American Journal of Distance Education (08923647)32(1)pp. 57-73
This article presents a meta-synthesis review of quality of online education (QOE) measurement approaches. In order to survey the existing body of knowledge, a qualitative method was employed to investigate what quality of online education is comprised of and how the concept has been measured through the literature. To achieve this, a total of 112 publications between 2000 and 2017 were analyzed. Results indicate that QOE factors are mostly focused on OE resources, input, and processes through this literature. There is a lack of evidence for output- and outcome-oriented approaches for quality factors identification and measurement. Most approaches focus on students’ views, with faculty and administrators’ views having less attention and very little focus on designers, employers, and clients. The lack of an integrated view of QOE not only in its definition but also in its measurement approaches is a key issue. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (14495554)32(3)pp. 38-49
Although higher education systems in developing countries such as Iran have embraced the online education approach, they are confronted with significant challenges in mis transition, one of which is lack of instructors' participation in online teaching. Therefore, this research is aimed at exploring barriers and influential factors for this lack of participation. The researchers developed their theoretical framework based on a thorough review of the existing body of knowledge while considering the cultural features of Iran as a developing country. A tailored questionnaire asking about the existence of three groups of barriers, namely personal, attitudinal and contextual inhibitors, was distributed among all faculty members who were candidates for delivering online courses in one of the top universities in the country. Data was analysed using the descriptive and inferential tests of Friedman, t- Test and ANOVA. The results were in line with research findings in other developing countries in which the contextual barriers had the most inhibition effect against faculty members' participation in online teaching. Certain cultural barriers also Jure highlighted by participants, pertaining to the context of Iranian online education systems. © 2016.
Engineering Intelligent Systems (14728915)21(4)pp. 271-281
This paper draws on the existing body of knowledge to develop an ontology for university social responsibility (USR). There are numerous terms and definitions for USR in the existing literature. However, there is no consensus among them. In order to address this issue, we used a semi-automated text mining approach for ontology engineering. The developed ontology covered USR and its associated terms by which social responsibilities of a university to its communities have been described in the existing literature. The developed ontology, which is an explicit specification of USR concept, its components and their relationships, can contribute to develop a unified understanding of the concept for measurement purposes. © 2013 CRL Publishing Ltd.
International Conference on Human System Interaction, HSI (21582254)pp. 1-7
The main purpose of this paper is to propose a content analysis approach in order to develop an ontology of university social responsibility (USR). The proposed approach comprises four main phases in which two content analyses software have been utilized to extract the main USR components and to identify the domain of this concept. To achieve the goal, the existing body of knowledge of USR definitions and specifications - using a variety of terms - has been considered to identify the main notions of USR and their relationships. The developed ontology can be applied to define a formal, explicit description of the USR concept and to construct a more reliable basis for measurement purposes. © 2012 IEEE.
Online learning systems in general and virtual universities in particular received considerable attention and had an increasing growth through two last decades. However, the acceptance and enough support from stakeholders sounds to be the main challenges of this kind of educational systems. Regarding this issue, the recent study is aimed to propose and validate a methodology for measuring social responsibility of virtual universities, by which higher education systems would be able to evaluate how each virtual university is responsible to its stakeholders and it can provide a useful scale to be used for ranking of this higher education institutions. The factors that comprise university social responsibility are inherently fuzzy and subjective in nature; therefore, in this research we propose to make use of Fuzzy Logic for measuring and quantifying this concept. Additionally in this research, based on the identified factors, we will develop ontological manifestations of social responsibility of virtual universities. © 2012 IEEE.
The technology enhanced collaborative learning (TECL) approach concerns with how information and communication technology might support learning in groups of students. This learning strategy can be employed to address students' disengagement concern within the academic settings; however, its effectiveness depends on different variables such as grouping strategies. The main goal of the current research was to investigate how the grouping strategies can enhance learners' engagement in a TECL based context. The study was conducted within a modernized learning environment as part of the UNITEL project. The participants were 38 undergraduate students enrolled in the 'Educational Evaluation' course at the University of Isfahan in 2023-2024 academic year. The course offered in blended mode with TECL as its main learning approach which incorporated two different grouping strategies including student-selected grouping (SSG) and heterogeneously assigned grouping (HAG) strategies. Results revealed the SSG strategy improved students' overall engagement; however, this grouping strategy have not influenced the students' effective engagement significantly. This study suggests that, for the present generation of learners, a group strategy that promotes student control and autonomy within the learning environment may be more effective than a strategy emphasizing the diversity of students' abilities, experiences, and backgrounds. © 2024 IEEE.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate, from a theoretical point of view, virtual universities in comparison with Social Networking Services (SNS). The theoretical framework constitutes of the Human Motivation Theory (HMT) and the Human Factors (HF) in which Facebook as the most popular SNS is compared with virtual university in general. The main features of these technologies were compared in order to consider whether they comply with mentioned theories. Using an exploratory research methodology, this study concludes that SNSs are more adopted with HMT than virtual university. In the other word, Facebook applications as the most popular virtual community with over 500,000,000 users worldwide, is more compliant with HMT to gratify users' needs. Also, from the perspective of human factors, it is more successful than the virtual university.
