Online Collaborative Environment Research Articles

Empowering Learning: A Review of Online Programming Tools and their Evolving Landscape

Abstract: The emergence of online programming tools has significantly impacted computer programming education. This review paper delves into the current research landscape surrounding these tools, analyzing their influence on learning outcomes, collaboration, and the potential of AI-powered personalized learning. The review explores the foundational role of online compilers and collaborative environments. It then examines recent advancements in AI, including adaptive coding tutors and AIpowered code completion.

Development of Learning Models in Core Competency Practice Courses Department of Mechanical Engineering Education Manado State University

The learning process obtained from universities to develop students' soft skills is also influenced by practical experience in the field. To develop soft skills in students, they have been given theories and practices that support the lessons in higher education, so that students have experience that can be used as a basis when entering the world of work. This research aims to develop a practical learning model in the Department of Mechanical Engineering Education, Manado State University. This research is developing research to develop a practical learning model. The online practice development model uses six interactions, namely interactions between students and lecturers, students with material, lecturers with material, students with students, lecturers with other lecturers, and material with material, through synchronous/asynchronous media. The results of this research show that the product developed is very suitable to be implemented to support online practical learning for core courses in higher education. This research has produced an online learning model for core subject practice with a flexible blended learning strategy at a low cost for students of the Mechanical Engineering Education Study Program. The resulting conclusion is that this model has the advantage of being able to create an online collaborative work environment. Validation by experts is carried out qualitatively and quantitatively.

Matching Learning Strategies in Online Group Collaboration with Cognitive Differences across Disciplines

This research investigates the dynamics of online group collaboration within Chinese universities, focusing on the current state of online learning platforms and the associated challenges and opportunities. Delving into cognitive differences across disciplines, the study seeks to understand cognitive diversity and extract disciplinary insights. The core of the research lies in proposing a framework for matching learning strategies in online group collaboration, considering the diverse cognitive profiles present in various disciplines. Challenges in the implementation of these strategies are explored, providing insights to address potential obstacles. The study concludes with reflections on the significance of tailored learning strategies and considerations for effective implementation in online collaborative environments.

Six Ideas for Building a Vibrant Online Professional Community

Building vibrant, online professional learning communities (PLCs) is crucial to combat the isolation experienced by online faculty and facilitate their professional growth, with strategies such as prioritizing relationship building, empowering all faculty with a voice, recognizing their achievements, ensuring relevant and targeted content, teaching best pedagogical practices, and accommodating faculty needs. By nurturing a supportive and collaborative online environment, institutions can help faculty overcome remote teaching challenges, connect them to valuable resources, and enhance their professional and personal fulfillment in their roles as online educators.

The Spanish experience of future classrooms as a possibility of smart learning environments

Developing advanced technologies and their integration into educational spaces generates new training opportunities. Examples of these are Future Classrooms (FC) and Smart Learning Environments (SLE), two concepts linked to educational innovation through technology but also have their differences. This paper aims to identify the similarities and differences between FC developed in the Spanish formal educational context concerning the theory of SLE. This study follows an exploratory research methodology using an ad hoc questionnaire applied transversally to a representative sample of teachers involved in the SLE (N = 66). SPSS V. 28 software was used. In relation to the results, some statistics (mean, standard deviation, kurtosis and skewness) were used to analyse the developed FC practices and professional satisfaction. In conclusion, the FC are at an initial stage of development in Spain, and although they could represent an approximation to what would be the practical basis of SLE, there are still several aspects to be developed, especially in relation to the technologies used and the dimension of attention to diversity. In relation to SLE technologies, they are related to the automation of certain processes and include artificial intelligence, learning analytics and sensors, among others. On the other hand, these technologies are not widely used in the FC, and the use of other more conventional technological resources, such as interactive whiteboards, online collaborative environments, LMS platforms, etc. In terms of attention to diversity, despite the existence of initiatives to personalise the learning experience in FC, assistive technologies are not considered, nor is automatic personalisation through certain SLE technologies.

