European Journal of Higher Education IT 2017-1

The process of digitalization challenges universities worldwide, in particular the universities’ IT. Qualitative interviews with students were conducted to gather information on service requirements. Three service categories clearly dominate the students’ wishes for IT support: study organization, online literature and software provision. As regards the study organization, a centralized platform granting access to all relevant information and services (e.g. schedule, exam administration, certificates, study progress, contact information) is particularly important. From the students’ point of view, IT should enable them to focus on the content of their studies, provide support for organizational problems, and grant easy access to resources, such as literature and software, while at the same time require little effort.

This paper deals with detection of flooding attacks which are the most common type of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in a Mobile Agent World. We propose a new framework for the detection of flooding attacks by integrating Divergence measures over Sketch data structure. The performance of the proposed framework is investigated in terms of detection probability and false alarm ratio. We focus on tuning the parameter of Divergence Measures to optimize the performance. We conduct performance analysis over publicly available real IP traces, in Mobile Agent Network, integrated with flooding attacks. Our analysis results prove that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing solutions.

New approaches to teaching and research require machine readable interfaces as provided by service oriented architectures. Many scenarios in teaching as well as in research demand cooperation between members of universities. Identity federations and federated applications provide some means for collaboration. Current federation services for single sign on however are not compatible with common applications arising from service oriented architectures. The OAuth2 workflow allows personalized access to service oriented architectures for applications but lacks a definition for federated deployment. The presented extensions are based on the current implementation of OAuth2 They allow establishing a federation of OAuth2 token services that builds on top of the existing federated infrastructures in higher education.

If the company doesn’t have a website, it is losing out on great opportunities for its business. A website itself can be used to accomplish many different marketing strategies to help the business grow. Companies can benefit from having a website. Websites are nowadays used not only as a sales method and information tool, but also as a communication tool in marketing. (Kvasnicova, Kremenova, Fabus, 2015)

Schools and universities have a special place in the market. They offer education opportunities in particular areas. The educational institutions market is huge and extremely competitive. Although the reputation and the quality of institutions is a major advantage, they must think about the target group, who are young people spending several hours per day browsing websites. Schools and universities should have their own web pages, which represent them and perform many functions: information, communication, publications, cultural, and social, among other activities. University websites are intended for employees, high school students interested in studying, school partners, public authorities and the general public. (Kvasnicova, Kremenova, 2015)

The most important is that the web pages are usable – it means it is easy to use the website, user find what are looking for. Otherwise, visitors leave them and click on the competitor’s website.

The word usability has become the most inflected in the design and management of web sites and applications worldwide in recent years. Nielsen (1993) defined usability as a quality attribute – something that is easy to use.

We are able to evaluate the usability. One of the common tool is System Usability Scale (SUS), which provides a “quick and dirty”, reliable tool for measuring the usability. (Brooke, 2013) It consists of a 10 item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Originally created by John Brooke in 1986, it allows us to evaluate a wide variety of products and services, including hardware, software, mobile devices, websites and applications.

We examined how the current situation in Slovakia is. There are no statistics for measuring and evaluating the usability of university websites. To fill this information gap, we conducted several interviews with administrators of schools websites. The interviews have shown that such a usability test have not been made. Therefore we formulated the research problem: Usability evaluation of universities websites and decided to find out the current situation. Research determine how many of universities in selected countries (Slovakia, Czech Republic and Finland) evaluate the usability of their web pages. We expect: More than 90% of schools do not evaluate the usability of their web pages.

Due to the existence of information gaps and our concern for them to be completed, it was a plan of the research project in two main steps. Step 1: We ask administrators from all universities and colleges in 3 selected countries to fill in a questionnaire. The main question will answer our research problem.

Step 2: We ask high school students to evaluate university websites by using SUS tool. The period of our research is from beginning of February to the end of May 2017.

The results offer insight into the current state of usability of universities website in selected countries. We can identify the weaknesses of websites and propose to remove them. Thanks to the results we are be able to improve website usability, make it more comfortable and easier for users.

Better insight into the teaching process and targeted feedback to students, ultimately resulting in improved education: that is the idea behind learning analytics. Learning analytics makes it possible to follow students’ digital footsteps. These footsteps can be recorded and analysed, leading to the creation of comprehensive data collections. With this data, it is possible to make predictions about, for example, the quality of the teaching materials used, how teachers and students interact with the material, how the digital learning and working environment is used, etc. Learning analytics offers a great many possibilities, but how can an institution use it successfully? This is the reason why SURFnet started the Learning Analytics Experiment for Dutch institutes for higher education to gain experience with learning analytics. With this experiment, SURFnet demonstrates the possibilities of learning analytics in education. In this paper we present the set-up of the Learning Analytics experiment, the learning analytics architecture and infrastructure used for this experiment as well as the preliminary results and further work.

An analysis of strategic plans of 40 institutions of higher education in the Netherlands shows an overlap in ambition: a search for more flexible and personalized education. But what does that look like, costumized education? And how would or should that prepare students for a career in a rapidly changing world? SURF, the collaborative ICT organisation for Dutch education and research, spoke to a large group of innovators that try to translate concepts of flexible and personalized education to classroom practices. We spoke to people who are changing the way they offer their courses, and explore, in the classroom, what works and what does not. We also spoke with visionaries who think about what we need to change to prepare students for the future. We asked them what they see as flexible and personalized education, why it is needed, what we have to change and offer to enable it, what organisational bounderies we encounter, what already is happening, and what their vision of the future is. We had them meet up and share their visions and inspire each other. We included international publications about the subject in the discussion. We looked where vision and practice seemed to connect and where it collided. During EADTU Christien Bok, program manager of SURF Technology Enhanced Education, will present the current state of flexible and personalized education in Dutch higher education, and how ICT can contribute to shape

It is a simple idea, really.

Learning is all about feedback. Runners, for example, use apps like the RunKeeper. Research shows that apps like that enhance engagement and results. And people think it is fun. The essence being that the behavior of the runner is tracked and communicated back to the runner in a dashboard.

We, at Fontys University, wondered if you can reach the same positive effect if you had a dashboard for study behavior. For students. And what should you measure, track and communicate? We wondered if we could translate the Quantified Self Movement into a Quantified Student.