[AISWorld] [IJDET] Contents of Vol. 15, No. 2 of International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET, an EI and Web of Science's ESCI journal)

Tue Mar 7 01:02:42 EST 2017

[Apologies if you receive multiple times, please circulate this to
  your colleagues who might be interested, thank you so much.]

The contents of the latest issue of:
International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET)
Volume 15, Issue 2, April - June 2017
Indexed by: Compendex (Elsevier Engineering Index), INSPEC, PsycINFO®, SCOPUS
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1539-3100; EISSN: 1539-3119; 
Published by IGI Global Publishing, Hershey, USA
www.igi-global.com/ijdet
Editor-in-Chief: Maiga Chang (Athabasca University, Canada)

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to the International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET) if you choose traditional publication mode. The IJDET also has an Open Access option, which allows individuals and institutions unrestricted access to its published content. Unlike traditional subscription-based publishing models, open access content is available without having to purchase or subscribe to the journal in which the content is published. All manuscripts are reviewed by three to four reviewers based on a double-blind peer review process.

GUEST EDITORIAL PREFACE

Special Issue on User Modeling for Web-based Learning

Haoran Xie (Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, New Territories, Hong Kong), Di Zou (English Language Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong), Tak-Lam Wong (Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, New Territories, Hong Kong), Yanghui Rao (School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China), Fu Lee Wang (Caritas Institute of Higher Education, New Territories, Hong Kong)

To obtain a copy of the Guest Editorial Preface, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/pdf.aspx?tid=177256&ptid=158205&ctid=15&t=Special Issue on User Modeling for Web-based Learning

ARTICLE 1

Individualization of Foreign Language Teaching through Adaptive eLearning

Katerina Kostolanyova (Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic), Stepanka Nedbalova (Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic)

Lifelong learning has become an essential part of each profession. For this reason, personalized and adaptive learning has been drawing attention of professionals in the field of formal as well as informal education in the last few years. The effort has been made to design adaptive study supports regarding students' requirements, abilities and current knowledge. In the Czech Republic, particularly at the University of Ostrava, a team of educators, didactics professionals and IT professionals has been applying their mind to personalized learning in the electronic environment. They have been developing a suitable learning environment to fit students' learning styles. The paper describes a general model and a theory of adaptive eLearning from the perspective of the University of Ostrava professionals. It also demonstrates hard facts of the research in the field of language learning. This paper, Individualization of foreign language teaching through adaptive eLearning, is an extended version of the paper published in the ICWL 2015 workshop proceedings.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/individualization-of-foreign-language-teaching-through-adaptive-elearning/177257

ARTICLE 2

Revealing Learner Interests through Topic Mining from Question-Answering Data

Yijie Dun (Mathematics and Computer Institute, Northwest University for Nationalities, Lanzhou, China), Na Wang (School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics, Zhengzhou, China), Min Wang (School of Informatics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China), Tianyong Hao (School of Informatics and Collaborative Innovation Center for 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China)

In a question-answering system, learner generated content including asked and answered questions is a meaningful resource to capture learning interests. This paper proposes an approach based on question topic mining for revealing learners' concerned topics in real community question-answering systems. The authors' approach firstly preprocesses all questions associated with learners. Afterwards, it analyzes each question with text features and generates a weight feature matrix using a revised TF/IDF method. In order to decrease the sparsity issue of data distribution, the authors employ three concept-mapping strategies including named entity recognition, synonym extension, and hyponym replacement. Applying an SVM classifier, their approach categorizes user questions into representative topics. Three experiments are conducted based on a TREC dataset and an actual dataset containing 1,120 questions posted by learners from a commercial question-answering community. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method compared with conventional classifiers as baselines.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/revealing-learner-interests-through-topic-mining-from-question-answering-data/177258

ARTICLE 3

Exploring Student and Supervisor Interaction During the SciPro Thesis Process: Two Use Cases

Preben Hansen (Department of Computer and Systems Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden), Henrik Hansson (Department of Computer and Systems Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden)

