Problems in Students’ Academic Writings

The students in colleges, universities and schools are given various types of academic writings like assignments, laboratory reports, project reports, essays, and many more as a part of teaching and learning. But the concern observed by many tutors are the kinds of problems that are seen in their academic writings. The main aim of the research is to evaluate and check the various common types of problems in students’ academic writings in the College of Science and Technology (CST), Royal University of Bhutan. Different journal papers were collected, read and evaluated to get the current state of the art. In CST, a survey questionnaire was formulated, added in Google form and the responses were collected from the faculties of CST.The research showed that most common types of problems seen in students’ work are plagiarism, paraphrasing, grammatical errors, spellings and punctuations. There are various reasons for having problems in students’ academic writings. The lack of not having intensive writing, time constraints, laziness and unaware of academic writing were the most common reasons stated. The result from the survey conducted in CST also showed the similar kind of problems that are seen in many of the literatures. The CST faculties recommend different solutions and suggestions to undertake so that the students’ problems in academic writings are improved drastically with minimal problems. Keywords: Academic writing, Plagiarism, Paraphrasing, Punctuation, Grammar DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-18-04 Publication date:June 30th 2020

Understanding Students’ C Programming Language Learning Styles: A Case Study in College of Science and Technology

The first year students are facing difficulties in learning C programming language when the module is being offered in their first year tenure. Ultimately, this leads to an increased failure rates in this module. On the other hand, even the faculties are having strenuous time teaching this module. The main aim of the case study is to assess and determine the different learning styles of first year students from Bachelors of engineering in Information Technology (BE1IT). And then, know the majority of the students’ preferred learning style so that the faculties teaching C programming language are made aware about the findings. And also, recommend the faculty to re-design their pedagogical material to cater students as per their various learning styles. The VARK learning style inventory was adopted for the study which consists of 17 questionnaires. A class of BE1IT with 40 students comprising of 16 female and 24 male students were the participants. All the students were asked to take into consideration of themselves in how they learn best with the module - C programming language and then accordingly attempt those questionnaires and the data was collected. The study showed that majority of the students are kinaesthetic learner irrespective of the genders. The faculty teaching the first year students need to understand that this method may be helpful in helping the students learn better. The pedagogical materials used to teach them may be one of the factor which is not helping them to learn better as it is not correlating with their learning styles. After having known the different type of learners, the faculty were made aware of the findings and were recommended to re-design their pedagogy and andragogy materials accordingly to cater all the students’ learning. Keywords: Learning styles, C programming language, VARK learning style model, Kinaesthetic DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/11-1-02 Publication date: January 31st 202

Practice of Robots Exclusion Protocol in Bhutan

Most of the search engines rely on the web robots to collect information from the web. The web is open access and unregulated which makes it easier for the robots to crawl and index all the contents of websites so easily. But not all wish to get their websites and web pages indexed by web crawlers. The diverse crawling activities can be regulated and managed by deploying the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) in a file called robots.txt in the server. The method used is a de-facto standard and most of the ethical robots will follow the rules specified in the file. In Bhutan, there are many websites and in order to regulate those bots, the usage of the robots.txt file in the websites are not known since no study has been carried out till date. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the use of robots.txt files in various organizations’ websites in Bhutan. And further, to analyze its content present in the file if it exist. A total of 50 websites from various sectors like colleges, government ministries, autonomous agencies, corporations and newspaper agencies were selected for the investigation to check the usage of the file. Moreover, the files were further studied and analyzed for its file size, types of robots specified, and correct use of the file. The result showed that that almost 70% of the websites investigated are using the default robots.txt file generally created by the Joomla and Word press Content Management Systems (CMS) which ultimately specifies that there is a usage of the file. But on the other hand, the file is not really taken into seriously and almost 70% of it lacks major and best protocols defined in it that will help define the access and denial to various resources to various types of robots available on the web. Approximately 30% of the URLs adopted for the study show that the REP file is not added in their web server, thus providing unregulated access of resources to all types of web robots. Keywords: Crawler, robots.txt, search engines, robots exclusion protocol, indexing DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-35-01 Publication date: December 31st 202

