ABSTRACT
This work in progress research will interest educational stakeholders in the STEM area dealing with Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and researchers interested in the affordance of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for education and especially providing personalized learning opportunities. The first question of this research seeks to identify students' general attitudes toward educational ICT. The second question is to identify any common usage patterns. And the third question is to identify affordances of the technology from the perspective of the students. The preliminary findings suggest that recent graduates in the United States have a sophisticated understanding of what educational technology is and how it can benefit their education. This is reassuring when considering the need for a sudden move to off-site teaching necessitated by an ERT. Several concerns were identified, including information quality and distractions from online entertainment. In addition, technical issues are a concern for many respondents. The qualitative questionnaire and coding have provided some insight into the perceived view of educational technology held by recent engineering graduates in the United States. This is an initial phase of this research which is ongoing and will be expanded to include a broader range of analysis techniques. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 crisis forced a rapid shift away from traditional face-to-face, blended, and hybrid learning experiences to off-site learning, drastically reducing the usual planning and design time and negatively affecting the existing scaffolding of an in-class course. This Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis. This presentation will discuss the use of technology for enhancing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) word, above-word, and sentence-level language instruction through micro-lessons. These lessons were hosted on an online content management system to provide support for learners. The lessons learned from this experience should be applicable to content designers using larger MOOCS that are interested in adding micro-lessons to their courses. The main challenge was the short timeline available to the course designers and the difficulty in dividing some macro-lessons into functional micro-lessons. This was relatively simple when dealing with the word level, such as the pronunciation of minimal pairs. However, when making lessons for the functions, the lesson duration tended to approach the limit for micro-lesson length. The functional sentence examples required more visual references, and the large variety of possible sentence patterns required that many patterns could not be included. The functions of generalization and personal opinion usually require a relatively large amount of text input that is time-consuming to assess, but the need for immediate feedback meant that the micro-lesson had to accept student input that was machine measurable. For these reasons, the researcher feels that the language functions would be best presented to the students in both a virtual class and as supplemental micro-lessons that are freely accessible at any time by the students. Examples of the micro-lessons will be shown during the presentation. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 crisis forced a rapid shift away from traditional face-to-face learning to fully off-site learning. If educators can better understand students' personal digital ecosystem, this can inform the implementation of off-site learning and lessen the impact of Emergency Remote Teaching. A short survey was employed to obtain a better understanding of the participants' degree of technological adoption in relation to their educational activities. Since this was an exploratory study, open-ended questions were used to allow a wide range of possible answers from participants. This resulted in 26 coded themes that emerged from these five open-ended questions. These themes represent the factors that the students' perceived as related to their uses of ICT for education. These initial findings suggest that, as digital natives, these students have a well-defined view of ICT that gives them clear views on the characteristics they would like to see in an online learning system.