This paper discusses learner-centered approaches and evaluation in English language teaching and learning materials design. Based on the researches in this field, a framework is developed for the evaluation of learner-centered components contained in the materials. Thereafter, we apply the criteria to the assessment of two major English textbooks College English (1991) and Experiencing English ...

As visual connectivity improves, an opportunity to enrich and rethink the place of learning design in online and distance education is presenting itself. The opportunity is derived from the increasing scope for personalised synchronous interaction which has been missing in computer mediated communications (CMC) and previous generations of distance education. This paper presents a model which di...

We reviewed the findings of 35 experimental studies of hypermedia use in educational tasks which emphasized quantitative, empirical methods to assess learning outcomes. The review found three broad themes in the literature: studies of learner comprehension compared across hypermedia and between other media; effects on learning outcome of the increased learner control offered users in hypermedia...

We are developing and annotating a learner corpus of Hungarian, composed of student journals from three different proficiency levels written at Indiana University. Our annotation marks learner errors that are of different linguistic categories, including phonology, morphology, and syntax, but defining the annotation for an agglutinative language presents several issues. First, we must adapt an ...

Educational Badges are touted as an alternative assessment that can increase learner motivation. We considered two distinct models for educational badges; merit badges and videogame achievements. To begin unpacking the relationship between badges and motivation, we conducted a study using badges within an intelligent-tutor system for teaching applied mathematics to middle-school students. Our f...

How does a child start to learn the sound patterns of her native language? There are two diametrically opposed approaches to this problem. According to one approach, the learner always looks for a symbolic representation in input, and such representation is based on a set of universal phonetic features (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). Since phonetic segments – or more intuitively “speech sounds” – ar...

background: every year a number of iran’s faculty members in medical science universities got promoted to a higher scientific rank with respect to their history of administrative and scientific services and research and educational activities. one of the faculty promotion criteria is assessing the quality of their educational activities which encompass four areas (training, professional and soc...

An easy example of a concept class is the set of emails and functions mapping emails to spam or not spam. Another example is the set of points and a line `, and a single function determining which side of the line ` the points are on. PAC learning is the following problem. We are given a concept class H, a function f ∈ H, and a hidden distribution D on X. The algorithm is allowed to get m label...

This paper addresses the problem of learning when high-quality labeled examples are an expensive resource, while samples with error-prone labeling (for example generated by crowdsourcing) are readily available. We introduce a formal framework for such learning scenarios with label sources of varying quality, and we propose a parametric model for such label sources (“weak teachers”), reflecting ...