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

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

Presence of information from multiple sources on the internet requires evaluating the credibility of the information, before its utilization. Researchers have suggested that internet users experience difficulty in accessing necessary information and do not pay enough attention to its credibility. We present here the design and implementation of an automated Web Credibility Assessment Support Tool (WebCAST) that considers multiple factors (type of website, popularity, sentiment, date of last update, reputation and review based on users' ratings reflecting personal experience) for assessing the credibility of information and returns a summary indication of the credibility of a website. We use Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) method of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to give weights to the scale values on each factor, representing the relative importance of the attributes. An empirical evaluation of the tool was conducted by computing the correlation between the tool-generated credibility scores and that of human judges. The correlation was found to be 0.89, thus verifying the validity of the tool. In the future the proposed tool can be made useful to students in their learning process of credibility assessment.

Abstract

Refactoring tools suffer from usability in the areas of automating mundane tasks, providing user customization, and providing strategies for error recovery. The automation of refactoring tools can be a risky undertaking since user intervention is required in many scenarios to maintain the internal quality of the system. Any type of design level refactoring requires complex changes to the code, the validation of preconditions, and could potentially harm the system. Smaller refactorings that handle code-smells can be carried out automatically with considerably lower risk. This paper discusses the current state of automated refactoring tools, and the development of an automated refactoring tool to extract and propagate Java literal expressions in IntelliJ IDEA.

Abstract

Traditional engineering disciplines like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering have focused on the design of artifacts. However most the modern day software engineering course with in the undergraduate-computing curriculum focuses on teaching software processes rather than design of software artifacts. This paper argues the need for introducing software product engineering, i.e., a course that extensively deals with design of software artifacts in undergraduate computing curriculum. At a broader level, we also argue the need for more undergraduate software engineering programs in India.

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”.