Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Text Analytics Approach To Extract Course Improvement Suggestions From Students’ Feedback, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Jeff Rongsheng Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In academic institutions, it is normal practice that at the end of each term, students are required to complete a questionnaire that is designed to gather students’ perceptions of the instructor and their learning experience in the course. Students’ feedback includes numerical answers to Likert scale questions and textual comments to open-ended questions. Within the textual comments given by the students are embedded suggestions. A suggestion can be explicit or implicit. Any suggestion provides useful pointers on how the instructor can further enhance the student learning experience. However, it is tedious to manually go through all the qualitative comments and …

Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study reports the use of a physical robot and robot simulator in an introductory programming course in a university and measures students' programming background conceptual learning gain and learning experience. One group used physical robots in their lessons to complete programming assignments, while the other group used robot simulators. We are interested in finding out if there is any difference in the learning gain and experiences between those that use physical robots as compared to robot simulators. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in terms of students' learning between the two approaches. However, the control group …

Class Discussion Management And Analysis Application, Venky Shankararaman, Swapna Gottipati, Seshan Ramaswami, Chirag Chhablan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discussion-based teaching is popular in several courses because it creates opportunities for students to practice important skills useful for the working environment. In order to make this pedagogy impactful and effective, instructors employ technologies such as online discussion forums and student response systems to conduct and manage classroom discussions. More recently mobile devices have become prevalent and researchers have been exploring how this device can help support education. In this paper we report the innovative use of mobile technology and supporting backend tools to manage classroom discussions. We have implemented a class discussion and management application, LiveClass. This application records …

Exploring Experiential Learning Model And Risk Management Process For An Undergraduate Software Architecture Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Yunghans Irawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper shares our insights on exploring theexperiential learning model and risk management process todesign an undergraduate software architecture course. The keychallenge for undergraduate students to appreciate softwarearchitecture design is usually their limited experience in thesoftware industry. In software architecture, the high-level designprinciples are heuristics lacking the absoluteness of firstprinciples which for inexperienced undergraduate students, thisis a frustrating divergence from what they used to value. From aneducator's perspective, teaching software architecture requirescontending with the problem of how to express this level ofabstraction practically and also make the learning realistic. Inthis paper, we propose a model adapting the concepts ofexperiential learning …

Smu Master Of It In Business Launches New Artificial Intelligence Track, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

The Singapore Management University’s School of Information Systems (SIS) has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) track under its Master of IT in Business (MITB) programme. Geared towards nurturing graduates who are ready for the revolutionary change from AI in data science, the AI track equips a new generation of IT business leaders in careers that bridge AI with business.

Competency Analytics Tool: Analyzing Curriculum Using Course Competencies, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The applications of learning outcomes and competency frameworks have brought better clarity to engineering programs in many universities. Several frameworks have been proposed to integrate outcomes and competencies into course design, delivery and assessment. However, in many cases, competencies are course-specific and their overall impact on the curriculum design is unknown. Such impact analysis is important for analyzing, discovering gaps and improving the curriculum design. Unfortunately, manual analysis is a painstaking process due to large amounts of competencies across the curriculum. In this paper, we propose an automated method to analyze the competencies and discover their impact on the overall …

Extracting Implicit Suggestions From Students’ Comments: A Text Analytics Approach, Venky Shankararaman, Swapna Gottipati, Jeff Rongsheng Lin, Sandy Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At the end of each course, students are required to give feedback on the course and instructor. This feedback includes quantitative rating using Likert scale and qualitative feedback as comments. Such qualitative feedback can provide valuable insights in helping the instructor enhance the course content and teaching delivery. However, the main challenge in analysing the qualitative feedback is the perceived increase in time and effort needed to manually process the textual comments. In this paper, we provide an automated solution for analysing comments, specifically extracting implicit suggestions from the students’ qualitative feedback comments. The implemented solution leverages existing text mining …

