Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems

A parallel grid-based implementation for real time processing of event log data in collaborative applications

Collaborative applications usually register user interaction in the form of semi-structured plain text event log data. Extracting and structuring of data is a prerequisite for later key processes such as the analysis of interactions, assessment of group activity, or the provision of awareness and feedback. Yet, in real situations of online collaborative activity, the processing of log data is usually done offline since structuring event log data is, in general, a computationally costly process and the amount of log data tends to be very large. Techniques to speed and scale up the structuring and processing of log data with minimal impact on the performance of the collaborative application are thus desirable to be able to process log data in real time. In this paper, we present a parallel grid-based implementation for processing in real time the event log data generated in collaborative applications. Our results show the feasibility of using grid middleware to speed and scale up the process of structuring and processing semi-structured event log data. The Grid prototype follows the Master-Worker (MW) paradigm. It is implemented using the Globus Toolkit (GT) and is tested on the Planetlab platform

The Tutor's Role

This chapter addresses three questions about being an effective online tutor: 1. Why do we still think that online tutoring can principally draw its basis from face-to-face group processes and dynamics or traditional pedagogy? 2. Does the literature tell us anything more than we would make as an intelligent guess? 3. Do we really know what an ‘effective’ online tutor would be doing? The OTiS participants have gone some way to answering these questions, through the presentation and discussion of their own online tutoring experiences. Literature in this area is still limited, and suffers from the need for timeliness of publication to be useful. Intelligent guesses are all very well, but much better as a source of information for online tutors are the reflections and documented experiences of practitioners. These experiences reveal that face-to-face pedagogy has some elements to offer the online tutor, but that there are key differences and there is a need to examine the processes and dynamics of online learning to inform online tutoring