2015, Aljaloud, Abdulaziz, Gromik, Nicolas, Billingsley, William, Kwan, Paul H

In recent years, the use of student response systems (SRS, also known as clickers) in the classroom setting has increased considerably, and researchers have developed a growing interest in their effect on learning and student engagement. This review analyses trends in SRS research by providing a brief history of SRS technology and usage as well as a detailed review of research in this field. In addition, this review focuses on the pedagogical implications of SRSs for education and analyses common criticisms of this emerging educational technology. Finally, research identifying common trends in SRS development is compiled and areas for future research are identified. The outcome of this leads to an understanding of best practices for this technology in a university setting.

2019, Aljaloud, Abdulaziz, Gromik, Nicolas, Kwan, Paul, Billingsley, William

This study aimed to investigate how the use of a smartphone clicker app by a group of 390 Saudi Arabian male undergraduate students would impact their learning performance while participating in a computer science class. The smartphone clicker app was used by the students during peer group discussions and to respond to teacher questions. A conceptual framework identified teacher-student and student-student interactions, collaborative learning, and student engagement as three primary practices that could improve student performance when a smartphone clicker app was used. The relationships between these factors were tested empirically by participant completion of a self-administered online survey. This study found the use of a smartphone clicker app promoted increased teacher-student and student-student interactivity, leading to active collaboration learning by students and improved learning performance. No positive relationship was found between the smartphone clicker app use and increased student engagement. These results demonstrated the role of the smartphone clicker app in enhancing the learning experience of the Saudi undergraduate students included in this study, but not the overall student engagement. Further research into how use of a smartphone clicker app in classroom settings might promote student engagement to improve the overall learning performance is needed.

2009, Billingsley, William, Robinson, Peter

"Intelligent Books" are Web-based textbooks that combine computer-supported exercises with content that is both adaptive and extensible. They impose very few restrictions on the kind of exercise that can be placed within the book, and they allow students to contribute material that they have written, and to incorporate material from the Web into the book. In this chapter, the authors describe the influences that affect the design of intelligent books. These come from looking at the roles that textbooks and course notes play in education, and economic factors that affect the sustainability of intelligent books - competing for the attention of users, and ensuring that network externalities do not prevent a sufficient quantity of material from being usable within the book.

2016, Billingsley, William, Ngu, Bing, Phan, Huy, Gromik, Nicolas, Kwan, Paul H

Studio courses have become a key way in which professional skills, especially those involving collaboration and design, are taught in many fields, including computer science. Studios typically involve students working on a design problem, periodically presenting their work for critique, and critiquing the work of other students or groups. They support productive inquiry, as well as teamwork, communication, and reflection. However, although studios have become an important mode of instruction for on-campus students, they have not typically been offered for online or distance education students. In this paper we describe a studio critique process that is designed to work asynchronously, using short videos, and a tool that we have built to support it. We also describe qualitative observations from a pilot study, in which video-based critiques were used at a university whose students predominantly study online rather than on-campus.

2022-11-18, Billingsley, William

Curriculum mapping in Australia has grown from early notions of constructive alignment to a governed ongoing commitment by institutions to the curriculum structures they have developed. These consider primary aspects of a degree: learning outcomes and how they are achieved. In this paper I describe the need for a descriptive set of mappings for secondary (or quality) aspects of a degree. Notably, mapping the identity verified assessment mechanisms used across a degree can support conversations with accreditors and reviewers around defences against cheating. In 2020 and 2021, many universities were forced to cancel paper-based examinations and academics altered their assessment mechanisms. Mapping the mechanisms that were adopted can reconnect those individual choices with their purpose within the degree. The paper is an experience report from the development of an accreditation submission for a suite of computer science cognate degrees. Other descriptive mappings developed within the submission are also described.

2022-06, Balogh, Matt, Billingsley, William, Paul, David, Kennan, Mary Anne

Introduction. This paper considers how we can better manage personal records in the home by addressing questions such as how and why personal records are retained in an electronic form and how they are managed.

Method. A qualitative method with semi-structured interviews was used. Participants were recruited through social media. The interviews included virtual guided tours of personal records. There were thirty participants in twenty-two interviews (some interviews were with couples).

Analysis. Each stage of the personal records management process described by participants was observed and categorised, resulting in an inclusive flow diagram.

Results. The management of personal records at home can be categorised and described in terms of a flow. Some commonalities were found between personal information management in the workplace and at home, such as the frequent use of e-mail to manage records and the use of micro-notes and reminders.

