COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR
A CROSS-DISCIPLINE RESEARCH CONSORTIUM
William B. Frakes, Gabriella Belli, Julián Urbano* and Reghu Anguswamy
Virginia Tech, Haycock Rd., Falls Church, VA, U.S.A.
*University Carlos III of Madrid, Avda. Universidad, Leganés, Madrid, Spain
Keywords: Graduate education, Research support, Website support, Statistical packages.
Abstract: This paper describes the use of web based and freeware tools for a cross-discipline research consortium to
support graduate education. The use of WordPress and Simple Machine Forums as the main environment to
provide web support is discussed, as are the use of statistics tools such as R and SAS-JMP. Usage data for
these tools are provided.
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper describes a multi-year effort on tools and
services to support a cross discipline Research
Methods Consortium for the Virginia Tech National
Capital region (NCR-RMC). The purpose of the
NCR-RMC is to provide better support for research
at VT-NCR by coordinating research resources
across colleges. This involves improved information
importation and sharing for consulting support and
coordinated teaching. The VT-NCR offers degrees at
the masters and doctorate levels. There are now 6
colleges represented in the region: Architecture and
Urban Studies, Business, Engineering, Science,
Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and Natural
Resources. These colleges currently offer more than
45 graduate degrees and certificates. There are 18
recognized centers represented in the region.
The colleges employ about 105 full-time
teaching, research and administrative faculty, and 50
support staff. There are currently around 1,000
students of whom about one third are full-time. The
part time students are primarily working
professionals who spend limited time on campus.
A preliminary survey produced a list of available
courses and some information about requirements
and needs. Many VT-NCR programs have a need for
statistical and/or research methods instruction,
which may or may not be offered within their own
department or college. Also, research or analysis
topics are sometimes included as part of content
courses. We found that several programs have to
rely on adjuncts or were in the process of trying to
hire faculty to help meet the research needs of
students. Occasionally, a methods course that
students planned on taking was cancelled, forcing
students to go to other universities. In at least one
case, a viable course for students in one program
could have been available from another program, but
that information was not known. In another case,
professors in two different colleges were teaching
essentially the same multivariate statistics course
with very small class sizes.
While certain specialized courses for particular
needs in one program may not be suited to another
program, some courses could serve multiple
programs. Likewise, useful resources or materials
could be shared if there was some way to do so
efficiently. One problem was a lack of effective
communication in a timely manner and of a good
vehicle to share and/or obtain such information. We
did an in-depth exploration of available resources
and specific needs for statistics and research
methods across VT-NCR programs. We determined
that one way to support these needs was with online
information, tools, and training. Section 2 describes
these resources and reports measures of their usage.
Section 3 presents the supporting activities of the
consortium, section 4 discusses the collaboration
activities and section 5 provides the conclusions of
the paper.
154
B. Frakes W., Belli G., Urbano J. and Anguswamy R. (2010).
COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR A CROSS-DISCIPLINE RESEARCH CONSORTIUM .
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 154-159
DOI: 10.5220/0002771501540159
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 COMPUTER SUPPORT
In this section we describe several types of
computing resources that were used to support the
research consortium effort.
2.1 Statistical Analysis Tools
We decided to primarily support three statistical
analysis tools, R (The R Project for Statistical
Computing, 2010), Microsoft Excel®, and SAS JMP
(JMP Software, 2010). We chose R because it is a
powerful, widely used, freeware environment and
SAS-JMP because of its ease of use and the fact that
it is supplied to all Virginia Tech students. We chose
Excel because many of the students already knew
how to perform basic tasks with it. These tools are
used for thesis and dissertation research by students
and research by faculty. These tools are also used to
support classes.
To support training in R, we developed several
screencast videos with CamStudio, containing
tutorials. These videos were to be uploaded to
Youtube, but due to its lack of video quality, we
finally chose to use Google Video. The R training
videos on Google Video are:
1. Introduction. This first video tutorial covers
how to download R, variables and simple data
types, operations, functions, and how to get
help within R.
2. Complex Data Types. The second tutorial
covers the basics of creation and modification
of vectors, lists, data frames, and tables in R.
3. Indexes. The third tutorial covers indexing
vectors, lists, data frames, tables, and indexing
by conditions.
4. Data Import & Export. The forth tutorial
covers how to import different types of data
structures both from files and the clipboard.
