Changing Role of Academic Libraries in the E-learning Environment: Issues and Challenges

The development of computer and network technology is changing the education scenario and transforming the teaching and learning process from the traditional physical environment to the digital environment. It is now possible to access vast amount of information online and enable one to one communication without the confines of place or time. While E-learning and teaching is unlikely to replace face-to-face training and education it is becoming an additional delivery method, providing new learning opportunities to many users. It is also causing an impact on library services as the increased use of ICT and web based learning technologies have paved the way for providing new ICT based services and resources to the users. Online learning has a crucial role in user education, information literacy programmes and in training the library professionals. It can help students become active learners, and libraries will have to play a greater role in this process of transformation. The significance of libraries within an institution has improved due to the fact that academic libraries and information services are now responsible for e-learning within their organization.

Ventajas que aporta el E-Learning a los procesos de diferenciación estratégica e internacionalización en la Universidad Del Rosario

En el presente trabajo se analiza la existencia y argumenta la importancia de las ventajas que aporta el E-Learning al proceso de Internacionalización en la Universidad del Rosario, además se indaga si dichas ventajas podrían facilitar la diferenciación estratégica de la misma. Inicia con una revisión teórica sobre los conceptos de educación virtual y aprendizaje, y su estado actual en Colombia, logrando la creación de un marco teórico. En una segunda etapa se identificarán las características que comparte la institución educativa con una organización y que la hacen objeto de estudio en el campo estratégico, específicamente en cuanto a la diferenciación. Posteriormente se describirán las etapas de implementación del E-Learning en la Universidad, analizando los aspectos más importantes de este proceso. Más adelante se hace una aproximación al concepto de internacionalización y la importancia que tiene en el mundo multicultural actual. Finalmente se relacionan las ventajas de la implementación del E-Learning con las brindadas en el proceso de internacionalización y se argumenta si estas facilitan la diferenciación estratégica del Rosario.

Actitudes de los directivos en torno a la adopción del e-learning como herramienta de trabajo en las empresas

El desarrollo del presente documento constituye una investigación sobre las actitudes de los directivos frente a la adopción del e-learning como herramienta de trabajo en las organizaciones de Bogotá. Para ello se realizó una encuesta a 101 directivos, tomando como base el tipo de muestreo de conveniencia; esto con el objetivo de identificar sus actitudes frente al uso del e-learning y su influencia dentro de la organización. Como resultado se obtuvo que las actitudes de los directivos influencian en el uso de herramientas e-learning, así como también en las acciones que promueven su uso y en las actitudes de los empleados; por otro lado se identificó que las creencias relacionadas con la apropiación de herramientas e-learning y los factores facilitadores del uso de estas, influencian en las actitudes de los directivos. Lo anterior, corresponde a los análisis llevados a cabo a partir de los resultados contrastados con los estudios empíricos hallados y el marco teórico desarrollado.

Efficiency and Equity in Learning Communities and schools

Traditionally, school efficiency has been measured as a function of educational production. In the last two decades, however, studies in the economics of education have indicated that more is required to improve school efficiency: researchers must explore how significant changes in school organization affect the performance of at-risk students. In this paper we introduce Henry Levin’s adoption of the X-efficiency approach to education and we describe the efficient and cost-effective characteristics of one Learning Communities Project School that significantly improved its student outcomes and enrollment numbers and reduced its absenteeism rate to zero. The organizational change that facilitated these improvements defined specific issues to address. Students’ school success became the focus of the school project, which also offered specific incentives, selected teachers, involved parents and community members in decisions, and used the most efficient technologies and methods. This case analysis reveals new two elements—family training and community involvement—that were not explicit parts of Levin’s adaptation. The case of the Antonio Machado Public School should attract the attention of both social scientists and policy makers

Be careful how you ask! Using focus groups and nominal group technique to explore the barriers to learning

Schools have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils who experience barriers to learning. Inclusive approaches to data collection ensure that the needs of all children who are struggling are not overlooked. However, it is important that the methods promote sustained reflection on the part of all children, do not inadvertently accentuate differences between pupils, and do not allow individual needs to go unrecognized. This paper examines more closely the processes involved in using Nominal Group Technique to collect the views of children with and without a disability on the difficulties experienced in school. Data were collected on the process as well as the outcomes of using this technique to examine how pupil views are transformed from the individual to the collective, a process that involves making the private, public. Contrasts are drawn with questionnaire data, another method of data collection favoured by teachers. Although more time-efficient this can produce unclear and cursory responses. The views that surface from pupils need also to be seen within the context of the ways in which schools customize the data collection process and the ways in which the format and organization of the activity impact on the responses and responsiveness of the pupils.

