The Effect of Course Format Change on Learning Behaviors and Performance of Students

This study investigates how the course format change caused by covid-19 pandemic affected learning behaviors and performance of college students enrolled in a large introductory history course. Clickstream log files capturing how students were interacting with online learning contents were analyzed to identify the learning behaviors of students before and after the mid-semester course format change. The non-parametric regression model was developed to examine the relationship between learning performance of students and course format change. Although the frequency of accessing learning resources decreased during the first three weeks after the course format change, it had a relatively small effect on the learning performance of students. The quantile regression model indicates the mid-semester course format change is associated with about 3.3% decrease in the learning performance of students. These results suggest that students were quite resilient and their learning during the pandemic was not as bad as we feared.

Lateral flow immunoassays for antigens, antibodies and haptens detection.

Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) is widely used as a rapid point-of-care testing (POCT) technique in food safety, veterinary and clinical detection on account of the accessible, fast and low-cost characteristics. After the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), different types of LFIAs have attracted considerable interest because of their ability of providing immediate diagnosis directly to users, thereby effectively controlling the outbreak. Based on the introduction of the principles and key components of LFIAs, this review focuses on the major detection formats of LFIAs for antigens, antibodies and haptens. With the rapid innovation of detection technologies, new trends of novel labels, multiplex and digital assays are increasingly integrated with LFIAs. Therefore, this review will also introduce the development of new trends of LFIAs as well as its future perspectives.

Digital transformation in higher education: A qualitative evaluative study of a hybrid virtual format using a smart classroom system.

This study presents the salient perceptions of students and instructors in a master's program taught in a hybrid virtual format using the pocket Bipolar Laddering tool, a written open-ended electronic data collection system. Perceptions about the hybrid virtual format were tested on the participants of a master's program taught in the 2021-2022 academic year through a hybrid virtual format based on a Smart Classroom system developed as part of the digital innovations implemented to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. This work aims to shed light on the users' salient perceptions of the format, detect the positive elements mentioned by the surveyed participants and identify the negative items in a bid to minimize, or even revert, their effects for future editions of the master. As expected, the findings suggest that one of the main advantages of this format is that it allows students who have difficulty attending classes on campus to enroll on courses. However, the participants detected diverse elements that could be improved such as interaction, the degree of socialization, or the technical problems that arose during teaching sessions. It is hoped that these findings will be of use when adjusting new editions of the program and will help to determine the design and implementation of other hybrid virtual programs in the Institution.

Lessons Learned from Online Teaching and Their Implications for Students' Future Careers: Combined PLS-SEM and IPA Approach

As far as students are concerned, there is a well-founded relationship between academic performance and career management from which a special professional path can result, based on the multitude of knowledge, skills, and experiences acquired during the years of study. To this end, the presence and help of teachers participating in the learning process, the teaching activities they are involved in, and their own participation are determinant factors. This research aims to highlight the impact that the above factors have on the professional future of students. For this purpose, 395 respondents, including students in the bachelor's and master's cycles, were involved in the research process, to whom a questionnaire was given in electronic format during two stages: one where the didactic activity was carried out in online format and the other carried out face-to-face. Hypotheses testing was performed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The present study focuses on two main directions regarding the results obtained. Thus, with respect to the acquisition of knowledge and the development of student skills, it emerged that the effect of the content in the didactic activities on student skills and the development of competencies is strengthened by the skills and degree of involvement of the teaching staff from the university environment. Related to the management of students' careers, the analysis showed that the effect of the content in didactic activities is complemented by the accumulation of knowledge and the formation of student skills. The rigorous economic training resulting from didactic activities constitutes a main pillar in the students' future, even more so depending on how much they perceive that the topics covered in the university courses are of interest to them. The results of this study can serve as theoretical support for future research that addresses the topic of student career management and the implications of university activities on knowledge and skills. In addition, the results can support decisions for the management of higher education institutions regarding the development and implementation of university programs and educational strategies with the aim of increasing the involvement of teachers and students in the teaching–learning process.

