Compressed Phases From Traditional Development Methodology

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) it's a computer simulation for a real or an imaginary system which enables the user to perform the operations on the simulated system and it shows the effects in a real time. VR application immerses the user in a computer-generated environment which simulates reality through the using of the interactive devices that send and receive information and are worn as headsets, goggles, gloves, or body suits. Virtual reality might also be used in advancing video conferencing, business, medical and training (Chiang & Lien, 2008).

Virtual training is one of training methods that it used based on virtual environment. This type of training environment a teacher can show, explain or test some abilities that can help to the learning procedure. Virtual training has different kinds of methods, splatted in the instructor supported and the non-instructor supported. There are two screens for instructor led training; one for the student and other one for teacher. The teacher screen includes a number of tools to influence and change the environment. The student able to steering and decision in their unit area by using student screen. Where, the instructor able to create and add challenging scenarios as well as who also able to change all the attributes. Virtual training has been applied in many sectors such as military, medical and education (Wrubel, White, & Allen, 2009). This research proposes to apply virtual training for viva voce examination.

The viva voce (an oral exam or an oral test) is a task in many universities, where examiners ask questions to the student in a vocal form. The student supposed to answer the question in such a way as to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the subject in order to pass the specific exam. A viva voce exam is attended by an internal examiner (selected by the academic staff of the University) and an external examiner (which is an expert from different Higher Education Institution in the field that the thesis has been written) and the student. The student and his/her supervisors are permitted to request the presence of a Chair at the viva to ensure the student receives a fair hearing (Pearce, 2004).

To be successful in viva candidates needs to match their training and preparation to the different viva components. Although many students assume that viva preparation is covered by rereading the thesis prior to the viva, this is misguided. As well as, some students prefers a mock viva as a right practice for a real viva. Preparation for the different components of the viva is a long-term process and needs to be planned in the early stages of your research degree. In order to reduce the difficulties faced by the student on the oral examination, this research propose a new approach for viva voce preparation that calls it virtual viva system. It is system that will ask the popular questions on the real viva by using an avatar. The PhD candidate will be able to access the virtual viva system in anytime (Murray, 2011).

Problem Statement

Generally, after more than three years the PhD students submit their doctoral thesis. It is a huge process of achieving a PhD. the students often supposed submission of the thesis which is as an emotional and practical endpoint in their studies. However, there is only one endpoint in the process and it is in the final stage of a PhD that is the viva, which is intended to examine the student at their best. Potter (2006) identifies three critical functions of the viva. The first is to check that the thesis is really the candidate’s own work, with questions and discussion designed to test authenticity. The second function is aimed at testing the ability of the student to defend their work, with being ‘articulate under stress’ seen as an important credential of being a professional researcher. The third function relates to opportunities for students to clarify aspects of process and clear up any misunderstandings (Watts, 2012).

Overall, the majority of candidates may face some mental anxiety that causes some feeling like stress, nerves, pressure and worry (Arndt, Guly & McManus, 2009). Therefore, the student has to prepare for real viva by; doing mock viva, attend to (conference, presentation or real viva) or discuss with senior PhD's students. These types of preparation have advantages and disadvantages. For example, the student may be able to do only one time mock viva because it is difficult to gather examiners. Attend to conference, presentation or real viva are not enough to cover all feeling of viva because the candidate will be just listener as well as are not available anytime the student need to attend it. In addition, the discussion always will be student to student and not all the other students have the experience and enough knowledge to advice or evaluate the candidate. Therefore, these kinds of preparations are not always useful for person who nominates for viva (Tinkler& Jackson, 2008).

In general, training by mock viva is more important than other ways. However, it has several challenges such as (Murray, 2011):

Some candidates will have one mock viva and another will not take.

Difficult to guess all the questions because mock viva usually does not have external examiners.

Often the audiences in mock viva will not attend like in real viva.

Mock viva needs some cost for arrangement the examination hall and other things because mock viva has to be similar to the real viva.

On the other hand, the candidates have no feeling of stress when attend to a conference or presentation if it compare with a real viva. Moreover, discussing with other student experience does not enough to acquire a right knowledge and the time spend for argument is unlimited. The table (1) below illustrates disadvantage of some components for the preparation of the real viva.

Table 1 Preparation components

Preparation type

Processing has taken

Cost

Arrangement

Knowledge obtained

Feeling of anxiety

Mock viva

Long

Have

Need

Very Good

Have

Attend to conference, presentation or real viva

Long

Have some time

No need

Acceptable

Don’t have

Discuss with senior PhD students

Depend

Don’t have

No need

Not enough

Don’t have

This research suggests a new approach for viva voce preparation that calls it virtual viva system. Virtual viva depends on virtual reality principle. The virtual viva system aims to reduce most of these challenges.

