The effect of competence-based simulations on management skills enhancements in e-learning courses

There is a growing interest in the assessment of tangible skills and competence among higher education in the United States. Specifically, there is an increase in the offerings of competency-based assessments, and some academic institutions are offering college credits for individuals who can demonstrate adequate level of competency on such assessments. An increased interest has been placed on competence-based computer simulations that can assist learners in traditional and online-courses to gain tangible skills. There has been an acceptable instrument used to measure a set of 12 management skills, as part of business and management courses. While computer simulations and competency-based projects, in general and in management in particular, have demonstrated great value, there are still limited empirical results on their impact in online learning courses. Thus, we have developed a quasi-experimental research, using such instrument on preand post-tests, to collect the set of 12 management skills from online learners attending courses that included both competence-based computer simulations and those that didn’t. Our data included a total of 253 responses. All 12 management skill measures demonstrated very high reliability, results consistent with prior literature. Our results indicate that all 12 skills of the competence-based computer simulations had higher increase than those that didn’t. A t-test on the mean increases indicated an overall statistically significant difference for six of the 12 management skills enhancements between the experimental and control groups. Our findings appear to demonstrate that overall computer simulations and competency-based projects do provide added value when it comes to management skill enhancements

An experimental study of habit and time incentive in online-exam procrastination

When it comes to task completion, habit is an automatic human behavior, where frequent past behaviors have a direct effect on future behavior. In contrast, procrastination appears to be a significantly observed habit. With today\u27s fast moving, information-rich environment and the speed at which information workers are required to complete their assignments, task performance, as well as task completion time, are crucial to the success of individuals and organizations. In the context of online exams, we have observed significant levels (nearly 60%) of procrastination in task completion, based on a large volume of exams. This study was set as a quasiexperiment that included an experimental group of 480 and a control group of 1,629 online exams. Given the significant procrastination observed, time incentives were provided to the experimental group in an effort to measure their effects on procrastination, task performance, and task completion time in online exams. Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to assess such differences between the experimental and control groups. Using the 2,109 online-exam records, our results indicated a significant effect of time incentives on procrastination, while task performance and task completion time documented no significant effect. Discussion and conclusion are provided

Towards an Evaluation of Cyber Risks and Identity Information Sharing Practices in e-Learning, Social Networking, and Mobile Texting Apps

With the growing dependency for online connectivity, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to share identity information surged substantially. Students are constantly sharing where they go, how they feel, and even pieces of identity information such as their age, address, personal pictures, etc. Pieces of identity information are bits of information that, if combined, provide a larger picture of the identity of an individual. Such identity information may enable criminals to obtain financial benefits under the victims’ identity, or be utilized for stalking, bulling, or other harassments. The use of different ICTs such as mobile texting, social networking, and e -learning among students, while most of them are not aware that their digital communication is not encrypted, exposes them to increased risk of identity theft. Given that students spend majority of their connectivity time with school related contacts, the focus of this exploratory study is to measure if there are significant differences on the frequency of identity information pieces they share, who do they willing to allow access to their personal profiles, and what is the level of identity protection risks they report compared between three ICTs (e-learning systems, social networking sites, & mobile texting apps). Preliminary results and discussions are provided

Towards a development of a users’ ratified acceptance of multi-biometrics intentions model (RAMIM): Initial empirical results

User authentication is a continuous balance between the level of invasiveness and system security. Password protection has been the most widely user authentication approach used, however, it is easily compromised. Biometrics authentication devices have been implemented as less compromised approach. This paper reports on initial results of user perceptions about their acceptance of a multi-biometrics authentication approach in the context of elearning systems. Specifically, this paper reports on the initial empirical results on the development of a learners’ Ratified Acceptance of Multibiometrics Intentions Model (RAMIM). The model proposed look at the contributions of learners’ code of conduct awareness, perceived ease-of-use, perceived usefulness, and ethical decision making to their intention to use multi-biometrics for authentication during e-learning exams. The study participants included 97 managers from service oriented organization and government agencies who attended e-learning courses. Results demonstrated high reliability for all constructs measured and indicated that perceived easeof-use and perceived usefulness are significant contributors to learners’ intention to use multi-biometrics. Conversely, code of conduct awareness appears to have little or no contribution on learners’ intention to use multibiometrics, while learners’ ethical decision making appears to have marginal contribution

