Shirley Ann Williams

University of Reading · School of Systems Engineering

In recent years there has been a significant growth in the number of online courses known as MOOCs available via online providers such as edX and Coursera. The result has been a marked reduction in the clarity around the different course offerings and this has created a need to reconsider the classification schemes for MOOCs to help inform potentia...

Open badges are a digital representation of skills or accomplishments recorded in a visual symbol that is embedded with verifiable data and evidence. They are created following a defined open standard, so that they can be shared online. Open badges have gained popularity around the world in recent years and have become a standard feature of many le...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to transform the global learning landscape as there are many reasons why institutions offer and students enrol in such courses. And, while relatively few students finish all parts of a MOOC, reaching the end point may not always be important, as the traditional understanding or measure of " suc...

Open government aims to improve the relationship between the government and citizens. In a shift from e-Government 2.0, open government provides openness of information and openness of interactions with the public. However, these opportunities pose privacy challenges in the implementation of open government. In order to address these privacy challe...

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on how measures of lexical diversity (LD) can help discriminate between essays from second language learners of English, whose work has been assessed as belonging to levels B1 to C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The focus is, in particular, on how different operationalizations of...

Background: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become commonplace in the e-learning landscape. Thousands of elderly learners are participating in courses offered by various institutions on a multitude of platforms in many different languages. However, there is very little research into understanding elderly learners in MOOCs. Objective: We ai...

This paper investigates the perceptions and behaviour of government employees regarding the disclosure of employment information. Two different contexts, namely 1) official websites and 2) online social networks (OSN: in this case, Facebook) that disclose employees' employment information are selected as contrasting platforms in order to understand...

Millions of users around the world have registered on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by hundreds of universities (and other organizations) worldwide. Creating and offering these courses costs thousands of pounds. However, at present, revenue generated by MOOCs is not sufficient to offset these costs. The sustainability of MOOCs is a pr...

The use of online social networking tools (SNTs) has become commonplace within higher education. In this paper a definition and a typology of educational affordance of social networking service (SNS) are presented. The paper also explores the educational affordances whilst examining how university lecturers and students use SNTs to support their ed...

Although social networking sites (SNSs) present a great deal of opportunities to support learning, the privacy risk is perceived by learners as a friction point that affects their full use for learning. Privacy risks in SNSs can be divided into risks that are posed by the SNS provider itself and risks that result from user’s social interactions. Us...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) attract learners with a variety of backgrounds. Engaging them using game development was trialled in a beginner's programming course, “Begin programming: build your first mobile game,” on FutureLearn platform. The course has completed two iterations: first in autumn 2013 and second in spring 2014 with thousands o...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent, innovative addition to the online learning landscape that can provide learning opportunities to large numbers of people across the globe. Within a short time span, MOOCs have become a popular phenomenon with many viewing them as 'the solution' to the developing world's lack of access to education. H...

Education, especially higher education, is considered vital for maintaining national and individual competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. Following the introduction of its “Free Education Policy” as early as 1947, Sri Lanka is now the best performer in basic education in the South Asian region, with a remarkable record in terms of high l...

This position paper presents work in progress (within the first year) of the doctoral research into adoption of social collaborative e-learning in higher education. The research coins three concepts which intersect to form the fourth, social collaborative e-learning. These concepts are: informal learning, social networking and learning management....

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become immensely popular in a short span of time. However, there is very little research exploring MOOCs in the discipline of health and medicine. http://www.jmir.org/2014/8/e191/

The use of social network sites (SNS) has become very valuable to educational institutions. Some universities have formally integrated these social media in their educational systems and are using them to improve their service delivery. The main aim of this study was to establish whether African universities have embraced this emerging technology b...

Many online services assume that they each account will only be accessed by one person, ever. This is even enshrined in the terms and conditions for some. However, our identities are bound up with others in various ways, in both life and death, legally and socially. A basic classification system for multiple ownership of accounts is proposed, based...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of online learning in distance educational delivery at Yellow Fields University (pseudonymous) in Sri Lanka. The implementation of online distance education at the University included the use of blended learning. The policy initiative to introduce online components to distance education in...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of...

http://openeducationeuropa.eu/en/download/file/fid/26956

Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research. Objective:...

Traditionally conversational interfaces, such as chatbots, have been created in two distinct ways. Either by using natural language parsing methods or by creating conversational trees that utilise the natural Zipf curve distribution of conversations using a tool like AIML. This work describes a hybrid method where conversational trees are developed...

Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research. Objectiv...

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Purpose Since its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research. Design/methodology/approach Firstl...

Communal Internet access facilities or telecentres are considered a good way to provide connectivity to people who do not possess home connectivity. Attempts are underway to utilize telecentres as eLearning centres providing access to learning materials to students who would otherwise not be able to take up eLearning. This paper reports on the find...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of...

