Today's dynamic distance learning environments offer a flexible, comfortable, and lifelong learning experience, independent of space and time. In this way, it also supports and develops existing traditional training programs. The increasing importance of knowledge, skills and learning in today's technological life cycle has led to an increase and…

Attrition is one of the main concerns in distance learning due to the impact on the incomes and institutions reputation. Timely identification of students at risk has high practical value in effective students' retention services. Big Data mining and machine learning methods are applied to manipulate, analyze and predict students' failure,…

Attrition is one of the main concerns in distance learning due to the impact on the incomes and institutions reputation. Timely identification of students at risk has high practical value in effective students' retention services. Big Data mining and machine learning methods are applied to manipulate, analyze, and predict students' failure,…

The present work describes an original associative model of pattern classification and its application to align different ontologies containing Learning Objects (LOs), which are in turn related to Open and Distance Learning (ODL) educative content. The problem of aligning ontologies is known as Ontology Matching Problem (OMP), whose solution is…

This paper reports on the implementation of a learner identification system developed to facilitate real-time interaction in an international distance course. To increase the teacher immediacy and social presence, it proposes an integrative system for incorporating technology to improve the learning involvement, teaching effectiveness, and quality…

An underlying theme of this paper is that it can be easier and more efficient to conduct valid and effective research studies in online environments than in traditional classrooms. Taking advantage of the "big data" available in an online university, we conducted a study in which a massive online database was used to predict student…

Students are not exposed to enough real-life data. This paper describes how a community of scholars seeks to remedy this deficiency and gives the pedagogical details of an ongoing project that commenced in the Fall 2004 semester. Fostering deep learning, this multiyear project offers a new active-learning, hands-on interdisciplinary laboratory…

An ontology is an effective formal representation of knowledge used commonly in artificial intelligence, semantic web, software engineering, and information retrieval. In open and distance learning, ontologies are used as knowledge bases for e-learning supplements, educational recommenders, and question answering systems that support students with…

Digital libraries play a crucial role in distance learning. Nowadays, they are one of the fundamental information sources for the students enrolled in this learning system. These libraries contain huge amount of instructional data (text, audio and video) offered by the distance learning program. Organization of the digital libraries is…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…