Blockchain Technology Consensus Algorithms and Applications: A Survey

One of the new promising technologies for the future is blockchain. It has become one of the popular techniques for various transactions and applications in many different areas such as economy, business, and government. Blockchain technology started with cryptocurrency and bitcoin applications for a safe and transparent environment. Blockchain is a hybrid technology that incorporates various technologies and tools such as mathematics, peer-peer networking, cryptography algorithms, and consensus algorithms. This survey highlights the latest studies in blockchain and consensus algorithms. The study covers the most recent blockchain applications in various domains and sectors. Furthermore, the study gives an insight into the latest adoption of the blockchain in the real world.</p

Agile Software Development: Methodologies and Trends

Software engineering is a discipline that undergone many improvements that aims to keep up with the new advancements in technologies and the modern business requirements through developing effective approaches to reach the final software product, agile software development is one of these successful approaches. Agile software development is a lightweight approach that was proposed to overcome the convolutional development methods’ limitations and to reduce the overhead and the cost while providing flexibility to adopt the changes in requirements at any stage, this is done by managing the tasks and their coordination through a certain set of values and principles.In this work, a comprehensive review that outlines the main agile values and principles, and states the key differences that distinguish agile methods over the traditional ones are presented. Then a discussion of the most popular agile methodologies; their life cycles, their roles, and their advantages and disadvantages are outlined. The recent state of art trends that adopts agile development especially in cloud computing, big data, and coordination are also explored. And finally, this work highlights how to choose the best suitable agile methodology that must be selected according to the task at hand, how sensitive the product is and the organization structure.</p

The pass/fail grading system at Jordanian universities for online learning courses from students’ perspectives

This study aimed to investigate the perspectives of Jordanian university students toward the pass/fail grading system (PFGS) that was used during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire was prepared, consisting of 37 items in its final form; divided into four subscales: advantages, drawbacks of (PFGS), the reasons for its use by students, and their attitudes toward it. This questionnaire was applied to a sample of 6,404 male and female students from four Jordanian universities: Al al-Bayt University, Balqa Applied University, The Hashemite University, and The University of Jordan. Out of the 6,404 responses, we rejected 263 responses due to careless survey filling and/or incomplete answers. The results revealed that most students were satisfied with applying the PFGS to all courses, especially among the freshmen. They believed that the PFGS was the best choice for grading due to online exams and full distance learning lectures. The results showed significant differences at α = 0.05 in how students evaluated the PFGS; namely: its advantages, drawbacks, reasons, and their attitudes toward it, based on participants’ gender, school, and academic level. As for the relationship between GPA and students’ perspectives on the PFGS, it was clear that the correlation coefficients indicated weak but significant correlations