Managing Plagiarism in Programming Assignments with Blended Assessment and Randomisation

Plagiarism is a common concern for coursework in many situations, particularly where electronic solutions can be provided e.g. computer programs, and leads to unreliability of assessment. Written exams are often used to try to deal with this, and to increase reliability, but at the expense of validity. One solution, outlined in this paper, is to randomise the work that is set for students so that it is very unlikely that any two students will be working on exactly the same problem set. This also helps to address the issue of students trying to outsource their work by paying external people to complete their assignments for them. We examine the effectiveness of this approach and others (including blended assessment) by analysing the spread of similarity scores across four different introductory programming assignments to find the natural similarity i.e. the level of similarity that could reasonably occur without plagiarism. The results of the study indicate that divergent assessment (having more than one possible solution) as opposed to convergent assessment (only one solution) is the dominant factor in natural similarity. A key area for further work is to apply the analysis to a larger sample of programming assignments to better understand the impact of different features of the assignment design on natural similarity and hence the detection of plagiarism

Leading by Narratives

A crucial perspective to academic leadership is that of sharing inspiring stories. Stories of successes and failures help an academic community to navigate itself by explicated and explicating tacit knowledge, in a bottom-up fashion. Unlike the hierarchical top-down management approach that focuses on strategic decision making within controllable environments, shared (or distributed) leadership copes with and even makes use of the uncertainties, common in fragile academic settings. When the shared leadership uses the stories of the whole (academic) community—faculty, staff and students—as its main source of information, we use the term leadership by narratives. Technologies for digital storytelling can significantly support leadership by narratives. Individuals upload their stories that an intelligent engine can relate to each other or sequence into more comprehensive understanding of the status of and trends within the organization. Modern big data techniques allow the community to reflect and therefore self-assess their processes, progress and results, based on the shared stories. In addition to the number-based facts, the leadership can make use of emotional expressions, to identify weak signals as early indicators of unexpected changes or threats identified at the grassroots level. Leading by narratives is a leadership approach for academic organizations that complements or even conflicts with the prevailing approach of a university as an efficient factory producing skilled labour force. Leadership by narratives aims at transforming the universities back to what they are supposed to be: communities known for their striving to the truth by sharing observations and experiences in the atmosphere of mutual trust. This is also a precondition for what the society expects from academic people and organizations: innovations, or fresh ideas that work in practice

Collaborating around digital tabletops: children’s physical strategies from the UK, India and Finland

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: the United Kingdom, India and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in India employed dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland used a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices

Special Issue on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

The task of processing natural language automatically has been on the radar of researchers since the dawn of computing, fostering the rise of fields such as computational linguistics and human–language technologies [...

Towards Local Community Involvement in Students’ Science Learning: Perspectives of Students and Teachers

The European Commission calls for schools to move towards becoming open to their communities, integrating external social, civil, and expert stakeholders into authentic learning experiences’ development alongside teachers and students, particularly in terms of science education. However, little research or practical implementation has been reported on how community actors could participate in the development of such curricular learning activities. In this study, we present an implementation of the open science schooling (OSS) approach to science learning, where community involvement in the development of science missions takes a vital role. During the study, students developed science missions related to local societal issues that interested them in collaboration with their teachers and community experts, with frequent hands-on investigations outside their classrooms or laboratories, in five European countries and Israel. Questionnaires with quantitative and qualitative questions concerning students’ and teachers’ views and perspectives about implementing science education using OSS were administered after the participants finished their science missions. The results indicate the effectiveness of the OSS approach to science learning involving the community from both students’ and teachers’ perspectives. This study is a step towards supporting schools in becoming active agents of change through the implementation of contextualized learning experiences alongside external stakeholders

Exploring the socio-cultural challenges of food processing women entrepreneurs in IRINGA, TANZANIA and strategies used to tackle them

