Problems and Promises of Using LMS Learner Analytics for Assessment: Case Study of a First-Year English Program

Learning management systems (LMS) are widely used in education. They offer the potential for assessing student learning, but the reality of using them for this is problematic. This case study chronicles efforts by librarians at Marquette University to use LMS data to assess students’ information literacy knowledge in Marquette’s first-year English program

Focal Spot, Spring 1999

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1081/thumbnail.jp

Using and evaluating CASE tools : from software engineering to phenomenology

CASE (Computer-Aided Systems Engineering) is a recent addition to the long line of "silver bullets" that promise to transform information systems development, delivering new levels of quality and productivity. CASE is particularly intriguing because information systems (IS) practitioners spend their working lives applying information technology (IT) to other people's work, and now they are applying it to themselves. CASE research to date has been dominated by accounts of tool development, normative writings (for example practitioner success stories) and surveys recording IT specialists' perceptions. There have been very few in-depth studies of tool use, and very few attempts to quantify benefits, therefore the essence of the CASE process remains largely unexplored, and the views of stakeholders other than the IT specialists have yet to be heard. The research presented here addresses these concerns by adopting a hybrid research approach combining action research, grounded theory and phenoinenology and using both qualitative and quantitative data in order to tell the story of a system developer's experience in using CASE tools in three information systems projects for a major UK car manufacturer over a four year period. The author was the lead developer on all three projects. Action research is a learning process, the researcher is an explorer. At the start of this project it was assumed that the tools would be the focus of the work. As the research progressed it became evident that the tools were but part of a richer organisational context in which culture, politics, history, external initiatives and cognitive limitations played important roles. The author continued to record experiences and impressions of tool use in the project diary together with quality and productivity metrics. But the diary also became home to a story of organisational developments that had not originally been foreseen. The principal contribution made by the work is to identity the narrow positivistic nature of CASE knowledge, and to show via the research stories the overwhelming importance of organisational context to systems development success and how the exploration of context is poorly supported by the tools. Sixteen further contributions are listed in the Conclusions to the thesis, including a major extension to Wynekoop and Conger's CASE research taxonomy, an identification of the potentially misleading nature of quantitative IS assessment and further evidence of the limitations of the "scientific" approach to systems development. The thesis is completed by two proposals for further work. The first seeks to advance IS theory by developing further a number of emerging process models of IS development. The second seeks to advance IS practice by asking the question "How can CASE tools be used to stimulate awareness and debate about the effects of organisational context?", and outlines a programme of research in this area

Towards a virtual research environment for paediatric endocrinology across Europe

Paediatric endocrinology is a medical specialty dealing with variations of physical growth and sexual development in childhood. Genetic anomalies that can cause disorders of sexual development in children are rare. Given this, sharing and collaboration on the small number of cases that occur is needed by clinical experts in the field. The EU-funded EuroDSD project (www.eurodsd.eu) is one such collaboration involving clinical centres and clinical and genetic experts across Europe. Through the establishment of a virtual research environment (VRE) supporting sharing of data and a variety of clinical and bioinformatics analysis tools, EuroDSD aims to provide a research infrastructure for research into disorders of sex development. Security, ethics and information governance are at the heart of this infrastructure. This paper describes the infrastructure that is being built and the inherent challenges in security, availability and dependability that must be overcome for the enterprise to succeed

Visualizations of Downtown San Bernardino and a Proposed Development Using CityEngine

Cities are experiencing increasing growth in population and business infrastructure. These changes have profound impacts on urban planners and stakeholders alike, in how they view and conceptualize potential new developments. In the past, the downtown area of the City of San Bernardino would take on new projects only having a rendering of the proposed building(s), making it time consuming and difficult to understand the wider impact on the surrounding areas. Without view analyses these developments could potentially result in termination due to deadlines or loss of interest from stakeholder. This project addressed this issue by creating 3D renderings of the area using CityEngine and preforming various visual analyses for new development(s). Having CityEngine will deduct meeting time and effectively answer visual questions their various stakeholders have in regard to the developments or cityscape of downtown San Bernardino area. These conclusions of these findings were significant to the downtown City of San Bernardino, and the project was able to be created with the data provided. The data also allowed the project to and create the cityscape of the downtown area and to preform various visual analyses to solidify the project’s fruition

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed

Reducing risk in pre-production investigations through undergraduate engineering projects.