Design And Implementation Of An Enterprise Integrated Project Environment: Experience From An Information Systems Program, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real world information technology projects cut acrossmultiple business domains and processes, involve large amounts of data and anassortment of different technologies. Advancedcourses within an IS programs must include projects that help students gain aholistic view of an enterprise by exposing them to business domains,business processes and technical knowledge and skills that will help them design and deliver enterpriseprojects. In order to guide the instructor to effectively design and implementsuch enterprise project experiences, in this paper, we propose an enterpriseintegrated project environment (EIPE) framework based on business domains andbusiness processes. Additionally, we share our experience in implementing thisframework in the Data …

A Conceptual Framework For Analyzing Students' Feedback, Venky Shankararaman, Swapna Gottipati, Sandy Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In academic institutions it is normal practice that at the end of each term,students are required to complete a questionnaire that is designed to gather students’perceptions of the instructor and their learning experience in the course. This questionnaire comprises of Likert-scale questions and qualitative questions.One of the important goals of this exercise is to enable the instructor and the senior management to examine the feedback and then enhance students’ learning experience. In most universities, including our own, a lot of attention is paid to the quantitative feedback, which is summarized and statistical comparisons are computed, analysed and presented. However, the …

The Making Of A Successful Analytics Master Degree Program: Experiences And Lessons Drawn For A Young And Small Asian University, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Singapore Management University's School of Information Systems is a young school within a young and small university in Asia. Being young and small, establishing a successful analytics master degree program required extensive landscape research, assessment of its own strengths and weaknesses, having a committed team, and having a clear vision to meet the ever-changing needs of the industry. The Master of IT in Business (Analytics) program, established since 2011, has grown from an annual intake of 16 to 128 students in six years. This article attempts to describe the design process, challenges faced, decisions made, and the key actions taken, …

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …

Smu’S Professor Robert Deng Conferred Axa Chair Professorship Of Cybersecurity, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

Singapore Management University’s Professor Robert Deng, a leading global authority and award winning researcher in cybersecurity, has today been conferred the prestigious AXA Chair Professorship of Cybersecurity.

€800,000 funding from AXA Research Fund over a period of eight years will support Professor Deng’s research in the development of new ways of protecting data security and privacy.

Research@Smu: Connecting The Dots, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

The word “Management” in the name of our university was carefully and deliberately chosen to address the needs of institutions and decisionmakers across all segments of society: business enterprises and the private sector, government and the public sector, and civil society and the people sector. Unless you are already familiar with the breadth and depth of research output from Singapore Management University (SMU), you would naturally assume that we were a “management” university that was focusing exclusively on business – in essence, a large business school. The reality is quite different.

Through this book, you will gain a more complete …

Using An Online Learning Tutorial To Teach Rea Data Modelling In Accounting Information Systems Courses, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Online learning has been gaining widespread adoption due to its success in enhancing student-learning outcomes and improving student academic performance. This paper describes an online tutorial to teach resource-event-agent (REA) data modeling in an undergraduate accounting information systems course. The REA online tutorial reflects a self-study application designed to help students improve their understanding of the REA data model. As such, the tutorial acts as a supplement to lectures by reinforcing the concepts and incorporating practices to assess student understanding. Instructors can access the REA online tutorial at http://smu.sg/rea. An independent survey by the University's Centre for Teaching Excellence found …

The Making Of A Successful Analytics Master Degree Program: Experiences And Lessons Drawn For A Young And Small Asian University, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Singapore Management University’s School of Information Systems is a young school within a young and small university in Asia. Being young and small, establishing a successful analytics master degree program required extensive landscape research, assessment of its own strengths and weaknesses, having a committed team, and having a clear vision to meet the ever-changing needs of the industry. The Master of IT in Business (Analytics) program, established since 2011, has grown from an annual intake of 16 to 128 students in six years. This article attempts to describe the design process, challenges faced, decisions made, and the key actions taken, …

