Improving content authoring user experience in the lovelace learning environment

Abstract. This thesis provides the analysis, planning, execution and evaluation of a new back- and frontend prototype of the online learning environment Lovelace created by the project group. The pre-requisite for the prototype was to utilize the same technologies as the current live version, and the project groups first major task was to investigate, comprehend and execute them. In addition, the project group was advised not to review the code of the live version to ensure fresh perspective into execution of the new version. The design takes influence from other sources such as Moodle. This thesis covers the process of the design from first sketches and analysis of the set-out requirements. These requirements include extracting the current editing functionality from separate administrator page to the easily accessible lecture pages editing widget, the static website contents caching, support for the existing Lovelace markup text and many others. The implementation phase starts by following the plan created in the design part which made the process more streamlined. Technical aspects of the development are handled in the implementation part of the thesis. Polymorphism, the way the content is rendered to the viewer, explanation and representation of how content forms and caching works are explored here. The evaluation of the finished prototype was executed in form of measurement of websites load times with addition of an expert evaluation meeting with experienced user of the live version of Lovelace. The meeting consisted of different test cases which the attendee had to complete on both old and new versions. These tasks were all timed and the results were vastly better with the project groups prototype. All of the tasks completed with less time with the prototype, and in some cases even twice as fast. Comparing the end result with the pre-requisites, the requirements were met well, and the improvements were proven to be a success.Tiivistelmä. Tämä tutkielma sisältää verkko-opintoympäristö Lovelacen uuden prototyypin suunnittelun, toteutuksen, analyysin sekä evaluaation vaiheet. Prototyyppi on projektiryhmän tuottama uusi front- ja backend toteutus, jonka esivaatimuksena oli hyödyntää samoja teknologioita kuin alkuperäinen versio. Tämän johdosta projektin keskeisin tehtävä alun kannalta oli tutkia ja opiskella näitä teknologioita perusteellisesti. Lisäksi projektiryhmää ohjeistettiin olemaan katsomatta alkuperäisen version koodia ja toteutusta, jotta projektia lähestyttäisiin täysin uudesta perspektiivistä. Suunnitteluvaiheessa projekti ottaa vaikutteita muista oppimisympäristöistä kuten Moodle:sta. Tämä tutkielma käsittelee suunnitteluprosessin vaiheet mukaanlukien käyttöliittymän luonnokset ja esivaatimusten analyysin. Vaatimuksia ovat editointitoiminnallisuuden siirtäminen erilliseltä ylläpitosivustolta luentosivulta helposti käsiteltävään editointipienoisohjelmaan, välimuistin implementointi latausnopeuksien nopeuttamiseksi, tuki Lovelacen ”markup” -tekstille sekä monia muita. Projektin tekninen puoli, kuten polymorfismi, sisällön renderointi sekä tarkempi välimuistin ja sisältölomakkeiden toiminta käsitellään implementointiosiossa. Valmiin prototyypin evaluointi suoritettiin latausnopeuksien mittauksilla sekä asiantuntijan arvioinnilla. Kyseinen asiantuntija oli kokenut Lovelacen käyttäjä ja hänelle annettiin kolme erilaista tehtävää, jotka hänen kuului suorittaa sekä alkuperäisellä että projektiryhmän versioilla. Nämä suoritukset ajoitettiin sekuntikellolla myöhempää data-analyysia varten. Tulokset prototyyppiversiolla olivat menestyksekkäitä. Tehtäviin kulutettu aika oli jokaisella kerralla lyhyempi prototyyppiä käyttäessä ja joissain tapauksissa jopa kaksi kertaa lyhyempi. Kun kokonaiskuvaa lopputuloksesta verrataan alkuvaatimuksiin, niin huomataan, että vaatimukset tavoitettiin ja uudet toiminnallisuudet paransivat todistetusti käyttäjäkokemusta

A Study of Information Fragment Association in Information Management and Retrieval Applications