Text presentation or video: Malaysian university students' preferences with synchronous and asynchronous learning.

In overcoming the obstacles of online learning with the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis, synchronous and asynchronous learning has been a significant part of teaching strategies applied by educators to construct a collaborative online environment with Malaysian university students. Synchronous learning has always been the most effective strategy for social learning, while asynchronous learning allows students to learn on their own schedule. Moreover, despite having many educational platforms created for higher educational settings, the practicality of selection between two teaching-learning approaches of text-presentation and video is still a debate among teachers/ lecturers with students' learning styles. Therefore, this paper explored Malaysian university students' preferences between synchronous and asynchronous learning modes with text-presentation or video. Qualitative and quantitative data from 178 participants from both public and private universities were collected via open and close-ended questions in the designed questionnaire. The findings indicated that 68% of the students preferred synchronous learning mode compared to asynchronous. Meanwhile, 39% of the students favoured both text-presentation and video learning tools to be implemented in synchronous and asynchronous approaches as it provided them better opportunities to grasp the learning content better. Thus, it can be concluded that the synchronous learning mode is preferred if only one method is provided as the students highly value the teacher's presence for ease of communication, but students prefer a range of delivery methods. Moreover, the students also displayed a strong preference for applying both text-presentation and video to achieve their learning outcomes.Thus, it is suggested that the university lecturers need to explore and apply interactive pedagogical methods in online teaching-learning process, while contributing to the development of motivation, participation, and engagement among the university students in acquiring their subjects. As such, the findings of this study have informed the pedagogical implications, and further studies are mandatory.

The Use of Personal Learning Environment to Support an Online Collaborative Strategy in Vocational Education Pedagogy Course

Online distance learning, on the one side, makes the learning process more efficient and flexible. However, on the other hand, it produces learning loss within a particular educational period and makes students less enthusiastic about building a collaborative attitude. In general, online learning platform providers have provided support for collaboration activity features, but in reality, they have not been able to support effective interaction. Experts believe that using the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as an IT tool in the learning process can help create an effective online collaboration environment. This study found that PLE was proven to increase collaborative activities in online learning significantly. The reflection feature is the type of PLE that has the most significant influence on creating a good collaboration environment. The research also found that suitable collaborative activities can increase students' understanding of TVET pedagogy.

Learning Flexibility and Innovation in the Post-Covid-19 Pandemic Era

Educators employ technology in the twenty-first century to build knowledge and soft skills to enhance competencies that fit with the demands of the workplace. With the advent of new technologies in education, instructors' perspectives on the learning process have shifted. We employ a research-based method to assist students in learning to program. Analysing an online collaboration environment enables the use of several solutions. In a group, collaboration does not occur spontaneously. This project aims to build student understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic both during and after it occurs. The findings indicated that in an online and offline collaboration setting, student learning success, particularly in computer programming abilities, rose compared to traditional collaborative classrooms. Additionally, students who studied using the suggested strategy improved their cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor learning outcomes.

Epistemic agency for costructuring expansive knowledge‐building practices

AbstractAs a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: “reflective structuration” by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever‐evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher's support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Distribution of labor, productivity and innovation in collaborative science

In this paper, we investigate the process of scientific discovery using an under-exploited source of information: the Polymath projects. Polymath projects are an original attempt to solve a series mathematical problems collectively and in a collaborative online environment. To investigate the Polymath experiment, we analyze all the posts related to the projects that have resulted in a peer-reviewed publication. We focus in particular on the organization of the scientific labor and on the innovations that result from the contributions of the different authors. We find that a high presence of occasional contributors increases the productivity of the most active users and the overall productivity of the forums (i.e., the number of posts grows super-linearly with the number of contributors). We argue that, in large-scale collaborations, the serendipitous interaction between occasional contributors can be crucial to the scientific process, and individual contributions from occasional participants can open new directions of research.

