Guangzhi Zheng

Supporting adult learning: enablers, barriers, and services

Adult learners are a large group for higher education including the computing and information technology programs. This paper provides a structured analysis of enablers and barriers to adult learning based on their characteristics and learning preferences. The paper proposes a general operational framework to support adult learners at different levels in educational institutions. The framework can be used as a guide for organizing adult learning support programs. Implications to IT education for adult learners are also discussed.

Career Trajectory Analysis of Information Technology Alumni: A LinkedIn Perspective

Understanding alumnis career path is critical for an Information Technology (IT) program to engage existing students, get connected to alumni and adapt the curriculum to the ever-changing technology field. LinkedIn, the largest professional networking site, provides a wealth of publicly available career outcomes of educations from higher education institutions. In the paper, we present an alumni database architecture that can extract the data from alumni LinkedIn profiles, transform and load the data in a database for analysis. We collected over 600 LinkedIn profiles of alumni who have graduated with Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees and Master of Science (MS) degrees from an IT program. We analyzed and compared the career trajectory of BSIT and MSIT graduates. Our findings show that graduates from both programs in general were moving towards managerial positions as their career progressed. However, BSIT and MSIT alumni showed some different career paths. BSIT graduates were developed into two different job titles: engineers and managers; while MSIT alumni were gradually growing into more managerial and business types of positions, such as managers and analysts

Transforming IT Education with No-Cost Learning Materials

The growing tuition has placed a large financial burden on many college students. High cost of textbooks adds to the problem that may cause students to delay or withdraw their education. Another problem of many current textbooks is their relevancy and currency. This is particularly notable in the computing and technology areas. In this project, we were pioneering the practice to use no-cost learning materials department-wide. A team made up of four faculty members, an instructional designer, and a librarian looked at collaborative ways to select, organize, and integrate publicly accessible information and transform the selected resources into instructionally rigorous free learning materials for four database related courses in the Information Technology curriculum. The team developed surveys and other assessment material to evaluate the educational effectiveness of using no-cost instructional materials in lieu of costly textbooks. The approach and resulted materials were tested in classes over a one-year period. This paper will discuss the study, background of the costs of textbooks, and present the assessment results of the four no-cost learning material courses.

Creating Courses with No Textbook -- Pros and Cons: Panel Discussion

One of the high costs for students includes buying textbooks and other materials for courses. According to the Institute for College Access and Success (2015) project on the student debt report, Georgia ranked 24th in the nation with

Hands-on privacy labs

26,518 average debt per student in 2014. [1] Since then, the average debt per student in Georgia increased 73 percent from

Practicing and Evaluating Soft Skills in IT Capstone Projects

15,354. College affordability is determined by several factors, including textbook cost. The textbook price index has been tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015) since 2001 (base period with index=100), rose from 115 in 2004 to 210 in 2014. [2]

Web Analytics Overview

Laboratory exercises are important in all technical disciplines including information security. Development of reliable laboratory exercises covering rapidly changing topics takes a lot of time and resources. Instructors often prefer to cover an ever-changing topic using textbook materials and additional readings rather than developing a new lab exercise. Privacy is one of those topics. This paper presents a virtual environment developed for hands-on exercises that will complement theoretical coverage of privacy topics. In these exercises, students will investigate technical aspects of privacy such as user tracking, data aggregation, and various tools such as Firefox add-on Collusion.