Browsing by Author "Imbulpitiya, A"

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Open Access
Say No to Free Riding: Student Perspective on Mechanisms to Reduce Social Loafing in Group Projects.
(Science and Technology Publications, 2021) Samarakoon, U; Imbulpitiya, A; Manathunga, K
Project based learning is a popular teaching method in Information Technology undergraduate programs where students gain necessary skills and knowledge via a hands-on capstone project. Key learning gains from such projects are problem-solving skills by applying theoretical knowledge while improving soft skills like collaboration and communication. Students can improve critical thinking, learn to face challenging situations, and build creative solutions for a desired problem as a group. Irrespective of all these benefits, social loafing or simply free riding can be recognized as the key challenge in these group-based projects. Some students in group projects put less effort on group work than when they work alone while surviving in the group and taking credits for someone else’s work. This scenario leads to demotivation of hard-working members and lot of group conflicts. Ultimately, social loafing affects the group performance while resulting with unsuccessful projects and dissatisfied students. Seeking mechanisms for reducing social loafing in group projects is becoming a vital and this research proposes set of mechanisms to reduce social loafing in IT group projects and presents the students’ perspective on usefulness of each mechanism.
Embargo
Using active learning integrated with pedagogical aspects to enhance student’s learning experience in programming and related concepts
(Springer, Cham, 2019-09-25) Imbulpitiya, A; Kodagoda, N; Gamage, A; Suriyawansa, K
Teaching programming concepts and skills to beginners is a challenging and daunting task. As undergraduates, students struggle with understanding the fundamental concepts of programming and learning the syntaxes to build up a solution to an existing problem. The main challenges in delivering an introductory programming module are to get the students actively engaged within and outside the classroom and to increase the level of interest towards programming. Many researchers have tried out using different active learning tools and techniques to engage students in the learning process interactively. Even though lot of different techniques and tools have been introduced with time there is still a reluctancy among the learners and academics to move from the traditional teacher centric learning environment to a more interactive student centric environment. This research is focusing on how active learning integrated with pedagogical aspects can be used in an introductory programming module and the effectiveness of it when compared with a traditional approach.
Open Access
Virtual student advisor using NLP and automatic appointment scheduler and feedback analyser
(www.ijser.org, 2016-02-02) Suvethan, N; Avenash, K; Huzaim, M. A. Q; Mathusagar, R; Gamage, M. P. A. W; Imbulpitiya, A
Virtual Student Advisor is a research project that mainly concerned on addressing a comprehensive solution to overcome the difficulties faced by the academic departments of any academic institutions. According to the context, the role of the Student Advisor is focused on helping students with problems related to their academic carrier at the University and also answer the general queries made by students related to the procedures conducted at the Institute. This happens to be a tedious and a very inefficient task for the Academics as they have to repeat the same answers for many students and also students coming to meet the academic in ad hoc manner without proper appointments makes both the student and the academic face lot of problems. The Virtual Student Advisor system mainly consists of three components; A Natural language based inquiry management module, Priority wise automatic appointment scheduler and Feedback analyzer. The inquiry management module is responsible in handling user queries based on frequently asked questions. Users can get the answers for a query by entering the question in natural language. This is implemented as a mobile application as it is convenient for students to ask questions from any place at any time. The system will answer the queries and if it needs more explanation it will be directed to the relevant advisor. Auto appointment scheduler handles the student appointment requests and helps in managing the schedules. This will be accessed by both Academics to set their free time slots and the students to request an appointment according to urgency. Feedback analyzer handles the entire process of student feedback taken for each subject starting from preparing feedback forms till analyzing the collected information. The lecturer can prepare a feedback form using the question bank in the system and customize it further to fit the requirements and after conducting the feedback the system can process the data and provide reports on varies views of the data such as tables and pie charts. The system uses Natural Language Processing to handle students’ queries by tokenizing the sentences and extracting answers based on keywords and comparing synonyms WordNet lexical database. The appointment scheduler uses priority based Round Robin CPU Scheduling Algorithm to schedule the appointments according to urgency. The Virtual Student Advisor system consists of a mobile application for students and a web application for both students and lecturers to access the information and conducted their daily tasks related to academic administration effectively.