Search

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are the latest online teaching and learning medium through website and are seen as a key factor in future lesson delivery. One well-established and popular MOOC is Coursera which is provided by Stanford University. Online participation and interactions are complex phenomena and the answers to the questions in regard to Courserians' participation gave considerable insights into knowledge construction in discussion forums. The successful construction of knowledge requires active participation. This article is aimed to observe a Coursera community in its natural setting and to investigate the participants' experiences in Coursera discussion forum. The data was derived from over 60 online interview forums with Coursera learners. Field note data was extracted from 160 days of interaction with the participants. Analysis of the qualitative data revealed some insights about learners' feelings, challenges, ideas and recommendations.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore in online education. Recent developments in MOOC have heightened the need for understanding the MOOC. The issue of an in-depth understanding of the MOOC setting has been a key subject within the field of qualitative research. However, far too little attention has been paid to the MOOC setting. This paper seeks to put the Netnography methodology into context by presenting a description of the Coursera community to better understand this community. It contributes by providing details about Coursera community through our engagement in this community.

Recently researchers have shown an increased interest in cloud computing technology. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore cloud computing technology in education context. However rapid changes in information technology are having a serious effect on teaching framework designs. So far, however, there has been little discussion about cloud computing benefits in domains of teaching frameworks which propels us to study and redesign teaching frameworks considering cloud computing. The purpose of this paper is to review recent research into cloud computing and features which can be improved with this new technology. This paper studied several researches through literature to determine the main impact of cloud computing on "planning and preparation" and "instruction" domains as two main domains of teaching framework. Light will be then shed on the impact and potential benefits of cloud computing on teaching framework. The paper closes by proposing to design an evaluation table based on cloud computing artifacts to enhance teaching practice and highlights its offerings for educational institutions.

Data mining has been useful in medical diagnosis area. The current research proposes a new combined classification technique based on support vector machine and neural network to determine malignancy of breast cancer tumours. The proposed method uses a meta-heuristic algorithm to find the best weights for combining the results of two aforementioned techniques. The numerical and statistical results confirm the superiority of our model in comparison to the previous methods. Following the results, the best accuracies are 98.23% and 96.85% for proposed and the previous methods, respectively. The method has potential to be implemented as a decision support system for breast cancer diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]