UNICAL - HP Grant

Principal Investigator: Professor Roberto Musmanno full professor in Operations Research, Department of Electronics, Informatics and Systems:

P. Bucci, cubo 41/c,University of Calabria, 87036, Rende, Italy,
phone +390984494730, fax +390984494847,

Secondary Contact: Professor Patrizia Beraldi, associate professor in Operations Research, Department of Electronics, Informatics and Systems:

P. Bucci, cubo 41/c, University of Calabria, 87036, Rende, Italy,
phone +390984494826, fax +390984494847,

Additional Team members (alphabetically listed):
Domenico Conforti, associate professor, teacher,

Nicola Frega, researcher, teacher,

Antonio Violi, Management Engineer, tutor,

Ester Zumpano, associate professor, teacher,

Campus: University of Calabria

Department: Department of Electronics, Informatics and Systems

Brief Project Description:

The aim of the project is to extend the mobile technology environment of UNICAL within the teaching courses of the Management Engineering degree using the Tablet PC wirelessly connected granted by HP to go deeper into our educational technology vision, aiming at implementing new teaching-and-learning models. The project should represent a first advanced pilot experience for evaluating the effectiveness of new educational paradigms, in the Engineering Faculty, outlining their advantages and drawbacks with respect to traditional models. By exploiting the communication infrastructure of our department and previous experiences in mobile technology, we expect that our experience would become a commonplace across the different engineering courses. In this way we foresee an improvement of the learning level of the future management engineers. Students are expected to benefit by the definition of the new teaching-and-learning models which allow: a higher level of interactivity between teacher and learners and among the learners, both during and off the class hours; the possibility to elaborate information from different sources: the student can write down annotations to the lessons material, record questions, acquire additional material from Internet or other sources, etc.; a better integration between theoretical foundations and practice.

Mobile technologies provide an opportunity for a fundamental change in education away from occasional use of a computer in a lab towards more embedded use in the classroom and beyond. This strategic vision is shared by the Department of Electronics, Informatics and Systems (DEIS) of University of Calabria (UNICAL), that devotes particular attention towards the study of new and emerging technologies, that can be applied to different fields. In recent years, UNICAL has carried out a concerted effort to give an answer to the increasing demand of integration of mobile technologies in teaching and learning support. We cite the creation of iCampus, a course management web portal of UNICAL, which offers several services also trough mobile technologies within the entire campus (wireless access points, repository of archived lessons, discussion forums, etc.). On a scale from 1 to 5 DEIS can be considered at stage 3 (intermediate deployment).

The academic leader of the project is Roberto Musmanno, full professor of Operations Research and chair of the Management Engineering degree at UNICAL. He is the pioneer in the definition of the new curricula of Management Engineering degree after the new normative of academic studies in Italy. The Management Engineering degree was the first which has introduced e-learning courses and promoted the adoption of mobile technology for exam registration. Furthermore, Roberto Musmanno is the author of several papers published on international scientific journals and is co-author of a book on Logistics that is also used in many international scientific universities. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Center of Excellence of High Performance Computing. He holds two graduate courses within Management Engineering degree that are particularly appreciated by the students especially for the applicative issues. Within the courses several collaborations with local industrial partners are established.

The attention towards the needs of students is a fundamental issue for a good teaching approach at every level of education. The Management Engineering degree board of UNICAL has demonstrated during the last few years to be strongly involved in the definition of suitable ways in which to organize courses. For example, the definition of contents within a course or among different courses has been revisited many times in order to provide a logically appropriate curriculum. Another issue that has been addressed is the possibility to have intermediate exams that constitute a stimulus for studying during the course issue. The monitoring activity is continually carried out and is based on the requests and suggestions of students that are very sensitive to the teaching-and-learning process. A specific committee has been created to monitor the opportunity of the graduate students to find a job after the study period.

The project aims at enhancing the educational process.
From the teaching perspective, it allows to overcome the drawbacks of the paradigms traditionally adopted:blackboard and chalk, that is effective in visualizing mathematical derivations, but reduces the possibility of presenting complex diagrams or figures, due to the time required for such operations;static predetermined slides, that are well suited to present static images or slowly moving animations, but are poorly effective in keeping the attention of the students high when facing mathematical procedures. The adoption of Tablet PC technology wirelessly connected allows to integrate the benefits of the two paradigms. Indeed, the teacher can use the screen as a blackboard and can import, if necessary, formulas, tables and images using at the same time the web browser always available on the computer. From the learner perspective, the new paradigm produces a significant increase of efficiency and a raise of the attention during the lessons, also due to a higher level of interactivity. Furthermore, the practice sessions can benefit by the possibility of sharing information and workload among students, which can actively cooperate in the solution of high level exercises and research projects.