Operation management of academic libraries in Hong Kong under COVID-19

PurposeThis research studies the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the operation management of Hong Kong academic libraries for understanding the difficulties and challenges for librarians to adapt to the special arrangements during the pandemic.Design/methodology/approachQualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with librarians in major universities and higher education institutions of Hong Kong. Participants were interviewed either in the face-to-face format or text-based format.FindingsParticipants provided a broad scope about the actual library management and operation changes during the COVID-19. According to the respondents, the most challenging problem for librarians during COVID-19 was to strike a balance between concerns of library staff and users. While they described how these arrangements and changes affected the service quality of academic libraries from different perspectives, the pandemic situation also brought some opportunities, such as pushing the digitalization of all collections and using online resources for future development. A hybrid model for library service would be more common in the future with more demands toward online resources and digital collection, in which academic libraries should be prepared after the pandemic.Originality/valueThis paper provided broad insights into library management and the future development of academic libraries for the post-COVID-19 period. There are scant studies of this topic, especially in an Asian metropolis context with dense population, small campus and limited library physical spaces.

2000 Eyes: Spherical View of La Fenice di Venezia: A Large-Format Equirectangular Drawing with a Gigapixel Resolution

"2000 eyes” is an artwork made for the Gran Teatro La Fenice di Venezia. It is a handmade spherical perspective drawn from observation in equirectangular projection, on the occasion of the special setup "Chiglia” (keel) designed during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This experimental project aims at testing practices and techniques to create gigapixel hand-drawn panoramic views of complex environments from observation and showing how the use of 360° drawings may enhance the perception of artworks and spaces, adding value to the visitor's experience. The original panoramic drawing and its interactive 360° version are currently exhibited in one of the halls of the Theater. The permanent installation presents one possible way to experience an artwork focusing on the intersection of digital and physical worlds. © 2023, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

ATTITUDES TOWARD STATISTICS ARE BETTER IN TRADITIONAL COMPARED TO ONLINE COURSES, AT LEAST UNTIL COVID-19

We examined students' initial and concluding attitudes toward statistics based on course delivery methods. Students enrolled in either traditional or online undergraduate statistics courses (N = 196) completed the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics-36. At the beginning of the semester, students in traditional courses felt better about the course and believed it would be easier, compared to students taking statistics online. Attitude differences, however, were mitigated as traditional courses were forced online by the pandemic, and distinct attitudinal differences were not observed at the semester's end. With limited offerings and restrictions on the delivery of traditional courses in the COVID-19 era, statistics educators should be cognizant of student attitudes, their potential for change, and how to best influence positive attitude shifts for different instructional formats © International Association for Statistical Education (IASE/ISI)

From In-Class Experiments to Lab@Home for General Chemistry Laboratory: Hands-On Experiences During the Pandemic Lockdown

The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in early 2020, forced educational institutions in Thailand to chiefly rely on online learning during the government mandated lockdown for almost two academic years. Although migration to the online format seems to suit lectures, it is inadequate for laboratory courses since students could not do the experiment themselves. To overcome this deficiency, four existing in-class experiments in General Chemistry Laboratory courses at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University were extensively revised to be Lab@Home format. Extra activities and design-your-own-lab were also included in every experiment. These experiments were prepared and bundled in two Lab@Home kits (<US$4 per kit), one for each semester, and sent to over 800 enrolling students twice by supportive staff. The self-evaluation of learning outcomes was satisfactory (4.26 ± 0.16 out of 5 from five experiments). Students' feedback affirmed that hands-on experiences partook in a better knowledge acquisition since they witnessed the results and could develop their learning process much better than concluding something from merely watching videos. Moreover, the design-your-own-lab allowed them to gather information from their classmates, thus broadening their insight. They also acknowledged the act of caring, and many expressed their gratitude for the department's effort to deliver this experience. This Lab@Home project is not only beneficial for students' learning but also an excellent opportunity for supportive staff to execute a sizable and challenging project.

Managing Data Protection and Privacy on Cloud

When pandemic rose in 2020, people were fighting against COVID-19 virus and organizations had accelerated their digitization and cloud adoption rapidly (De et al. in Int J Inf Manag 55:102171, 2020 [1]) to meet the online based business during the lockdown. This chaos helped fraudsters and attackers taking advantage of the momentary lack of security controls and oversight. Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI) Internet Crime Compliant Center (IC3) 2020 reported highest number of complaints in 2020 (791 k + ) compared to prior five years (298 k + in 2016), with peak losses reported ($4.2 Billion in 2020 compared to $1.5 Billion in 2016) (Internet Crime Complaint Center in Internet crime report. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., 2020 [2]). Majority of these incidents were connected to financial fraud, identity fraud, and phishing for personally identifiable information (PII). Considering the severity and impact of personal data exposure over cloud and hybrid environment, this paper provides a brief overview of prior research and discuss technical solutions to protect data across heterogeneous environments and ensure privacy regulations. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Correlations between student connectivity and academic performance: A pandemic follow-up

Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses from the University of Colorado Boulder and one course from the Colorado School of Mines. All three courses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for a comparison between the course at the Colorado School of Mines (in a fully remote format) with results from a previous pre-pandemic study of student collaboration at the Colorado School of Mines (in an in-person format), as well as comparison between the Mines results with the two University of Colorado courses (in a hybrid format). We compute nodal centrality measures and calculate the correlation between student centrality and performance. Results varied widely between each of the courses studied. The course at the Colorado School of Mines had strong correlations between many centrality measures and performance which matched the patterns seen in the pre-pandemic study. The courses at the University of Colorado Boulder showed weaker correlations, and one course showed nearly no correlations at all between students' connectivity to their classmates and their performance. Taken together, the results from the trio of courses indicate that the context and environment in which the course is situated play a more important role in fostering a correlation between student collaboration and course performance than the format (remote, hybrid, in-person) of the course, a finding which has implications for the broader use of SNA within physics education research. Additionally, we conducted a short study on the effect that missing nodes may have on the correlations calculated from the measured networks, an analysis largely missing from the SNA literature within PER. This investigation showed that missing nodes tend to shift correlations towards zero, providing evidence that the statistically significant correlations measured in our networks are not spurious.

Content posted by Spanish automotive sector brands on YouTube: branded content, insights and environmental commitment

PurposeThe main objective of this study is to analyze content posted by automotive sector brands on their YouTube channels, identifying the use of a branded content format, the application of insights to creative conceptualization and the dissemination of messages related to messages' environmental commitment.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive study was conducted using qualitative content analysis as the methodological approach. The sample is made up of 691 videos posted on YouTube from September 2020 to August 2021 by the ten automotive brands with the biggest advertising budgets in Spain (InfoAdex, 2021).FindingsThe findings reveal a predominance of the advertorial format in content posted on YouTube by automotive sector brands, while the branded content format is less popular. Creative concepts based on insights are rare and limited to videos with an advertisement format. The theme of respect for the environment is used mainly in connection with the discourse on vehicle features and not so much as a commitment by the brand in response to consumer concerns or the changes that the automotive sector is undergoing.Originality/valueThe originality of the study lies in the approach it takes to content posted by automotive brands on YouTube. The paper's contribution is innovative in that the study monitors posts by brands in the sample on YouTube over the course of a year, rather than just during the specific periods when these brands run advertising campaigns.

Post-Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Satisfaction of Foreign Students with Telelearning in Russian Universities

Introduction. The influx of foreign students into domestic universities makes it possible to attract foreign intellectual resources, develop international cooperation and diplomacy, and tools for the principles of "soft power”. In this regard, the urgent task is to study the satisfaction of foreign students of Russian universities with the parameters of distance technologies in the environment of a digital alternative to the educational system of higher education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and Methods. Qualitative and quantitative methods of scientific knowledge were used as a tool for multi-stage research. At the first stage, a general theoretical method of analyzing the results of domestic and foreign studies was used. At the second, empirical stage of the study, the authors reasonably used methods of sociological survey of foreign students (N = 760 people) studying at universities located in various constituent entities of the Russian Federation, as well as an induction method for the purpose of interpreting and summarizing the results of the survey. Results. The assessment of the level of satisfaction with foreign students with the parameters of telelearning at Russian universities made it possible to develop practical-oriented recommendations in the field of digital competencies, technological and resource opportunities for better conduct of the educational process in remote digital format for foreign students in Russian universities. Discussion and Conclusion. The conclusions made by the authors make a theoretical and practical contribution to the development of scientifically based approaches and methodological tools for studying the level of satisfaction of foreign students with the parameters of distance learning in Russian universities. The materials of the article will be useful to scientists and researchers involved in such problems, as well as federal and regional governments, ministries of education, universities. © 2022 National Research Ogarev Mordovia State University. All rights reserved.

Twitter Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Using Dimensional Model and Data Mining

Sentiment analysis is used to analyze data in text format such as tweets from Twitter social media users. Twitter is one of the most popular social media with more than half a billion users and can generate large volumes of data. It is difficult to operate large-scale data, so the data warehouse can be used as a data storage area that allows the operation of large-scale data. The final step of data warehousing is the application of business intelligence. This research uses dimensional model approach to build data warehouse from Twitter and uses lexicon-based approach to analyze public opinion of Twitter users toward covid-19 vaccine in Indonesia. The results show that the creation of a data warehouse and sentiment analysis have been successfully carried out based on the evaluation of the data warehouse and sentiment analysis. The evaluation carried out on the data warehouse is to examine the components of the dimensional model based on indicators and dimensional modeling rules by Kimball. While the evaluation carried out on sentiment analysis is the confusion matrix with the result of the accuracy of sentiment analysis is 74%. © 2022 IEEE.