Towards a framework of biometrics exam authentication in e-learning environments

In the past fifteen years the use of Internet technologies has been substantially growing for delivery of educational content. E-learning environments have been incorporated in many universities for the delivery of e-learning courses. However, opponents of e-learning claim that a central disadvantage of such teaching medium is by growing academic misconduct in such environments. In particular, opponents of e-learning argue that the inability to authenticate exam takers is a major challenge of e-learning environments. As a result, some institutions proposed to take extreme measures including asking e-learning students to take exams in proctor centers or even abandon completely the offering of e-learning courses in their institutions. This paper attempts to address this important problem by proposing a framework that incorporates available fingerprint biometric authentication technologies in conjunction with e-learning environments to curb unethical conduct during e-learning exam taking. The proposed framework suggests practical solution that can incorporate a repeated fingerprint biometric user authentication during exam taking in e-learning courses. Doing so is hypothesized to curb exam cheating in e-learning environments

Initial development of a learners’ ratified acceptance of multibiometrics intentions model (RAMIM)

Authenticating users is a continuous tradeoff between the level of invasiveness and the degree of system security. Password protection has been the most widely authentication approach used, however, it is easily compromised. Biometric authentication devices have been implemented as a more robust approach. This paper reports on initial results of student perceptions about their acceptance of a multibiometrics authentication approach in the context of e-learning systems. Specifically, this paper reports on the initial empirical development of a learners’ Ratified Acceptance of Multibiometrics Intentions Model (RAMIM). The model proposed investigates the impact of students’ code of conduct awareness, perceived ease-of-use, perceived usefulness, and ethical decision making on learners’ intention to use multibiometrics for authentication during elearning exams. The study’s participants included 97 non-information technology (IT) students who attended e-learning courses. Additionally, results of a path analysis using Partial Least Square (PLS) indicate that perceived usefulness has the most significant impact on learners’ intention to use multibiometrics during e-learning exams. Students’ ethical decision making and perceived usefulness demonstrated significant impact on their intention to use multibiometrics. Additionally, students’ code of conduct awareness appears to have a positive impact on their ethical decision making. Conclusions are discussed including recommendations for future research on extending this initial research into applied experiments to address e-learning security issues

A study of online exams procrastination using data analytics techniques

Procrastination appears to be an inevitable part of daily life, especially for activities that are bounded by deadlines. It has implications for performance and is known to be linked to poor personal time management. Although research related to procrastination as a general behavior has been well established, studies assessing procrastination in the context of online learning activities are scarce. In the exploratory investigative phase of this study, advanced data analytic techniques were used to gather information about online exams. The dataset included 1,629 online exam records over a period of five terms in an academic institution in the southeastern United States. The online exams were provided during a weeklong timeframe where students were asked to take them based on material they studied the previous week. Task performance time and task performance window were fixed for all records extracted. Results of this study indicate that when it comes to online exams, over half (58%) of the students tend to procrastinate, while the rest (42%) stage their work to avoid procrastination. However, those who procrastinated appeared to perform significantly lower than those who staged their work. Clear trends were also observed based on whether the students attempted exams in the morning or the evening, their academic level, and gender

Emerging Educational Technology: Assessing the Factors that Influence Instructors’ Acceptance in Information Systems and Other Classrooms

Over the past decade there has been a shift in the emphasis of Internet-based emerging educational technology from use in online settings to supporting face-to-face and mixed delivery classes. Although emerging educational technology integration in the classroom has been led by information systems (IS) instructors, the technology acceptance and usage of other instructors continue to be problematic for educational institutions. The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate factors influencing instructors’ intention to use Tegrity®, an emerging educational technology in traditional IS classes and other non-IS classes. Specifically, the factors studied were computer self-efficacy, computer anxiety, and experience with the use of technology. Responses from 56 instructors from a small, private university were used to formulate a predictive model using ordinal logistic regression. Results showed that computer self-efficacy had the greatest influence on intention to use. As computer self-efficacy appears to be high among IS instructors, administrators of other subjects are urged to pursue avenues to increase their instructors’ computer self-efficacy when attempting to increase the acceptance of emerging educational technology in non-IS classrooms

Students’ perceived ethical severity of e-learning security attacks

Over the past 15 years there has been a sharp increase in the use of e-learning systems both in education for degree delivery as well as corporate environment for training and certification purposes. Information systems security has been an important concern for most organizations. However, very little attention has been given to information security in the context of elearning systems. In this study, we conducted an investigation into students’ perceptions of ethical severity related to five common information security attacks in the context of e-learning. We have concentrated our investigation specifically in testing for differences over these five e-learning security attacks based on gender, age, and academic rank (undergraduate/graduate). Our findings indicate that majority of the students appears to self-report their perceptions as ethically driven across all five e-learning security attacks. However, we were somewhat alarmed to find that, although a small percentage, indeed some students reported these security attacks to be ethical. Our results indicated that overall males find these security attacks less severe than females. We also found that undergraduate students appear to perceive these attacks only slightly less severe than graduate. Age wise, our results indicated that there is an increase trend where the older the student is, the more severe s/he ranks the attacks. The paper concludes with a summary of the results and implication of this study for practice and research