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This paper aims at introducing, identifying opportunities, presenting a vision and stakeholder driven challenges regarding the concept of classroom makerspaces. With the engineering design process at its core, the discussions are in the purview of K-college engineering classrooms. So as to provide a background and elucidate upon accomplishments to date, we first shed light on the history, elements...
In this paper, we present the 2013 Response Robotics Summer School, an event for the dissemination of the challenges and Best-in-Class capabilities in response robotics, focusing on explosive ordnance disposal and remote handling. A particularly unique feature of this event was the close integration of the responder community in both the technical and practical sessions. This was made possible by...
This paper describes the results of a pilot programme to introduce ethanol gel as a replacement for paraffin for cooking in a low-income informal settlement, Samora Machel, in the Philippi district of Cape Town. A baseline study had shown that paraffin was the dominant source of energy in this community, and that the community knew that its use was both hazardous and unhealthy, but they had no apparent...
The focus of this project is to facilitate program evaluation by creating a database that captures data about incidents, offenders, and offenses across the entire criminal justice system, while complying with national justice information sharing standards and maintaining individual stakeholders' legacy data systems. Current systems support individual functions and were not designed for cross-functional...
As more community colleges have adopted a video conferencing system for tele-education and tele-meetings, this new conference technology enables a convenient collaborative communication between the branch campuses and the mother campus through the so-called BCCA network. However, the insufficient bandwidth of video conferencing may often result in high frequent video disruptions, mosaic pictures,...
Due to the rise of MOOC-like courses available from third-party providers, the services universities offer students have the potential to become unbundled. Yet the possible impacts of these changes are not well understood. Few university stakeholders can articulate the actual value students receive from a university education, aside from instruction in their chosen field. How universities are doing...
Facebook is a social network very popular among University students for purposes of self-presentation. As social networks support the sharing of ideas, can we facilitate collaborative learning in Facebook? We designed a Facebook app that supports scripting of learners' interaction and the construction of arguments in Facebook. In an empirical study with 128 undergraduate teacher trainees, we investigated...
Online education has gained much popularity in the recent time. This paper throws light on some of the recent advances in the field of open courseware and rise of many online portals which provide University equivalent courses for millions all across the world and their potential to get better. These new portals have proven to be extremely useful for students from under developed and developing countries...
India is purging towards becoming a developed nation by delving in technological advancement. To achieve this vision, having very high student potential, proper utilization of human resource is critical. The students' perception of education (learning process) is as vital as the teachers' ability to teach. A survey of 575 students is conducted to successfully reveal the students' perspective of the...
This paper is a report on the findings of a trial web-based test conducted on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Japan after the two-year qualitative analysis on our own computer-based tests. Through the two years of small scale surveys to detect the efficiency of two newly developed types of computer-based tests, we found that the levels of vocabulary knowledge, along with the learners'...
The ability of students in public speaking is a stated requirement for Electrical and Information Engineering students at all levels according to the Washington, Sydney and Dublin Accords and UK and European Qualifications standards. It is also a frequently cited requirement in job specifications for graduate engineers. Effective public speaking is a skill that can be assessed simply by observing...
The importance and benefit of group work is nowadays widely recognized and acknowledged in education. Group work can be supported by online shared workspaces that allow group collaboration. However, the e-assessment of group work remains an issue. Most of the existing strategies rely on intra-group peer assessment to evaluate individual contribution to group work. We propose an alternative by introducing...
In recent years, the demand of in-class interaction and assessment for learning is rising. There is more emphasis on using electronic tools for assessment for learning in order to facilitate teachers seeking to identify and diagnose student learning problems, and providing quality feedback for students on how to improve their work. This paper discusses the challenges of e-assessment and introduced...
The reliability of online reviewers is a complex issue due to multiple dimensional and heterogeneous properties. In this paper, we propose a computational study of the rating pattern of reviewers. A reliability matrix is built between two data types which are the reviewer and the product. Two types of clusters can be extracted concurrently after a nonnegative tri-factorization of the reliability matrix...
This paper investigates whether the quality and efficiency of peer review is more influenced by scientists' behaviour or by the type of scientific community structure (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous). We looked especially at the importance of reciprocity and fairness to ensure cooperation between everyone involved and the role of evaluation standards to reduce parochialism. We modelled peer review...
For many scholars conference papers are a stepping stone to submitting a journal article. However with increasing time pressures for presentation at conferences, peer review may in practice be the only developmental opportunity from conference attendance. Hence it could be argued that the most important opportunity to acquire the standards and norms of the discipline and develop researchers' judgement...
This paper looks at undergraduate engineering students who have solitary study habits and do not frequently engage with classmates. These students, referred to as ‘academic solitaries,’ explicitly state that they do not interact or study much with their academic peers and may find a sense of belonging elsewhere. Using a mixed methods approach (including interviews with students and surveys), our data...
After the cataclysmic explosion in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, more than 100,000 citizens living within 20km of the nuclear power station were evacuated. These residents were not allowed to return home for more than a year, until April 2012, when the Japanese government began to lift the evacuation order for some areas. As...
Over the past years a large amount of digital science education resources became available for open access through web-based repositories. These resources have the potential to support technology-enhanced science education by enabling science teachers to improve their day-to-day science teaching. Nevertheless, it has been identified that science teachers could benefit from their participation in communities...
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