Impacts of ICT Integration in the Higher Education Classrooms: Bangladesh Perspective

For the last few years, ICT integration in education has been the topic of discussion for researchers. Very few researches have been conducted on ICT integration in the context of higher education, especially in Bangladesh. The purpose of this study is to explore the ICT integration in higher education teaching - learning in Bangladesh. This study is qualitative in design. Data were collected from students and teachers in the University of Dhaka through semi-structured interview schedule, focused group discussion and classroom observation schedule. The major findings of this study reveal that ICT is not integrated effectively in higher education teaching-learning. Furthermore, several obstacles have been identified that impede the effective integration of ICT. The obstacles are teachers’ lack of knowledge and skills, teachers’ lack of time to take preparations for class, lack of adequate equipment and access to internet and inadequate technical support. It is asserted that proper teachers’ training about integrating ICT in education will be able to change the scenario to a great extent. This study has, therefore, implications for policy developers, teachers and students of various departments. Keywords: ICT, Pedagogy, Social Interaction, Technology, Teaching – learning

Towards developing a framework to analyze the qualities of the university websites

The website of a university is considered to be a virtual gateway to provide primary resources to its stakeholders. It can play an indispensable role in disseminating information about a university to a variety of audience at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to fulfil the users’ need. This paper presents a multi-method approach of quality assessment of the academic websites, in the context of universities of Bangladesh. We developed an automated web-based tool that can evaluate any academic website based on three criteria, which are as follows: content of information, loading time and overall performance. Content of information contains many sub criteria, such as university vision and mission, faculty information, notice board and so on. This tool can also perform comparative analysis among several academic websites and generate a ranked list of these. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first initiative to develop an automated tool for accessing academic website quality in context of Bangladesh. Beside this, we have conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation among several universities to obtain the respective users’ feedback about their academic websites. Then, a ranked list is generated based on the survey result that is almost similar to the ranked list got from the University ranking systems. This validates the effectiveness of our developed tool in accessing academic website

An effective hotel recommendation system through processing heterogeneous data

Recommendation systems have recently gained a lot of popularity in various industries such as entertainment and tourism. They can act as filters of information by providing relevant suggestions to the users through processing heterogeneous data from different networks. Many travelers and tourists routinely rely on textual reviews, numerical ratings, and points of interest to select hotels in cities worldwide. To attract more customers, online hotel booking systems typically rank their hotels based on the recommendations from their customers. In this paper, we present a framework that can rank hotels by analyzing hotels’ customer reviews and nearby amenities. In addition, a framework is presented that combines the scores generated from user reviews and surrounding facilities. We perform experiments using datasets from online hotel booking platforms such as TripAdvisor and Booking to evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed framework. We first store the keywords extracted from reviews and assign weights to each considered unigram and bigram keywords and, then, we give a numerical score to each considered keyword. Finally, our proposed system aggregates the scores generated from the reviews and surrounding environments from different categories of the facilities. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed recommendation framework