Using a wiki to facilitate learning on a Requirements Engineering course

In this paper, we describe the introduction of a wiki for collaborative activities in a Requirements Engineering course offered at a distance to part-time learners. The paper describes the course and how wiki activities were incorporated. The paper then discusses the initial feedback from the students which shows that the wiki has been largely effective for developing students' understanding of the course concepts, the effectiveness of team working in Requirements Engineering and the use of wikis in practice. However, there are particular issues related to asynchronous working in distance education/eLearning that need to be better addressed. We conclude with a discussion of how we are tackling these issues and developing the use of the wiki on the course based on the students' feedba

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Enhancing design learning using a digital repository

The process of design is context dependent and open-ended, and therefore does not revolve around a specific body of information or knowledge. The educational paradigm shift in the area of engineering design from teaching to coaching and the increased use of social constructivist learning ideals requires students to have access to as wide a range of information as possible. Digital resources provide an excellent opportunity for extending the range of information available to design students and to this end, as part of a joint research program with Stanford University, the University of Strathclyde has developed a groupware product called LauLima to provide students with a collaborative environment which allows them to gather, organise, store and share information. This paper describes the improvement to design learning, based on a Design Knowledge Framework, in a 3rd year product design engineering project from session 03/04 to 04/05 which has been facilitated by the implementation of this technology

Multipath Routing of Fragmented Data Transfer in a Smart Grid Environment

The purpose of this paper is to do a general survey on the existing communication modes inside a smart grid, the existing security loopholes and their countermeasures. Then we suggest a detailed countermeasure, building upon the Jigsaw based secure data transfer [8] for enhanced security of the data flow inside the communication system of a smart grid. The paper has been written without the consideration of any factor of inoperability between the various security techniques inside a smart gridComment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Enhancing Moodle to meet the needs of 200,000 distance learners

In 2005 The Open University UK selected Moodle as the basis of its institutional virtual learning environment. Since then, the system has been integrated with existing elearning and administrative systems at the University and considerably enhanced during an extensive development programme costing around €8m and taking nearly three years. Many policy issues have emerged which needed to be tackled alongside the software developments in order for the platform to be adopted by the 7,000 tutors and nearly 200,000 students of the University. The Moodle system has proven to be reliable, scalable and customisable and has resulted in a more flexible system for the Open University than the commercial alternatives. This paper examines some of the many enhancements made to Moodle by the Open University, most of which have been fed back into the product for the benefit of other Moodle users. It describes some of the policy and pedagogical issues which have emerged during the roll-out of Moodle across the University