A Primer for Work-Based Learning: How to Make a Job the Basis for a College Education

Provides an overview of the Jobs to Careers model, in which employers and colleges collaborate to embed curricula and training in the work process, as a way to meet healthcare labor force needs. Includes grantee profiles, lessons learned, and worksheets

Load balancing clustering on moodle LMS to overcome performance issue of e-learning system

In dealing with the rapid growth of digitalization, the e-learning system has become a mandatory component of any Higher Education (HE) to serve academic processes requests. Along with the increasing number of users, the need for service availability and capabilities of eLearning are increasing day by day. The organization should always look for strategies to keep the eLearning always able to meet these demands. This report presents the implementation of Load Balancing Clustering (LBC) mechanism applied to Moodle LMS in an HE Institution to deal with the poor performance issues. By utilizing existing tools such as HAProxy and keepalived, the implemented LBC configuration delivers a qualified e-learning system performance. Both qualitative and quantitative parameters convince better performance than before. In four months of the operation there is no user complaint received. Meanwhile, in the current semester has been running for two months, the up-time is 99.8 % of 52.685 minutes operational time

Using Professional Development to Build Pre-Service Teachers\u27 Self-Efficacy for Helping Students with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to Learn

The current study determined if a professional development on PTSD would improve pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy for helping students with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to learn. Participants consisted of 59 college students from one large, comprehensive, Mid-Southern university who were enrolled in an education program and an educational psychology course. Using a quasi-experimental method, participants either received the PTSD professional development (treatment) or regular instruction (control group). All participants completed a measure of demographics, a pre-test measure of selfefficacy for helping students with PTSD to learn, which was further dissected into four constructs (i.e., self-efficacy for identifying students with PTSD, adapting instruction to maximize learning, creating a safe and secure environment, and finding help), and a posttest measure of the same self-efficacy items. A one-way MANOVA indicated statistically significant differences between the two groups in self-efficacy for identifying students with PTSD. Furthermore, a paired-samples t-test revealed that the treatment groups’ selfefficacy scores on all four constructs significantly improved from pre- to post-test. Information is offered to support this finding; additionally, possible reasons for nonsignificant findings are discussed

RE-THINKING BLOOM\u27S TAXONOMY BY INTEGRATING DIGITAL SIMULATION IN

Despite the significant developments in adapting Bloom\u27s taxonomy in architectural design studio in the last few years, in addition to the advancements in applying digital media in the education process, there is still no integrated framework that combines all threads together. The learning objectives of advanced design studio include pragmatic thinking through testing new hypotheses, evaluating and applying different parameters, and identifying appropriate decisions. These are only achieved once barriers between design studio and building sciences considerations are overcome by addressing the process of simulation across the domains and levels of the revised Bloom\u27s taxonomy. The Design Studio and building sciences have traditionally been viewed as independent disciplines due to the lack of an integrated framework to connect them. This formulates a sound basis on which to explore the utilization of revised Bloom\u27s taxonomy levels, adapted through the use of the process of digital simulation in design studio as a decision-supporting tool. This paper aims to design a path for the integrating building performance simulation through upgrading the framework of Bloom\u27s taxonomy. To achieve this, the paper adopts qualitative exploratory approach of integrating building simulation software and its application in an Environmental design studio. The importance of the proposed framework is determined through measuring the attainment attributes. The results show that using this methodology in the design studio highlights the gaps in the learning process that students are facing in conventional architectural education

The Impact of Applying ISO Standards Systems on Improving the Quality of the Performance in Higher Educational Institutions in Egypt

