A comprehensive review of security threats and solutions for the online social networks industry.

The term "cyber threats" refers to the new category of hazards that have emerged with the rapid development and widespread use of computing technologies, as well as our growing reliance on them. This article presents an in-depth study of a variety of security and privacy threats directed at different types of users of social media sites. Furthermore, it focuses on different risks while sharing multimedia content across social networking platforms, and discusses relevant prevention measures and techniques. It also shares methods, tools, and mechanisms for safer usage of online social media platforms, which have been categorized based on their providers including commercial, open source, and academic solutions.

Serious game design model for language learning in the cultural context.

Digital learning environments have been gaining prominence during the last few years. In particular, the rising usage of mobile devices, including smartphones and tabs, has invited researchers to design and develop learning applications and games for such platforms. Mobile applications and games have been developed for learning languages like many other domains. However, most of these games are fun-based and lack a holistic design and development approach. Therefore, as a principal contribution, this research presents a theoretical model for designing language learning games in a cultural context. The proposed model combines the elements of sociocultural theory with the concepts and elements of gamification, keeping in view the requirements and educational settings, including level and mode of education, etc., to ensure the effectiveness and usability of the developed game. Subsequently, based on the proposed model, a Language Learning Game (LLG) has been designed and developed through a systematic process that involves game design, low-fidelity, and high-fidelity prototyping and its validation. The LLG has been evaluated comprehensively at different stages by incorporating standard methods. Whereby this research augments the existing set of heuristics by proposing a number of specialized heuristics for the evaluation of serious games to gauge their conformance to the cultural context. The evaluation results show that the game has overall usability scores of 90%. While the quasi-experiment-based pre-test and post-test have been conducted, the results reveal that the results obtained by LLG are statistically significantly better than adopted mobile application and traditional group.

Mobile-assisted and gamification-based language learning: a systematic literature review.

Learning a new language is a challenging task. In many countries, students are encouraged to learn an international language at school level. In particular, English is the most widely used international language and is being taught at the school level in many countries. The ubiquity and accessibility of smartphones combined with the recent developments in mobile application and gamification in teaching and training have paved the way for experimenting with language learning using mobile phones. This article presents a systematic literature review of the published research work in mobile-assisted language learning. To this end, more than 60 relevant primary studies which have been published in well-reputed venues have been selected for further analysis. The detailed analysis reveals that researchers developed many different simple and gamified mobile applications for learning languages based on various theories, frameworks, and advanced tools. Furthermore, the study also analyses how different applications have been evaluated and tested at different educational levels using different experimental settings while incorporating a variety of evaluation measures. Lastly, a taxonomy has been proposed for the research work in mobile-assisted language learning, which is followed by promising future research challenges in this domain.