Conclusion. Personal records management at home can be described as a flow through which records progress. The fact that the study of personal information management has rarely addressed personal information management at home offers many opportunities for fruitful future research.

2023-11-17, Wysel, Matthew, Baker, Derek, Billingsley, William

This work centers on the mechanisms by which value is accrued to data, a field that is becoming known as datanomics. The research is mobilized from platform economics, the economics of information, Big Data, communication theory, the study of data as a production factor and an exchangeable service, and the emerging field of information chain failure (a vertical form of market failure). This thesis makes the case that the creation of value from data requires a broader consideration of activities and resources than has been researched previously. Essentially, value creation relies on capitalization of enrichment infrastructure, and recognition of a community of internal and external stakeholders who collaborate around the data. At issue is the fundamental question of how each stakeholder can operate around data to achieve maximum advantage, and how collaboration, not competition, is required to achieve those outcomes.

The empirical case used is of animal (specifically cattle) breeders who periodically collect performance data and then must decide both how much of it to share and how frequently to do so. The emergent model characterizes optimal strategies at firm and industry level. This novel approach provides guidance for industry and policy action. For industry, it identifies optimal data sharing actions and contextual conditions. At the policy level, it identifies and quantifies market failure, and the steps necessary to correct it.

This PhD is presented as a thesis-by-publication. The first two chapters draw from the literatures noted above to derive the ingredients required to create value from data, the attributes of the value creation process and the mechanics of its operation. The first of these chapters was published in an A* agricultural systems journal in 2021. The final three chapters apply this theory at a firm-level, across a market, and into a microeconomy, respectively, and have been through the full revision process at a management journal (A*), information systems journal (A*) and agricultural technology journal (Q1).

The primary author and student has presented his research at three annual Conferences of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, the annual conference of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association, and the International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. The author won first place in the Economics and Business section of NE’s 3-Minute Thesis competition and has been influential in NE’s business incubation activities that target knowledge management aspects of Agtech adoption.

2019-02, Billingsley, William, Torbay, Rosemary, Fletcher, Peter R, Thomas, Richard N, Steel, Jim R H, Süß, Jörn Guy

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places small teams of students on different features of a common product. This creates two layers of collaboration, as students work within their teams on individual features, and the teams must interoperate with many other teams on the common product. The class uses continuous integration practices and predominantly asynchronous communication channels (Slack and GitHub) to facilitate this collaboration. The original goal of this design was to ensure that students would authentically experience issues associated with realistically sized software projects, and learn to apply appropriate software engineering and collaboration practices to overcome them, in a course without significant extra staffing. Data from the development logs showed that most commits take place outside synchronous class hours, and the project operates as a temporally distributed team even though the students are geographically co-located. Since 2015, a course adapted from this format has also been taught at the University of New England (UNE), an Australian regional university that is also a longstanding provider of distance education. In this course, most students study online, and the class has to be able to work globally, because as well as students taking part from around Australia, there are also typically a small number of students taking part from overseas. Transferring the course to a smaller but predominantly online institution has allowed us to evaluate the distributed nature of the course, by considering what aspects of the course needed to change to support students who are geographically distributed, and comparing how the two cohorts behave. This has produced an overall course design, to teach professional distributed software engineering practices, that is adaptable from large classes to small, and from local to global.

2022-02-09, Balogh, Matt, Billingsley, William, Paul, David, Kennan, Mary Anne

The purpose of this article is to identify the key attributes of personal electronic records in order to develop systems that may enable people to manage them in the home. As more personal information becomes electronic, this is increasingly necessary. Personal electronic records were identified and categorised using interviews and virtual guided tours. Three main attributes were identified: primary user-subjective categories; attributes which identify the circumstances that give rise to the records; and attributes which describe the legal validity of each record. In addition to providing an improved understanding of personal electronic records in the home, these attributes are developed into a set of potential metadata fields.

2021, Billingsley, William

Typical university Learning Management Systems (LMSs) place an enrolment paywall between students and the content within a unit. This has the effect not only of preventing access from potential students, but also of locking past students out from accessing updated materials as the subject develops over subsequent years to their enrolment. In this and many regards, the mechanisms by which academics can produce and publish content face limitations that open source software documentation sites do not. This provocation paper describes some of these limitations and gives an overview of the JamStack - common techniques that have developed within the software development community that allow convenient self-publishing of sites and materials. The paper then gives a brief introduction to Doctacular: a course-oriented static site generator that is under development (but already used for two live sites) to bring JamStack-style publishing to academic course materials