Browsing by Subject "infrastructure"
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Item A Delphi Study Assessing Effective Peer Faculty E-Mentoring to Support Scaling Distance Education Programs(2014-04-02) Lewis, Judith HolbrookThis research addressed a gap in the literature regarding the use of e-mentoring as a successful infrastructure mechanism to support educators in delivery of higher education and metrics for its use in scaling online education programs. The methodology applied to this research was a Delphi Study. The Delphi Technique is a qualitative methodology to build a consensus opinion from a panel of experts. This Delphi was based on a series of rounds in which a panel of experts responded to survey questions, each survey item presented as an essentiality statement ranked by a Likert-type scale index from Very Important down to Unimportant. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each survey statement to determine consensus. This study addressed five research questions in the areas of support for distance education faculty: what attributes of an e-mentoring program for faculty engaged in teaching distance education classes lead to perceived effectiveness by coaches and practitioners (terms introduced to describe the mentoring relationship between peers in a community of practice), what formal and informal activities or processes provide for preparation for teaching online, collegiality, and professional development (previously published operationalized factors) (Velez, 2010), and what metrics can be used to determine that e-mentoring has led to increased spread, depth, sustainability, and sense of ownership in distance education, previously published factors for scaling (Coburn, 2003). Based on the Delphi results, the highest consensus means concerned the importance of faculty and administrative support of distance education. For example, the study found high consensus that e-mentoring should be encouraged with release time, coaching should be considered in tenure and promotion decisions, and provision for communication allowances and technical support should be provided for e-mentoring sessions. Training topics of greatest interest included accessibility training, content delivery and teaching modalities, and copyright law and intellectual property expectations. Important metrics included the number of ?formerly coached? practitioners acting as e-mentoring coaches in the future, the number of semester-hours taught, the number of faculty initiating new practices, and faculty acceptance of delivering education online. This study is significant because it researched the use of e-mentoring as a support for faculty in scaling online learning programs in higher education and provided expert evaluation of processes and procedures recommended by faculty to support their effort. It also evaluated metrics to assess the scaling of distance education programs.Item TDL Infrastructure within Amazon Web Services(2016-05-26) Bradley, Effie; Texas Digital LibraryTexas Digital Libraries(TDL) is a consortium of libraries from twenty-two Universities within the State of Texas. In 2010, TDL was among the first in Digital Libraries to move to cloud based infrastructure. TDL has over one hundred servers running within Amazon Web Services(AWS), providing online publishing and preservation services. AWS is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, and flexible storage solutions. In a traditional model of buying hardware, the resources needed must be determined ahead of time, with a lengthy purchasing process. This process would need to be repeated if demands on resources grow, and as the hardware ages. AWS gives TDL and it’s members the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for our applications, and allows us to quickly scale up or down when application requirements change. TDL continues to explore the ever evolving landscape of cloud technologies. In this presentation we’ll take a look at the TDL Infrastructure within AWS, and what new possibilities lie on the horizon.Item Tradeoff between Investments in Infrastructure and Forecasting when Facing Natural Disaster Risk(2010-07-14) Kim, Seong D.Hurricane Katrina of 2005 was responsible for at least 81 billion dollars of property damage. In planning for such emergencies, society must decide whether to invest in the ability to evacuate more speedily or in improved forecasting technology to better predict the timing and intensity of the critical event. To address this need, we use dynamic programming and Markov processes to model the interaction between the emergency response system and the emergency forecasting system. Simulating changes in the speed of evacuation and in the accuracy of forecasting allows the determination of an optimal mix of these two investments. The model shows that the evacuation improvement and the forecast improvement give different patterns of impact to their benefit. In addition, it shows that the optimal investment decision changes by the budget and the feasible range of improvement.