Interdisciplinary Teaching Reform of Financial Engineering Majors Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process in the Post-Pandemic Era

In the post-epidemic era, the labor market has become increasingly complex, making it even more crucial to incorporate sustainability into employment demand. As we enter the post-pandemic era, a globalization trend has become more apparent. It is crucial to modernize employability through educational reform in order to assist employees in enhancing their professional skills. This study began by analyzing the importance of financial engineering practice instruction and graduate employability in the post-epidemic era. Second, the study proposed the content and a plan for inter-disciplinary teaching reform to address talent cultivation needs based on labor market requirements. Third, a face-to-face survey and interview were conducted with students affected by changes in teaching, and the results were analyzed and summarized. On this basis, the impact of education reform was evaluated using both the expert scoring method and the analytic hierarchy approach. The results indicated that the suggested financial engineering teaching reform program improved the school's discipline strength, enrollment rate, employment rate, and competition awards, especially discipline strength. This research can be used to inform the teaching of financial engineering majors in various countries, assist job candidates in enhancing their professional skills, and build a formidable talent pool for the labor market.

Behavior of Science and Engineering Students to Digital Reading: Educational Disruption and Beyond

This paper investigates the impact of digital reading during educational disruption on science and engineering students' learning experience. Before the pandemic, some studies explored whether university students preferred using printed or digital resources for their academic readings. Amidst the pandemic, online learning became essential. Several studies showed students' preference for printed text. This paper extends a pilot study that was conducted during the first COVID-19 wave in China. A survey consisting of Likert questions and open questions was designed using MS-Forms. The survey was shared with the science and engineering students in Years 2–4 (Levels 1–3) of their study at SWJTU-Leeds Joint School, Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China. This covered students from four undergraduate programs: Civil Engineering with Transport, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science. In total, 223 students participated in this study. The survey was anonymous and was made available to students for a month. The participation rate is nearly 27%. Findings indicate that the behavior of science and engineering students toward digital reading was different than other majors, and it is generally favorable. The necessity for online learning during educational disruption has encouraged some students to develop their digital reading skills. © 2023 by the authors.

Flipped online approach with learning analytics for supporting higher education students' learning. Course feedback results

Using learning analytics and dispositional learning analytics in teaching is difficult. Examples of their use are required for higher educational institutions and teachers. In this paper, we present a flipped learning approach in online settings (due to COVID-19) with particular emphasis on learning analytics and dispositional learning analytics. For this, an understanding of flipped approaches (i.e., flipped classroom and flipped learning) as well as the role of technology in the teaching context is required and presented. The role of technology includes (1) a digital learning system, (2) a conferencing system, (3) the collection and use of learning analytics and dispositional learning analytics, and (4) content-specific technology. Additionally, our aim is to present students' course feedback results from quantitative research methods course practices (2020, 2021) for preservice teachers (i.e., students;N = 70). The content is highly challenging for these students, causing fear, frustration, anxiety, and boredom. Generally, the results for pedagogy were positive, but the results of students' learning perceptions were lower. Based on the approach and results, discussion with new insights is provided. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

Blending Academic Writing: The Use of Technology to teach amid Covid-19 Pandemic

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers have to hesitantly switch to the virtual world of teaching, known as enriched virtual blended learning in which technology, surely plays a significant role in material delivery and discussion. Studies related to blended learning in English language classes, especially in academic writing classes, have been done in many countries, but they are still lacking in the Indonesian setting. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of technology utilization in enriched blended learning to teach academic writing and the students' perspectives towards the use of technology in blended learning. This study involving forty-five students in a university in Jakarta applied both quantitative and qualitative methods. A pre-test and a post-test were assigned before and after the blended learning period to study the effectiveness of blended learning. In addition, surveys and interviews were conducted to investigate the students' perspectives. The results indicated that the use of technology in blended learning effectively helped students develop their academic writing skills despite being a new experience. Furthermore, despite some limitations, this strategy of using technology in teaching-learning was accepted with optimism as they started to get accustomed to it. Hence, the use of technology is promising for the future of learning. © 2023 IEEE.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Smart Tele-Assisting Technology for First-Year Engineering Students

Engineering programs emphasize students career advancement by ensuring that engineering students gain technical and professional capabilities during their four-year study. In a traditional engineering laboratory, students "learn by doing", and laboratory equipment facilitates their discipline-specific knowledge acquisition. Unfortunately, there were significant educational uncertainties, such as COVID-19, which halted laboratory activities for an extended period, causing challenges for students to perform and obtain practical experiments on campus. To overcome these challenges, this research proposes and develops an Artificial Intelligence-based smart tele-assisting technology application to digitalize first-year engineering students practical experience by incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms using the HoloLens 2. This application improves virtual procedural demonstrations and assists first-year engineering students in conducting practical activities remotely. This research also applies various machine learning algorithms to identify and classify different images of electronic components and detect the positions of each component on the breadboard (using the HoloLens 2). Based on a comparative analysis of machine learning algorithms, a hybrid CNN-SVM (Convolutional Neural Network - Support Vector Machine) model is developed and is observed that a hybrid model provides the highest average prediction accuracy compared to other machine learning algorithms. With the help of AR (HoloLens 2) and the hybrid CNN-SVM model, this research allows students to reduce component placement errors on a breadboard and increases students competencies, decision-making abilities, and technical skills to conduct simple laboratory practices remotely. © 2023 IEEE.

