Study Room Online Reservation in UUM Library

This study introduces the online room reservation system that is developed to facilitate the development of shared virtual environments. The main objective of this project is to assist the students in gaining an easier and faster way of reservation, providing them with more selections, and real time information. The library will be able to offer students the precise estimation of rooms schedule in the service management. This system is to be implemented by integrating online technology with web services

A federation of online labs for assisting science and engineering education in the MENA Region

Tese de doutoramento, Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2017Education is now more widely available than ever before. In a great part, this is due to the usage of digital tools, applications and online services by students and teachers. In fact, the Internet has hugely increased the availability of educational resources and also prompted additional collaboration and cooperation among institutions and among countries. Today, active learning methods offer several techniques that have been adopted by teachers to bring efficient learning experiences for the students. Learning by doing promotes successful learning by providing varied experiences to the students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. In addition, with continued practice, the students learn the contents of lessons and develop their skills by using all available resources. This leads to effective learning and effective acquisition of knowledge, and helps in building a strong relationship among students and between them and their teachers. In recent decades, instructional technologies have supported higher education systems well. They have offered several active learning methods to institutions, for instance online labs. Several projects in online labs area are being done worldwide, at present. Generally, the supporting idea of online labs is to offer additional access to remote experiments to students in different disciplines, 24/7 without substantial increase in cost per student around the world and especially in countries with limited resources. Moreover, they allow students to spend more time on experiments and increase their ability and skills through a simple computer connected to the Internet. This study focuses on the higher education systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It discusses the level of collaboration and cooperation work among researchers in this region, particularly in online labs fields. It offers new perspectives and new ways to increase that work by creating the Community of Practices (CoP) around online labs and also by promoting the idea of federation new and existing online labs.O ensino é, hoje em dia, mais acessível à generalidade da população mundial do que em qualquer momento do passado. Isso deve-se, em grande parte, à utilização de ferramentas digitais, de aplicações informáticas e de serviços online, pelos professores e pelos estudantes. Com efeito, a Internet fez aumentar imenso a disponibilidade de recursos educativos e, simultaneamente, proporcionou o desenvolvimento dos intercâmbios e das colaborações entre as instituições de ensino superior e entre os diversos países. As várias técnicas que integram os métodos de ensino ativo têm vindo a ser adotadas progressivamente pelos professores, dessa maneira proporcionando aos estudantes percursos de aprendizagem mais aliciantes e mais profícuos. Aprender fazendo promove o sucesso na aprendizagem por via da realização de experiências práticas nos vários domínios da Ciência, Tecnologia, Engenharia e Matemática. Além do que, dessa maneira os estudantes assimilam os conteúdos programáticos e desenvolvem as suas capacidades, atingindo mais eficazmente os objetivos do estudo. Isto conduz a uma aprendizagem mais conseguida e a uma real aquisição de conhecimentos, fomentando, ao mesmo tempo, um relacionamento mais forte entre estudantes e também entre estudantes e professores. Nas últimas décadas, o funcionamento das instituições do ensino superior tem vindo a apoiar-se cada vez mais nas tecnologias de ensino. Entre as diversas tecnologias que foram adotadas, contam-se os laboratórios online. Existem, atualmente, diversos projetos neste domínio, com vasta cobertura. Resumidamente, a visão dos promotores dos laboratórios online é proporcionar aos estudantes das diversas disciplinas acesso remoto a experiências práticas, 24 horas por dia. Isto deve ser conseguido sem que as instituições de ensino superior tenham de incorrer em gastos substanciais, de modo a possibilitar a adoção dos laboratórios online por países que atravessem dificuldades económicas. Com os laboratórios online, os estudantes têm oportunidade de realizar mais experiências do que realizariam de outro modo e, assim, desenvolver mais eficazmente as suas capacidades científicas e tecnológicas. E isso conseguir-se-á por via de um simples computador ligado à Internet. O presente estudo centra-se nos sistemas de ensino superior dos países do Médio Oriente e do Norte de África, em inglês, Middle East and North Africa, MENA. Analisamos, em particular, o nível de colaboração existente entre os investigadores desta região, no domínio dos laboratórios online, e propomos novas perspetivas para o desenvolvimento do trabalho desses investigadores, por meio de da criação de uma comunidade de prática (em inglês community of practice) sobre o tema dos laboratórios online. Adicionalmente, propomos a criação de uma federação de laboratórios online, que agrupará laboratórios dispersos pelo mundo, já existentes ou a criar, assim facilitando a sua utilização à escala mundial