Building a Learning Architecture : e-Learning and e-Services

With the rapid advancement of the webtechnology, more and more educationalresources, including software applications forteaching/learning methods, are available acrossthe web, which enables learners to access thelearning materials and use various ways oflearning at any time and any place. Moreover,various web-based teaching/learning approacheshave been developed during the last decade toenhance the capability of both educators andlearners. Particularly, researchers from bothcomputer science and education are workingtogether, collaboratively focusing ondevelopment of pedagogically enablingtechnologies which are believed to improve theinfrastructure of education systems andprocesses, including curriculum developmentmodels, teaching/learning methods, managementof educational resources, systematic organizationof communication and dissemination ofknowledge and skills required by and adapted tousers. Despite of its fast development, however,there are still great gaps between learningintentions, organization of supporting resources,management of educational structures,knowledge points to be learned and interknowledgepoint relationships such as prerequisites,assessment of learning outcomes, andtechnical and pedagogic approaches. Moreconcretely, the issues have been widelyaddressed in literature include a) availability andusefulness of resources, b) smooth integration ofvarious resources and their presentation, c)learners’ requirements and supposed learningoutcomes, d) automation of learning process interms of its schedule and interaction, and e)customization of the resources and agilemanagement of the learning services for deliveryas well as necessary human interferences.Considering these problems and bearing in mindthe advanced web technology of which weshould make full use, in this report we willaddress the following two aspects of systematicarchitecture of learning/teaching systems: 1)learning objects – a semantic description andorganization of learning resources using the webservice models and methods, and 2) learningservices discovery and learning goals match foreducational coordination and learning serviceplanning.

Crisis communication: organization's reactions to unexpected events

A reputação é considerada o ativo mais importante das empresas. Ela permite o estabelecimento de relações comerciais e garante um bom funcionamento da organização. Quando um evento inesperado surge, a reputação pode ser ameaçada. Os gerentes, líderes da organização, têm então que demonstrar reatividade e capacidade em responder as necessidades dos stakeholders, e capacidade de detectar e consertar as falhas dentro da organização através de um processo de aprendizagem, para evitar conseqüências negativas que poderiam danificar a reputação e impactar o desenvolvimento operacional da empresa. Através da comunicação de crise, observamos que depois da queda do avião AF 447, a companhia Air France adotou diferentes posturas adaptadas ao pedido dos stakeholders e ao grau de ameaça sofrido. Logo depois do acidente, a empresa decidiu adotar a estratégia do reconhecimento, assumindo uma responsabilidade simbólica e comunicando prioritariamente para as famílias das vitimas e para a mídia. Nas seguintes semanas ela utilizou a estratégia do silêncio que consiste em não comunicar diretamente a mídia. Finalmente, ela usou a estratégia do “bode expiatório” quando ela foi sujeita a ataques diretos. As reações da empresa somadas ao avanço das investigações judiciais revelaram falhas organizacionais “históricas” dentro da própria empresa, como por exemplo, a falta de comunicação entre pilotos e gerentes ou uma falha de sensibilidade técnica e operacional da parte dos gerentes. Apesar de problemas interno e externo, a Air France demonstrou que uma comunicação de crise bem gerenciada limita os impactos financeiros e de reputação. As conseqüências negativas sofridas pela companhia Air France foram limitadas.

Achieving educational quality: what schools teach us: learning from Chile's P900 primary schools

Includes bibliography

Motor intervention in children with school learning difficulties

This study sought to evaluate motor development in children aged 6 to 11 years with learning difficulties and school characteristics of delayed motor development, before and after application of a motor intervention program. The sample consisted of 28 children with a mean age of 107.21 ± 16.56 months, who were evaluated by the Motor Development Scale and received motor intervention for 6 months, followed by reassessment. We observed a statistically significant difference between the average of the motor activity ratios in all areas of the evaluation and reevaluation. Also verified in the evaluation were the concentration ratios of children with motor activity greater than or equal to 80 and there was a revaluation increase in this concentration on re-evaluation, the areas with the greatest increase in concentration and significant differences being: Body Schema, Space and temporal Organization. In the overall evaluation of MDS, most children presented the classification of low normal. However, in the reassessment most have evolved into the average normal, only 4 of themremaining in the same classification. Therefore, in this study, children with learning disabilities also showed motor deficits and the intervention applied contributed to an increase in the motor ratios with consequent improvement in motor development. Besides psychopedagogical asistance, it is essential to reassess them and if necessary apply the intervention in the motor development of children with learning difficulties.

