Knowledge Innovation Through Update Propagation in Collaborative Data Sharing Systems

Innovative knowledge discovery comes through collaboration of knowledge in educational systems. In a collaborative educational system the heterogeneity of data in different learning management systems presents many difficulties for data sharing; some of these difficulties are how to integrate data, produce results for user queries, and find the correct data from heterogeneous learning management systems. In the past few years, various educational system architectures have been proposed; however, issues related to sharing data from different systems have been given less attention. Considering the lack of collaboration of knowledge this chapter investigates a problem of sharing of innovative knowledge among collaborative educational institutes. The knowledge is shared by propagation of updates. Updating innovative knowledge is done by propagating update from the originating source to other collaborative partners. The author examines update propagation in both cyclic and acyclic networks. Moreover, the authors considers cases where a source is temporarily unavailable or offline.

Strategic Digital City Projects

In order to face numerous challenges, cities need innovative solutions. Offering innovative information and efficient public services is a permanent challenge for cities concerned with citizens' quality of life and effective municipal management. The objective of this study is to describe and assess the strategic digital city projects in Chicago (USA) and Curitiba (Brazil), using innovative information and public services offered to citizens by the website. The research methodology emphasizes a case study covering the city hall, municipal departments, and other municipal entities. The results show advantages for the citizens who have free communal access to public services on the internet. Chicago offers its citizens 281 public services distributed in 256 subjects or themes and Curitiba 508 public services distributed in 26 subjects or themes. In both cities, it resulted in benefits for citizens through access to innovative information and public services offered by the internet. The conclusion reiterated the importance of the implemented innovative strategic digital city projects.

Using Recommendation Systems in MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is a model of educational delivery that is, to varying degrees, massive, with theoretically no limit to enrollment; open, allowing anyone to participate, usually at no cost; online, with learning activities typically taking place over the web; and a course, structured around a set of learning goals in a defined area of study. The MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course) are online courses, which are mainly for higher education level. These courses present an interesting evolution in the distance learn methods. The MOOCs do not replace the current universities, but they can be an innovative proposal to the curriculum. In this chapter, the authors present the algorithm they are creating. The main purpose of this algorithm is to create automatic mechanisms as the recommendation system to give such assistance and personalized guidance to students. They will also discuss the integration of this algorithm in MOOCMAROC which is a MOOC platform powred by Open edX.

Use of Presentations in the Classroom

The use of electronic presentations in the classroom has become a controversial subject, as the innovative educational value of electronic presentation tools such as MS-PowerPoint or Prezi is being questioned. This study uses the participatory research approach to investigate how college instructors feel about the use of PowerPoint presentations when teaching an introductory course of computer information systems. Nine college instructors participated in this research project by exchanging their views through an online discussion forum. The findings revealed that PowerPoint presentations are perceived by instructors as valuable only when combined with other teaching techniques. Moreover, it became evident that the instructors perceived that although students' attention and participation is affected by the use of electronic presentations, their actual performance is not.

Impact of Accreditation on Engineering Education

The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of accreditation on engineering education including student learning outcomes and innovation based on two accreditation bodies the NCAAA in KSA, and the ABET in USA. The article explores the approach of constructionism with emphasis to makerspace by delivering engineering and design courses with opportunities for innovation, creativity, and the ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs. This innovative approach shifts the active learning strategies from Do-It-Yourself to Do-It-With-Others culture. Makerspace is one of the integral parts of modern education system that brings together and facilitates the community of interdisciplinary individuals. Results from courses in engineering and design shows the benefit of the accreditation in terms of enhancing the overall program quality and the importance of re-evaluating strategies and methodologies of learning which help in delivering innovative solutions and educating tomorrow's leaders to address the most pressing issues facing our societies.

Business Intelligence in Secondary Education

This research assesses the education quality factors in secondary schools using a business intelligence approach. We operationalize each layer of the business intelligence framework to identify the stakeholders and components relevant to education quality. The resulting Education Quality Indicator (EQI) framework consists of seven Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and is measured through twenty-eight Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The EQI framework was evaluated through expert interviews and a survey, and uncovers that the most important factor in assuring education quality is a teacher's ability to communicate with students. Furthermore, a feasibility analysis was conducted in a Dutch student monitoring information system. The results pave the way towards attainable and data-driven innovation in secondary education towards personalized student and teacher performance management using business intelligence technologies, which may ultimately integrate a wide variety of data sources from environmental sensors to wearables to optimally understand each individual student and teacher.

The Development of a Virtual University Campus Using Second Life

This paper presents the development of a virtual campus named DeepThink designed to support a postgraduate program named MPhil (Master in Philosophy) at The Open University. The MPhil is a formal Open University degree delivered to a distance. The virtual campus integrates second life, moodle and several Web 2.0 technologies like elluminate (online conferencing tool), MyStuff (e-Portfolio), Skype and Ning (Social network). This integration between second life and web 2.0 technologies has caused enthusiasm in tutors at the Open University who saw the benefit of using DeepThink in their courses. This campus is an innovative project which brings new ways of supervision. Our campus DeepThink in general promotes higher Education using technologies like second life, which has shown to be useful in supervision and teaching undergraduate courses. Finally, we discuss our experiences on second life and its limitations.

Perceived Innovative Teaching Procedures in Higher Education From Students' Perspectives From a Sentiment Analysis Approach

In the fourth revolution era talking innovation is not only necessary for improving and forwarding all social and economic activities, but also is it an exigence of those who are demanding high-quality goods or services. This is important for knowledge services, and becomes a core issue for educative issues designed for the millennials or digital natives. Sometimes, these exigencies are no shown directly, but it is possible assessing them by means of the analysis of sentiments, which reflects a range of feelings which are not clearly verbalized and even self-recognized. This paper analyzes sentiments for assessing the importance of innovative procedures in higher education, from the point of view of the students. A prototype architecture – LADEL (Learning Analytics Dashboard for E-Learning) - is introduced, for dealing with the diverse e-learning domains. Some experiments are conducted. This demonstrated the necessity of innovative procedures in higher education, since it is a widespread, multidisciplinary and transversal demand, even it is not always explicit.

An Analysis of Student Performance in a Digital Electronics Design Course

The main purpose of this research was to find relations between activities in Dees (Digital Electronics Education and Design Suite) and student performance in an undergraduate course of Digital Electronics. In our case of study, we used a dataset which contains examples of students using Dees toolkit. Firstly, we performed an analysis of the attributes of the dataset, to find correlations between student performance and activities developed during six sessions of the course. Secondly, we performed clustering using the algorithm k-means. Then, we concluded that, there is a relation between Dees activities performed by a student and student performance. This result opens the possibility of further analysis and perhaps the use of similar software toolkit in different courses of the Engineering curricula.

Innovation on Geo-Enrichment of Texts Using Gazetteers for Massive Open On-Line Courses

Text documents available in the Web contain a large amount of geographic information. For instance, forum messages posted by students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may contain references to places. Normally, this information is not exploited, although it can be useful to further understand the topics of courses. Therefore, we propose an approach to instantly provide additional information to MOOC students about geographic features found in publications at course forums (geo-enrichment). The results are displayed through our tool, called ORBIS, which automatically highlights the geographic entities in the texts, and provides access to additional information in the same environment, without disruption; interacting with maps and spatial relationships with other entities. Information on locations mentioned in text is obtained from queries posted to the gazetteer Linked OntoGazetteer. We applied our prototype to the students' posts in the forum space for the MOOC titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, offered by the Pennsylvania State University.