Validating Academic Training versus Organizational Training： An Analysis in the Enterprise Resource Planning （ERP） Field

ERP （enterprise resource planning） systems are packaged software applications that support most of an organization＇s informational needs within and across functional areas of the organization. Modern ERP systems serve as the foundation for a wide range of e-business models within one company, as well as throughout the value chain. This study explored industry ERP training of employees new to ERP, and compared this latter group to college students prepared with ERP skills from a college ERP class. The students remotely accessed the ERP systems featured here for class requirements. University and industry collaborations allow for a hands-on experience in the classroom that replicates industry applications by using real world tools. This synergistic relationship provides opportunities for students to acquire knowledge using a tangible tool that imitates what is utilized in the industry. The study noted that schools supported by several ERP vendor initiatives are increasingly integrating enterprise systems in their curricula. The resultant data identifies pertinent information that businesses consider valuable in their employees＇ ERP training. This noteworthy correlation, between college prepared students and employees new to ERP who have gone through ERP training, examined case studies of students who are now in the workforce. This study exposes these students＇ distinct advantage because of their ERP learning experience, and compares it to companies＇ ERP training practices. The intent, as in any educational environment, is not only to help students attain an understanding of the material, but to also master that material in the environment in which they will be required to use it.     

Knowledge assessment-practical example in testing

Knowledge assessment is inseparable part of current e-learning technologies. It can be used for self-assessment of students to give them feedback about their progress in a study or for an intermediate or final grading for tutors. However, knowledge tests are not developed with the adequate care. Author＇s experience in the area of knowledge assessment led to a confidence the ＂unstructured＂ testing is usually used in this process. It means that many of knowledge tests are not designed to reveal the reached level of knowledge. Moreover, testing suites are reviewed very seldom regarding their validity and items correlation. This paper presents experiences gained during the design and implementation of specific software focused on teaching several principles of the Unix-like operating systems. The structure of the specific assignment follows the Bloom＇s taxonomy of educational objectives.     

FinalReferencing within Code in Software Engineering Education!

Traditionally computer sciences courses will assess software code.It is common and accepted good practice(as in written reports) to reference other sources of appropriate material.However there appears to be no explicit method,recommendation or advice available to computer science tutors and students on a referencing approach! This paper aims to stimulate discussion from peers involved in software engineering education.By discussing the apparent lack of "referencing within code" advice to students and proposing suggestions for appropriate solutions.This will be based on the authors' experience of assessing code and the current advice given to their students.     

The Global Crisis and Academic Communication： The Challenge of Social Networks in Research

The global economic crisis is seriously affecting academic research. The situation is provoking some big changes and an urgent need to seek alternatives to traditional models. It is as if the academic community was reinventing itself; and this reinvention is happening online. Faced with a lack of funding, researchers have determined to help each other develop their projects and they are doing so on social knowledge networks that they have created for this mission. The purpose of this paper is to analyze different social networks designed for academic online research. To this end, we have made a selection of these networks and established the parameters for their study in order to determine what they consist of, what tools they make use of, what advantages they offer and the degree to which they are bringing about a revolution in how research is carried out. This analysis is conducted from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, allowing us to identify the percentage of these networks that approach what would be the ideal social knowledge network. As we will be able to confirm, the closer they are to this ideal, the more effective they will be and the better future they will have, which will also depend on the commitment of users to participation and the quality of their contributions.     

The Instructional Media for Different Levels in the Philippine Educational System

In the Philippines, the K＋I2 system is newly introduced and the readiness for its implementation undoubtedly made the teaching community confused and confounded. Thus, extra efforts are being done to upgrade and update all instructional materials. Even it＂ the Department of Education are preparing the faculty members through trainings, seminars and providing them with syllabus accompanying the new curriculum, still the confidence for the coming teaching assignments for the additional two years in the system is vet3.＇ Iow~ The faculty members are now strategizing teaching methodology for the subjects they have to handle through upgrading not only their knowledge but also the teaching materials they are to use in their classroom. With the changing environment, the learning style of students also advances. Children are now exposed to various modern gadgets, thus, they learn more advanced knowledge about their environment. These modern medium must be an advantage to the teaching profession. Teachers must know how and what the children learn through these medium and create some learning materials that will augment this knowledge in schools. This study is a partial analysis of the learning style of students in different levels of the educational system and the knowledge they acquire through different modern medium and test the gap between this and the knowledge they must learn in school. Also, this study will come up with what medium can be used as instructional medium that will aid the faculty members in their teaching courses or subjects in school.     

