Indika Perera

Educationally enhanced virtual worlds

Virtual worlds continue to attract considerable interest as an innovative means of engaging students through the use of immersive, 3D, collaborative environments. They allow for the dynamic creation of content and for that content to be programmed. Second Life is the dominant virtual world technology in use, and whilst attractive in that it is a ready-made — albeit commercial — service, it was not designed for educational use and has significant social and technical drawbacks when used for that purpose. As such, we have been researching the serious use of OpenSim as an alternative virtual world for Computer Science education. OpenSim is a free, open source software development project which supports self-hosting and maintenance of virtual worlds. This paper explains our rationale for using OpenSim and reports on our experiences to date. It includes a feature comparison between OpenSim and Second Life as an aid for those wishing to exploit virtual worlds in the Computer Science curriculum.

Towards successful 3D virtual learning - a case study on teaching human computer interaction

This paper presents a case study illustrating successful involvement of a shared online 3D virtual world, for teaching Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as a final year course in an undergraduate curriculum. While there is considerable interest throughout academia in using such multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) for education, academics are experiencing many challenges in exploring various possible use-cases. This study was conducted to identify some of the critical issues such as student perception, privacy, ownership, access to practical work for assessment purposes, maintaining an association between institutional and virtual world identities, and the achievement of learning outcomes through the MUVE approach of teaching.

The third dimension in open learning

Virtual worlds continue to attract considerable interest as an innovative means of engaging students through the use of immersive, collaborative environments. They allow for the dynamic creation of content and for that content to be programmed. They empower students to explore learning environments that would be inaccessible to them in the real world. Learners achieve presence through the proxies of avatars, and consequently are aware of and may interact with fellow learners within the virtual environment. Interactivity ranges from simple exhibits as might be found in a museum to configurable, complex simulations rendered in a 3D space. At the same time there are now numerous open learning initiatives which seek to encourage the sharing of independently produced educational resources through the Internet, but these are mostly web-based, so the challenge of producing open learning materials based on virtual worlds remains. This paper identifies the challenges which need to be met to support the use of virtual world technologies in the emerging open learning context and presents two case studies of moving from 2D web-based learning environments to 3D virtual world versions of the same topic. These examples illustrate the type of innovative 3D learning environments that can be shared in the open learning context.

Quality of MOOCs: A review of literature on effectiveness and quality aspects

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is a trending phenomenon in online education. Number of participants in a MOOC and the number of MOOCs by platforms and courses are appearing to be increasing at a tremendous level. Although MOOC found to be the “buzz” word, latest reports claim that the hype of the MOOC is fading. One reason to this is because many MOOCs offered and created despite of evaluating the effectiveness of it. Therefore the qualities of MOOCs are under criticism. It is essential to seek possible solutions to balance the learner goal while offering a quality service. Working towards the direction, this literature review focuses on past researches carried out in identifying the success factors, best practices, and effectiveness of a MOOC. We focused literature published between 2012 and 2015 and found significantly less number of empirical evidence in discovering MOOC quality factors. Out of 4745 peer reviewed publications which met with the search terms, only 26 literatures found to produce highly relevant in deciding a quality of a MOOC. Out the 26 literatures, only 3 provided a quality dimensions with empirical evidence and 7 provided with proposal frameworks based on past literature. We discuss the concerns arising from the review and identify issues including lack of evidence in identifying the critical success factors, absence of social interactions, networking, anthropological and ethnographic view in determining a quality MOOC.

Establishing traceability links among software artefacts

Artefact management in a software development process is a difficult problem in software engineering. Usually there is a wide variety of artefacts, which are maintained separately within a software development process such as requirement specifications, architectural concerns, design specifications, source codes and test cases to name a few. Artefact inconsistency is a major problem since these artefacts evolve at different rates. Maintaining traceability links among these artefacts and updating those artefacts accordingly can be a solution to address artefact inconsistency. There is a need for establishing these artefact traceability links in semi-automatic way. Proper management and visualization tool is required for effective software artefact management in an incremental software development. We provide a prototype tool to establish artefact traceability links and visualization. This paper describes the research methodology and relevant research carried out for semi-automatic traceability link establishment and visualization of software artefacts.

