Pragmatic meta analytic studies: learning the lessons from naturalistic evaluations of multiple cases

This paper explores the concept of pragmatic meta‐analytic studies in eLearning. Much educational technology literature focuses on developers and teachers describing and reflecting on their experiences. Few connections are made between these experiential ‘stories’. The data set is fragmented and offers few generalisable lessons. The field needs guidelines about what can be learnt from such single‐case reports. The pragmatic meta‐analytic studies described in this paper have two common aspects: (1) the cases are related in some way, and (2) the data are authentic, that is, the evaluations have followed a naturalistic approach. We suggest that examining a number of such cases is best done by a mixed‐methods approach with an emphasis on qualitative strategies. In the paper, we overview 63 eLearning cases. Three main meta‐analytic strategies were used: (1) meta‐analysis of the perception of usefulness across all cases, (2) meta‐analysis of recorded benefits and challenges across all cases, and (3) meta‐analysis of smaller groups of cases where the learning design and/or use of technology are similar. This study indicated that in Hong Kong the basic and non‐interactive eLearning strategies are often valued by students, while their perceptions of interactive strategies that are potentially more beneficial fluctuate. One possible explanation relates to the level of risk that teachers and students are willing to take in venturing into more innovative teaching and learning strategies

Electron capture from helium by photons

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Performance Evaluation of Construction Companies in Malaysia with Entropy-VIKOR Model

Construction industry is an important industry that has an enormous impact on the country’s economic development. Nowadays, the government strives to encourage the construction industry to develop the advanced and modern infrastructure that related to health, transport, education, and housing. As a result, the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance is studied in this paper based on the crucial financial ratios. This paper aims to assess and compare the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance based on Entropy-VIKOR model. In this paper, the listed construction companies in Malaysia are investigated. The findings of this paper demonstrate that ZECON, DKLS, GADANG, TRIPLC, and MELATI are ranked as the top five construction companies based on the proposed model. The importance of this paper is to assess the construction companies’ financial performance as well as identify the weights of the financial ratios in assessing the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance with the proposed Entropy-VIKOR model

A feasibility study on the use of bayesian model updating and vibration prediction for structural diagnostic

This paper puts forward a feasibility study on the use of Bayesian model updating and vibration prediction for structural diagnostic when the level of modeling error is relatively high. The proposed method consists of two parts. In the first part, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based model updating is employed to calculate the posterior PDF of uncertain model parameters conditional a set of measurement and a given model class. Modeling error is the key problem to be addressed in the practical implementation of structural model updating or damage detection. Apart from very simple structures, model updating of real structures is usually not globally and locally identifiable. Therefore, MCMC simulation is employed in the proposed method in generating samples in the important region(s) for the approximation of the posterior PDF. In the second part, the probabilities for the vibrations of the structure to exceed a list of threshold limits (i.e., the failure probabilities) were calculated using the MCMC samples. It is believed that the failure probabilities for the damaged structure are higher than those for the undamaged one. A 3-dimensional scaled transmission tower model was tested under laboratory conditions for verifying the proposed method. To test the robustness in the detection of damage existence, artificial modelling error was introduced to the model class in the numerical case study. The numerical case study results were positive implying the feasibility of the proposed method