In a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, a client desiring a particular file must choose a source from which to download. The problem of selecting a good data source is difficult because some peers may not be encountered more than once, and many peers are on low-bandwidth connections. Despite these facts, information obtained about peers just prior to the download can help guide peer selection. A...

The Teacher’s Dilemma: A game-based approach for motivating appropriate challenge among peers A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ari Bader-Natal In classroom-based studies, peer tutoring has proved to be an effective learning strategy, both for the tutees and for their peer tutors. Today, the incr...

Peer teaching is recognized as a powerful instructional method; however, there is a paucity of studies that have evaluated the outcomes experienced by peer-teachers and their student recipients in the context of trained, non-reciprocal, high school physical education (PE). Accordingly, the effectiveness of a formalized and trained non-reciprocal peer teaching (T-PT) program upon psychosocial, b...

Semi-supervised learning methods constitute a category of machine learning methods which use labelled points together with unlabelled data to tune the classifier. The main idea of the semi-supervised methods is based on an assumption that the classification function should change smoothly over a similarity graph, which represents relations among data points. This idea can be expressed using ker...

Although the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a very new term, (the first recorded use of the term is November 4, 2004) the concept represents the latest step in an alternative approach to e-learning which can trace its origins to earlier systems such as Colloquia, the first peer-to-peer learning system (released as Learning Landscapes in 2000), and to more recent phenomena such as the El...

In higher music education (HME), the notion of "private teaching, private learning" has a long tradition, where the learning part rests on the student's individual practicing between instrumental lessons. However, recent research suggests that collaborative learning among peers is beneficial in several aspects, such as sense of belonging, motivation and self-efficacy. This is consistent with th...

In recent years, peer assessment has established itself as one of the most promising methods of assessment in open learning environments typically in massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, researchers are still working on ways to address a number of challenges in peer assessment. In this paper, we propose some solutions from the field of learning analytics which have the potential to pro...

Using self-and peer-assessment to enhance students' future-learning in higher education. In higher education settings, assessment tasks get the attention of students, but once students submit their work they typically become disengaged with the assessment process. Hence, opportunities for learning are lost as they become passive recipients of assessment outcomes. Future-learning oriented assess...