Anecdotal evidence shows that in computer programming courses plagiarism is a widespread problem. With the growing number of students in such courses, manual plagiarism detection is impractical. This requires instructors to use one of the many available plagiarism detection tools. Prior to choosing one of such tools, a metric that assures the…

Numerous studies have identified causal factors for academic success. Factors vary from personal factors, such as cognitive style (McKenzie & Schweitzer, 2001), to social factors, such as culture differences (Aysan, Tanriogen, & Tanriogen, 1996). However, in these studies it is re-searchers who theorized the causal dimensions and…

How can transnational education (TNE) programs be made more effective? According to the literature, no one is in a better position to comment on this question than the students themselves. At the same time, there is a recognized scarcity in the literature of student input into the issue of transnational program effectiveness. In consideration of…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Declining enrollment in MIS Departments in Colleges of Business has been the norm for many if not most universities since the dot.com bust of 2000. This has serious repercussions for the departments involved, students, and the companies that hire MIS graduates. In order to reverse this trend, an understanding of the important factors which…

Literature relating to personality and entrepreneurship has focused primarily on personality characteristics of traditional entrepreneurs. The focus of this study was on personality characteristics and temperaments of potential Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entrepreneurs. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the…

Designing web technology courses that match students' knowledge background and emphasize students' hands-on experience is imperative yet challenging. This paper discusses a new approach to teaching web technologies, particularly, open source Web 2.0 technologies, in which a combination of studios, mini-lectures, presentations and tutorials, class…

Concurrent engineering or overlapping activities is a business strategy for schedule compression on large development projects. Design parameters and tasks from every aspect of a product's development process and their interdependencies are overlapped and worked on in parallel. Concurrent engineering suffers from negative effects such as excessive…

Since 2001, there has been a dramatic decline in Information Technology and Computer Science student enrolments worldwide. As a consequence, many institutions have evaluated their offerings and revamped their programs to include units designed to capture students' interests and increase subsequent enrolment. Likewise, at Victoria University the…

The majority of an engineer's time in the software industry is spent working with other programmers. Agile methods of software development like eXtreme Programming strongly rely upon practices like daily meetings and pair programming. Hence, the need to learn the skill of working collaboratively is of primary importance for software developers.…

Java is an object-oriented programming language. From a software engineering perspective, object-oriented design and programming is used at the architectural design, and structured design and programming is used at the detailed design within methods. As such, structured programming skills are fundamental to more advanced object-oriented…

Every few years, there is a breakthrough in information technology, introducing a new concept that becomes widely used. This paper deals with the challenges IT (information technology) instructors face due to these rapid developments in the IT industry. More specifically, we are interested in the challenges instructors of the introductory IT…

The use of computers has become part of everyday life. The high prevalence of computer use appears to lead employers to assume that university graduates will have the good computing skills necessary in many graduate level jobs. This study investigates how well the expectations of employers match the perceptions of near-graduate students about the…

Open Source Software (OSS) is a major force in today's Information Technology (IT) landscape. Companies are increasingly using OSS in mission-critical applications. The transparency of the OSS technology itself with openly available source codes makes it ideal for students to participate in the OSS project development. OSS can provide unique…

In modern learning environments, the lecturer or educational designer is often confronted with multi-national student cohorts, requiring special consideration regarding language, cultural norms and taboos, religion, and ethics. Through a somewhat provocative example we demonstrate that taking such factors into account can be essential to avoid…