Michael A. Herzog

Supervision and Regulation of Home Automation Systems with Smartphones

Home automation and building services systems are integrated in many homes and buildings to meet the needs of comfort, security and efficiency of the customers. On the other hand, mobile devices such as handheld devices and smart phones are providing location-independent access to the Internet and local networks. This paper describes the requirements to combine these two mediums to supervise home automation systems with smart phones. It presents the design and implementation of an iPhone application that allows the retrofitting of mobile devices into an existing KNX home automation system without the need of specific hardware or skilled technicians. An approach to use configuration files, which arise during the installation of KNX home automation systems, for the initial setup of the mobile application is discussed.

Process-Oriented Production of Learning Units for Sustainable E-Learning Offerings

During the federal funding program ‘New Media in Education’, a project group was established, which produces learning contents for two E-Learning offerings of an international virtual university. The continuous improvement and development of the required production processes with the objective of creating professional and competitive learning units lead to process and efficiency-driven approaches for E-Learning production. After introducing the main elements from business process orientation and their application to the E-Learning domain, this contribution proposes a generic procedural model for the production of reusable and standard-compliant E-Learning offerings, which has been derived from the practical experiences. On a Micro-layer, this model can be adapted to meet the individual requirements of content developers. In the second part, the documented processes and their advantages are illustrated using two examples from practical project work: the production of video assets and XML-based SCO production.

Didactic Support of Diversity of Learning Styles? Potential Analysis of Three Collaborative Learning Methods within e-Business Education

Media-supported learning scenarios achieve varying successful learning results and consequently students evaluate them differently. The impact on learning success that gender, occupation, graduation level and especially learning styles of students may have is subject to this study. 555 students participated in a transnational cooperation between two universities by applying collaborative media in different e-business-courses since 2010. Thereby three different media-supported learning scenarios were compared: virtual case study, game-based simulation (Beer Game) and online peer review. The results of the accompanying study made clear that different learning settings benefit different learning types. Thus the major goal of the long-term study is to evaluate how specific learning patterns or the different learning types can be supported more specifically by the use of different learning methods. Such approach includes the potential of a better didactic support regarding the diversity of students.

Der „Short-Clip“ Ansatz zur Produktion von E-Learning Video-Content für die VGU

Technologischer Fortschritt und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung tragen zur steigenden Bedeutung neuer Lernformen bei. Durch die rasante Verbreitung von Internet-Technologien spielt insbesondere E-Learning dabei eine grose Rolle. Der Lehrstuhl Systemanalyse und EDV des Instituts fur Wirtschaftsinformatik und quantitative Methoden der TU Berlin beteiligt sich deshalb zusammen mit einem Netzwerk aus 16 weiteren Professoren aus Deutschland, der Schweiz und Osterreich an dem Master Programm der Virtual Global University, welche ausschlieslich uber das World Wide Web arbeitet und global Studenten zum Abschluss als „International Master of Business Informatics“ (MBI) fuhrt. Dieser Artikel beschreibt dabei insbesondere die Vorteile und die Vorgehensweise des entwickelten Short-Clip Konzepts zur Konzeption und Produktion kurzer Videoeinheiten am Praxisbeispiel des MBI-Kurses Knowledge Management.

Embedding Interuniversity Peer Review in Virtual Learning Groups

Interdisciplinary cooperation in virtual groups has become a reality and challenge for businesses and institutions in the globalised world and thus a main learning objective for business students. This paper reports an inter-university cooperation between a German University of Applied Sciences and an Austrian University, in which students of both institutions work together in virtual learning groups. They collectively develop a research project concerning “ethical issues of digital communication”. The students pass the different stages of a typical research process starting with a relevant research question towards the presentation of the findings at a conference. For this research-based learning scenario a process model is developed based on established theory and including a Peer Review process for students from three courses of both universities. An accompanying study collects qualitative and quantitative data on Peer Review as a learning method in an inter-university context and the role of media for virtual cooperation.

Peer-Review from Learners’ Perspective

Within the framework of a broad four-year study with 550 participants in the fields of e-business and business informatics that was conducted at a German and an Austrian university, different media-based learning methods and their effects were compared. In order to be able to draw comparisons with other learning methods, a game-based learning scenario (Beer Game), a case study that was worked on in interuniversity groups and documented in a Wiki as well as peer-review were factored into the study. This article focuses on different pedagogical and technical varieties of implementation of a peer-review learning scenario as well as the qualitative analysis of students’ feedback and improvement suggestions. Compared with other media-based learning scenarios, the peer-review method was rated surprisingly positive in most respects. However, the suggestions for improvement analyzed for the present study mainly concerned a lack of anonymity in courses with a small number of participants, a lack of knowledge on the part of the reviewers, a wish for more reviews, the possibility to defend one’s paper after the review and a wish for examples what good peer reviews look like. Furthermore the study mirrors the progress that was achieved in the recent past of the peer-review tools.

Integration of a social media platform into university information architecture

This document describes the concept and prototype for a lifelong accompanying portal to be used in higher education. Through the use of profiles, good usability and display of concentrated information students should be bound to the portal and university throughout their studies and their life.

Multimedia Production with a Content HUB Environment. Media Engineering for Mobile Computing Courseware

A primary problem in multimedia content production is the plethora of formats and the resulting multiple point-to- point transformation processes in different content formatting specifications. However, these content transformation processes can be conceptually broken down into only few abstract principles. This makes it possible to develop a unified approach that theoretically enables the transformation of any given input channel into any desired output. Based on this principle, the present article introduces the concept of Generic Content Transformation and the related project MOCCA, which develops the corresponding software implementation of generic content transformation for a variety of input and output channels. To balance technical similarities with specific properties of different media channels, we suggest a combination of an XML-based structure (MXML) and a high level authoring environment. Generic Content Transformation further allows for novel means of accessing assets via compound search algorithms. In the second part we summarize and discuss current results and experience in three scenarios of media production, including mobile learning.