Undertanding the Experience of Universities Flexible Learning in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case for Two Universities in the Philippines

The school system was greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a need to assess the implementation of flexible learning in academic institutions. The study intends to describe the flexible learning as practiced in the highly urbanized University and the countryside University during the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey research aims to explore students' and faculty members' perceptions of the flexible learning modality implemented in the two institutions of higher learning. It also aims to discover the challenges, preferences, and support students and faculty need. Based on the results, learning becomes not workable given reasonable factors: strength of internet connectivity, quality of modules provided, the validity of the assessment, availability of learning devices such as smartphones, availability of budget for net data subscription, conduciveness of respective households for learning, et cetera. There should be standardized, normativized, and effective modules that are produced out of the intervention of various stakeholders. Requirements must be simple, reasonable, and workable given the students' time, resources, and capacity. Assessments should not be traditional and objective but should be authentic assessments. The digital divide should never be promoted directly or indirectly. The default system for all degree programs has to be the modules. The synchronous and/or asynchronous sessions should be made available to students but not mandatory;the University and teachers have to monitor every student's learning progress effectively. © 2022 IEEE.

Sentiment analysis of student feedback on flexible learning

The World Health Organization declares COVID-19 as a global pandemic, which disrupts classes around the world. This study aims to reveal the sentiment of the students on flexible learning, specifically about online education. The Public Relations and Publication Office of Pangasinan State University (PRPIO) posted a thread on its Facebook page asking the students how they feel about the flexible learning modality implemented by the institution. All Students are invited to comment on possible problems that they may encounter in synchronous online delivery of instruction. Automated extraction was used to mine comments from the specific post on the official page per quarter. Most of the respondents mentioned that they faced issues during the first quarter, and most of the respondents were worried about internet connectivity during the first quarter. While students provided negative sentiments during the first quarter of the year 2021, the trendline was changed to the last quarter. © 2023 Author(s).

Academic rope to cope: Teachers' coping strategy to academic anxiety

The pandemic drove an abrupt global change that brought anxiety and distress to individuals. As such, the study explored the coping strategies used by higher education faculty members in dealing with academic anxiety. A concurrent triangulation mixed method was employed. Data were gathered from the faculty members of a state university using questionnaires and interviews. The faculty members primarily employed religiosity, problem-solving, cognitive reappraisal, and relaxation/recreation as their coping mechanisms. Furthermore, the females were more inclined to use emotional release, and the young adults employed social support and overactivity. Henceforth, the female faculty members may be exposed to peer counseling where they will be able to freely release their anger because of academic anxiety and the young adults may be showered with care and understanding from the people who are close to them and they may be provided with activities to do that may lessen their academic anxiety. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Accelerating change: strategic direction and evolving practices for flexible learning

In higher education institutions (HEIs), online course delivery has been steadily increasing over the past couple of decades. However, the COVID-19 pandemic quickly accelerated this trend with some HEIs being better prepared than others. This case study explores how an open admission, regional university in the United States developed a robust infrastructure for flexible learning delivery before the COVID-19 pandemic. This infrastructure enabled the acceleration of flexible learning modalities during the pandemic. Aspects of the framework are examined along with pre- and post-COVID data. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Perspectives: Policy & Practice in Higher Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

In a road of trying times: Unraveling the lived experiences of students in the new normal

The majority of educational systems worldwide have shifted to remote learning as a preventative strategy against the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This phenomenon is producing a lot of difficulties, as articulated by students in developing nations. Thus, this qualitative study sought to explore and understand the difficulties encountered by college students in Quirino State University in Philippines under the new normal of education. A total of 85 participants were purposely and conveniently selected to participate in an electronic survey through Google Forms. Further, to qualify and clarify responses from the respondents, the researchers conducted phone call interviews. The data were evaluated qualitatively using the NVIVO software. The findings revealed that the student's difficulties in the new normal can be summed in 10 significant themes, namely: i) Vague module content;ii) Poor internet connectivity;iii) Lack of teacher's guidance and motivation;iv) Financial problems;v) Stress/psychological pressure;vi) Insufficient learning materials;vii) Overloaded academic activities;viii) Conflict with household chores;ix) Personal factors;and x) Poor and inadequate learning environment. On the other hand, students' coping strategies had four major themes, namely: i) Managing time wisely;ii) Having self-discipline;iii) Taking time for a break;and iv) Seeking help from others. © 2023, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Pedagogical models of digital learning in the United Kingdom: Lessons for Africa

