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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 11 October 2018

Jun Lin, Han Yu, Zhengxiang Pan, Zhiqi Shen and Lizhen Cui

Today’s software engineers often work in teams to develop complex software systems. Therefore, successful software engineering in practice require team members to possess not only…

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Abstract

Purpose

Today’s software engineers often work in teams to develop complex software systems. Therefore, successful software engineering in practice require team members to possess not only sound programming skills such as analysis, design, coding and testing but also soft skills such as communication, collaboration and self-management. However, existing examination-based assessments are often inadequate for quantifying students’ soft skill development. The purpose of this paper is to explore alternative ways for assessing software engineering students’ skills through a data-driven approach.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the exploratory data analysis approach is adopted. Leveraging the proposed online agile project management tool – Human-centred Agile Software Engineering (HASE), a study was conducted involving 21 Scrum teams consisting of over 100 undergraduate software engineering students in multi-week coursework projects in 2014.

Findings

During this study, students performed close to 170,000 software engineering activities logged by HASE. By analysing the collected activity trajectory data set, the authors demonstrate the potential for this new research direction to enable software engineering educators to have a quantifiable way of understanding their students’ skill development, and take a proactive approach in helping them improve their programming and soft skills.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has yet to be published previous studies using software engineering activity data to assess software engineers’ skills.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 19 November 2018

Benliu Qiu and Ningxuan Zhang

With the recent development of science and technology, research on information diffusion has become increasingly important.

Abstract

Purpose

With the recent development of science and technology, research on information diffusion has become increasingly important.

Design/methodology/approach

To analyze the process of information diffusion, researchers have proposed a framework with graphical evolutionary game theory (EGT) according to the theory of biological evolution.

Findings

Through this method, one can study and even predict information diffusion.

Originality/value

This paper summarizes three existing works using graphical EGT to discuss how to obtain the static state and the dynamics of information diffusion in social network.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 6 March 2017

Zhiyuan Zeng, Jian Tang and Tianmei Wang

The purpose of this paper is to study the participation behaviors in the context of crowdsourcing projects from the perspective of gamification.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study the participation behaviors in the context of crowdsourcing projects from the perspective of gamification.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper first proposed a model to depict the effect of four categories of game elements on three types of motivation based upon several motivation theories, which may, in turn, influence user participation. Then, 5 × 2 between-subject Web experiments were designed for collecting data and validating this model.

Findings

Game elements which provide participants with rewards and recognitions or remind participants of the completion progress of their tasks may positively influence the extrinsic motivation, whereas game elements which can help create a fantasy scene may strengthen intrinsic motivation. Besides, recognition-kind and progress-kind game elements may trigger the internalization of extrinsic motivation. In addition, when a task is of high complexity, the effects from game elements on extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation will be less prominent, whereas the internalization of extrinsic motivation may benefit from the increase of task complexity.

Originality/value

This study may uncover the motivation mechanism of several different kinds of game elements, which may help to find which game elements are more effective in enhancing engagement and participation in crowdsourcing projects. Besides, as task complexity is used as a moderator, one may be able to identify whether task complexity is able to influence the effects from game elements on motivations. Last, but not the least, this study will indicate the interrelationship between game elements, individual motivation and user participation, which can be adapted by other scholars.

Details

International Journal of Crowd Science, vol. 1 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-7294

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 4 January 2013

Thorsten Roser, Robert DeFillippi and Alain Samson

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to co‐creation theory by integrating conceptual insights from the management and marketing literatures that are both concerned…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to co‐creation theory by integrating conceptual insights from the management and marketing literatures that are both concerned with co‐creation phenomena. It aims to develop a reference model for comparing how different organizations organize and manage their co‐creation ventures. It also aims to apply the authors' framework to four distinct cases that illustrate the differences in co‐creation practice within different co‐creation environments.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors compare four different companies based on case profiles. Each company is employing its own distinct approach to co‐creating. The authors employ a method mix including literature analysis, structured interviews, document and web site analysis, as well as participation.

Findings

The reference model offers a set of useful dimensions for case‐based inquiry. The case comparisons show how firms may decide to systematise and manage a mix of co‐creation activities within B2B versus B2C contexts, utilising either crowd‐sourced or non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Further, the case comparisons suggest that there are less differences in B2B versus B2C co‐creation as compared with crowd‐sourced versus non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Ultimately, implementation decisions in one dimension of co‐creation design (e.g. whom to involve in co‐creation) will affect other dimensions of implementation and governance (e.g. how much intimacy) and thus how co‐creation needs to be managed.