Common problems identified by students during their interaction with supervisors are too little instructions as well as infrequent and insufficient supervisor feedback. The SciPro system has been developed to tackle these problems. This paper describes, analyze and discuss the interaction between students and supervisors using the SciPro system. Through two use cases involving two supervisors and 38 bachelor and master students, the authors show that the structure implemented in SciPro supports and allows for different pedagogical approaches and supervision styles. Ten different types of interactions in the thesis process are identified. In order to explain why some students do not complete within the timeframe, the authors identify six categories of problems: 1) language skills, 2) inability to apply research methods, 3) ability for self-study, 4) lack of creativity, 5) limited knowledge about how to write academic work, and 6) lack of motivation. The collaborative stage of group-supervision may be one possible way to deal with the different type of support for the process of managing student theses.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/exploring-student-and-supervisor-interaction-during-the-scipro-thesis-process/177259

ARTICLE 4

Learning Styles in the e-Learning Environment: The Approaches and Research on Longitudinal Changes

Pavel Doulik (Faculty of Education, UJEP University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic), Jiri Skoda (Department of Education, UJEP University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic), Ivana Simonova (Department of Applied Languages, University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic)

The paper focuses on the field of learning styles in e-learning. The study is structured in two main parts: (1) a brief overview of traditional approaches to learning styles is presented and their role in the process of instruction is set; this part results in the reflection of current state, when learning styles are considered within e-learning; (2) results of meta-analysis dealing with learning styles in the e-learning environment are introduced focusing on two periods (2001-2007, 2008-2014) and journals in selected databases ProQuest Central, Elsevier Science Direct and ERIC. Totally 5,361 papers were collected and structured according to three criteria: (1) time period, (2) relevancy of information sources and (3) relevant key words. Collected data underwent the chí-squared test for independence and the analysis of adjusted residuals on the significance level a=0.05. No statistically significant changes were discovered in the research sample, however, some shifts were detected in this field. Finally, the results were discussed and relating conclusions provided.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/learning-styles-in-the-e-learning-environment/177260

ARTICLE 5

Design of Open Content Social Learning based on the Activities of Learner and Similar Learners

Benneaser John (Department of Computer Applications, Karunya University, Coimbatore, India), J. Jayakumar (Karunya University, Coimbatore, India), V. Thavavel (Department of Computer Science, Prince Sultan Unviersity, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Muthukumar Arumugam (PSG Institute of Technology and Applied Research, Coimbatore, India), K. J. Poornaselvan (Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Government College of Technology Coimbatore, Coimbatore, India)

Teaching and learning are increasingly taking advantage of the rapid growth in Internet resources, open content, mobile technologies and social media platforms. However, due to the generally unstructured nature and overwhelming quantity of learning content, effective learning remains challenging. In an effort to close this gap, the authors designed and built an Open Content Social Learning (OCSL) system that compares different pedagogical strategies and algorithms intended to improve learning. Their results have shown increased effectiveness when recommending learning activities in a pedagogically appropriate order based on learning goals, historical learning preferences, and behaviors from other learners who had similar goals.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/design-of-open-content-social-learning-based-on-the-activities-of-learner-and-similar-learners/177261

ARTICLE 6

Integrating User Reviews and Ratings for Enhanced Personalized Searching

Shuyue Hu (School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China), Yi Cai (School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China), Ho-fung Leung (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong), Dongping Huang (School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China), Yang Yang (School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)

With the development of e-commerce, websites such as Amazon and eBay have become very popular. Users post reviews of products and rate the helpfulness of reviews on these websites. Reviews written by a user and reviews rated by a user reflect the user's interests and disinterest. Thus, they are very useful for user profiling. In this study, the authors explore users' reviews and ratings of reviews for personalized searching and propose a review-based user profiling method. To satisfy a user's basic information needs, expressed in the form of a query, they also propose a priority-based result ranking strategy. For evaluation, they conduct experiments on a real-life data set. The experimental results show that their method can significantly improve retrieval quality.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/integrating-user-reviews-and-ratings-for-enhanced-personalized-searching/177262

