University Learning Management System Research Articles

Using the TAM Model to Predict Undergraduate Distance Learners Behavioural Intention to Use the Makerere University Learning Management System

The purpose of the research was to predict the factors that affect the undergraduate distance learners behavioural intention to use the Makerere University E-learning Environment (MUELE) at Makerere university using the Learning Management System-Technolog...

Here, go read these papers: An approach to engage undergraduate and graduate research students with literature

One of the key tasks of a research mentor is to foster the skill of independent inquiry. Central to effective independent inquiry is the ability of students to extract meaningful value from the topical research literature. For several years, students applying to be part of the acoustics and vibrations lab at East Carolina University have been required to summarize a select research paper as part of the interview process. That task provides a valuable barometer to evaluate prospective research students. It also has provided the nucleus for an evolving system to mentor students through the process of learning how to effectively interact with topical literature. This system has been used both to onboard new research students and to support directed research and independent study courses. This talk will present the approach—implemented in an asynchronous and largely self-paced manner with the university learning management system—and some key case study examples.One of the key tasks of a research mentor is to foster the skill of independent inquiry. Central to effective independent inquiry is the ability of students to extract meaningful value from the topical research literature. For several years, students applying to be part of the acoustics and vibrations lab at East Carolina University have been required to summarize a select research paper as part of the interview process. That task provides a valuable barometer to evaluate prospective research students. It also has provided the nucleus for an evolving system to mentor students through the process of learning how to effectively interact with topical literature. This system has been used both to onboard new research students and to support directed research and independent study courses. This talk will present the approach—implemented in an asynchronous and largely self-paced manner with the university learning management system—and some key case study examples.

Predoctoral Curricular Revision for Dental Radiographic Interpretation Competence Based on OSCE Results.

Teaching radiographic interpretation skills to predoctoral dental students is challenging. The results of an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) at one U.S. dental school failed to yield expected outcomes for students' radiographic interpretation skills. The purpose of this article is to describe the development of the radiology OSCE and subsequent curricular revisions based on the outcomes. Examples of curricular changes are a series of self-assessed radiographic interpretation cases using the university learning management system. Each case contains a set of four intraoral radiographs and a series of questions. In year 4, an OSCE and final radiographic interpretation competency exam are administered; students are required to pass both exams. OSCE outcomes over a period of six years were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the curricular revisions. A questionnaire developed to capture student perceptions of the curricular changes was administered. The pilot OSCE of 2.9% first attempt pass rates initiated curricular revision. The strongest results to date occurred in 2018 with a 73.3% first attempt pass rate. Results from the questionnaire showed that students reported greater confidence in their interpretation skills when it came to recognizing radiographic errors, dental caries, and periodontal disease/pathologies (65%, 64%, and 57%, respectively). The use of the OSCE for programmatic assessment revealed the need for curricular revision in radiology. Students' participation in the newly revised radiology curriculum resulted in improved student performance and outcomes. This article emphasizes the importance of global and programmatic assessment for assessing student competence along with analysis of how assessment and accompanying data can inform curricular decisions.

Identifying and Classifying the Mindfulness of Medical Students on Effective Factors on the Effectiveness of a Learning Management System (LMS)

Introduction: Learning management system is one of the most effective methods in teaching and learning The present study aims to identify and categorize effective factors on the effectiveness of this system from students' point of view. Methods: The present study uses exploratory and '' Q method'. The study participants were Students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in academic year 2016-2017. According to the Q methodology, a small sample of participants were selected based on the purposeful sampling method for the interview Accordingly, 42 statements were identified. Then, 25 students were selected for quantitative study based on the targeted method. Content validity was used to assess the validity of the content and to evaluate reliability; Cronbach's alpha test was used. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 20 software. Result: The results showed that a good learning management system should have 42 characteristics from students' point of view. These characteristics led to the identification of six mental patterns, including; ease of use, accessibility, individual attention, positive attitude, independent learning, and usefulness. Conclusion: The effectiveness of a learning management system should be continuously evaluated from the point of view of its stakeholders. Therefore the six identified mental models in the present study are suggested as a guide and a model for designing and improving the quality of the learning management system in medical universities.

Social Media Usage Patterns in Higher Education Institutions – An Empirical Study

The main goal of this research is to identify some notable trends, opportunities and limitations regarding the application of social media in higher education based on studying the way students use social media during their education. The re-search is focused on the impact of social media on the process of learning, creation and distribution of education related content, as well as on education related communication. The target groups of the research are students in University of Economics Varna enrolled in different bachelor and master programs.
 An association analysis was implemented to identify the most common pat-terns regarding the application of social media in the education process. Statistical methods for testing hypothesis were used to assess the relationship between students’ specialty and derived social media patterns.
 The findings show that Facebook groups are а preferable social media tool for communication with colleagues, content sharing and distribution, while wikis and university Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are most used for content creation and additional learning. Some social media channels are more preferable for content creation and additional learning compared to scientific databases and e-books.
 Following the research results a conclusion can be drawn regarding the leading part of the students in initiating the use of social media compared to the relatively smaller role of the academic staff in this process. A medium to small relationships were discovered between students’ specialty and the application of con-tent sharing communities and forums in knowledge process with students in computer science more likely to use these social media types compared to students in economics.

