In our modern era of Internet, mobile and digital information technology, adoption of innovative education strategies to the needs of the time is quite important particularly at private educational institutions which cater to economically affluent students who are becoming picky and often more interested in their distractions than in their studies. Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) which was established in the year 2000 with an aim of becoming a hub for shaping the future of Asia-Pacific region by creating world class leaders in science, management, and economics through a bilingual curriculum, international under-standing, promotion of freedom, peace, humanity, and sensitiveness to the needs of the time, has integrated multimodal approach towards enhancing the quality of teaching and learning, and provides a total student support and care system. As a millennium university, it is equipped with state-of-the-art classrooms and tries to enhance its educational endeavors through proper use and efficient adaptation of educational technologies into its teaching pedagogies. However, due to being a private university and charging handsome tuitions fees, it has been attracting some of the most affluent students onto the campus, many of whom are often more interested in their distractions than in their studies. The decline in youth population and the economic slowdown in Japan have also adversely affected the quality of incoming students. This paper attempts to explain how APU tries to assure quality of their graduates despite the abovementioned problems through blended learning, peer knowledge sharing, adaptation of Blackboard (Bb, the most commonly implemented Web-based learning management system), portfolio, active learning, student support, academic advising, and by providing of a natural learning environment.

Due to the elevated programming courses' failing rate in our department (45%) an action research was initiated. As part of this action research, that was performed during four semesters several course structures and learning tactics were examined. The evaluation methodology was simple and based only on the percentage of failing students. The success achieved was attributed to two main factors (1) using a visualization environment (Micro-world) for the whole duration of the course, which helped in understanding the more complex and abstract issues, and (2) using individual assignments that enforced better learning habits and development of individual algorithmic thinking. The paper describes the various attempts, as well as the final structure, that reduced the failing students by over 77%.

A requirement is a capability to which a product or service should conform to. A meticulous consideration to requirements engineering acts as a backbone of software projects. Ambiguous and unrealistic requirements are major source of failure in the software-intensive systems. Requirements engineering processes are complex as most of the requirements engineering documentation is written in natural languages which are less formal and often distract the designers and developers. Requirements management is a continuous process throughout the project lifecycle and relates to documenting, analyzing, tracing and prioritizing requirements and then finally controlling changes. The main issues related to requirements management are usually social, political and cultural. Software requirement engineers who gather the requirements generally consider that such issues are beyond the scope of their profession as they deem them within the project management ambit. In this study, we highlight the management issues that arise in the requirements engineering process and explore the possibilities to tackle them amicably. The study is supplemented with a critical review of the existing methodologies for resolving and managing software requirements.

The use of color in image analysis and compression is becoming more and more popular. The high quality color images are in demand, but the bandwidth and power resources are limited, this shows the requirement of effective color image compression algorithm which is suitable to human visual system. However most of the existing algorithms are designed for gray scale visual information. In this work a unique wavelet based approach is proposed for compression of color images. Wavelet families are used to characterize the quality of image by calculating quality estimation parameters, which are, peak signal to noise ratio, energy retained, entropy and redundancy. The entropy calculations are done using color histogram and coding programme is developed for estimation of PSNR, ER and redundancy of the compressed image. The results are analyzed and a set of criteria is determined for the acceptability of coding algorithm. Results show that Biorthogonal wavelet filter outperforms the orthogonal one in quality of compressed image but the orthogonal filter is more energy preserving.

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of weekly quizzes on Iranian high school students’ performance on final achievement tests. This effect, which is technically referred to as washback, is defined as the effect of testing on learning and teaching. Most scholars have attempted to provide guidelines in order to achieve positive washback. While some suggest frequent quizzes as a means of positive washback, others oppose the idea. The proponents claim that frequent quizzes stimulate practice and review, give the students more opportunities for feedback and have a positive influence on students’ study time. The opponents, on the other hand, believe that too frequent testing might inhibit of larger units of instructional material and frustrate anxious students, and thus, hinder learning. This study explored whether students taking weekly quizzes performed better in the final achievement tests. 70 students studying in grade two of high school were selected and divided into two groups. One group received weekly quizzes and the other group took only midterm exam. The results indicated that the group with weekly quizzes performed better than the group without quizzes.

This paper presents OBAMAS (Ontology-Based Approach for Multi-Agent Systems engineering), an ontology-based contribution to Agent Oriented Software Engineering. We propose a formal process for agentification, starting with an analysis phase which consists of the construction of three formal ontologies (a domain ontology, an ontology of functionalities, and an ontology of multi-agents systems) and their alignment to merge in a single one. The second step, which is a design phase, consists of the operationalization of the single ontology in order to infer in a more formal way the agents of the system. A case study is introduced to illustrate OBAMAS and to show its use and effectiveness in a real application, a distance learning system.

The purpose of this paper is to prove new common fixed point theorem in Symmetric G-metric space. While proving our result, we utilize the idea of occasionally weakly compatible maps due to Al-Thagafi and N. Shahzad. Our result substantially generalize and improve a multitude of relevant common fixed point theorems of the existing literature in G- metric space.

This paper focuses on the design of a low power and high performance FPGA based Digital Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (DSVPWM) controller for three phase voltage source inverter. A new method is proposed to realize easy, accurate and high performance DSVPWM technique based on FPGA with low resource consumption and reduced execution time than conventional methods. Equations of SVPWM are relatively complicated and need a considerable time to execute on a typical microcontroller, therefore a simple method is presented to minimize run time of instructions, e.g. the multiplication operation used in these equations is replaced by a proposed signed and unsigned shifter using 2 to 1 multiplexer unit. Total power consumption of controller is reduced to 37 mW at 100MHz clock frequency. The proposed DSVPWM technique algorithm was synthesized and implemented using Quartus II 9.1V and Cyclone II FPGA, to target device EP2C20F484C6. Also power is analyzed using XPower analyzer. Experimentation and results demonstrate that proposed method have high performance than other works.