Applying ISO 21001:2018 standard ensures that universities have a competitive advantage as well as the achievement of their objectives. This study aims to identify the impact of implementing ISO 21001: 2018 management systems standards on the performance quality of higher education institutions. The study investigates the reasons why private higher education institutions seek ISO standards certificates in general and the specifications of management systems for educational institutions in particular. The study applied a set of statistical testing methods on paired samples as well as independent samples to ensure quality assurance. The study also proposes the required prerequisites that should be considered. The study investigated a hypothesis stating that "there are no statistically significant differences before and after applying the ISO 21001:2018 management systems specification for educational institutions in improving the quality of performance in higher education institutions" which was rejected by conducting an experiment in Future University in Egypt and accepting the alternative hypothesis. The study confirmed the impact of quality which was previously investigated by prior research that has been discussed in this study. The study further presented the need to apply quality based on determined criteria which were not considered in prior studies. Moreover, the study proposed the impact of ISO standards in educational institutions in general and in Egypt in specific. This recommendation is proved by this study to enhance the quality level in educational institutions

Solving the imbalanced data issue: automatic urgency detection for instructor assistance in MOOC discussion forums

In MOOCs, identifying urgent comments on discussion forums is an ongoing challenge. Whilst urgent comments require immediate reactions from instructors, to improve interaction with their learners, and potentially reducing drop-out rates—the task is difficult, as truly urgent comments are rare. From a data analytics perspective, this represents a highly unbalanced (sparse) dataset. Here, we aim to automate the urgent comments identification process, based on fine-grained learner modelling—to be used for automatic recommendations to instructors. To showcase and compare these models, we apply them to the first gold standard dataset for Urgent iNstructor InTErvention (UNITE), which we created by labelling FutureLearn MOOC data. We implement both benchmark shallow classifiers and deep learning. Importantly, we not only compare, for the first time for the unbalanced problem, several data balancing techniques, comprising text augmentation, text augmentation with undersampling, and undersampling, but also propose several new pipelines for combining different augmenters for text augmentation. Results show that models with undersampling can predict most urgent cases; and 3X augmentation + undersampling usually attains the best performance. We additionally validate the best models via a generic benchmark dataset (Stanford). As a case study, we showcase how the naïve Bayes with count vector can adaptively support instructors in answering learner questions/comments, potentially saving time or increasing efficiency in supporting learners. Finally, we show that the errors from the classifier mirrors the disagreements between annotators. Thus, our proposed algorithms perform at least as well as a ‘super-diligent’ human instructor (with the time to consider all comments)

THE QUEST GAME-FRAME: BALANCING SERIOUS GAMES FOR INVESTIGATING PRIVACY DECISIONS

Digitalisation permeates all areas of social life. The use of digital games in research settings to analyse social phenomena is thereby no exception. However, games that can successfully achieve research ob- jectives and at the same time create an engaging experience require thoughtful balancing. When inves- tigating decision-making, for example, asking players directly about their reasoning in the game is breaking the game flow and prone to distorting influences from the game experience. This paper presents the design science (DS) process of a quest-based game-frame (QGF) oriented on the investigation of privacy decision-making. The design-empirical cycle of the QGF is outlined and applied to design two privacy decision scenarios for investigating reflection tendencies. The conducted binational experiment reflects the behaviour of 78 educators, university students and high-school students from Austria and Norway in online ordering security and fake news sharing while monitoring the game flow. Results demonstrate the potential of the QGF for unobtrusively investigating privacy decisions while maintaining high fluency of performance. Significant differences between educators and high-school students are found in time spent for reflection before making online security decisions. Additionally, Norwegian high-school students show a low awareness when deciding on real/fake news sharing

Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Interrogating the technical, economic and cultural challenges of delivering the PassivHaus standard in the UK.

A peer-reviewed eBook, which is based on a collaborative research project coordinated by Dr. Henrik Schoenefeldt at the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment at the University of Kent between May 2013 and June 2014. This project investigated how architectural practice and the building industry are adapting in order to successfully deliver Passivhaus standard buildings in the UK. Through detailed case studies the project explored the learning process underlying the delivery of fourteen buildings, certified between 2009 and 2013. Largely founded on the study of the original project correspondence and semi-structured interviews with clients, architects, town planners, contractors and manufacturers, these case studies have illuminated the more immediate technical as well as the broader cultural challenges. The peer-reviewers of this book stressed that the findings included in the book are valuable to students, practitioners and academic researchers in the field of low-energy design. It was launched during the PassivHaus Project Conference, held at the Bulb Innovation Centre on the 27th June 2014