Objectives

The main objective of this research is to identify the requirements and developing a prototype for virtual viva system. In order to achieve this objective, the sub-objectives are required to follow:

To determine the requirements for developing virtual viva prototype.

To design and develop virtual viva prototype by using PHP language and MySql.

To evaluate the performance of the prototype by using questionnaires.

Significance of the Research

Generally, this research will contribute significantly to the knowledge, because it provides a new approach for PhD viva voce preparations. This study will develop virtual viva system for PhD students. Virtual viva system enables the candidates to know many popular questions in their real viva. In addition, some other significant contributions of this study are listed below:

Training sessions can be done at the student's convenience and can be repeated as many times as the students requires.

Virtual viva can help improve the confidence level of the student to effectively in English by means of repeated viva exercises.

The students going to get big picture about the popular questions that will ask in real viva.

Literature review

Virtual reality

Virtual environment is a three-dimensional computer generated model, where participants able to interact intuitively in a real time with the environment or objects within it and to some extent have a feeling of being actually there. VR is a way for humans to manipulate, visualize and interact with computers and complex data. VR can be described as the science of integrating human with information. It consists of interactive, three-dimensional and computer generated environments. These environments can be models of a real or imaginary world. Their purpose is to present information through experience. The technology was born from the emerging of a variety disciplines including electronics, psychology, control theory and robotics, database, computer graphics, design, real time and distributed system and multimedia telepresence (Chiang & Lien, 2008).

VR is characterized by real-time simulation and presentation of, and interaction with a virtual word, offers a new quality of presentation and interaction. A model differs from the one produced by Caddie is a mid-range Computer-Assisted Draughting (CAD) system in two basic ways. Firstly, the objects can interact in a different way with the system. For example, in VR a person can pick up a torch and switch it on. Secondly, behaviors can be associated with objects; for example a cat can chase a mouse. Virtual prototyping provides such simulation by using a CAD system, into which in one or another way data of a product are supplied and the behavior calculated. In a VR system, the result is as visual display of the object in design which is rapid and efficient with the additional benefits of a virtual prototype (Phillips, 1994).

A typical VR system contains of six core components, the figure (2) shows the overview of these components that are the virtual world, simulation engine, graphics engine, user interface, user outputs and finally user inputs. The virtual world contains in its scene database the attributes for all objects within the environment and present geometric representations. The responsible of generating images is graphics engine. The dynamics of the environment is purely concerned by the simulation engine. This includes handling any programmed objects actions, interactions, user actions or physical simulation. The user interface controls how the user interacts and navigates with this virtual environment. It acts as a buffer between the virtual world software and the myriad of input and output devices.

Virtual Training Environment

Normally, VTE is a developing method in most of the educational training fields. The Researchers from each of the main departments involved have different beginning positions and still continues quite different perspectives. Below are the machineries from universally agreed or homogeneous:

(Pan, Cheok, Yang, Zhu & Shi, 2006)( Neji & Ammar, 2007) (Maizatul, 2009)

General Architecture

A VTE supplies an environment based on network and the resources in the network which are free for share. Thus, the process can improve the collaboration among the learners. The VTE helps learners to make cooperative study and making necessary interactions between each other.

Human Computer interaction

Interaction able to promote the learners active learning. Interaction able to offer the learners various controls, like interacting with the manipulating characters, virtual environment and objects in a virtual environment. The VTE technologies able to address wide range of interaction abilities. For example, Maes (1994) constructed a video-based interaction within artificial agents named the Alive System. The system is ideally suitable to each other with a physical skills, for its convenience for using instant feedback.

Synthetic Characters

A Synthetic characters with its significant feature of intelligent and interactive behavior able to provide potential tool to the learning in the VUE. For example Blumberg and his synthetic character groups have been focus on developing a specific approach to a real time learning by using a synthetic characters. Bruce Blumberg is the head of the Synthetic Characters group, he have been focusing on building a computer systems which able to robustly learn the kinds of things animals learn easily, that behavior with the daily common sense which animals show, and that evoke the feelings of the companionship that animals like dogs invoke in us. He and his group have been created many virtual characters able of an independent decisions making, and these characters have been widely demonstrated at many conferences like Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), where he has been served also as a lecturer on the artificial life of animation, virtual reality and graphics, and a smarter animated agents Their implementations are identified in reinforcement training or techniques and notified by insights from animal's training. They have been worked on building a characters which have the daily common sense, the capability to learn and the senses of empathy which one find in animals like the dogs.

Viva cove

The viva can be seen as not only a defining moment in the doctoral experience but as, in many ways, the defining element of doctorate research. It is the final assessment of the research, the thesis and the student. Questions about, for example, how the viva is conducted, who will be there and how long it lasts can have no definite answers. It is a new, high-level communication event, requiring advanced rhetorical and performance skills (Tinkler & Jackson, 2008).

