Search results for " research"
showing 10 items of 14115 documents
Design principles for collaboration platforms for open education
2015
Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such…
Wastewater treatment: New insight provided by interactive multiobjective optimization
2011
In this paper, we describe a new interactive tool developed for wastewater treatment plant design. The tool is aimed at supporting the designer in designing new wastewater treatment plants as well as optimizing the performance of already available plants. The idea is to utilize interactive multiobjective optimization which enables the designer to consider the design with respect to several conflicting evaluation criteria simultaneously. This is more important than ever because the requirements for wastewater treatment plants are getting tighter and tighter from both environmental and economical reasons. By combining a process simulator to simulate wastewater treatment and an interactive mul…
E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method
2015
Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…
Teaching programming by emphasizing self-direction: How did students react to the active role required of them?
2013
Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming activities. In this article, we present the first results of an exploratory study, in which we teach programming without lectures, exams, or grades, by heavily emphasizing programming activity, and, in a pedagogical sense, student self-direction. This article investigates how students reacted to the active role required of them and what issues emerged in …
Schemata, Acculturation, and Cognition : Expatriates in Japan's Software Industry
2016
This multiple case based empirical study expands the knowledge around North American software and IT workers in Japan as well as the expatriate literature and discussion of cognitive schemata in cross cultural settings. The study includes eleven individuals, nine of them in software. Evidence of selection, rejection, and adjustment of cognitive schemata found in Japan's business world is presented. Changes in schemata drive cultural adjustment and acculturation. North American software and IT workers in Japan must maneuver through unfamiliar and often complex schemata to motivate, lead, manipulate, and communicate with coworkers and partners and thereby gain success.
Interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy
2012
Abstract We present an approach to interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy. The approach relies on formulae for lower and upper bounds on coordinates of the outcome of an arbitrary efficient variant corresponding to preference information expressed by the Decision Maker. In contrast to earlier works on that subject, here lower and upper bounds can be calculated and their accuracy controlled entirely within evolutionary computation framework. This is made possible by exploration of not only the region of feasible variants – a standard within evolutionary optimization, but also the region of i…
High school students' perspective to university CS1
2013
This paper presents a qualitative study of a school-university collaborative project where a game-themed CS1 course was offered as-is to high school students. Our specific interest was to explore the students' experiences with the university level course. Our analyses indicate that immediate and regular support was highly important for student performance, as support of this kind could mitigate issues related to students' orientation towards the high workload of the course. Students who showed academic interest were likely to pass, whereas students lacking self-direction or work efficiency were likely to drop out. Both passed and drop-outs found the course to be a good learning experience. …
Understanding differences among coding club students
2014
Scholars and instructors have been carrying out a multitude of actions to increase students' interest in computer science during the past years. Still, there is a need for knowledge on how these attempts develop student interest. In this qualitative study, we construct illustrative categories out of students who have attended our K-12 coding club and game programming summer course activities. We found four categories: Inactivity, Lack of self-direction, Experimenting, and Professionalism. We also briefly project this abstraction onto a four-phase model of interest development.
Utilizing online serious games to facilitate distributed requirements elicitation
2015
Online serious games are used to facilitate distributed requirements elicitation.Interactive games enhance collaboration and communication between project members.Serious games raise individuals' confidence to engage in requirements elicitation.Using serious games can improve both quality and quantity of software requirements.Serious games specially enhance the performance of less-experienced stakeholders. Requirements elicitation is one of the most important and challenging activities in software development projects. A variety of challenges related to requirements elicitation are reported in the literature, of which the lack of proper communication and knowledge transfer between software …
Consumers’ adoption of information services
2013
This paper reports on a design science research study that seeks to investigate how information service components affect consumers’ potential adoption of such services. More specifically, the paper develops a conceptual model that uses the theory of organizational information services (TOIS) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as a basis. The results indicate that individual constructs can be linked to service components. In turn, this result can potentially be instrumental in progress toward a deeper understanding of consumers’ adoption of information services and how this affects the development of such services and systems that support them.