Final Report

Paper Study-- Distance Learning and Student Satisfaction in Java
A. Settle, C. Settle, JUCS, Vol 13, Iss 9. 2007

Distance learning is an increasingly important way of delivering content for educational institutions. As a result, it is important to understand how the experiences that students have in distance-learning courses differ from the experiences of more traditional students.

In this article they obtain statistically significant results different from the earlier article when a distance-learning course that uses the dominant model is considered. In particular, the course evaluations for online and traditional sections of introductory Java programming courses varied in some notable ways.

The results of this study are different from the initial results obtained by the authors. Distance-learning students are less satisfied than either traditional students or their peers in live sibling sections with the course. The distance-learning students feel that the course is less well-organized and that the course objectives are not met as well.
This result cannot be attributed to the type of live section or to the type of Java course, as their restricted regression shows. This explanation is consistent with previous work on student satisfaction with online courses that has shown distance learning students to be sensitive to course organization and to rate the course poorly if excellent course organization does not compensate for a lack of interaction.

Most striking are the results for instructor-related questions. Distance-learning students rate the instructor lower on seven out of the twelve questions. While some are understandable, such as encouraging student participation, the effect spills over to other questions, such as the instructor’s knowledge of the subject, whether the students want to take another course with the instructor, or the instructor’s teaching effectiveness as compared to other instructors. Distance-learning students are unhappy with the course and attribute the change to the instructor. One hypothesis for these results is that an increasingly interactive class, which seems to be the situation when you consider the analysis of the data for live students, would highlight the shortcomings of the distance-learning format. Unable to understand that the situation is inherent to distance-learning courses using this format, some distance-learning students may penalize the instructor. Even those students who understand the situation lack the ability to express their frustration with the format.

Although Distance-learning is a trend now, it can’t replace traditional classes. No matter how flexible and convenient Distance-learning is, students and instructors can’t “feel” each other. Without face to face communication, miscellaneous questions and answers between students and instructors may be misinterpreted. I guess that’s why the “Distance-learning students are less satisfied than either traditional students or their peers in live sibling sections with the course”. I believe appropriate and timely classes face to face may improve the satisfactions of students with Distance-learning classes. No matter how many compliments the instructors and students gave, it couldn’t be better than smiles on their faces! ^__^

Homework 5-3-2008

Paper 12-Empirical analysis of online social networks in the age of Web 2.0

In this paper, they present empirical analysis of statistical properties of two important Chinese online social networks, namely, Sina blogs and Xiaonei SNS—a blogging network and an SNS open to college students, and they investigate the distribution of topological distance. The former is the largest Chinese blog space provider and has more than 2 million registered users in the mainland of China. The latter is the largest and most popular social networking service provider in China.
It is found that both the networks have small-world and scale-free features already observed in real-world and artificial networks. Further, the correlations between degree (in/out) and degree (in/out), clustering coefficient and degree, popularity (in terms of number of page views) and i-degree (for the blogging network), etc. are examined. It is also shown that the blogging network is a disassortative one, whereas the Xiaonei network and assortative one.

Paper 13-A short walk in the Blogistan

In this paper, they show how to identify emerging interests and argued that in contrast to traditional search, this mandates not only large scope analysis of referenced links but also of their evolution over time. Their multi-hop crawl has presented a reasonable approximation of the connected portion of the blogistan along with several of its interesting attributes such as the number unique domains that host blogs and the relatively low number of IP addresses.
They said an important contribution of their work is the methodology they developed to identify emerging interests by mining hyperlinks in blogs and their change over time. The methodology constitutes a general approach to mine evolving interconnection networks that they believe can have applications well beyond the Blogistan.

Paper 14-Analysis of User Relations and Reading Activity in Weblogs

In this study, they analyze which pages the users in a blog network read most frequently from the viewpoint of the relationship among blogs, and interpret the result. This paper focuses on the relationships among blogs and analyzes how great an effect blog relationships have on the reading behavior of the user. In this paper, they investigate the database of Doblog, an existing blog hosting service. Since users of this service write blogs or comments after logging in, the data on the reading behavior of the users can be acquired. The range of 2-hop connection from a blog is considered, and an attempt is made, by using the index, to reveal the reading behavior of users, such as strength and kind, on the basis of the number of routes. It is evident that bookmarks have a strong effect, and that users circulate around the bookmarks in a blog network.