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Open social learning communities

Published: 25 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

With the advent of open education resources, social networking technologies and new pedagogies for online and blended learning, we are in the early stages of a significant disruption in current models of education. The disruption is fueled by a staggering growth in demand. Open Social Learning systems open a new venue for self-motivated learners to access high quality learning materials. In this paper, we describe our vision of open social learning and introduce a cyber-infrastructure that supports a large-scale open social learning community in order to facilitate self-guided learning.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)PhenomenologyProceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists 201910.1145/3351108.3351112(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Employing community question answering for online discussions in university coursesComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2019.02.017135:C(75-90)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
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Reviews

Barrett Hazeltine

In this paper, the authors describe a set of Web technologies that support learning on the Internet: technologies for collaboration, systems to connect learners with relevant content, tools to assess learning outcomes, and techniques to establish social capital. The set is called "OpenStudy,"? and is available at http://openstudy.com. A successful online learning experience requires both content and "an engaging online interaction experience (community)."? Typical online courseware does not meet the second need for an open social learning community; OpenStudy aims to. OpenStudy informs users who is online, promotes question-asking by directing questions appropriately, facilitates joining discussions, and thanks a user for help. The authors also claim that it offers "really real-time"? chat. OpenStudy was launched in September 2010, and has over 25,000 students from more than 150 countries. User profiles help to match users across study groups, growing a learning community. OpenStudy classifies users as enthusiastic, casual, or passive, and routes them accordingly, to reduce the load on topic experts. Under development is a social-semantic recommender system to reformulate user queries to match existing discussions. Also under development is a set of learning analytics to improve OpenStudy and allow self-assessment by learners. Preliminary evaluations have been positive. It does seem clear that collaborative learning is effective for many students, and that online learning generally lacks an opportunity for students to interact. The approach presented here seems very promising. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WIMS '11: Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics
May 2011
563 pages
ISBN:9781450301480
DOI:10.1145/1988688
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 25 May 2011

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  1. social learning

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)PhenomenologyProceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists 201910.1145/3351108.3351112(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Employing community question answering for online discussions in university coursesComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2019.02.017135:C(75-90)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
  • (2017)Monitoring, awareness and reflection in blended technology enhanced learningInternational Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning10.5555/3124918.31249209:2-3(126-150)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
  • (2017)Education-specific Tag Recommendation in CQA SystemsAdjunct Publication of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3099023.3099081(281-286)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2017
  • (2016)SlideQAProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2851581.2892432(1229-1235)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
  • (2016)Initiatives and experiences in open educational resources (OER) in higher education: A reflective roadmap2016 International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE)10.1109/SIIE.2016.7751863(1-6)Online publication date: Sep-2016
  • (2015)AskalotProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2685553.2699001(179-182)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015
  • (2013)A Transitive Recommendation System for Information Technology CommunitiesActa Informatica Pragensia10.18267/j.aip.92:1(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2013
  • (2012)Classroom salonProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157196(197-202)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
  • (2011)Is social software really a “killer app” in the education of net generation students? Findings from a case studyLibrary Hi Tech News10.1108/0741905111118404328:7(14-17)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2011

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