Information and Communication Technologies： A Way to Reduce Digital Illiteracy

The teaching-learning process may have several obstacles; one of those would be a cultural situation of students. When the author refers to cultural situation, the author means the language or dialect that they speak. In the state of Puebla, Mexico, there are primary schools where the courses are taught to students who do not speak Spanish and they only speak their own dialect. On the other hand, the use of information and communication technologies in primary schools in Puebla is a fact but a main concern in schools is that the languages in which they are operated are Spanish. To analyze this situation, the author finds that turns out to be very important and with a negative effect on both the implementation and acceptance of a multimedia program in these schools, generating a technological gap between students. The government efforts are decimated because of this cultural divide prevalent in many communities in the state of Puebla and the increase of this situation when considering the illiterate population.     

A Supervised Learning Approach to Search of Definitions

This paper addresses the issue of search of definitions. Specifically, for a given term, we are to find out its definition candidates and rank the candidates according to their likelihood of being good definitions. This is in contrast to the traditional methods of either generating a single combined definition or outputting all retrieved definitions. Definition ranking is essential for tasks. A specification for judging the goodness of a definition is given. In the specification, a definition is categorized into one of the three levels： good definition, indifferent definition, or bad definition. Methods of performing definition ranking are also proposed in this paper, which formalize the problem as either classification or ordinal regression. We employ SVM （Support Vector Machines） as the classification model and Ranking SVM as the ordinal regression model respectively, and thus they rank definition candidates according to their likelihood of being good definitions. Features for constructing the SVM and Ranking SVM models are defined, which represent the characteristics of terms, definition candidate, and their relationship. Experimental results indicate that the use of SVM and Ranking SVM can significantly outperform the baseline methods such as heuristic rules, the conventional information retrieval--Okapi, or SVM regression. This is true when both the answers are paragraphs and they are sentences. Experimental results also show that SVM or Ranking SVM models trained in one domain can be adapted to another domain, indicating that generic models for definition ranking can be constructed.     

Literature Review of Image Denoising Methods

Image denoising is a fundamental and important task in image processing and computer vision fields. A lot of methods are proposed to reconstruct clean images from their noisy versions. These methods differ in both methodology and performance. On one hand, denoising methods can be classified into local and nonlocal methods. On the other hand, they can be marked as spatial and frequency domain methods. Sparse coding and low-rank are two popular techniques for denoising recently. This paper summarizes existing techniques and provides several promising directions for further studying in the future.     

Technological Gap： The Education Case of the State of Puebla,Mexico

The teaching-learning process may have several obstacles; one of those would be a cultural situation of students but also the ICT （information and communication technologies） resource distribution per children. When we refer to cultural situation, we mean the language or dialect that they speak. In the state of Puebla, Mexico, there are primary schools in which courses are taught to students who do not speak Spanish and they only speak their own dialect. On the other hand, the use of information and communication technologies in primary schools in Puebla is a fact but a main concern in schools is that the languages in which are operated is Spanish. The present article will also deal with the distribution of enciclomedia sets per children population in the 217 communities of the state of Puebla. To analyze this situation, we find that turns out to be very important and with a negative effect on both the implementation and acceptance of a multimedia program in these schools, generating a technological gap between students. The government efforts are being decimated because of this cultural divide prevalent in many communities in the state of Puebla, Mexico.     

Video-based running water animation in Chinese painting style

This paper presents a novel algorithm for synthesizing animations of running water,such as water-falls and rivers,in the style of Chinese paintings,for applications such as cartoon making. All video frames are first registered in a common coordinate system,simultaneously segmenting the water from background and computing optical flow of the water. Taking artists’ advice into account,we produce a painting structure to guide painting of brush strokes. Flow lines are placed in the water following an analysis of variance of optical flow,to cause strokes to be drawn where the water is flowing smoothly,rather than in turbulent areas: this allows a few moving strokes to depict the trends of the water flows. A variety of brush strokes is then drawn using a template determined from real Chinese paintings. The novel contributions of this paper are:a method for painting structure generation for flows in videos,and a method for stroke placement,with the necessary temporal coherence.     

