The Implementation, Deployment and Evaluation of a Mobile Personal Learning Environment

[EN] The application of ICT to learning, the Web 2.0 trends and the widespread use of technologies such as mobile devices make it necessary to provide new solutions to satisfy the needs of learners. Such solutions should treat the students as the centre of the learning process. The students should be able to decide which tools they will use to learn, and the learning institution must consider the behaviour of students in such personal learning activities independently of the location where learning activities are carried out. In addition, learners can choose the type of devices they will use with special attention to mobile technologies. The work described in this paper proposes a service-based approach to defining mobile personal learning environments that facilitates communication with institutional learning platforms. Such an approach is implemented as a proof-of-concept and evaluated via a pilot study to demonstrate that such types of mobile learning platforms are feasible and can increase students’motivation to help them learn

Framework de servicios para facilitar la interoperabilidad entre entornos personalizados e institucionales de aprendizaje

[ES]La aplicación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación al aprendizaje proporciona una revolución en el soporte que se utiliza para aprender y enseñar. En especial una de las herramientas más significativas son las plataformas de aprendizaje, que facilitan servicios tanto a profesores como estudiantes para realizar esta tarea. Sin embargo estas plataformas están muy centradas en el curso y la institución y no en las necesidades específicas del usuario y en el aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. Esto supone que sean necesarios otro tipo de entornos, los entornos personalizados de aprendizaje. Plataformas institucionales y entornos personalizados van a coexistir y eso supone que tengan que interoperar entre sí. En este trabajo se propone la definición e implementación de una arquitectura que, mediante el uso de servicios web y especificaciones de interoperabilidad facilite esa integración. Dicha arquitectura facilita que las funcionalidades de los entornos instituciones sean exportados a entornos personalizados y que la actividad que en ellos se lleva a cabo se refleje en el entorno institucional. De esta forma se va a poder demostrar que la interoperabilidad entre ambos contextos es posible y favorece los procesos de enseñanza/aprendizaje.[EN] Application of Information Technology and Communication learning provides a revolution in the media being used for learning and teaching. In particular one of the most significant tools are platforms learning, which provide services to both teachers and students to perform this task. However, these platforms are very focused on the course and the institution and not on the user's specific needs and learning throughout life. This assumes that other necessary settings, customized environments for learning. Institutional platforms and custom environments will coexist and that means they have to interoperate with each other. in This paper proposes the definition and implementation of an architecture that, using web services interoperability specifications that facilitate integration. This architecture enables the functionality of the institutions environments exported into custom environments and that the activity being carried out is reflected in the institutional environment. In this way you will be able to demonstrate that interoperability between the two contexts is possible and favors the teaching / learning

Performance modeling of congestion control and resource allocation under heterogeneous network traffic. Modeling and analysis of active queue management mechanism in the presence of poisson and bursty traffic arrival processes.

Along with playing an ever-increasing role in the integration of other communication networks and expanding in application diversities, the current Internet suffers from serious overuse and congestion bottlenecks. Efficient congestion control is fundamental to ensure the Internet reliability, satisfy the specified Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints and achieve desirable performance in response to varying application scenarios. Active Queue Management (AQM) is a promising scheme to support end-to-end Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control because it enables the sender to react appropriately to the real network situation. Analytical performance models are powerful tools which can be adopted to investigate optimal setting of AQM parameters. Among the existing research efforts in this field, however, there is a current lack of analytical models that can be viewed as a cost-effective performance evaluation tool for AQM in the presence of heterogeneous traffic, generated by various network applications. This thesis aims to provide a generic and extensible analytical framework for analyzing AQM congestion control for various traffic types, such as non-bursty Poisson and bursty Markov-Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP) traffic. Specifically, the Markov analytical models are developed for AQM congestion control scheme coupled with queue thresholds and then are adopted to derive expressions for important QoS metrics. The main contributions of this thesis are listed as follows: iii ¿ Study the queueing systems for modeling AQM scheme subject to single-class and multiple-classes Poisson traffic, respectively. Analyze the effects of the varying threshold, mean traffic arrival rate, service rate and buffer capacity on the key performance metrics. ¿ Propose an analytical model for AQM scheme with single class bursty traffic and investigate how burstiness and correlations affect the performance metrics. The analytical results reveal that high burstiness and correlation can result in significant degradation of AQM performance, such as increased queueing delay and packet loss probability, and reduced throughput and utlization. ¿ Develop an analytical model for a single server queueing system with AQM in the presence of heterogeneous traffic and evaluate the aggregate and marginal performance subject to different threshold values, burstiness degree and correlation. ¿ Conduct stochastic analysis of a single-server system with single-queue and multiple-queues, respectively, for AQM scheme in the presence of multiple priority traffic classes scheduled by the Priority Resume (PR) policy. ¿ Carry out the performance comparison of AQM with PR and First-In First-Out (FIFO) scheme and compare the performance of AQM with single PR priority queue and multiple priority queues, respectively

Methodology development for measuring virtual university social responsibility (VUSR)

This thesis addresses the most challenging issues in online education and its social responsibility. A world’s first ontology on virtual university social responsibility (VUSR) along with an ontological-driven approach for measuring the corporate social responsibility (CSR) for virtual universities (VUs) in five dimensions, namely education, research, engagement, ethics and transparency is developed. The impact on social, economic and ethical standards is ascertained by rigorously defining measurement indicators and performance assessment attributes to help assess CSR

Innovations in the Food System: Exploring the Future of Food

Innovations in Food Systems should be: Inclusive: ensuring economic and social inclusion for all food system actors, especially smallholders, women, and youth; Sustainable: minimizing negative environmental impacts, conserving scarce natural resources, and strengthening resiliency against future shocks; Efficient: producing adequate quantities of food for global needs while minimizing postharvest loss and consumer waste; Nutritious and healthy: enabling the consumption of a diverse range of healthy, nutritious, and safe foods. These are ambitious goals that will require multidisciplinary effort—from engineering to life sciences, biotechnology, medical sciences, social sciences, and economic sciences. New technologies and scientific discoveries are the solutions to the increasing demand for sufficient, safe, healthy, and sustainable foods influenced by the increased public awareness of their importance