José Dutra de Oliveira Neto

Analysis of the Methods and Research Topics in a Sample of the Brazilian Distance Education Publications, 1992 to 2007

Abstract The objective of this study was to identify the methodological approaches employed in a sample of Brazilian distance education scientific literature and compare with similar publications in the United States. Brazilian sample articles (N = 983) published in several journals and meetings were compared with a sample of articles published in The American Journal of Distance Education (AJDE) from 1987 to 2006. A categorization system based on Gall, Gall, and Borg (2006) and Lee, Driscoll, and Nelson (2007) was used. The methodological approach employed in the Brazilian sample was predominantly qualitative, and this feature remained largely unchanged over the past seven years. The predominant research method continues to be exploratory, followed by case studies. Of note, the most frequent research topic in AJDE articles was evaluation, contrasting with the predominant topic of management in Brazilian publications.

INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION

This study aims to develop and implement a tool called intelligent tutoring system in an online course to help a formative evaluation in order to improve student learning. According to Bloom et al. (1971,117) formative evaluation is a systematic evaluation to improve the process of teaching and learning. The intelligent tutoring system may provide a timely and high quality feedback that not only informs the correctness of the solution to the problem, but also informs students about the accuracy of the response relative to their current knowledge about the solution. Constructive and supportive feedback should be given to students to reveal the right and wrong answers immediately after taking the test. Feedback about the right answers is a form to reinforce positive behaviors. Identifying possible errors and relating them to the instructional material may help student to strengthen the content under consideration. The remedial suggestion should be given in each answer with detaileddescription with regards the materials and instructional procedures before taking next step. The main idea is to inform students about what they have learned and what they still have to learn. The open-source LMS called Moodle™ was extended to accomplish the formative evaluation, high-quality feedback, and the communal knowledge presented here with a short online financial math course that is being offered at a large University in Brazil. The preliminary results shows that the intelligent tutoring system using high quality feedback helped students to improve their knowledge about the solution to the problems based on the errors of their past cohorts. The results and suggestion for future work are presented and discussed.

Support tools to assist scientific writing: assessment of key features to construct a system for production engineering

Scientific articles are the most frequently used channels for the dissemination of research results by thousands of researchers around the world. However, writing scientific papers is not an easy task, even for an experienced writer. There are several tools designed to assist in this important step, yet many knowledge areas require customised tools. This work presents the assessment of some of these tools in order to identify the type of support offered and the needs reported by the users, and then propose the key features desired in a tool suited for production engineering. The results are shown in a comparative table that lists the tools that were studied with the identified features, which enabled determining the main aspects for building a tool that can help researchers write papers related to production engineering.

MOOCS’ Potential for Democratizing Education: An Analysis from the Perspective of Access to Technology

MOOCs can be considered the fifth generation of distance education and can potentially provide access to quality education to students with disadvantaged background in developing countries. However, ensuring that MOOCs provide access to education to these students involves ensuring access to the necessary ICT infrastructure. The question is then whether the access to technology is truly democratic, especially in those countries. The aim of this study is then to assess the potential for democratization of quality education provided by MOOCs, considering the perspective of access to technology. To reach this objective, data obtained from 4.784 students from 27 universities in 9 Southern Hemisphere countries were analyzed. Results show that the potential for democratization of education provided by the MOOCs is limited by access barriers to technology, so that to fully realize their potential, governmental actions are necessary to democratize access to technology and promote the reduction of the digital skill gap.

Self-, peer- and professor assessment using rubrics in accounting

Additionally, the students’ perception regarding the peer assessment approach was collected. A sample of 52 undergraduate accounting students enrolled in a research methodology class from a public university in Brazil. A tool called “workshop” from Moodle LMS were used during in-class activity of creating an academic abstract. The student was required to post their own abstract and do a self-assessment, using a rubric, on his/her own posted abstract as well assess two other students’ abstract anonymously. An additional assessment was done by the instructor using the same rubric and compared to the students’ assessment. The result shows that the self-assessment and peer-assessment are not statistically different, but they underrated themselves relative to the instructor. The results also show that students perception of the importance of the peer assessment as a valuable tool for the learning process. The results are partially consistent with the literature. We conclude that the peer evaluation is a valuable tool for critical thinking and may help the education institution to assess the large number of assignments with small cost. The results of self and peer assessments do not demonstrate consistency with the results of instructor’s assessment and may be due to the training of the students, quality of the rubric, and maturity differences of the students and instructors. Keywords: Self-assessment, Peer-assessment, Teacher-assessment, rubrics

EVALUATION OF CRITICAL THINKING AND COGNITIVE PRESENCE IN ONLINE DISCUSSION FORUM

The process of teaching and learning in distance education requires the use of assessment strategiesand efficient and objective discussion forum stands out for promoting and guiding the collectiveconstruction of knowledge in online learning communities. But the evaluation methods of the forumsare still restrictive and subjective and disparage the evidence of cognitive development and criticalthinking of the participants. The objective of this paper is to present the model of Socratic forumcognitive and methodological tool that guides the assessment of critical thinking and cognitivepresence in discussion forum. The model recovers the principles of Socratic questioning of Paul(1993) and the presence of cognitive proposed by Garrison, Anderson & Archer (2001). Socraticforum called cognitive, the model was applied in two disciplines Course Improvement in DistanceLearning and Continuing Unicentro the UAB-Parana-Brazil held in 2011 and 2012. In this paper, wedescribe the application of the model and the results obtained in the course Public Policy at EADoffered in 2011 and 2012. For content analysis of forum posts and text-based discussion of thediscipline we used the basics of indexing and lexicometry, with support from Lexico3 ® software.Quantitative analysis of keywords involving a total of 166 students in 2011 and 360 students in 2012to 722 and 2415 respectively posted messages during the forum. For the qualitative analysis weselected the most significant messages of students who obtained a final average ≥ 7.0 in the disciplinein both editions of the course. The results show varying rates of vocabulary growth between studentsand a significant level of equivalence between the terms used in the messages and the key concepts inthe text-based indexed by the teacher. It is considered that the Socratic Forum stimulates thedevelopment of cognitive presence and cognitive skills of critical thinking, negotiation and reflection.

FORMATIVE AND CUSTOM DEBRIEFING IN BUSINESS SIMULATION

Context: The simulation games (SM) have shown potential to contribute to the process of experiential learning. Consonant with this potential, we observed an increase in production and use of SM in the last decade. Despite of the growth, there is concern about the quality of which is a critical success factor. Studies indicate that formative and personalized debriefing can help in improving the quality of the learning process. Gap: Although there are researches about debriefing, we found no national research about formative and custom debriefing in higher education.Purpose: Develop a model of formal and custom debriefing to JS in higher education. Methodology: The study sample comprised 66 undergraduate Business Administration students by using Marketing’s simulation. The debriefing proposed model was evaluated in two dimensions: efficiency of the facilitator using the DASH and financial performance the students in the game using the BSC.Results: The results indicate that the proposed debriefing had a direct impact on the evaluation of the facilitator. On average, about 70% of the members of the groups that received a formative and custom debriefing considered as good, very good or excellent, the efficiency of the facilitator, in addition, 50% of these groups improved financial performance in the next round. Conclusion: The proposed model of debriefing has the potential to increase student learning in undergraduate courses using SM, but we emphasize that the training of the facilitator is the key to success for this model.