BBC News - Top US universities put their reputations online

This is an interesting story about the latest developments in US online provision of education. These courses aren't just available in America. I've studied one of them, Stanford University - Databases.

20 June 2012

Top US universities put their reputations online
By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent

"This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.

Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionising education around the world".

Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online interactive courses which can be studied by anyone, anywhere, with no admission requirements and, at least at present, without charge.

With roots in Silicon Valley, Stanford academics have set up another online platform, Coursera, which will provide courses from Stanford and Princeton and other leading US institutions."

- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18191589

Survey - Usability Evaluation

This usability evaluation survey was published in my PhD. At that date there were 91 responses. Now there are 97. The 6 extra responses will also contribute because the updated survey will be published in a journal paper - Journal of Visual Languages and Computing - http://ees.elsevier.com/jvlc/. I've completed minor changes to the paper today which is called - User-Driven Modelling: Visualisation and Systematic Interaction for end-user programming. I'm the main author on that paper - much of which is based on my PhD.

The survey can be accessed at - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=A8Z1u2o5WlIphAPdzNCoeA_3d_3d

The survey is based on 2 user interface examples - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration1.htm and

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration2.htm

The summary of the results that has been submitted to the Journal is below :-

A survey of 97 people was conducted focused on the prototype implementations. This supplemented the feedback obtained from Airbus and Rolls-Royce. This survey was conducted in order to determine what kind of diagrammatic interface might be most appropriate. Extensive consultation with engineers at Airbus and Rolls-Royce helped establish the possible interfaces that needed evaluating, as these interfaces were useful to and understood by these engineers. These possible interfaces were taxonomy, CAD style diagrammatic, flow chart (or activity diagram), UML style (entity relationship). Which was preferred depended partly on the skills and type of work of the engineers, and others surveyed, and on the type of problem to be modelled/programmed :-

Which would you consider yourself to be?

answered question 93

skipped question 4

An End-User (anyone else, familiar with computers but not in categories below) - 29.0% - 27

An Experienced Developer - 28.0% - 26

A Researcher - 32.3% - 30

Other (please specify) - 10.8% - 10

What type of visualisation is best for enabling end-user programming?

answered question 78

skipped question 19

Taxonomy (tree view) - 26.9% - 21

Diagrammatic - 37.2% - 29

Flow Chart - 37.2% - 29

Unified Modeling Language (UML) - 14.1% - 11

Other (please specify) - 12.8% - 10

Which example Program have you used?

answered question 81

skipped question 16

Taxonomy viewer -  http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration1.htm

- 17.3% - 14

Diagrammatic Viewer -  http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration2.htm

- 17.3% - 14

Neither - 43.2% - 35

Both - 22.2% - 18

Which example interface do you prefer?

answered question 75

skipped question 22

Taxonomy (tree) viewer - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration1.htm - 26.7% - 20

Diagrammatic Viewer - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration2.htm

- 17.3% - 13

Neither - 9.3% - 7                                                 

Both - 13.3%- 10

No opinion - 33.3% - 25

As a result of all the feedback from engineers and others, the main problem needing to be tackled is provision of a system that moves this theoretical and prototyped work on to a fully fledged end-user modelling system, available and usable by a wide range of people.