21,013 research outputs found

    Gamification in E-Learning: game factors to strengthen specific English pronunciation features in undergraduate students at UPTC Sogamoso

    Get PDF
    Appendix A Characterization survey (104), Appendix B. EFL Students’ questionnaire (109), Appendix C. Characterization survey: data treatment question (113), Appendix D. Informed consent letter, English version (114), Appendix E. Carta de consentimiento informado, versión en español (117), Appendix F. Time Schedule (120), Appendix G. Sample Challenges at Moodle (126), Appendix H. Participants’ questionnaire results (128).La gamificación es un término que suele denotar el uso de componentes del juego en situaciones no relacionadas con el juego en sí para crear experiencias de aprendizaje agradables, divertidas y motivadoras para los estudiantes (Werbach y Hunter, 2012). Por lo tanto, el análisis de los factores básicos de los juegos se convierte en algo esencial a la hora de definir y utilizar la gamificación como estrategia de mediación del inglés como lengua extranjera para fortalecer rasgos específicos de pronunciación en los estudiantes de pregrado de la UPTC Sogamoso. El procedimiento de estudio se basa en la investigación acción mediante la implementación de la estrategia de gamificación para la mediación en la pronunciación del inglés, orientada a treinta estudiantes de diferentes programas de ingeniería, administración y tecnología con niveles heterogéneos de dominio del inglés. Las actividades se centran principalmente en la producción de sonidos, el ritmo, el acento y la entonación, los rasgos de pronunciación segmental y suprasegmental. Los resultados arrojaron una evidente mejora en las características segméntales y suprasegmentales de la percepción en la pronunciación de los participantes así como la contribución del objetivo de los juegos a la instrucción fonética y fonológica, la sensación en el juego a la motivación para mejorar la pronunciación, el reto establecido en los juegos a la actitud positiva de los participantes, y la sociabilidad a la exposición practica de la pronunciación inglesa.Gamification is a relatively new term that often denotes the use of game components in situations unrelated to the game itself to create enjoyable, fun, and motivating learning experiences for students (Werbach and Hunter, 2012). Therefore, analyzing the games' basic factors becomes essential when defining and using gamification as a strategy for English as Foreign Language mediation to strengthen specific pronunciation features in UPTC Sogamoso undergraduate students. The study procedure is based on action research by implementing the gamification strategy for mediation in English pronunciation, oriented to thirty students from different engineering, management, and technology programs at heterogeneous levels of English proficiency. The activities mainly focus on sound production, rhythm, stress, and intonation, segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features. The results showed an evident improvement in the segmental and suprasegmental features of the participants' pronunciation perception as well as the contribution of game goals to phonetics and phonological instruction, the game sensation to the motivation for pronunciation improvement, the game challenge to the participants' positive attitude, and the sociality to the English pronunciation exposure practice

    Exploring environmental concerns on digital platforms through big data: the effect of online consumers’ environmental discourse on online review ratings

    Get PDF
    By deploying big data analytical techniques to retrieve and analyze a large volume of more than 2.7 million reviews, this work sheds light on how environmental concerns expressed by tourists on digital platforms, in the guise of online reviews, influence their satisfaction with tourism and hospitality services. More specifically, we conduct a multi-platform study of Tripadvisor.com and Booking.com online reviews (ORs) pertaining to hotel services across eight leading tourism destination cities in America and Europe over the period 2017–2018. By adopting multivariate regression analyses, we show that OR ratings are positively influenced by both the presence and depth of environmental discourse on these platforms. Theoretical and managerial contributions, and implications for digital platforms, big data analytics (BDA), electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and environmental research within the tourism and hospitality domain are examined, with a view to capturing, empirically, the effect of environmental discourse presence and depth on customer satisfaction proxied through online ratings

