Kristy de Salas

The Development and Implementation of Learning Objects in a Higher Education Setting

With the increase in offshore and off-campus demand for University of Tasmania degrees, lecturers have become aware of the need to develop more flexible delivery processes which add value to the student learning experience and provide teaching staff with opportunities for greater creativity in the teaching process. The three cases described will outline a model guiding Learning Object development and teaching within the School of Information Systems and will describe the process of student interaction and response to these Learning Objects. This paper describes the replacement of face-to-face lectures with the online delivery of complex learning objects, resulting in high quality outcomes for students. The development of these discrete re-usable learning objects has followed a ‘tell, show and do’ model by way of integrating a theory presentation with a practical example exercise, followed by an opportunity for individual review & application of the material within each learning object. The development of these Learning objects has been undertaken in Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® with audio narration, with files being compressed using Impatica for PowerPoint™ and streamed within the University environment by WebCT Vista allowing access to all students enrolled over three local campuses as well as those enrolled interstate and overseas. The application and use of these learning objects has allowed for the concentration of face-to-face resources on highly interactive workshops that are supported by the Learning Objects, rather than on traditional lectures. The outcomes are better coverage of material in the three units, greater student satisfaction with the delivery of the unit and increased flexibility for both the students and staff.

Features of Achievement systems

Achievements and Achievement systems are recognized as important elements to increasing the profitability and success of games titles. Achievements can influence a players buying decisions and can even increase a players motivation to continue playing a game. Despite their growing importance to game players, designers, and promoters, little attention has been paid to them by the academic community. In order to better understand these games elements, there exists a need to better understand Achievement Systems, their features and the opportunities offered by them. To this end, this paper will consolidate current knowledge and provide an overview of the features of todays Achievement Systems, exploring the common features of the most popular systems and highlighting points of differentiation designed to better engage players and increase distributor revenue.

Enhancing visualisation to communicate and execute strategy: Strategy-to-Process Maps

Purpose – Developing an organisational, business, or corporate strategy is an important process which sets the direction and the scope for the business, over a period of time. While any organisation can create their own strategy, not all strategies are well executed and lead to business success. What is required is a process that provides a holistic understanding of an organisational strategy, and clear links between the elements of the strategy and the organisational processes that will be central to its execution. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes three case studies of medium-sized organisations that were the research context in which the methodology for developing and representing Strategy-to-Process Maps was developed and iteratively refined. Findings – Each of these three case organisations had identified a need to better understand their strategic objectives by a stronger visual representation of the components of their strategy, as well as a ...

Using the critical process targeting method to improve SMEs’ process understanding: A tale of two Australian case studies

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exhibit limited understanding of their business processes. This lack of understanding limits the potential of these businesses and is a direct contributor to the high failure rates of this sector of the economy. Research has suggested that existing BP methods to not support SMEs in gaining an improved understanding of their processes due to the high complexity and resource intensity of these tools, more suitable for deployment within a large business context. The paper aims to discuss these issues.,This paper reports on two qualitative case studies of medium-sized financial entities that employ a new approach, the critical process targeting method (CPTM), to improve their understanding of their processes.,In reviewing these two case studies, the authors find that the CPTM can be considered a useful tool in improving process understanding in SMEs, and can lead to the achievement of strategic goals. This paper, however, also describes a number of practical limitations that were encountered when employing the CPTM within the SME context.,This new contribution to theory adds significant and critical support to academia and practice in business process understanding where current methods are found to be too resource heavy for even some large organisations. These two case studies have also provided support for struggling management teams being overwhelmed by the need to understand business processes within their organisations. Published literature and the case study experience both suggest that medium-sized entities have difficulty understanding their business processes.

