Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems to Optimize Learning

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of learners."Today, we know more than ever about how students learn, acknowledging that the process isn't the same for every student and doesn't remain the same for each individual, depending upon maturation and the content being learned. We know that students want to progress at a pace that allows them to master new concepts and skills, to access a variety of resources, to receive timely feedback on their progress, to demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways and to get direction, support and feedback from—as well as collaborate with—experts, teachers, tutors and other students.The result is a growing demand for student-centered, transformative digital learning using competency education as an underpinning.iNACOL released this paper to illustrate the technical requirements and functionalities that learning management systems need to shift toward student-centered instructional models. This comprehensive framework will help districts and schools determine what systems to use and integrate as they being their journey toward student-centered learning, as well as how systems integration aligns with their organizational vision, educational goals and strategic plans.Educators can use this report to optimize student learning and promote innovation in their own student-centered learning environments. The report will help school leaders understand the complex technologies needed to optimize personalized learning and how to use data and analytics to improve practices, and can assist technology leaders in re-engineering systems to support the key nuances of student-centered learning

Software como um Serviço: uma plataforma eficaz para oferta de sistemas holísticos de gestão da performance

This study main objective was to assess the viability of development of a Performance Management (PM) system, delivered in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS), specific for the hospitality industry and to evaluate the benefits of its use. Software deployed in the cloud, delivered and licensed as a service, is becoming increasingly common and accepted in a business context. Although, Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are not usually distributed in the SaaS model, there are some examples that this is changing. To achieve the study objective, design science research methodology was employed in the development of a prototype. This prototype was deployed in four hotels and its results evaluated. Evaluation of the prototype was focused both on the system technical characteristics and business benefits. Results shown that hotels were very satisfied with the system and that building a prototype and making it available in the form of SaaS is a good solution to assess BI systems contribution to improve management performance.O objetivo principal deste estudo é avaliar a viabilidade de desenvolvimento de um sistema de Gestão da Performance, entregue sob a forma de “Software como Serviço” (SaaS), específico para o setor hoteleiro, e também avaliar os benefícios de seu uso. O software implantado na cloud, entregue e licenciado como um serviço, é cada vez mais aceite num contexto de negócios. Todavia, não é comum que soluções de Business Intelligence (BI) sejam distribuídas neste modelo SaaS. No entanto, existem alguns exemplos de que isso se está a alterar. Para atingir o objetivo do estudo, foi utilizada Design Science Research como metodologia de pesquisa científica para desenvolvimento de um protótipo. Este protótipo foi implementado em quatro hotéis para que os seus resultados pudessem ser avaliados. A avaliação foi focada tanto nas características técnicas do sistema como nos benefícios para o negócio. Os resultados mostraram que os hotéis estavam muito satisfeitos com o sistema e que construir um protótipo e disponibilizá-lo sob a forma de SaaS é uma boa solução para avaliar a contribuição dos sistemas de BI para melhorar o desempenho da gestão.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Energy Information Systems: From the Basement to the Boardroom

A significant buildings energy reduction opportunity exists in the office sector, given that this market segment typically is an early adopter of new technology. There is a rising trend towards smart and connected offices through the internet of things (IoT) that provides new opportunities for operational efficiency and environmental sustainability practices. Leading commercial real estate companies have begun to shift from individual building automation systems (BAS) to partially integrated and automated systems such as energy information systems (EIS). In both the United States and India, organizations are seeking operational excellence, enhanced tenant relationships, and topline growth. Hence it is imperative to engage the executives with decision-making power, by tapping into their interest in sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and innovation. This expansion of interest can enable data-driven decisions, strong energy investments, and deeper energy benefits, and would drive innovation in this field. However, none of this would be possible without robust, consistent building energy information to provide visibility across all the levels of decision making, i.e. from the basement where the facilities staff take operational action to the boardroom where the executives make investment decisions. Price, security, and ease of use remain barriers to the adoption and pervasive use of promising EIS technologies in commercial office buildings. We believe that these barriers can be addressed through the development of ready, simplified, consistent, commercially available, low-cost EIS-in-a-box packages, that have a pre-defined set of hardware components and software features and functionality that are pertinent to a particular building sector. These simplified, sector-specific EIS packages can help to obviate the need for customization, and enhance ease of use, thereby enabling scale-up, in order to facilitate building energy savings. The EIS-in-a-box are adaptable in both U.S. and Indian office buildings, and potentially beyond these two countries

Alexandria: Extensible Framework for Rapid Exploration of Social Media

The Alexandria system under development at IBM Research provides an extensible framework and platform for supporting a variety of big-data analytics and visualizations. The system is currently focused on enabling rapid exploration of text-based social media data. The system provides tools to help with constructing "domain models" (i.e., families of keywords and extractors to enable focus on tweets and other social media documents relevant to a project), to rapidly extract and segment the relevant social media and its authors, to apply further analytics (such as finding trends and anomalous terms), and visualizing the results. The system architecture is centered around a variety of REST-based service APIs to enable flexible orchestration of the system capabilities; these are especially useful to support knowledge-worker driven iterative exploration of social phenomena. The architecture also enables rapid integration of Alexandria capabilities with other social media analytics system, as has been demonstrated through an integration with IBM Research's SystemG. This paper describes a prototypical usage scenario for Alexandria, along with the architecture and key underlying analytics.Comment: 8 page

What are the Most Critical HR Capabilities and Competencies that are Emerging for the Future?

[Excerpt] What are most critical competencies that are emerging for HR professionals today? What capabilities are needed for HR leaders to advance forward in their careers? While there has been much research and emphasis on technical competencies. (i.e. training & development, diversity & inclusion, etc.), our summary focuses on the important leadership and behavioral traits that enable HR professionals to successfully impact their organizations

Healthcare Data Analytics on the Cloud

Meaningful analysis of voluminous health information has always been a challenge in most healthcare organizations. Accurate and timely information required by the management to lead a healthcare organization through the challenges found in the industry can be obtained using business intelligence (BI) or business analytics tools. However, these require large capital investments to implement and support the large volumes of data that needs to be analyzed to identify trends. They also require enormous processing power which places pressure on the business resources in addition to the dynamic changes in the digital technology. This paper evaluates the various nuances of business analytics of healthcare hosted on the cloud computing environment. The paper explores BI being offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) solution towards offering meaningful use of information for improving functions in healthcare enterprise. It also attempts to identify the challenges that healthcare enterprises face when making use of a BI SaaS solution

Decoding Data Products – Through the Lens of Work System Theory

Data products are seen as important levers in repurposing the large volumes of data that are captured in organizations and in satisfying the increasing demand for analytics. Despite the increasing popularity of the data product concept, it remains unclear how data can be productized. This article proposes work system theory to study the implications data products have for how organizations manage their data. Adopting a multimethod approach involving case studies and focus groups, we identify three types of data products and analyze how organizations coordinate their resources to build work systems around each data product type. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discourse on scaling data and analytics capabilities to repurpose and consume data effectively