Use of digital visualization tools in planning is nowadays widely practiced around the world by various contributors to the field and in different planning scales. Visualization facilitates perception of underlying thoughts and objectives of planning alternatives and consequently assists with communication of the plan to stakeholders of different groups. This – in turn - enables them to actively and efficiently participate in the procedure from the very initial stages to the implementation phase thanks to the insight provided by user-friendly visualization tools. Available visualization tools for planning, however, are either not integrated and efficient enough or too resource- or expertise-demanding and thus not entirely fulfilling the qualities mentioned above. This study is a search for a conceptual framework for the optimal web-based visualization tool. Web-basedness diminishes temporal and spatial distance among the users and planning agents and provides the possibility for more participation in and interaction with planning projects. Within this study, major characteristics of an optimal tool have been investigated through literature and online resources, contacts with experts and practitioners, a survey over existing products and visual analysis of the outcomes. An evaluation cube was initially developed and then used as the basis for a set of duality criteria. A selection of visualization tools were examined against those criteria and results were demonstrated visually. Eventually, findings were used to provide a backcasted example of the optimal tool and suggestions were made for actual development of the package to be used by planning agents.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in 50% fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education (in the field of Educational Technology). / Online learning has been identified as a growing area in the education sector and many educational institutions are expanding their offering of online courses. When designing online courses, there are several design considerations and decisions that need to be made. Despite the development of various instructional design literature and the potential of online courses to support learning, there exists a gap between theoretical knowledge (theory) and practice (reality). The objective of the current research study is to determine the effectiveness of the design of online courses for teaching and learning, and what designers and instructors of online learning environments should collectively consider in terms of the quality of the design for online courses. The current study found the dimensions (1) course information, course structure and course organisation, (2) interaction and communication, (3) multimedia design, (4) assessment and feedback, and (5) effective use of technology of online courses to be important contributors towards the quality design of online courses. Using these dimensions, a valid and reliable evaluation instrument was developed – a rubric. In the current study, the rubric is used as an evaluation tool to evaluate three online short courses at a university level. The current study uses a quantitative instrument design methodology as it involves measuring by scoring various criterion on the developed rubric. These scores were measured and analysed using simple descriptive statistics. Qualitative descriptive evaluations of the online short courses were also done. Both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the online course analysis were integrated to ascertain a summative conclusion of the three online courses and whether the rubric, as a design framework, needed further improvement or not. The current study provides a contribution towards literature by advancing the development of best practices in terms of quality design and evaluation of online courses. The rubric offers a framework to determine what components contribute towards quality design in online courses. This framework contains a set of benchmarks that will assist instructors and course designers in one of two ways; (1) as a self-evaluation tool for an online course thus advising the appropriate stakeholder on how to revise their current online course, and (2) as a best practice guideline to design a new course within the online environment. / NG (2020)

Online teacher professional development (oTPD) has gained momentum globally as a mode of teacher professional development (Dede et al., 2009; Lieberman & Mace, 2010), appealing to teachers who prefer the convenience of online learning and/or the autonomy of self-paced learning. With oTPD gaining traction, especially in this climate of COVID-19 pandemic where many face-to-face interactions have shifted to an online space, there is insufficient research done on teachers’ learning experiences and the type of reflective thinking observed during teachers’ participation in oTPD activities. This is compounded by the ubiquitous but poorly defined use of reflection in literature pertaining to learning and professional development (Finlay, 2008; Roessger, 2014). In Singapore where teachers have access to a range of oTPD opportunities, this problem is similarly observed. Very few studies have been undertaken in Singapore to understand teachers’ learning experiences and how teachers reflect when they engage in TPD or oTPD. In light of the growing popularity of oTPD as a means for Singapore teachers to learn and improve their classroom practice, this exploratory case study sought to contribute to TPD research by studying the oTPD experiences of Singapore teachers. Specifically, this study explored factors that facilitated and/or impeded teacher learning in oTPD and the level of reflective thinking observed in teachers’ oTPD participation. The motivation for this study stems from an appreciation of the complexity of classroom practice and the recognition that what teachers do in their respective classrooms is pivotal to student learning. This study recognizes the crucial need to support teacher learning through oTPD. Findings from this study may inform the design and implementation of oTPD in Singapore and address the paucity of research in this area by providing qualitative case study data on the understudied area of oTPD and teacher learning. Recommendations pertaining to the design and implementation of oTPD may benefit professional development providers and the teachers they serve, as well as teacher leaders hoping to support teacher learning. This study and the recommendations it proposes will also be of interest to researchers in educational research who seek to understand the phenomenon of oTPD.

