Monica Vladoiu

• Professor (Associate) at Petroleum & Gas University of Ploieşti

A remarkable shift of what technologies may offer particularly mobile, wireless and sensor-based ones, i. e. a SF like environment in which ubiquitous and pervasive technologies provide for opportunities only imagined before, e. g. Ubiquitous Computing and Ubiquitous Learning has taken place in the last decade. We introduce here the first version o...

Finding effectively open educational resources and open courseware that are the most relevant and that have the best quality for a specific user's need, in a particular context, becomes more and more demanding. Hence, even though teachers and learners (enrolled students or self-learners as well) get to a greater extent support in finding the right...

Group creativity is a hot topic in the creativity literature, yet no method to obtain the most creative teams given a group of individuals is available. We introduce here a method for building creative teams, based on unsupervised learning and implemented with support from a multiagent system. Our first experiments with using this method for groupi...

Seeing the world’s knowledge as a public asset that can be accessed, shared, used and reused, etc. mediated by technology, especially ICT, is a potent idea and it may have an influential impact on educational processes within our society. A decade of development of initiatives that offer open courseware and open educational resources has passed, an...

Despite the momentum of the open courseware movement around the world, no quality criteria and metrics for evaluation of open courseware or open educational resources’ repositories are available yet. Therefore, learners and instructors have no support and guidance in their quest for locating the most suitable learning resource that fulfills their e...

In this paper, we analyze and discuss some of the challenges regarding safety, security, and privacy involved in developing a vehicle tracking system, zooming on the tracking device. Potential concerns as vehicle and tracking system safety, tampering activity, criminal activity, and unauthorized access to the system are approached and several solut...

More than a decade has passed since the start of the MIT OCW initiative, which, along with other similar projects, has been expected to change dramatically the educational paradigms worldwide. However, better findability is still expected for open educational resources and open courseware, so online guidance and services that support users to locat...

In this paper we introduce a rubric for assessing quality of open educational resources and open courseware based on our socio-constructivist quality model (QORE) that includes 70 criteria grouped in four categories related with content, instructional design, technology, and courseware evaluation. Quality is assessed from an educational point of vi...

In spite of the scale, popularity, and importance of the open courseware movement for users worldwide, there is yet no quality assessment framework that could support users on their quest for finding the most appropriate learning resource with regard to their educational needs. This paper presents both an evaluation and a comparison between three o...

In this paper we overview the state-of-the-art in open courseware initiatives worldwide. First, the MIT OpenCourseWare project is surveyed, as it has been the real starting point of the OCW movement. Generally, open courseware refers to a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials that are organized as...

The information revolution we live nowadays provides the technological power that fuels an unmatched need for preserving, collecting, storing, organizing, propagating, accessing, sharing, constructing, etc. information and knowledge, and digital libraries appropriately support this need. They go beyond the basic functions of searching, browsing, an...

New technological developments have made it possible to interact with computer systems andapplications anywhere and anytime. It is vital that these applications are able to adapt to the user, as aperson, and to its current situation, whatever that is. Therefore, the premises for evolution towards alearning society and a knowledge economy are presen...

This paper investigates the modeling of the personal driving style of various vehicle drivers based on several driving parameters. The purpose of such an endeavor is to classify the drivers according to their risk-proneness within the larger context of increasing traffic safety, which is a major concern worldwide. This information is valuable espec...

New technological developments have made it possible to interact with computer systems and applications anywhere and anytime. It is vital that these applications are able to adapt to the user, as a person, and to its current situation, whatever that is. Therefore, the premises for evolution towards a learning society and a knowledge economy are pre...

Technological progress has made it possible to interact with computer systems and applications anywhere and any time. It is crucial that these applications are able to adapt to the user, as a person, and to its current situation, whatever that is. Contextual information and a mechanism to reason about it have demonstrated an important potential to...

We present here our taxonomy of desktop grid systems and some hints on how to use it to solve real-world problems. We have customized this taxonomy according to user' perspective to counterbalance the existent taxonomies that are mainly focused on the developers' viewpoint. Our taxonomy is three-level and hierarchical. The first level refers to inf...

In this paper we first present briefly QADPZ, an open source platform for heterogeneous desktop grid computing, which enables users from a local network (organization-wide) or Internet (volunteer computing) to share their resources. Users of the system can submit compute-intensive applications to the system, which are then automatically scheduled f...

Computer-based instruction, online or offline, which we will be referring at as e-instruction, provides for the development of new flexible pedagogical frameworks that will offer opportunities for open worldwide lifelong instruction. We claim that these are to be stored in instructional digital libraries in order to be accessible to anyone, anytime...

In this paper, we present a standard definitio n for learning objects, a controversy around it, and the resulted working definition, along with features to be held by learning objects, benefits of the object-oriented approach for learning, some pros and cons for using learning objects, and finally some quality standard guidelines for these objects....

A growing ,number ,of universities and companies ,are now ,becoming focused on promoting,learning that is not merely instrumental. These aspirations refer to deep learning, transformational learning, critical learning, intentional learning, reflective learning and lifelong learning. Our primary goal is to present several ways ,in which ,lifelong re...

While in psychology instruction appears as a binder and an intersection between conscience, activity and personality structures, in didactics, at individual level, instruction is conceived as a bi-dimensional activity that involves both teaching and learning. The internal dichotomy of this activity has lead during history to learning theories (in p...

We are in the course of a major paradigm shift from printed to electronic in all stages of the research process, and this is the de facto standard for printed research such as journal or conference papers. In the last decade a lot of new peer review software systems have been developed and their support for this significant shift is critical to edi...

We may say the knowledge is the new global asset – so people have to be continually learning, crafting innovative solutions to changing circumstances, staying informed and responsive. Computer Based Learning (CBL) provides perhaps the best opportunity for person self-guided learning. If we take into consideration the role played by the Internet in...

This paper presents some criteria about how to plan, design, evaluate and use a CBL hypermedia application. In our university, four years ago, we started a new program called "Multimedia Integrated Model for Active Learning" (MIMAL). During the development of this program we have found out some basic guidelines for building sound hypermedia CBL app...

Remote visualization techniques that use client-server environments allow users to access large datasets. One possible solution for remote visualization is the use of compression techniques, in which images are generated and compressed at the servers' side and then the encoded images are transferred over a data network, decompressed and displayed a...

Traditional university world with both faculty and students enjoying the intellectual challenge of knowledge mastering is not a reality anymore. Nowadays students juggle their university studies together with parallel studies of other subject, paid employment or other activities. In order to keep them close to the knowledge world, educators have to...