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This paper presents a study on the evaluation of hybrid learning and teaching practices by academics. A mixed research method involving a questionnaire survey and a focus group interview was employed to gather academics’ feedback on their experience in delivering hybrid instruction in a synchronous manner in which on-site and remote students attended classes simultaneously, their students’ hybrid learning effectiveness, and their suggestions for improvement. The questionnaire was administered to 76 academics from a university in Hong Kong where hybrid learning and teaching were implemented, and the focus group interview involved 10 academics. The findings reveal that the participating academics perceived themselves as having an overall high degree of readiness to handle technical issues. They expressed that the students from their hybrid classes had lower levels of interaction, engagement, and motivation than those from traditional face-to-face classes. The participants also reported their challenges regarding hybrid learning and teaching, including heavy workload for lesson preparation and face-to-face and online classroom management, unfamiliarity with interactive teaching design suitable for hybrid classes, and difficulties in monitoring students’ learning process. They provided suggestions for the improvement of hybrid classes, ranging from the provision of technological support to professional development for enhancing students’ online interaction and engagement. These findings contribute to revealing academics’ experience in practising hybrid learning and teaching and identifying ways to address their challenges.

This project investigated how Wikipedia can be integrated into flipped learning in higher education through the project-based learning approach. It proposed a flipped learning model where Wikipedia...

This paper investigates the students’ self-regulated learning in elementary education when traditional teaching method, which is teacher centered in a classroom, is replaced with a blended approach enriched with open educational resources. Various open educational resources such as videos, simulations, and learning games are readily available on the Web. In addition, mobile and classroom technologies, such as portable devices can be considered as teaching tools in education. The good use of these educational resources and technologies can not only assist students’ formal classroom learning but also cultivate the self-regulated learning of students. The i-Classroom implemented in an elementary school adopted a new teaching method, which made use of the online educational resources and information technology, to achieve this goal. Three surveys (Sample size N = 149, N = 168, N = 150) were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of promoting three key aspects of self-regulated learning: learning motivation, planning and management, and self-monitoring. Focus group interviewed was also carried out to collect the feedback in i-classroom learning. The results show that i-Classroom can help students to enhance their ability in self-regulated learning.

It is widely acknowledged that the acquisition of vocabulary is the foundation of learning English. With the rapid development of information technologies in recent years, e-learning systems have been widely adopted for English as a Second Language (ESL) Learning. However, a limitation of conventional word learning systems is that the prior vocabulary knowledge of learners is not well captured. Understanding the prior knowledge of learners plays a key role in providing personalized learning, which many studies suggest is a successful learning paradigm for vocabulary acquisition, one that aims to optimize instructional approaches and paces by catering to individual learning needs. A powerful learner profile model which can represent learner’s prior knowledge is therefore important for word learning systems to better facilitate personalized learning. In this article, we investigated various methods to establish learner profiles and attempted to determine the optimal method. To verify the effectiveness of personalized word learning supported by the proposed model, ESL students from several universities participated in this study. The empirical results showed that the proposed learner profile model can better facilitate vocabulary acquisition compared with other baseline methods.

This study investigates the effectiveness of three kinds of word learning exercises in terms of Nation and Webb's (2011) technique feature analysis. Three commonly used vocabulary learning tasks: r...

This paper investigates the students' self-regulated learning in primary education when traditional teaching method, which is teacher-centered in a classroom, is replaced with online educational resources. Various online educational resources such as videos, simulations and learning games are readily available on the Web. In addition, mobile and classroom technologies, such as portable devices can be considered as teaching tools in education. The good use of these educational resources and technologies cannot only assist students' formal classroom learning, but also cultivate the self-regulated learning of students. The i-Classroom implemented in a primary school adopted a new teaching method, which made use of the online educational resources and information technology, to achieve this goal. A survey (Sample size N = 149) was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of promoting self-regulated learning in three key aspects: learning motivation, planning and management, and self-monitoring. The result shows the current situation of the self-regulated learning of primary school students and discusses how i-Classroom can help students to enhance their ability to conduct self-regulated learning.

