Abstract

This paper is an attempt at a vision, driven by experiences in India, of a set of research and technical challenges for software engineering researchers that stem from critical concerns of scale and variety when designing educational technologies. Educational concerns are the same everywhere. To be holistic, we have to consider points of view of all concerned stake holder groups of educational systems: they are grouped as: {students, teachers, employers, society}, {administrators}, and {managers}. The first group is concerned with the technical content to be transacted through education and its quality and value to them. It is concerned with integrity with the body of knowledge of the subject, constrained by the level at which the subject is to be taught or learnt, further constrained by the time available for a course on that subject - this is a source of variety, as do the different languages of instruction that may be used, whilst the subjects themselves and the level at which they are dealt with present a concern for scale. Further sources of variety are: the student as a novice, a beginner, an advanced student, or one revising the subject matter for the purposes of a test or an examination - the kind of student presents a source of variety, and the number of students presents a matter of scale; the teacher as an expositor, a tutor, a coach, or a mentor - the kind of teachers presents variety, whereas the number of teachers needed in the system are a matter of scale; as an employer, as the next level of an educational system, or the society as the beneficiary of education, and the student is both a product of the Educational System, as well as a consumer, the immediate beneficiary. There is lastly, the quality of the Educational System as a whole, as seen from each stakeholders point of view. This is all about technical content to be transacted in the process of educational services. In addition, we will need to look for support to administrative and managerial aspects of educational systems.

Abstract

As education and technology merge, the diversity of teaching and learning methods expand even more. Virtual labs are a set of web applications containing learning materials that compliment the various courses in an Engineering curriculum. The primary intent of the virtual labs is to provide in-lab experience to their users even when the physical lab infrastructure is not available. In this paper, we propose a method for providing access to virtual labs for all those lack internet access. Our aim is to facilitate availability and usage of Virtual Labs without network connectivity. We preinstall the virtual labs with full environment on an Operating System and also use Debian packages for easy installation of the labs on existing Operating System.

Abstract

e propose set of guidelines for virtual labs to improve end user experience based on analysis of experimental results. Virtual labs were designed and developed by people with different technical backgrounds based on their familiarity with the technologies and the complexity of virtual lab. As a result each lab developer decided to use his or her own set of tools and technologies leading to performance issues during execution of the virtual labs. Performance of a web application depends upon the content of the web page. Therefore, we did analysis on web pages of virtual lab and listed guidelines to enhance user experience.

Abstract

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) advocates the notion of aspects to encapsulate crosscutting concerns. A concern is a behavior in a computer program and is said to be crosscutting if the module(s) that address the behavior are scattered and tangled with other modules of the system. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using AOP for software testing and non-invasive debugging. We have identified some crosscutting concerns like access control, logging, performance, tracing, etc., and developed a framework based on java bytecode instrumentation technique to inject these crosscutting concerns into the compiled code. The framework is available as a service, i.e., the service takes the required code as input and produces the changed code as output that contains the appropriate aspects. Thus, it is argued that the framework can be the basis for implementing the notion of “Enabling testing as a Service”.