Building a Web-based EFL Course with Open Source CMS in Vocational Colleges

Aiming to solve the existing problems with the Quality Course,an EFL online course is developed with an Open Source Course Management System(CMS).The principles and strategies of designing and constructing the course are discussed.The process of developing vocational college students'professional and social competence in the web-based environment is ex plored.Research results show the students are satisfied with the web-based EFL course and the teaching.

Studying Chinese Characters in a Web-Based Learning Environment: A Case Study of Swedish University Students

This survey study aims to investigate the perceptions learners have of the character-learning strategies they employ when taking a web-based course in Chinese.The seven Likert-scale statements are included in the questionnaire to examine learners’opinions on the three character-learning strategies that are widely used in traditional campus courses.A total of 65 students who completed the beginner level‘Chinese Characters’web-based course at a university in Sweden completed the survey.The results suggest that students in web-based courses consider these three strategies to be just as helpful and effective as campus students;moreover,the more orthodox strategy-rote learning-is found to be the most popular among distance students.Furthermore,findings of this study provide insight into the limitations and advantages associated with a web-based course,and also the possible effect learners’age and gender may have on learning strategy preferences.

Dominant Meaning Method for Intelligent Topic-Based Information Agent towards More Flexible MOOCs

The use of agent technology in a dynamic environment is rapidly growing as one of the powerful technologies and the need to provide the benefits of the Intelligent Information Agent technique to massive open online courses, is very important from various aspects including the rapid growing of MOOCs environments, and the focusing more on static information than on updated information. One of the main problems in such environment is updating the information to the needs of the student who interacts at each moment. Using such technology can ensure more flexible information, lower waste time and hence higher earnings in learning. This paper presents Intelligent Topic-Based Information Agent to offer an updated knowledge including various types of resource for students. Using dominant meaning method, the agent searches the Internet, controls the metadata coming from the Internet, filters and shows them into a categorized content lists. There are two experiments conducted on the Intelligent Topic-Based Information Agent: one measures the improvement in the retrieval effectiveness and the other measures the impact of the agent on the learning. The experiment results indicate that our methodology to expand the query yields a considerable improvement in the retrieval effectiveness in all categories of Google Web Search API. On the other hand, there is a positive impact on the performance of learning session.