Online Support Tools Research Articles

Can social support work virtually? Evaluation of rheumatoid arthritis patients' experiences with an interactive online tool.

There is strong empirical evidence that the support that chronic patients receive from their environment is fundamental for the way they cope with physical and psychological suffering. Nevertheless, in the case of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), providing the appropriate social support is still a challenge, and such support has often proven to be elusive and unreliable in helping patients to manage the disease. To explore whether and how social support for RA patients can be provided online, and to assess the conditions under which such support is effective. An online support tool was designed to provide patients with both tailored information and opportunities to interact online with health professionals and fellow sufferers. The general purpose was to identify where the support provided did - or did not - help patients, and to judge whether the determinants of success lay more within patients - their engagement and willingness to participate - or within the design of the website itself. The present study reports qualitative interviews with 19 users of the tool. A more specific purpose was to elaborate qualitatively on results from a quantitative survey of users, which indicated that any positive impact was confined to practical matters of pain management rather than extending to more fundamental psychological outcomes such as acceptance. Overall, online learning and interaction can do much to help patients with the everyday stresses of their disease; however, its potential for more durable positive impact depends on various individual characteristics such as personality traits, existing social networks, and the severity and longevity of the disease.

Online support: Impact on anxiety in women who experience an abnormal screening mammogram

ObjectivesTo determine whether an online support tool can impact anxiety in women experiencing an abnormal mammogram. Materials and methodsWe developed an online support system using the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) designed for women experiencing an abnormal mammogram as a model. Our trial randomized 130 of these women to online support (the intervention group) or to a list of five commonly used Internet sites (the comparison group). Surveys assessed anxiety and breast cancer worry, and patient satisfaction at three important clinical time points: when women were notified of their abnormal mammogram, at the time of diagnostic imaging, and at the time of biopsy (if biopsy was recommended). ResultsStudy participants in the intervention group showed a significant decrease in anxiety at the time of biopsy compared to the comparison group (p = 0.017). However, there was no significant difference in anxiety between the intervention group and the comparison group at the time of diagnostic work-up. We discontinued assessment of patient satisfaction after finding that many women had substantial difficulty answering the questions that referenced their physician, because they did not understand who their physician was for this process of care. ConclusionThe combination of the inability to identify the physician providing care during the mammography work-up and anxiety effects seen only after an interaction with the breast imaging team may indicate that online support only decreases the anxiety of women in concert with direct interpersonal support from the healthcare team.

An experimental study of software agent negotiations with humans

Electronic negotiations allow participants to negotiate online and use analytical support tools in making their decisions. Software agents offer the possibility of automating negotiation process using these tools. This paper aims at investigating the prospects of agent-to-human negotiations using experiments with human subjects. Various types of agents have been configured using the following tactics: individualistic, neutral, yielding, yielding-then-individualistic, and absolute tit-for-tat. These agents were paired up with human counterparts for negotiating product sale. A set of hypotheses has been proposed involving the performance of agents, as well as humans in terms of objective, as well as subjective measures. Overall, the findings speak in favor of agent-managed negotiations.

The Development of an Online Support Tool for the Teaching and Learning of the IEEE Standard 1500 for Embedded Core-based Integrated Circuits

In this paper, an online education tool for assisting the teaching and learning of the IEEE 1500 standard testability method, used to support the testing of complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) integrated circuits (ICs), is developed and presented. The tool is an Internet browser based tool that supports the ability to investigate key aspects of the standard and its application to embedded core-based IC designs. The tool allows the user to create VHDL descriptions of both the test circuitry and the function circuitry via the Internet browser interface. The key considerations for developing this tool were to provide a computer based learning tool to support the teaching and learning of the standard and its application. This paper is an extended version of a paper presented at the EDUCON 2012 conference in April 2012.

Developing Web-based online support tools: The Dartmouth decision support software.

This article discusses the development of Web-based online decision support tools intended for researchers examining the issue of shared decision making for the population of individuals with serious mental illnesses. The authors describe the background and use of decision support tools to facilitate shared decision-making between individuals diagnosed with a psychiatric condition and clinicians and describes a novel software platform that allows researchers and other system designers to build decision support systems. In supporting ongoing research efforts, an online decision support tool appears to be useful for individuals facing preference-sensitive decisions and an online designer tool allows for rapid deployment of these research sites to support ongoing research efforts in shared decision making.

