The Moodle Platform

This chapter analyzes Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and their main features and compares the most popular LMSs platforms considering their utilization and the services they offer. Additionally, it presents a study carried out at the University of Aveiro (UA) that analyses the functionalities and tools of the Moodle platform and their use by students. The data was collected based on content analysis, one non-structured interview with the responsible of the Moodle from the UA and a questionnaire applied to 278 students. The results show that the most mentioned purposes of the Moodle@UA were ‘Download materials', ‘News' and ‘Deliver assignments' and that the most used information materials are ‘Texts' and ‘Slides', showing that despite Moodle has a great potential, it is mainly used as a repository of materials. The results also highlighted the existence of two groups of students distinguished by the degree of importance given to the Moodle tools.

GSSP – A Generic Semantic Search Platform

Semantic search has been rapidly growing as a way to improve search results. The meaning of the input expression has revealed to produce better results than the traditional keyword appearance. Regarding search engines, there are currently several proposals but all of them are already implemented to a specific goal. We find important to develop a generic semantic search system so it rapidly be adapted to any system and domain that has search needs. This work introduces GSSP, a generic semantic search platform proposal. We present the platform and the several steps that need to be followed in order for the platform to be used. We also provide the ongoing work that is being done to apply GSSP to a Quality Management System.

Theory of Intelligent Collectives

We review our theory of robust intelligence (RI) for groups. We examine the quality of decisions by groups in the laboratory under either majority rule (MR) or consensus rule (CR). Theoretically, engagement in decision-making becomes a factor depending on whether an individual is in a group or in competition between groups. From earlier research, measures of engagement in three-person groups included self-reports, counts of utterances during discussions, and changes in electro-dermal activity (i.e., galvanic skin responses, or GSR). We predicted engagement (number of utterances) would be greater under CR than MR; under MR, we predicted that GSRs would be greater (more attention). Based on partial analyses, participants under CR spoke significantly more often during discussions than MR. As predicted, after de-trending GSR data, we found MR produced higher GSRs and shorter discussions. Our recent work in group size has increased to five participants working on Wason Selection Tasks.

Concepts for the Design of a Manager-Centric Global Decision Support System for Organizations

The goal of this chapter is to describe a set of concepts for the design of information systems supporting the global decision process in an organization from a management point of view. Managers are responsible for decisions that are crucial for the success of the organization. Supporting decision taking by management in an integrated way means to support the global decision process of the organization and increase its efficiency and resilience. The system is envisaged so that i) each manager has available a decision dashboard to support the flux of decision-making for which he or she is responsible; ii) the dashboards also allow managers to crowdsource from non-managers different aspects of decision iii) the dashboards are connected in a conversational network; iv) this conversational network is so structured to support the global decision process of the organization.

Tourism Time Series Forecast

In this chapter four combinations of input features and the feedforward, cascade forward and recurrent architectures are compared for the task of forecast tourism time series. The input features of the ANNs consist in the combination of the previous 12 months, the index time modeled by two nodes used to the year and month and one input with the daily hours of sunshine (insolation duration). The index time features associated to the previous twelve values of the time series proved its relevance in this forecast task. The insolation variable can improved results with some architectures, namely the cascade forward architecture. Finally, the experimented ANN models/architectures produced a mean absolute percentage error between 4 and 6%, proving the ability of the ANN models based to forecast this time series. Besides, the feedforward architecture behaved better considering validation and test sets, with 4.2% percentage error in test set.

Ubiquitous Integration Architectural Issues

The paradigm of heterogeneous systems has been demanding the implementation of new approaches to ensure the organizational operations as a whole. This chapter proposes a new integration model architecture, supported by research in an organization with great needs at integration systems level which can be applied to any situation, based on the execution of instructions transmitted between systems. The new architecture sustains the interoperability process between different systems that can be applied in an environment populated by heterogeneous systems and is supported by the use XML language. To this architecture contributed decisively different integration experiences and concepts provided by SAP R/3.

Organizational Cockpit

The “rationalization of costs” is the actual paradigm of current national and international scene. However, even in a time of enormous savings, organizations must continue to effectively perform their missions. To accomplish it without the slightest fault and in spite of budget reductions, organizations must possess the ability to adapt to reality and create mechanisms that provide situational awareness and rapid reaction to external actions. One of these mechanisms involves finding indicators that can assess the effectiveness of the operation. This chapter develops the theory behind an artifact that is used to obtain the Global Organizational Effectiveness Index Subsystem that, when applied to an organizational subsystem will give quantitative and qualitative information about its performance by comparing the performed actions with the planned actions. The research was conducted in the Portuguese Air Force and the resulting Model is now being used with success in the operational subsystem.

Local Communities Platform for Restoration of “Kizuna”

Residents of towns near nuclear power plants have been forced to evacuate to other areas due to the nuclear disaster, being scattered and living in various parts of Japan, causing “empty time” which will lead to collapse of the local community in these areas. Dispersed residents hope to restore their hometown along with the community, and the government also puts up restoration of “Kizuna” as a keyword for reconstruction. It is therefore proposed in this chapter to develop a platform that can systematically accumulate information owned by the local government and residents with ICT, for the purpose of restoring “Kizuna”. With this platform, residents mutually dispatch information on daily living on their own. This will help maintain association of information which will be necessary to recollect memories; therefore sharing of such information will be promoted and the “empty time” will be filled.

Cloud Computing Implementation Level in Portuguese Companies

The Information Technology (IT) has suffered many advances in recent years due to the development of new hardware and software solutions. These major changes have been noted in recent times in how we interact with applications and services in IT. Cloud computing provides services and applications over the Internet with the promise of infinite capacity and service models of “pay-as-you-go”. In this chapter we describe the main characteristics of Cloud computing, future expectations and analyzes the state of knowledge and implementation in Portuguese companies.

Business Process Management Skills Development

The chapter presents a Business Process Management (BPM) training program initiative based on the preliminary training needs identification and by characterizing its market acceptance and impact. The presented approach was built in an international partnership. The experience (wisdom, knowledge) gained by a Slovenian group of trainers in building, disseminating and practically implementing a BPM training program has been transferred (and adapted) to Romania, using the knowledge already existing in the field. The main ideas tackled in the paper are: (1) a brief description of the BPM concept and a short overview of the existing training and certification programs on the market; (2) presentation of the proposed CertiBPM training program structure based on the training needs identification (related to the Romanian market); (3) research results regarding the Romanian market acceptance of the CertiBPM training program based on the participants/trainees feed-back collection and process (marketing survey); (4) Conclusions and lessons learned.