The flipped classroom has been receiving a lot of press lately as a more desirable way to manage the classroom and help students learn. However, flipping the classroom may not be appropriate for every course or every instructor. There may be a time when other active learning strategies are more appropriate to meet learning outcomes, student needs, and instructor capacity. This manuscript will d...

Assessment data were collected from multiple institutions in fall 2013 and winter 2014 to measure the conceptual understanding and perspectives of statistics for students taught under a randomization-based curriculum. We concentrated on identifying student and instructor characteristics that were associated with student gains and determining whether there was a disparity in student gains based ...

Research has demonstrated that Peer Instruction (PI) is an attractive pedagogical practice in computer science classes. PI has been shown to improve final exam performance over standard lecture, reduce failure rates, contribute to increased retention, and be widely valued by students. In addition, a recent study using isomorphic (same-concept) questions found that students are learning during p...

A geothermal power plant multiple simulator for operators training is presented. The simulator is designed to be installed in a wireless local area network and has a capacity to train one to six operators simultaneously, each one with an independent simulation session. The sessions must be supervised only by one instructor. The main parts of this multiple simulator are: instructor and operator’...

Recent policy debates have focused on class size as an explanatory variable that may, or may not, influence student achievement. This research paper reviews the literature on class size, and examines the impact of class size on successful course completion when controlling for instructor and class specific variables, the gender and ethnicity of a student, the reading abilities of students, the ...

In this lecture, we consider online network design and a new analysis framework based on tree embeddings introduced in [3]. We will start with the most basic online network design problem called the online Steiner tree problem. Then, we review the necessary background on tree embeddings for the analysis framework and apply the framework to analyze a natural greedy algorithm for the online Stein...

Many discrete optimization problems are naturally modeled as an integer (linear) programming (ILP) problem. An ILP problem is of the form max cx Ax ≤ b x is an integer vector. (1) It is easy to show that ILP is NP-hard via a reduction from say SAT. The decision version of ILP is the following: Given rational matrix A and rational vector b, does Ax ≤ b have an integral solution x? Theorem 1 Deci...

Encryption in which “your name is your public key” is called Identity-Based Encryption (IBE). Shamir’s original motivation for identity-based encryption was to simplify the management of public keys. Frequently, this process can be unwieldy because of the following problem: if Bob obtains Alice’s public key over the network, how does Bob know that the key really belongs to Alice, and not to a m...