Forecasting Models of Natural Gas

In recent times, there has been immense research in the machine learning and artificial intelligence field. Resulting into a gigantic collection of research papers, well formatted textbooks and countless frameworks that have been developed. Even though individuals are open to such enormous resources, the best way to learn ML algorithms is to implement them. Individuals often find this difficult not only because of math, but also due to the exponentially difficult debugging, software upgrade patch or fix, and fear of programming for individual enthusiasts from other fields. Some of these difficulties can be eliminated by creating an online collaborative environment, which is setup free, provides a visual framework, and helps in understanding and implementing the basic and research algorithms. In this project, we are trying to create an online collaborative environment named “Visual Prediction”, which is an online application that promotes visual based learning and provides a GUI based ML framework. The platform will support collaborative learning for users analysing similar data, by sharing their approach, insights and algorithms to tackle generalized problems. The following Paper ensure to provide the methodologies used for development of the application. It provides the obtained outcomes of the features developed within the application.

The development of an implementation framework to support knowledge construction in online networked learning

ABSTRACT A networked learning community (NLC) comprises teachers from different schools engaging collaboratively in purposeful and sustained professional learning. Networked learning entails the construction of knowledge that is new to the members of the group by tapping their collective practitioner knowledge and the public knowledge base. Members can use technology to engage in knowledge construction in a sustained NLC environment even though they may not be able to meet face to face regularly. This paper outlines the development, aided by the design-based research methodology, of an implementation framework to support knowledge construction in online collaboration groups by NLCs in Singapore. Findings from an empirical research on interactions within NLCs’ online collaboration groups and members’ perceptions of online knowledge construction informed the development of the implementation framework. Feedback obtained from a field test of the framework revealed the importance of ensuring members recognise the importance of co-owning and co-leading the knowledge construction in online collaborative environments. The framework can inform the work of NLCs, particularly in the challenging aspect of sustaining technology-supported knowledge construction that is co-led and co-facilitated by teachers.

A conceptualization of factors affecting collaborative knowledge building in online environments

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the major findings of published research on the factors influencing students’ knowledge building in an online collaborative environment. Design/methodology/approach The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses was used to review and synthesize existing empirical studies on knowledge building in a collaborative learning context. In total, 24 studies were identified from major electronic bibliographic databases. The research was conducted between 2017 and 2019. Results of these studies were analyzed to determine potential factors that may influence the knowledge-building process among students. Findings Factors related to interaction and participation, task, student and support were found to be the major factors driving students’ knowledge building in the online collaborative learning environment. The association between these factors and certain collaborative tasks was mapped. Originality/value Findings from this review can help decision makers of higher education in both developing and developed countries to take the necessary steps in order to promote effective knowledge-building practices in online collaborative learning. It may also help educational policy makers to understand the particulars of collaborative knowledge-building practices, so to increase organizational overall effectiveness and performance.

Enabling Collaborative Numerical Modeling in Earth Sciences using Knowledge Infrastructure

Knowledge infrastructure is an intellectual framework for creating, sharing, and distributing knowledge. In this paper, we use knowledge infrastructure to address common barriers to entry into numerical modeling in Earth sciences as demonstrated in three computational narratives: physical process modeling education, replicating published model results, and reusing published models to extend research. We outline six critical functional requirements: 1) workflows designed for new users; 2) community-supported collaborative web platform; 3) distributed data storage; 4) software environment; 5) personalized cloud-based high-performance computing platform; and 6) a standardized open source modeling framework. Our methods meet these functional requirements by providing three interactive computational narratives for hands-on, problem-based research using Landlab on HydroShare. Landlab is an open-source toolkit for building, coupling, and exploring two-dimensional numerical models. HydroShare is an online collaborative environment for the sharing of data and models. We describe the methods we are using to accelerate knowledge development by providing a suite of modular and interoperable process components that allows students, domain experts, collaborators, researchers, and sponsors to learn by exploring shared data and modeling resources. The system is designed to support uses on the continuum from fully-developed modeling applications to prototyping research software tools. Landlab notebooks are available for interactive computing on HydroShare at https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.fdc3a06e6ad842abacfa5b896df73a76 and for further development on Github at https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/187289993.

