Toward a comprehensive and distributed approach to assessing university student experience

Higher education’s rapid expansion is paired with growing social expectations of its benefits and concern on its teaching quality. In response to these, institutional/national surveys based on an array of theories are widely used in universities for quality assurance, enhancement, and benchmarking. This paper reviews three major types of instruments used for such purposes, including two distinct schools of theory that have guided the development of such assessment in the USA, Australia, UK and then spread to the other parts of the world. The theories shaping the development of the two instruments, the dimensions assessed, and the challenges and criticisms involved when using such instruments for quality assurance are each discussed. This review concludes with a call for comparisons of different lines of research in this area, discussions on student learning experience that include more diverse characterizations of student experience across different educational contexts, development of tools to enable distributed leadership among teachers, and encouragement of students as partners for quality enhancement in higher education.

Evaluation of a Blockchain-Enabled Resource Management Mechanism for NGNs

A new era in ICT has begun with the evolution of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) and the development of human-centric applications. Ultra-low latency, high throughput, and high availability are a few of the main characteristics of modern networks. Network Providers (NPs) are responsible for the development and maintenance of network infrastructures ready to support the most demanding applications that should be available not only in urban areas but in every corner of the earth. The NP’s must collaborate to offer high- quality services and keep their overall cost low. The collaboration among competitive entities can in principle be regulated by a trusted 3rd party or by a distributed approach/technology which can guarantee integrity, security, and trust. This paper examines the use of blockchain technology for resource management and negotiation among NPs and presents the results of experiments conducted in a dedicated real testbed. The implementation of the resource management mechanism is described in a Smart Contract (SC) and the testbeds use the Raft and the IBFT consensus mechanisms respectively. The goal of this paper is two-fold: to assess its performance in terms of transaction throughput and latency so that we can assess the granularity at which this solution can operate (e.g. support resource re-allocation among NPs on micro-service level or not) and define implementation-specific parameters like the consensus mechanism that is the most suitable for this use case based on performance metrics.

A non-cooperative game based energy management considering distributed energy resources in price-based and incentive-based demand response program

Demand response (DR), an integral part of the smart grid, has great potential in handling the challenges of the existing power grid. The potential of different DR programs in the energy management of residential consumers (RCs) and the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) is an important research topic. A novel distributed approach for energy management of RCs considering the competitive interactions among them is presented in this paper. The impact of participation of RC’s in price-based (PB) and incentive-based (IB) DR programs is investigated using game theory. For this, an energy management optimization problem (EMOP) is formulated to minimize electricity cost. The utility company employs electricity price as a linear function of aggregated load in the PB DR program and an incentive rate in the IBDR program. RCs are categorized into active and passive users. Active users are further distinguished based on the ownership of energy storage devices (SD) and dispatchable generation units (DGU). EMOP is modeled using a non-cooperative game, and the distributed proximal decomposition method is used to obtain the Nash equilibrium of the game. The results of the proposed approach are analyzed using different case studies. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of aggregated cost and system load profile. It has been observed that participation in PB and IBDR program benefits both the utility and the consumers.

Clarifying Institutional and Organizational Conditions Promoting Principals' Quality Leadership and Reform Design for Japan

Education reform helps ensure that the education in a given country is of the highest possible quality and is a key area of focus for many developed countries. Japan's education system rates highly and the evolution of education reform is key to ensuring this high level is sustained. School principals play a key role in delivering high-quality education and, indeed, a school principal's leadership correlates with the quality of education available. This is an area of interest for Professor Hirofumi Hamada, School Management Laboratory in the Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan, who is currently exploring the institutional and organisational conditions that affect the leadership of principals. The goal of this research is to help shape education reform in Japan. Hamada believes it is necessary to create an environment of independent and collaborative learning and to value the individuality of children. In addition, problem situations among children are diverse and complex and how schools respond influences the quality of education. Given that the principal is in charge of how a school is run, they play a vital role in assuring the quality of education. Key to Hamada's work is the idea that principals can share their knowledge and leadership with teachers and this creates an environment of shared leadership. He believes that empowering teachers and encouraging them to take on leadership duties is essential. He is working to inform educators that schools require the leadership of principals and for principals to promote a distributed approach to leadership.