The chapter reports on the 'This Is Me' project, which aimed to help students and the wider public to be aware of the impact that online material has on their identity and reputation. The chapter explores practical aspects of Digital Identity, relating to issues such as employability, relationships and even death. For example, understanding the imp...

The chapter reports on the ‘This Is Me’ project, that aimed to help students and the wider public to be aware of the impact that online material, particularly that on the Internet, has on their identity and reputation. The chapter explores practical aspects of Digital Identity, relating to issues such as employability, relationships and even death....

The third chapter, data mining in education, examines potentials and constraints in the use of data mining in education, summarizing the potential they have to offer meaningful support to: students, teachers, tutors, authors, developers, researchers, and the education and training institutions in which they work and study.

Traditionally representation of competencies has been very difficult using computer-based techniques. This paper introduces competencies, how they are represented, and the related concept of competency frameworks and the difficulties in using traditional ontology techniques to formalise them. A 'vaguely' formalised framework has been developed with...

When using e-learning material some students progress readily, others have difficulties. In a traditional classroom the teacher would identify those with difficulties and direct them to additional resources. This support is not easily available within e-learning. A new approach to providing constructive feedback is developed that will enable an e-l...

Customer-Driven Development is a technique from the software development method called extreme Programming (XP) where customers (most importantly including end users of all levels) are closely involved in the software design and redesign process. This method of producing software suitable for customers has been adapted to help in the production of...

For several years, online educational tools such as Blackboard have been used by Universities to foster collaborative learning in an online setting. Such tools tend to be implemented in a top-down fashion, with the institution providing the tool to the students and instructing them to use it. Recently, however, a more informal, bottom up approach i...

The Learning Landscape project described here is known as RedGloo and has several objectives; among others it aims to help students to make friends, contacts and join communities based on interests and competencies. RedGloo provides a space where students can support each other with personal, academic and career development, sharing insights gained...

Competency management is a very important part of a well-functioning organisation. Unfortunately competency descriptions are not uniformly specified nor defined across borders: National, sectorial or organisational, leading to an opaque competency description market with a multitude of competency frameworks and competency benchmarks. An ontology is...

As the learning paradigm shifts to a more personalised learning process, users need dynamic feedback from their knowledge path. Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer customised feedback dependent on questions and the answers given. However these LMSs are not designed to generate personalised feedback for an individual learner, tutor and instructi...

With the rapid development of information technology, learners demand effective personalised learning support, which imposes a new learning paradigm in learning content management. Standards as well as best practice in industry and research community have taken place to address the paradigm shift. With respect to this trend, it is recognised that f...

Learning Management Systems (LMS) in e-learning have functionality for monitoring learning activities. The statistics generated from learning performances can be processed for tutors and a group of learners to improve their quality of teaching and learning. However the current LMS are not designed to facilitate personalised learning support for an...

As e-Learning environments evolve, learners have become increasingly demanding on personalised learning which allows them to build their own knowledge pathway. This significant change in learning requirements imposes a new learning paradigm which ensures one-to-one learning with flexible mode of content configuration, and adaptive delivery and asse...

A self study course for learning to program using the C programming language has been developed. A Learning Object approach was used in the design of the course. One of the benefits of the Learning Object approach is that the learning material can be reused for different purposes. 'Me course developed is designed so that learners can choose the ped...

Pair Programming is a technique from the software development method eXtreme Programming (XP) whereby two programmers work closely together to develop a piece of software. A similar approach has been used to develop a set of Assessment Learning Objects (ALO). Three members of academic staff have developed a set of ALOs for a total of three differen...

In the traditional classroom, students learned to depend on tutors for their motivation, direction, goal setting, progress monitoring, self-assessment, and achievement. A fundamental limitation is that students have little opportunity to conduct and manage their learning activities which are important for knowledge construction. e-Learning approach...

Niklaus Wirth and others at his institution (ETH, Zurich) have a long standing interest in programming languages and their implementation. In the late 1960s Wirth developed Pascal. Subsequent work on a personal workstation led to the systems programming language Modula (Wirth, 1977). Modula was based on Pascal with additional features for using mod...

In the last three decades a number of compiler transformations for optimising sequential programs for execution on vector or parallel architectures have been implemented. Optimisations for high performance architectures maximise parallelism and memory locality with transformations based on extensive control and data dependency analysis - with parti...

Clusters of computers can be used together to provide a powerful computing resource. This paper presents a configurable system capable of modelling a variety of particle growth mechanisms. Large Monte Carlo simulations, such as those used to model particle growth, are computationally intensive and take a considerable time to execute on conventional...