This research examines the effectiveness of vocabulary learning tasks from the perspective of Nation and Webb’s (2011) technique feature analysis. Three frequently practiced word learning exercises (reading comprehension, cloze-exercises, and sentence writing), and two types of annotations for target words (pictorial annotations, and textual annotations) were investigated. One hundred and twenty undergraduate students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to four groups to complete four tasks: reading comprehension with pictorial annotations, cloze-exercises with textual annotations, cloze-exercises with pictorial annotations, and sentence-writing with textual annotations. The post-test scores showed that the tasks of reading comprehension with pictorial annotations and doing cloze-exercises with textual annotations were similarly effective; and cloze-exercises with pictorial annotations were similarly effective as sentence-writing with textual annotations. Such results are consistent with the checklist for technique feature analysis, indicating that this framework is reliable in evaluating and predicting task effectiveness. It also shows that the involvement of imaging in an activity is conducive to word learning, and pictorial annotations promote effective learning. More integration of pictorial annotations in language learning materials is therefore suggested.

Sentiment analysis has important applications in many areas, including marketing, recommendation, and financial analysis. Since topic modeling can discover hidden semantic structures, researchers put forward sentiment analysis models based on topic models. These models have been successfully applied on long texts, but analysis for short text is a challenging task because of the sparsity of features in short texts. We observe that the textual context has been widely considered on text analysis task, but on sentiment analysis area, most sentiment analysis models still lack of consideration and integration of sentimental context. Thus, by taking the speciality of sentiment analysis task and short text into consideration, we propose the sentimental context to enrich the characteristics and improve the performance of sentiment classification over short text. We first put forward the concept of sentimental context, which is extracted from the text body and sentiment lexicon, and then we integrate the sentimental context and propose two sentiment classification models based on word-level and topic-level respectively. We present results on real-world datasets from various sources, validating the effectiveness of the proposed models.

Word knowledge is the foundation of language acquisition for second language learners. Due to the diversity of background knowledge and language proficiency levels of different learners, it is essential to understand and cater for various needs of users in an e-learning system. A personalized learning system which meets this requirement is therefore necessary. Users may also be concerned about the possible risk of revealing their private information and prefer controls on the personalization of a system. To leverage these two factors: personalization and control, we propose an explicit learner profiling model for word learning task recommendation in this paper. This proposed profiling model can be fully accessed and controlled by users. Moreover, the proposed system can recommend learning tasks based on explicit user profiles. The experimental results of a preliminary study further verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) maturity plays in the achievement of global competitiveness at the country level. The paper investigates the socio‐economic and technological factors that are most likely to be associated with ICT maturity, and then assesses their role in driving the global competitiveness wheel forward.Design/methodology/approachSecondary data were used, based on data sets generated by the World Bank, World Economic Forum, and UNESCO for the years 2003‐2007. The countries common to all reports were included, yielding a study sample of 93 cases. Cluster analysis was used to categorize countries in terms of ICT usage, readiness, and environment. Structural equation modeling was used to test the fit of a model employing these factors.FindingsFirst, it was found that ICT plays an important role in driving a country's global competitiveness forward, with a stronger relationship existing in high readiness countries than in low readiness countries. Second, ICT maturity was found to mediate the relationship between ICT quality and R&D spending on one hand and global competitiveness on the other. Finally, the relationship between R&D spending and global competitiveness was found to be stronger for low readiness countries than for high readiness countries.Practical implicationsThe paper's findings provide insights to managers and government policy makers regarding the effects of economic, social and technological factors on ICT maturity, as well as the relationship between ICT maturity and global competitiveness. Such insights can influence the standards, programs, and strategies that governments implement in order to attain and maintain global competitiveness.Originality/valueThe paper presents a holistic model that depicts the ICT maturity factors and their dynamic contributions to global competitiveness. Despite the considerable contributions of existing research in this domain, there is a lack of substantive research that examines the relationship at the country level between ICT maturity and its indicators on one hand and global competitiveness on the other. The paper is an attempt to fill this gap.

The development of big data techniques has created great opportunities for more powerful e-learning systems. Online platforms such as MOOCs, distance learning communities and mobile learning applications are therefore able to have larger data capacity and allow more users to access. However, a big challenge accompanied with the rapid development of e-learning systems is information overload for learners. Users may get lost in such a large volume of learning resources. To address this issue, it is essential to have a model for better understanding of user intentions, preferences and prior knowledge. Therefore, in this article, a flexible graph-based model for users is proposed by incorporating various relationships in this context. By consolidating various kinds of relationships in a unified graph model for the users, the model can then facilitate digital learning activities in e-learning systems. Additionally, some examples of using this model are discussed for the future studies on the model.