Overall, the purposes of the oral examination divide into three categories: i) examination, ii) development of the candidate and her/his work, and iii) ritual. There are a variety of viva purposes that fall under the examination topic. First of all, the viva should always serve as a site for authenticating the thesis. In other words, the examiners have to confirm that the student is the writer of the thesis and that she or he has undertaken the work presented in it. Defend the thesis provides examiners with an opportunity to question, probe and explore the candidate’s thesis. The second aim is developing, Viva can serve two developmental roles: basic and advanced. Basic development, in cases where the thesis is not judged to be at doctoral standard, but where the examiners feel that it could be raised to the required standard by extra work, the viva can have a very important role in working out and discussing how the thesis can be improved. Advanced development, when examiners judge a thesis to meet PhD standards, advanced developmental roles often come to the fore. These include guidance on publications, future research and careers. Third purpose is a ritual, doctoral examination, including the viva, is one of the most formal and explicit gate keeping processes operating within academia. It can keep aspiring academics out of the academy, or it can welcome them in. While academics mentioned the celebratory or reward aspects of the viva as a rite of passage, candidates occasionally experienced the viva as a more painful ritual (Tinkler & Jackson, 2004).

Related work

According to Yang (2010) virtual reality educational training is just two dimensional. The researcher suggested using ABNet platform as shows in figure (3) to develop three dimensional applications for educational section. One of the applications the researcher applied is a virtual multimedia classroom with avatar that it can create good environment for learning. In addition, virtual academic hall was developed to provide a nice voce dialogues for the student with three dimensional environments.

Furthermore, there is another paper has been presented from Fan, Zhang and Chen (2010) related to virtual education environment. The researchers were aim from this study to teach student the negative impact of fertilizer, and the correlation with people behavior and natural environments. In this case the authors has been provided model for virtual education training environment. The model has been created for simulation task in education parts as in figure (3) illustrious below.

Methodology

Methodology is a set of principles or guidelines that able to be applied and tailored to a specific situation. In a research environment, these principles may be a list of things to achieve. The methodologies might also be specific forms, templates, approach and even checklists used over the development life cycle (Charvat, 2003). A methodology could also be defined as:

The analysis of the principles of rules, methods, and postulates employed by a correction.

A set of procedures or particular procedure.

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

The methodology for this research will apply by using Rapid Application Development (RAD) Methodology. The best approach for develop a small prototype with short time is (RAD) Methodology. Therefore, virtual viva will be more suitable with (RAD). Normal software development methodologies often follow a sequence of stages (Charvat, 2003). The sequence:

Gather user requirements.

Formulate Specifications and the design.

Complete project Development.

Testing commences.

Compressed phases from traditional development methodology

Requirements planning

User design

Construction

Cutover

Figure 4 Compressed phases from traditional development (Maizatul, 2009).

Phase 1: Requirements planning

In this phase is a fully understand of the life cycle of the prototype and realize all the integrated elements of system planning and system analysis. Therefore, the problem for PhD and Master Students during viva voce examination should be quite clear in this section. Thus, literature study from the available sources such as proceedings, books, white papers, journals, news and reports will review to gather the relevant information to solve the problem. Also, Requirements planning known as the Concept Definition Stage, this phase describes the data subject areas and business functions that the system will determine and support the system’s scope. Therefore, according to the previous study and the initial requirements that obtained from literature review, the primary model as illustrated in figure (5):

Phase 2: User design

This phase is usually significantly abbreviated and accelerated. In this point, the focus changes to design. This part will specific the design and also reviews the materials from earlier phases. It focus to identifying any additional system objects, data structures for all objects also determining operations, validating relationships as well as prototyping user interface objects and interactions between objects.

Phase 3: Construction

This stage is focuses on application and program development task related to the system. The virtual viva prototype will develop by using PHP program language to design the class and the interface for the prototype and the database of the prototype was implemented by using MySQL language.

Phase 4: Cutover

Resembles the final tasks is testing the Virtual Viva system. The evaluation will perform to define the level of helpfulness and usefulness of the system after it will develop. The evaluation will be through questionnaire. The rating based on the usability and the testing will follow Perceived Usefulness and Ease of Use (PUEU), by Davis (1989). The prototype will evaluate by the PhD candidates and Master by research students.

Table (2) below shows the aims of the search through following questions:

C:\Users\TiMaRY\Dropbox\Ali Raad - MSc\Pictures\Research question.bmp

Scope and Limitation of the Study

The scope of this study will focus on viva voce part of education. Virtual viva system is related to PhD candidates and Master students by research. Virtual viva will ask popular questions that usually asked in a real viva.

Gantt chart:

C:\Users\TiMaRY\Dropbox\Ali Raad - MSc\Pictures\Gantt chart.bmp