Learning Specialists Research Articles

Obszary wiedzy specjalistycznej i socjokulturowej w nauczaniu rosyjskiej komunikacji biznesowej

Contemporary specialist language teaching is a combination of linguistic, professional and socio-cultural areas of knowledge, applied in practice. The aims and contents of teaching are directed towards learners’ requirements and the development of the professional communicative competence. This article analyses the efficiency of teaching and learning specialist languages. The effectiveness in this field allows for a better specification not only linguistic but also professional and socio-cultural teaching material and choice of adequate and varied teaching aids.

Modified Delphi Investigation of Motor Development and Learning in Physical Education Teacher Education

Purpose: As the scope of motor development and learning knowledge has successfully broadened over the years, there is an increased need to identify the content and learning experiences that are essential in preparing preservice physical educators. The purpose of this study was to generate expert consensus regarding the most critical motor development and learning competencies that prospective physical educators need to learn within the physical education teacher education (PETE) curriculum and to identify learning environments and instructional methods for delivering core knowledge. Method: The study employed a 2-round, modified Delphi procedure involving the repeated circulation of a questionnaire to a panel of motor development specialists, motor learning specialists, teacher educators, and K–12 physical education teachers. Panel members rated an initial list of theoretical and applied motor development and learning competencies derived from various curricular guidelines and textbook sources. An open-response question was incorporated into the 2nd round asking panel members to recommend specific instructional methods and settings for delivering core motor development and learning content to prospective physical educators within the PETE curriculum. Results: Expert consensus determined that 64 out of the initial 159 motor development and learning competencies were critical in preparing preservice physical educators. Early field experiences and peer practice in a variety of settings were recommended by panelists for delivering the identified competencies. Conclusions: The Discussion section represents an important link between the motor development and learning body of knowledge and physical education teachers' role in promoting skillful movement, physical activity, and fitness among youth in the school setting.

Cloud technologies in teaching computer science of future economists

Research goals: to analyze the main features use cloud technology in the training of computer science specialists economy and future develop recommendations for their use in the educational process of the university.Research objectives: to learn and generalize best educational experience to implement the learning process of cloud technologies and consider their strengths and weaknesses in the educational use.Object of research – the process of applying cloud technologies in teaching computer science future economists.Subject of research – cloud technology in computer science education of future economists.In order to solve the tasks used the following research methods: theory-analysis, research and systematization of literature on the study, analysis of existing government programs, empirical-diagnostic (direct and indirect observations, interviews with teachers and students, an analysis of experience of teachers) – used to determine and verify the effectiveness of methods of teaching science future professionals in the field of economics.In the results of research analyzed cloud services Google Apps for Education, Microsoft Office 365, web-oriented of computer mathematics system Sage and MathCAD Calculation Server, e-learning system Moodle, Advantages and disadvantages specified of resources, and recommendations regarding their use in teaching computer science future economists.The main conclusions and recommendations. One of the real ways to improve the training of future specialists in economics, enhance teaching and learning and research activities of students, opening their creativity, increase the role of independent and individual work is the development and implementation of the learning process of university innovative educational technologies, based on a organic combination of traditional and computer-oriented forms, methods and means of education, including the cloud.

What employees do not like about L&D opportunities: and six learning strategies to win them back

Purpose – To highlight six commonly cited employee criticism of learning and development initiatives in organisations and recommend six innovative learning and development strategies that counter the common criticisms. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a finding of an international survey of 517 white-collar employees with regards to learning and development in their organizations. Findings – Employees appear to have numerous complaints about the learning and development opportunities they experience at work. Often learning and development specialists may never know what these grievances are. There is a range of inexpensive and easy to implement alternate strategies that overcome the commonest complaints of employees as reflected in the survey. Practical implications – The paper offers a description of six practical learning and development strategies that organizations can adopt to help develop their employees. The paper also provides practical advice on getting management support for t...