Exporting data is also covered.
As of October 13, 2009, in a year and a half of
availability, these videos has been watched 350
times and downloaded 9 times.
Many places in our website are dedicated to
these statistical analysis tools, with references to
books and other tutorials, as well as other pointers to
resource material.
2.2 Website
A website was created containing information about
research courses, funding sources, cross-discipline
research, and tools and methods for research. It can
be found at http://rmc.ncr.vt.edu. The blogging
platform WordPress (WordPress > Blog Tool and
Publishing platform, 2010) was used for this
website. It allowed us to add information and
resources so that it is easy for readers to keep track
of new content. Blogs are thought to be useful for
this kind of situation as users can easily post
feedback comments and also follow other
comments. We chose WordPress because it is one of
the easiest and most used free platforms. Moreover,
the website supports RSS (Really Simple
Syndication) syndication, allowing readers to be
instantly notified of new content either in their e-
mail or feed reader. At a given time, on average, 10
users are subscribed to this feed.
Despite being focused on the management,
categorization and display of new content,
WordPress also allowed us to have static
information (i.e. lists of courses, funding sources,
etc.) always visible.
Another point in favor of a platform like this, is
the possibility of having multiple users adding new
content at the same time which we considered a
major advantage.
The website is running on a regular desktop
computer, with a standard freeware LAMP platform,
using Ubuntu Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Being the most common platform on the Internet,
there is plenty of documentation and its maintenance
does not require much effort.
As of October 13, 2009, the website has been
visited 6,897 times by 4,223 unique visitors, who
displayed a total of 17,782 pages.
2.2.1 Mindmaps
In order to organize the information and make
navigation easy for the user, we developed several
mindmaps using FreeMind (FreeMind – free mind
mapping software, 2010). Figure 1 shows a
mindmap of the research resources and information
available. Each of the topics in the mindmap is
hotlinked to the relevant section in the website.
2.2.2 Forum
It was clear from the beginning that the purpose of
the consortium was not just for its members to share
resources, but also to debate and ask for help on any
research-related topic. Of course, this is crucial from
the student point of view, so we later decided to
incorporate a web forum. It allowed us to discuss
topics about statistics, writing, joint research groups
and some others, as shown in Figure 2.
COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR A CROSS-DISCIPLINE RESEARCH CONSORTIUM
155

Figure 1: Mindmap of RMC resources.
The platform chosen was Simple Machines
Forum (Home of SMF : Free PHP and MySQL
forum software, 2010) because it is, again, one of
the most widely used and simple systems. It is
freeware, offers good anti-spam protection and is
also capable of RSS feed syndication, which was a
plus. Its system requirements are similar to
WordPress’, so the same machine is used to run both
services
As of October 13, 2009, 59 registered members
participate in the forum, having a total of 254 posts
organized in 209 topics. Each of these topics has
been seen 530 times on average, summing up to
110,775 views in total.
2.2.3 Writing Support
The forum section on writing support currently
includes links to the style and diction tools for
checking writing style, the Queequeg Grammar
(Queequeg, A Tiny English Grammar Checker,
2010) checker, and to discussions of Latex (LaTeX
project: LaTeX - A document preparation system,
2010) and Microsoft PowerPoint. Students get
training on these tools in some courses. These
courses also require students to use Google Scholar
(Google Scholar, 2010), Citeseer (Computer and
Information Science Papers Citeseer Publications
Research Index, 2010), and Web of Science (ISI
Web of Knowledge, 2010) to measure the citation
rates for references they choose for course research
projects.
2.2.4 Research Resources
The research resources section of the forum includes
links to a variety of information sources, from
decision trees for selecting inferential statistics to
how to measure research quality, as well as links to
publicly available datasets. Also included is
information specific to our own students such as
how to get library help and a seminar series in
Computer Science.
2.3 Research Groups
There are two research groups listed on the forum,
Service Oriented Architectures, and Software Reuse
and Domain Analysis. These group listings provide
a way for researchers to identify each other and
collaborate, and provides a convenient way to link
web resources relevant to the groups.
2.3.1 Dissertation and Thesis Support
Since January 1, 1997, Virginia Tech. (VT)
mandated that all graduate students submit their
theses and dissertations online in order that research
and scholarship conducted by them be freely
available and openly accessible. It also allows for
the use of audio and video as part of their final
scholarly products. This section of the website
contains a summary of available online guidelines,
which appear in various VT web pages.