Currently, for educators and researchers, diagnosing the online interactions specifically related to knowledge and expertise exchanges is challenging. To address the problem, this paper describes a framework for the understanding and measurement of expertise presence in computer conferences. Expertise presence is defined as a persistent contribution of knowledge relevant to the purposes of the computer conferences. The paper includes a technique for measuring the strength of expertise presence from transcripts of computer conferences, and it also envisages a number of applications in online learning diagnosis and research. A case study of the application of the framework to the computer conferences of several online courses is discussed.

A number of published techniques have emerged in the trading community for stock prediction tasks. Among them is neural network (NN). In this paper, the theoretical background of NNs and the backpropagation algorithm is reviewed. Subsequently, an attempt to build a stock buying/selling alert system using a backpropagation NN, NN5, is presented. The system is tested with data from one Hong Kong stock, The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Holdings. The system is shown to achieve an overall hit rate of over 70%. A number of trading strategies are discussed. A best strategy for trading non-volatile stock like HSBC is recommended.

Mobile learning or M-learning brings a new aspect of learning environment. Due to the large amount of available applications in mobile devices, students use their mobile devices for many purposes including entertainment, sharing, communication, video recording, photo shooting and learning. The acceptance toward mobile learning has naturally become a major interest for educators. In this paper, we will present preliminary findings from a small scale study exploring the students’ experiences on using mobile devices versus desktop computers, as well as perceptions towards mobile learning. The data are obtained from the quantitative survey. The preliminary findings indicate that students will use mobile devices rather than desktops to access the Internet. Students are willing to use mobile devices to conduct learning activities.

The Perform approach aims to improve the success rate of weak students in a first programming course. The approach, based on constructivism, takes a tight control on the mental model construction process in the weak students, and allows the students to navigate through many conceptual pitfalls in programming fundamentals. The paper covers a discussion of applying constructivism in programming, exposes common hazards in the learning process, illustrates why weak students are weak, and then suggests several guidelines that can help the weak students to attain at least foundation level programming. The paper ends with a summary of our experiences in the effect of the Perform approach.

A robot simulation system has been used not only as a design and simulation tool, but it also serves as an off-line programming system for industrial robots and other machines with a computer integrated manufacture (CIM) system. A robot simulation system is one of the essential elements for virtual manufacturing and agile manufacturing. A post-processor is an important element of an off-line robot programming system, as it allows the commercially available robot simulation systems to be used as off-line robot programming tools. The post-processor translates output statements from a robot simulator to a target robot language. Typically, the sequence of motion and data required to drive the robot can be transmitted through the use of a serial or parallel data link, between an off-line computer and a robot controller. The design of a general post-processor capable of translating the output of multiple robot simulators to multiple robot programming languages is an extremely complex problem. There are two basic ways of describing robot movements in robot control systems; one describes the manipulator movements in terms of the manipulator end-effector location (in compound transformation or absolute); whilst the other describes the movements in terms of manipulator joint angles. The former approach is suitable for future and present generation robots with a language processor installed in their controllers, whilst the latter is only specifically linked to earlier generation robot languages. Discrepancies between a specific robot simulation system and a real robot system which should be resolved as part of the post-processing, are analysed. The feasibility of generalising the post-processor was studied. In this paper different approaches of post-processing for off-line programs and methods of downloading off-line programs to robot controller are discussed also.

Over the past decade, there have been a number of studies on the influence of student interaction and group work on the one hand, and the employment of Web 2.0 technologies on the other, on the language acquisition process respectively. However, the use of blog, which involves a seamless combination of both group collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies, as a device of language education in the local context has not received the proper attention it deserves. The limited relevant studies focus mainly on either the primary and junior secondary school settings or teacher education at the undergraduate level, leaving a virtually empty page regarding the field of English language education at the sub-degree level. This paper describes and investigates a blog-integrated collaborative writing activity for sub-degree students at a self-financing post-secondary institution in Hong Kong. The discussion focuses on exploring students’ willingness to embrace blog as a medium to learn English as a second language and the perceptions of both students and teachers concerning blog writing.