Stephan Poelmans

• PhD
• KU Leuven

Advances in educational data mining and learning analytics techniques allow instructors and institutions to analyze log data generated from learning management systems to inform themselves about student learning and success. Over the years, several machine learning techniques have been developed, used, and researched to provide more accurate predic...

As many software development teams have started to adopt agile methods, a vast amount of valuable experiences have been reported on in both academic and industrial knowledge bases. This information has been used through various approaches to guide and help practitioners finding suitable practices for their software development projects. Nevertheles...

Pollution cost control is key to solve pollution problem. The paper takes pollution control cost of pollution control contract between management authority and pollutant discharge enterprise as research object, considers pollution control quality level, pollution control quality inspection and pollution control cost model, and establishes pollution...

Business process modeling (BPMo) is of primary importance for assessing the current state of an organizations’ practices to discover inefficiencies, redesign business processes, and build software solutions. High-quality representations best capture the true nature of the organization. This paper investigates the hypothesis of whether Business Proc...

User stories are primary requirements artifacts within agile methods. They are comprised of short sentences written in natural language expressing units of functionality for the to-be system. Despite their simple format, when modelers are faced with a set of user stories they might be having difficulty in sorting them, evaluating their redundancy,...

User stories describe system requirements from the users’ point of view using structured natural language. These artifacts mostly assist the development team in agile projects where sets of them express the expected features of the to-be software. Nevertheless, when faced with large user stories’ sets, further structuring needs to be introduced to...

Despite the existence of numerous studies that focus on the benefits of online delivery systems and tools for learners, there is still limited understanding of the determinants of learners’ performances. Moreover, experiments are only rarely the method of inquiry. This study reports on findings of a repetitive factoral experiment in an ecological s...

Scrum is driven by user stories (US). The development team indeed uses, to fill the project’s and the sprints’ backlog, sentences describing the user expectations with respect to the software. US are often written “on the fly” in structured natural language so their quality and the set’s consistency are not ensured. The Quality User Story (QUS) fra...

A Partnership in Higher EducationThe “European Maturity Model for Blended Education” (EMBED) is a higher education (HE) project (2017-2020) led by a consortium of universities across Europe: KU Leuven, TU Delft, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Aarhus, Dublin City University and Tampere University of Applied Sciences. It is coordinate...

Within the field of e-learning, numerous studies focus on the benefits of online delivery systems and tools for learners. Nevertheless, there is still limited understanding of why learners perform better or worse and experiments are only rarely the method of inquiry. This study reports on findings of a repetitive factoral experiment in an ecologica...

[Context and Motivation] User Stories (US) are often used as requirement representation artifacts within agile projects. Within US sets, the nature, granularity and inter-dependencies of the elements constituting each US is not or poorly represented. To deal with these drawbacks, previous research allowed to build a unified model for tagging the el...

Most of the caregivers working in hospitals are highly skilled and educated work force. Even if they are supported by administrative staff, part of their time still consists of administrative procedures or trying to empirically fill or retrieve agendas on the basis of real-time constraints. Similarly, patients waste time waiting for adequate treatm...

Various frameworks are available for modeling an organizational setting. Their constituting models nevertheless mostly choose a particular decision level to represent perceived reality meaning that some introduce coarse-grained (i.e. abstract) elements and some others fine-grained (i.e. detailed) ones. Sometimes, in a same model, elements of variou...

Context and Motivation: The Business Use Case Model (BUCM) formalized in the Rational Unified Process (RUP) defines stereotypes of elements refining the UML Use Case Model for coarse-grained business processes modeling (BPM). The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Business Process Diagram (BPD) is designed for workflow-based (i.e. fine-grai...

User Stories (US) are mostly used as basis for representing requirements in agile development. Written in a direct manner, US fail in producing a visual representation of the main system-to-be functions. A Use-Case Diagram (UCD), on the other hand, intends to provide such a view. Approaches that map US sets to a UCD have been proposed; they however...

With the emergence of cloud technologies, on the one hand, and social networks, on the other hand, the possibilities for e-learning have been drastically enhanced in the latest years. Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) can now indeed contain a huge amount of learning resources; in parallel, large user communities are available in social networks....

Context: UML diagrams are the de facto standard for analysing, communicating and designing software systems, as well as automated code generation. However there is a certain degree of difficulty in understanding a system represented by means of UML diagrams. Object: Our previous research demonstrates a significant improvement in understanding the...

It is commonly accepted that simulation contributes to a better learning quality while also promoting successful transfer of the skills to real-world environments. However, the practical use of simulation is hampered by the difficulty of interpreting simulation results. This paper demonstrates the learning benefits in conceptual modeling of busines...

The authors propose a new approach to discourse analysis which is based on meta data from social networking behavior of learners who are submerged in a socially constructivist e-learning environment. It is shown that traditional data modeling techniques can be combined with social network analysis - an approach that promises to yield new insights i...

In this study, we report on the students' evaluation of a self-constructed constructivist e-learning environment for statistics, the compendium platform (CP). The system was built to endorse deeper learning with the incorporation of statistical reproducibility and peer review practices. The deployment of the CP, with interactive workshops and group...

Business process management systems (BPMS) belong to a class of enterprise information systems that are characterized by the dependence on explicitly modeled process logic. Through the process logic, it is relatively easy to manage explicitly the routing and allocation of work items along a business process through the system. Inspired by the DeLon...