Additionally, students are provided with an
overview of the traditional five chapter format and
guidelines for an alternative format, which refers to
the use of manuscripts and/or book chapters to
replace standard chapters. Other useful information,
such as advice on how to successfully complete a
thesis, is included in a forum topic area.
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Figure 2: Mindmap of RMC forum.
2.3.2 Institutional Review Board
Any research conducted by students or faculty that
involves human subjects must be reviewed and
approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
This page alerts researchers to that requirement,
providing links to VT’s IRB page. Additional links
lead researchers to the pages for the Office of
Research Compliance, which provides support to
assure that appropriate laws and regulations
regarding the conducting of research are met. This
also addresses Post Approval Monitoring for both
animal and human researchers, which is a way to
ensure compliance with both University and Federal
regulations after a research protocol has been
approved.
2.4 Course Support
The NCR-RMC effort has been used to support and
enhance several courses, and to make more courses
available across college boundaries. R, SAS-JMP,
and Excel, for example, have been introduced into
the courses: CS5014 - Research Methods in
Computer Science, CS5744 - Software Design and
Quality, STAT 5615 - Statistics in Research I and
EDRE 6605 & 6606 - Quantitative Research
Methods in Education I & II. The Google Video
tutorials on R, discussed above, are used to
introduce students to that tool. In both courses the
RMC website is used as an information source and
the forum is used for discussion of course topics,
which serves as a knowledge body for future years.
For example, the discussion of the use of simulation
versus experimentation, which began in CS5014, has
been accessed over 2000 times. Other contributions
to the forum discussions by students include the
topics of Google technical talks on information
retrieval and the use of formal methods in software
engineering.
The Identification of cross-discipline research
methods courses led to the adoption of new cognate
courses for Computer Science majors. Cognate
courses are courses taught outside the computer
science department that are used to give students
breadth of learning. These courses, such as
EDRE5644, Questionnaire Design and Survey
Research help to broaden the research approaches
for theses and dissertations in Computer Science.
2.5 Usage Statistics
Although NCR-RMC is intended for Virginia Tech
faculty and students, we soon noticed that our
website was being visited from many other states in
the United States, and eventually from many other
countries. Eighty one percent of the total visits to
our website, excluding the forum, came from within
the US. The other 19% came from 118 different
countries. The surprising figure is that only 55% of
the total visits came from the State of Virginia. This
leaves us with about 45% of the visits coming from
people that presumably had nothing to do with
Virginia Tech.
A more detailed analysis shows that 38% of the
total visits were the result of queries to search
engines like Google or Yahoo. Again, only 16% of
these visits came from the State of Virginia.
We examined the 2000+/- queries people used
when they reached us, and found that over 55% of
the queries were about:
 “research methods” with 466 visits.
 “quantitative research” with 344 visits.
 “education” with 328 visits.
 “statistics” with 228 visits.
We think these numbers help to support the point
in favour of efforts like the NCR-RMC, because
many visits to the site seem to come from people
external to the University.
3 SUPPORTING ACTIVITIES
Although the primary motivation for the RMC was
related to better communication across the faculty, it
soon became apparent that student needs beyond
COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR A CROSS-DISCIPLINE RESEARCH CONSORTIUM
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coursework and resource information needed to be
considered. As stated above, most of our student
body consists of employed adults working on their
advanced degrees on a part time basis. This
translates into a need for information and support in
ways that differ from the needs of full-time students.
3.1 Support Person
A full-time graduate student at VT-NCR is
employed as a support person for 20 hours a week to
support the RMC. The support person is given an
office with a desktop computer. The support person
chosen was required to have basic background
experience in computer science, statistics and
research methods. An email id
([e-mail]) is setup as a contact
email id for the support person specific to RMC
activities. Responsibilities of the support person
include maintaining and updating the website and
forum as its administrator.
The support person also acts as a consultant on
statistics and statistical tools such as R, SAS-JMP,
and Excel. For example, the support person assisted
a professor from the College of Business to
implement a Principal Component Analysis and
Factor Rotation in SAS-JMP. At least 3 students
from the College of Engineering were trained in R to
build boxplots and interpret them. Students also
approach the support person for help in thesis and
dissertation formatting, as well as for the analysis of
their data.