As we strive to identify useful information sifting through the vast number of resources available to us, we often find that the desired information is residing in a small section within a larger body of content which does not necessarily contain similar information. This can make this Information Fragment difficult to find. A Web search engine may not provide a good ranking to a page of unrelated content if it contains only a very small yet invaluable piece of relevant information. This means that our processes often fail to bring together related Information Fragments. We can easily conceive of two Information Fragments which according to a scholar bear a strong association with each other, yet contain no common keywords enabling them to be collocated by a keyword search.This dissertation attempts to address this issue by determining the benefits of enhancing information management and retrieval applications by providing users with the capability of establishing and storing associations between Information Fragments. It estimates the extent to which the efficiency and quality of information retrieval can be improved if users are allowed to capture mental associations they form while reading Information Fragments and share these associations with others using a functional registry-based design. In order to test these benefits three subject groups were recruited and assigned tasks involving Information Fragments. The first two tasks compared the performance and usability of a mainstream social bookmarking tool with a tool enhanced with Information Fragment Association capabilities. The tests demonstrated that the use of Information Fragment Association offers significant advantages both in the efficiency of retrieval and user satisfaction. Analysis of the results of the third task demonstrated that a mainstream Web search engine performed poorly in collocating interrelated fragments when a query designed to retrieve the one of these fragments was submitted. The fourth task demonstrated that Information Fragment Association improves the precision and recall of searches performed on Information Fragment datasets.The results of this study indicate that mainstream information management and retrieval applications provide inadequate support for Information Fragment retrieval and that their enhancement with Information Fragment Association capabilities would be beneficial

Top tools for Data Visualisation in web development : a performance first approach

The purpose of this final year project was to deliver a visualisation based solution for the game analytics company, Game Refinery. The company’s platform presents a handful of reviews for games based on features with an additional chart that shows the rank of games in stores. Due to the slowness of the charts on the platform, multiple types of performance testing mechanisms were implemented to optimize the charts and the ways the system runs them. The focal point of the thesis is testing the performance of different charting libraries based on their user friendliness, features, functionalities, customisability, architecture, scalability, compatibility and performance. The project also put emphasis on performance optimization in web development and proper implementation of data visualization in web applications

Understanding the performance of interactive applications

Many if not most computer systems are used by human users. The performance of such interactive systems ultimately affects those users. Thus, when measuring, understanding, and improving system performance, it makes sense to consider the human user's perspective. Essentially, the performance of interactive applications is determined by the perceptible lag in handling user requests. So, when characterizing the runtime of an interactive application we need a new approach that focuses on the perceptible lags rather than on overall and general performance characteristics. Such a new characterization approach should enable a new way to profile and improve the performance of interactive applications. Imagine a way that would seek out these perceptible lags and then investigate the causes of these lags. Performance analysts could simply optimize responsible parts of the software, thus eliminating perceptible lag for interactive applications. Unfortunately, existing profiling approaches either incur significant overhead that makes them impractical for an interactive scenario, or they lack the ability to provide insight into the causes of long latencies. An effective approach for interactive applications has to fulfill several requirements such as an accurate view of the causes of performance problems and insignificant perturbation of the interactive application. We propose a new profiling approach that helps developers to understand and improve the perceptible performance of interactive applications and satisfies the above needs

Mobile IP movement detection optimisations in 802.11 wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11 standard was developed to support the establishment of highly flexible wireless local area networks (wireless LANs). However, when an 802.11 mobile node moves from a wireless LAN on one IP network to a wireless LAN on a different network, an IP layer handoff occurs. During the handoff, the mobile node's IP settings must be updated in order to re-establish its IP connectivity at the new point of attachment. The Mobile IP protocol allows a mobile node to perform an IP handoff without breaking its active upper-layer sessions. Unfortunately, these handoffs introduce large latencies into a mobile node's traffic, during which packets are lost. As a result, the mobile node's upper-layer sessions and applications suffer significant disruptions due to this handoff latency. One of the main components of a Mobile IP handoff is the movement detection process, whereby a mobile node senses that it is attached to a new IP network. This procedure contributes significantly to the total Mobile IP handover latency and resulting disruption. This study investigates different mechanisms that aim to lower movement detection delays and thereby improve Mobile IP performance. These mechanisms are considered specifically within the context of 802.11 wireless LANs. In general, a mobile node detects attachment to a new network when a periodic IP level broadcast (advertisement) is received from that network. It will be shown that the elimination of this dependence on periodic advertisements, and the reliance instead on external information from the 802.11 link layer, results in both faster and more efficient movement detection. Furthermore, a hybrid system is proposed that incorporates several techniques to ensure that movement detection performs reliably within a variety of different network configurations. An evaluation framework is designed and implemented that supports the assessment of a wide range of movement detection mechanisms. This test bed allows Mobile IP handoffs to be analysed in detail, with specific focus on the movement detection process. The performance of several movement detection optimisations is compared using handoff latency and packet loss as metrics. The evaluation framework also supports real-time Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic. This is used to ascertain the effects that different movement detection techniques have on the output voice quality. These evaluations not only provide a quantitative performance analysis of these movement detection mechanisms, but also a qualitative assessment based on a VoIP application