The knowledge economy demands a highly skilled and well-rounded work force. However, because traditional institutions cannot meet the demand for post-secondary education, technological innovations, particularly distance learning, are becoming the solution for increased access. As distance programs are developed for global delivery, cultural and linguistic issues must be considered. Pedagogical ...

The introduction of elearning often leads to an increase in the time staff spends on tutoring. To alleviate the workload of staff tutors, we developed a model for organizing and supporting learner related interactions in elearning systems. It makes use of the knowledge and experience of peers and builds on the assumption that (lifelong) learners, when instructed and assisted carefully, should b...

Learner corpora collect the language produced by people learning their first or a second language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with the representation and the automatic analysis and generation of human language. The two thus overlap in the representation and automatic analysis of learner language, which constitutes the topic of this chapter. As such, the chapter focuses on one of th...

This article proposes a framework for web-based language learning support systems designed to provide customizable pedagogical procedures based on the analysis of characteristics of both learner and course. This framework employs a course-centered ontology and a teaching method ontology as the foundation for the student model, which includes learner knowledge status and learning preferences. A ...

Social adaptive e-learning combines, threads and balances the amount of social and adaptive features for e-learning in order to achieve high-quality Learner eXperience (LX). Evaluating a social adaptive e-learning system is a difficult task due to its complexity. It is crucial to ensure that appropriate evaluation methods and measures are used. A User-centric approach serves the empirical syste...

An investigation of learner satisfaction in an online learning environment can lead to improvement in designing an online course or its task, and gives the course facilitator the opportunity to re-focus computer integrated learning environment. In this paper, five key areas of online learning environments, vis. peer interaction, tutor support, online task, technology support, and knowledge acqu...

This paper describes a system which incorporates natural language technologies, database manipulation and educational theories in order to offer learners a Negotiated Learner Model, for integration into an Intelligent Tutoring System. The system presents the learner with their learner model, offering them the opportunity to compare their own beliefs regarding their capabilities with those infer...

Open and Distance Learning (ODL) gives learners freedom of time, place and pace of study, putting learner self-direction centre-stage. However, increased responsibility should not come at the price of over-burdening or abandonment of learners as they progress along their learning journey. This paper introduces an approach to wayfinding support for distance learners based on self-organisation th...

Evidence is mounting from a number of studies undertaken with groups of learners of all ages and all abilities that there is a particular factor common to successful language learners: strategic competence involving the use of appropriate learning strategies. The growing body of research into this area has not, however, had much to say so far about the special situation of those learning a lang...