    Image classification over unknown and anomalous domains

    Get PDF
    A longstanding goal in computer vision research is to develop methods that are simultaneously applicable to a broad range of prediction problems. In contrast to this, models often perform best when they are specialized to some task or data type. This thesis investigates the challenges of learning models that generalize well over multiple unknown or anomalous modes and domains in data, and presents new solutions for learning robustly in this setting. Initial investigations focus on normalization for distributions that contain multiple sources (e.g. images in different styles like cartoons or photos). Experiments demonstrate the extent to which existing modules, batch normalization in particular, struggle with such heterogeneous data, and a new solution is proposed that can better handle data from multiple visual modes, using differing sample statistics for each. While ideas to counter the overspecialization of models have been formulated in sub-disciplines of transfer learning, e.g. multi-domain and multi-task learning, these usually rely on the existence of meta information, such as task or domain labels. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to a new transfer learning setting, called latent domain learning in this thesis, in which training and inference are carried out over data from multiple visual domains, without domain-level annotations. Customized solutions are required for this, as the performance of standard models degrades: a new data augmentation technique that interpolates between latent domains in an unsupervised way is presented, alongside a dedicated module that sparsely accounts for hidden domains in data, without requiring domain labels to do so. In addition, the thesis studies the problem of classifying previously unseen or anomalous modes in data, a fundamental problem in one-class learning, and anomaly detection in particular. While recent ideas have been focused on developing self-supervised solutions for the one-class setting, in this thesis new methods based on transfer learning are formulated. Extensive experimental evidence demonstrates that a transfer-based perspective benefits new problems that have recently been proposed in anomaly detection literature, in particular challenging semantic detection tasks

    Underwater optical wireless communications in turbulent conditions: from simulation to experimentation

    Get PDF
    Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is a technology that aims to apply high speed optical wireless communication (OWC) techniques to the underwater channel. UOWC has the potential to provide high speed links over relatively short distances as part of a hybrid underwater network, along with radio frequency (RF) and underwater acoustic communications (UAC) technologies. However, there are some difficulties involved in developing a reliable UOWC link, namely, the complexity of the channel. The main focus throughout this thesis is to develop a greater understanding of the effects of the UOWC channel, especially underwater turbulence. This understanding is developed from basic theory through to simulation and experimental studies in order to gain a holistic understanding of turbulence in the UOWC channel. This thesis first presents a method of modelling optical underwater turbulence through simulation that allows it to be examined in conjunction with absorption and scattering. In a stationary channel, this turbulence induced scattering is shown to cause and increase both spatial and temporal spreading at the receiver plane. It is also demonstrated using the technique presented that the relative impact of turbulence on a received signal is lower in a highly scattering channel, showing an in-built resilience of these channels. Received intensity distributions are presented confirming that fluctuations in received power from this method follow the commonly used Log-Normal fading model. The impact of turbulence - as measured using this new modelling framework - on link performance, in terms of maximum achievable data rate and bit error rate is equally investigated. Following that, experimental studies comparing both the relative impact of turbulence induced scattering on coherent and non-coherent light propagating through water and the relative impact of turbulence in different water conditions are presented. It is shown that the scintillation index increases with increasing temperature inhomogeneity in the underwater channel. These results indicate that a light beam from a non-coherent source has a greater resilience to temperature inhomogeneity induced turbulence effect in an underwater channel. These results will help researchers in simulating realistic channel conditions when modelling a light emitting diode (LED) based intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) UOWC link. Finally, a comparison of different modulation schemes in still and turbulent water conditions is presented. Using an underwater channel emulator, it is shown that pulse position modulation (PPM) and subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) have an inherent resilience to turbulence induced fading with SIM achieving higher data rates under all conditions. The signal processing technique termed pair-wise coding (PWC) is applied to SIM in underwater optical wireless communications for the first time. The performance of PWC is compared with the, state-of-the-art, bit and power loading optimisation algorithm. Using PWC, a maximum data rate of 5.2 Gbps is achieved in still water conditions

    Interactive Sonic Environments: Sonic artwork via gameplay experience

    Get PDF
    The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of video-game technology in the design and implementation of interactive sonic centric artworks, the purpose of which is to create and contribute to the discourse and understanding of its effectiveness in electro-acoustic composition highlighting the creative process. Key research questions include: How can the language of electro-acoustic music be placed in a new framework derived from videogame aesthetics and technology? What new creative processes need to be considered when using this medium? Moreover, what aspects of 'play' should be considered when designing the systems? The findings of this study assert that composers and sonic art practitioners need little or no coding knowledge to create exciting applications and the myriad of options available to the composer when using video-game technology is limited only by imagination. Through a cyclic process of planning, building, testing and playing these applications the project revealed advantages and unique sonic opportunities in comparison to other sonic art installations. A portfolio of selected original compositions, both fixed and open are presented by the author to complement this study. The commentary serves to place the work in context with other practitioners in the field and to provide compositional approaches that have been taken