Public sphere between online and offline space

After Chilean social outbreak and restriction by Covid19, San Borja park would be unused. Given this, a community reproduced the park in Minecraft creating its own version: BorjaCraft. So two parks coexist in one environment, separate but forming part of a place. When entering or leaving the space, turning the digital on or off, the public experience happens between online and offline. If the characteristics of online and offline space were linked, how would the public sphere of a place be expanded? This puts in check the understanding of the public depending on space or format where it is inhabited. © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.

A format for a plagiarism-proof online examination for calculus and linear algebra using Microsoft Excel

As educational systems move from onsite to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers face the difficulty of designing online examination formats which minimize opportunities for dishonesty. In this paper, we expose our design of such a format: a protected Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing short-answer questions, which was implemented in a calculus module taught by us. This format allows examiners to randomize questions with the aim that each student receives each question with different numerical details, making plagiarism impossible, while keeping the marking effort very low.

Filter Questions in Symptom Assessment Affect the Prevalence of (A)Symptomatic COVID-19 Cases.

BACKGROUND: It has been reported that a substantial number of COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic, with both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections contributing to transmission dynamics. Yet, the share of asymptomatic cases varies greatly across studies. One reason for this could be the measurement of symptoms in medical studies and surveys. DESIGN: In 2 experimental survey studies (total N > 3,000) with participants from Germany and the United Kingdom, respectively, we varied the inclusion of a filter question on whether participants who tested positive for COVID-19 had experienced symptoms prior to presenting a checklist of symptoms. We measured the reporting of asymptomatic (versus symptomatic) COVID-19 infections. RESULTS: The inclusion of a filter question increased the reporting of asymptomatic (versus symptomatic) COVID-19 infections. Particularly mild symptoms were underreported when using a filter question. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Filter questions affect the reporting of (a)symptomatic COVID-19 cases. To account for such differences in the estimation of population infection rates, future studies should transparently report the applied question format. HIGHLIGHTS: Both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections are important for COVID-19 transmission dynamics.In previous research, symptoms have been assessed either with or without a filter question prior to presenting a symptom list.We show that filter questions reduce the reporting of asymptomatic infections.Particularly mild symptoms are underreported when using a filter question.

School and learning contexts during the COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for child and youth mental health.

Despite significant disruption to school during the COVID-19 pandemic, research on the impact on children is sparse. This study examines in-person and virtual learning contexts and the impact of school format on mental health (MH). Children and adolescents were recruited from community and clinical settings. Parents and children completed prospective online surveys about school experiences (November 2020) and MH symptoms (February/March 2021), including school format and activities. Standardized measures of depression, anxiety, inattention, and hyperactivity were collected. Hierarchical regression analyses tested associations between school format and MH. Children (N = 1011; aged 6-18 years) attending school in-person (n = 549) engaged in high levels of participation in COVID-19 health measures and low levels of social learning activities. Learning online in high school was associated with greater MH symptoms (B = -2.22, CI[-4.32,-.12] to B = -8.18, CI[-15.59,-.77]). Children with no previous MH condition that attended school virtually experienced a similar magnitude of MH symptoms as those with previous MH conditions. However, children who attended school in a hybrid in-person format, with no previous MH condition, experienced less hyperactivity as same-age peers with prior MH problems (B = -8.08, CI[1.58,14.58]). Children's learning environments looked very different compared to before the pandemic. Removing children from school environments and limiting opportunities that support their MH, such as social learning activities, is problematic. Efforts to address the learning contexts to protect the mental health of children are needed.

Detrimental impact of contagious disease cues on consumer preference for anthropomorphic products.

Despite the extensive use of anthropomorphism strategy in marketing practices, little research attention has been given to the environmental factors that influence consumer preference for anthropomorphic products. This research examines when and why contagious disease cues can influence consumer preference for anthropomorphic products. The results from four empirical experiments consistently show that when exposed to contagious disease cues, consumers exhibit a lower preference for anthropomorphic products (Study 1), which is mediated by social withdrawal (Study 2). Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that this detrimental effect would be attenuated for products in digital (vs. physical) format (Study 3), or in regions with low (vs. high) local severity of the contagious disease (Study 4). These findings contribute to the literature on contagious diseases and anthropomorphism and offer important managerial implications. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11002-022-09614-x.