The chapter discusses pedagogical models of digital learning in the United Kingdom with a focus on online and blended learning, rolled out as a case study in one university. The chapter appraises the effectiveness of the model that implemented and foregrounded the evidence in the wider literature on models of digital learning in higher education. The chapter provides thematic analysis and methodological opportunities for the improvement of practice and presents a set of implementation implications and pitfalls to avoid for higher education institutions in Africa. Furthermore, a number of trends regarding the blending of learning and communication synchrony in digital learning have also been identified. © 2022 by Paula Shaw and Sarah Rawlinson.

Challenges of Hybrid Flexible (HyFlex) Learning on the Example of a University of Applied Sciences

Due to the global coronavirus pandemic, it became increasingly necessary to rearrange the teaching process at all school levels. Higher education institutions all over the world have been facing the challenge since 2020, to find blended teaching formats and activities to provide higher education without compromising the quality of education, but at the same time mitigating health risks. This article deals with the HyFlex learning model. The aim of this paper is to identify problems that may arise when implementing HyFlex teaching and learning in higher education. Identifying problems also provides an opportunity to offer solutions to these problems and to introduce possible solutions more widely. In order to answer the research question an online survey was conducted in spring 2021 (n = 570). The survey consisted of both closed and open questions. The fact that Estonia was one of those countries, where periods of F2F classes during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic were possible, speaks in favor of conducting the research in Estonia. In conclusion, most of the students (75%) participating in the survey were rather positive, rating the learning experience to be good or even excellent. However, some problems were pointed out too: difficulties in concentrating, decrease of learning motivation/self-discipline, lack of depth in learning, and insufficient self-directed learning skills;followed by communication barriers and problems related to digital competencies and skills for both teachers and students. Based on the above, almost a quarter of the respondents found that the volume of learning increased. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Course Design and a Flexible Platform for Learning Programming Languages in Health Informatics Courses Flexible Platform for Learning Programming Languages

This paper addresses problems of learning programming languages for healthcare professionals. Learners may have limitation of time to understand and apply their knowledge and skills of these topics. This study aimed to create a course design and a flexible learning platform to increase the flexibility learning platform for programming languages in both the normal and the COVID-19 situations. The way in which learners learn was discussed and designed. After a lecture-based session, students could use any of their computing devices including computers with several operating systems, tablets, and smartphones to practice the exercise. Students may workout whenever they wanted and from any locations when the internet connection was provided. In the course design, it began with the programming module and then follow by the computer system module. In this module, a flexible learning platform was constructed to teach the PHP. The real server was installed with Ubuntu Linux, and environments for running the PHP. For the client, only a web browser was enough to learn coding. However, some useful editors with the ability of remote syncing files on the server, were introduced. With this platform, instructors could easily review and modify codes written by learners. Learners also gained some experiences in the computer systems module, i.e., operating systems and network. This concept was applied on a course namely "Computer Systems and Principles of Programming for Pharmaceutical and Health Informatics” in Master Degree in Pharmacy (Health Informatics) in academic year of 2021 during the COVID-19 situation. The results from the questionnaire suggested that the course design and the platform were very useful and flexible. Students had more knowledge and skills by using this learning environment. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.

LECTURE CAPTURE AS LEARNING RESOURCE IN TEACHING LAW SUBJECT FOR NON-LAW STUDENTS UNDER THE NEW NORMAL

An action research was conducted to determine the efficacy of using lecture capture as learning resource in teaching law subject to Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) third year students under the new normal during the First Semester of A.Y. 2020-2021. A total of 53 BSBA 3A students enrolled in Law on Obligations and Contracts served as respondents. Data on the efficacy of lecture capture on students' performance were gathered through the pre-tests and post-tests administered to them while students' acceptability of lecture capture was measured using a modified survey questionnaire sent via Google form. Results showed that using lecture capture as a learning resource is effective in teaching law subject under the new normal as evidenced by the highly significant difference (p=0.000) between the scores of pre-tests and post-tests of the students using Paired Sample T-Test. Lecture capture was also highly acceptable (μ=4.44) to the respondents in terms of technical quality, instructional quality, instructional design and organization, and usefulness. Lecture capture can be a useful instructional material in understanding hard subjects like law which can be further improved though the incorporation of constructive feedbacks from the students. Finding a quiet place to avoid background noise when recording, inclusion of other post activities per topic, maintaining the high volume of the lecturer's voice, and uploading it to the Instructor's YouTube Channel were the recommendations of the respondents on how to further improve the lecture capture material. © 2022 Seorim. All rights reserved.

