Social network Perception Alignment of E-recruiters and Potential Applicants

Benefits from online social networking are being incorporated into the selection processes used by e-recruiters. While this offers great potential for both recruiters and applicants, especially in an increasingly globalized environment, it requires both parties to have mutual understanding of each other's perceptions. This paper empirically explores a global sample containing 1498 applicants from 68 countries and 405 recruiters from 39 countries. We find that both students and recruiters underestimate the impact of each other's social network profile. A model is presented based on communication theory is used to explain these gaps. These gaps in perception will act as barriers to better utilization of global e-recruitment and need to be closed to allow efficient and effective use of social media for this function

Requirements for effective professional IT-training: a case study

In companies, it is common practice to provide continuous training and skill enhancement. Unfortunately, this is often done without comprehensive pre-evaluations of requirements for coming tasks and suitability for the participant. Moreover, companies attempt to reduce overall costs by booking training units for larger groups; independent of needs, preknowledge, or working area of the participants. Thus, continuing training is covered but often it is more time-off-duty than effective time for sustainable training. In this paper, we analyzed almost thousand participants in an empirical study to understand the interdependencies of their background, course selection, tutor, course material, mode of learning; i.e. with respect to effectiveness and sustainability. The outcome shows the importance of pre-determining the requirements compared to other factors

Culturally-based adaptive learning and concept analytics to guide educational website content integration

In modern learning environments, the lecturer or educational designer is often confronted withmulti-national student cohorts, requiring special consideration regarding language, cultural norms and taboos, religion, and ethics. Through a somewhat provocative example we demonstrate that taking such factors into account can be essential to avoid embarrassment and harm to individual learners' cultural sensibilities and, thus, provide the motivation for finding a solution using a specially designed feature, known as adaptive learning paths, for implementation in Learning Management Systems (LMS). Managing cultural conflicts is achievable by a twofold process. First, a learner profile must be created, in which the specific cultural parameters can be recorded. According to the learner profile,a set of content filter tags can be assigned to the learning path for the relevant students. Example content filter tags may be "no sex" or "nudity ok, but not combined with religion". Second, the LMS must have the functionality to select and present content based on the content filter tags. The design of learning material is presented via a meta-data based repository of learning objects that permits the adaptation of learning paths according to learner profiles, which include the cultural sensibilities in addition to prior knowledge and learning and categorized learning content - a detailed example is given.The drawback of using static or predefined meta-data elements is discussed, suggesting a further refinement via the introduction of dynamic concept analysis to be applied to both learner profiles and learning objects (restricted to text at this stage). An automated method of generating the content filter tags is achieved through the use of the Normalised Word Vector algorithm first developed for Automated Essay Grading system known as MarkIT (R. Williams, 2006). An automated method reduces human effort and ensures consistency.Sophisticated fine-grained dynamic learning path adaptivity is achieved through a detailed design given in the article, helping ensure that learners from a variety of cultural backgrounds can be treated appropriately and fairly and are not disadvantaged or offended by inappropriate learning content and examples

The lived user experience of virtual environments: Initial steps of a phenomenological analysis in a safety training setting

Virtual environments (VEs) are making their way into various sectors of life to enhance and support human activity, including learning. VEs have been used in various contexts for training, and in many cases they are designed to model or simulate - as accurately and authentically as possible - a specific work context. In striving for authenticity, visual and representative realism tends to receive most of the development input, despite of several studies that challenge its importance. New training avenues have raised the importance of rigorous phenomenological descriptions for a deeper understanding of user experience in the actual context of use. This paper reports the preliminary steps in a phenomenological analysis of how employees working in actual hazardous settings experience virtual safety training environments. Such open-ended research project can reveal new aspects of user experience that can advice the development and evaluation of human-computer interaction in digital technology-enhanced training contexts

Action-based Learning Assessment Method (ALAM) in Virtual Training Environments

Specialised and high priced simulators for surgical training, chemical labs, and flight training can provide real-world simulation in a safe and risk-free environment, but they are not accessible for the broader community due to costs for technology and availability of experts. Thus, training scenarios shifted to virtual worlds providing access for everyone interested in acquiring skills and knowledge at educational or professional institutions. Even in this context, we still expect a detailed formative feedback as would have been provided by a human trainer during the face to face process. Whilst the literature is focusing on goal-oriented assessment, it neglects the performed actions. In this paper, we present the Action-based Learning Assessment Method (ALAM) that analyses the action-sequences of the learners according to reference solutions by experts and automated formative feedback

Effects of social network profiles on (E-)recruitment: An international study

The exponential growth of Social Networks offers us manifold opportunities by being part of a large network. We are able to have immediate updates of (international) events and share information. The advantage is paired with risks about potential influences on our (social) life. With everyone being able to submit information, it is likely to be presented in an inappropriate way in public. And this can happen without even noticing, e.g. if a connected friend is publishing the information. In this paper, we present an international study where we asked many students about the awareness of their profiles in Social Networks and if they believe that this could influence their job applications. The study is matched with a survey of human resource manager if and to what extent they use information being visible in Social Networks. The poster visualizes the results for countries like Germany, U.S., Afghanistan, and China, and demonstrates how different the perception of Social Networks still is

Design Perspective on the Role of Advanced Bots for Self-Guided Learning

Virtual worlds are rapidly gaining acceptance in educational settings; with bots play an important role in these environments to help learners. Authentic learning can be significantly supported by bots to help self-guided learning in authentic tasks. in this paper, we investigate what is stopping educators from making more use of bots as a valuable resource and how these barriers can be overcome. This exploratory research uses interviews with six educators, who use educational bots. We show that while the experts have 'big plans' for bot use, the current educational implementations are 'low-level' and restrictive in their application. There is further confusion about appropriate pedagogical models and how to use them effectively as more than 'prompters' or 'extras'. While creation- and control-technologies are advancing, allowing use of bots as a 'hard technology' to guide learners through routine procedures; there is a lack of resources for automation as intelligence technologies are slower to develop and may required future partnerships with external parties before they are available useable by general educators

Manifestations of hard and soft technologies in immersive spaces

Immersive spaces are innately flexible. However, for learners, some constraints and scaffolding may often be valuable. This paper looks at immersive spaces as soft and hard technologies. Soft technologies are technologies enabling creative and flexible use, while hard technologies embed processes that limit creativity but provide efficiency and freedom from error. Technologies may be softened or hardened by assembly. For instance, if your Learning Management System (LMS) has no wiki, then it may be softened by adding one from outside the system. If your wiki has no assessment management system, then it may be hardened by using a LMS. For learning, the intrinsically soft nature of immersive spaces sometimes requires scaffolded hardening. This paper provides an example of an ongoing project that realizes these soft and hard technologies in an immersive virtual space and discusses the rich potential of such spaces for technology assembly

Design and Construction of Semantic Document Networks Using Concept Extraction

Processing of unstructured documents according to their content is required in many disciplines; e.g., machine translation, text analysis and mining, and information extraction and retrieval. Whilst research in fields like text analysis, conceptualisation, or design of semantic networks progressed crucially over the last years, we still observe gaps between state-of-the-art algorithms to extract concepts from documents and how these concepts are linked effective and efficiently. This paper proposes a framework to store processed documents in a specialised semantic network database to enhance retrieval and analysis of common concepts in documents. We apply natural language reduction to calculate semantic cores for the concept-based indexing of stored documents. The developed prototype demonstrates an advanced document storage as well as a fast (semantical) retrieval of documents based on given key concepts