Zurinah Suradi

Most organizations use performance appraisal system to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their employees. In evaluating staff performance, it usually involves awarding numerical values or linguistic labels to their performance. These values and labels are used to represent each staff’s achievement by reasoning incorporated in the arithmetical or statistical methods. However, the staff performance appraisal may involve judgments which are based on imprecise data especially when human (the superior) tries to interpret another human (his/her subordinate) performance. Thus, the scores awarded by the appraiser are only approximations. From fuzzy logic perspective, the performance of the appraisee involves the measurement of his/her ability, competence and skills, which are actually fuzzy concepts that can be captured in fuzzy terms. Accordingly, fuzzy approach can be used to handle these imprecision and uncertainty information. Therefore, the performance appraisal system can be examined using Fuzzy Logic Approach and this was carried out in the study. The study utilized hierarchical fuzzy inference approach since performance evaluation comprises of four criteria; namely work achievement, skill knowledge, personal quality, and community services. The output of the study provides the ranking for staff performance. From this study, it is expected that reasoning based on fuzzy models will provide an alternative way in handling various kinds of imprecise data, which often reflected in the way people think and make judgments.

Conducting a systematic literature review is an essential research activity in ensuring a good piece of research.
However, students who are new to this research activity may find the activity highly challenging. This article presents the
findings from a classroom research involving pre-service teachers on the use of concept mappings for conducting and creating a literature review. The findings indicate that students are overwhelmed by the vast amount of information that they encounter and often do not know how to identify and organize the information to be of use in their research. However, by using concept maps, the creation of a literature review becomes less daunting and more bearable throughout. Concept mappings are used for two purposes mainly that is, to summarize the information obtained from an individual source and to synthesise information obtained from the different sources.

This paper discusses on an analysis of Technology Acceptance Model of Learning Management System for
an ODL university in Malaysia towards the e-satisfaction and e-retention of the students. The factors being
used to measure the satisfaction and retention of students are perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness,
enjoyment, design features, security and privacy, and internet connection. The result of the study indicated
that for the LMS factors, the Internet connection and security and privacy have a significance positive
influence on e-satisfaction. Although the design feature of LMS was demonstrated to have little influence
on e-satisfaction, this factor may have influence on specific type of e-learning system. In contrast, only
Internet connection has a significance positive influence on e-retention, while the design features and the
security and privacy are shown to have less influence on e-retention.
Key Words: Teachnology Acceptance Model, Learning Management System, E-Satisfaction, E-Retention,
Malaysia, Adult learner, On-line learning.