Design and Assessment of an Interactive Digital Tutorial for Undergraduate-Level Sandstone Petrology

This study describes the goals, features and effectiveness of a digital interactive tutorial which was created to provide undergraduates a 'virtual microscope' resource for learning sandstone petrology. The goal of the tutorial is to provide students exposure to the highly visual subject matter of petrography outside the confines of organized laboratory exercises. The hope is that widespread use of such digital interactive formats will allow students to gain high levels of expertise with description and interpretation of earth materials despite the reduced amounts of hands-on laboratory practice that are allowed by modern curricula. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Low Power Processor Architectures and Contemporary Techniques for Power Optimization – A Review

The technological evolution has increased the number of transistors for a given die area significantly and increased the switching speed from few MHz to GHz range. Such inversely proportional decline in size and boost in performance consequently demands shrinking of supply voltage and effective power dissipation in chips with millions of transistors. This has triggered substantial amount of research in power reduction techniques into almost every aspect of the chip and particularly the processor cores contained in the chip. This paper presents an overview of techniques for achieving the power efficiency mainly at the processor core level but also visits related domains such as buses and memories. There are various processor parameters and features such as supply voltage, clock frequency, cache and pipelining which can be optimized to reduce the power consumption of the processor. This paper discusses various ways in which these parameters can be optimized. Also, emerging power efficient processor architectures are overviewed and research activities are discussed which should help reader identify how these factors in a processor contribute to power consumption. Some of these concepts have been already established whereas others are still active research areas. © 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

OFMTutor: An operator function model intelligent tutoring system

The design, implementation, and evaluation of an Operator Function Model intelligent tutoring system (OFMTutor) is presented. OFMTutor is intended to provide intelligent tutoring in the context of complex dynamic systems for which an operator function model (OFM) can be constructed. The human operator's role in such complex, dynamic, and highly automated systems is that of a supervisory controller whose primary responsibilities are routine monitoring and fine-tuning of system parameters and occasional compensation for system abnormalities. The automated systems must support the human operator. One potentially useful form of support is the use of intelligent tutoring systems to teach the operator about the system and how to function within that system. Previous research on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) is considered. The proposed design for OFMTutor is presented, and an experimental evaluation is described

Beyond the Bubble: Technology and the Future of Student Assessment

Provides an overview of information technology's potential to enable better assessments of student achievement. Outlines promising models for testing complex skills, cognition, and learning and for utilizing such assessments to improve instruction

Reflecting on Experiential Learning in Marketing Education

© Westburn Publishers Ltd 2014. This is the preprint (pre peer-review) version of an article which has been published in its definitive form in Marketing Review, and has been posted by permission of Westburn Publishers Ltd for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in [Marketing Review, Vol.14, No.1, pp.97-108, http://dx.doi.org/10.1362/146934714X13948909473266"Experiential learning methods have become increasingly popular in marketing education. Factors underlying this trend are: the desire to respond to the changing higher education environment (the student-customer); the need to endow students with employability skills; the common sense assumption that since marketing is a practical activity, learning from experience makes sense; and, pedagogic methods designed around experiential learning theory which has been widely influential in recent decades. While not seeking to argue that experiential learning methods are ineffective in marketing education, this article argues that they should be used thoughtfully and where the learning goals and the cohort of students are likely to benefit from them. In particular, marketing educators should be wary of imposing an excessively high cognitive load on their students by expecting them to learn complex concepts from experiential learning methods that themselves have an intrinsically sharp learning curve, such as client consultancy projectsNon peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Understanding requirements engineering process: a challenge for practice and education

Reviews of the state of the professional practice in Requirements Engineering (RE) stress that the RE process is both complex and hard to describe, and suggest there is a significant difference between competent and "approved" practice. "Approved" practice is reflected by (in all likelihood, in fact, has its genesis in) RE education, so that the knowledge and skills taught to students do not match the knowledge and skills required and applied by competent practitioners. A new understanding of the RE process has emerged from our recent study. RE is revealed as inherently creative, involving cycles of building and major reconstruction of the models developed, significantly different from the systematic and smoothly incremental process generally described in the literature. The process is better characterised as highly creative, opportunistic and insight driven. This mismatch between approved and actual practice provides a challenge to RE education - RE requires insight and creativity as well as technical knowledge. Traditional learning models applied to RE focus, however, on notation and prescribed processes acquired through repetition. We argue that traditional learning models fail to support the learning required for RE and propose both a new model based on cognitive flexibility and a framework for RE education to support this model

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems