A comparison of responses to group learning between first-year Asian and first-year Australian veterinary science students

Introduction - Group learning has been used to enhance deep (long-term) learning and promote life skills, such as decision making, communication, and interpersonal skills. However, with increasing multiculturalism in higher education, there is little information available as to the acceptance of this form of learning by Asian students or as to its value to them. Methodology - Group-learning projects, incorporating a seminar presentation, were used in first-year veterinary anatomical science classes over two consecutive years (2003 and 2004) at the School of Veterinary Science, University of Queensland. Responses of Australian and Asian students to survey forms evaluating the learning experience were analyzed and compared. Results - All students responded positively to the group learning, indicating that it was a useful learning experience and a great method for meeting colleagues. There were no significant differences between Asian and Australian students in overall responses to the survey evaluating the learning experience, except where Asian students responded significantly higher than Australian students in identifying specific skills that needed improving. Conclusions - Group learning can be successfully used in multicultural teaching to enhance deep learning. This form of learning helps to remove cultural barriers and establish a platform for continued successful group learning throughout the program.

Bridging the divide between theory and practice. Experiential learning approaches for tourism and hospitality education

Experiential learning approaches such as role-play have been found to be valuable methods of bridging the divide between academic knowledge and practical skills, a problem often cited in tourism and hospitality management education. Such approaches have been found to contribute towards deeper learning by enhancing students' interest, motivation, participation, knowledge and skill development. This paper reports on the implementation of an experiential learning approach designed to encourage and facilitate deeper learning approaches, with the contributing aims of providing students with a more interesting learning experience and a broader set of skills for future employment.

Suit keen renovator: Alternate reality design

Virtual territories and their theme parks are more akin to the physical world of real estate than they might at first appear. The trick in triggering the designer's imagination, is to find a 'nice renovator' (cottage/ house) at a low price, with loads of potential, and by doing it on the cheap to add character, and engage the imagination. Here the designer can construct changes from an imagined space. Vision is more important than how the actual place presents.This work describes a case study involving undergraduate students in the Creative Industries who needed a place to explore, so as to create their own visions and projects. The place had to inspire, trigger engagement, and their imaginations. At the same time it was important that the place did not coerce activity, or distract from the task by confusing tools with task, or architectural navigation with conceptual skills.The solution was an alternate reality.

A reference architecture for instructional educational software

Our extensive research has indicated that high-school teachers are reluctant to make use of existing instructional educational software (Pollard, 2005). Even software developed in a partnership between a teacher and a software engineer is unlikely to be adopted by teachers outside the partnership (Pollard, 2005). In this paper we address these issues directly by adopting a reusable architectural design for instructional educational software which allows easy customisation of software to meet the specific needs of individual teachers. By doing this we will facilitate more teachers regularly using instructional technology within their classrooms. Our domain-specific software architecture, Interface-Activities-Model, was designed specifically to facilitate individual customisation by redefining and restructuring what constitutes an object so that they can be readily reused or extended as required. The key to this architecture is the way in which the software is broken into small generic encapsulated components with minimal domain specific behaviour. The domain specific behaviour is decoupled from the interface and encapsulated in objects which relate to the instructional material through tasks and activities. The domain model is also broken into two distinct models - Application State Model and Domainspecific Data Model. This decoupling and distribution of control gives the software designer enormous flexibility in modifying components without affecting other sections of the design. This paper sets the context of this architecture, describes it in detail, and applies it to an actual application developed to teach high-school mathematical concepts.

SaveRF: Towards efficient relevance feedback search

In multimedia retrieval, a query is typically interactively refined towards the ‘optimal’ answers by exploiting user feedback. However, in existing work, in each iteration, the refined query is re-evaluated. This is not only inefficient but fails to exploit the answers that may be common between iterations. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called SaveRF (Save random accesses in Relevance Feedback) for iterative relevance feedback search. SaveRF predicts the potential candidates for the next iteration and maintains this small set for efficient sequential scan. By doing so, repeated candidate accesses can be saved, hence reducing the number of random accesses. In addition, efficient scan on the overlap before the search starts also tightens the search space with smaller pruning radius. We implemented SaveRF and our experimental study on real life data sets show that it can reduce the I/O cost significantly.