Online learning: a New Testament

The statement by Hunter R. Rawlings III that “there are no good studies on what constitutes bad online pedagogy” coincides with the creation of a Global Learning Council to define the guidelines that previous online educators have allegedly failed to identify. This article discusses these disparaging remarks by the President of the Association of American Universities about the distance education (DE) field and the likely influence on the Council’s deliberations by the motives of its members—American university presidents, corporate representatives, and providers of support for massive open online courses. The influence of their conclusions on public attitudes to new educational practices is anticipated, and the distorted pedagogical principles being offered in support of massive course practices are defined as arising from a form of plagiarism. A formal response by DE and online learning specialists to the rejection of their previous literature is encouraged; and an analysis of the situation is offered by a fictitious educational historian in the year 2031.

A Bayesian approach to ranking private companies based on predictive indicators

Private equity investors seek to rank potential investment opportunities in growth stage private companies within an industry sector. The sparsity of historical investment transaction data for many growth stage private companies' may present a major obstacle to using statistical methods to discern industry specific features associated with successful and failed companies.This paper describes a Bayesian ranking approach based on i extracting and selecting features; ii training support vector machine classifiers from feature pairs of labeled companies in an industry; iii non-parametric estimation of posterior probabilities of success and failure; and iv ranking unlabeled companies within a cohort based on scores derived from posterior probability estimates. We anticipate that this approach will not only be of interest to statisticians and machine learning specialists with an interest in venture capital and private equity but extend to a broader readership whose interests lie in classification methods where missing data is the primary obstacle.

7. Enquiry, Engagement and eLearning: Three Perspectives on a Student-Centred, Online, Enquiry-Based Course

In the 2011 Winter semester, the University of Guelph engaged in a pedagogical experiment: an online first-year seminar. This article is a conversation about the learning journey that surrounds this seminar, as experienced by three participants: Jacqueline Murray (JM), Professor of History and Director of the First-Year Seminar Program (FYS); Natalie Giesbrecht (NG), Manager, Distance Education and a Distance Learning Specialist; and Samuel Mosonyi (SM), an undergraduate student who was enrolled in the course. We reflect upon the online seminar and discuss the technology and pedagogy, student learning experience, and process of online interaction. We conclude that this seminar, an innovation in both enquiry-based learning and first-year seminars, is arguably comparable with classroom-based offerings.

Supporting Political Science Education in UK Universities: The Role of the PSA Teaching and Learning Group

This article explores the work of the UK Political Studies Association Teaching and Learning Specialist Group in promoting the development of teaching and learning. It was prompted by the invitation to take part in a panel on ‘Advancing Political Science Education in Europe’ at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) 6th General Conference held in Reykjavik in August 2011. It begins with a brief overview of scholarship relating to political studies teaching, before turning to consider the activities of the Teaching and Learning Group. The article sets the work of the Group within the context of other bodies that promote learning and teaching such as the Higher Education Academy, before presenting some concluding observations on the potential for future collaboration at a European level.

Visual Classifier Training for Text Document Retrieval.

Performing exhaustive searches over a large number of text documents can be tedious, since it is very hard to formulate search queries or define filter criteria that capture an analyst's information need adequately. Classification through machine learning has the potential to improve search and filter tasks encompassing either complex or very specific information needs, individually. Unfortunately, analysts who are knowledgeable in their field are typically not machine learning specialists. Most classification methods, however, require a certain expertise regarding their parametrization to achieve good results. Supervised machine learning algorithms, in contrast, rely on labeled data, which can be provided by analysts. However, the effort for labeling can be very high, which shifts the problem from composing complex queries or defining accurate filters to another laborious task, in addition to the need for judging the trained classifier's quality. We therefore compare three approaches for interactive classifier training in a user study. All of the approaches are potential candidates for the integration into a larger retrieval system. They incorporate active learning to various degrees in order to reduce the labeling effort as well as to increase effectiveness. Two of them encompass interactive visualization for letting users explore the status of the classifier in context of the labeled documents, as well as for judging the quality of the classifier in iterative feedback loops. We see our work as a step towards introducing user controlled classification methods in addition to text search and filtering for increasing recall in analytics scenarios involving large corpora.

