Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, two different systems for taking exams through the Internet are described and analyzed. They have been designed and executed in Yazd and Shahed Universities. These systems enable us to take the multiple-choice and descriptive exams. In these systems, the exam questions are prepared by the instructor of the concerned lesson and placed in the system database. The students who have taken that lesson can be connected to the system from wherever they want. After entering their username and password they can take part in the exam. One of these systems has been created on the basis of the synchronous model and another one has been developed on the basis of the asynchronous model.... 

In the past few years, Iranian universities have embarked to use e-learning tools and technologies to extend and improve their educational services. After a few years of conducting e-learning programs a debate took place within the executives and managers of the e-learning institutes concerning which activities are of the most influence on the learning progress of online students. This research is aimed to investigate the impact of a number of e-learning activities on the students' learning development. The results show that participation in virtual classroom sessions has the most substantial impact on the students' final grades. This paper presents the process of applying data mining... 

Web-based E-Leaning Systems (WELSs) have emerged as new means of skill training and knowledge acquisition, encouraging both academia and industry to invest resources in the adoption of these systems. Traditionally, most pre- and post-adoption tasks related to evaluation are carried out from the viewpoints of technology. Since users have been widely recognized as being a key group of stakeholders in influencing the adoption of information systems, their attitudes about these systems are considered as pivotal. Therefore, based on the theory of multi-criteria decision making and the research results concerning user satisfaction in the fields of human-computer interaction and information... 

After the emergence of modern technologies in the field of information technologies (IT), virtual learning has attained a new form. The way of announcing exams' grades is an important topic in e-learning. For announcing exams' grades on the web, various methods have been proposed. In this paper, first some common methods for announcing students' grades are reviewed, then three new methods which are named "Virtual Grade", "Steganography Grades", and "Grade HIP" are introduced and the result of implementing these methods for announcing the grades of some courses at the some Iranian universities are provided. Also these methods and their results are analyzed. Finally these three new methods are... 

Virtual learning is a new idea that has gotten a new form with the emergence of new technologies such as the wireless networks. The mobile phone (cell phone) is a device that is used by most people nowadays. Therefore, one can use the mobile phone for virtual learning on a wide scale. One of the popular and at the same time simple and inexpensive services on the mobile phone is the SMS (Short Message Service). In this paper I propose a method for taking multiple-choice quizzes by using the SMS on mobile phones. In the provision of these tests, some SMS messages were sent to the student along with the answers of the questions, which were steganography in an image. The student, after receiving... 

Nowadays, e-learning platforms are widely used by universities and other research-based and educational institutions. Despite lots of advantages these educational environments provide for organizations, yet there are many unresolved problems which cause instructors and training managers with some difficulties to get proper information about the students' learning behavior. On one hand, lack of tools to measure, assess, and evaluate the performance of learners in educational activities has led the educators to fail to guarantee the success of learning process. On the other hand, strict structure of learning materials prevents students to acquire knowledge based on their learning style.... 

This article mainly focuses on the characteristic, technologies and applications of cloud computing in mobile and electronic learning, and analyzes the features of this concept. We firstly tried to clarify the meaning of cloud computing as well as its features, secondly, proposed different models of using cloud computing in different learning environments, including web-based learning, mobile video learning and observational learning  

In this article, a universal collaborative and competitive approach is introduced for deployment of digital collections in an ideal Digital Library for future's educational system. A hierarchical structure is proposed to be used for browsing and searching within mass of digital contents provided for union of curriculums worldwide. The collaborative and open-source aspects of the system guarantee the growth of the Digital Library. On the other hand, the competitive and reviewing aspects guarantee the accuracy of the novel library contents. Two experiments confirm the need for such a universal Digital Library worldwide to enhance learning capabilities, increase accessibility, avoid redundancy... 

In this paper, we have presented a novel virtual reality setup with the ability to teach music to children with autism as well as perform automatic assessment of their behaviors. This setup contains Social Virtual Reality Robots (V2Rs) and virtual musical instruments (i.e. xylophone and drum). After conducting a game-session pilot study, we observed that the acceptance rate of the virtual reality headset is about 65% among children with autism, while all of the typically developing children attending the session used the headset. Furthermore, using statistical analysis, it is indicated that the performance of children with autism in music assignments was significantly weaker than their... 

Real-time video transmission is considered as an important means for information distribution. One major application of it is E-learning, which requires real-time video processing and transmission. On the other hand, the process of cut detection is a fundamental component in automatic video browsing, indexing, searching, retrieval, and archiving. This paper introduces a new video cut detection technique that uses dominant lines and angles extracted from edge information of the video contents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first works done for cut detection in E-learning application. This method is compatible with our application's requirements and has a low complexity and high... 

