A review on massive e-learning (MOOC) design, delivery and assessment

MOOCs or Massive Online Open Courses based on Open Educational Resources (OER) might be one of the most versatile ways to offer access to quality education, especially for those residing in far or disadvantaged areas. This article analyzes the state of the art on MOOCs, exploring open research questions and setting interesting topics and goals for further research. Finally, it proposes a framework that includes the use of software agents with the aim to improve and personalize management, delivery, efficiency and evaluation of massive online courses on an individual level basis.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The occurrences and potential mitigation of occupational fraud in the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) sector in Vietnam: an empirical holistic approach

Purpose – This research investigated the overall research question as follows: How do factors (individual-level, organisational-level, industry-level, and country-level) influence occupational fraud in the INGO sector in Vietnam? This thesis addresses occupational fraud or internal fraud, rather than external fraud, because the former accounted for the majority of losses due to fraud. Additionally, this thesis has two foci: what may contribute to fraud – the second focus, and what may prevent fraud – the first focus. Specifically, the first focus is on how effective organisational-level factors are at preventing or reducing fraud (undetected, suspected, actual/detected, and future). Whilst, the second focus is on factors (individual-level, organisational-level, industry-level, and country-level) that may contribute to fraud (future only). Design/methodology/approach – This study develops a conceptual model, built on the fraud triangle by Cressey in 1950. The model combines: fraud (undetected, suspected, actual/detected, and future); individual-level determinants (e.g. pressures); organisational-level determinants [e.g. organisational ethical culture (OEC), organisational ethics program (OEP), and organisational internal control (OIC)]; the industry-level determinant (e.g. the non-profit nature); and country-level determinants (e.g. cultural, political, legal, economic, and technological). The methodological choice of research design is quantitative, using the survey strategy with a self-administered questionnaire to collect data. The questionnaires were administered to the entire target population of 408 INGOs (a census) in Vietnam. In each INGO, only one potential survey respondent was approached. Potential respondents were high-level staff members such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), Chief Accountants (CAs), accounting/auditing/financial employees, and other managers (e.g. human resources managers). In order to approach potential respondents, the current research used two survey modes: the paper-based (drop-off) mode (administered through Indochina, a research company) and the web-based (online) mode (administered through the Internet). Furthermore, descriptive and inferential data analysis was performed. In inferential analysis, testing the goodness of the data, including the scales used, was undertaken, prior to hypotheses testing. Chi-square test for independence, independent-samples t-test, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), logistic regression, and multiple regression were statistical techniques employed in inferential analysis. CFA was executed by AMOS, whilst the rest were performed by SPSS. Results – This thesis attained 177 usable returned questionnaires, representing the overall response rate to be 47.6%. The results of statistical analyses are as follows. What may prevent fraud? – The first focus. Actual fraud At the model level, the combination of OEC, the effectiveness of OEP, and the effectiveness of OIC, to some extent, significantly predicted actual fraud. Likewise, the combination of the degree of OEP and the degree of OIC, to some extent, significantly predicted actual fraud. Moreover, at the independent variable level, the dimension of supportability under OEC as well as both the degree and effectiveness of OIC make unique statistically significant contributions to predicting/explaining actual fraud. Specifically, the latter is related to the effectiveness of the three dimensions under OIC. They are: management-performed monitoring activities and process-level control activities; commitment-to-competence control environment; and audits-performed monitoring activities and gifts-hospitality control activities. In which, commitment-to-competence control environment made the strongest unique contribution to predicting actual fraud. Conversely, the degree and effectiveness of OEP play no role in mitigating actual fraud. Undetected fraud At the model level, the combination of OEC, the effectiveness of OEP, and the effectiveness of OIC, to some extent, significantly predicted undetected fraud, whilst the combination of the degree of OEP, and the degree of OIC did not. In addition, at the independent variable level, only the dimension of supportability under OEC made a unique statistically significant contribution to predicting undetected fraud, but not the effectiveness and degree of OEP and OIC. Suspected fraud At the model level, the combination of OEC, the effectiveness of OEP, and the effectiveness of OIC, to some extent, significantly predicted suspected fraud, whilst the combination of the degree of OEP, and the degree of OIC did not. Additionally, at the independent variable level, there were three dimensions making unique statistically significant contributions to predicting suspected fraud. They were: the dimension of discussability under OEC, the effectiveness of the dimension of ethics-incorporated performance and employment under OEP, and the effectiveness of the dimension of monitoring activities and process-level control activities under OIC. In which, ethics-incorporated performance and employment made the strongest unique contribution to predicting suspected fraud. Conversely, the degree of OEP and OIC played no role in mitigating suspected fraud. Future fraud At the model level, the combination of OEC, the effectiveness of OEP, and the effectiveness of OIC, to some extent, significantly predicted future fraud, whilst the combination of the degree of OEP, and the degree of OIC did not. Moreover, at the independent variable level, only the dimension of supportability under OEC made a unique statistically significant contribution to predicting future fraud, but not the effectiveness and degree of OEP and OIC. What may contribute to fraud (future only)? – The second focus. For the purposes of this thesis, individual-level determinants (e.g. pressures), organisational-level determinants (e.g. poor OEC, poor OIC), and the industry-level determinant (e.g. the non-profit nature) are micro factors, whilst country-level determinants (e.g. cultural, political, legal, economic, technological) are macro factors. At the model level, the combination of the determinants, to some extent, significantly contributed to engendering future fraud. In addition, at the independent variable level, there were five factors making unique statistically significant contributions to engendering future fraud. They are: two individual-level factors: non-financial personal pressure (e.g. lack of personal discipline, greed) and financial corporate/employment pressure (e.g. management financial interest, low salary); one organisational-level factor: poor OIC; one industry-level factor: the non-profit nature in the operation of INGOs; and one country-level factor: the legal factor in Vietnam. In which, the non-profit nature was the strongest source of future fraud, whilst poor OIC is considered to be a silent source of future fraud. Originality/value – This thesis has made three distinct contributions to the literature. Firstly, it is the first comprehensive study worldwide to incorporate individual-level, organisational-level, industry-level, and country-level factors into predicting future fraud in the INGO/NPO (non-profit organisation) sector in a specific country (e.g. Vietnam), with statistically empirical evidence. Secondly, it is the first comprehensive study worldwide to examine different stages of fraud occurrence (undetected, suspected, actual/detected, and future), with statistically empirical evidence. Thirdly, it is the first comprehensive study in Vietnam as well as in developing countries to investigate fraud in the INGO/NPO sector (industry-level), with statistically empirical evidence. Besides, this thesis also provided other remarkable theoretical contributions. Practical implications – The results of this thesis are useful for different stakeholders in the INGO sector in Vietnam. The results may also be beneficial to stakeholders in the INGO/NPO sectors in other developing countries, which have similar or close national context factors as in Vietnam. The groups of stakeholders include: (1) CEOs, CFOs, CAs and other directors/managers of INGOs; (2) donors of INGOs; (3) auditors related to INGOs; and (4) the Vietnamese government. Furthermore, fruitful areas of further research were identified, in which five research areas, being equivalent to five research projects, could use the data collected by this thesis

