Michele Scalera

The OSEL Taxonomy for the Classification of Learning Objects

This project started from the necessity to create a taxonomic classification for the management of the Learning Objects (LO) repository used by the LCMS platforms. The classification obtained is now in use for the OSEL project (OSEL website – http://www.osel.it). The OSEL project is financed by the Statistics Department of the University of Bari. The aim is to analyze and to promote the introduction of blended elearning in the academic world. Many LCMSs Open-source platforms have been studied, tested and put at users’ disposal. The support to the ADL/SCORM (see http://www.adlnet.org) given by all the platforms has allowed the integration in the OSEL web of the repository service, along with the services already in use (forum, newsletter, glossary, database). The aim is to gather and to catalogue the LO products proposed in the various courses and managed by the learners on the web. Starting from Wiley’s (2000) and Redeker’s (2003) taxonomies, the research group studied the OSEL Taxonomy and presented the project of a web application able to classify the LO and to place them in order into the repository.

Ontological support for the creation of learning objects

This work belongs to a project in support of the semantic Web standard. The aim is to give an ontological support for the creation of e-learning courses. This will make a selection of learning objects according to semantic descriptors and in heterogeneous contexts, by means of a selective agent of didactic courses customized on the users preferences. This will also apply in the knowledge management systems where the time of answer to an informative need is a very critical aspect for the efficiency of the whole system

Customer centric strategies for value creation: academic experimentation

The exigency to assure the maximum of efficacy and efficiency of the educational processes is an important challenge to the social and economic development. The use of customer centric strategies is a crucial opportunity to the monitoring and the continuous development of the performance amelioration. This paper presents a new customer intelligence system that offers an indispensable support to improve the performance of the academic educational system by extracting knowledge from a data warehouse. In particular, the experimental analysis made on undergraduates of the Faculty of Economics of Bari proves that the CIS allows to detect early the dropout reducing the academic death rate.

Artifact-based vs. human-perceived understandability and modifiability of refactored business processes: An experiment

Abstract Business processes modeling has proven to be effective and reverse engineering techniques with which to recover business process models when they are missing or outmoded have therefore emerged. Regrettably, these techniques often lead to models with quality flaws and consequently to models with low levels of understandability and modifiability. Refactoring has been widely used to deal with such flaws, altering the internal structure of models while preserving their semantics. There are several studies concerning how understandability and modifiability are affected by refactoring in terms of several artifact-based measures. However, there is little evidence regarding how refactoring affects quality in terms of human-perceived measures. The goals of this paper are, therefore: to collect further empirical evidence about the influence of refactoring on understandability and modifiability of business process models and to investigate the correlation between artifact-based understandability and modifiability and human-perceived ones. The obtained results are not trivial and show that business process obtained by means of reverse engineering has recurrent quality flaws, and the understandability and modifiability of business process models cannot be assessed by using artifact-based measures only. Human-perceived measures need to be taken in to consideration in order to have a more accurate evaluation.

Enforcing Software Developers’ Productivity by Using Knowledge and Experience

Objective—Explore the relation between developers, a Knowledge Experience Base (KEB) called PROMETHEUS and their presentation in the development of enterprise applications used to propose a theory that expresses relations based on empirical evidences. Methods—Case study carried out in a real context with 5 development teams each of 6 staff members, who have in turn carried out evolutive maintenance tasks on 5 Software Packages commercialized by the enterprise with 5 different process models. Results—In the 5 experimental teams that used KEB productivity is almost double compared to previous data without the KEB. Conclusions—We can assume that the theory is extendible to the development process according to which using KEB in maintenance processes improves developer productivity as it mitigates the errors made due to the amount of decisions taken during project execution. Experience collected in PROMETHEUS becomes part of the organizational culture, being it formalized.

Integrating Fitts’ law in heuristical evalution checklist

The Learner Centered Design (LCD) guarantees efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction avoiding that the learning environment becomes frustrating and offering quality to the IT support together with low cost evaluation parameters. In the academic and industrial environments the heuristic analysis based upon checklist is a diffused method to analyze the LCD adequacy to the quality criteria. The usability of the interfaces has a relevant role. Fitts’ law is a model of the human behavior of the prediction of the times for the pointing of a target. It can be used for the design of usable interfaces, as well. In literature, the empirical evidence shows the effectiveness of Fitts’ law in the interactions between humans and control equipment for the military and aeronautics field. Nevertheless there are still few experiments in web usability. In this paper we present an experiment which shows a significant improvement of the indices used to measure usability. The advantages of the integration of Fitts’ law within the heuristic based upon checklist will be analyzed after an adequate presentation of the literature. A usability test on two samples of users of the Jonian Department at the University of Bari will be adopted.

PQMET: A digital image quality metric based on human visual system

In this paper we propose a digital image quality metric based on human visual system. This metric considers the coefficients of discrete cosine transform related to each 8×8 block of an image. To perform image evaluation PQMET detects a distortion applied to the image and then selects the corresponding matrix of minimum visibility thresholds capable to produce a visible signal. Therefore it uses the information about the distortion applied, with a consequent improvement in the image quality evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed metric achieves competitive performance with other well known metrics and outperforms them in some cases.