Abstract Women entrepreneurs have significant contributions to the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. However, women in this region are facing a shocking array of challenges in their business environment. This paper examines the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in the food processing industry in Iringa, Tanzania. The study employs interviews and focus group discussions in collecting data and utilizes content analysis for interpreting findings. The findings indicate that these women entrepreneurs face problems of lack of access to markets, unequal social responsibility and lack of enough capital. Our findings also show that women entrepreneurs in the food processing business of the region employ an array of transversal strategies in order tackle and mitigate the socio-cultural challenges, including the creation of economic groups and entrepreneurship clubs. Our work sheds light on the issues that women entrepreneurs in the food processing industry struggle with in Iringa. Furthermore, we present the general and transversal strategies that they use in order to mitigate the problem and finally put forward the use of mobile technology as a transversal tool

Digi-Bags on the Go: Childminders’ Expectations and Experiences of a Tablet-Based Mobile Learning Environment in Family Day Care

The use of mobile technologies is playing an increasingly important role in early childhood education (ECE) settings. However, although technologies are often integrated in ECE provided in day care centres, technology use in other ECE settings, such as in family day care, is rare. In this paper, we describe the Digi-bag, a tablet-based mobile learning environment deployed at several family day care homes, and present the expectations and first experiences of family day care personnel regarding the pedagogical use of Digi-bags together with 1- to 5-year-old children as well as their experiences of training to use the digital technology. The results of the pilot study indicate that the deployment of Digi-bags facilitates the pedagogical, creative, and regular use of digital technology with small children. The study also underlines the importance of providing opportunities to family day care personnel for peer support and peer learning in natural settings besides professional training in the use of digital technologies

Detecting the likely causes behind the emotion spikes of influential twitter users

Understanding the causes of spikes in the emotion flow of influential social media users is a key component when analyzing the diffusion and adoption of opinions and trends. Hence, in this work we focus on detecting the likely reasons or causes of spikes within influential Twitter users’ emotion flow. To achieve this, once an emotion spike is identified we use linguistic and statistical analyses on the tweets surrounding the spike in order to reveal the spike’s likely explanations or causes in the form of keyphrases. Experimental evaluation on emotion flow visualization, emotion spikes identification and likely cause extraction for several influential Twitter users shows that our method is effective for pinpointing interesting insights behind the causes of the emotion fluctuation. Implications of our work are highlighted by relating emotion flow spikes to real-world events and by the transversal application of our technique to other types of timestamped text.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Demonstration of a Mobile Education Artifact in a Tanzania’s Higher Education Institution

This study reports the demonstration of the effectiveness of a mobile education tool (MET) that was co-designed and developed at the College of Business Education (CBE) in Tanzania by a team of teachers, researchers, and a developer using the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. The demonstration of the CBEMET Prototype as an artifact was done to 30 teachers who had participated in the co-designing of the prototype phase, 3 members of CBE management team and 20 students in Bachelor II degree program as the observers and representative of those who will use the prototype at a later stage. Different sets of questionnaires were administered to the teachers, the members of the management team and the students. The demonstration confirmed that it is easy to access the prototype, share learning contents, and provide education through mobile devices. Nonetheless, teaching materials prepared for testing the prototype were insufficient and thus needed improvement. Furthermore, teachers and observers proposed for more options to the prototype such as the inclusion of timetables, alerts of events like examination dates, and news on innovation activities. The feedback from the participants has thus been considered to reduce errors in the usage of the prototype before its final deployment.</p

Exploring the contribution of business and technology incubators to women entrepreneurs’ business development in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract Women entrepreneurs are key players in the economic development of societies in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, research has reported that business and technology incubators offer insufficient support to their enterprises. Consequently, this paper sets out to explore and highlight the present status of the contribution of business and technology incubators to women entrepreneurs’ businesses. The study collected data through exploratory focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and structured questionnaires. The data were analysed and interpreted using the convergent parallel method. The findings indicate that business incubators provide women’s business with training and to some extend enhance their access to market information and business networks. However, the study also finds a lack of contextualisation in the business and technology incubators’ services to the real needs of the incubatees, which eventually makes their support less impactful. In this light, the study recommends the provision of incubators’ services tailored to the real needs of women businesses. Our work puts forward recommendations to support women entrepreneurs’ business development through the contextualisation of the incubators’ services tailored to the incubatees’ real needs including appropriate training beyond business management. Further investments for establishing new incubation centres are also recommended