Developing an Understanding of How College Students Experience Interactive Instructional Technology: A UX Perspective

Technology is increasingly mobile and social, resulting in dynamic digital and interactive environments. The ubiquitous nature of interactive instructional technology presents new paradigms for higher education, creating challenges for instructors to compete for time and attention as students are bombarded by information in a digital, media rich world. The problem being studied, with all of these technological advancements, is how instructors can approach these challenges from a user experience (UX) perspective. A macro level view sees college students taking multiple courses at a time, over many semesters, and using different interactive instructional technology that mix with other forms of online media consumption. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to describe the experiences with interactive instructional technology from the perspective of college students at a large Midwestern university. A combination of cognitive load theory, communications strategy, and UX perspective is used to provide a structure that higher education faculty and administrators can use to approach content strategies, technological advances, and student perceptions throughout their college education. Focus groups with college students found communication is the number one priority when using interactive instructional technology. However, as more social media is adopted, the line between personal and professional lives is being blurred for better or worse. Technological advances introduce layers of separation between student and faculty, as well as student and course content, which all impact motivation. Students want faculty to be comfortable with the technology to build trust and confidence with their interactions. There will always be technology problems, but students now need to actively solve problems when technology isn’t working. The significance of this study informs educators of issues they could expect when teaching with technology and offer ideas to integrate it in appropriate ways. Students offer a number of suggestions and UX tools are provided to improve student experiences with interactive instructional technology. Adviser: Allen Steckelber

Yoga Birds

Singing crows, diving swans, and preening peacocks join eagles in this fun, kid-friendly yoga book. Yoga brings together the mind and body, connecting breath with posture, presence, and play. Yoga Birds is written by a certified yoga teacher with experience teaching a wide range of students—toddlers to octogenarians. The illustrator is an occasional yogi with a good eye for spotting birds. This book is designed to be shared and read aloud by adults and children. The easy how-to pose guide includes Sanskrit, too. Young yoga students can develop language skills as they build strength, flexibility, and balance. The journey of yoga begins at any age. With strong storks and flying cranes, Yoga Birds starts children on this mind-body journey.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1079/thumbnail.jp

Simultaneous inference in generalized linear model settings

Generalized Linear Models (GLM's) are utilized in a variety of statistical applications. Many times the estimated quantities from the models are of primary interest. These estimated quantities may include the mean response, odds ratio, relative risk, or attributable proportion. In these cases overall conclusions about these quantities may be desirable. Currently few sophisticated methods exist to simultaneously estimate these quantities from a GLM. I propose several methods of estimating these quantities simultaneously and compare them to the existing methods. Intervals for the expected response of the GLM and any set of linear combinations of the GLM are explored. Most existing methods emphasis the simultaneous estimation of the expected response; few consider estimation of the sets of regression parameters, and hence quantities such as the odds ratio or relative risk. Additionally, almost all intervals employ maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) for the model parameters. MLEs are often biased estimators for GLMs, particularly at small sample sizes. Thus, another set of intervals is proposed that utilize an alternative estimator for the parameters, the penalized maximum likelihood estimator (pMLE). This estimator is very similar to the usual MLE, but it is shifted in order to account for the bias typically present in the MLE for GLMs. Various critical values of the simultaneous intervals are explored for both the MLE and pMLE based intervals. Emphasis is placed on scenarios where the sample size is small relative to the number of parameters being estimated. Simulation studies compare the various intervals and suggest general recommendations. The pMLE based intervals proposed exhibit superior performance, particularly at small and moderate sample sizes. While usual MLE based intervals typically do not attain the desired level of confidence at the small sample sizes, the pMLE based intervals do. Additionally, at moderate to large sample sizes the pMLE based intervals are, in many cases, less conservative than the usual MLE based intervals

What is historic preservation? : an examination historic preservation in Rural Main Street Iowa communities

What is historic preservation? This seemingly simple question can be very hard to answer. While most all have a general understanding of historic preservation, few understand where it has been, where it is going and what historic preservation means in and to a community and its citizens. Thanks to organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation and its Main Street program, historic preservation has now moved into the limelight of many communities and their planning efforts which is helping to create a more widespread understanding of the discipline. In 1985, the Iowa legislature adopted the National Trust\u27s Main Street Center\u27s Four Point Approach® with the goal to preserve the history and integrity of Main Street commercial districts throughout the state by improving their economic conditions. This study examines the use of historic preservation in participating Rural Main Street Iowa communities (less than 5,000 in population) and localizes the study of historic preservation in order to create a more common understanding of its use, emphasis and meaning to rural Iowa communities. The purpose of this research was to define historic preservation by exploring the activities, involvements, local community makeup and goals of historic preservation within the Rural Main Street Iowa program. Through this investigation of local historic preservation uses and emphasis, factors that affect the use and success of historic preservation at the local level were also drawn from data gathered during the two phases of research. This research incorporated the use of a two-phase, sequential mixed methods approach which began with the collection of statistical, quantitative data from a sample of all Rural Main Street Iowa communities and was followed by a series of case studies which collected a more qualitative set of data. The results of this study illustrate the diverse, multi-disciplinary nature of historic preservation while providing evidence to what historic preservation means and how it is used in the rural Iowa setting. In addition, the researcher provides recommendations to help ensure the future success of local historic preservation activities in rural Iowa

Balancedness of subclasses of circular-arc graphs

A graph is balanced if its clique-vertex incidence matrix contains no square submatrix of odd order with exactly two ones per row and per column. There is a characterization of balanced graphs by forbidden induced subgraphs, but no characterization by mininal forbidden induced subgraphs is known, not even for the case of circular-arc graphs. A circular-arc graph is the intersection graph of a family of arcs on a circle. In this work, we characterize when a given graph G is balanced in terms of minimal forbidden induced subgraphs, by restricting the analysis to the case where G belongs to certain classes of circular-arc graphs, including Helly circular-arc graphs, claw-free circular-arc graphs, and gem-free circular-arc graphs. In the case of gem-free circular-arc graphs, analogous characterizations are derived for two superclasses of balanced graphs: clique-perfect graphs and coordinated graphs.Fil: Bonomo, Flavia. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Computación; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Duran, Guillermo Alfredo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Computación; Argentina. Universidad de Chile; ChileFil: Safe, Martin Dario. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. Instituto de Ciencias; ArgentinaFil: Wagler, Annegret Katrin. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Franci

Open-separating dominating codes in graphs

Using dominating sets to separate vertices of graphs is a well-studied problem in the larger domain of identification problems. In such problems, the objective is to choose a suitable dominating set $C$ of a graph $G$ such that the neighbourhoods of all vertices of $G$ have distinct intersections with $C$. Such a dominating and separating set $C$ is often referred to as a \emph{code} in the literature. Depending on the types of dominating and separating sets used, various problems arise under various names in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new problem in the same realm of identification problems whereby the code, called \emph{open-separating dominating code}, or \emph{OSD-code} for short, is a dominating set and uses open neighbourhoods for separating vertices. The paper studies the fundamental properties concerning the existence, hardness and minimality of OSD-codes. Due to the emergence of a close and yet difficult to establish relation of the OSD-codes with another well-studied code in the literature called open locating dominating codes, or OLD-codes for short, we compare the two on various graph families. Finally, we also provide an equivalent reformulation of the problem of finding OSD-codes of a graph as a covering problem in a suitable hypergraph and discuss the polyhedra associated with OSD-codes, again in relation to OLD-codes of some graph families already studied in this context