Three essays in industrial organization

This dissertation comprises three essays on the topic of industrial organization. The first essay considers how different intellectual property systems can affect the incentives to invest in R&D when innovation is cumulative. I introduce a distinction between plain and sophisticated technological knowledge, which plays a crucial role in determining how different appropriability rules affect the incentives to innovate. I argue that the positive effect of weak intellectual property regimes on the sharing of intermediate technological knowledge vanishes when technological knowledge is sophisticated, as is likely to be the case in many high tech industries. The second essay analyzes a two-sided market for news where advertisers may pay a media outlet to conceal negative information on the quality of their own product (paying positive to avoid negative) and/or to disclose negative information on the quality of their competitors products (paying positive to go negative). It is shown that whether advertisers have negative consequences on the accuracy of media reports or not, ultimately depends on the extent of correlation among advertisers products. The third essay considers the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new technology. A population of agents can choose between two risky technologies: an old one for which they know the expected outcome, and a new one for which they have only a prior. Different environments are confronted. In the benchmark case agents are isolated and can perform costly experiments to infer the quality of the new technology. In the other cases agents are settled in a network and can observe the outcomes of neighbors. We observe that in expectations the quality of the new technology may be overestimated when there is a network spread of information.

Learning Methods and Algorithms for Semantic Text Classification across Multiple Domains

Information is nowadays a key resource: machine learning and data mining techniques have been developed to extract high-level information from great amounts of data. As most data comes in form of unstructured text in natural languages, research on text mining is currently very active and dealing with practical problems. Among these, text categorization deals with the automatic organization of large quantities of documents in priorly defined taxonomies of topic categories, possibly arranged in large hierarchies. In commonly proposed machine learning approaches, classifiers are automatically trained from pre-labeled documents: they can perform very accurate classification, but often require a consistent training set and notable computational effort. Methods for cross-domain text categorization have been proposed, allowing to leverage a set of labeled documents of one domain to classify those of another one. Most methods use advanced statistical techniques, usually involving tuning of parameters. A first contribution presented here is a method based on nearest centroid classification, where profiles of categories are generated from the known domain and then iteratively adapted to the unknown one. Despite being conceptually simple and having easily tuned parameters, this method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in most benchmark datasets with fast running times. A second, deeper contribution involves the design of a domain-independent model to distinguish the degree and type of relatedness between arbitrary documents and topics, inferred from the different types of semantic relationships between respective representative words, identified by specific search algorithms. The application of this model is tested on both flat and hierarchical text categorization, where it potentially allows the efficient addition of new categories during classification. Results show that classification accuracy still requires improvements, but models generated from one domain are shown to be effectively able to be reused in a different one.

Learning through Listening: Conversations for Strategic Change in a Healtcare Provider

The aim of this paper is investigate the role of conversation in strategic change so as to enhance both theory and practice in this respect. As an investigation on how conversations shape change processes in practice, we reflect on an interpretive case study in a health care organization. Through an OD project complemented by semi-structured interviews with participants, we gained a set of data and experiences that allows us to inquire into the relationship between conversations and change in more depth.

Building the capacity for learning and change through reflective conversation

Conversation is central to the process of organizational learning and change. Drawing on the notion of reflective conversation, we describe an action research project, "learning through listening" in Omega, a residential healthcare organization. In this project, service users, staff, members of management committees, trustees, managers, and central office staff participated in listening to each other and in working together towards building capacity for creating their own vision of how the organization could move into the future, according to its values and ethos. In doing so they developed ways of engaging in reflective conversation that enabled progress towards a strategic direction.

Cerebellar mechanisms for motor learning: Testing predictions from a large-scale computer simulation

The cerebellum is the major brain structure that contributes to our ability to improve movements through learning and experience. We have combined computer simulations with behavioral and lesion studies to investigate how modification of synaptic strength at two different sites within the cerebellum contributes to a simple form of motor learning—Pavlovian conditioning of the eyelid response. These studies are based on the wealth of knowledge about the intrinsic circuitry and physiology of the cerebellum and the straightforward manner in which this circuitry is engaged during eyelid conditioning. Thus, our simulations are constrained by the well-characterized synaptic organization of the cerebellum and further, the activity of cerebellar inputs during simulated eyelid conditioning is based on existing recording data. These simulations have allowed us to make two important predictions regarding the mechanisms underlying cerebellar function, which we have tested and confirmed with behavioral studies. The first prediction describes the mechanisms by which one of the sites of synaptic modification, the granule to Purkinje cell synapses (gr → Pkj) of the cerebellar cortex, could generate two time-dependent properties of eyelid conditioning—response timing and the ISI function. An empirical test of this prediction using small, electrolytic lesions of the cerebellar cortex revealed the pattern of results predicted by the simulations. The second prediction made by the simulations is that modification of synaptic strength at the other site of plasticity, the mossy fiber to deep nuclei synapses (mf → nuc), is under the control of Purkinje cell activity. The analysis predicts that this property should confer mf → nuc synapses with resistance to extinction. Thus, while extinction processes erase plasticity at the first site, residual plasticity at mf → nuc synapses remains. The residual plasticity at the mf → nuc site confers the cerebellum with the capability for rapid relearning long after the learned behavior has been extinguished. We confirmed this prediction using a lesion technique that reversibly disconnected the cerebellar cortex at various stages during extinction and reacquisition of eyelid responses. The results of these studies represent significant progress toward a complete understanding of how the cerebellum contributes to motor learning. ^