Detection of COVID-19 for image dataset by using Deep learning algorithm

This COVID-19 study uses a new way of looking at data to shed light on important topics and societal problems. After digesting specific interpretations, experts' points of view are looked at: We'll study and categorize these subfields based on their importance and influence in the academic world. Web-based education, cutting-edge technologies, AI, dashboards, social networking, network security, industry titans (including blockchain), safety, and inventions will be discussed. By combining chest X-ray images with machine learning, the article views provide element breadth, ideal understanding, critical issue detection, and hypothesis and practice concepts. We've used machine learning techniques in COVID-19 to help manage the pandemic flow and stop infections. Statistics show that the hybrid strategy is better than traditional ones. © 2022 IEEE.

U-Net based Semantic Segmentation for Touchless Fingerprint Technology: A Reflective Review

Touch-based fingerprints are widely used in today's world;even with all the success, the touch-based nature of these is a threat, especially in this COVID-19 period. A solution to the same is the introduction of Touchless Fingerprint Technology. The workflow of a touchless system varies vastly from its touch-based counterpart in terms of acquisition, pre-processing, image enhancement, and fingerprint verification. One significant difference is the methods used to segment desired fingerprint regions. This literature focuses on pixel-level classification or semantic segmentation using U-Net, a key yet challenging task. A plethora of semantic segmentation methods have been applied in this field. In this literature, a spectrum of efforts in the field of semantic segmentation using U-Net is investigated along with the components that are integral while training and testing a model, like optimizers, loss functions, and metrics used for evaluation and enumeration of results obtained. © 2022 IEEE.

EXPERIENCES IN THE DISTANCE LEARNING TEACHING PROCESS IN ENGINEERING THROUGH VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS DURING THE COVID-19

The effects of the COVID 19 pandemic led Cuban Higher Education to take emerging measures to continue the teaching-learning process. Consequently, the undergraduate courses had to rethink the curricular designs according to the existing possibilities. The change to the distance learning modality constituted an enormous challenge for university education, with an emphasis on engineering education where students must acquire a set of skills, abilities and attitudes that allow them to fulfill their social responsibilities in the exercise of the profession. The Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Universidad Central "Marta Abreu” de Las Villas takes on the challenge and begins to design courses on the Moodle platform and re-design the existing ones according to the new study modality, which led to the need to seek a common structure for those designs so that students would quickly become familiar with them. In this paper, the experiences in the design of virtual classrooms for engineering education are presented and the teaching results obtained by the students and their satisfaction with the contents received in two distance-taught course are discussed. © 2023, University of Cienfuegos, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. All rights reserved.

Online learning environments for the promotion of undergraduate research in pandemic times: A case study in an engineering program

This case study explores the use of online learning environments as an alternative tool for the promotion of undergraduate research culture within an engineering program during the COVID-19 pandemic times. This context entailed the transition from face-to-face to online learning environments, which was taken as an opportunity for the diffusion and socialization of outstanding research projects developed by undergraduate students within the classroom, through the launching of an online event and a virtual permanent exhibition. The results of this case study were measured through quantitative indicators related to the number of research projects submitted by the students for participating in this exhibition, the number of courses participating through these projects, and the number of professors involved. Participation of students and professors increased by 85% and 90%, respectively, comparing the online environment to the previous face-to-face one. Consequently, it was concluded that the use of online learning environments supports the promotion of undergraduate research culture, by increasing the interest of students for the socialization of their research results. © 2023, Rajarambapu Institute Of Technology. All rights reserved.

