Communication and Security Issues in Online Education: Student Self-Disclosure in Course Introductions

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore’s 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students’ introductions in a hybrid content-design course and an online design course, we noted that students self-disclosed private information in their introductions, whether to classmates or instructors. To investigate further, we analyzed the content of discussion-board and email-to-instructor introductions in a community college (first data set). Then, we analyzed discussion-board and memo-to-instructor introductions at a four-year university (second data set). We identified categories in the information that students disclosed, noting that they shared demographic, professional, academic, and personal information, some of which were identifiers that could compromise the students’ privacy. Our findings are relevant to professional communication, instruction design, pedagogy, and writing research as the study sheds light on issues that we address as investigators, instructors, and student advocates in a variety of contexts, specifically online spaces

Recognizing risk-of-failure in communication design projects

The pace of commercial graphic design practice presents very few opportunities to conduct user research after a project’s launch. This makes the design team’s ability to anticipate and address risks during the design development phase even more important, recognized in the astute observation from Tim Brown, CEO of leading international design group IDEO, that sometimes you must “fail early to succeed early.” This paper presents the methods and strategies used by the Centre for Design Research’s (CfDR) creative team to mitigate risk during three communication design case-study projects. Elements of failure are identified in each of the three cases and presented, with discussion of where and why they occurred, and the possible approaches for reducing the risk of such problems re-occurring. To provide structure to the discussion, the paper frames each contributory issue as either a usability, communication or technical failing. The analysis demonstrates that the factors contributing to design process failures are often complex and multi-layered. To avoid a poor design project outcome, it is evident that consistent risk monitoring is present in all stages of a design project, but might be improved by better understanding how issues change their degree of importance and potential negative impact during the course of the project. Developing a mechanism to enable teams to objectively identify and manage these fluctuating project risks, will contribute to a more coherent and effective strategy for recognizing and managing future design projects

Communication Design

In this article, we present our approach to communication design, which focuses on the organization of information for a particular audience and communicative purpose, drawing on knowledge from a range of disciplines including linguistics and communication. We argue that communication design can help companies save enormous costs and attract, as well as keep, customers. We present an example for a redesign by one of the students from our study programs at SDU Sonderborg that illustrates the kind of work communication designers can do

Designing Communication Design

Innovating in the field of new media genres requires methods for producing designs that can succeed in being disseminated and used outside of design research labs. This article uses the author's experiences with the development of university courses in communication design to address the research question: How can we design courses to give students the competencies they need to work as designers of new media? Based on existing approaches from UX design and other fields, I present a model that has demonstrated its usefulness in the development of commercial products and services. The model emphasises rapid techniques for user research and ideation; genre analysis; use of pitching and storytelling as a form of prototyping; and humanist methods for evaluation and critique

Joint Trajectory and Communication Design for UAV-Enabled Multiple Access

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest recently in wireless communication due to their high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost. This paper studies a UAV-enabled wireless network where the UAV is employed as an aerial mobile base station (BS) to serve a group of users on the ground. To achieve fair performance among users, we maximize the minimum throughput over all ground users by jointly optimizing the multiuser communication scheduling and UAV trajectory over a finite horizon. The formulated problem is shown to be a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem that is difficult to solve in general. We thus propose an efficient iterative algorithm by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques, which is guaranteed to converge to at least a locally optimal solution. To achieve fast convergence and stable throughput, we further propose a low-complexity initialization scheme for the UAV trajectory design based on the simple circular trajectory. Extensive simulation results are provided which show significant throughput gains of the proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes.Comment: Submitted for possible publicatio

Communication Design or Graphic Communication Design: Demystifying the Impending Controversy

The phrase ‘Graphic Design’ has been the adopted name for the branch of Visual Art that combines text, illustration and other visual elements to communicate messages. This name has reigned for decades, however, since the emergence of the digital revolution and the information age, different names have been adopted to replace the popular name graphic design. The adaptation of the new names has sparked controversy in the fraternity across the world, and these ideological positions have created confusion among people outside the profession regarding a definite name for the profession. In this paper, the researchers who are part of the fraternity and in academia sought the views and opinions of graphic design tutors in senior high schools in the Cape Coast metropolis in the Central Region of Ghana on the controversy through questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, and a total of 10 graphic design tutors were used. The data was analysed and discussed using quasi qualitative-analytical approaches. The findings revealed that, there are diverse entrenched opinions of people in the controversy which does not suggest a possibility of compromise to adopting a definite name soon. To indicate their position in the argument, the researchers employed critical thinking and inductive reasoning to examine the facts that emerged from the views of the tutors discussed, and the findings from the analytical review, and concluded on what they believe should be the appropriate name for the programme. Keywords: Graphic Design, Communication Design, Visual Communication Design and Graphic Communication Design. DOI: 10.7176/ADS/86-04 Publication date:October 31st 202

3D UAV Trajectory and Communication Design for Simultaneous Uplink and Downlink Transmission

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-Aided simultaneous uplink and downlink transmission networks, where one UAV acting as a disseminator is connected to multiple access points (AP), and the other UAV acting as a base station (BS) collects data from numerous sensor nodes (SNs). The goal of this paper is to maximize the system throughput by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectory, communication scheduling, and UAV-AP/SN transmit power. We first consider a special case where the UAV-BS and UAV-AP trajectories are pre-determined. Although the resulting problem is an integer and non-convex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the polyblock outer approximation (POA) method based on the problem's hidden monotonic structure. Subsequently, for the general case considering the 3D UAV trajectory optimization, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to alternately optimize the divided sub-problems based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design is able to achieve significant system throughput gain over the benchmarks. In addition, the SCA-based method can achieve nearly the same performance as the POA-based method with much lower computational complexity