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Asynchronous educational services may be used later than the time oftheir generation, and by overcoming geographical limitations, provide astudent-centered standard, that allows students to learn at their own paceand investigate the material at any depth they wish.These past years a larger number of educational institutions as well ascompanies, implement asynchronous education services over the internet,while at the same time it has become an important research sector in manyuniversity departments of informatics and education, to an extent that theterm e-learning has been established as a region with distinct featuresregarding the media used. An important e-learning communication tool arethe fora which provide a high level of interaction that encouragescooperation and has an impact on the learning process.This dissertation presents the relevant study which was carried out at the elearningfield, with emphasis on electronic discussion fora through anapproach from the view of the informat ...
Asynchronous educational services may be used later than the time oftheir generation, and by overcoming geographical limitations, provide astudent-centered standard, that allows students to learn at their own paceand investigate the material at any depth they wish.These past years a larger number of educational institutions as well ascompanies, implement asynchronous education services over the internet,while at the same time it has become an important research sector in manyuniversity departments of informatics and education, to an extent that theterm e-learning has been established as a region with distinct featuresregarding the media used. An important e-learning communication tool arethe fora which provide a high level of interaction that encouragescooperation and has an impact on the learning process.This dissertation presents the relevant study which was carried out at the elearningfield, with emphasis on electronic discussion fora through anapproach from the view of the informatics science by merging artificialintelligence and cognitive theories. The study was focused on the reality thatapplies today with regard to the asynchronous education environment overthe internet of the Hellenic Open University, taking into accountcorresponding developments on a European and global level.The dissertation’s main problematic was how those responsible for remoteeducation (designers, coordinators, tutors) could have at any given momentan overall image of a number of discussion threads in a remote educationforum, not simply at a quantity level of participation, but also at the level ofwhat is being discussed and what the discussion focuses on. An importantpart of this problematic was the “codification” of the (unstructured) form ofcommunication (through the discussions at the fora) and its analysis towardsthe direction of exporting educational conclusions.The result of this problematic was the adoption of fora modeling as amethodology for codifying the messages. In this context, the following werecarried out:• A formal language was created, which was defined by mathematicalterms and represents the messages at the HOU fora.• Its correctness was checked with specific examples of its operation.• An algorithm was designed for the syntactic check of the language.• The factors that influence the effectiveness of a remote educationforum were defined and integrated in the language.• A relevant tool was developed for the automatization of thisprocedure. At this point it should be noted that it different cases wereinvestigated and calibration was required, with a subsequent repetitionof the procedure’s stages, which affected each time both the designof the system and the development of the algorithms. This helicalprocedure, albeit time-consuming, was however deemed as the mostappropriate one for the exclusion of reliable results.• The statistical data extracted by a relevant tool, designed for thispurpose, were collected, with automatic categorization of themessages according to the aforementioned model. During theprocedure that was followed, the message content category was usedas unit of analysis.• Given that the parallel use of the tool was deemed necessary, it wastried with the use of various education techniques (brainstorming andsnowballing).• This procedure produced the additional need of investigating the sizeof the student group as a factor that affects participation in fora andthe educational effectiveness, therefore the working group techniquewas used.This dissertation, both on a methodological level and as a tool, is an overallprocess that can be developed into a standard, and was the result ofdesign, development, trial, experimental operation, correction, improvementand utilization in the extraction of educational conclusions.
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