Quizzes and Eggs: Exploring the Impact of Course Design Elements on Students' Engagement

In this paper, we explored the impact of course design elements that aim to support and sustain students' engagement during a 12-week online course. The course we analyzed targeted higher education, master-level students of Computer Science and Educational Technologies, and took place fully online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The course was facilitated by a Learning Management System (LMS), and due to the circumstances, the instructor's primary goal was to motivate students to actively participate during the course duration. To that end, the instructor implemented a course design focused on integrating elements such as interactive activities, short quizzes, hidden "easter eggs,” and real-time webinars. To study the impact of these elements on students' activity, we carried out an exploratory analysis of students' activity as recorded by the log files of the LMS and the qualitative feedback that students provided to the instructor. Our results suggest that the course design supported sustaining students' engagement. The level of students' activity varied for the learning materials and resources, but we confirmed a high usage of the quizzes over the course duration. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Study on the Online Learning Evaluation Based on 2D and 3D Image Processing Technology

In recent years, the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has posed a serious threat to the life safety of people around the world, which has also led to the development of a series of online learning assessment technologies. Through the research and development of a variety of online learning platforms such as WeChat, Tencent Classroom and Netease Cloud Classroom, schools can carry out online learning assessment, which also promotes the rapid development of online learning technology. Through 2D and 3D recognition technology, the online learning platform can recognize face and pose changes. Based on 2D and 3D image processing technology, we can evaluate students' online learning, which will identify students' learning state and emotion. Through the granulation of teaching evaluation, online learning platform can accurately evaluate and analyze the teaching process, which can realize real-time teaching evaluation of students' learning status, including no one, many people, distraction and fatigue. Through relevant algorithms, the online learning platform can realize the assessment of students' head posture, which will give real-time warning of learning fatigue. Firstly, this paper analyzes the framework of online learning quality assessment. Then, this paper analyzes the face recognition and head pose recognition technology. Finally, some suggestions are put forward. © 2023 SPIE.

Soft Skills of Latin American Engineering Professors: Gender Gap

The importance of soft skills in the professional work of an engineer is becoming increasingly important, even more so since the emergence of Covid-19 boosted the digitization of all professional sectors. In order for future engineers to acquire this type of skills, it is necessary for engineering professors to have an optimal level of technical and transversal skills. This article analyzes the assessment made by a group of engineering professors about their degree of development of soft skills and describes gender gaps in these assessments. Based on a self-created survey to evaluate different families of soft skills relevant to engineering education, a sample of 284 Latin American engineering professors reported: 1) high evaluations of their soft skills and 2) the existence of gender gaps in the families of work behavior and social skills in favor of females. This gap is especially wide among participants younger than 45 and older than 65 in the social skills family. In addition, females also rate their work motivation skills higher, except in the 55–64 age range.

Teachers' Perceptions of Videoconferencing and Smartphones in a Retrospective Analysis 2009-2020: An Educational Social Internet of Things Framework

Schools have become increasingly influenced by what has been called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT). As many schools transitioned to online teaching and learning in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to analyze data on technology adoption in schools for changes and continuity since the inception of increasingly popular smartphones since 2007 that has affected videoconferencing, blended learning, and the flipped classroom concept. In this study, videoconference technology is the main factor analyzed in relation to IoT and schools in which handheld devices are considered gateways to further integration of schools into an IoT framework. The researchers analyze a selection of a 2009 dataset and a 2019 dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics (United States) to discuss teachers' perceptions of technology, especially the use of handheld devices and videoconference technology. Recommendations for educator preparation programs (EPPs) are made based on the discussion of the results of this analysis in context with the events of 2020 for why EPPs could emphasize flipped classroom design models within an SIoT framework. © 2023 IEEE.

An Approach of Skill-Based Education for Industry-Ready Electrical Engineers: Power Electronics Course as A Case Study

Recently, and particularly after the Covid19 pandemic period and during teaching different courses, it has been noticed that most of the undergraduate engineering students have rising the type of questions such as ''Why we are learning this particular course?'' and ''What are the main benefits and direct impacts of such course on our future carrier? Also as a direct impact of the new available job requirements, it becomes most importance to prepare future engineers to thrive in recent dynamic changing in employment landscape. Hence for students who want to compete and involved in promising working opportunities, it is important to bridging the gap between teaching courses and the industry requirements by focusing on the concept of ''Industry Ready Engineers Since most of recent jobs concentrate on specific required competencies, the author believes that it is important now to give more focusing on the skill-based learning methodology. This paper introduces an approach focusing on group categorization for the recent specific required skills of electrical engineers;then how to involve these skills in specific teaching courses. The main objectives of such approach is to intentionally improve such group skills (one by one) throughout the all program courses in order to introduce a final graduated engineer with great working readiness skills. The approach is validated and evaluated on teaching the power electronics course 1 as a case study. © 2023 IEEE.

Analysis of the Academic Performance of Mechanical-Electrical Engineering Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study in a Private University in Peru

The COVID-19 pandemic, brought with a number of problems in different sectors, one of the most affected was the education sector, especially in engineering programs, since these have a practical nature and need laboratories to consolidate meaningful learning. In many cases, the virtualization generated some anomalous behavior in the academic indicators that could be used for the analysis of the successes and errors that could lay the foundations for a modern education in engineering careers. The main objective of this research is to analyze the average academic performance per course of a mechanical-electrical engineering program, for which some data was taken from 2018 to 2021. To explain the behavior of the curves, a qualitative survey was applied to 357 students. Three academic indicators are used in the study: grades average, "not pass” rate, desertion rate. The results of the analysis showed that in the first period of the year 2020 (starting period of confinement) they presented very different parameters from those already known in previous years, which could be based on three main causes. The first was due to the full-time dedication of the students to carry out their academic activities, the second is based on the proper technology, resources and strategies adopted by the university and finally, the economic aid from the Peruvian government. © 2023 by the authors.