Student trajectories in high school mathematics: Issues of choice,support, and identity‐making

Abstract

This study explores the range of experiences students have when making two kinds of decisions in relation to high school mathematics courses: what course to take, and how to and how much to apply themselves. Looking at the choices of students about to enter Grade 10, the first decision is their choice of courses. In mathematics, students leaving Grade 9 selected one course (usually), from five possibilities, for their Grade 10 year: an advanced‐placement Honours stream, an academic course with a traditional symbol‐manipulation approach, an academic course with a technology‐based applications approach, a non‐academic mathematics‐for‐citizenship course, and (as an imposed choice) repeating the Grade 9 mathematics course. The second point of decision‐making occurred within their mathematics and science courses—students constantly made choices about how, and how much, to apply themselves to the challenges of succeeding in the courses they had chosen. These students’ course choices, to a considerable extent, conformed to expectations based on the influence of socioeconomic status and prior achievement. Overwhelmingly, students were concerned more in the credentialing value of courses than their educational value or structural nature. Within their courses, most students focused their attention on doing the work rather than the content or the learning process. Students reported being encouraged to do their work by teachers, but could not provide any indication of tactical support with becoming effective learners. The final outcomes of the students’ marks suggest that, in the context of the study, Grade 10 mathematics courses are much more effective as gate‐keeping mechanisms than as opportunities for students to improve and succeed.     

Teaching Mathematics in Architecture

The Department of Architecture of Middle East Technical University offers a course entitled ‘Mathematics in Architecture’ for the third year students. In the beginning of the term, students are forced to imagine themselves as twodimensional creatures living in a two-dimensional space. At this point, fundamentals of architectural geometry are introduced first in the plane, simply by employing the set concept; mapping as a general tool is then introduced and students are asked to use mapping in their design to correlate the project requirements and geometry. Following that, the principles of isometries and isometric constructions are introduced. In the second part of the term, students are allowed to think in terms of three-dimensional space and topics related with the principles of similarities and proportions and symmetry are presented. In the final part of the course, students are forced to think themselves as three-dimensional creatures living in a four-dimensional space and this fourth dimension is sought. The last topic of the course is related with biomimicry in architecture and mathematics inherent in bioforms and man-made structures     

Student selection and assignment methodology based on fuzzy MULTIMOORA and multichoice goal programming

Student selection is a multicriteria decision‐making problem that includes both tangible and intangible factors. In these problems if educational institutions have budget or other different constraints, two problems will exist: which students are the best and how students are assigned to the predefined programs? In this study, an integrated approach of fuzzy MULTIMOORA and multichoice conic goal programming is proposed to consider criteria in choosing the best students and define the optimum assignments among the predefined programs to maximize both the total preference value and total ranking value. The rankings of the students are determined by using fuzzy MULTIMOORA. The rankings of candidates are set as the parameters of the first objective function. The placement preferences of the students according to the predefined programs are considered in the second objective function. The candidates are assigned to their placement preferences both by using multichoice conic goal programming among partner universities according to the objectives and by considering the budget and quota.     

Exploring college students' generational differences in Facebook usage

In recent years the usage of social networks among students has become the subject of numerous studies. In this study we were interested in differences in patterns of online behaviour and the use of Facebook (FB) among the second and third generation of students. The results showed that 66% of the second year students had a FB account, while in the third generation all of the respondents had a FB account. One third of the second year students avoid any involvement in FB. Lack of interest was one of the main reasons the respondents indicated for not being engaged in FB, as well as their unwillingness to put personal information online. Currently, most of them are satisfied using FB, and do not plan to turn off their profile. The newer generations of students use FB mainly for overcoming boredom. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the time spent online increases, as well as the number of FB users, and also the number of virtual friends increases in order to exchange information.     

Offer acceptance prediction of academic placement

The paper examines the validation of prediction models of acceptance of academic placement offers by students in the context of international applications at a large metropolitan Australian University using data mining techniques. Earlier works in enrolment management have examined various classification problems such as inquiry to enrol, persistence and graduation. The data and settings from different institutions are often different, which implies that in order to find out which models and techniques are applicable at a given university, the dataset from that university needs to be used in the validation effort. The whole dataset from the Australian university comprised 24,283 offers made to international applicants from the year 2008 to 2013. Every year around 2000–2500 new international students who accept offers of academic placement commence their studies. The important predictors for the acceptance of offers were as follows: the chosen course and faculty, whether the student was awarded any form of scholarship, and also the visa assessment level of the country by the immigration department. Prediction models were developed using a number of classification methods such as logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, support vector machines, random forests, k-nearest neighbour, neural networks and their performances compared. Overall, the neural network prediction model with a single hidden layer produced the best result.     