    Strung pieces: on the aesthetics of television fiction series

    Get PDF
    As layered and long works, television fiction series have aesthetic properties that are built over time, bit by bit. This thesis develops a group of concepts that enable the study of these properties, It argues that a series is made of strung pieces, a system of related elements. The text begins by considering this sequential form within the fields of film and television. This opening chapter defines the object and methodology of research, arguing for a non-essentialist distinction between cinema and television and against the adequacy of textual and contextual analyses as approaches to the aesthetics of these shows. It proposes instead that these programmes should be described as televisual works that can be scrutinised through aesthetic analysis. The next chapters propose a sequence of interrelated concepts. The second chapter contends that series are composed of building blocks that can be either units into which series are divided or motifs that unify series and are dispersed across their pans. These blocks are patterned according to four kinds of relations or principles of composition. Repetition and variation are treated in tandem in the third chapter because of their close connection, given that variation emerges from established repetition. Exception and progression are also discussed together in the fourth chapter since they both require a long view of these serial works. The former, in order to be recognised as a deviation from the patterns of repetition and variation. The latter, In order to be understood in Its many dimensions as the series advances. Each of these concepts is further detailed with additional distinctions between types of units, motifs, repetitions, variations, and exceptions, using illustrative examples from numerous shows. In contrast, the section on progression uses a single series as case study, Carnivàle (2003-05), because this is the overarching principle that encompasses all the others. The conclusion considers the findings of the research and suggests avenues for their application

    Studies of strategic performance management for classical organizations theory & practice

    Get PDF
    Nowadays, the activities of "Performance Management" have spread very broadly in actually every part of business and management. There are numerous practitioners and researchers from very different disciplines, who are involved in exploring the different contents of performance management. In this thesis, some relevant historic developments in performance management are first reviewed. This includes various theories and frameworks of performance management. Then several management science techniques are developed for assessing performance management, including new methods in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Soft System Methodology (SSM). A theoretical framework for performance management and its practical procedures (five phases) are developed for "classic" organizations using soft system thinking, and the relationship with the existing theories are explored. Eventually these results are applied in three case studies to verify our theoretical development. One of the main contributions of this work is to point out, and to systematically explore the basic idea that the effective forms and structures of performance management for an organization are likely to depend greatly on the organizational configuration, in order to coordinate well with other management activities in the organization, which has seemingly been neglected in the existing literature of performance management research in the sense that there exists little known research that associated particular forms of performance management with the explicit assumptions of organizational configuration. By applying SSM, this thesis logically derives some main functional blocks of performance management in 'classic' organizations and clarifies the relationships between performance management and other management activities. Furthermore, it develops some new tools and procedures, which can hierarchically decompose organizational strategies and produce a practical model of specific implementation steps for "classic" organizations. Our approach integrates popular types of performance management models. Last but not least, this thesis presents findings from three major cases, which are quite different organizations in terms of management styles, ownership, and operating environment, to illustrate the fliexbility of the developed theoretical framework

    Working in ministries or public organizations in Saudi Arabia : A study of career development and job satisfaction of the Saudi Arabian middle managers

    Get PDF
    Career development and job satisfaction studies carried out in developing countries are very limited in number. Saudi Arabia is one of those developing countries which appeared on the political scene quite recently, but striving hard to develop its human resources due to its heavy dependence on expatriate labour to initiate and execute its development plans. The genesis of the study began when General Civil Service Bureau officials noticed a large movement of employees from ministries to other sectors (i.e. public organizations and the private sector). The purpose of this dissertation is to examine and analyze the factors behind this movement and relate this to the studies of career development and job satisfaction. The position of government organizations in Saudi Arabia is rather unique. Most of their employees are drawn from Universities due to the regulations of the GCSB of compelling them to work in ministries for a period equivalent to that spent in their University education until graduation. This situation has prevented such graduates from choosing their own occupations and seem to hinder their career development. As a consequence, this study, not only analyzes career development and job satisfaction in Saudi Arabia, but (v) job satisfaction in Saudi Arabia, but also makes a comprehensive evaluation of economic, social and organisational environments which seem to have an effect of the occupational choice of the Saudis. We take the assumption that the ideology of free occupational choice is not properly applied in Saudi Arabia due to some cultural variables (e.g. nepotism and strong family ties). Hence, this thesis will develop a definition of the concept of occupational choice and career development and the process of personnel flow and the ways in which such movement can be influenced within the Saudi context. The study will be primarily concerned with middle managers in two types of organization - government ministries and public organizations. This will hopefully give a profile of the Saudi situation as far as occupational choice, career development and job satisfaction are concerned
    • …
    corecore