The role of personal values in enhancing student experience and satisfaction among international postgraduate students : an exploratory study

Problem Statement: Universities are faced with the challenging task of educating an increasingly diverse and mobile student community. An understanding of the backgrounds of students and their expectations is central to ensure effective delivery of educational and support services to enhance student experience and satisfaction. The study of student personal values is able to provide better understanding of student demands and aspirations and to assist universities to target educational and support services to meet the differential needs of students.

Purpose of Study: To examine the differences in personal values among Asian international postgraduate students studying in Australian universities and to discuss the strategic implications of these differences in relation to enhancing student experience and satisfaction.

Research Methods: Data collected from a sample of 371 postgraduate students from China, India, Indonesia and Thailand studying in five universities in Victoria, Australia. Personal values were measured using Kahle’s (1983) List Of Values (LOV). Factor analysis was undertaken to determine the underlying personal value domains and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to analyse the relationship of the value constructs to student satisfaction. ANOVA and MANOVA tests employed to examine the differences of personal values between the nationalities, gender and age.

Findings: Factor Analysis resulted in a two factor solution and labelled as Self-efficacy and Hedonism which explained 73.5 percent of the variance. MANOVA and ANOVA results indicated significant differences (.001) across the values constructs of Self-efficacy and Hedonism and the individual variables between nationalities, gender and age.

SEM results indicated a link between student satisfaction and the value domains of Self-efficacy and Hedonism.

Conclusions: The study highlighed the opportunities for universities to recognise that Asia is a differentiated market place and the development of segmented approach in designing educational programs as part of the strategy to enhance student experience and satisfaction. The inclusion of cultural aspects in educational programs, promotional material that fits in with different cultural backgrounds of students, self-paced learning approaches, promotion of cross cultural understanding among university staff are among the recommended strategies.

AdaBoost.MRF: boosted Markov random forests and application to multilevel activity recognition

Activity recognition is an important issue in building intelligent monitoring systems. We address the recognition of multilevel activities in this paper via a conditional Markov random field (MRF), known as the dynamic conditional random field (DCRF). Parameter estimation in general MRFs using maximum likelihood is known to be computationally challenging (except for extreme cases), and thus we propose an efficient boosting-based algorithm AdaBoost.MRF for this task. Distinct from most existing work, our algorithm can handle hidden variables (missing labels) and is particularly attractive for smarthouse domains where reliable labels are often sparsely observed. Furthermore, our method works exclusively on trees and thus is guaranteed to converge. We apply the AdaBoost.MRF algorithm to a home video surveillance application and demonstrate its efficacy.

Agents in adversarial domains - modelling environments in parallel

We present a model of an environment to evaluate the behavior of an agent trying to hide from a pursuer is presented. The model computes the direction and the amount of protection provided by the environment. The computational complexity of this problem is improved by using a parallel implementation of this algorithm.

A profiling based task scheduling approach for multicore network processors

 Multicore network processors have been playing an increasingly important role in computational processes, which emphasize on scalability and parallelism of the systems, in distributed environments especially in Internet-based delay-sensitive applications. It is an important but unsolved issue, however, to efficiently schedule tasks in network processors with multicore and multithread for improving the system throughput as much as possible. Profiling can gather runtime environment information and guide the compiler to optimize programs through scheduling tasks based on the runtime context. This paper proposes a profiling-based task scheduling approach, targeting on improving the throughput of multicore network processor (Intel IXP) systems in the balanced pipeline way. In this work, we investigate a profiling-based task scheduling framework, a task scheduling algorithm, and a set of performance models. Our task allocation scheme maps tasks onto the pipeline architecture and multiple threads of network processors in parallel, which incorporates the profiling context and global thread refinement. We evaluate our task scheduling algorithm by implementing representative network applications on the Intel IXP network processor. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to schedule tasks in a balanced pipeline fashion and achieve the high throughput and data transmission rate. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of task lighting on visual function in age-related macular degeneration

The purpose was to investigate the effects of the spectral power distribution (SPD) and illuminance of task lighting on visual function in age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) compared to normal healthy eyes. Twenty-eight subjects with ARMD and 18 age-matched normal subjects were studied. The effects on visual function were determined for four common task light sources: standard pearl coat incandescent (SP), daylight blue incandescent (DL), warm white fluorescent (WW) and cool white fluorescent (CW). Apart from a small, statistically significant improvement in contrast sensitivity with DL compared to SP lighting (0.5 dB, p = 0.01), there were no significant effects of SPD on other visual functions and no differences in the effects for subjects with ARMD and those with normal vision. Thus, for task lighting typically used in low vision rehabilitation, the SPD would seem to be of minimal clinical importance to visual function. However, increasing the task illuminance had a greater effect on visual function, in particular for subjects with ARMD (p < 0.01). For an increase in illuminance from 300 to 3000 lux, the mean increase in contrast sensitivity and near visual acuity was 1.5 dB and 0.13 log MAR, respectively. Although this effect is not large, we suggest that it is clinically relevant and supports the provision of additional task illuminance as an important part of low vision rehabilitation for patients with ARMD.

The relevance of perspectivism to the task of modularisation in ontology development

An ontology development methodology seeks to provide developers with established principles, processes, practices, methods and activities for developing ontologies (Gasevic et al., 2009). Diverse methodologies have been published for the development of ontologies, and have evolved, based on the diverse experiences of researchers and practitioners, and the development teams who surveyed the benefits and shortcomings of the available methodologies in order to determine the applicability of methodologies to particular contexts. An evaluation of existing ontology development methodologies has identified that the concept formulation process is not well defined, or based on rigorous processes (Castro et al., 2006; Winters & Tolk, 2009). In order for the validity of the social realism of the actors in a social setting to be captured, the perspectives of each actor needs to be acknowledged and incorporated into the concept formulation process / framework. This paper demonstrates how consideration of perspectivism leads to a meaningful modularisation of the resultant ontology.

Visualizing the core-periphery distinction in theory domains

As specific parts of a theory are refined over time, the aggregated set of variables and associations of multiple theory instances provide the identity of a theory domain. This research applies a meta-theoretical analysis to the problem of theory identity and the core-periphery distinction. The theoretico-empirical network for quantitative publications over a 20 year span of two top Information Systems journals is analysed and visualized to illustrate these aspects of theory. The analysis provides insight into the density of research in specific theory domains, the verisimilitude and explanatory ubiquity of core versus peripheral postulates, and suggests opportunities for increasing explanatory depth and integration in select theory domains.