In the contemporary era of digital transformation, the prevalence of multi-campus universities is escalating. This progression necessitates standardized yet adaptable course designs suitable for deployment across diverse campuses. The overarching challenge encompasses the formulation of courses with uniform objectives and quality, while simultaneously respecting the distinct attributes and limitations of each campus. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), after its merger with three state colleges, confronted with these complexities, leading to the inception of a wide array of courses spread across multiple campuses. To address this multifaceted scenario, our research introduced a gamified tool designed to simplify the multi-campus course design process. This tool, built on principles of cohesion, alignment, and adaptability, ensures the catering of unique campus-specific requirements. We gauged the tool's effectiveness through workshops with educators, which highlighted its capacity to instill structured course design methodologies, strengthen collaboration, and elevate awareness among educators about multi-campus nuances. Notable feedback from educators emphasized the potential advantages of digitizing this tool. A digital adaptation would not only enhance integration with existing learning management systems but also offer the versatility of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative course design, eliminating geographical constraints. This research, therefore, provides an innovative, gamified solution adept for universities worldwide, aiming to surmount similar multi-campus design challenges.

Multi-campus courses is a solution for the challenge of having similar courses, but possibly with different qualities, offered at the various campuses in multi-campus universities. Multi-campus courses offer new opportunities, one of them being to have multiple teachers working jointly on a single course taught over multiple campuses. However, working in a novel teaching environment, such as multi-campus settings, requires teacher readiness. This includes the readiness to collaborate with teachers at distant campuses on a single course to develop a course with the same quality for all the campuses. Such collaboration is important from the viewpoint of quality management at the university level. In this paper, we will study teachers' readiness for teaching in such an environment using a case study as the research methodology. Moreover, we will present teachers' perspectives on the benefits and challenges of teaching in multi-campus environments in addition to what they want from the university to facilitate the teaching process.

By convention, designing learning activities in higher education is one of the main responsibilities of academic staff. designing activities for multi-campus settings, where more than one campus is involved in the activities need to consider the related context of multi-campus universities. in this paper. Using the D6 gamification framework, we describe the development of gamified tools for teachers. With this tool, teachers from different campuses of a multi-campus university can sit together and design the desired activities for their joint course.

This research work examines the students’ expectation towards the multi-campus courses. The paper also gives insight about the expected advantages that students see by taking this kind of courses and possible concerns they may have. For this paper we used a two-step process. Data for this research was collected through an online questionnaire which was designed based on interview we have with eight students. To analyze the data, we used the affordance theory and six related principles as a lens which helped us in identifying the functionality students expected from multi-campus courses. We also used activity theory to categorize students’ expectations. Students had some expectations toward learning activities, teachers, tools, community members like teaching assistants, rule and regulation and the division of labor among the people who are involved in multi-campus courses.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for multi-campus education. The framework is based on the transtheoretical model where the planning and action stages have been extended with course development specific activities. Current research, including our own, has been studied to identify several factors affecting the process of offering multi-campus courses/programs. Factors identified include those related to readiness, planning based on the new context, training and preparation, and delivery, observation and maintenance. The proposed framework will hopefully result in improved multi-campus course development processes in multi-campus universities.

Global software engineering (GSE) courses traditionally require cooperation between at least two universities so as to provide a distributed development environment to the students. In this study, we explore an alternative way to organize a global software engineering course where students work on open source software development (OSSD) projects rather than in a multi-university collaboration setting. The results show that the new setup may provide core GSE challenges as well as challenges associated with software development outsourcing and challenges related to working on large open source software. The present article compares the experiences gained from running a combined GSE and OSSD course against the experiences gained from running a traditional GSE course. The two alternatives are compared in terms of students’ learning outcomes and course organization. The authors found that a combined GSE and OSSD course provides learning opportunities that are partly overlapping with, and partly complementary to, a traditional GSE course. The authors also found that the combined OSSD and GSE course was somewhat easier to organize because most of the activities took place in a single university setting. The authors used the extended GSE taxonomy for the comparison and found it to be a useful tool for this, although it had some limitations in expressive power. Therefore, two additional relationship dimensions are proposed that will further enrich the extended taxonomy in classifying GSE (and OSSD) projects.