Opinion of Engineering Students on the Use of Live Online Lectures after the Pandemic

—The first outbreak of COVID-19 was reported in December 2019 and the disease took the shape of a pandemic in the next few months. Universities around the world imported lessons to their student mostly in online mode in 2020 and 2021. Thirty-five undergraduate computer science students were interviewed about their experience of attending online lectures during the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative analysis of their responses revealed that 43% of them felt that they can learn equally well from online and offline lectures, 49% felt that online lectures provide them flexibility which in turn helps them to perform better in academics and 54% felt that professors have improved their online teaching skills since the beginning of the pandemic. Further, a qualitative analysis revealed that students appreciate online lectures for allowing them to access ebooks and digital resources while attending lectures, and making it easier to study topics that require a lot of visualization and ask queries to professors. Consequently, 77% students said that a combination of online and offline lectures may be used in the future with students being allowed to choose how they learn. Alternatively, only online lectures may be scheduled on some days of the week so that students need not travel to the campus on those days. © 2022, Rajarambapu Institute Of Technology. All rights reserved.

Is it really flexible? Examining definitions of flexibility against contemporary practice in online education

COVID-19 has recently driven a shift in formal education environments through the transition from on-campus to online learning. The urgency of this transition has challenged the traditional perception of what a higher education experience should look like for educators and higher education institutions. However, flexibility in the delivery of formal education environments is not new. This paper explores the development of flexibility as a concept within higher education against an established flexibility framework. This paper adapts the ‘Roberts Model' to reflect contemporary definitions of flexibility and uses this adapted framework to evaluate 12 online courses to validate/moderate. It then considers the implications for institutions who are increasingly exploring online delivery models appropriate for the contemporary student.

Connection, connectivity and choice: Learning during COVID-19 restrictions across mainstream schools and Flexible Learning Programmes in Australia.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated school closures may have constrained educational participation particularly for students in disadvantaged circumstances. We explore how 30 disadvantaged students in secondary school (14 mainstream/16 Flexible Learning Programme) from Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania experienced home learning during the first wave of COVID-19, teasing out nuances across two educational models. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with these students, our analysis revealed three interconnected themes inflecting their learning: connection, connectivity and choice. Connection captures the desire for belonging and practices that facilitated meeting this desire during system-wide disruptions to school routines and face-to-face learning. Connectivity captures the impact of digitally facilitated learning at home on students' ability to engage with curriculum content and with their learning community. Choice captures the availability of viable options to overcome barriers students encountered in their learning and possibilities to flexibly accommodate student preferences and learning needs. Students from Flexible Learning Programmes appeared generally better supported to exercise agency within the scope of their lived experience of home-based learning. Findings indicate a need for strengthening student-centred policy and practices aimed at leveraging the affordances of information technology, balancing self-directed and structured learning and providing holistic support to enable meaningful student choice.

Management students' perspective and preferences towards flexible learning during covid-19 pandemic in India

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global health emergency in January, which has impacted different sectors worldwide. The education sector in India and worldwide is no exception, as the current health crisis and lockdown regulations disrupted the educational learning system. Educational institutions have slowly acclimatized to digital learning platforms to minimize the impact of the pandemic on education. Even the post-graduate students in India have also moved to the virtual mode of learning. Accessible technologies have made it possible for the students to step gradually to flexible learning. Flexible learning is learner-centered, giving independence and encouraging flexibility in the time, mode, evaluations, academic and personal excellence, and study location. AIM: This research aims to analyze management students' perception towards flexible learning methodology for self-development and active learning in times of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in India. METHODOLOGY: A self-administered online structured questionnaire was drafted and sent to 410 management students. The research is based on methods of quantitative analysis from the students pursuing an MBA. The survey data is mainly based on the factors that motivate and enhances management student's participation in flexible learning. RESULT: A total of 244 management students responded to the questionnaire. The study highlights that five main factors are important for the management students to lead them to an effective way of learning regarding flexibility dimensions: resources, content, delivery, time, and pedagogy.