A reliable method of generating a high-volume of pseudo-random numbers is an essential requirement for any sort of stochastic modelling or Monte Carlo simulation work. We describe in detail the parallel PVM implementation of a pseudo-random number generator that combines the LeapFrog and Shuffling algorithms to create a single generator that preser...

There are a number of problems that can only be solved in a realistic time frame by using high performance computing environments. Large scale Monte Carlo simulations are an example of such problems. There are many different high performance environments ranging from massively parallel processors to clusters of distributed workstations. Here we pre...

This paper will detail some of the problems discovered using PVM on the campus wide network, consisting of hundreds of machines, at Reading; how these difficulties were remedied and suggestions for future installations. Currently all solutions implemented have been constructed on top of PVM, using only standard PVM and UNIX system calls to aid port...

Computers linked via a network can be used together to provide a powerful computing resource. Spreading the work of computationally intensive calculations across a cluster of computers considerably reduces the elapsed execution time compared to that achieved on a single workstation. Overall performance is limited by the slowest machine in the clust...

Maintenance of software systems is an un-glamorous and taxing process that is costly and error-prone. Unfortunately the process of maintenance can never be avoided, for software must operate in our everchanging world. We explore how reverse engineering can help the core activities involved in the process of maintaining software. Remould, a reverse...

Introduction Experimental data on the dissolution of silica from feldspar at various pH values is available (e.g. Wollast [1]), we wished to model the dissolution rate as a summary succession discrete event simulation so that all of the dissolution events over a time interval were modelled. Wollast recorded data over a period of 25 days; modelling...

This paper will detail some

Clusters of computers can be used together to provide a powerful computing resource. Large Monte Carlo simulations, such as those used to model particle growth, are computationally intensive and take considerable time to execute on conventional workstations. By spreading the work of the simulation across a cluster of computers, the elapsed executio...

In this paper we present a set of algorithms for simulating both digital and analogue neural networks across several parallel architectures, including array processors and transputers. This includes a brief discussion of their use upon a distributed heterogeneous architecture. Details of advances in the use of both neural networks and genetic algor...

This book focuses on parallel processing systems and the programming models that are necessary to accomplish this task. The book covers the categories of parallel programming models including sequential, array, pipeline, and shared memory processing, message passing, and functional, logic, and object-oriented programming. It examines transformation...

The course under discussion here is aimed at helping women return to the software industry. This is achieved by helping them to regain confidence in their existing skills in the computing industry and to update and consolidate their knowledge of software engineering; hence its name — Women In Software Engineering UPdate. The course covers the entir...

Whereas software engineering methodologies have evolved to the point where specification and design activities have been deliberately separated in order to reduce the complexities of large scale software development, hardware engineers are providing us with new architectures eminently suited to concurrent systems. This reality lures the software en...

The segments of a pipelined process can be represented as communicating sequential processes. The communication between the segments of the pipeline are represented as channel communication between the communicating sequential processes. It is possible to merge two communicating sequential processes (that would be adjacent in the pipeline) into one...

Over the past few years a number of methods have been formulated and implemented by which a programmer may explicitly indicate where parts of his program may be executed on different processors at the same time (Anderson, 1965). This, although useful in some circumstances, leaves the onus on the programmer to detect and express all possible paralle...

Clusters of computers can be used together to provide a powerful computing resource. This paper presents a configurable system capable of modelling a variety of particle growth mechanisms. Large Monte Carlo simulations, such as those used to model particle growth, are computationally intensive and take a considerable time to execute on conventional...

The emergent requirements for effective e-learning calls for a paradigm shift for instructional design. Constructivist theory and semiotics offer a sound underpinning to enable such revolutionary change by employing the concepts of Learning Objects. E-learning guidelines adopted by the industry have led successfully to the development of training m...

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are now being widely used in education. Their main function is to systematically manage and deliver learning materials. There is a need for LMS that can deliver personalised material suited to the learner's learning requirements and their learning style. A method and associated techniques have been developed that a...

The gap between formal ontologies and folksonomies is identified, and termed the "Ontology-Folksonomy Divide". This is explored through the application of sociological and psychological models of identity, which are examined and applied to the phenomena of online social networking, using a specially developed analysis framework based on activity th...

Automatic keyword or keyphrase extraction is concerned with assigning keyphrases to documents based on words from within the document. Previous studies have shown that in a significant number of cases author-supplied keywords are not appropriate for the document to which they are attached. This can either be because they represent what the author b...

Different systems, different purposes – but how do they compare as learning environments? We undertook a survey of students at the University, asking whether they learned from their use of the systems, whether they made contact with other students through them, and how often they used them. Although it was a small scale survey, the results are qui...