Business Intelligence and Big Data in Higher Education: Status of a Multi-Year Model Curriculum Development Effort for Business School Undergraduates, MS Graduates, and MBAs

Business intelligence (BI), “big data”, and analytics solutions are being deployed in an increasing number of organizations, yet recent predictions point to severe shortages in the number of graduates prepared to work in the area. New model curriculum is needed that can properly introduce BI and analytics topics into existing curriculum. That curriculum needs to incorporate current big data developments even as new dedicated analytics programs are becoming more prominent throughout the world. This paper contributes to the BI field by providing the first BI model curriculum guidelines. It focuses on adding appropriate elective courses to existing curriculum in order to foster the development of BI skills, knowledge, and experience for undergraduate majors, master of science in business information systems degree students, and MBAs. New curricula must achieve a delicate balance between a topic’s level of coverage that is appropriate to students’ level of expertise and background, and it must reflect industry workforce needs. Our approach to model curriculum development for business intelligence courses follows the structure of Krathwohl’s (2002) revised taxonomy, and we incorporated multi-level feedback from faculty and industry experts. Overall, this was a long-term effort that resulted in model curriculum guidelines

MOOClm: Learner Modelling for MOOCs

Massively Open Online Learning systems, or MOOCs, generate enormous quantities of learning data. Analysis of this data has considerable potential benefits for learners, educators, teaching administrators and educational researchers. How to realise this potential is still an open question. This thesis explores use of such data to create a rich Open Learner Model (OLM). The OLM is designed to take account of the restrictions and goals of lifelong learner model usage. Towards this end, we structure the learner model around a standard curriculum-based ontology. Since such a learner model may be very large, we integrate a visualisation based on a highly scalable circular treemap representation. The visualisation allows the student to either drill down further into increasingly detailed views of the learner model, or filter the model down to a smaller, selected subset. We introduce the notion of a set of Reference learner models, such as an ideal student, a typical student, or a selected set of learning objectives within the curriculum. Introducing these provides a foundation for a learner to make a meaningful evaluation of their own model by comparing against a reference model. To validate the work, we created MOOClm to implement this framework, then used this in the context of a Small Private Online Course (SPOC) run at the University of Sydney. We also report a qualitative usability study to gain insights into the ways a learner can make use of the OLM. Our contribution is the design and validation of MOOClm, a framework that harnesses MOOC data to create a learner model with an OLM interface for student and educator usage

Purple Computational Environment With Mappings to ACE Requirements for the General Availability User Environment Capabilities

Purple is an Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) funded massively parallel supercomputer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The Purple Computational Environment documents the capabilities and the environment provided for the FY06 LLNL Level 1 General Availability Milestone. This document describes specific capabilities, tools, and procedures to support both local and remote users. The model is focused on the needs of the ASC user working in the secure computing environments at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories, but also documents needs of the LLNL and Alliance users working in the unclassified environment. Additionally, the Purple Computational Environment maps the provided capabilities to the Trilab ASC Computing Environment (ACE) Version 8.0 requirements. The ACE requirements reflect the high performance computing requirements for the General Availability user environment capabilities of the ASC community. Appendix A lists these requirements and includes a description of ACE requirements met and those requirements that are not met for each section of this document. The Purple Computing Environment, along with the ACE mappings, has been issued and reviewed throughout the Tri-lab community

Performance Benchmarks for Custom Applications: Considerations and Strategies

The motivation for this research came from the need to solve a problem affecting not only the company used in this study, but also the many other companies in the information technology industry having similar problem: how to conduct performance benchmarks for custom applications in an effective, unbiased, and accurate manner. This paper presents the pros and cons of existing benchmark methodologies. It proposes a combination of the best characteristics of these benchmarks into a methodology that addresses the problem from an application perspective considering the overall synergy between operating system and software. The author also discusses a software design to implement the proposed methodology. The methodology proposed is generic enough to be adapted to any particular application performance-benchmarking situation

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Engineering handbook

1995 handbook for the faculty of Engineerin

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

OURMINE: An open source data mining toolkit

When researchers want to repeat, improve or refute prior conclusions, it is useful to have a complete and operational description of prior experiments. If those descriptions are overly long or complex, then sharing their details may not be informative.;OURMINE is a scripting environment for the development and deployment of data mining experiments. Using OURMINE, data mining novices can specify and execute intricate experiments, while researchers can publish their complete experimental rig alongside their conclusions.;This is achievable because of OURMINE\u27s succinctness. For example, this thesis presents three case studies documented in the OURMINE syntax. Thus, the brevity and simplicity of OURMINE recommends it as a better tool for documenting, executing, and sharing data mining experiments