Software development projects increasingly extend over the boundaries set by a single company, or country. As the a vailable communication media becomes more sophisticated, and more advanced technology costs less, the trends in software development move towards a more "virtual" nature. This evolutionary process allows individuals or even teams from different locations a nd cultures, with different expectations and goals, to blend in a virtual team of effectively collaborating and coordinating members. This paper focuses on virtual software development teams and how cultural differences between them or their members may a ffect activities in different stages of the development cycle. It briefly reviews the existing perspectives on virtual teams and their organisation and management. It also discusses the main characteristics that such teams have and clarifies the differences between various definitions available for the "virtual team". After outlining some of the main benefits and barriers of such teams, it concentrates on justifying that cultural differences are one of the most important issues that should be addressed for these teams to work effectively. Next, existing theories on cultural differences are reviewed. Also, the requirements for modelling cultural difference issues are identified. Finally, it provides evidence for the need of computational support for effectively resolving conflicts, forming teams, dynamically allocating roles, and managing software engineering projects in culturally diverse environments.
Purpose
The emergence of Education 2.0 enabled technology-enhanced learning, necessitating new pedagogical approaches, while e-learning has evolved into an instrumental pedagogy of collaboration through affordances of social media. Social learning networks and ubiquitous learning enabled individual and group learning through social engagement and social distribution of knowledge. Nevertheless, these developments have not been supported with extensive studies focusing on quantifying the impact of technology-enhanced learning on students’ progress and achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quantitative overview of Facebook’s influence on students’ progress can be incorporated in a proposed e-moderation model of teaching and learning.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach is based on extending Salmon’s (2003) e-moderation model, which provides an emphasis on the theoretical perspectives that support socially situated learning environments of social networks such as Facebook. The findings revealed that students’ grades were positively influenced by the complementary use of Facebook on their courses of study.
Findings
The use of a social learning network also triggered a significant increase in student participation in learning activities delivered over Facebook.
Research limitations/implications
The main research limitations were due to the fact that a single social network was chosen for conducting the experiments. Furthermore, the investigation was narrowed down to a selected range of sessions offered to college and university students as part of their course.
Originality/value
The paper’s contribution is twofold, as it offers an original set of guidelines for conducting social learning network experiments and provides valuable quantifiable findings on the educational value of such networks.
PurposeThe objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the literature on learning analytics (LA) stakeholders' expectations to reveal the status of ongoing research in this area and to highlight gaps in research.Design/methodology/approachConducting a literature review is a well-known method to establish knowledge and interpret the domain under examination (Snyder, 2019). In this paper, a descriptive approach was used to investigate the different research methods used to tackle LA stakeholders' expectations, which depends on summarising the studies' content and minimising the reviewer's interpretation.FindingsMost of the studies have used interviews and focus groups without testing isolated variables. Moreover, it was concluded that LA awareness and perception are affected by a lack of resources, technical skills, trustworthiness, data availability, accessibility, organisational culture, integration and lack of technology. 10;This paper sheds light on research on LA stakeholders' expectations and highlights the need for investigating developing countries' context in order to test the perception and impact of LA. The study has focussed mainly on papers published in journals, which may have led to missing some previous research papers.Originality/valueLiterature review studies provide an overview of the existing LA literature from general focus to analytical methods. As it is a broad topic, this paper focuses on reviewing studies about stakeholders, which will give a fuller understanding of how their expectations are being discussed beyond the currently assumed benefits of LA.
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