Fashion designer, fashion consumer, fashion learner

Fashion Design is a complex sector, formed by scattered consumers and companies, by non-linear models of production and by dynamic information flow. Sustained by technology pervasiveness fashion designers and fashion consumers create content around fashion brands, beyond the formality of products. New models of consumption fashion push new models of fashion design and should be pushing new models of learning. What kind of learning model can better prepare future professionals to contribute to the sector? This paper hypothesizes that online collaborative environments represent a valid alternative to recognize fashion designers, as fashion consumers, as ‘lifelong’ fashion learners. We confronted the results obtained in previous studies with recent data gathered from providers about consumer behavior on global online and mobile usage and penetration, fashion design sector in Europe and fashion design ‘e-commerce’ worldwide. The results demonstrated that although fashion figured as the most significant eCommerce segment in 2017, fashion design higher education programs offered online are either non-existent or merely transpose the traditional lecture-based education models to online settings. This paper also presents heutagogical principles for fashion design higher education, demonstrating how they could collaborate to bring together fashion consumption, fashion design development, and fashion design learning.

Measuring Relevant Information in Health Social Network Conversations and Clinical Diagnosis Cases.

The Internet and social media is an enormous source of information. Health social networks and online collaborative environments enable users to create shared content that afterwards can be discussed. The aim of this paper is to present a novel methodology designed for quantifying relevant information provided by different participants in clinical online discussions. The main goal of the methodology is to facilitate the comparison of participant interactions in clinical conversations. A set of key indicators for different aspects of clinical conversations and specific clinical contributions within a discussion have been defined. Particularly, three new indicators have been proposed to make use of biomedical knowledge extraction based on standard terminologies and ontologies. These indicators allow measuring the relevance of information of each participant of the clinical conversation. Proposed indicators have been applied to one discussion extracted from PatientsLikeMe, as well as to two real clinical cases from the Sanar collaborative discussion system. Results obtained from indicators in the tested cases have been compared with clinical expert opinions to check indicators validity. The methodology has been successfully used for describing participant interactions in real clinical cases belonging to a collaborative clinical case discussion tool and from a conversation from a health social network. This work can be applied to assess collaborative diagnoses, discussions among patients, and the participation of students in clinical case discussions. It permits moderators and educators to obtain a quantitatively measure of the contribution of each participant.

Pensoft’s ARPHA Publishing Platform top innovations in OA publishing as demonstrated by Subterranean Biology

There are three key challenges that need to be addressed by journal publishers nowadays: increasing machine-readability and semantic enrichment of the published content to allow text and data mining, aggregation and re-use; adopting open science principles to expand from publication of mainly research articles to all research objects through the research cycle, and facilitating all of this to authors, reviewers and editors through novel and user-friendly technological solutions. increasing machine-readability and semantic enrichment of the published content to allow text and data mining, aggregation and re-use; adopting open science principles to expand from publication of mainly research articles to all research objects through the research cycle, and facilitating all of this to authors, reviewers and editors through novel and user-friendly technological solutions. ARPHA stands for: Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, all in one place. ARPHA is the first publishing platform to support the full life cycle of a manuscript within a single online collaborative environment. The platform consists of two interconnected but independently functioning journal publishing workflows: ARPHA-XML: Entirely XML- and Web-based, collaborative authoring, peer review and publication workflow; ARPHA-DOC: Document-based submission (PDF, or text files), peer review and publication workflow. ARPHA-XML: Entirely XML- and Web-based, collaborative authoring, peer review and publication workflow; ARPHA-DOC: Document-based submission (PDF, or text files), peer review and publication workflow. A full list of services provided by ARPHA is available at: http://arphahub.com/about/services Furthermore, Pensoft has been heavily investing in the technological advancement of its journals. The most significant technologies implemented by Pensoft as demonstrated also by the journal Subterranean Biology in the recent years are: Automatic registrations of reviews at Publons - Publons helps reviewers and editors get recognition for every review they make for the journal; Dimensions - powerful tracker of citations, which provides ranking of given research in a given field; Scopus CiteScore Metrics - interactive tool providing information on journal’s performance; Еxport of published figures & supplementary materials to Biodiversity Literature Repository at ZENODO - increases visibility and traceability of article and sub-article elements; Hypothes.is - tool allowing annotations on selected texts from the published article. Automatic registrations of reviews at Publons - Publons helps reviewers and editors get recognition for every review they make for the journal; Dimensions - powerful tracker of citations, which provides ranking of given research in a given field; Scopus CiteScore Metrics - interactive tool providing information on journal’s performance; Еxport of published figures & supplementary materials to Biodiversity Literature Repository at ZENODO - increases visibility and traceability of article and sub-article elements; Hypothes.is - tool allowing annotations on selected texts from the published article.