Developing Charity Web Application to Eradicate Poverty in Bhutan

This paperdescribes the designsand features deduced from the extensive literature reviewsthat helped us to build the prototype of the charity web application. Literature review on poverty helped us to understand feasibility and the need of building charity web applicationto uplift the poor communities in Bhutan.The prototype had been built considering the Human Computer Interaction(HCI) domain such as navigability, visual and page design. Navigability is achieved by providing thelinks on the side bar, breadcrumbs for a complex site and search tools for the ease of use. Visual design includes the logical structuring of contents and appropriate use of fonts, graphics, space and colors. Successful user friendly website with the possibility to minimize the access time issue is defined in page design.The HCI concepts are considered while building the prototype to achieve overall effectiveness, efficiency of charity web application and user satisfaction

Factors Affecting Online Teaching and Learning Amidst Covid-19 in College of Science and Technology

COVID-19 had an enormous influence on students, teachers, and educational institutions all over the world, as it did on so many other aspects of everyday life. Schools and colleges were closed across the world to comply with social distancing initiatives. In order to ensure education continuity, the traditional mode of face-to-face learning has been replaced by online learning. This paper sets out to determine the factors affecting online teaching and learning amidst COVID-19 in College of Science and Technology. The research is based on a mixed methodology consisting both qualitative & quantitative approach which is used mainly to gain more in-depth understanding of the factors that affect online teaching and learning for both tutors and students. Firstly, the quantitative approach is applied whereby an online survey will be carried out in order to see the   core factors in the bigger picture. The survey was conducted via Google form for the students and collected the data from 297 respondents. It was then followed by the qualitative approach whereby four teachers and nine students were interviewed (semi-structured interview) to validate the findings collected from the survey and consequently find the recurring factors. Then, to get a true integration of data and the relations between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the data sets, the Dedoose software is used to analyze as a whole rather than two different components that must be pieced together. It was found that network connectivity, equipment availability for practical classes, nature of student and tutors, data insufficiency, favorable environment, module content and how adaptive student and tutor were to online platform were the factors identified affecting online teaching and learning at CST during Covid-19. Keywords:Online teaching and learning, Factors, Equipment availability, Network connectivity, Student characteristics, Tutors characteristics, Data insufficiency, Favorable environment, Module content DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-20-03 Publication date:July 31st 202

Intrusion Detection System in Cloud Computing: A Literature Review

Cloud computing provide users a convenient, ubiquitous and on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources over an Internet. On the other aspect, due to its distributed and complex architectures, it possess many security risks and become one of the attractive targets for the cyber-attacks by the intruders. With the growing popularity of cloud computing, the importance to provide reliable and secure services assurance remains one of the major issues. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been widely used as one of the mechanism to detect attacks on cloud. Different authors have proposed various IDS that can be used in cloud computing in an attempt to provide secure services. This paper surveys different methods and approaches applied in intrusions detection systems (IDS) of cloud environment by various authors. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 discusses about the different kinds of attacks or intrusions found in cloud. Section 2 discusses and demonstrates different IDS used in cloud that have been proposed by various authors in their research. Section 3 concludes the review with references at the end. Keywords: Cloud computing, IDS, NIDS, HIDS, DIDS DOI: 10.7176/NCS/12-05 Publication date: January 31st 202

A systematic review on Android Malware Detection

Android malware is growing at alarming rate and spreading rapidly despite on-going mitigating efforts. This brings  a  necessity  to  find  more  effective  solutions  to  detect those malwares and prevent users from any malicious threats. The aim of the systematic review is to summarize the situation that existed from 2010 to 2015 with regards to various android malware analysis approaches and detection methods. A total of 58  selected  papers  met  the  inclusion  criteria  based  on  title  of articles, exclusion criteria, reading abstract and content of the selected  58  papers.  Different  data  are  extracted  from  these articles  and  recorded  in  an  excel  sheet  for  further  analysis. Most of the paper discussed about the use of dynamic analysis approach to analyze malware and signature-based method for malware detection.  The  systematic  review  carried  out  would provide information to all researchers and further inform the requirements  for  future  development  of  enhanced  malware analysis and detection methods