Global software engineering (GSE) has become common in the software industry. Distributed development work comes with many challenges, especially related to communication and coordination. Thus, it is essential to also teach and prepare the new population of software engineers to be aware of - and familiar with - these hurdles. We addressed this need by arranging a joint (agile) software project course between universities in Finland and Norway. We had three teams - one with students from both countries and two with students from the Norwegian university only. The students were given a teacher mentor, a handbook on agile practices and state-of-the-art tools for project management and software development. Apart from monitoring the teams' progress, we also collected data from emails, questionnaires, student reports and interviews during and after the project. The main lesson learned is that the global and local teams are mostly facing the same challenges - especially when it comes to team building, clear project roles, and communication and management issues. Ultimately, our results show that the challenges were harder to solve by the global team and that not solving challenges in a timely manner had more serious consequences.

This paper presents a new approach to indexing videos of presentations which use electronic slides. By determining the images of slides in the video frames, and then matching the video sequences to the original electronic slides, the video can be indexed and searched, and the visual appearance of the segments can be improved. We first detect the "content area" in video frames using a color similarity weighted least square method. By monitoring the frame-to-frame "content difference", we then temporally segment the video into sequences which display the same slide. Since this differencing removes low-level imaging effects, we can then relate the video segments to slides by matching the content differences of adjacent video segments to the content differences of all possible slide pairs. By defining the transition probabilities of video segments, we are able to solve this matching efficiently in two steps, first by finding high likelihood matches, and then by using dynamic programming for the unmatched remainder. Once matched, the correspondence to the original slides can be used to enhance the presentation video quality in the content area, and can also be used for indexing and summarization. Experiments show high performance of segmentation and matching on several presentation videos which vary considerably in color and background style.

As the number of electronic messages continues to grow, information visualization tools become increasingly important to support users in the complexity of managing the large amount of information they receive. This paper presents a visualization approach to support e-mail browsing as well as querying. A new clustering mechanism is presented which, based on the hierarchical nature of domain names, provides an automatic classification of electronic messages. This representation is combined with a temporal visualization that supports browsing, Boolean searching and threading operations.

While monochrome unformatted text and richly colored graphical content are both capable of conveying a message, well designed graphical content has the potential for better engaging the human sensory system. It is our contention that the author of an audio presentation should be afforded the benefit of judiciously exploiting the human aural perceptual ability to deliver content in a more compelling, concise and realistic manner. While contemporary streaming media players and voice browsers share the ability to render content non-textually, neither technology is currently capable of rendering three dimensional media. The contributions described in this paper are proposed 3D audio extensions to SMIL and a server-based framework able to receive a request and, on-demand, process such a SMIL file and dynamically create the multiple simultaneous audio objects, spatialize them in 3D space, multiplex them into a single stereo audio and prepare it for transmission over an audio stream to a mobile device. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first reported solution for delivering and rendering on a commercially available wireless handheld device a rich 3D audio listening experience as described by a markup language. Naturally, in addition to mobile devices this solution also works with desktop streaming media players.

This paper describes an application framework for providing and managing personalized, interactive video on the web. The application framework enables content providers and aggregators to stream personalized content to end-users. The server stores video and multimedia content that is structured and profiled. The content profile is matched against an end-user's interest profile to determine which parts of the video to include and what hotspots and hyperlinks to provide to the user. The server generates SMIL files that represent the personalized content and returns their unique URLs to the client when responding to end-user requests.

This paper introduces the CARAT-ARC digital multimedia archiving system. CARAT-ARC is an open system for indexing, storing and searching multimedia documents (audio, video, graphics, text, etc.) It uses a hybrid approach to multimedia indexing and retrieval by combining automatic feature extraction with advanced multimedia browsing and logging tools. The motivation for such a hybrid approach as well as a description of the main parts of the systems are presented.

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