The main objective of our project is the creation of a mobile technology environment for teaching core courses within the Management Engineering degree. This scope requires the definition of new teaching-and-learning paradigms which can exploit the new potentialities offered by the innovative technology granted by HP. This project constitutes a first pilot experience which should improve the learning process and the quality of interaction among students and between students and teachers. Our long-term vision is the extension of this technological environment to different engineering disciplines and courses, in order to allow the creation of e-classroom and the possibility for students to actively participate to virtual laboratories and experiment specific aspects evidenced by teacher during the lessons. This goal would be achieved within few years, since DEIS is going to be equipped with a wireless network for scientific laboratories which would allow to extend the use of the mobile technology to other areas. The main expected outcome from the learner perspective is an improvement of the learning process by means of: a higher level of active participation and interaction; the possibility of integrating theoretical, simulative and experimental approaches; a deeper understanding of the course contents.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the project in terms of students learning advancement a set of indicators will be considered:Satisfactory level, that is a set of questions concerning the course quality (teaching material availability, clarity of presentation, active participation, etc.) and a set of suggestions for the course improvement. The results of this indicator will be compared to the ones collected before the project started. Self-grading tests, that include a set of self-examination tests, which will be prepared and assigned as homework to the students. Tests, assigned electronically, will consist of a step-by-step solution of complex problems. Examination marks, that include intermediate tests. A statistical analysis of these results aims to measure the actual improvement in the level of students learning. Student marks before and after the project started will be compared. The analysis of these indicators will allow to verify the achievement of the objectives of the project and will become a reference for the pedagogical models proposed. These results will be subject to comparative analysis with previous research works, and then they will be communicated within the university context such as Educational Technology Congresses, science and technology journals, specialized distribution lists, etc.

The granted HP products will allow an enhancement into the practical achievement of the technology vision of our institution. The mobile technology will be used for the realization of the virtual mobile laboratory, where lessons and practice sessions of the involved courses will be held. Tablet PCs will be equipped with educational versions of software tools for optimization, simulation and hardware emulation. Since DEIS is going to realize a wireless network across the department, the equipment from HP would be used to dynamically set up the virtual lab in potentially any room of the campus, allowing to recreate the advanced learning environment independently from its physical location. Indeed, a major relevance is given to the possibility for the students to directly access, by means of properly designed web interfaces, real equipments available in research labs. Currently, the web portal iCampus, based on the CLAROLINE content management system, constitutes the main access gate to the repository of archived lessons, as well as of the discussion forums, assigned homework, etc. Finally, the mobile technology granted by HP will allow to realize a stronger collaborations also with other educational and research institutions. In particular, we propose to share our experience with the Logistics Laboratory of University of Lecce (director: prof. Gianpaolo Ghiani), with the attempt to combine e-learning with the mobile technologies.

The first re-designed courses within the project belong to the Management Engineering degree:
Financial Optimization (undergraduate): definition of mathematical models and solution methods for some strategic decisional problems arising in finance.
Logistics (graduate): analytical tools for Logistics Systems Planning and Control.
Medical decision support systems (graduate): methodologies and tools for the design and implementation of decision support systems within the medical-clinical domain.
Information Systems (graduate): methodologies and tools for the design, development and maintenance of information systems.
E-commerce (undergraduate): Information and operation management in electronic services.

The project requires the redesign of the contents and the teaching methodologies of the involved courses, exploiting the potentialities offered by the mobile technology. At the present, the courses are organized in lessons and practice sessions. The former are typically taught by beaming predetermined slides on a screen, whereas the latter consist of exercises and practical activities in labs under the supervision of a tutor. The availability of the Tablet PC technology granted by HP allows to modify the teaching models. In particular, during the issue of the lessons in the classroom, the technological support could provide suitable services, by making more effective the interaction between the teacher and the students (comments, remarks, FAQ, downloading of material by Internet), by making possible the development of ?real-time? exercising and monitoring test, by supporting the effective development of real case studies. Moreover, the laboratory sessions could be reorganized by the definition of new individual and group activities, where students can use the mobile technology devices to take advantage from interaction and connectivity.

The wireless system will be integrated into the University ICT platform which provides for a wireless environment covering all the campus. This system, through access points displaced along all the campus, allows the students to benefit of all the available services. Furthermore, the HP equipment will be put in the wireless network of DEIS, in order to make usable even the departmental services. In the development stage, no other department will provide a support to the project.

LAUNCH (2 months): during this phase the mobile technology lab within DEIS will be deployed. All the technological requirements for the correct operability of the structure will be assessed.
DEVELOPMENT (3 months): in this phase the team members will define new teaching-learning paradigms and redesign the courses taking into account the new offered possibilities, by integrating theoretical, simulative and experimental approaches to the courses contents. Moreover, new criteria for evaluating students assessments will be jointly defined.
EXECUTION (8 months): during this phase the courses involved in the project will be held, according to the new pedagogical paradigm. A preliminary evaluation of students learning advancement will be carried out, by means of intermediate tests.
CONCLUSION (3 months): in this phase three main activities will be carried out: evaluation,aimed at measuring the students learning advancement, which will be carried out by using different indicators; dissemination, aimed at advertising the potentialities offered by the new teaching and learning paradigm; follow up, which refers to the possibility of extending the adoption of the new learning model to other courses within UNICAL (including also Ph.D. courses).

Abstract

World Conference (Monterey)

HP Conference (Rende)