This article starts with an overview on China's MOOC phenomenon and social media, and then reports a comparative, multiple case study on three selected MOOC communities that have emerged on social media in China. These representative MOOC communities included: (a) MOOC Academy, the largest MOOC community in China, (b) Zhejiang University of…

The purpose of this article is to identify the order of significance of the variables that affect science and mathematics achievement in middle school students. For this aim, the study deals with the relationship between science and math in terms of different angles using the perspectives of multiple causes-single effect and of multiple…

The problem of building test collections is central to the development of information retrieval systems such as search engines. The primary use of test collections is the evaluation of IR systems. The widely employed "Cranfield paradigm" dictates that the information relevant to a topic be encoded at the level of documents, therefore…

Social networks have become more complex, in particular considering the fact that elements in social networks are not only abstract topological nodes and links, but contain rich social attributes and reflecting diverse social relationships. For example, in a co-authorship social network in a scientific community, nodes in the social network, which…

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive industry. Thousands of documents are generated by construction projects. Documents, as information carriers, must be managed effectively to ensure successful project management. The fact that a single project can produce thousands of documents and that a lot of the documents are generated in a…

In this paper we present the state of the art in writer identification and verification of handwritten text. In addition, a special and extensive survey of writer identification and verification of Arabic handwritten text is also included. Different feature extraction techniques are addressed showing the different research groups' efforts as well…

Purpose: This paper seeks to examine the further integration of machine translation technologies with cross language information access in providing web users the capabilities of accessing information beyond language barriers. Machine translation and cross language information access are related technologies, and yet they have their own unique…

This article analyzes articles published in "The Internet and Higher Education" from 2001-2010. The researchers analyzed the frequency of author-provided keywords and common abstract words, type and frequency of authorship, the type of research method employed, and the number of citations the journal and specific articles received. Words…

A large-scale online teacher resource exchange is studied to examine the ways in which metadata influence teachers' selection of resources. A hierarchical linear modeling approach was used to tease apart the simultaneous effects of resource features and author features. From a decision heuristics theoretical perspective, teachers appear to…

Soon after the university movement started in the late 1800s, academic libraries became the dominant providers of the tools and services required to locate and access scholarly information. However, with the advent of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with open access scholarly content, researchers now have the…

Mining social web data is a challenging task and finding user interest for personalized and non-personalized recommendation systems is another important task. Knowledge sharing among web users has become crucial in determining usage of web data and personalizing content in various social websites as per the user's wish. This paper aims to design a…

Low foreign language achievers in vocational education often have a lack of learning strategies, a tendency to feel frustrated, and unwillingness to be involved. In order to develop vocational college students' autonomy, this study integrated on-site workshops with an online learning community by means of self-directed learning English for…

This study was conducted as part of the OER for Skills Development project of COL, supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The objective of the study was to collect baseline data from Commonwealth institutions with respect to the development, use and reuse of OER; the availability of support; and challenges faced in fostering the…

An important research problem for Educational Data Mining is to expedite the cycle of data leading to the analysis of student learning processes and the improvement of support for those processes. For this goal in the context of social interaction in learning, we propose a three-part pipeline that includes data infrastructure, learning process…

Excessive course attrition is costly to both the student and the institution. While most institutions have systems to quantify and report the numbers, far less attention is typically paid to each student's reason(s) for withdrawal. In this case study, text analytics was used to analyze a large set of open-ended written comments in which students…