Background: Family-centered web-based lifestyle interventions have the potential to be a scalable and cost-effective strategy to promote physical activity for children. However, program engagement and attrition are key challenges facing self-guided web-based interventions. Human email-mediated support may be a solution to these challenges. Currently, there is a lack of research examining whether the addition of human email-mediated support to self-guided family-centered physical activity interventions can improve engagement and intervention effectiveness. Thus, a feasibility study is needed to further understand ways to enhance web-based intervention delivery. Objective: (i) Evaluate the feasibility (recruitment, attrition, engagement, satisfaction) of a human email-mediated support compared to a self-guided web-based intervention (ii) examine the potential efficacy of a human-supported versus self-guided web-based intervention in improving children’s physical activity and parental support behaviours. Methods: Children aged 8-12 years old who did not meet the Canadian physical activity guidelines were recruited. Families were allocated to either 10-week human email-mediated support or self-guided program. The programs were developed using the multi-process action control (M-PAC) framework. The programs provided information and interactive online activities targeting healthier lifestyle behaviours. The human support group received multiple weekly support emails as needed. The self-guided only received one generic email per week. Both parents and children completed validated questionnaires assessing physical activity and parental support behaviours pre- and post- 10-week intervention. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze recruitment rate, attrition and website engagement. Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to evaluate intervention effectiveness. Post-program interviews were added to further explore program satisfaction. Results: Fifty-one families contacted the researcher and eighteen families completed follow-up measures. The overall recruitment rate over a 16-month period was 41% (21/51). The attrition for human email-mediated support and the self-guided group was 10% and 18.2%, respectively. The attrition for both groups was 14% (3/21). The human email-mediated support group showed a significantly higher login frequency (4.7±2.1 vs. 2.3±1.4, respectively; p = 0.02), percentage of core pages accessed (35.8±19.6 vs. 13.1±18.2, respectively; p = 0.02), and total time spent in minutes (180.6±110.6 vs. 108.8±88.1, respectively; p = 0.01). The human email-mediated support group was more satisfied with the program compared to the self-guided group (p < 0.05). Both human support and self-guided groups improved their informational and appraisal-emotional support (p < 0.01; ηp2 = 0.9), parent self-efficacy to support their child’s physical activity (p = 0.03; ηp2 = 0.27), and child physical activity confidence (p = 0.04; ηp2 = 0.26). Children in the human email-mediated group showed a greater increase in the children’s physical activity intrinsic motivation (p = 0.02; ηp2 = 0.34) than self-guided group following the intervention. Conclusions: Study recruitment was a challenge. The human email-mediated support group had a lower attrition rate and a higher engagement than the self-guided group. Both interventions showed potential efficacy in improving physical activity measures. A full-scale study is recommended to confirm findings. / Graduate

Encryption is the process of obfuscating data to restrict access to it while allowing it to be returned to its original non-obfuscated form through decryption. This process is increasingly used within web-based systems to secure data. When encryption is introduced in a system, the overall end-to-end latency of the system typically increases, and this increase depends on the size of the input data given to the encryption algorithm. Arguably, the latency introduced by encryption can be reduced if data sizes can be reduced before encryption. Lossless compression is the process of taking some data and reducing its overall data footprint. Introducing such a process within a web-based system that uses encryption could have the potential of reducing overall end-to-end latency within the system, both by reducing encryption time and data transfer time. This thesis evaluates whether the introduction of compression can reduce end-to-end latency in a web-based file upload system that encrypts the received files before storage. A series of experiments have been performed on a created file upload system where compression has been implemented to be used before upload and encryption. The results of these experiments show that compression can reduce end-to-end latency within web-based file upload systems that use encryption by approximately 39% for upload scenarios and approximately 49% for download scenarios when running in a system configuration with network latency.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of three deadline conditions (i.e., frequent-instructor-set-deadline condition, flexible-instructor-set-deadline condition, and self-imposed-deadline condition) on students of different academic procrastination levels (high, medium, and low) in terms of their perceived learning, academic performance, and course satisfaction in an online course. A 3 x 3 factorial quasi-experimental design was adopted for this study. One hundred and seventy three students from three classes of different majors voluntarily participated in the study with 50 students majoring in Agriculture, 61 in International Trading, and 62 in Food Manufacturing. The three classes were randomly assigned to three deadline conditions. Data were collected through an online survey and a final exam. This study found that there were significant differences in perceived learning and course satisfaction among high, medium, and low procrastinators, but there was no significant difference in academic performance among students at different procrastination levels. Low and medium procrastinators had significantly higher perceived learning and were significantly more satisfied with the course than high procrastinators. Among the three deadline condition groups, there were no significant differences in perceived learning and course satisfaction, however, the difference in academic performance was significant. The flexible deadline group achieved the best academic performance followed by the frequent and the self-imposed deadline groups. There was no interaction effect between procrastination and deadline conditions on any of the dependent variables. Limitations of the present study, recommendations for future research, and implications for practice are discussed.