The Design and Implementation of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE)

Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) is taken by students in the mathematics, science or engineering programs in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). This course was originally taught in the traditional way with the lecturer as the instructor. In 2014, this course evolved into the blended-learning mode i.e. a combination of classroom sessions and online sessions using the university learning management system. In 2017, a team of lecturers in the Tapah campus of UiTM decided to develop an instructional design of ODE using the MOOC platform. Students would then use the MOOC during the blended-learning hour. Five modules are offered in this MOOC. Lecture notes are presented using Prezi together with instructional videos and self-checking exercises. 55 students enrolled for the MOOC and were surveyed to gauge the initial impact of the MOOC as an instructional tool. More than 50% of the students said that the MOOC absolutely helped them to better understand the classroom sessions. Most of the students put in maximum effort in accessing the MOOC. The MOOC also helped to build up self-confidence of students in the course material. It is hoped that as the MOOC is further refined and improved, more students will benefit from the MOOC.

Using e-Delphi to formulate and appraise the guidelines for women's health concerns at a coal mine: A case study.

BackgroundE-Delphi is an online method widely used in health and social research to strengthen decision-making processes and reach consensus on developing guidelines for health services.ObjectivesThe e-Delphi technique was designed to formulate and appraise a set of criterion-referenced guidelines for women’s health concerns of mineworkers at a selected coal mine in Mpumalanga, South Africa.MethodThe University Learning Management System’s discussion forum was customised to suit the characteristics of e-Delphi as the second phase of a primary study on the formulation of guidelines for women’s health concerns. Six purposively sampled experts with extensive experience in Occupational Health and in Women’s Health participated. Online engagements on the formulation and appraisal of the guidelines for women’s health concerns took 7 weeks, divided into four phases as preparatory, exploratory, consensus and refinement. From the experts’ inputs, guidelines were drafted. Experts were invited to evaluate the guidelines by using a 7-point Likert scale with AGREE II criteria. Consensus was reached in two e-rounds.ResultsEight guidelines were formulated, appraised and adopted as: change management, control of hazardous environments, suitable psychosocial working environment, provision of health care service, uphold human dignity and adherence to human rights, effective measures for safety participation compliance, accessible, available and relevant on-site health care services and hope and resilience. Each guideline has rationale, operational strategies and anticipated outcomes.ConclusionE-Delphi platform used various tools to deliberate on the process of guidelines formulation and appraisal. The platform was convenient for the experts’ participation in the discussion at any time and anywhere.

Developing Executive Nurse Leaders: Exemplar for Using Information Technology to Bolster Professional Role Development of BSN-DNP Students.

Universities are offering a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) to Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) track to meet the demands of complex health systems by preparing nurses to lead change. Curriculums developed for the adult learner may benefit from adding supplemental resources to prepare nurses with limited leadership experience for their future roles. Support the development of executive leadership skills of BSN-DNP students. Faculty at a Western Pennsylvania university used the existing learning management system (LMS) to create a nursing leadership site. Practice competencies described by professional organizations were used as the framework for identifying best practice resources. A supplemental site serving as a repository of information for students was successfully developed. Students were encouraged to access the site to augment their learning on professional competencies. Developing an online support site via the university LMS was a creative solution for providing supplemental professional development content to best prepare future nurse executive leaders. Faculty teaching in streamlined academic programs can provide additional content based on professional standards to students using innovative and interactive methods. Promoting further development of executive leadership skills may bolster program strength and influence future nurse leaders.

Predicting academic performance by considering student heterogeneity

The capacity to predict student academic outcomes is of value for any educational institution aiming to improve student performance and persistence. Based on the generated predictions, students identified as being at risk of academic retention or performance can be provided support in a more timely manner. This study creates different classification models for predicting student performance, using data collected from an Australian university. The data include student enrolment details as well as the activity data generated from the university learning management system (LMS). The enrolment data contain student information such as socio-demographic features, university admission basis (e.g. via entry exam or past experience) and attendance type (e.g. full-time vs. part-time). The LMS data record student engagement with their online learning activities. An important contribution of this study is the consideration of student heterogeneity in constructing the predictive models. This is based on the observation that students with different socio-demographic features or study modes may exhibit varying learning motivations. The experiments validated the hypothesis that the models trained with instances in student sub-populations outperform those constructed using all data instances. Furthermore, the experiments revealed that considering both enrolment and course activity features aids in identifying vulnerable students more precisely. The experiments determined that no individual method exhibits superior performance in all aspects. However, the rule-based and tree-based methods generate models with higher interpretability, making them more useful for designing effective student support.