Originality/value

The paper presents case comparisons utilising B2B versus B2C, as well as crowd versus non‐crowd‐sourcing examples of co‐creation and an original decision support framework for assessing and comparing co‐creation choices.

Article
Publication date: 21 June 2013

Sharmistha Chatterjee, Jukka K. Nurminen and Matti Siekkinen

Detecting and tracking the position of a mobile user has become one of the important subjects in many mobile applications. Such applications use location based services (LBS) for…

Abstract

Purpose

Detecting and tracking the position of a mobile user has become one of the important subjects in many mobile applications. Such applications use location based services (LBS) for learning and training user movements in different places (cities, markets, airports, stations) along different modes of transport (bus, car, cycle, walk). To date, GPS is the key solution to all LBS but repeated GPS querying is not economical in terms of the battery life of the mobile phone. The purpose of this paper is to study how cheap and energy‐efficient air pressure sensors measuring the altitude could be used, as a complement to the dominant GPS system. The location detection and route tracking task is then accomplished by matching the collected altitude traces with the altitude curves of stored data to find the best matching routes.

Design/methodology/approach

The cornerstone of the authors' approach is that a huge amount of route data, collected with GPS devices, is available in various cloud services. In order to evaluate the mechanism of matching routes with altitude data, the authors build a prototype system of crowd‐sourced database containing only altitude data of different routes along different modes of transport. How accurately this stored altitude data could be matched with the collected altitude traces is the key question of this study.

Findings

Results show that, within a certain level of accuracy, older repeated routes can be detected from newly tracked altitude traces. Further, the level of accuracy varies depending on the length of path traversed, route curvature, speed of travel and sensor used for tracking.

Originality/value

The new contribution in this paper is to propose an alternative route detection mechanism which minimizes the use of GPS query. This concept will help in retrieving the GPS coordinates of already traversed routes stored in a large database by matching them with currently tracked altitude curves.

Abstract

Details

Digital Theology: A Computer Science Perspective
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-535-4

Article
Publication date: 7 March 2016

Arash Joorabchi, Michael English and Abdulhussain E. Mahdi

The use of social media and in particular community Question Answering (Q & A) websites by learners has increased significantly in recent years. The vast amounts of data…

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Abstract

Purpose

The use of social media and in particular community Question Answering (Q & A) websites by learners has increased significantly in recent years. The vast amounts of data posted on these sites provide an opportunity to investigate the topics under discussion and those receiving most attention. The purpose of this paper is to automatically analyse the content of a popular computer programming Q & A website, StackOverflow (SO), determine the exact topics of posted Q & As, and narrow down their categories to help determine subject difficulties of learners. By doing so, the authors have been able to rank identified topics and categories according to their frequencies, and therefore, mark the most asked about subjects and, hence, identify the most difficult and challenging topics commonly faced by learners of computer programming and software development.

Design/methodology/approach

In this work the authors have adopted a heuristic research approach combined with a text mining approach to investigate the topics and categories of Q & A posts on the SO website. Almost 186,000 Q & A posts were analysed and their categories refined using Wikipedia as a crowd-sourced classification system. After identifying and counting the occurrence frequency of all the topics and categories, their semantic relationships were established. This data were then presented as a rich graph which could be visualized using graph visualization software such as Gephi.

Findings

Reported results and corresponding discussion has given an indication that the insight gained from the process can be further refined and potentially used by instructors, teachers, and educators to pay more attention to and focus on the commonly occurring topics/subjects when designing their course material, delivery, and teaching methods.

Research limitations/implications

The proposed approach limits the scope of the analysis to a subset of Q & As which contain one or more links to Wikipedia. Therefore, developing more sophisticated text mining methods capable of analysing a larger portion of available data would improve the accuracy and generalizability of the results.

Originality/value

The application of text mining and data analytics technologies in education has created a new interdisciplinary field of research between the education and information sciences, called Educational Data Mining (EDM). The work presented in this paper falls under this field of research; and it is an early attempt at investigating the practical applications of text mining technologies in the area of computer science (CS) education.