A Community of Practice Around Online Labs in Iraq: Towards Effective Support for Academics and Higher Educational Systems in the MENA Region

The growing interest of society in science and engineering disciplines has lead to a quality improvement in curricula; a more careful definition of the educational outcomes; and; an increased concern with the continuous improvement of student learning and the quality of teacher training programmes. Hands-on experiments with innovative instructional technologies (e.g. online labs) built confidence and skills of academics and students by helping them to better understand, especially in those disciplines. A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise or an area of interest in a topic. It focuses on sharing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance a domain of professional practice. In addition, it shares the appropriate activities and instructional technologies that support the higher educational systems. This study aims to examine how teachers and students are interested in using online labs to support hands-on labs for completing their educational tasks and illustrates the potential benefit of a community of practice around online labs. Consequently, in order to facilitate the formation of a new community of practice around instructional technologies in the Middle East and North Africa, several presentations about online labs have been made in different universities in Ira

Using UML Models to Describe the VISIR System

Analysis and design are important phases in the system development lifecycle. In these phases, developers record information necessary for properly understanding the nature of the systems under consideration. We consider a particular type of system, named Remote Lab that allows both teachers and students to perform real ex- periments over the internet and we focus on Virtual Instru- ment Systems in Reality (VISIR). We describe a summarized web interface of VISIR using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our case study aims at identifying the requirements of VISIR and at creating a set of UML diagrams that succinctly provide enough infor- mation to both developers and users so that they acquire enough information for building a general understanding of it. Additionally, we provide elements for extending UML to better support further user interface development in VISIR.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

VISIR SYSTEM @ DEUSTO, BTH, ISEP, and UNED institutes: Assisting and supporting a hands-on laboratories to serve higher education students

Practical study is considered a backbone of qualification in engineering and sciences education. It helps to understand the theoretical concepts for university students. Over the last decades, limitation of available lab has become one of encumbrances to some universities and institutions owing to the cost and unavailability of instructors. It led to decline the students’ qualifications in experimentation in engineering and sciences fields. Today, several ideas have implemented to get over the limitation of lab, for example online labs technology, which is refers to “Remote and Virtual Labs”. This technology is become available over Internet, for instance Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). In addition, online labs are proven that they can assist hands-on laboratories and may become the best technology for supporting hands-on ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. This paper presents the number of students (access and users access) who are involved to use VISIR nodes that located at BTH, Deusto, ISEP, and UNED institutions. The filtration that used in this study is to categorize yearly and monthly access of students from those VISIR nodes.N/

Why visir? Proliferative activities and collaborative work of visir system

Online laboratories have been increasingly deployed in several universities and institutions around the world. Besides helping to leverage a number of educational developments, they enable teachers and researchers to share their knowledge across institutional boundaries. It has been observed that online laboratories have a positive effect on students' skills acquisition because they promote collaborative work and allow students to perform physical experiments remotely usually 24/7. Today, one can find a wide range of online laboratories in the literature that are supporting many subjects in different engineering and sciences fields, especially in electric and electronic engineering. One such system is VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality). VISIR plays an important role in electrical and electronic engineering education by allowing both teachers and students to conduct real experiments with electric and electronic circuits, via the Internet. It also complements hands-on laboratories by serving thousands of students globally, as a result of being spread by several universities and institutes worldwide. Presently, VISIR is installed in eight higher education institutions), in six different countries (Austria, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, India, and Georgia), and is the first remote lab in the world supporting a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). In addition, a number of experiments in VISIR can be freely accessed, using the guest user mode, depending on the institutions available resources. In this study, we have used the data collection method focused on all scholarly papers that are related to the VISIR system, which allowed collecting references from many resources such as conference proceedings, book chapters, and journals. The objective of the paper is to illustrate the researches activities, developments, and studies that contributed to making of VISIR the best remote controlled laboratory in the world, according to the GOLC (Global Online Laboratory Consortium). Our research included the following dimensions: a) courses and subjects that include experiments done in VISIR, from different universities and institutes; b) the number of scholarly papers and authors related to VISIR, with a reference to the publishing sources; c) the different technologies used to deliver the laboratory experiments; d) the total number (and its evolution) of users who have accessed the several VISIR nodes; e) finally, the collaborative work resulting from the use and share of the VISIR system. To conclude, the paper discusses the impact of VISIR in the role of the laboratory in undergraduate engineering education, in particular in electrical and electronic engineering, and its contribution to the collaborative work observed among the academic staff, researchers and students who used it.N/