Using CAL to broaden design experience for undergraduate engineers

This paper describes how a CAL exercise has been developed to provide undergraduate Civil Engineering students with the type of open ended design problem that they encounter in practice. The exercise forms part of the second year course in hydraulics at Queen Mary College and specifically relates to the design of pipe networks for water supply.The package is divided into three phases. The first of these tests the students' understanding of the basic theoretical concepts underlying pipe network analysis. The second phase is designed to familiarise the student with the way large and complex networks behave and how they respond to changes either in their layout or in the demands placed upon them. The final phase of the exercise involves the students in a completely open ended and realistic design problem, resulting from a proposed industrial development in the area of the supply network. The student is required to place himself or herself in the position of a manager of a water company who has to arrive at the cheapest viable solution from a wide range of options. This is very much the type of broad ranging design and management problem that occurs in practice.The package, which replaced a traditional laboratory experiment, has been running for two years now. The response of the students has been encouraging and many show sufficient interest to book additional computer time in order to develop and complete the design to their own satisfaction. As a teaching tool it has enabled us to identify those students who have the competence to synthesise rather than just analyse a problem, and this, in most areas of practising engineering, may be the more important ability.     

Finnish high school students’ readiness to adopt online learning: Questioning the assumptions

The Finnish high school system in rural areas is facing challenges because of a decreasing number of the students. This situation places new emphasis on online learning. Online learning offers new possibilities for high schools to provide equal learning opportunities for their students. This paper explores students’ readiness to adapt their studying habits in the networked high schools by outlining their beliefs about online learning. Beliefs are assumed to direct people’s actions, in this case activities concerning studying online. Three hundred second year high school students from Eastern Finland who had not had the experiences of learning online were studied. The findings suggest that students polarize into negative, neutral and positive groups based on their beliefs concerning online learning. Results also indicate that students’ knowledge about the possibilities of online learning is quite superficial. In contrast to theories about collaborative learning practices, students see online learning rather differently. Students with negative and neutral beliefs especially see online learning merely as a static “warehouse” of materials and study-alone learning tasks instead of offering possibilities for collaborative knowledge building.     

Webbook for engineers: An interactive information skills programme

First‐year engineering students at the University of Queensland used an interactive webbook to acquire information skills. These helped them search information resources for their projects, which they are required to undertake as part of the subject Introduction to professional engineering. The information skills exercise was an integral part of the project and worth 10% of the overall assessment. The exercises were only available on the Web, allowing the students to enter their answers from home or wherever they had access to the Internet. All answers were marked automatically using a database of all possible answers. Students were able to go back to check their answers. Students were assessed on both their responses to the exercises and also their final bibliography which largely reflected the impact of the webbook. The entire process was evaluated. This paper presents the process and the outcomes of the first‐year engineering project involving use of WWW for information skills instruction. The webbooks can be found at http r//www.library .uq.edu.au/9elO5/     

Overcoming the novelty effect in online gamified learning systems: An empirical evaluation of student engagement and performance

Learners in the higher education context who engage with computer-based gamified learning systems often experience the novelty effect: a pattern of high activity during the gamified system's introduction followed by a drop in activity a few weeks later, once its novelty has worn off. We applied a two-tiered motivational, online gamified learning system over 2 years to a total number of 333 students. In a mixed methods research design, we used 3-year worth of longitudinal data (333 students for the treatment group and 175 in the control group) to assess students' engagement and performance in that period. Quantitative results established that students engaged and performed better in the gamified condition vis-à-vis the nongamified. Furthermore, students exhibited higher levels of engagement in the second year compared with the first year of the gamified condition. Our qualitative data suggest that students in the second year of the gamified delivery exhibited sustained engagement, overcoming the novelty effect. Thus, our main contribution is in suggesting ways of making the engagement meaningful and useful for the students, thus sustaining their engagement with computer-based gamified learning systems and overcoming the novelty effect.     

Engaging first‐year students through online collaborative assessments

Substantial increases in the size of many undergraduate classes in recent years have limited the ways in which students can engage with their disciplines and become active participants in their learning. This paper presents a methodology which uses a basic WebCT platform to improve the way in which students in large classes learn. The approach, termed the Collaborative Online Assessment approach, provides a structured, scaffolded learning environment for students to engage with their peers in collaborative assessments. Results from a year‐long application of the approach with first‐year psychology students are presented. These show that the approach facilitates active student engagement throughout the academic year, and is associated with improved marks in the final written exam. This improvement in exam performance is significantly greater for students not intending to major in psychology (traditionally poorer performers). The paper discusses the implications of these findings in relation to learning theories and provides a critique for further improvement of the approach.