the postings are linked to each other. There are opinion-oriented measures which deal with the opinion evolution within a discussion. Time-oriented measures exploit the presence of the temporal dimension within a model, while topic-oriented measures can be used in order to measure the presence of topics within a discussion. The user's presence inside the online discussions can be exploited either by social network techniques or through the new model which encapsulates knowledge about the author of each posting.The representation of an online discussion in the proposed way allows a user to "zoom" inside the discussion. A recommendation of messages is proposed to the user to enable a more efficient participation inside the discussion.Additionally, a prototype system has been implemented which allows the user to mine online discussions by selecting a subset of postings and browse through them efficiently. / Le développement du Web 2.0 a donné lieu à la production d'une grande quantité de discussions en ligne. La fouille et l'extraction de données de qualité de ces discussions en ligne sont importantes dans de nombreux domaines (industrie, marketing) et particulièrement pour toutes les applications de commerce électronique. Les discussions de ce type contiennent des opinions et des croyances de personnes et cela explique l'intérêt de développer des outils d'analyse efficaces pour ces discussions.L'objectif de cette thèse est de définir un modèle qui représente les discussions en ligne et facilite leur analyse. Nous proposons un modèle basé sur des graphes. Les sommets du graphe représentent les objets de type message. Chaque objet de type message contient des informations comme son contenu, son auteur, l'orientation de l'opinion qui y été exprimée et la date où il a été posté. Les liens parmi les objets message montrent une relation de type "répondre à". En d'autres termes, ils montrent quels objets répondent à quoi, conséquence directe de la structure de la discussion en ligne.Avec ce nouveau modèle, nous proposons un certain nombre de mesures qui guident la fouille au sein de la discussion et permettent d'extraire des informations pertinentes. Les mesures sont définies par la structure de la discussion et la façon dont les objets messages sont liés entre eux. Il existe des mesures centrées sur l'analyse de l'opinion qui traitent de l'évolution de l'opinion au sein de la discussion. Nous définissons également des mesures centrées sur le temps, qui exploitent la dimension temporelle du modèle, alors que les mesures centrées sur le sujet peuvent être utilisées pour mesurer la présence de sujets dans une discussion. La représentation d'une discussion en ligne de la manière proposée permet à un utilisateur de "zoomer" dans une discussion. Une liste de messages clés est recommandée à l'utilisateur pour permettre une participation plus efficace au sein de la discussion. De plus, un système prototype a été implémenté pour permettre à l'utilisateur de fouiller les discussions en ligne en sélectionnant un sous ensemble d'objets de type message et naviguer à travers ceux-ci de manière efficace.

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This mixed methods study compared distance and blended undergraduate environmental students at Royal Roads University (RRU) as they participated in online asynchronous PBL case discussion forums as part of an Ecotoxicology course. This study examined the differences between distance and blended teams in their activity, approaches, and levels of critical thinking in an online PBL activity. Critical thinking was evaluated using the cognitive presence indicators of the community of inquiry framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001). An organization indicator was added to the framework to capture posts that organized the discussion forum layout or the team and the distribution of work. The use of the organization indicator in the thread map analysis revealed that teams adopted one of two approaches to the online PBL activity, either an organic approach or an organizational scaffold approach. An open coding approach to content analysis of the posts was used to develop two coding schemes to capture the use of learning scaffolds and degree of online collaboration respectively. These coding schemes were used to compare scaffolding and collaboration behaviours of distance and blended students during the online PBL activity. The study found that whether teams used the online discussion forums or face-to-face discussion as their primary communication method influenced both the timing and the critical thinking content of the online discussion forums. Student moderators’ choices influenced the structure and approach to the PBL activity, as well as the form of document assembly that was observed in the online discussion forums. The learning scaffolds coding scheme demonstrated that both distance and blended students were reading beyond the assigned reading list. Both distance and blended students appeared to develop skills in identifying information gaps over the progression of the PBL case problems as their observable level of critical thinking remained consistent as the problem scaffolding was faded. Although both environmental and non-environmental work experience may be used to scaffold team learning, they are used differently. Online PBL is a good fit for the Royal Roads University Learning and Teaching Model and may be used to provide some consistency across blended and online course content. / Graduate