Flexible Learning Experience Analyzer (FLExA): Sentiment Analysis of College Students through Machine Learning Algorithms with Comparative Analysis using WEKA

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic broughtsignificant changes in society. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning devices improved several industries, especially in academe and higher education institutions. In this study, a model to analyze and predict college students' sentiments from the Flexible Learning Experience portal was built using several supervised machine-learning techniques. Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) application was used to apply the Naive Bayes (NB), C4.5, Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms. Additionally, a comparative analysis of different machine-learning methods was applied. The experimental results revealed that the C4.5 algorithmobtained the highest accuracy than other algorithms. The effectiveness of each algorithm was evaluated and compared using 10-fold cross-validation (CV), taking into account the major accuracy metrics, instances that were accurately or inaccurately classified, kappa statistics, mean absolute error, and modeling time. Moreover, results show that the C4.5 algorithm outperformed other algorithms by classifying the model with 98.13% accuracy, 0.0132 mean absolute error, and 0.00 seconds of training time. Furthermore, teachers and college administrations were well accustomed to the sentiments and problems of college students and might act as a decision-support mechanism mainly as they deal with the new setting during this time of crisis. © 2022 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering. All rights reserved.

Can Students with Dyslexia Learn Independently? A Seven-Week Study of Chinese Character Learning in an Informal Learning Environment

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects primary school students, which is difficult to tackle through traditional school learning due to limited resources. To this end, large-scale digital learning presents new opportunities to address the need for inclusive education. A unique challenge for students with dyslexia in Hong Kong is learning Chinese characters. In this paper, we investigate whether students with dyslexia can learn the writing of Chinese characters independently in an informal learning environment. For that purpose, we developed a mobile application for learning to write Chinese characters with three different writing conditions. First, students learn new Chinese characters in Condition 1: Grid+Contour+Instruction. Then, students strengthen their memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 2: Grid+Contour. Finally, students retrieve the memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 3: Grid Only. Students with dyslexia demonstrated a significant improvement after practicing with the three-condition design. For example, they wrote much slower than students without dyslexia before the study but caught up over time. This study contributes an approach to facilitate the self-paced learning of students with dyslexia at scale. IEEE

i-Comments: On-screen Individualized Comments for Online Learning Support

With the rapid development of digitization in education, online learning has become an alternative and promising way to enable flexible learning scenarios. Especially after COVID-19, online learning draws more and more attention. However, online learning has inherent disadvantages and problems. One of them is that learners have difficulty in concentrating, and the other one is that they may feel lonely during lessons. In this study, a new model of on-screen individualized comments, namely i-Comments, is proposed for online learning support. In the proposed model, three elements, i.e., timing, content, and quantity of i-Comments, are defined respectively, which are used to help learners improve concentration and decrease the feeling of loneliness. Furthermore, an experiment is designed to evaluate the model and verify whether the proposed model can help learners gain a better learning experience and improve their learning effectiveness. © 2022 IEEE.

Analysis of Dynamic Resource Allocation in Digital Education Ecosystems

The use of technology enhanced learning in education institutions has been developing at a rapid pace. Higher education administration affirms the value of digitization in learning platforms, especially in view of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conventional education system is not consistent with the changing demands of modern education concepts, which are the driving factors towards formation and development of the digital educational ecosystem. To digitally transform education systems within a cross organizational environment, educational institutions should be interconnected, and the learners are able to access the learning modules from anywhere in the world. The effective allocation of learning modules to the students is of crucial importance due to the scarceness of such resources. The main objective of this paper is to identify the methods for assigning digital learning modules from a set of existing solutions. Facilitated by optimal resource allocation, the digital ecosystem can provision learning instances via virtual machines or containers and allocate it based on demand. Through the optimal resource allocation, the overall cost and power consumption shall be decreased and the availability of the learning service shall be increased. In this paper, literature research of different scheduling and allocation policies are discussed under varying statistical processes, priority, and performance metrics to increase efficiency and reduce operating cost of servers with no allocated task. © 2022 IEEE.