Blood and Violence: Exploring the Impact of Gore in Violent Video Games

Violence is a key element in video games and despite the extensive research in video game violence, there is still a debate on its psychophysiological effect. There is a lack of understanding on the elements of video game violence that influence aggression. The present pilot study examines the effect of blood and gore in a first-person shooter with participants playing in one of the two conditions, with or without blood and gore. To assess the effect of blood and gore, and thus violence, a number of elements were measured including physical arousal, individual differences, personality, and game experience. The results suggested that blood and gore had no effect on aggression-related associations and cognitive processes. The findings did suggest that previous game experience had a significant effect on increased physiological arousal when engaging in violent content featuring blood and gore. Furthermore, a personality trend emerged showing an effect on arousal and cognitive processes. As the study was preliminary, definitive conclusions cannot be drawn, however the findings warrant further investigation.

Augmented exergaming: increasing exercise duration in novices

Engaging people in exercise is vital for the health of the population. Health issues such as obesity are significant ongoing concerns for governments and society across the world, which can be improved through increasing the exercise activities of the population. The problem of lack of motivation for and engagement in exercise is well known, and so identifying techniques to improve engagement in exercise activities is worthy of investigation. This project reports on an initiative designed to increase both the duration of exercise activity and the intensity of exercise activity, through a gamified exercise solution. Preliminary results indicate that augmenting traditional exercise equipment with gamified elements can increase the time spent exercising, when compared to non-gamified exercise equipment.

Identifying types of Achievements

While the importance of Achievements has been recognized by the videogames industry and players as contributors to both player motivation and game selection, little attention has been paid to them by the academic community. There exists a need to better understand Achievements and the opportunities they offer as there is an absence of research into basic foundational knowledge about them. For example, only two previous studies exist that attempt to identify types of achievements, and both of these studies suffer problems of limited scope, limited currency and limited consistency. This paper will provide a current and detailed classification of Achievement types that spans multiple platforms, multiple genres, multiple pricing structures and multiple types of delivery. The new classification provided is a superset of those generated by previous research and can be used as a foundation for much future research on game achievements.

Simple Acts for a Better World: A Gameful System for Prosocial Behavior: Preliminary Design and Research Plan

Games and gameful systems designed to support social change most often seek to persuade by inducing empathy and outrage through the depiction of the direness of social issues and thus motivating people to take action. However, motivation is only one possible angle from which to approach behavior change. When capability or opportunity for meaningful impact are not given, people may refrain from taking action even when motivated. This work-in-progress outlines the theoretical background and design plan for a pervasive gameful system. Based on the behavior change wheel this system is designed to propose simple actions tailored to the players given capabilities and opportunities, thereby encouraging prosocial behavior. We conclude with a discussion of the research plan for the evaluation of the prototype and the prosocial actions by means of two rounds of mixed-method diary studies.

Developing smartphone apps for behavioural studies: the AlcoRisk App case study

Smartphone apps have emerged as valuable research tools to sample human behaviours at their time of occurrence within natural environments. Human behaviour sampling methods, such as Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), aim to facilitate research that is situated in ecologically valid real world environments rather than laboratory environments. Researchers have trialled a range of EMA smartphone apps to sample human behaviours such as dieting, physical activity and smoking. Software development processes for EMA smartphones apps, however, are not widely documented with little guidance provided for the integration of complex multidisciplinary behavioural and technical fields. In this paper, the AlcoRisk app for studying alcohol consumption and risk taking tendencies is presented alongside a software development process that integrates these multidisciplinary fields. The software development process consists of three stages including requirements analysis, feature and interface design followed by app implementation. Results from a preliminary feasibility study support the efficacy of the AlcoRisk apps software development process.

Mining for Gold (and Platinum): PlayStation Network Data Mining

Achievements are a common feature of modern video games. Early research efforts have attempted to classify achievements into taxonomies in order to identify achievement types and to learn about their potential affect on players, however, these studies have been constrained by small, manually collected samples of player data. This study describes a novel method of overcoming the lack of publicly-available achievement data, by scraping the PlayStation Network (PSN) for player profiles, including player achievement lists and progress in order to allow for a more informed analysis of players and their activities. Results of the application of this method have allowed us to source 30,227 player profiles, and subsequently learn that a number of factors can influence the earning of achievements, including PlayStation Plus subscriptions, player regions, and individual game achievement counts. We also present a wide range of future research applications which make use of this system to augment other existing datasets such as achievement taxonomies, sales figures, and review aggregators.