This paper investigates computing students’ entrepreneurial intentions, motivations, recognisable barriers and encouragements towards entrepreneurship, with a focus on gender. Two universities, one in Australia and one in the UK (n = 247), were used as locations for the research to consider two distinct contexts. In each university there were similarly high levels of interest in entrepreneurship among computing students, however some significant differences in responses were found, especially between male and female participants. Job flexibility was a strong motivation for the UK-based female participants; while female participants at the Australian university identified internal barriers (such as lack of confidence and experience). Enablers to entrepreneurial activity were identified, including access to incubators and academic support. Directing such support towards computing students, while recognising gender differences, could increase interest in, and take-up of, entrepreneurship. Recommendations are made regarding how universities can best support would-be entrepreneurs and encourage inclusive entrepreneurship into the future.

Online discussion forums have become an essential part of university courses, whether the course is conducted online, or face to face, or in mixed or blended mode. Discussion forums are considered to engage students better with the course content and encourage them to share and gain knowledge from each other. However, online engagement does not always happen automatically between students. Hence grading of discussion forum participation has been recommended to ensure quality student participation. Currently, a major focus has been put onto the better use of discussion forums, but the way in which the quality of participation can be evaluated has yet to be adequately investigated. Furthermore, evaluation of the instructor participation in a discussion forum and its impact on students and their contributions is lacking. In this paper, we report on our research into online discussion forum quality through analysis of discussion forum activities, along with student focus group meetings and instructor interviews. We have devised a set of criteria for evaluating discussion forum activities. Our results show that students depend highly on the instructor's feedback and the participation of the students can only be evaluated with reference to the moderation of the instructors.

The rapid advancement of fully online courses has made education accessible from-anywhere‖ and-anytime‖. One of the major success factors of online courses is effective student-content interaction-which defines how students interact with the content in the fully online learning environment. However, there appears to have been little research published about the relationship of content to course design and consequent outcomes for students. In this article, we report on our research on the investigation of factors that affect student-content interaction in fully online computing courses. We have conducted our research through surveys and used a grounded theoretic approach for data analysis. Our results identify the factors that are perceived by students as critical in ensuring effective student-content interaction in fully online computing courses.

It is becoming common for several devices to be utilised together to access and manipulate shared information spaces and migrate tasks between devices. Despite the increased worldwide use of cross-platform services, there is limited research into how cross-platform service usability can be assessed. This paper presents a novel cross-platform usability model. The model employs the think-aloud protocol, observations, and questionnaires to reveal cross-platform usability problems. Two Likert scales were developed for measuring overall user satisfaction of cross-platform usability and user satisfaction with the seamlessness of the transition between one device and another. The paper further employs a series of objective measures for the proposed model. The viability and performance of the model were examined in the context of evaluating three cross-platform services across three devices. The results demonstrate that the model is a valuable method for assessing and quantifying cross-platform usability. The findings were thoroughly analysed and discussed, and subsequently used to refine the model. The model was also evaluated by eight user experience experts and seven out of the eight agreed that it is useful.