Metonymic errors in a web development course

Studies indicate that information systems and computer science programs should place more emphasis on software design topics.Because little significant software in a commercial environment is developed using only programming skills,students without exposure to design patterns and frameworks will be ill-prepared for the workforce. This paper investigates whether PHP-based web development courses should use PHP frameworks to guide program development and how to select an appropriate framework. The paper begins with a literature review of the concept of design patterns, particularly the Model-View-Controller(MVC) pattern. We review studies that argue that design patterns and frameworks are essential pedagogical tools. Finally, we report on our work to select an appropriate framework for incorporation into web development courses as well as the process by which some of the major PHP MVC frameworks were assessed to determine which is best-suited for use in an academic environment.

Teaching students project managements requires a hands-on approach. Incorporating project management concepts and processes into a student team Web development project adds a dimension that exposes students to the realities of effective Web development. This paper will describe the project management approach used in a Web development course in which students build complete Websites. Based upon the written evaluations included with the final project documentation, students feel this project is the most valuable learning experience of the course. Furthermore, a positive relationship is established between the actual Web development and effective project management processes. It is important for students to understand the triple constraints (scope, time, and cost) that must be balanced in business projects.

Recent research has demonstrated pair programming to be an effective model of collaborative learning for millennial students. However, much of the research describes the impact of pair programming in first-year programming courses. This paper highlights experiences using pair programming in an advanced web development programming course. Most of the students in the course were at the junior or senior level and had not been formally introduced to pair programming prior to taking the course. Qualitative data were collected through the use of written reports and surveys. The author discusses what was learned about the impact on students’ attitudes, learning and quality of work. Challenges are also described, as well as recommendations for enhancements.

Can Web development courses avoid obsolescence?

Mobile web development is one of the fast growing fields in IT. New and powerful front-end development technologies and tools are available to help users with limited experience build mobile-friend...

Digital portfolios have become an essential assessment tool in project-based and student-centered learning environments. Unfortunately, students exert minimal effort in creating digital portfolios because they find the writing component unchallenging. This issue is concerning since existing research predominantly focuses on the use of pre-existing platforms for building digital portfolios. With this concern, there is an opportunity to explore more challenging approaches to digital portfolio creation. Consequently, this study employs a project-based learning (PBL) approach within a website design and development course, where 176 undergraduate students completed weekly coding tasks culminating in a self-coded digital portfolio. Using a one-group posttest-only research design, data were collected through a structured questionnaire that included demographic items and validated scales measuring learning effectiveness and ownership of learning. The survey was administered electronically after students submitted their digital portfolio projects. The results reveal that device ownership shows only weak associations with students’ perceptions, while internet connectivity and self-reported academic performance demonstrate stronger relationships with engagement and ownership of learning. Additionally, prior experience with digital portfolios positively influences students’ engagement, motivation, and ownership of learning. Implications of these findings are discussed for supporting the integration of digital portfolios into technical disciplines. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on PBL methodology, expands our understanding of digital portfolio integration, and underscores the significance of student-centered pedagogies.

Most graduate students and even upper-level undergraduates desire to maximize control of their learning experience. One approach to supporting self-directed learning is to allow students to control course particulars such as assignments and due dates. This presentation describes an approach that allows students to define their own grading rubric for a semester-long software project and then to self-assess their grade on the project according to the rubric. The approach has been employed successfully in a graduate web application design and development course.

Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) provides developers a conceptual abstraction for mapping the application code to the underlying databases. ORM is widely used in industry due to its convenience; permitting developers to focus on developing the business logic without worrying too much about the database access details. However, developers often write ORM code without considering the impact of such code on database performance, leading to cause transactions with timeouts or hangs in large-scale systems. Unfortunately, there is little support to help developers automatically detect suboptimal database accesses. In this paper, we propose an automated framework to detect ORM performance anti-patterns. Our framework automatically flags performance anti-patterns in the source code. Furthermore, as there could be hundreds or even thousands of instances of anti-patterns, our framework provides sup- port to prioritize performance bug fixes based on a statistically rigorous performance assessment. We have successfully evaluated our framework on two open source and one large-scale industrial systems. Our case studies show that our framework can detect new and known real-world performance bugs and that fixing the detected performance anti- patterns can improve the system response time by up to 98%.

Providing students with the expertise of scientific and practical skills in Web development requires good preparation and practical competencies, the formation of positive attitudes toward the given course and determining suitable learning outcomes is one of the most important trends and issues in instructional design and technology. One of the most important challenges in this paper is to develop the relatively old course plan to cope with the rapid developments in the world of web application development, this requires Curriculum mapping to identify and address academic gaps, and redundancies. For purposes of improving the overall coherence of the course, its relationship with the other prerequisite courses should be explained more, some learning outcomes may be achieved through more than one course, therefore this study traced other related courses to the problem statement, such as Object-Oriented-Programming (OOP), Software Modelling and Design and other courses. This interconnected set of courses was motivated by the idea of Crosscutting concepts (CCCs) in Web Application Development, such as design patterns, Model-View-Controller (MVC), Entity Framework, Object Relational Mapping, Application Programming Interface (API), and others. This paper proposed some best practices and guidelines to take students gradually from a simple to more complicated tasks in learning Web development.

