Thank you for reading (or at least starting to read) what may be one of the least interesting ‘memoirs’ ever written. It’s certainly the only one I've ever attempted. I was asked to write this for my 'going away dinner' — or as they call it officially, my ‘tribute’ banquet, at COMPSAC 2025 in Toronto this July.

Welcome to Osaka, Japan, and COMPSAC 2024. After more than four years of "turmoil," we are all delighted to once again be back to a fully in-person conference. While most of that turmoil has been pandemic-induced, there have also been international disruptions. Many COMPSAC volunteers wondered how all this turmoil would manifest itself in terms of this year's registrations. I, as usual, worried about the worst case. After all, in addition to conducting a very high-quality conference, I also feel the burden of ensuring that COMPSAC is a financial success for the IEEE Computer Society. Over the years, we've managed to do both. And it appears that this year, while all the numbers aren't in as I write this, we have continued that trend. In fact, I have been pleased and amazed at the number of high-quality submissions we have received.

Welcome back to COMPSAC. As you know, we are virtual again this year, yet the last few months have been very busy for our volunteers. Complicating matters was the difficulty trying to forecast the movement of the Coronavirus and its likely effect on COMPSAC's attendance in a “real” environment. In April, our Standing Committee decided to take a very conservative approach and go virtual again rather than opt for an in-person or even a hybrid version of the conference. With surges from evolving virus variants being constantly reported worldwide, we have had no reason to regret our decision.

In this paper, we present an innovative open educational resource (OER) competition for students to suggest and create OERs. The competition is based on a 3E model (Enriching lectures with OERs, Extending classroom learning through OERs, and Elevating student learning with OERs), as well as a flipped learning approach (i.e., students teaching others as teachers). Student learning enhancement is evaluated using nine learning principles/catalysts. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations are presented and discussed. In particular, the student learning reflections provide valuable insights into how the OER competition can transform student learning (e.g., with reference to the Bloom’s Taxonomy/Model), including their learning attitude. The results indicate that OER competition can provide an effective method to enhance student learning, complementing traditional teaching/learning.

With the advent of the Internet, there is now a vast amount of useful learning resources available. These public resources or Open Educational Resources (OERs) can complement traditional teaching/lectures and student learning. In this paper, we make two contributions to the development of OERs for the global education community. First, we analyze the popular computing/IT-related OERs at MERLOT, one of the major OER repositories in the world. Through the analysis of peer reviews and other data, we present interesting findings and valuable insights for the development of OERs, particularly for the computer science discipline. Second, we present an innovative 3E (Enrich, Extend, Elevate) strategy/pedagogy for the use of OERs with the aim of enhancing student learning from different perspectives. In particular, students can play an important role, to find and even create OERs to enhance their learning to a new dimension.

This paper performs a preliminary analysis of the first MOOC of the IEEE Education Society, an IEEE Free Online Course on Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) Repositories. The MOOC "Foundations to Open Education and OERs repositories" is based on providing a comprehensive understanding both of Open Education and OERs, as well as the way they are changing the educational environment. The selection of participants' features from the MOOCKnowledge data collection mainly focuses on socio-demographic issues, previous experiences with MOOCs, usefulness of the MOOC to the participants' professional, personal and academic spheres, and types of student interaction. The preliminary results show that additional efforts are needed in order to boost the enrolment of both females and people with low level of completed studies, as well as increasing the level of awareness regarding certification. The results also reveal a positive impact of the course on the participants' professional and personal spheres. Finally, the most relevant interaction for them is the learner-content interaction. On the basis of these results it can be concluded that this MOOC offers an opportunity for practitioners to take advantage of the Open Education philosophy and its subsequent application to their everyday educational environment.

Open Educational Resources deliver a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education. Currently, OER users, students, instructors, and scholars can find OERs from general search engines through metadata enrichment and logic extrapolation. Yet, most users of Web search engines today face difficulties when searching for decent and appropriate learning materials. One of the explanations may be that users are unable to get a clear overview of the list of results produced by current learning object repositories (LORs) for a given single keyword search. The purpose of this study is to propose an enhanced learning object (LO) search engine solution together with a data visualization feature in order to navigate a hitlist of LOs using a hierarchical knowledge graph based on a single keyword search in LORs. In order to conduct experiments and validate our approach, in this study we selected MERLOT II, a well-known learning resource repository. We implemented a Web-based solution where users can execute a single keyword search, then visualize results on a hierarchical knowledge graph. In order to accomplish our objectives, the back-end of the system was involved in the functions of data extraction, data transformation, data clustering and data visualization. The outcome of the search and data visualization results indicate that the proposed approach can help users to get a clear overview of the LOs based on a single keyword search.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in setting up technology-focused communities of practice for teaching and learning purposes. Instructors and students can play a key role in these communities of learning by creating and/or using Open Educational Resources (OERs). In 2016 two new discipline-specific communities were created within the MERLOT OER user community: Information Systems and Information Technology (IT/IS), and Computer Science (CS). The OER taxonomies for these, predicated on the CSAB/ABET curricula were a key factor in the endorsement of these communities and their portals, by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Education Society. This paper describes the process of creation of both communities with the aim of establishing Editorial Boards to peer review OERs in these disciplines. Moreover, some analytics of the recently-created IT Editorial Board in MERLOT are presented as well.

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record.

Presents a listing of the Symposium organizing committee.

Presents a listing of the Symposium organizing committee.