Evaluation of an Online Tool for Assessing Competence in Achievement Testing

Special education teacher preparation programs typically require training in delivery of standardized achievement assessments. Appropriate administration of standardized assessments in eligibility and instructional planning process are critical. To insure production of valid assessments, pre-service teachers at Utah State University must deliver a valid checkout assessment directly to course instructors. On-campus, this process is accomplished with ease. However, when the course is offered at a distance, cost of checkouts is substantially greater. To reduce costs, checkouts were conducted over a teleconferencing system using an online support tool. In this article, authors describe online checkout procedures and an initial evaluation of the online tool to facilitate valid assessments of pre-service special education teachers' achievement test delivery skills over a distance delivery system.

Constructing a ‘third space’ for EFL learners: Where language and cultures meet

Efforts have been made by language educators and researchers to use computer technology to assist L2 learners’ growth in either linguistic or intercultural competence. Nonetheless, web-based environments devoted to developing both types of competences in tandem are new and experimental. The purpose of this project, which involves the collaboration of EFL educators and computer engineers in Taiwan, is to establish an innovative web-based environment to support students in tertiary levels to develop both types of competences. This web-based EFL learning environment experiments with a few main features: (1) instead of reading articles about a foreign culture, the users of this website read articles about their native culture; (2) two on-line computer-based support tools, a bilingual concordancer and a dictionary, are made available to provide students with contextual supports for language learning; and (3) discussion boards are provided for intercultural communication. The web-based learning environment contains several instructional units. While working on a unit, students read an article and then answer comprehension and vocabulary questions. After reading, students share their responses to the articles with intercultural conversation partners via online forums. To evaluate the effectiveness of the learning environment, the researcher recruited a group of Taiwanese university students to test-use the system. Frequencies of the uses of the two e-referencing tools were calculated. The students’ responses to a questionnaire were examined and informal interviews with the students were conducted. Finally, the students’ forum entries were analyzed. The findings revealed initial interest in using e-referencing tools but a dramatic decrease in use after the first few units had been completed. The students used the concordancer as a link to extensive reading materials and suggested adding pronunciation tools to the dictionary. Questionnaire findings showed that students were generally satisfied with the design of the web-based learning environment. An analysis of the students’ forum entries revealed increases in the length and complexity of sentences in their writings, as well as reductions in grammatical errors, as more units were completed. As for intercultural learning, the content analysis of the forum entries demonstrated different types of intercultural competences. Based on the findings, some implications for revision of the virtual environment to enable more effective learning of English as a foreign language and greater development of intercultural competence are drawn.

Multimedia in the Business English Classroom: The Learners' Point of View

Besides the internet and the various opportunities it provides for language learning, the multimedia CD-ROM, with its potential for integrating and offering different media in one storage medium, has created quite a stir amongst language teaching professionals in the 90s. The benefits of multiple modalities, online support tools, and instant feedback are believed to have the potential of increasing learner control, motivation, and autonomy. However, a closer look at what is actually available on the market, in this instance the sub-market of Business English multimedia programmes, reveals that many such learning tools fall short of the claims that have been made for them, at least in the eyes of pedagogues. As teachers and students do not always see eye-to-eye as far as the usefulness of particular learning tools and activities is concerned, it seems paramount to let the final user and ultimate target group have their say, as well. The present study focuses on the reactions and comments of 30 students of Business English during and after a semester-long use of a CD-ROM presenting the language of negotiating, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the programme as perceived by the respondents.

Use of the ADAMO data management system within ALEPH

ADAMO is a data management system for defining data and manipulating them from FORTRAN programs. A form of the Entity-Relationship (ER) model and the data flow diagrams of structured analysis have been combined to provide a system suited to algorithmic work. The FORTRAN interface consists of calls to a subroutine package with a few data manipulation primitives. Data items are visible in variables carrying meaningful names; the code is compact and readable. The ER data structures, mapped onto tables, are compatible with a relational data base management system. Tools have been written to copy tables to and from a relational data base. The system has been used for several applications in the fields of event simulation and reconstruction, online systems, detector description, support tools and packages.