This poster is the culmination of final year Bachelor of Engineering Technology (B.Eng.Tech) student projects in 2017 and 2018. The B.Eng.Tech is a level seven qualification that aligns with the Sydney accord for a three-year engineering degree and hence is internationally benchmarked. The enabling mechanism of these projects is the industry connectivity that creates real-world projects and highlights the benefits of the investigation of process at the technologist level. The methodologies we use are basic and transparent, with enough depth of technical knowledge to ensure the industry partners gain from the collaboration process. The process we use minimizes the disconnect between the student and the industry supervisor while maintaining the academic freedom of the student and the commercial sensitivities of the supervisor. The general motivation for this approach is the reduction of the entry cost of the industry to enable consideration of new technologies and thereby reducing risk to core business and shareholder profits. The poster presents several images and interpretive dialogue to explain the positive and negative aspects of the student process

The proposition of custom development model (CDM) for Account Payable (AP) in Integrated Management System (IMS) at Integrated Knowledge and Campus Management (IKCM)

The goal of the Technical Report is to analyze and recommend the best practice of Software Development Methodology for the IKCM to develop Account Payable (AP) System using Oracle 9i Forms Developer, and how the software development methodology can be applied to web development organizations to help the software developers increase their productivity to produce better quality software, on time, and on budget. As Web technology shifts its paradigm from static document focused to perform more functionality, Web development is becoming more like other software development. The importance is no longer only on the presentation, organization, and contents. When a site is delivered from a server to a customer, client issues, server issues, database issues, and network issues may influence the user’s perception of the Web site. To minimize the possibility of failure, a rigorous approach to site development should be adopted. Web development is no longer completely foreign to the concept of traditional software development. There are many models and ideas in software engineering that can be applied to Web development. Rapid Application Development (RAD) of Custom Development Method (CDM) using Oracle Developer Suite is among the choices. An ideal process model for Web Development environment must be easy to apply and help developers address the complexity of a Web site, minimize the risks, deal with the possibility of change, and deliver the site quickly with a high quality. Every set of software process has strengths and weaknesses. What is desirable is a set of software processes by which a web development organization can benefit the most. This Technical Report presents an approach to evaluation of software engineering processes and their application to web development of Integrated Management System (IMS) at UPSI

MSIS 2000: Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Graduate Degree Programs in Information Systems

This article contains the official text of the MSIS 2000 model curriculum as approved by both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association for Information Systems. It is presented here in its original form

Lessons from Mission-Critical Spreadsheets

We present eighteen examples of mission-critical spreadsheets used by diverse people and organizations for application software development, financial risk management, executive information systems, sales and marketing business processes, business operations, and complex analytics. We argue the spreadsheet is a Rapid Development Language, an Integrated Development Environment, and a Fourth Generation Language, and has unusual challenges regarding source code protection. We note that intentional spreadsheet applications are largely absent from the error literature. We explain why people might prefer a spreadsheet to an application developed by the IT department, and show how some spreadsheet programmers choose to avoid--or do not have--an IT department. We find that 1) Spreadsheets are widely used for mission-critical functions; 2) Spreadsheets are an effective application development platform; 3) There is diversity of development skill in creators of mission-critical spreadsheets; 4) Sophisticated programmers sometimes choose spreadsheets over other languages; 5) Spreadsheets are amenable to formal development practices, but such practices seem rare; 6) Spreadsheets play a central role in the evolution of business processes and work systems; and 7) Spreadsheets are a source of accidental legacy systems . We provide the Skill-User Programming Paradigm to help interpret and explain our observations. We conclude that spreadsheets are vitally important to business, and merit sustained research to discover techniques to enhance quality, productivity, and maintainability