SUCCESSES & CHALLENGES OF SUPPORTING PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION FOR DEAF & HARD OF HEARING LEARNERS DURING A PANDEMIC: A CASE STUDY

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Higher Education has been considerable, none more so for practical/vocational subjects such as Product Design. However, consider being deaf/hard-of-hearing (D/HOH) whilst being forced to study predominantly online, with reduced practical in-person teaching opportunities, being socially distanced, and having to contend with face coverings limiting your ability to hear and lip read. The everyday challenges for D/HOH students in higher education is constantly demanding, but the global pandemic exacerbated this, presenting significant educational challenges. This paper presents a case study focused on the 2020/21 academic year whereby we examine the challenges and successes of supporting a product design student with Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD) and permanent bilateral severe-profound hearing loss. The scope of this paper presents the learner arrangements for their product design education and highlights methods of managing the blended learning/teaching environment in combination with the use of British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters, electronic/handwritten notetakers and accompanying technologies. Numerous challenges were presented ranging from, managing rapidly developing online learning tools, adapting personal protective equipment to facilitate lip reading, managing multiple recording technologies to facilitate captioning/transcription, amongst others. The perspectives of the learner are presented, with reflections on how different session types, timetabling, delivery methods, etc., affected their day-to-day learning. Recommendations are made for improved collaboration with student support staff (i.e., BSL interpreters and electronic/handwritten note takers) and the need to implement digital technologies to facilitate the optimal blended learning and socially distanced teaching environment. © Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Disrupt, Innovate, Regenerate and Transform, E and PDE 2022. All rights reserved.

Student, Interrupted: Can Digital Badging Improve Programmatic Agility and Help IS Students During Crises?

We propose that a stackable badged micro-credential system could increase academic programmatic agility, in turn helping university students cope with personal crises (illness, accidents, family emergencies), and societal-level crises (pandemics, natural disasters, geopolitical events). We demonstrate how our proposed system would certify students' mastery of several modules comprising a required graduate-level Strategic IS Management course. This proposed system will provide helpful structure (through a modular design and reliance on well-accepted faculty governance, including the traditional college registrar role), and temporal flexibility (enabling students to receive credit for course modules taken in different terms/semesters, and taught by the same or different instructors) and portability (given that micro-credentials provide valid evidence of specific skills or knowledge a student has acquired, regardless of learning modality or instructor). This stackable badged micro-credential system would help students during crises, by making it easy for them to temporarily drop out of a course when circumstances impede effective learning and making it easy for them to resume studies when they are ready and able to do so. We discuss technical challenges that university administrators may face in implementing micro-credentialing in IS classes, offer suggestions for pilot-testing the proposed system, and suggest possible future extensions of this idea.

Hyflex for Successful Student Veteran Engineering Education: Say it Like You Mean It

There has been increased attention on producing engineers that are technically proficient while having many professional skills such as organization, time management, communication, and leadership. Across organization types, especially academia, veterans are admired by their peers for their professionalism and communication skills. Student veterans have trained and taken online classes in diverse and remote environments. They are accustomed to learning under ideal and less than ideal circumstances. The combined traits of increased professionalization, prior experience with online learning, and persistence position student veterans to perform as well or better than their traditional college-aged peers during the COVID-19 crisis. In a study of the effectiveness of Hyflex (Hybrid Flexible) learning conducted in the School of Engineering at The Citadel, forced-choice and free text survey responses showed that student veterans match with and differ from traditional college-aged students in important ways. Results from this study can be used to guide best practices in the Hyflex educational model, in order to better serve the student veteran demographic and all students. In particular, student veteran responses coalesce around a focus on effectiveness and time management concerns, as many have families and other external obligations. As a result, student veterans simultaneously want more Hyflex educational options going forward, however they want Hyflex implementation strategies to be refined and executed better in the future with more long-term planning. Active duty and student veterans can serve vital roles in the engineering classroom, modeling appropriate communication strategies for traditional students as well as connecting their global knowledge with the course content, enriching all students' understanding. Faculty and traditional students can benefit from this unique demographic if they are aware of their skills and experiences. This paper presents some of the issues and concerns of active duty and veterans pursuing an engineering degree compared to their traditional student counterparts when institutions pivot to alternative instructional delivery, specifically Hyflex. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022