On the one hand, no one international model for quality assurance evaluation of higher education has emerged. On the other hand, as a reference model rather than a prescription, the CDIO initiative proposes a mature integrated framework for creation or continuous improvement of engineering programs. However, institutions developing and managing educational programs have to juggle the expectation of various accreditation and evaluation bodies, which may create consistency and interoperability problems. A need exists to unambiguously specify relations among quality assurance concepts to enable more transparent and comparable descriptions of quality frameworks for educational programs. Following constructive alignment principles, this article creates structural models using some of the CDIO Standards. In doing so it lays the foundations of an architectural meta-model for describing complex educational systems, which will contribute to consistency and interoperability among quality frameworks.

We investigate how the three technologies, social media, mobile / pervasive learning and semantic web, may enhance Inquiry-Based Science Teaching (IBST) approaches and digital literacy. IBST may be defined by engaging students in: i) authentic and problem-based activities, ii) experimental procedures, iii) self regulated learning sequences, iv) discursive argumentation and communication with peers. We analyzed the benefits of each technology and their combination. From an existing IBST learning scenario, we propose an innovative one based on the convergence of the three following technologies: social media, mobile / pervasive learning and semantic web.

IPTV systems attracting millions of users are now commonly deployed on peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructures and provide an appealing alternative to multicast-based systems. Typically, a P2P overlay network is associated with each channel, composed of users who receive, watch and redistribute this channel. Yet, channel surfing (aka as zapping) involves switching overlays and may introduce delays, potentially hurting the user experience when compared to multicast-based IPTV. In this paper, we present a distributed system called OAZE (Overlay Augmentation for Zapping Experience) which speeds up the switching process and reduces the overall cross-domain traffic generated by the IPTV system. In OAZE, each peer maintains connections to other peers, not only in a given channel, but also in a subset of all channels to which the associated user is likely to zap. More specifically, we focus on the channel assignment problem, i.e. determining, in a given P2P overlay, the optimal distribution of the responsibility to maintain contact peers to other channels. We propose an approximate algorithm providing guaranteed performances, and a simpler and more practical one. Our experimental results show that OAZE leads to substantial improvements on the connections between peers, resulting in less switching delay and lower network cost; it then represents an appealing add-on for existing P2P IPTV systems.

In this paper we present an approach for supporting best effort traffic on an ECOFRAME ring network which has been dimensioned primarily for Guaranteed Traffic. This approach is reservation based, and is combined within the ECOFRAME MAC with the opportunistic access method used for Guaranteed traffic. The reservation method is intended to both protect the Guaranteed traffic and allocate fair shares of the excess resources to the competing Best Effort traffic flows. We analyze the performance of the proposed approach on 2 simple scenarios, i.e. a “concentration” scenario where all stations send the same amount of traffic to a Hub on the ring, and an “any-to-any” scenario where each station sends the same amount of traffic to each other station on the ring. The maximum amount of BE traffic that can be supported without degrading the QoS offered to Guaranteed traffic is derived using simple queueing models. The simple scenarios are then simulated, with the modified MAC, and compared to the theoretical results. The obtained simulation results show that Guaranteed traffic is very well protected, and that spare resources are indeed fairly shared. However, the reservation approach fails to meet the maximum utilization in the any-to-any scenario due to the fact that it forbids spatial reuse for BE traffic.