European Journal of Higher Education IT 2017-1

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.

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.

The introduction of e-Assessment is hindered by reservations, despite e-Assessment being a valuable tool for teaching and examining in general. These reservations concern mainly the fairness and reliability of e-Assessment as well as financial questions. The latter can be solved in practice by utilizing BYOD, since most of today’s students already possess devices that are capable of being used for e-Assessment. This poses, however, additional challenges to the fairness and reliability of e-Assessment. This paper presents an approach that utilizes cryptographic methods, like public key cryptography and digital signatures, and the version control system GIT in order to overcome this challenges. Based on these techniques a framework for e-Assessment was implemented as client-server architecture.

Many institutions strive to provide education that matches the learning needs of each individual student. This places high demands on the digital learning environment (DLE) of an institution. One system that meets all the needs and requirements of every student and lecturer, does not exist, which is why a modular approach seems the obvious choice.

In 2016, SURFnet translated this modular approach into a functional model for the DLE. This resulted in thirteen components for the DLE, that support several educational processes. Splitting the DLE into components is supportive for institutions in two ways: 1. It helps institutions to decide to what degree of control and management the components have to be placed in the architecture of the digital learning environment; 2. It helps institutions to determine in which way the components are connected and able to interact.

The ongoing digitalization leads to a need of continuous change of ICT (Information and Communi-cation Technology) in all university domains and therefore affects all stakeholders in this arena. More and more ICT components, systems and tools occur and have to be integrated into the existing processes and infrastructure of the institutions. These tasks include the transfer of resources and information across multiple ICT systems. By using so-called virtual environments for domains of re-search, education, learning and work, the performance of daily tasks can be aided. Based on a user requirement analysis different short- and long-term objectives were identified and are tackled now in the context of a federal research project. In order to be prepared for the ongoing digitalization, new systems have to be provided. Both, a service-oriented infrastructure and a related web-based virtual learning environment constitute the platform Campus.UP and creates the necessary basis to be ready for future challenges. The current focus lies on e-portfolio work, hence we will present a related focus group evaluation. The results indicate a tremendous need to extend the possibilities of sharing resources across system boundaries, in order to enable a comfortable participation of exter-nal cooperating parties and to clarify the focus of each connected system. The introduction of such an infrastructure implies far-reaching changes for traditional data centers. Therefore, the challenges and risks of faculty conducting innovation projects for the ICT organization are taken as a starting point to stimulate a discussion, how data centers can utilize projects to be ready for the future needs. We are confident that Campus.UP will provide the basis for ensuring the persistent transfer of innovation to the ICT organization and thus will contribute to tackle the future challenges of digitalization.