Students’ Learning Management System in Some Universities of Education in Vietnam: Facts and Solutions

The article focuses on assessing facts of students’ learning activities management in libraries at universities of education. In general, the implementing contents of students’ learning activities management in libraries at universities of education is of good level. Among them, the aspect that has been done best is management of students’ objectives, content, subject curricular in libraries at universities of education and conditions of assisting students’ learning at libraries. The content of management is implemented from the lowest level of managing disciplines of students’ learning at libraries. Basing on practical survey, the piece of writing proposed 6 measures to manage students’ learning activities in libraries at universities of education. If these 6 measures are implemented simultaneously, they are capable of enhancing efficiency of managing students’ learning activities in libraries at universities of education, which contributes to raising training quality of universities these days.

Meet the phallic lecturer: early career research in a neoliberal imaginary

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the concept of the phallic lecturer, a spectral figure negotiated in the early stages of a research career in education, when the relative freedom of doctoral study morphs into compliance with institutional demands. Awareness of the dominance of the phallic in education emerges from reading curriculum theorist Madeleine Grumet, feminist philosopher Judith Butler and academic Judith Baxter, whose feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis offers ways to engage with the addresses and imperatives of phallicism that move beyond traditional, masculinist discourse analysis. The article expands an initial study of how secondary teachers both comply with and subvert curricula and shifts to the pedagogical addresses of university learning management systems, as they call gendered subjectivities into being, interpellating junior academics as shining lights or failed subjects. These concepts are offered to other researchers seeking to speak back to the common sense demands of neoliberalism that prosthetically structure work in higher education.

Undergraduate Student Nurses' Use of Information and Communication Technology in Their Education.

Students expect to use technology in their study just as they use technology in other aspects of their life. Technology is embedded in the day-to-day work of nursing, and therefore needs to be integrated in education to prepare students to assume professional roles and develop skills for lifelong learning. A quantitative descriptive study, using an anonymous survey, explored how undergraduate student nurses from one New Zealand school of nursing, access information and communication technologies for their learning. In total 226 completed questionnaires were returned (75%). Nearly all students (96%) have smart phones, all students have a computer and 99% use the university learning management system daily or several times a week. The search engine most commonly used to find information for assignments was Google Scholar (91%), with only 78% using subject specific academic databases. Implications from this study include the need for charging stations and further education on information searching.

LSA Based Smart Assessment Methodology for SDN Infrastructure in IoT Environment

The Software Defined Network (SDN) is merged in the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect large and complex networks. It is used in the education system to interconnect students and teacher by heterogenous IoT devices. In this paper, the SDN-based IoT model for students’ Interaction is proposed which interconnects students to a teacher in a smart city environment. The students and teachers are free to move to anywhere, anytime and with any hardware. An architecture model for students’ teacher’s interaction in IoT is proposed which shows the details procedure about the interaction of teacher with students for electronic assessment. The SDN solves the scalability and interoperability issues between their heterogenous IoT devices. A Methodology for Students’ Answer Assessment using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is proposed which calculates the semantic similarity between teacher’s question and students’ answers. The LSA is used to calculate semantic similarity between text documents. It is used to mark the students’ answers automatically by semantics. The Students’ can see results through their IoT devices just after finishing the examination with more accurate marks We have collected fifty (50) undergraduate students’ data from Learning Management System (LMS) of Virtual University (VU) of Pakistan. The experiment is implemented on eighteen (18) students’ answers in R Studio with R version 3.4.2. Teachers are provided with four (4) bins of the mark while the proposed method assigns accurate marks. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology gave accurate results as compared to teacher’s marks.

Use of Learning Management Systems by the Undergraduates in Rajarata University of Sri Lanka

Learning management system is a widely used technique by educational institutes to provide online learning and teaching support for students and teachers. Although students tend to use many e-resources, use of learning management system is evidently low. This study aims to identify the factors that effect on use of leaning management system by undergraduates in Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. A sample of 150 students was selected for the study using purposive sampling technique and a structured questionnaire was used in data collection. Descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis were used in the data analysis. The result reveals that the lecturer support, students commitment and perceived usefulness have a significant effect on use of learning management system by the undergraduates in the university. The university should take initiatives to encourage academic staff for delivering lectures and conducting assessments through the university learning management system. Future studies could validate the findings of the present study using a larger sample representing other universities in the system.

