ABSTRACT
The Robots for Learning workshop series aims at advancing the research topics related to the use of social robots in educational contexts. This year's half-day workshop follows on previous events in Human-Robot Interaction conferences focusing on efforts to discuss potential benchmarks in design, methodology and evaluation of new robotics systems that help learners. In this 6th edition of the workshop, we will be investigating in particular methods from technologies for education and online learning. Since the past few months, online and remote learning has been put in place in several countries to cope with the health and safety measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this workshop, we aim to discuss strategies to design robotics system able to provide embodied assistance to the remote learners and to demonstrate long-term learning effects.
ABSTRACT
Remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced many challenges for educators. It is important to consider how AI technologies can be leveraged to support educators and, in turn, help students learn in remote settings. In this paper, we present the results of a mixed-methods study that examined how teachers used a dashboard with real-time alerts during remote learning. Specifically, three high school teachers held remote synchronous classes and received alerts in the dashboard about students’ difficulties on scientific inquiry practices while students conducted virtual lab investigations in an intelligent tutoring system. Quantitative analyses revealed that students significantly improved across a majority of inquiry practices during remote use of the technologies. Additionally, through qualitative analyses of the transcribed audio data, we identified five trends related to dashboard use in a remote setting, including three reflecting effective implementations of dashboard features and two reflecting the limitations of dashboard use. Implications regarding the design of dashboards for use across varying contexts are discussed. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The ongoing pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 calls for rapid and cost-effective methods to accurately identify infected individuals. The vast majority of patient samples is assessed for viral RNA presence by RT-qPCR. Our biomedical research institute, in collaboration between partner hospitals and an accredited clinical diagnostic laboratory, established a diagnostic testing pipeline that has reported on more than 252,000 RT-qPCR results since its commencement at the beginning of April 2020. However, due to ongoing demand and competition for critical resources, alternative testing strategies were sought. In this work, we present a clinically-validated procedure for high-throughput SARSCoV-2 detection by RT-LAMP in 25 minutes that is robust, reliable, repeatable, sensitive, specific, and inexpensive © 2021. Buck MD et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
ABSTRACT
Purpose Within higher education, there was an abrupt shift from face-to-face to online lecturing with the introduction of social distancing measures in light of a global pandemic. The purpose of this study is to enrich the connection between students and instructors, the authors integrated elaborated interactive activities into large online lectures to enhance both students' cognitive activities and social presence. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the goals are twofold. First, the authors introduce a classroom orchestration system and its features that support active learning across learning environments. Second, they investigate the differences and similarities between student behaviors during these activities in face-to-face and online settings. Findings The findings reveal individual differences in student behaviors between student cohorts, but no differences between learning environments, highlighting the versatility of the orchestration system across face-to-face and online environments. Practical implications This work presents the use of a classroom orchestration tool that is designed to easily support teaching and learning in online and face-to-face contexts and is particularly well suited for large classes. Originality/value Online lectures can be more than watching a teacher speaking on the computer display. Rich class-wide learning activities can be integrated into online lectures to support more cognitive engagement during the lecture.