INTRODUCTION An one hour didactic lecture is the common method of teaching in dental colleges in India. Lengthy lectures are boring and students are passive recipients of the information. Interactive lectures are suggested as a means of overcoming the disadvantages of regular lectures. AIMS The present study was conducted to pilot various methods of making lectures interactive and to find the...

A cohort of first-year biology students was surveyed regarding their opinions and viewing habits for live and recorded lectures. Most respondents (87%) attended live lectures as a rule (attenders), with 66% attending more than two-thirds of the lectures. In contrast, only 52% accessed recordings and only 13% viewed more than two-thirds of the available recordings. Respondents regarded lectures ...

This paper presents the approaches IRIT developed for the VLNetChallenge regarding recommender systems in the context of video lectures. The first task aims at recommending newly acquired lectures after viewing an “old” lecture. We use random walk algorithms based on a graph composed of author, category, event, and lecture nodes and associated relationships. The second task aims at recommending...

With the ever increasing popularity of emails, it is very common nowadays that people discuss specific issues, events or tasks among a group of people by emails. Those discussions can be viewed as conversations via emails and are valuable for the user as a personal information repository. For instance, in 10 minutes before a meeting, a user may want to quickly go through a previous discussion v...

Branching story games have gained popularity for creating unique playing experiences by adapting story content in response to user actions. Research in interactive narrative (IN) uses automated planning to generate story plans for a given story problem. However, a story planner can generate multiple story plan solutions, all of which equally-satisfy the story problem definition but contain diff...

This study, situated in an EFL context, aimed at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities  influence  vocabulary  knowledge  gain  and  retrieval.  Seventy  five  elementary  learners of  English  were  randomly  assigned  to  three  groups  of  ‘free  reading’,  ‘reading  comprehension’ and ‘reading to summarize’. A modified text was administered to all the three groups. The dat...

We propose a solution for detecting and summarizing human activities from a large amount of video. A video is divided into short segments(called stories), and a set of simple motion/image features are computed for each image frame. Prototypical elementary action patterns(called action events) is constructed by vector quantization on these features.A bipartite graph is constructed by taking stor...

In a human dialogue it is usually considered inappropriate if one conversant monopolizes the conversation. Similarly it can be inappropriate for a natural language database interface to respond with a lengthy list of data. A non-enumerative "summary" response is less verbose and often avoids misleading the user where an extensional response might. In this paper we investigate the problem of gen...

In this paper we present an approach to summarizing positive and negative opinions in blog threads. We first run a sentiment analysis system and consequently pass its output through a standard LSA-based text summarization system. Further on, we evaluate our approach and present the results obtained, which we believe are promising in the context of multi-document text summarization. Finally, we ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The use of an electronic audience response system (ARS) that promotes active participation during lectures has been shown to improve retention rates of factual information in nonmedical settings. This study (1) tested the hypothesis that the use of an ARS during didactic lectures can improve learning outcomes by family medicine residents and (2) identified factors infl...