Developments and leanings of crowdsourcing industry: implications of China and India

Purpose – Since crowdsourcing can be taken as a new field, the purpose of this paper is to suggest an idea/movement to motivate pro or anti-ideas/movements from scholars and experts to develop a synthesis in future. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a quantitative analysis of world leading outsource provider markets: China – manufacturing sector: and India – service sector. The paper uniquely presents the much needed analysis details along with a model that fits crowdsourcing into outsourcing setup. Findings – There is a strong need of policy implications and business process re-engineering strategies to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing into the present industry norms taking into account the macroeconomic norms as well as the potential impact on individual workers or participants of the crowd. Originality/value – The paper indicates a possible shift in the scope of management from managing a firm to managing beyond boundaries. Implications drawn in this paper can provide high impact su...

User Training for 3D Virtual Worlds: An Evaluation of Training Approaches

3D Multi User Virtual Environments (3D MUVEs), often referred to as 3D virtual worlds, show a number of useful applications in different domains. These engaging immersive environments which have simulated 3D content and virtual land are popular in the entertainment, commercial and education sectors because of their novelty and attractiveness. 3D MUVEs provide an application interface known as a viewer (client) to access the simulation server; viewers often provide a challenge for novice users as a result of their steep learning curve. Moreover, the application specific terminology used in the User Interface and the hierarchical menu options increase the challenge of even basic avatar interactions let alone the complex virtual environment and content management models. In this study we have investigated two popular methods of user training in order to identify the best options for efficient and effective training. The study described in this paper suggests that in-world training is more effective than conventional user documentation in building competences.

A framework for Mixed Reality application development: A case study on Yapahuwa archaeological site

A major challenge in developing Mixed Reality (MR) applications is the lack of a generic framework that can be used for easy development of MR applications employing multimodal user interaction techniques. The main objective of having such framework is that, whenever needed, it should be possible to simply design and develop a complete MR application to provide an immersive user experience based on the given framework. In this research we have designed and developed a mixed reality application using the proposed framework as part of the research; this MR application is customized to run on resource constrained portable devices such as smart phones. Moreover, it is capable of capturing required user inputs without their active intervention through the inbuilt sensors of the device, while using its screen for rendering visualization. Hence, the expensive and physically constrained explicit hardware devices are not required for a user to enjoy the MR experience. The framework presented in this research allows easy development of such MR applications relying on its architecture. By building a MR application in the domain of archaeological site reconstruction and exploration, the usefulness of the framework was emphasized. The proposed solution was tested to analyse the resource usage on the mobile device, accuracy of visualization and level of user experience, which are discussed in the paper.

A traceability management framework for artefacts in self-adaptive systems

We expect software systems to be dependable and sufficiently responsive to the inevitable changes regularly happen in their operational environments. This can be a challenging task to achieve when systems are in enterprise scale and large enough to cater for multiple complex business processes. One approach to address this is by incorporating suitable software process models and managing various artefacts within the process. However, once deployed, only maintenance of the software is viable through the process; it may not be sufficient for the needed changes due to the essential difficulties associated with software engineering. In order to overcome this challenge, self-adaptive systems with dynamically modifying architectures are becoming popular and sufficiently warrant for a mainstream practice in future. In light of these developments, we identified an important yet missing part in self-adaptive system engineering, i.e. artefact traceability management at runtime. This paper presents the research work on developing a generic traceability management toolkit with a traceability interlink visualizer aiding software engineers to explore artefact inconsistencies rapidly. The toolkit was then extended with a widely used self-adaptive system framework. The evaluation of the developed traceability management framework with a case system is presented.

Educating users for disaster management: An exploratory study on using immersive training for disaster management

Educating users for effective disaster management skills can be a challenge that requires different levels of training support. While the training requirements can be different with respect to the contexts of managing different disaster types there can be generic training requirements that should be incorporated into all types of disaster management training. Another key aspect of disaster management training is to associate new tools and technologies that facilitate disaster management and relief work. Wireless sensor based disaster management is an emerging research area that promotes technology incorporation into different levels of disaster management tasks. In this work we explore the training for disaster management activities with wireless sensor networks. As the training platform we use a novel, yet increasingly popular and learner engaging, immersive environment OpenSim. In an OpenSim installation, a specialised training environment was developed to simulate several disaster scenarios and required wireless sensors. A set of users have successfully used the training environment and provided feedback. The next phase of the research is planned to produce a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to facilitate academics and students for disaster management training.