The Impact of Socialization on Collaborative Learning Method in E-Learning Management System (eLMS)

Recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have allowed humans to accomplish various tasks more effectively. This also applies to the quality of education, research, and development. For this reason, as one of the countries striving to improve the education system quality, Laos aims to leverage the ICT. As the empirical data on the ICT tools needed to achieve this goal in Laos is limited, this gap in extant knowledge has motivated the present study. Its aim is to examine the views of Laotian academics on the ICT tools and platforms needed, level of ICT usage, and required ICT training. The data for this quantitative study was obtained through a survey involving 11 participants who are directly involved in Building Research Building Social Research Capacities in Higher Education Institutions in Lao PDR and Malaysia (BRECIL) under the ERASMUS project. Subsequent analyses revealed that SPSS, Survey Monkey, Google Scholar, and Grammarly are among the tools academics need the most to support them in research. They also require plagiarism and grammar checking, dissemination and networking, and analysis and interpretation platforms. Most of the respondents also indicated the need for training on how to use ICT tools for analyzing research data. These findings can be used by the educational decision makers when formulating their strategies for introducing ICT tools and organizing training for Laotian academics on research and development.

In software engineering (SE), team roles play significant impact in determining the project success. To ensure the optimal outcome of the project the team is working on, it is essential to ensure that the team members are assigned to the right role with the right characteristics. One of the prevalent team roles is Belbin team role. A successful team must have a balance of team roles. Thus, this study demonstrates steps taken to determine balance of software team formation based on Belbin team role using fuzzy technique. Fuzzy technique was chosen because it allows analyzing of imprecise data and classifying selected criteria. In this study, two roles in Belbin team role, which are Shaper (Sh) and Plant (Pl) were chosen to assign the specific role in software team. Results show that the technique is able to be used for determining the balance of team roles. Future works will focus on the validation of the proposed method by using empirical data in industrial setting.

The current study focused on the instrument designing to measuring the persuasion perspectives of parents using persuasive mobile child’s obesity monitor (PMCOM) app. So far, there is no single agreement on how to measure the level of persuasion of users especially for behaviour change systems. Therefore, the majority of researchers attempt to measure the level of users’ acceptance or attitude. In this context, the present paper is aimed to provide a general process of an instrument design to be persuasive and generalizable for a similar behaviour change system, and appropriate for a similar context to target different groups of parents in other areas. A review of literature analysis led to five dimensions located under three variables that include trigger, ability and motivation. These variables are used to establish the required behaviour when combined with mobile applications. Finally, the process of developing this questionnaire provides guidance and information on the construction and validation of the questionnaires for any future studies.

In recent years there has been an increased focus on persuasive design of mobile in the healthcare domain. However, most of the studies did not follow systematic processes while analysis and designing the persuasive technology applications, and they also failed to provide some of the relevant information needed to design the persuasive applications. Adding to this is a need for more guidance in order to set how the persuasive guidelines can be implemented, which also means that there is a need for a way to transform the persuasive components into software requirements and functionalities. Therefore, this paper proposes a general systematic process to be used independently of the problem domain in order to analyze the customers’ significant requirements. Such domain is the obesity problem among Malaysian children, and the most significant treatment of this case is parents’ involvement. To this end, this paper will apply a systematic process in monitoring the children’s obesity status among parents.