UK Students' Concerns About Security and Privacy of Online Higher Education Digital Technologies in the Coronavirus Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has led to major changes in higher education around the world. Higher education institutions (HEIs) moved to completely online learning and a range of new technologies including online videoconferencing and chat tools. Research has shown that users have privacy and security concerns about such tools, but little is known about the attitudes of HEI students to these issues, apart from reluctance to use webcams during online teaching. A survey of 71 UK HEI students explored attitudes and concerns about privacy and security in online teaching in the pandemic. Participants knew little about institutional policies on these issues and few had had any training. Ratings of concern across a range of issues were generally low, however in open-ended questions, a range of concerns such as being recorded without permission, unauthorised people entering and disrupting of online sessions, not knowing where recordings are stored and who has access to them. The main concerns about online teaching situations related to being monitored in examinations. HEIs moved very rapidly to deploy online technologies for teaching in response to the pandemic, but going forward, more transparency and information to students could alleviate many of these concerns and create better informed students. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Improvement of the Quality of Question Papers for Online Examinations Toward Simultaneous Enhancement of Students', Learning

The present study is related to the problem associated with student assessment with online examinations at higher educational institutes (HEIs). With the current COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of educational institutes are conducting online examinations to assess their students, where there would always be a chance that the students go for malpractice. It is difficult to set a question paper for any technical course with great novelty. Under these circumstances, safeguarding academic integrity has become a challenge for HEIs. This study is aimed at improving the quality of questions for online exams to increase the accountability of HEIs by proper evaluation of their students. A detailed procedure with suggestions for setting the questions for technical courses, in the format of assertion and reason, matching, multiple select types, etc., has been discussed with adequate examples. It deals with a strategy for ensuring that all the students are held to the standards that are reflected in their grades. The proposed evaluation method has been implemented on a test batch and presented the results along with a comparison with that of traditional question papers. It is witnessed that there is a simultaneous enhancement of students'learning as an additional benefit of implementing the proposed learning-oriented assessment method. IEEE

Conducting educational escape rooms during a global pandemic

PurposeEscape room-based learning is a new educational game-based learning trend which embeds student learning within an exciting escape room scenario. Ordinarily these educational escape rooms are in a table-top format which involves learners decoding clues together around a table. In the age of a global pandemic [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] with stringent social distancing and lock-downs, this normal game modality was not possible and so an alternate online approach was required. Thus, this paper aims to study escape room activities during global pandemics.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors outline how these escape room activities have been taken online, in an synchronous virtual environment and evaluate the student perception of these escape rooms, in contrast to previous cohorts of students who completed escape rooms together in person.FindingsThe authors' results indicate that although students enjoy the escape room game-based learning environment, the remote nature of the activity means the students take longer to solve the puzzles. The students are also more likely to struggle in the activity and find them less engaging than the in-person escape room challenges.Originality/valueAlthough educational escape rooms have been devised for a variety of subjects and can be run through several different modalities (table-top, full rooms and online), this study compares different modalities (online vs table-top) for identical puzzles taken over different cohorts of students.

Design Experience of Laboratory Practices in COVID Times

The development of laboratory practices is necessary for training mechatronics engineering students because they must learn in scenarios that allow checking the theories reviewed in class and implementing their solutions to real-world challenges posed in a course. Unexpectedly, the COVID pandemic caused a rethinking of how to develop the laboratory as a form of teaching, looking for online alternatives using simulation platforms, portable instruments, and 3D printing to design prototypes. This work presents the experience of two online laboratory practice activities in two mechatronics engineering subjects, which allowed students to complement their training without the risk of contagion, develop the planned competencies, and acquire skills in this form of teaching. © 2023 IEEE.

Virtual laboratories for teaching automation, robotics, and optomechatronics

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented crisis has been generated in all areas of life. In education, this emergency led to the massive closure of face-to-face activities in educational institutions of all levels to prevent the spread of the virus and mitigate its impact. In response to this situation, nine public research centers of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) of Mexico, CIDETEQ, CIATEJ, CIATEQ, CIESAS, CIMAV, CIO, CIQA, COMIMSA, and ECOSUR, proposed a project through which a set of virtual laboratories would be established, both for teaching and to improve their technological infrastructure for teaching. The project would take advantage of the tools of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that allow remote access, which is the main challenge to develop educational tools that provide for distance education, and give continuity to graduate programs. © 2023 IEEE.