Semi-Automated Tool For Providing Effective Feedback On Programming Assignments, Min Yan Beh, Swapna Gottipati, David Lo, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human grading of introductory programming assignments is tedious and error-prone, hence researchers have attempted to develop tools that support automatic assessment of programming code. However, most such efforts often focus only on scoring solutions, rather than assessing whether students correctly understand the problems. To aid the students improve programming skills, effective feedback on programming assignments plays an important role. Individual feedback generation is tedious and painstaking process. We present a tool that not only automatically generates the static and dynamic program analysis outcomes, but also clusters similar code submissions to provide scalable and effective feedback to the students. We studied …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

Smu Enhances Curriculum And Expands Offering To Prepare Undergraduates For The Digital Age, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

Demand for infocomm professionals in Singapore is outpacing supply with 30,000 new infocomm jobs expected by 2020. The Infocomm Media 2025 masterplan has identified salient trends that are significant for the next decade, these include Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things and Cybersecurity. The masterplan also highlighted future key infocomm job areas: Software Development, Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, and Network Infrastructure. In response to these industry trends and demand, SMU has strengthened its undergraduate curriculum in three schools to contribute to the 'future-proofing' of Singapore. The School of Information Systems (SIS) has revised its undergraduate curriculum in response to changes …

Leveraging Competency Framework To Improve Teaching And Learning: A Methodological Approach, Venky Shankararaman, Joelle Elmaleh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A number of engineering education programs have defined learning outcomes and course-level competencies, and conducted assessments at the program level to determine areas for continuous improvement. However, many of these programs have not implemented a comprehensive competency framework to support the actual delivery and assessment of an individual course. This paper highlights how a competency framework can be used across the life cycle of a course to effectively deliver and assess course content, and give valuable, timely feedback to students thus, improving teaching, student motivation and learning. A framework for leveraging course competencies during course design and delivery is presented, …

Professor Pang Hwee Hwa Appointed Dean Of Smu School Of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has announced today the appointment of Professor Pang Hwee Hwa as the next Dean of the SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) with effect from 1 July 2016 for a term of five years. Selected from a global pool of candidates after an extensive and rigorous global search which started in October 2015, Prof Pang’s strong commitment to research in information systems and a passion for excellence in education, make him the ideal candidate to lead the School of Information Systems.

Mycompetencies: Competency Tracking Mobile Application For Is Students, Gottipati Swapna, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overall aim of learning outcomes and competency based education is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of higher education. It's important to track regularly student's competency acquisition so that the faculty can improve the teaching delivery and adapt the content accordingly. Student based self-assessment of competency tracking on a weekly basis aids faculty to intervene in course delivery process for effective teaching and learning experience. It also helps students to have a better understanding of their competency levels and accordingly prepare for weekly sessions. To enable students to self-assess the competencies in more structured format, there is a need …

Mapping Information Systems Student Skills To Industry Skills Framework, Shankararaman, Venky, Gottipati Swapna

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SFIA skills framework is widely popular among education institutions and ICT industries. The framework provides ICT skills profiles which can be a valuable resource that supports the career planning of a student. However, currently a student does not have a method or approach to exploit the SFIA framework to align his or her competencies that he or she has acquired during the education program, to the skills defined in the SFIA framework. In this paper, we present a solution model for generating a skills report based on individual's competencies and experiences. In particular, we focus on Information Systems students' profiles. …

Scrum-X: An Interactive And Experiential Learning Platform For Teaching Scrum, Wee Leong Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivating and engaging thecurrent generation of technology-savvy students and improving the quality oflearning is becoming more challenging with traditional instructional methods.Educational games and simulations are gaining more ground, both in formal andinformal learning environments. With experiential learning, learners canenhance their management skills and ability to make decisions by analyzingdifferent scenarios and paths that the project could have taken if specificdecisions were made during the project. This paper presents Scrum-X, acomputer-based simulation game to teach Scrum, an agile project managementmethodology, to graduates and professionals with IT background. In the game,players plan, execute and manage a software development project using Scrummethodology. Players …

