Chinese Normal Students' Satisfaction of Emergency Remote Learning in Higher Education during COVID-19 Pandemic

Despite the widespread use of emergency remote learning (ERL) during the COVID-19 pandemic in higher education, little is known about the determinants of Chinese normal student satisfaction with ERL. This study uses a questionnaire survey method to examine how Chinese normal students' satisfaction with ERL during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that Chinese normal students prefer face-to-face teaching to online teaching to some extent. According to the findings, it is important to emphasize students' pre-class preparation, adjust course assessment methods, change teachers' teaching strategies, create a positive teaching environment, boost students' learning confidence, and help them deal with their anxiety during ERL to improve the online course experience for Chinese students at normal universities. © 2023 ACM.

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)

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.

Research and Practice of 'Trinity' Construction of Emerging Engineering Big Data Course Teaching Quality Assurance System during the Epidemic

The pandemic of the COVID-19, has brought a great impact to the education and teaching, so the teaching can only be carried out online, in order to ensure the monitoring and management of teaching quality during teaching. This project import the latest information intelligent teaching system, multi-directional to ensure the monitoring and control of teaching quality, the deep integration of 'Rain Classroom' technology and teaching in this project, So that the interaction information between teachers and students can be recorded in real time during the online teaching, and organized, analyzed, stored also;Import the online teaching platform, collected the students records that finished homework during the epidemic;Import the online virtual experiment platform, online to finished the remote experimental operation of students. Thus, the trinity builds a three-dimensional teaching quality assurance system to escort high-quality big data course teaching during the epidemic. © 2023 IEEE.

Hybrid Learning: A Boon or Bane

The context of higher education is changing. The emerge of social, technical, and intellectual forces has pushed higher education to the point of a significant transformation (Garrison & Vaughn, 2008). Technology enhanced learning have raised concerns about the quality of education and learning environment. For the traditional classroom-based teaching and learning, the breakthrough came during the emerge of Covid-19 pandemic. Online learning, once a separated learning system, was fully integrated into teaching and learning to continue providing education amidst the lockdown. Post the reopening of higher education institutions, hybrid learning was widely implemented in almost all universities across the world, to accommodate students' diverse range of learning needs in the post pandemic era. This case study is intended to gain insights regarding the learning experiences, challenges, and benefits in hybrid learning from both the lecturers' and students' perspective. Based from the gathered qualitative data, results show that both students and lecturers have mixed reviews regarding hybrid learning experience. One of the main findings is that hybrid learning creates a more flexible, engaging learning environment compared to traditional face-To-face learning. Lecturers generally feel that hybrid learning has several pedagogical and technological challenges. However, issues concerning quality of lecture delivery and academic malpractice during online assessments has found to be a concern among lecturers and students. In overall, lecturers and students feel that hybrid learning needs to be evaluated from time to time to address the drawback for continuous improvement towards better quality of learning. © 2023 IEEE.

E-learning Challenges for Lecturers in Indonesia Higher Education Institutions

Since the Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020, e-learning has become a necessity. There may have been some uncertainty on how to perform e-learning properly because many educational institutions may not have expected the rapid change in learning style. This is especially true when it comes to offering an e-learning management system (LMS). This study aims to examine the affordances of higher education institutions in Indonesia in conducting the e-learning during the pandemic. To understand more about the adoption of e-learning in their individual institutions, we conducted an online survey towards 100 university lecturers from several cities. The results revealed that 79% of the participants used a specially built LMS in their universities, while the rest still used commercially built LMS like Moodle. Then, 82% of the participants prefer blended learning model which combined face-To-face and e-learning models, and 46% of them wanted to have a fifty-fifty division between face to face and e-learning. As for the challenges, no interaction with students was deemed as the most disturbing challenge for the lecturers. The results imply that e-learning will continue to be implemented in Indonesia, regardless of the condition of the pandemic. Thus, universities should provide an e-LMS that can cater all the e-learning needs, while lecturers should also equip themselves with pedagogical as well as technological skills to face the e-learning challenges. © 2023 IEEE.

Experiences of Project-Based Simulated Work-Integrated Learning in Renewable Energy Course during COVID-19

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is a key component of current higher education learning and teaching to train globally employable engineering graduates. However, COVID-19 imposed significant challenges to delivering WIL face-to-face at the workplace. One of the solutions to these challenges is the simulated WIL which can be delivered online or in hybrid mode. This paper presents a project-based innovative simulated work integrated learning (WIL), successfully introduced in the renewable energy course at the time of COVID-19, tackling all the issues related to online deliveries and simulated WIL. The project is on the practical design of renewable energy-based community microgrids where students need to collect real-world data for the design and use professional software to finalise their designs in collaboration with the course coordinator and an industry expert. Student surveys and external reviews show that the simulated WIL is well received to replace the traditional WIL. © 2023 IEEE.

