Lessons learned from the use of the SlideWiki OpenCourseWare platform in different learning contexts

A major obstacle to increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material, i.e. OpenCourseWare (OCW). The creation of comprehensive OCW is often a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process, with the effect that courseware employed by educators and trainers can be incomplete and outdated, as well as inaccessible to those with disabilities. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared. Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner. SlideWiki has won the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award and is used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available on SlideWiki in different languages. The SlideWiki large-scale trial project is further maturing the SlideWiki platform by improving its usability and accessibility. The SlideWiki project is performing a wide range of trials covering different levels of education (i.e. from secondary to higher education) and different types of learning (i.e. formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning). Each of these large-scale trials is carried out with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in different countries across Europe. A particular focus of the technology development and testing in the trials is the suitability for academics, teachers and learners with disabilities. This paper will present the lessons learned from piloting the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts and scenarios. In particular, we will describe the learning scenarios considered in each pilot and how these scenarios have been implemented with the use of SlideWiki. We will then describe the methodology followed in each pilot, in terms of the authoring, teaching and learning activities performed by educators and learners using SlideWiki. Finally, the lessons learned from each pilot will be discussed, focusing on the challenges faced in each pilot, how these challenges have been addressed, as well as the best practices that have emerged from the pilots regarding the collaborative authoring and sharing of OCW

DiffServ Aware MPLS Traffic Engineering for ISP Networks: State of the Art and New Trends

In the recent ten years, with the development of new applications through Internet such as multimedia or networked control applications, users need more and more quality of service (QoS). However, the requested QoS is not the same depending on the application. Most of the new models to manage internet traffic are based on specific QoS criteria which should be optimized. This paper presents main multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) approaches such as MPLS adaptive traffic engineering (MATE), load distribution in MPLS (LDM) and load balancing over widest disjoints paths (LBWDP) that are new models for traffic engineering. It also introduces periodic multi-step (PEMS) algorithm that adapts the offered quality depending on the class of the routed traffic

A mixed integer linear programming approach to schedule the operating room

International audiencethe problem studied in this paper is to allocate and to sequence the elective operation on operating rooms (ORs). We develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to solve this problem. Decisions in this model include the allocation of operations to material resources and human resources, the starting time of them and the starting time for each surgeon. To show the efficiency of this model, we decide to compare it with a constraints programming (CP) approach. The performance of these models is tested using a benchmark of the literature. The results indicate the efficiency of the MILP model compared with the CP model in terms of computational time

A Mathematical Model for Cyclic Scheduling With Assembly Tasks and Work-In-Process Minimization

International audienceIn this paper, we deal with the cyclic scheduling problem. More precisely, we consider the cyclic job shop with assembly tasks. Such a problem is made of several jobs, each job consisting of tasks (assembly/disassembly tasks and transformation tasks) being assigned to machines in a cyclic way. This kind of scheduling problem is well fitted to medium and large production demands, since the cyclic behavior can avoid the scheduling of the whole tasks by considering only a small temporal window (cycle). Thus, cyclic scheduling is a heuristic to solve the scheduling problems whose complexity is NP-hard in the general case. Many methods have been proposed to solve the cyclic scheduling problem. Among them, we focus on the mathematical programming approach. We will propose here a mathematical model for cyclic scheduling with assembly tasks and Work-In-Process minimization, and we illustrate this approach with an example from literature

Applications of Petri nets in production scheduling: a review

The production scheduling problem allocates limited resources to tasks over time and determines the sequence of operations so that the constraints of the system are met and the performance criteria are optimized. One approach to this problem is the use of Petri nets in conjunction with other methods. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview for production scheduling research that combines PNs with other methods, discuss both theoretical developments and practical experiences, and identify research trends. More than 20 major production and operations management journals published in years 1989-2005 has been reviewed. Existing approaches are classified into four groups, and additionally a historical progression in this field was emphasized. Finally, recommendations for future research are suggested in this paper