The design of multimedia teaching materials and the principles of their presentation to students strongly influence distance learning efficiency. The appropriate design of online educational multimedia content became especially important during the period of the COVID-19 crisis. This study presents a methodology for improving the efficiency of multimedia-based distance learning by reducing the cognitive load. Combining the segmentation principle with pauses and testing questions in the design of multimedia teaching materials has a positive influence on reducing the cognitive load in distance learning. Practice as an instructional element was more efficient if it was used between the multimedia educational segments than after the presentation of complete multimedia material. The obtained experimental results show an improvement in distance learning efficiency and an increase in the students’ quality of experience. The improvement of learning outcomes using the proposed methodology of multimedia segmentation combined with pauses and testing questions can be especially important for distance education in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modern computing is migrating towards more prevalent use of shared infrastructures and is transforming physical and fixed resources into a more dynamic and virtualized environment. This trend has proved to be a boon for advanced monitoring and profiling tools and approaches available for infrastructure operators and service providers. On the other end of the spectrum, the clients have been provided with previously unavailable flexibility and simple access to vast resources at the price of being unable to detect or correctly locate issues caused by lower layers of the new complex but abstracted infrastructure. This issue is most visible with performance degradation caused by other tenants of the same infrastructure, tenants formally invisible for other end-users. Although performance interference in shared infrastructures is a known problem that is covered by research aimed at detection and mitigation by infrastructure operators, there is a lack of research aimed at end-users and their ability to detect and locate such performance degradation. This paper covers the areas of shared networking, virtualized compute and grid compute infrastructures, gives an analysis of the specifics of each of the infrastructures, presents a novel approach for client-side monitoring and discusses the practical implementation issues. The system presented in the paper aims to provide end-users with valuable insight into underlying physical infrastructure without burdening them with complex and heterogeneous nature of monitored devices by reducing the shared infrastructure to a single representative generated node simply accessible as a generic SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled networked device. The primary aim of the system is to enable end-users to detect and locate the domain of the issue causing the performance interference and not to replace or reimplement existing general -purpose monitoring systems. The system was tested on a regional e-Infrastructure within VI-SEEM and NI4OS-Europe projects where it performed as expected.

Feed costs represent a significant component of milk production expenses, making up a share of 50% or more of the total cost. The optimization of feed costs is important to achieve financial stability, competitiveness, and sustainability in dairy farming. Optimizing dairy rations not only improves economic efficiency but also plays a significant role in reducing the environmental impact of dairy farming. On the other hand, dairy rations need to meet the specific nutritional requirements of cattle to ensure their health, well-being, and maximum milk production. The formulation of an optimal dairy ration is not an easy task for farmers due to the many challenges they face in this process. This study presents an intuitive web-based tool called OPTIMILK that is used for the optimization of dairy rations using the Simplex method of linear programming. This tool enables farmers to efficiently find a least-cost ration considering the nutritional needs of dairy cows, feed availability and costs, and the nutritional composition of feed. The tool was created for a dairy farmers’ association in Bosnia and Herzegovina and made available to its members for free. After almost four years of operation, the tool’s usage was evaluated by analyzing the collected data. The results show that after an initial period of low activity, there was evidence of an increase in the level of use, which implies the gradual adoption of the tool in dairy farming practice.

Economic and business related demands of decreasing time to market and efficient production in an ever more efficient manner have manifested themselves in software development as well. They are most visible in the use of streamlined development approaches and production of aggressively reusable components, on both server and client sides of modern applications. On the server side, the modern development is dominated by tendency to use microservice based architectures, while on the client side, the same idea is realized through the use of micro-frontends. Micro-frontend applications represent a natural counterpart to numerous segmented and compartmentalized backend services. One of the issues related to micro-fronted approach is relatively low support for rapid deployment and evolution of individual components. In this paper we present a novel approach that enables fully dynamic use and deployment of micro-frontends, synchronized with their respective micro-services, both in development and in production stages. We also show possible use cases beyond classic scenarios present in existing practice of micro-frontend applications.

Web applications and REST API based applications can be seen as the most common type of application today and their number is constantly increasing. Due to the pressure to produce more code and be faster at producing it, developers have been using various programming languages, libraries and frameworks suitable for such applications. Two of the most popular technologies are Spring on the back-end, and React on the front-end. While each technology provides satisfactory functionality, the amount of code that needs to be produced is non-trivial, especially in cases where the application has to provide even basic security and auditing functionalities. One solution for this issue is the use of code generator tools that produce both back- and front-end code from a model. While a wide variety of generators exist, none of the analyzed ones fulfill all the requirements of a modern web application. In this paper, we present CodeCrafter, a web-based code generation application that produces Spring and React code based on relational data models in DDL or JSON format, and provides developers with a simple and efficient tool to generate fully functional foundational code. We compare it to existing code generation tools and measure its performance as a function of the number of tables in the database. We show that CodeCrafter produces code in a very short amount of time even for very complex databases, while providing features and functionalities not present in other analyzed tools. We also give a short overview of possible use in conjunction with LLM based coding tools.

Ensuring uninterrupted access to digital services such as learning management systems, email, and student portals is essential for the operational continuity of modern educational institutions. Single Sign-On (SSO) systems streamline authentication by enabling centralized identity management, but they inherently introduce a critical single point of failure (SPOF). This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a highly available, container-based SSO architecture tailored for university environments using open-source components. The proposed solution integrates Keycloak for identity and access management, HAProxy with Keepalived for resilient load balancing, and PostgreSQL with streaming replication for data persistence. Automated failover is achieved at the application and load balancing layers with sub-second recovery, while custom monitoring enables database layer recovery within 20 seconds. The architecture eliminates SPOFs across all major layers without relying on complex orchestration frameworks, offering a replicable and lightweight blueprint for resilient authentication infrastructure in academic settings.