Policy Enforcement with Proactive Libraries

Software libraries implement APIs that deliver reusable functionalities. To correctly use these functionalities, software applications must satisfy certain correctness policies, for instance policies about the order some API methods can be invoked and about the values that can be used for the parameters. If these policies are violated, applications may produce misbehaviors and failures at runtime. Although this problem is general, applications that incorrectly use API methods are more frequent in certain contexts. For instance, Android provides a rich and rapidly evolving set of APIs that might be used incorrectly by app developers who often implement and publish faulty apps in the marketplaces. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the novel notion of proactive library, which augments classic libraries with the capability of proactively detecting and healing misuses at run- time. Proactive libraries blend libraries with multiple proactive modules that collect data, check the correctness policies of the libraries, and heal executions as soon as the violation of a correctness policy is detected. The proactive modules can be activated or deactivated at runtime by the users and can be implemented without requiring any change to the original library and any knowledge about the applications that may use the library. We evaluated proactive libraries in the context of the Android ecosystem. Results show that proactive libraries can automati- cally overcome several problems related to bad resource usage at the cost of a small overhead.Comment: O. Riganelli, D. Micucci and L. Mariani, "Policy Enforcement with Proactive Libraries" 2017 IEEE/ACM 12th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017, pp. 182-19

A Decentralized Mobile Computing Network for Multi-Robot Systems Operations

Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique source of inspiration for the development of fault-tolerant and self-healing multi-robot systems capable of operating in dynamic environments. Specifically, swarm robotics emerged and is significantly growing on these premises. However, to date, most swarm robotics systems reported in the literature involve basic computational tasks---averages and other algebraic operations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Collective computing framework based on the swarming paradigm, which exhibits the key innate features of swarms: robustness, scalability and flexibility. Unlike Edge computing, the proposed Collective computing framework is truly decentralized and does not require user intervention or additional servers to sustain its operations. This Collective computing framework is applied to the complex task of collective mapping, in which multiple robots aim at cooperatively map a large area. Our results confirm the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, its robustness to the loss of multiple units, as well as its scalability. Furthermore, the topology of the interconnecting network is found to greatly influence the performance of the collective action.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Proc. 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conferenc

Periodic Pulay method for robust and efficient convergence acceleration of self-consistent field iterations

Pulay's Direct Inversion in the Iterative Subspace (DIIS) method is one of the most widely used mixing schemes for accelerating the self-consistent solution of electronic structure problems. In this work, we propose a simple generalization of DIIS in which Pulay extrapolation is performed at periodic intervals rather than on every self-consistent field iteration, and linear mixing is performed on all other iterations. We demonstrate through numerical tests on a wide variety of materials systems in the framework of density functional theory that the proposed generalization of Pulay's method significantly improves its robustness and efficiency.Comment: Version 2 (with minor edits from version 1