The support person serves as a point of contact
to the RMC resources. The person also guides
students to related resources such as the different
support groups, online resources, courses offered
etc.
3.2 Dissertation Support Group
One venue for such support was the Dissertation
Support Group, which was jointly sponsored by the
NCR-RMC and the NCR Graduate Student Services
Office. Meetings were held on a monthly basis for
the purpose of providing general information and
discussions regarding research and the dissertation
process. After the NCR-RMC was initiated, the first
Dissertation Support Group meeting consisted of a
presentation of the resources available on the
website and a discussion of how to make use of
them. Other sessions included presentations by
invited faculty and discussions on topics such as
 using spreadsheets to organize the literature
search,
 the differences between a typical five-chapter
dissertation format and a manuscript format
with several chapters intended to be stand-
alone manuscripts suitable for submission,
 issues concerning selecting members for the
dissertation committee
 guidelines for getting approval from the
Institutional Review Board for their research.
Participating students were from different
colleges and departments, as well as from different
physical locations in the Northern Virginia area.
Although attendance was small (typically, 10 to 25
students per session), those who attended were very
positive about the presentations.
3.3 Panels on Qualitative Research
Although much of the research at VT-NCR is
quantitative, more and more students are interested
in pursuing qualitative research (Creswell, 2007),
(Schwandt, 2001). We have limited course
opportunities for these students. In response to this
need, we organized two panel discussions for the
purpose of demonstrating some of the breadth of
qualitative research. Five VT faculties and one
doctoral student from different disciplines provided
their perspectives via overviews of the use of
qualitative techniques in their research. The six
presentations covered auto-ethnography,
ethnography and case studies, oral histories,
historical research, phenomenology, and grounded
theory and the application of qualitative methods to
inform building simulation models in systems
engineering. MP3 files of the presentations and
subsequent discussions were made available through
the NCR-RMC website.
4 COLLABORATION
Faculty collaboration across departments is
encouraged at Virginia Tech, and particularly so in
our off-campus location. An initial underlying goal
for the NCR-RMC was to foster the development of
a community of practice that crossed departmental
lines and with a common interest in teaching
research methods. One example of this was a joint
research methods course taught by faculty from
computer science and college of education.
Communities of practice are “groups of people
informally bound together by shared expertise and
passion for a joint enterprise” (Wenger and Snyder,
2000), (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002).
There was and continues to be a lot of interest and
support for such an endeavour in the NCR, but we
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are still working on increasing the levels of
participation.
(Wenger et al., 2002) described three levels of
participation in communities of practice:
1. Core members, small group or regular
participants who contribute regularly to the
forum.
2. Active members, a somewhat larger group
who participate periodically with lower levels
of engagement.
3. Peripheral members, who typically constitute
the largest group but who do not contribute
and maintain passive participation.
This certainly has been our experience. While
gratified by the apparent peripheral usage of the
website and supporting activities, we are working
toward increasing both active and core participation.
Two activities planned for this academic year
revolve around different formats for dissertations
and theses. The first will bring interested faculty
together to discuss various options so that a coherent
set of guidelines may be developed for students from
different programs. The second is to facilitate a
series of presentations by current and former
students to discuss their use of different formats and
approaches. It is hoped that these activities will
foster continued involvement through the forum,
thereby providing a vibrant discussion of options
and procedures.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have described the use of web
based, freeware, and other tools to support a cross-
discipline research consortium in an off-campus
setting, with several locations and many part-time
professional students. Based on data we have
collected, and on our experience using the tools in
courses and for research, we conclude that this
technology is an important aid to our research
consortium effort.
The website serves as an information repository
and discussion venue for the consortium. Its contents
are secondary and tertiary literature. That is, some
information and resources about research methods,
tools, and coursework contained in the NVC-RMC
web page is available elsewhere, but we thought it
necessary to have a single location where both
faculty and students could easily find such
information and, more importantly, be able to share
their knowledge.
The usage statistics only tell part of the story.
There are also intangible benefits from bringing
together a community of researchers, both faculty
and students.
It is our hope that the model we used in creating
and maintaining the Research Methods Consortium
for Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region will be
useful to others who might want or need a similar
stimulus to aid in interdisciplinary research and in
building a research community.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Dr. Karen DePauw, Vice
President and Dean for Graduate Education at
Virginia Tech., for her continued support to the
NCR-RMC effort.
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