A Web-based circuit design package has been improved and evaluated to provide students with an enhanced and innovative teaching tools package for the electrical circuit design course. The project objectives can be summarized as follows: 1) developing enhanced problem solving skills using a Web-based environment, 2) developing the design skills and sharpening the critical thinking process, 3) developing a generic and comprehensive teaching/learning circuit package as an extention to the Electrical Engineering virtual lab environment, which gives students the capability to practice and experience all the circuit design skills with minimum cost and effort. The project provides the students with an enhanced and powerful graphical computer aided design (CAD) tool by which students can carry out an online simulation of AC and DC designs with the capability to plot simulation results graphically. The proposed prototype is implemented by JAVA, which is used to to implement Web-based applications with different platform support. The project provides students with an enhanced graphical user interface (GUI) by which they can build any electrical circuit using either text or schematic entry format, generate the Netlist, which describes all circuit information (circuit topology, circuit attributes and so on), and simulate the design by parsing the Netlist to CIRML format, which is sent over the network to the remote server. The server will process the CIRML data and run the simulation using PSPICE and eventually send back the simulation results to the client for display.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the short-term and long-term effects of two kinds of advance organizers (AOs), a visual concept map and a text outline. The AOs were administered in a fully Web-based course in health care ethics. The outcome measures are students' knowledge acquisition and application in two posttests. This study was conducted through a post-test only control group design with a random assignment. The population of the study involved 166 college students who participated in this online class in their junior or senior year. The voluntary research participants were randomly assigned into the two treatment groups and one control group. The treatment of AO was administered as an integral part of a one-week-long online module on the topic of patient-physician relationships. Students of the two treatment groups were presented with one of the two AOs, while the control group was instructed to proceed to textbook reading without an AO. Then, students were tested on the subject matter with two parallel posttests. Both posttests were composed of a multiple-choice question quiz and a set of scenario-based essay questions. The students took posttest I at the end of the instructional week, and posttest II four weeks after. A survey and interviews were also conducted to supplement the quantitative results with contextual information. The findings do not demonstrate a statistically significant AO effect among the treatment groups and the control group. However, in agreement with the previous research, this study shows a positive but inconclusive benefit of using AOs for students' short-term knowledge acquisition. The students using a concept map consistently obtained higher learning achievements than individuals using a text outline. More importantly, this study reiterated the proposition that students of lower-learning abilities benefit more from using an AO for online learning than those of higher-learning abilities. The current study extends our knowledge on the use of AOs in fully Web-based educational environments. The results indicated that although AOs more often than not have small facilitative effects for learners, they are not equally effective for all learners in all learning situations. The incorporation of the instructional strategies, such as AOs, in Web-based courses and programs might benefit online learners, especially those students of lower verbal and analytical abilities, or of lower prior knowledge of the material-to-be-learned.

Two major questions guide this study: How are different on-line teaching styles related to classroom participation; does the on-line classroom generate a more gender-neutral environment? The data source for this study was a classroom instruction and performance program at a mid-size university in the Northwest. Included in this study were 59 students (38 males and 21 females) with 75 separate course records from six classes. Each academic discussion conference transcript was coded by message to record message traffic flow for each instructor and student. There were four actions that instructors used that influenced the participation performances of their class. The organization of the conferences influenced participation performance. The two discussion conference model out performed the single conference model in message traffic. Instructor guidance, which was issued by message, had a profound affect on student performance. Although each instructor assigned a percent of the final grade based on participation, this guidance appears to have been relegated low on the students' priority. Guidance given in a prepared syllabus which the students received both in paper and electronic form did not have the same impact as a personal instructor message. At the start of the study, it was assumed the instructors would provide most of the on-line encouragement to students to participate. During the coding process it became obvious that fellow students provided most of the positive social encouragement to participate. Not only did these students conduct student-centered discussions but they also self-motivated the group to participate more. Does the on-line classroom foster a more gender-neutral environment? The results of this study are mixed, but very encouraging. There was no flaming or questionable innuendoes detected in any of the messages. The t-tests did not show a significant difference between male and female participation performance except for length of message. Females were encouraged by their peers to participate and their messages were valued. Since one did not have to wait a turn to speak in these on-line classrooms, there was more air time for all. In these on-line courses the verbose did not silence the rest. / Ed. D.