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET) in your institution's library. This journal is also included in the IGI Global aggregated "InfoSci-Journals" database: www.igi-global.com/isj.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS

The electronic version of this cfp can be seen at
http://maiga.athabascau.ca/editors/IJDET-Call_for_Papers-General.pdf

International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET)
(http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-distance-education-technologies/1078)

Mission of IJDET:
The International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET) publishes original research articles of 
distance education four issues per year. IJDET is a primary forum for researchers and practitioners 
to disseminate practical solutions to the automation of open and distance learning. This journal is targeted 
to academic researchers and engineers who work with distance learning programs and software systems, 
as well as general participants of distance education. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are peer-
reviewed according to the procedure consisting of initial review, peer review, and recommendation.

Editor in Chief:
Dr. Maiga Chang (maiga.chang at gmail.com)

Indices:
ACM Digital Library, Australian Education Index, Compendex (Elsevier EI), 
DBLP, EBSCOhost, ERIC, Google Scholar, INSPEC, PsycINFOR, SCOPUS, Web of Science's ESCI, and many others 

Suggested topics:
IJDET is an EI and Web of Science's ESCI journal. The scope of the journal includes, but is not limited to:
- Assessment
- Distance Learning for Culture and Arts
- Intelligent and Adaptive Learning
- Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
- Mobile Learning
- Nurse Medical Healthcare
- Pedagogical Issues
- Social Learning
- Serious Games for Distance Education
- Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education
- Technology Enhanced Learning
- Ubiquitous Learning
- Virtual Worlds for Distance Education

Interested authors should consult the journal's manuscript submission guidelines
http://www.igi-global.com/calls-for-papers/international-journal-distance-education-technologies/1078

Interested in serving IJDET as a reviewer?
Please note that as a reviewer of IJDET, you are expected to review
FOUR manuscripts a year within FOUR weeks and you will be removed
from the reviewer list if you couldn't finish assigned reviews in a
timely manner or you can not review four manuscripts a year for IJDET.

There are two boards in IJDET - international review board and 
editorial review board. All members in these two boards are reviewers 
and required to review maximum FOUR manuscripts a year and finish 
the review within FOUR weeks. All reviewers are inviting and starting 
from being a member of international review board first.

The only difference is the publisher only lists editorial review board 
members on the website and the journal due to there are more than 
150 reviewers from both boards.

You can quit for being a reviewer at any time you want, just send
an email to the editor-in-chief and he or she will help you remove
your name from the reviewer list.

You would be invited to become a reviewer of editorial board from
international review board if you could maintain high quality 
reviews in a timely manner for at least two years.

Please BE AWARE that every year, IJDET evaluates reviewers' last 
2-year performance in terms of review quality, timing, and 
review tasks done to decide whether a member should be PROMOTE to
the editorial review board or DEMOTE to the international review board. 
On the otherhand, if there is vacancy for associate editor area,
an editorial board member later may be promoted to be 
an associate editor if he or she can always provide high quality 
reviews on time. 

If you are interested in serving IJDET as a reviewer, You are welcome 
to apply to be the reviewer for IJDET with complete profile and 
research areas entered, via 
http://www.igi-global.com/journals/become-a-reviewer/?tid=1078

Special Issue proposals:
We also encourage potential research in any fields related to the journal
to form a high quality guest editorial team to submit special issue proposal
online, for any emerging, important, and hot topics. Please send editor-in-chief
Dr. Maiga Chang (maiga.chang at gmail.com) an email with a well-completed 
special issue proposal based on the sample which can be downloaded at
http://maiga.athabascau.ca/editors/IJDET-Special_Issue_Proposal_Sample.doc

For queries, please contact Dr. Maiga Chang (maiga.chang at gmail.com)
------------------------------------ 

Sincerely,

Maiga Chang
maiga.chang at gmail.com
http://maiga.athabascau.ca
02, 24 '17