508,848 research outputs found
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Improving further education provision for learners from minority ethnic groups: a review of the evidence
This paper summarises the findings from a review carried out by the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy (NRDC) for the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA) between April and September 2007. The study sought to summarise what is known about the participation of those from minority ethnic groups in Further Education (FE) and to identify effective practice in helping them to achieve
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Models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis
Digital technology has become near ubiquitous in many countries today or is on a path to reach this state in the near future. Across the globe the share of internet users, for instance, has jumped in the last ten years. In Europe most countries have a share of internet users near to or above 90% in 2016 (last year available for international comparisons), in China the current share is 53%, but this has grown from just 16% in 2007, even in Ethiopia the share has grown from 0.4% to 15.4% in the same period (data from ITU). At the same time expectations of widespread adoption of digital solutions in higher education have been rising. In 2017 the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report predicted that adaptive learning would take less than a year to be widely adopted (Adams Becker et al., 2017). And projects such as ‘Virtually Inspired’ are showcasing creative examples of how new technologies are already being harnessed to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Furthermore, discussion of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals emphasise the key potentials that digital technology holds for achieving the goals for education in 2030 (UNESCO, 2017).
These developments lead university and college leadership to the question of how they should position their institution. What type of digitalisation initiatives can be found practice beyond best practices and future potentials? This is the question that this study attempts to answer. It sets out to analyse how higher education providers from across the world are harnessing digitalisation to improve teaching and learning and learner support and to identify emerging types of practice. For this, it focuses on the dimensions of flexibility of provision (in terms of time, place and pace) and openness of provision (in terms of who has access to learning and support and who is involved in the design of learning provision), as both of these dimensions can significantly benefit from integration of digital solutions.
The method of information collation used by the study was a global survey of higher education institutions (HEIs) covering all world continents, more than thirty countries and 69 cases. The survey found that nearly three-quarters of all HEIs have at least one strategic focus and typologies were developed based on this analysis to group HEIs with similar strategic focuses.
Overall, the findings suggest that most higher education providers are just at the beginning of developing comprehensive strategies for harnessing digitalisation. For this reason, the authors of this study believe that providers can benefit from the outcomes of this study’s research, as it can be used by university and college leadership for benchmarking similarities and differences and for cooperative peer learning between institutions. The database of cases and the guidelines for reviewing current strategies, which accompany this study, aim to facilitate this learning and evaluation process
Using quality models in software package selection
The growing importance of commercial off-the-shelf software packages requires adapting some software engineering practices, such as requirements elicitation and testing, to this emergent framework. Also, some specific new activities arise, among which selection of software packages plays a prominent role. All the methodologies that have been proposed recently for choosing software packages compare user requirements with the packages' capabilities. There are different types of requirements, such as managerial, political, and, of course, quality requirements. Quality requirements are often difficult to check. This is partly due to their nature, but there is another reason that can be mitigated, namely the lack of structured and widespread descriptions of package domains (that is, categories of software packages such as ERP systems, graphical or data structure libraries, and so on). This absence hampers the accurate description of software packages and the precise statement of quality requirements, and consequently overall package selection and confidence in the result of the process. Our methodology for building structured quality models helps solve this drawback.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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Layout area models for high-level synthesis
Traditionally, the common cost functions, the number of functional units, registers and selector inputs, are used in high level synthesis as quality measures. However, these traditional design quality measures may not reflect the real physical design. To establish quality measures based on the physical designs, we propose layout estimation models for two commonly used data path and control layout architectures. The results show that quality measures deriving from our models give an accurate prediction of the final layout. The results also show that traditional cost functions are not good indicators for optimization in high level synthesis
A multiprocess quality model: identification of of key processes in the integration approach
In this paper we investigate the use of multiprocess quality model in the adoption of process improvement frameworks. We analyze an improvement effort based on multiple process quality models adoption. At present, there is a possibility of a software development organization to adopt multi-quality and improvement models in order to remain competitive in the IT market place. Various quality models emerge to satisfy different improvement objective such as to improve capability of models, quality management and serve as IT government purpose. The heterogeneity characteristics of the models require further research on dealing with multiple process models at a time. We discuss on the concept of software process and overview on software maintenance and evolution which are important elements in the quality models. The concepts related to process quality model and improvement models are discussed. The research outlined in this paper shows that software processes, maintenance, evolution, quality and improvement have become really important in software engineering. The synergy among the multi-focused process quality model is examined with respect to process improvement. The research outcome is to determine key processes vital to the implementation of multi-process quality model
A Review of Models for Evaluating Quality in Open Source Software
Open source products/projects targeting the same or similar applications are common nowadays. This makes choosing a
tricky task. Quality is one factor that can be considered when choosing among similar open source solutions. In order to measure quality in software, quality models can be used. Open source quality models emerged due to the inability of
traditional quality models to measure unique features (such as community) of open source software. The aim of the paper
therefore is to examine the characteristic features, unique strengths, and limitations of existing open source quality
models. In addition, we compare the models based on some selected attributes
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