Forming shared inquiry structures to support knowledge building in a grade 5 community

This study explores the reflective processes by which a grade 5 science community co-constructed shared inquiry structures to focus and guide its inquiry about human body systems over a school year supported by a collaborative online environment. The co-constructed structures included a list of collective wondering areas as the shared focus of inquiry and models of the inquiry process in the form of “research cycle.” Qualitative analyses of field notes, classroom videos, student notebooks and interviews elaborate the evolution of the inquiry areas and the “research cycle” model as well as students’ adaptive use of the structures to guide deeper inquiry. Content analyses of students’ individual research questions and collaborative online discourse indicate that students used the structures to develop more advanced inquiry and make productive contributions. The results contribute to elaborating a reflective structuration approach to co-organizing and sustaining long-term, open-ended inquiry in knowledge building communities.

Relationships between Learning Styles, Perceived Advantages of Online Collaborative Learning and Practical Knowledge in Teaching among Taiwanese Student Teachers

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the three learning styles (collaborative, competitive, and individualistic) on the perceived advantage of collaborative learning (PAoCL) and practical knowledge in teaching (PKiT) among Taiwanese student teachers in an online collaborative environment. This study built a Facebook Group and developed the tasks of collaborative learning based on field-experience courses. The participants were required to share various practical experiences as the collaborative learning tasks. A total of 100 student teachers who enrolled in field-based courses between August 2016 and January 2017 participated in this study and were required to complete a validated survey in January 2017. This study determined the relationships between the three learning styles and PAoCL and PKiT and further identified predictors of online collaborative learning. The collaborative learning style of student teachers was positively associated with their PAoCL, while competitive learning style was correlated with their PKiT. Accordingly, teacher educators can encourage student teachers to share experiences about teaching practices during participating in field-experience courses through online collaboration. However, teacher educators should remind the student teachers to transfer the online information into PKiT.

The appropriation of GitHub for curation

GitHub is a widely used online collaborative software development environment. In this paper, we describe curation projects as a new category of GitHub project that collects, evaluates, and preserves resources for software developers. We investigate: (1) what motivates software developers to curate resources; (2) why curation has occurred on GitHub; (3) how curated resources are used by software developers; and (4) how the GitHub platform could better support these practices. We conduct in-depth interviews with 16 software developers, each of whom hosts curation projects on GitHub. Our results suggest that the motivators that inspire software developers to curate resources on GitHub are similar to those that motivate them to participate in the development of open source projects. Convenient tools (e.g., Markdown syntax and Git version control system) and the opportunity to address professional needs of a large number of peers attract developers to engage in curation projects on GitHub. Benefits of curating on GitHub include learning opportunities, support for development work, and professional interaction. However, curation is limited by GitHub’s document structure, format, and a lack of key features, such as search. In light of this, we propose design possibilities to encourage and improve appropriations of GitHub for curation.