Details

Journal of Enterprise Information Management, vol. 29 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1741-0398

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 14 January 2014

Francis J. Gouillart

After leading more than thirty co-creation projects, and observing more than 200 others, the author can offer a view on why co-creation with stakeholders is becoming a cornerstone

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Abstract

Purpose

After leading more than thirty co-creation projects, and observing more than 200 others, the author can offer a view on why co-creation with stakeholders is becoming a cornerstone of the creative economy and suggest how the most popular approaches contribute to helping firms gain a competitive advantage through connections that enable continuous innovation.

Design/methodology/approach

To tackle large, complex problems, co-creation, in its most generic form, requires adopting five processes that each represent a potential source of competitive advantage; an approach can utilize each process from very little to a lot. A co-creation strategy will be most powerful when all five processes are used in combination.

Findings

Leading theorists are predicting that in the foreseeable future the co-creation model will become a primary source of the firm's competitive advantage.

Practical implications

Opening up the traditional value chain to stakeholders could precipitate a race to co-creation, as every firm tries to connect each function and process to the relevant ecosystem and attract the best external players as partners.

Originality/value

Leading theorists anticipate that in the foreseeable future the co-creation model will become a primary source of the firm's competitive advantage. The article lays out five approaches.

Details

Strategy & Leadership, vol. 42 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1087-8572

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 January 2019

Maria Sideri, Angeliki Kitsiou, Ariadni Filippopoulou, Christos Kalloniatis and Stefanos Gritzalis

Even though social media are nowadays used in the frame of public governance to ensure citizens’ major participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, this…

Abstract

Purpose

Even though social media are nowadays used in the frame of public governance to ensure citizens’ major participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, this utilization has not been expanded yet in the field of education, whose key role focuses on the cultivation of active citizenship, as it is promoted through participation. The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership’s views of Greek Secondary and Tertiary Education on the potential use of social media for participatory decision-making processes in order to identify if the e-participation model could be implemented in the Greek education field as in other public domains.

Design/methodology/approach

An exploratory research was elaborated, employing a survey design of quantitative method in order to explore Greek educational organizations leadership’s perspectives toward social media usage in participatory decision-making processes.

Findings

The research reveals Greek educational leadership’s positive view on the potential effects of social media usage in participatory decision-making processes and highlights anticipated benefits as well as problems to be faced, indicating the foundation for Greek leaders to implement social media in their leadership practices and exploit their affordances as in e-governance shifts.

Practical implications

Bringing the concept of e-participation and crowd sourcing model – key features in e-governance initiatives through social media usage – in education field, Greek educational leadership is informed to consider social media utilization more methodically in the context of participatory decision-making processes, updating simultaneously existing leadership practices.

Originality/value

Up till now, social media usage in participatory decision-making processes in educational settings has hardly received attention.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 29 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 January 2022

Gerrit Anton de Waal and Alex Maritz

The purpose of this practitioner paper is to explore whether the principles of Design Thinking and the Lean Startup could be employed in developing a disruptive model for…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this practitioner paper is to explore whether the principles of Design Thinking and the Lean Startup could be employed in developing a disruptive model for delivering educational programs within higher education in a way that attempts to eliminate the multitude of problems facing this industry, while simultaneously adhering to the principles of frugal innovation and meeting relevant sustainability goals.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors followed a design thinking approach, employing tools such as empathy mapping, customer journey, value proposition and semi-structured interviews to obtain a deep level of understanding of the problems educators and students within the context of entrepreneurship education are facing. Throughout the process they drew on the practice of emergent inquiry and customer co-creation to help guide decision making.

Findings

The authors successfully derived a conceptual solution in the form of a Minimum Viable Product of which the features were tested against the multitude of user needs and requirements. It was possible to demonstrate how the solution meets all nine of the requirements for frugal innovations while simultaneously adhering to applicable sustainability principles.

Practical implications

The proposed solution offers a potential opportunity to first-movers in chosen academic disciplines to become leaders in online education.

Originality/value

Even in an industry such as higher education there is a dire need for frugality and finding sustainable solutions for educators and students in both developed and developing markets. With this paper the authors succeed in presenting innovative combinations of digital artefacts, platforms and infrastructure to arrive at a novel crowd-sourced solution that is unique in its design.

Details

Education + Training, vol. 64 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0040-0912

Keywords

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