Shantha Fernando

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.

Information Systems Security: Cases of Network Administrator Threats

In today’s business environment it is difficult to obtain senior management approval for the expenditure of valuable resources to “guarantee†that a potentially disastrous event will not occur that could affect the ultimate survivability of the organization. The total information network flexibility achieved depends to a great extent on how network security is implemented. However, this implementation depends on the network designers at the initial stage and the network administrators in the long term. Administrator may pave the way to attacks that could take place either at once where an obvious vulnerability may exist or in several phases where it requires information gathering or scanning in order to enter into the target system. Two studies on real cases given in this paper highlights the influence of such network administrators. To preserve the confidentiality, the names of personnel or organizations are not revealed.

Transcoding based optimum quality video streaming under limited bandwidth

Bandwidth scarcity is a common problem faced in multimedia transmission over broadband wireless networks. From a consumers perspective, the effectiveness of multimedia delivery suffers significantly in such networks. Further, in a mobile environment, when the number of users increases, they experience interruptions in the received multimedia streams. Adaptive streaming is one solution that can be adopted in any network environment regardless of the nature of the network. Adaptive streaming can be achieved using transcoding techniques. Transcoding is a mechanism that converts a video to a form that has less information so that the resulting data volume is appropriate for streaming over a low bandwidth network. However, the quality of the video stream drops due to transcoding. The advantage is that when there is a large number of users sharing the network, users could watch a video at a lower quality with no interruption if the transcoding is applied before the video is streamed to the end user. i.e., a compromise can be made between the video quality and network delay. The main focus of this research is to analyze the variation of transcoding parameters with respect to bandwidth, in order to achieve an adaptive streaming solution of optimum achievable quality in a low bandwidth broadband network.

Improving Assessment on MOOCs Through Peer Identification and Aligned Incentives

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) use peer assessment to grade open ended questions at scale, allowing students to provide feedback. Relative to teacher based grading, peer assessment on MOOCs traditionally delivers lower quality feedback and fewer learner interactions. We present the identified peer review (IPR) framework, which provides non-blind peer assessment and incentives driving high quality feedback. We show that, compared to traditional peer assessment methods, IPR leads to significantly longer and more useful feedback as well as more discussion between peers.

Factors leading to an effective MOOC from participiants perspective

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are dominating the eLearning field due to its sound pedagogical features and being open to any interest participant. Due to popularity and the demand, number of MOOCs increases at a higher rate. However, not all the MOOCs meet the goals of user. In other terms, not all the MOOCs are effective. It is vital to identify the factors affect to an effective MOOC. Since the MOOC concept is new, students behaviors and requirements are different than a typical eLearning course. Hence we used Grounded Theory (GT) methodology in order to identify these factors. We found 10 dimensions which affects to an effective MOOC; namely interactivity, collaboration, pedagogy, motivation, network of opportunities/ future directions, assessment, learner support, technology, usability and content. This research explains the process of GT and the results dimensions will assist in designing and implementing an effective MOOC.

Improving eLearning to meet challenges in 21 st century

Elearning has been practicing for more than a decade, it is evolving and changing rapidly to meet the needs of users. Many countries are moving from an industrial-based to information-based economy and the education systems must respond to this change. The skills needed in a modern world are critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, metacognition, and motivation. Last couple of decade eLearning focused more towards the individual development and literally assessing the students lower order thinking. The pedagogy supports to achieve learning outcomes based on individual performances leaving the learner in an isolated learning environment. The latest disruption in online learning is the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Many researchers assert that it provides sound pedagogical change leading to many advantages. Our research aims to address the gap between current and past outcomes produced by eLearning with that of next few decades to come. We used qualitative method Grounded theory to identify the factors affecting to an effective eLearning and ranked them according to the priority by using quantitative method Principle Component Analysis (PCA) in SPSS (Version 10.0 for Windows).

Next Generation Security Framework to Detect Botnets on Computer Networks

Botnet is one of the most widespread and serious modern malware occurs commonly in todays cyber attacks. A botnet is a group of compromised computers which are remotely controlled by hackers to launch various network attacks, such as DDoS attack, spam, click fraud, identity theft and information phishing. The effort of the research is to analyze the behavior, possible countermeasures and preventive procedures of botnets; and come up with a next generation security framework to detect botnets on computer networks. Index Terms—Botnet, bots, centralized, decentralized, peer-to-peer, similar behavior.

The Usefulness of Learning Objects in Industry Oriented Learning Environments

A model is presented to evaluate the usefulness of learning objects for industry oriented learning environments that emphasise training university graduates for job opportunities in a competitive industry oriented economy. Knowledge workers of the industry seek continuous professional development to keep their skills and knowledge up to date. Many of the desired features of learning objects and facilities of e-learning systems can be realized in a framework that combines usefulness, usage, and usability. This model on the usefulness of learning objects, called Learning Objects Evaluation Model LOEM, defines the concepts: academic level specificity, field specificity, industry specificity, operational specificity, and reusability specificity. It also defines an index, called Learning Objects Specificity Index LOSI that helps course developers in a course design and development process to assess the usefulness of learning objects.

A service platform for subscription-based live video streaming

The development and expansion of broadband technologies has stimulated the multimedia streaming market for the delivery of live streaming services which can be used for a variety of applications. The design of a generic audio and video streaming platform that can be employed for a wide range of applications is presented in this paper. A key feature of the platform is the ‘subscription framework’ which enables the service users to subscribe to a set of live feeds with their application specific requirements. The platform is capable of adjusting its service functionalities and the extent to which the media streams are secured for a particular user based on the requirements given at the service subscription. The platform is designed based on a layered architecture and a prototype implementation is carried out within the University network.

Adaptive IT Education through IT Industry Participation

Information Technology (IT) education, when adaptive to the market demand, can contribute towards the development of IT in a country. The contribution of IT education to the economic growth and sustainable development of a country is seen in the quality and spread of IT industries. It has been observed that there is a gap between the IT knowledge provided by universities and the knowledge required by IT industries to improve the level of IT in many countries. Adaptive Course Development (ACD) using IT-aligned learning objects was proposed as a solution to this. A framework is required to help such a process. Proposed framework for ACD takes into account the IT capabilities of a university in IT education, the specific attributes of academic subjects demanded by the IT industries and the availability of experts in IT industry and the universities.