A Semantics-Based Clustering Approach for Online Laboratories Using K-Means and HAC Algorithms

Due to the availability of a vast amount of unstructured data in various forms (e.g., the web, social networks, etc.), the clustering of text documents has become increasingly important. Traditional clustering algorithms have not been able to solve this problem because the semantic relationships between words could not accurately represent the meaning of the documents. Thus, semantic document clustering has been extensively utilized to enhance the quality of text clustering. This method is called unsupervised learning and it involves grouping documents based on their meaning, not on common keywords. This paper introduces a new method that groups documents from online laboratory repositories based on the semantic similarity approach. In this work, the dataset is collected first by crawling the short real-time descriptions of the online laboratories’ repositories from the Web. A vector space is created using frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and clustering is done using the K-Means and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) algorithms with different linkages. Three scenarios are considered: without preprocessing (WoPP); preprocessing with steaming (PPwS); and preprocessing without steaming (PPWoS). Several metrics have been used for evaluating experiments: Silhouette average, purity, V-measure, F1-measure, accuracy score, homogeneity score, completeness and NMI score (consisting of five datasets: online labs, 20 NewsGroups, Txt_sentoken, NLTK_Brown and NLTK_Reuters). Finally, by creating an interactive webpage, the results of the proposed work are contrasted and visualized

IT-Based Education with Online Labs in the MENA Region: Profling the Research Community

Education plays a primary role in developing countries, fostering their economy and augmenting their human potential. It is now easier to learn newest methods and techniques in many fields, particularly in engineer- ing and science, where IT-based educational tools - such as online laboratories - have been instrumental to improve the teaching and learning process. Online laboratories are widely used in several universities around the world, particularly in developed countries. There is evidence that online laboratories have a positive effect on the students’ skills and promote cooperative and collaborative learning by allowing them to work remotely without restrictions. This led to a quality increase of the teaching and learning process. Likewise, students from other countries, namely in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, could also benefit from using online labs. This paper studies the existing collaboration among the researchers working with online labs, in the MENA region, by reviewing a selection of articles from conferences and journals. The patterns of cooperation and collaboration among them are discussed and analyzed, as well. In the authors’ opinions, the community characterized in this paper should establish more collaboration links in order to strength its capacity of influencing the adoption of online labs, in that region.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Federation of Online Labs for Assisting Engineering and Science Education in the MENA Region

Today, education is considered as a critical factor in the economic expansion and a principal component in any development strategy in third world countries. The main objective of developing education is to shape the students personality and bring them to the twenty-first century and understanding the nature of systems in which they work and live. Experiments in a hands-on laboratory for engineering and science fields are considered an essential backbone to improve students' skills. But actually, there are obstacles in a hands-on laboratory, for example: limitation of time, safety, scarcity of laboratory equipment, cost to setting up a new laboratory, etc. Nowadays, several online labs projects, which are controlled and executed via the Internet, are found to serve the students and the teachers, particularly in electric and electronic engineering subjects. These online experiments are similar to what happens in hands-on laboratories. Additionally, several advantages can be included from using the online labs, for example: safe environment, availability of experiments, and support the educational system. This Ph.D work shows the current status of higher education system in the Middle East and North Africa region and some of challenges that existed in their system. In addition, it highlights the cooperation and collaboration work among the researchers in this region, especially in the online labs fields. The methodology of work is described in this paper as well. Additionally, online labs federation and community of practice are suggested for assisting the higher education system in the Middle East and North Africa countries.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Framework for Enhancing Higher Education in The Kurdistan Region of Iraq through A Dedicated Digital Education Mooc

Technology-enhanced learning is utilized to support teaching and learning processes by using technology. ICT has enabled Open Online Learning to become a phenomenon and a prominent feature of higher education in developed countries because it can deliver a wide range of high-quality courses to a massive number of students and increase the collaborative learning experience among learners. It is possible to suggest that the range of pedagogical practices based on open online learning. MOOCs are presently shifting the educational landscape from classical scenarios to digital scenarios where open educational resources are being shared among universities and institutions. In this paper, a framework based on open online learning for serving higher education institutions in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is proposed. The proposed framework aims to serve teachers and students by providing adapted high-quality contents and scaffolding teaching and learning processes, in a cultural-aware context, in order to improve the existing higher education system.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio