No abstract

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play an important instructional role in teaching undergrad- and graduate-level courses, yet they receive very little training. The most common form of teaching professional development to GTAs is a pre-semester workshop held at the course, department, or college level. In this study, we describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of GTA training programs using the ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation). We used observation and interviews for data collection. ADDIE is generally used in instructional design. The results show the value of utilizing ADDIE in developing and evaluating a training program. It is intended to analyze the multi-dimensional connection of designing a training program: meeting expectations of trainees seeking to acquire skills sets as well as understanding the nuances and navigating the complex system that is needed to be successful on the job.

NoSQL databases outperform the traditional RDBMS due to their faster retrieval of large volumes of data, scalability, and high performance. The need for these databases has been increasing  in recent years because data collection is growing tremendously. Structured, unstructured, and semi- structured data storage is allowed in NoSQL, which is not possible in a traditional database. NoSQL needs to compensate with its security feature for its amazing functionalities of faster data access and large data storage. The main concern exists in sensitive information stored in the data. The need to protect this sensitive data is crucial for confidentiality and privacy problems. To understand the severity of preserving sensitive data, recognizing the security issues is important. These security issues, if not resolved, will cause data loss, unauthorized access, database crashes by hackers, and security breaches. This paper investigates the security issues common to the top twenty NoSQL databases of the following types: document, key-value, column, graph, object- oriented, and multi-model. The top twenty NoSQL databases studied were MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, Hypertable, Redis, Riak, Neo4j, Hadoop HBase, Couchbase, MemcacheDB, RavenDB, Voldemort, Perst, HyperGraphDB, NeoDatis, MyOODB, OrientDB, Apache Drill, Amazon, and Neptune. The comparison results show that there are common security issues among the databases. SQL injection security issues were detected in eight databases. The names of the databases were MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, Neo4j, Couchbase, RavenDB, OrientDB, and Apache Drill.

Usability evaluation clarifies the user’s comfortability, satisfaction, and experience with a product. The success of the product is solely dependent on the usability factor. Web applications are excellent channels to communicate between the customers and the suppliers, for satisfying users' needs. Particularly usability evaluation of web applications plays an important role in observing the design, content, and navigation of a website. These observations help to improve the design of a web application. A proper design and content management of a web application acts as a gateway to attract more customers to use their application. Customer satisfaction would also help increase business for that particular company. The restaurant recommender web application acts as a medium for customers and restaurants. These applications help the food industry to attract customers. If the mode of communication is not effective, restaurants fail to promote their food business to the customers.  Previous research studies focused on business models, restaurant reviews, and offers provided by restaurant recommenders, instead of usability evaluation.  The goal of this research study is to test the efficiency and effectiveness of zomato.com through usability evaluation. The importance of this research study is to help both Zomato and other applications to increase their popularity. The methodology used was both think aloud and observations. The results were satisfactory and informative. The average time taken for website navigation tasks was 20.5 minutes. 100% satisfaction with restaurant reviews. 33% satisfaction for restaurant search and location information. 33% were not willing to re-use the Zomato website. These results convey that user satisfaction plays a major role in users returning to a website. This could be one reason for less web usage traffic in Zomato, hence leading to unpopularity. Recommendations and future research were also discussed.

We are aware of the tremendous growth of new mobile phones released in the market every year. The increase in the users’ needs with respect to the new devices is not to be ignored as well. Each product has so many brands with n-number of models and versions.The way the users choose to buy these products is perplexing. For example,decision made to buy a new mobile or change to new brand or even continuing the same brand is not an easy task. The user acceptance for any new behavior is very complex. This paper explores all the possible human factors connected to either pleasant or unpleasant user experiences. Various researchstudies discovered that loyalty of the users for a particular brand plays an important role for the success of the product. Long- term usage of the product by a user would have a negative impact, as the user is not willing to switch to other brands and this has a positive impact on the companies. User memory, expectations and experiences are closely knit to understand the user acceptance for choosing a product. A positive emotion such as pleasant user experience is significant because users recommend the products to others based on these emotional experiences. Age plays an important role with respect to user experience. Old age users were not enthusiastic in going for a change as they preferred to continue with the same technology. Cultural aspects of users are interesting to know in understanding the product purchases. There was biased information regarding user’s visual attractiveness and long- term usage memory. Certain studies explored UX curve and user burden scale that was used to analyze user experiences. It was interesting to know sensory characteristics formed a base for both pleasant and unpleasant user experiences. This research will help companies of mobile devices in identifying the various factors (both positive and negative) related to user experiences and behavior. Future research will be conducted in the areas of short-term user experience and in areas where illiteracy prevail. This study will help the companies to improve their product better based on customer satisfaction.