SFIA in Education and Workplace Learning

As this issue of ITNOW goes to print, the BCS Learning and Development Specialist Group will be celebrating its fifth anniversary and it has certainly been a year to remember. With this in mind Jooli Atkins FBCS, Group Chair, BCS L & D SG and Paul Jagger FBCS, IBM Certified Consulting Learning Specialist, report on one of the most important events of the group's fifth year; namely its first conference.

A Bayesian Approach to Ranking Private Companies Based on Predictive Indicators

Private equity investors seek to identify potential investment opportunities in growth stage private companies and rank their prospects relative to a cohort of companies such as an industry sector. Growth stage private companies often have investment transaction histories from which industry specific characteristics associated with successful and failed companies may be discerned using machine learning. In general, one of the primary challenges in pursuing this approach is the sparsity of historical data on private companies which is exacerbated in nascent sectors by the relatively few number of observed exits. This papers describes a four step predictive approach for ranking private companies within a cohort which can be applied to sparse industry specific historical data. This papers describes a four step approach based on (i) extracting and selecting features; (ii) training Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification models from feature pairs of labeled companies in an industry; (iii) estimating posterior probabilities of success and failure given a set of SVM model outputs; and (iv) ranking unlabeled companies within a cohort based on scores derived from posterior probability estimates. The main advantage of this ranking approach is that it includes labeled companies with missing features which would otherwise be excluded if the approach was based on the output of a single SVM model trained from higher dimensional feature sets. Being able to include labeled companies with missing data is a critical step towards a machine learning based methodology for ranking companies relative to an industry sector and we anticipate that this approach will not only be of interest to machine learning specialists with an interest in venture capital and private equity but extend to a broader readership whose interest is in other classification models applied to finance where missing data is the primary obstacle.

BBC Micro Past, Present and Future?

It's been just over 30 years since the BBC Microcomputer was launched by Acorn Computers in the United Kingdom, an event that inspired a generation of school children to learn about computers and programming at home and in schools. No surprise then that the recent Royal Society report (1) looking into the provision of computer science teaching and assessment in schools opens with mention of the BBC Micro. With the 30th anniversary of the BBC Micro in mind, IBM Certified Consulting Learning Specialist, Paul Jagger FBCS, reflects upon the BBC Micro - past, present and future.

Understanding and Self-Advocacy: Students with Learning Disabilities, Unrecognized Talent

This is the first phase of a two-phase project that looks at the relationship between diagnostic testing and self-advocacy for students with learning disabilities (LD) within post-secondary education. In this first phase, data was obtained using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with professionals within the field of LD: three learning specialists, two administration staff, and five LD testing administrators. All data was thematically coded. Two four-year public universities in Northern California (one, a prominent research institution) participated. Findings show that university administrators often see students with disabilities as having less “economic value” than students without disabilities. In an effort to reduce costs, bureaucratic barriers are created through policies and burdensome documentation processes, which make it more difficult for students to gain or utilize support services. The data shows that few students understand their LDs, the diagnostic tests used, and their rights as a person legally defined as having a disability. The findings indicate that students’ primary focus is not on fully understanding their diagnosis and its implications. Rather, the initial data suggests that current policies require students to concentrate their energies on the documentation requirements to gain needed resources, and consequently, lower the possibility for self-advocacy.

Book Review: Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the Learning Imperative for the 21st Century.

Book Review: Librarians as Learning Specialists: Meeting the Learning Imperative for the 21st Century.

