Elicia Lanham

Identifying items for moderation in a peer assessment framework

Abstract Peer assessment can be considered in the framework of group decision making and hence take advantage of many of the proposed methods and evaluation processes. Despite the potential of peer assessment to greatly reduce the workload of educators, a key hurdle to its uptake is its perceived reliability, with there being the preconception that peers may not be as reliable or fair as ‘experts’. In this contribution, we consider approaches to moderation with the aim of increasing the accuracy of scores given while reducing the total workload of the subject experts (or lecturers in the university context). Firstly, we propose several indices, which, in combination can be used to estimate the reliability of peer markers. Secondly, we consider the consensus of scores received by peers. We hence approach the problem of reliability from two angles, and from these considerations can identify a subset of peers whose results should be flagged for moderation. We conduct some numerical experiments to investigate the potential for these techniques in the context of peer assessment with heterogeneous marking behaviors.

The Usefulness Metrics of the Most Popular eReader Used by Higher Education Students

In the digital technology era, mobile devices have an important rule to deploy a copy of data and information through the network. An electronic reader (eReader) allows readers to read written materials in an electronic manner that is available in many models. The objective of this study is to evaluate the usage of eReader by higher education students. We firstly identified the most frequently used eReader by surveying higher education students. The survey results showed that Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, and Samsung Tablet are the most popular eReader devices used by higher education students. We presented these results, and then we analyzed the surveyed results in detail in order to develop an evaluation metric of the eReader in a mobile platform that clearly allows the selection of the most suitable eReader for higher education students. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a set of criteria that can be used by students in the selection of an eReader that matches their specific needs and requirements.

Clock synchronization state graphs based on clock precision difference

Consistent and stable global states of clock synchronization are very important in distributed and parallel systems. This paper presents an innovative strategy and method to obtain stable global clock synchronization state graphs in asynchronous Internet environments. Our model will introduce the concept of clock precision difference as a means to evaluate running states of all clocks in this system and make this system self-adaptive well. Finally, we introduce the concept of clock precision difference into global states analysis of clock synchronization and construct clock synchronization state graphs in order to evaluate distributed clock synchronization states. We also present detailed simulations of the strategy and mathematical analysis used on real Internet environments.

Cultural Issues Relating to Teaching IT Professional Ethics Online: Lessons Learned

Over the last few years the number of fee paying international students attending Australian Universities has increased dramatically. However with the increasing number of international students enrolling in Tertiary education, awareness of their different learning styles has become apparent. Therefore the current way in which unit information is presented to students is no longer ideal and procedures are needed to be reviewed in order to keep up with the changing audience.