Neither an academic tome nor a prescriptive 'how to' guide, "The Theory and Practice of Online Learning" is an illuminating collection of essays by practitioners and scholars active in the complex field of distance education.Distance education has evolved significantly in its 150 years of existence. For most of this time, it was an individual pursuit defined by infrequent postal communication. But recently, three more developmental generations have emerged, supported by television and radio, teleconferencing, and computer conferencing. The early 21st century has produced a fifth generation, based on autonomous agents and intelligent, database-assisted learning, that has been referred to as Web 2.0.The second edition of "The Theory and Practice of Online Learning" features updates in each chapter, plus four new chapters on current distance education issues such as connectivism and social software innovations.

The Theory and Practice of Online Learning

A generic Mediator architecture for distributed task planning and coordination has been developed using multi-agent paradigms. In this approach, agents function autonomously as independent computing processes, and dynamic virtual clusters coordinate the agent's activities and decision making. This coordination involves dynamically created coordination agents and resource agents concurrently. The Mediator architecture contains three levels of these coordination agents: the template mediator, the data-agent manager, and the active mediator. The template mediator is the top-level global coordinator. This agent contains both the templates and the cloning mechanism to create the successively lower-level agents. Task plans are decomposed successively into subtasks, which are allocated to dynamically created agent clusters coordinated through data-agent managers and active mediators. Coordination of agent activity takes place both among the clusters and within each cluster. The system dynamically adapts to evolving manufacturing tasks, with virtual agent clusters being created as needed, and destroyed when their tasks are completed. The mediator architecture and related mechanisms are demonstrated using an intelligent manufacturing scheduling application. Both the machines and the parts involved in this production system are considered as intelligent agents. These agents use a common language protocol based on the Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML). The generic Mediator approach can be used for other distributed organizational systems beyond the intelligent manufacturing application it was originally developed for.

Multi-agent Mediator architecture for distributed manufacturing

https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/files/18681588/system_05.pdf

Context and Learner Modelling for the Mobile Foreign Language Learner

Ubiquitous learning is supported by ubiquitous computing and repre- sents the next step in the field of e-learning. The goal is, that learning environ- ments will be accessed increasingly in various contexts and situations. From this challenge, new questions arise concerning the adaptation of learning spaces to different contexts of use, so that they continue to enable and support learning processes. As a basic work in this direction, this paper introduces a first notion of a comprehensive definition of 'plasticity of digital learning spaces'. It exem- plifies some of the facets affecting the plasticity and presents aspects of a first system prototype, which enables to select learning materials depending on a given situation. Ubiquitous learning is the next step in performing e-learning and by some groups it is expected to lead to an educational paradigm shift, or at least, to new ways of learning. The potential of ubiquitous learning results from the enhanced possibilities of access- ing learning content and computer-supported collaborative learning environments at the right time, at the right place, and in the right form. Furthermore, it enables seam- less combination of virtual environments and physical spaces. The focus of our research in the field of ubiquitous learning is affected by our ex- periences in teaching at a distance university for higher education. Starting from the vision of ubiquitous computing, we tackle the issue of supporting learning processes while the learner makes use of ubiquitous computing technology. By this we follow a slightly different research direction, since most other work deals with the fundamental question of how to utilize ubiquitous computing technology to enhance learning proc- esses. In this contribution we present our steps towards the plasticity of digital learning spaces, the objective of which is the adaptation of learning resources to dif- ferent contexts of use, so that they continue to enable and support learning processes. The structure of the paper is as follows: In the rest of this chapter the terms ubiqui- tous computing and learning are presented. Since the web has become the predomi- nant platform for realizing learning spaces, the focus within this paper is on web- based learning. After a brief overview of existing approaches to adaptation (chapter

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Adaptation of Learning Spaces: Supporting Ubiquitous Learning in Higher Distance Education

Purpose




E-learning has gained much focus from educators and researchers, with many extolling e-learning over traditional learning. Despite this focus, implementation of e-learning systems often fails. The purpose of this paper is to consider a range of barriers, impacting the success of e-learning implementations, yet to the best of the authors’ knowledge no conceptual framework is able to consolidate existing research.




Design/methodology/approach




This paper undertook an in-depth review of literature concerning e-learning implementation barriers. Papers were extracted from established peer-reviewed journals and open sources. Articles not related to e-learning implementation barriers were discarded. A total of 259 papers were identified, published between 1990 and 2016. Hermeneutics and data-driven qualitative content analysis was used to define 68 unique barriers.




Findings




The 68 unique barriers were thematically grouped into four conceptual categories, i.e. Technology (T), Individual (I), Pedagogy (P), and Enabling Conditions (EC). These four categories led to the conceptualization of “TIPEC” framework, which highlights the key concepts hindering e-learning implementation and delivery. Results show that most articles only consider a narrow range of success barriers.




Practical implications




The proposed TIPEC framework acts as a guide for education practitioners, system developers, policy makers, and researchers. It provides stakeholders with a summary of e-learning barriers.




Originality/value




This paper fulfils an identified need for a conceptual framework that consolidates all current research related to e-learning implementation barriers.