Thank You for Ethics Reminder

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderInbox1 Oct 2011Thank You for Ethics Reminder Karen Wicklund Karen Wicklund Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.IN2.16122011.2 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In My heartfelt thanks for our president Dr. Rao’s reminder about our need to follow to the letter our Code of Ethics(Aug. 2, 2011). Dr. Rao mentions Mark Twain’s quote to “always do the right thing.” This thought reminds us to always do the right thing with our clients’ best interest in mind. As a private-practice speech-language pathologist specializing in voice disorders, I collaborate with a number of team professionals and referral sources who help guide my clients to their most effective treatment options. The ASHA Code of Ethics is included as an appendix of my textbook for guidance. Sometimes the right thing is to refer one’s client to an audiologist, psychologist, learning specialist, or other medical professional. Then our ethical responsibility becomes counseling our clients about the need for appropriate referrals when necessary. Karen WicklundChicago, Illinois Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 16Issue 12October 2011 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Oct 1, 2011 Metrics Current downloads: 91 Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagasha-article-typesleader-topicsCopyright & Permissions© 2011 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Shall we dance? The importance of staff-student relationships to undergraduate dissertation preparation

This article evaluates the factors that comprise the staff—student relationship as it relates to undergraduate dissertation preparation. By utilizing secondary and primary material the article pinpoints the emotionally charged backdrop to the dissertation — for both students and staff. The research points to the combined intellectual and counselling dimensions of the relationship. Data were generated through completed questionnaires by students either leading up to or finishing dissertations, by staff involved in dissertation advising at a single university, and by three international published specialists in teaching, learning and assessment. The research highlights the perceived importance of the staff—student relationship to all stages of dissertation production. Essential supervisor characteristics are identified, and the research culminates in the presentation of a student—supervisor ‘contract’ or guide, setting down their respective rights and responsibilities.

New Wine, New Wineskins

Academic libraries face an uncertain future. Rather than attempting to develop libraries based on an unknowable future, the author argues it is preferable to address student learning needs with a set of information and learning instructional services established on teaching and learning principles and activities. Evolving from and replacing the present academic library, this new organization, the information and learning center, is staffed by a new academic professional, the information and learning specialist, who addresses the student's need to gather and manage information, read, and write as an integrated set of experiences directed by the curriculum and teachers’ pedagogies.

Time to automate identification

Taxonomists should work with specialists in pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence, say Norman MacLeod, Mark Benfield and Phil Culverhouse — more accuracy and less drudgery will result.

Supporting Associate Teaching and Mentoring of Teacher Candidates: Building a Community of Practice

Associate teachers play a significant role in the preparation of pre-service teachers in Canadian universities. The literature on the subject indicates that the practicum component of the pre-service teacher education is considered by teacher candidates to be their most valuable learning experience. Therefore, Faculties of Education are constantly exploring new ways of engaging associates in re-imagining their role and clarifying expectations and support from the faculty. This paper presents preliminary findings from a survey of associate teachers conducted by the Faculty of Education at a mid-size, comprehensive university in south-western Ontario, Canada. The survey explored the perceptions of associate regarding their role, and sought feedback on supports that the faculty could offer strengthen the triumvirate relationship in teacher education. The study found that associates enthusiastically embrace their role as mentors and/or experiential learning specialists, and recommended closer ties with faculty personnel as collaborative opportunities with which to develop a community of practice in teacher education.

Automatic boosting of cross-product coverage using Bayesian networks

Closing the feedback loop from coverage data to the stimuli generator is one of the main challenges in the verification process. Typically, verification engineers with deep domain knowledge manually prepare a set of stimuli generation directives for that purpose. Bayesian networks based CDG (coverage directed generation) systems have been successfully used to assist the process by automatically closing this feedback loop. However, constructing these CDG systems requires manual effort and a certain amount of domain knowledge from a machine learning specialist. We propose a new method that boosts coverage in the early stages of the verification process with minimal effort, namely a fully automatic construction of a CDG system that requires no domain knowledge. Experimental results on a real-life cross-product coverage model demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.