Farzana Afrin

Farzana Afrin, Mohammad Saiedur Rahaman, Margaret Hamilton

The identification and analysis of student satisfaction is a challenging issue. This is becoming increasingly important since a measure of student satisfaction is taken as an indication of how well a course has been taught. However, it remains a challenging problem as student satisfaction has various aspects. In this paper, we formulate the student satisfaction estimation as a prediction problem where we predict different levels of student satisfaction and infer the influential predictors related to course and instructor. We present five different aspects of student satisfaction in terms of 1) course content, 2) class participation, 3) achievement of initial expectations about the course, 4) relevancy towards professional development, and 5) if the course connects them and helps to explore the real-world situations. We employ state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to predict each of these aspects of student satisfaction levels. For our experiment, we utilize a large student evaluation dataset which includes student perception using different attributes related to courses and the instructors. Our experimental results and comprehensive analysis reveal that student satisfaction is more influenced by course attributes in comparison to instructor related attributes.

Farzana Afrin, Mohammad Saiedur Rahaman

The aim of Harmonic Broadcasting protocol is to reduce the bandwidth usage in video-on-demand service where a video is divided into some equal sized segments and every segment is repeatedly transmitted over a number of channels that follows harmonic series for channel bandwidth assignment. As the bandwidth of channels differs from each other and users can join at any time to these multicast channels, they may experience a synchronization problem between download and playback. To deal with this issue, some schemes have been proposed, however, at the cost of additional or wastage of bandwidth or sudden extreme bandwidth requirement. In this paper we present an adaptive quasi harmonic broadcasting scheme (AQHB) which delivers all data segment on time that is the download and playback synchronization problem is eliminated while keeping the bandwidth consumption as same as traditional harmonic broadcasting scheme without cost of any additional or wastage of bandwidth. It also ensures the video server not to increase the channel bandwidth suddenly that is, also eliminates the sudden buffer requirement at the client side. We present several analytical results to exhibit the efficiency of our proposed broadcasting scheme over the existing ones.