Standards and Costs for Quality Management of E-Learning Services

The proportions of the technological development in the field of communications and information represent an irrefutable premise for significant changes in all the spheres of human life. Corroborated with the advance of the Internet recorded in the last decade, these changes form the perfect recipe for the emergence (ever since the '90s), functioning and development of flexible forms of labour at distance, using the technology of information and communication. Among the first domains where the impact of technology is very strong may be named education, marketing, advertising and commerce; the forms of manifestation are materialized in e-learning, cyber-marketing, online advertising and electronic commerce. But the simple use of technology does not automatically assure the success of the new forms of activity. These transformations of the traditional into digital, of the classic into virtual must be accompanied by the adequate support with respect to the quality of services, standards, platforms and the hardware and software technologies. If we are referring to the educational domain, we have to analyze the e-learning phenomenon or tele-education in its spectacular evolution in such a recent history. Quality represents a landmark of major importance in all the fields of modern society based on knowledge. From the perspective of tele-education, quality assurance must be focalized on three main directions: the quality of the actual educational process (class/course support, platform, technology, etc.); the quality of the instructor (professional training, qualification, specialization, pedagogic ability, teaching method, etc.); the quality of the person undergoing the course/class (training, knowledge thesaurus, involvement, accumulation wish, etc.). Also, like in any activity, quality standard reporting means an economic approach by quality costs. Theat means that the good product or quality services in e-learning are very strongly linked with educational multimedia production and good costs.quality, standards, e-learning, technology, cost

Migrating agile methods to standardized development practice

Situated process and quality frame-works offer a way to resolve the tensions that arise when introducing agile methods into standardized software development engineering. For these to be successful, however, organizations must grasp the opportunity to reintegrate software development management, theory, and practice

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant: Beyond CASE

This paper will outline the similarities and differences between two paradigms of software development. Both support the whole software life cycle and provide automation for most of the software development process, but have different approaches. The CASE approach is based on a set of tools linked by a central data repository. This tool-based approach is data driven and views software development as a series of sequential steps, each resulting in a product. The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant (KBSA) approach, a radical departure from existing software development practices, is knowledge driven and centers around a formalized software development process. KBSA views software development as an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary process with development occurring at the specification level

A Web Services Component Discovery and Deployment Architecture for Simulation Model Reuse

CSPs are widely used in industry, although have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development carried out within CSPI-PDG and Fluidity Group at Brunel University, of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organization simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Ethically Aligned Design: An empirical evaluation of the RESOLVEDD-strategy in Software and Systems development context

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in human contexts calls for ethical considerations for the design and development of AI-based systems. However, little knowledge currently exists on how to provide useful and tangible tools that could help software developers and designers implement ethical considerations into practice. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a method that enables ethically aligned design in a decision-making process. Though this method, titled the RESOLVEDD-strategy, originates from the field of business ethics, it is being applied in other fields as well. We tested the RESOLVEDD-strategy in a multiple case study of five student projects where the use of ethical tools was given as one of the design requirements. A key finding from the study indicates that simply the presence of an ethical tool has an effect on ethical consideration, creating more responsibility even in instances where the use of the tool is not intrinsically motivated.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. The copyright holder's version can be found at https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA.2019.0001

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future