Exploring students’ expectations of learning analytics: A person-centered approach

Education and Information Technologies - In order to successfully implement learning analytics (LA), we need a better understanding of student expectations of such services. Yet, there is still a...     

Procrastination in a distance university setting

Procrastination, putting off until tomorrow what should have been done today, is a self-regulation failure that is widespread among students. Although plenty of research has emerged regarding academic procrastination, hardly any research endeavor regarding procrastination in distance university settings exists. This lack of research is even more astonishing when considering that the demands on self-regulation are higher in distance education settings than in traditional university settings. The present (questionnaire) study was intended to shed light on procrastination in an actual distance university setting by exploring its relationship to grades, learning strategies (e.g., cognitive, meta-cognitive strategies), and life satisfaction in students from a distance university in comparison to students from a traditional university.     

The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences

This paper investigates the fitness-for-purpose and soundness of bibliometric parameters for measuring and elucidating the research performance of individual researchers in the field of education sciences in Switzerland. In order to take into account the specificities of publication practices of researchers in education sciences, the analyses are based on two separate databases: Web of Science and Google Scholar. Both databases show a very unequal distribution of the individual research output, and the indicators used to measure research performance (quantity of publications and citation impact) from the two data sources are highly positively correlated. However, individual characteristics of the researchers, such as age, gender and academic position, that serve to explain the great variance in research performance, can only be identified if the Web of Science is used as a benchmark of research performance. The results indicate that Google Scholar is so inclusive that it impedes a meaningful interpretation of the data. However, the Web of Science inclusion policy for journals is also associated with certain shortcomings that put some researchers at an unjustified disadvantage. Therefore, problems currently exist in regard to both citation databases when used to benchmark individual research performance.     

Solutions in global software engineering: A systematic literature review

Global software engineering (GSE) has received increased attention, as globalization enables and encourages increased distribution of product development. Many empirical studies and systematic literature reviews (SLRs) focus on the identification of challenges, this paper however presents the first SLR collecting and analyzing solutions associated with GSE, while also evaluating the level of empirical validation of said solutions. As a starting point the paper presents a GSE model, designed to categorize solutions into process areas, useful for the analysis of the research community's contributions to state-of-the-art and identifying fundamental gaps in research. In addition, the model categorizing the solutions is populated with references and good-examples, useful for practitioners, which can use the model to find solutions to overall challenges in various process areas. The overall results of the systematic review revealed more than 330 papers containing 127 solutions that were then identified and mapped to the model. The process areas of project management are highly populated, while other areas like product integration have received surprisingly little attention. In addition, selected process area is elaborated upon in terms of contents and deficiencies.