Understanding the processes in education, such as the student learning behavior within a specific course, is a key to continuous course improvement. In online learning systems, students’ learning can be tracked and examined based on data collected by the systems themselves. However, it is non-trivial to decide how to extract the desired students’ behavior from the limited data in traditional classroom courses. Software development courses are a domain where student behavior analysis would be especially useful, as continuous teaching improvement in this fast progressing domain is necessary. In this paper, we propose to use process mining for improvement-motivated process analysis of a software development course (web development in particular). To this end, we analyze Git logs of students’ projects to understand their development processes. Process mining has been chosen as it can help us to find a descriptive model of this process. The main contribution of this paper is the detailed methodology of process mining usage for students’ project development analysis, considering various commit characteristics, which are crucial in understanding student coding-behavior patterns. The process mining analysis proved to be very useful, indicating multiple directions for the course improvement, which we also include in this work as a secondary contribution. The third contribution of this work is the summary and discussion of the process mining advantages and current gaps in process mining research for this task. The data we used are made publicly available to other researchers.

In software systems, existing applications usually face some mismatches between object and relational models for their using object-oriented patterns in system structures/behaviours and relational models in data persistence. Therefore, object-relational mapping (ORM) mechanisms are commonly used to deal with these problems. However, this in contract results in some disadvantages that become a major factor in decreasing the execution performance of software systems. To address these issues, we present in this paper an extended analysis and design mechanism for directing an extensive discussion about the inheritance between classes and its implication on the design of object behaviours that impacts further the accessing of databases. Experiments have shown the improvement of the system performance through our UML-based extension work.

The universality of Web application prompts the rapid development of Web development technologies, which has inspired many students and engineering technicians to study and apply them. Through the research of the Web technology and combining the teaching practice, an autonomous learning platform system about Web system development course was designed and developed. The platform system has the characteristics of self-evolution, Web application dynamic embedding, and abundant learning resources. Also, the platform system provides learners with independent, open, collaborative learning space.

Student projects in software engineering courses are traditionally graded according to the features developed/tasks completed by given deadline. This leads to two problems: cascading failure of some students in the course, and "feature hacking" by the students. In order to address these issues, we decided to shift grading to grading applied techniques in a web application development course. In this paper, we present the analysis of the impacts of our decision. For the analysis we use general student performance data from four prior years and three post-shift years, their performance in written exam, project grades in the web application development course for four years (two prior and two post change), and student feedback to the course. The results show that the shift to grading technique use has resulted in improved student exam and future performance among weaker students, reduced drop-out rates, and lowered the student feedback score for the course. The added benefit according to textual feedback from students was that the new grading scheme teaches students the best practices of agile web development better than previously possible.

The Web development has drastically changed the human interaction and communication, leading to an exponential growth of data generated by users in various digital media. This mass of data provides opportunities for understanding people’s opinions about products, services, processes, events, political movements, and organizational strategies. In this context, it becomes important for companies to be able to assess customer satisfaction about their products or services. One of the ways to evaluate customer sentiment is the use of Sentiment Analysis, also known as Opinion Mining. This research aims to compare the efficiency of an automatic classifier based on dictionary with the classification by human jurors in a set of comments made by customers in Portuguese language. The data consist of opinions of service users of one of the largest Brazilian online employment agencies. The performance evaluation of the classification models was done using Kappa index and a Confusion Matrix. As the main finding, it is noteworthy that the agreement between the classifier and the human jurors came to moderate, with better performance for the dictionary-based classifier. This result was considered satisfactory, considering that the Sentiment Analysis in Portuguese language is a complex task and demands more research and development.

Providing accessible open educational resources (OER) is essential for users with impairments to access university resources. To achieve this, web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) have been developed. In this study, we used the AChecker web accessibility evaluation tool to assess the content of 42 federal university websites in Nigeria and recorded their conformance level to the WCAG. The findings show that at Level A (Minimal Compliance), there were 855 known problems, 55 likely problems, and 7536 potential problems. At Level AA (Acceptable Compliance), 2516 known problems, 58 likely problems, and 15537 potential problems were identified. At Level AAA (Optimal Compliance), 2679 known problems were found, while there were no likely problems, and 16772 potential problems. The results indicated that most websites did not conform to the accessibility guidelines, highlighting the need for educational institutions to comply with WCAG2.1 content standard. The study recommends introducing accessibility training courses in web design and development to ensure effective OER creation for people with diverse abilities. Furthermore, enforcing the implementation of these guidelines by flagging down non-compliant educational websites was suggested. There is a problem of lack of accessibility in federal university websites in Nigeria, leading to unequal access to web content for users with varying abilities. The study aimed to identify aspects of the websites where accessibility needs to be improved and promote diversity and inclusiveness for users with different abilities to have equal access to web content.