COVID-19 pandemic caused an increasing demand for online academic classes, which led to the demand for effective online exams with regards to limitations on time and resources. Consequently, holding online exams with sufficient reliability and effectiveness became one of the most critical and challenging subjects in higher education. Therefore, it is essential to have a preventive algorithm to allocate time and financial resources effectively. In the present study, a fair test with sufficient validity is first defined, and then by analogy with an engineering product, the design process is implemented on it. For this purpose, a hybrid method based on FMEA, which is a preventive method to... 

"Web 2.0" refers to a second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. The truth is that Web 2.0 is a difficult term to define, even for web experts. Usually phrases like "the web as platform" and "architecture of participation" are used to describe this term. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. The Internet is changing medicine and Web 2.0 is the current buzz word in the World Wide Web dictionary. Radiology in the Web 2.0 probably refers to... 

E-learning environments are being used more efficiently by the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies. Adaptive learning is a kind of learning environment which provides individual learning. It can customize the learning style according to the individual's personality and characteristics. Although there are a lot of e-learning systems having adaptive learning feature, they do not satisfy all adaptive learning aspects. This paper proposes a new method which tries to help learners find educational contents adapted to their personalities in an efficient manner. Our proposed method has four essential parts: 1) It finds out learner's features by Bayesian networks. 2) Then It tries... 

With the increasing volume of data, the best approach for learning from this data is to exploit an online learning algorithm. Online ensemble methods take advantage of an ensemble of classifiers to predict labels of data. Prediction with expert advice is a well-studied problem in the online ensemble learning literature. The weighted majority and the randomized weighted majority (RWM) algorithms are two well-known solutions to this problem, aiming to converge to the best expert. Since among some expert, the best one does not necessarily have the minimum error in all regions of data space, defining specific regions and converging to the best expert in each of these regions will lead to a... 

Animal walking is one of the most robust and adaptive locomotion mechanisms in the nature, involves sophisticated interactions between neural and biomechanical levels. It has been suggested that the coordination of this process is done in a hierarchy of levels. The lower layer contains autonomous interactions between muscles and spinal cord and the higher layer (e.g. the brain cortex) interferes when needed. Inspiringly, in this study we present a hierarchical control architecture with a state of the art intrinsic online learning mechanism for a dynamically walking 5-link biped robot with compliant knee joints. As the biological counterpart, the system is controlled by independent control... 

The learning effects of the workers and machine deterioration in an aggregate production planning (APP) problem have not been taken into account in the literature yet. These factors affect the performance of any real-world production system and require attention. In this paper, a bi-objective optimization model is developed for an APP problem with labor learning effect and machine deterioration. The first objective of this model maximizes the profit by improving learning and reducing the failure cost of the system. The second objective function minimizes the costs associated with repairs and deterioration, which depend on the failure rate of the machines in the production periods. The aim of... 

In this work, the proposed model by Pazuki et al. based on the Local Composition Concept (LCC), has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior of polymer solutions and the liquid-liquid phase behavior of aqueous two-phase systems. The Flory-Huggins model has been used as the combinatorial part of the proposed model, as well as the model proposed by Pazuki et al. was considered as the residual term. The proposed model has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior for a number of PEG-Water systems at constant temperature. The results obtained from the proposed model have been compared with those obtained from the Poly-NRTL and the Poly-Wilson models. The results... 

In this study, the recently proposed model by Pazuki et al., based on the local composition concept (LCC), has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior of polymer solutions. Similar to the LCC models available in the literature, the proposed model has two combinatorial and residual terms to account for both entropic as well as enthalpic effects in solution. The Flory-Huggins model has been considered as the combinatorial part of the proposed model, while the equation proposed by Pazuki et al. was considered as the residual term. The proposed model has been used in correlating the vapor-liquid phase behavior for a large number of polymer-solvent mixtures at different... 

Recently Mobile Learning (M-Learning) has attracted much attention. Due to advantages of SMS (Short Messaging Service) on mobile phones we present a safe and protected method for taking multiple-choice quizzes by using the SMS on mobile phones in this paper. In this method questions of quiz are sent to students along with their answers through some SMS messages. The students will receive their grades immediately after answering the questions and this grade is also sent to the instructor or professor along with the student's answers through an SMS Picture Message. Answers of questions and the student's grade are hidden in SMS picture message through stenography and then they are sent. The... 

In this paper, a novel self-adaptive control method based on a digital twin is developed and investigated for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear system, which is a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. For this purpose, hardware-in-loop (HIL) and software-in-loop (SIL) are integrated to develop the digital twin control concept in a straightforward manner. A nonlinear integral backstepping (NIB) model-free control technique is integrated with the HIL (implemented as a physical controller) and SIL (implemented as a virtual controller) controllers to control the HVAC system without the need for dynamic feature identification. The main goal is to design the virtual...