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A conceptual framework highlighting e-learning implementation barriers

‘Advanced database applications’, such as CAD/CAM, CASE, large AI applications or image and voice processing, place demands on transaction management which differ substantially from those in traditional database applications. In particular, there is a need to support ‘enriched’ data models, ‘synergistic’ cooperative work, and application- or user-supported consistency. Unfortunately, the demands are not only sophisticated but also diversified, which means that different application areas might even place contradictory demands on transaction management. This paper deals with these problems and offers a solution by introducing a flexible and adaptable tool kit approach for transaction management. This tool kit enables a database implementor or applications designer to assemble application-specific transaction managers. Each such transaction manager is meant to provide a number of individualized, application-specific transaction types. To be able to emulate each kind of application environment the nesting of transaction is supported. In particular, different transaction types can be executed in any order within such a hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on a flexible and comprehensive support of cooperative work.

TOPAZ: A Tool Kit for the Construction of Application-Specific Transaction Managers

The Virtual University is a learning environment at the University of Hagen. The project is aimed at distance education of fully employed part-time students inter alia. These students need special assistance in their difficult learning situation in many ways. One goal of this paper is to provide them with appropriate and reasonable to use learning material any time any location where we assume that our learners have their cell phone, smart phone or PDA at hand if nothing else. We show that the well known technical profiling can only be one part of this assistance. We need to know about the learners attitude, preconditions and take into account the strong impact the situation he is in has on the learning process. We developed a didactic profiling system in which we can provide our students with those (and only to those) didactic resources which can reasonably be used under the given environment conditions.

Didactic Profiling: Supporting the Mobile Learner

Hypermedia systems are becoming an important information system class for a wide range of new and fascinating applications. But current systems still have some unpleasant restrictions. For example, only few hypermedia systems support the design of higher level hypermedia objects beyond the basic node-link paradigm. There are further restrictions concerning the modukuization of the overall design and the reuse of (complex) hypermedia resources. HYDESIGN is the prototype of an extensible hypertext/ hypermedia system which adresses these restrictions. The crucial part of the development is the data management component, the HYDESIGN-engine, which has been built on top of the Gem Stone object-oriented database management system. A first prototype of a graphical user interface, the HYDE SIGN-GUI, has been developed in Smalltalk-80. This paper focuses on central features of the HYDESIGN data model representing the conceptual basis of the HYDESIGN-engine. Aggregate links of differefit types are introduced which allow for the creation of higher level hypermedia networks. SBLnodes represent particular composite nodes offering the capability of defining (nested) local environments with particular behaviour. Also different options for the sharing of hypermedia resources are proposed. HYDE SIGN further supports navigation as well as query based access in an integrated approach. As a whole, HYDESIGN aims at a better support for the hypermedia design process by the provision of powerful structuring facilities. Permission to copy without fee au or part of this material is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to repubtish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. @1992 ACM &89791-547-X/92/~11 /0B2/ $1.50

Towards a better support for hypermedia structuring: the HYDESIGN model

Providing access to digital information for the indefinite future is the intention of long-term digital preservation systems. One application domain that certainly needs to implement such long-term digital preservation processes is the design and engineering industry. In this industry, products are designed, manufactured, and operated with the help of sophisticated software tools provided by product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. During all PLM phases, including geographically distributed cross-domain and cross-company collaboration, a huge amount of heterogeneous digital product data and metadata is created. Legal and economic requirements demand that this product data has to be archived and preserved for a long-time period. Unfortunately, the software that is able to interpret the data will become obsolete earlier than the data since the software and hardware lifecycle is relatively short-lived compared to a product lifecycle. Companies in the engineering industry begin to realize that their data is in danger of becoming unusable while the products are in operation for several decades. To address this issue, different academic and industrial initiatives have been initiated that try to solve this problem. This article provides an overview of these projects including their motivations, identified problems, and proposed solutions. The studied projects are also verified against a classification of important aspects regarding scope and functionality of digital preservation in the engineering industry. Finally, future research topics are identified.

State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product lifecycle management

In 1996, the Virtual University (VU) started as an online learning project at the University of Hagen (Germany) with a few courses and a small number of users. Today the VU has grown into a large learning platform with a student community of more than 10,000 and more than 200 learning events online-. This paper describes some of the experiences related to the development and use of the VU and outlines the effects on all areas of the university. Not only has the learning environment and process of students changed dramatically, but faculty, administrative staff, and technical supportpersonnel have experienced fundamental challenges and reorgani-zation.-The VU is leading toward -a major quality improvement in open and distance education. The impacts of the VU are described in the following areas: (1) impact on learning, including communication and interaction, tutoring and student support, topicality, applicability, and innovation; (2) impact on_teaching, including communication and interaction, tutoring and support, topicality, applicability, and innovation; and (3) impact on management, including the computer center, printing and shipping department, and study center. (Contains 23 references.) (MES) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Five Years Virtual University Review and Preview PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

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Gunter Schlageter

Papers

TOPAZ: A Tool Kit for the Construction of Application-Specific Transaction Managers

Didactic Profiling: Supporting the Mobile Learner

Towards a better support for hypermedia structuring: the HYDESIGN model

State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product lifecycle management

Five Years Virtual University - Review and Preview.