Digital badges and library instructional programs: Academic library case study

ABSTRACTThis case study describes the planning, implementation, and migration process of Eastern University Library's information literacy digital badge. Prior to implementing a badging program, information literacy sessions were informally embedded in first-year college writing courses as a “one-shot” presentation. Spurred on by accreditation requirements, the library formalized its instruction by creating an information literacy digital badge. With a limited budget, low-cost tools such as Credly, Wordpress, and LearnDash were selected to serve as our delivery platforms. Through user feedback (both faculty and student), the library reevaluated the program and integrated the badge into the University's learning management system (LMS).

Online examiner calibration across specialties.

Integrating undergraduate medical curricula horizontally across clinical medical specialties may be a more patient-centred and learner-centred approach than rotating students through specialty-specific teaching and assessment, but requires some interspecialty calibration of examiner judgements. Our aim was to evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of an online pilot of interdisciplinary examiner calibration. Fair clinical assessment is important to both medical students and clinical teachers METHODS: Clinical teachers were invited to rate video-recorded student objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) performances and join subsequent online discussions using the university's learning management system. Post-project survey free-text and Likert-scale participant responses were analysed to evaluate the acceptability of the pilot and to identify recommendations for improvement. Although 68 clinicians were recruited to participate, and there were 1599 hits on recordings and discussion threads, only 25 clinical teachers rated at least one student performance, and 18 posted at least one comment. Participants, including rural doctors, appeared to value the opportunity for interdisciplinary rating calibration and discussion. Although the asynchronous online format had advantages, especially for rural doctors, participants reported considerable IT challenges. Our findings suggest that fair clinical assessment is important to both medical students and clinical teachers. Interspecialty discussions about assessment may have the potential to enrich intraspecialty perspectives, enhance interspecialty engagement and collaboration, and improve the quality of clinical teacher assessment. Better alignment of university and hospital systems, a face to face component and other modifications may have enhanced clinician engagement with this project. Findings suggest that specialty assessment cultures and content expertise may not be barriers to pursuing more integrated approaches to assessment.

Content strategy

This paper proposes an industry paradigm, called content strategy, for identifying data that has yet to be explored in learning analytics: student engagement data with individual online learning resources in a particular week of a course. Industry examples (including nine.com.au and Buzzfeed) suggest that adopting a content strategy approach to course design could increase student engagement with learning resources, making them more likely to achieve learning outcomes. Furthermore, this paper argues that there is no time left for blindness to content strategy data. Given the online context of curriculum, universities need content strategy to better align themselves with the student of today's user-centred internet. Finally, this paper draws on a university case study to identify existing challenges with implementing content strategy at university, including the limited capabilities of university learning management systems, limited instructor knowledge and copyright issues.

Analyzing the Effects of the Personality Traits on the Success of Online Collaborative Groups

Abstract The purpose of this study is to analyze how efficient online study groups can be formed among students based on their personality traits. A survey consisting of Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) was conducted among the undergraduate students in a well-known university. Eighty-two students who did not know each other were assigned to 35 small online groups based on their personality characteristics. The group members were then asked to study collaboratively on a task by communicating via the university's learning management system (LMS) forums. It was found that other factors (such as gender) were more effective than personality traits on the group success, and groups with lower degrees of Emotional Stability scores obtained higher grades over the task. This study is one of the first examples that hierarchically show different factors affecting the success of online groups with data mining techniques. The findings of the study will contribute to the field of online collaborative learning that is one of the most prominent subject in distance education.

Flipping organic chemistry course: Possibilities and challenges

The flipped classroom approach was applied to an introductory organic chemistry course. A total of 76 video clips (15 hours of running time) were developed and delivered to 41 sophomores (21 females and 20 males) through Youtube in addition to the university's learning management system. The students were asked to preview the lecture contents before each class by watching a pre-class video. For in-class activities, exercise problems were presented to groups of 3-5 students. An instructor and a teaching assistant guided each group to solve problems cooperatively, monitored the students’ group activity and answered their questions. At the end of every chapter, the students were asked to evaluate their group work and personal preparedness for the class and also to write a short reflective journal. The muddiest point of each chapter, i.e., the topic posing the most difficulty to students’ understanding, was surveyed through Google Forms®. The students liked watching the videos before each class and performing student-centered, in-class group activities but a few limitations were also found and reported.

Learning Management Systems: A Shift Toward Learning and Academic Analytics

This paper presents the major findings from a study conducted with six different universities in the U.S. regarding their use of the learning analytics (LA) capabilities available within their learning management systems (LMS). Data was collected from an online survey instrument, in-depth interviews with IT directors and academic administrators, and a case study in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. One observation is that universities are attempting to make better use of new analytics functions and the data stored in the university LMS in order to make more informed decisions regarding short-term and long-term goals and objectives. The new functions include analytics performed at the institutional level, college level, degree-program level, course level, and even course section level. Courses and degree programs as well as learning performance and objectives can be measured and analyzed using different goals, criteria, and accreditation requirements.