Capstone Projects Mining System For Insights And Recommendations, Melvrivk Aik Chun Goh, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a classification based system to discover knowledge and trends in higher education students’ projects. Essentially, the educational capstone projects provide an opportunity for students to apply what they have learned and prepare themselves for industry needs. Therefore mining such projects gives insights of students’ experiences as well as industry project requirements and trends. In particular, we mine capstone projects executed by Information Systems students to discover patterns and insights related to people, organization, domain, industry needs and time. We build a capstone projects mining system (CPMS) based on classification models that leverage text mining, natural …

Enhancing Students' Learning Process Through Interactive Digital Media: New Opportunities For Collaborative Learning, Benjamin Gan, Thomas Menkhoff, Richard R. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe and review several examples of web technology-enabled teaching and learning approaches at undergraduate level in an Asian institution of higher learning. We begin by reporting on experiences made in the context of an iPad-enabled mobile learning project conducted during a Knowl- edge Management course (excursion) in support of the university’s technology-enabled learning vision. This is followed by reflections on the deployment of a collaborative social learning platform website (Edmodo), wiki- and web page-creation tools (Google Site), animated videos, etc. in elective courses on leadership and human capital management. Finally, we describe a proven project-based learning …

Analyzing Educational Comments For Topics And Sentiments: A Text Analytics Approach, Gokran Ila Nitin, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Universities collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from students upon course completion in order to improve course quality and students’ learning experience. Combining program-wide and module-specific questions, universities collect feedback from students on three main aspects of a course namely, teaching style, content, and learning experience. The feedback is collected through both qualitative comments and quantitative scores. Current methods for analyzing the student course evaluations are manual and majorly focus on quantitative feedback and fall short of an in-depth exploration of qualitative feedback. In this paper, we develop student feedback mining system (SFMS) which applies text analytics and opinion mining approach …

Targeted Blended Learning Through Competency Assessment In An Undergraduate Information Systems Program, Joelle Elmaleh, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we report our study on the problem of competency acquisition when students progress from one course to another and more generally, from one term to the next. We observed that some students moved on to a second programming course without acquiring some of the competencies in the first programming course. This leads to problem in the second course, especially when these competencies are pre-requisites for this course. We applied blended learning, which allows a student to learn at least in part through delivery of content and instruction via online media, to overcome this problem. Our approach is …

Students’ Perspectives On Flipped Classroom Implementation In Higher Education, Joelle Elmaleh, Nachamma Sockalingam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports students' experiences with a Flipped Classroom pedagogy model in an undergraduate programming course and suggests ways to improve the Flipped Classroom implementation.

Project Sourcing For Capstone Course Experience From An Undergraduate Program, Benjamin Gan, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Capstone project courses give students experience solving a substantial problem using concepts that span several topic areas in the program of study. Having 280 students graduate every year, requires a substantial effort towards sourcing appropriate projects from the industry and academia that provide hands-on opportunity to apply IT solutions to problems. This paper presents two sourcing models for supporting the sourcing of capstone projects. For each model, the various project origination sources, the distinct attributes, the challenges and lessons learnt are discussed.

Singapore Management University Establishes A New Research Centre On Secure Mobile Computing Technologies And Solutions, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has announced today the establishment of a new centre of research excellence that focuses on mobile computing security. Funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), the Secure Mobile Centre is developing efficient and scalable technologies and solutions that strengthen the security of mobile computing systems, applications and services. The Secure Mobile Centre is led by a team of five faculty members from SMU’s School of Information Systems who specialise in information security and trust: Professor Robert DENG (Centre Director), Professor PANG Hwee Hwa, Associate Professor LI Yingjiu, Associate Professor DING Xuhua and Assistant Professor Debin …