Organizational modeling with the i* framework has widely been used for model-driven software development adopting a transformational approach, notably within the Tropos process. Its high-level representation elements allow to partition the software problem into adequate and manageable elements (actors, goals, tasks, resources and dependencies) lead...

The optimization investment policy decision of an ERP implementation has been analyzed under symmetric and asymmetric information conditions. For both conditions, ERP implementation options’ decision optimizing models have been developed. In these models, both clients and vendors try to pursue their own benefits. Based upon the principal-agent theo...

The optimization investment policy decision of an ERP implementation has been analyzed under symmetric and asymmetric information conditions. For both conditions, ERP implementation options’ decision optimizing models have been developed. In these models, both clients and vendors try to pursue their own benefits. Based upon the principal-agent theo...

In this paper we continue our previous research on ICT skills in the higher education student population. We focus on several students' perceived ICT skills, general computer use patterns, and perceived computer self-efficacy. The approach taken is different from the mainstream computer literacy research in not focusing on 'Office-based' skills, bu...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical success factors of ERP implementations in Belgian SMEs and to identify those success factors that are specific to a SME environment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors survey the literature to discover and classify critical success factors that are potentially applicable to smal...

Business process management technology is used at many sites as an instrument to improve the efficiency and agility of business operations. Currently, only a fragmented insight exists into the determinants for successful usage of this technology. The study in this paper is a first approach to more systematically investigate this issue, in particula...

Video games are considered to be promising tools with a considerable learning potential. They are supposed to motivate students, promote discovery-based learning and empower students to deal with ill-structured problems. Since future generations will be “digital natives”, they will likely benefit the most from the learning potential of educational...

In this paper, the optimization investment policy decision of an ERP II implementation has been analyzed under different information conditions. ERP II implementing options' decision-optimizing models were established. In these models, both clients and vendors try to pursue their own benefits. Based upon the principal-agent theory, the models show...

This paper examines various extensions of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and related frameworks from a theoretical and empirical point of view. A brief discussion of the relevant literature – from a multidisciplinary perspective – explains why it is important to bridge the different fields that are involved: educatio...

In a process-enabled service oriented architecture, a process engine typically stores the state of the process instances during enactment. As an alternative, stateless process enactment entails that process state is derived from the state of business objects, which are organized in a domain model. The business objects are referred to in pre- and po...

Despite the enormous interest in workflow management systems and their widespread adoption by industry, few research studies are available that empirically assess the effectiveness and acceptance of this technology. Our work exactly aims at providing such insights and this paper presents some of our preliminary quantitative findings. Using a theory...

Service granularity generally refers to the size of a service. The fact that services should be large-sized or coarse-grained is often postulated as a fundamental design principle of service oriented architecture (SOA). However, multiple meanings are put on the term granularity and the impact of granularity on architectural qualities is not always...

E-learning systems, also known as a virtual learning environments (VLE's), are systems that use modern information and communication technology to support education and training efforts. In this paper we present the evaluation of a newly developed Compendium Platform (CP) that can be used to create educational applications that support effective le...

Many organizations migrate to service-oriented architecture (SOA) since it caters for the demanded flexibility and reusability in information systems. Besides delineating appropriate business services, a mechanism for coordinating these services is needed to support business processes. The current state-of-the-art falls short in realizing that goal...

John from the claims department at InsuranceCo is quite dissatisfied after his exploratory study of some popular work-flow engines available in the market. In his opinion, they all act like some "Big Brother" who needs complete control over all existing information systems. John considers their claim handling process that is enacted by such a workf...

The image of workflow systems as being context-insensitive technology, hindering rather than supporting people in performing their work may still exist at present. This impres-sion is also raised in the well-known and often cited case study within Establishment Printers. Using this case as a starting point, this paper presents an analysis of more r...

This paper presents the result of a case study that has been done in a Belgian financial corporation in 1998. Presently, a follow-up study is being conducted. Focus is put on the validation of theoretical frameworks with explanatory value. In the literature on IT in general, the criterion to evaluate the acceptance of technology is the actual usage...

Separation of concerns is a determining factor of the quality of ob- ject-oriented software development. Done well, it can provide substantial bene- fits such as additive rather than invasive change and improved adaptability, customizability, and reuse. In this paper we propose a software architecture that integrates concepts from business process...

Workflow systems and object-oriented technology have undoubtedly been some of the most important domains of interest of information technology over the past decade. Both domains however, have largely evolved independently, and not much research can be found in which workflow modelling principles and concepts have been applied to OO systems developm...

This research aims at studying enduser acceptance of workflow system. Enduser acceptance is crucial when considering the implementation success of workflow systems (WFS). The case study reported here is the first step in the development of a general diagnostic tool for evaluating the implementation of workflow systems.Many case studies have been pr...

Although many case studies have been presented in the field of Workflow Management, few articles are rooted in a general framework. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of a WFMS in a larger Belgian corporation. The data were collected in first two months of 1998. It is the first step in the development of a general diagnostic to...

This paper focuses on the evaluation and positioning of a new generation of development tools containing subtools (browsers, debuggers, GUI-builders, …) and programming languages that are designed to work together and have a common graphical user interface and are therefore called environments. Several trends in IT have led to a pluriform range of...

E-learning systems, or virtual learning environments (VLEs), are systems that use modern ICT technology to support educational and training efforts. This paper discusses the implementation of a new VLE, that supports non-rote learning of exploratory and inductive statistics within the paradigm of social constructivism. An attempt was made to link t...