SignalR based Real-Time applications in education

Before Covid, we introduced our own classroom response system to improve the effectiveness of our teaching. To this end, we adopted an open-source technique, SignalR, which provides a framework for building real-time web applications. Overnight, due to the emergency situation starting in 2019, education was moved to the virtual space. Both students and professors had to learn how to teach or learn using only online facilities, without a testing period. During the emergency, a synchronous online teaching mode was required by our university, so the choice was made to use Microsoft Teams, implemented with SignalR for real-time functionality. After the emergency, we were all happy to have our 'old life' back and return to our personal teaching style, but is it possible, is it possible to continue teaching in the same way as before Covid-19 - is it possible to step into the same river twice? Students have become accustomed to convenient, modern, digital options during the online education period and now that we are back in school, they insist that we continue to use the new tools. In this essay, we want to describe the changes in students' attitudes that we can usefully build on in the future and that will influence the further development of our project. © 2023 IEEE.

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)

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.

Design to Improve Social Presence among University Students in Asynchronous Online Learning Environment

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online lectures are becoming more common in higher education. Specifically, asynchronous online classes have become increasingly popular because of their flexibility. Asynchronous online courses, however, may negatively impact students' academic performance and social development due to the diminished sense of social presence. To explore ways to enhance social presence among students in asynchronous online classes, this paper used a co-design methodology that involved 12 undergraduate students as primary stakeholders. As a result, we developed a design framework for designing in-class interaction to promote social presence in asynchronous online lectures. This framework consists of four high-level elements and sub-categories: interaction topic (direct or peripheral topics related to learning), interaction size (small or entire group), interaction mode (anonymity, synchronicity, instructor involvement), and interaction motivator (lightweightness and entertainment). Our design framework may serve as a guide to future technology for improving asynchronous online classes. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Problems-based Learning in Higher Education Under Regular and COVID19 Pandemic Conditions: An Educational Experience

Offshore wind and waves will play an important role at helping the European Union (EU) meet its sustainability goals. Among other efforts, a clear commitment is needed in the area of High Education, a field in which the European Union is also making its contribution through a miriad of initiatives. Amongst these, it is worth highlighting the Renewable Energy in the Marine Environment (REM) master (https://www.master-remplus.eu/), an European Union funded Erasmus Mundus program that started in 2018. In this work, an educational experience corresponding to one subject in the REM Msc is described. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance and resilience of the Problems-Based Learning Methodology (PBL) and compare the educational outcomes obtained in standard conditions first, and then, under COVID-19 pandemic conditions. © 2023 IEEE.

Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Sub-Saharan African Third-Year Students Studying Computer Science and Information Technology

Low vaccination rates, inferior-quality vaccines, limited testing, and a lack of funding forced many institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa into online-learning-only environments for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instructors scrambled to put classes online. Only in 2022 did some face-to-face classes resume. Unforeseeable and unprecedented circumstances forced university personnel to function with reduced budgets and without regard for the return to in-person classes. We taught, studied, and analyzed a cohort of third-year Sub-Saharan African students who spent their first two years of studies online. We describe the struggles they faced and what can be done to make up for their shortcomings and missed opportunities. We quantify the shortcomings through focus groups, an analysis of what parts of an accredited program would have fallen short, interviews, and through anecdotal evidence. Our findings can help those who suffered a similar fate. These observations can be applied to non-STEM disciplines. © 2023 IEEE.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE UTILISATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA TO FOSTER TEAM COLLABORATION IN A HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges with subsequent opportunities to teach innovative ways of team collaboration. One example is the utilisation of social media to foster online team collaboration. This study investigates the use of Discord by students, a social media platform originally developed for online gamers, to collaborate virtually to complete project team tasks. The research question – what role a social media tool, namely Discord, plays in fostering team collaboration – was investigated using a qualitative, interpretative approach. Topic modeling identified ten themes, with the most vital theme indicating that students initially used Discord due to the academic requirement but later extensively used the platform because of its convenience and usefulness. Most students continued to use Discord even after completing their studies. While the main reason for adopting the tool was convenience due to peers using the platform, it became a logical and practical platform to communicate with friends, work on completing tasks together, and as a result, create a strong sense of belonging. © (2022) by Association for Information Systems (AIS) All rights reserved.

Active learning: the reformulation of learning/teaching methodology in Design Theory

Higher education, as well as other levels of education, face a major problem: the focus, and sometimes interest, of students during classes. Increasingly, students' focus time is shorter and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this problem. Currently, keeping a student attentive and motivated throughout the class is not an easy task. The problem worsens when the theoretical classes are too long. In this sense, it is urgent to change the teaching methods in order to make, not only, the class more pleasant but also to keep the student and professor motivated. Thus, the article aims to present a more dynamic way of teaching a theoretical subject in order to increase student involvement and interaction during class. © 2023 IEEE.

Post Covid Scenario Effective E-Mentoring System in Higher Education

During Covid-19 pandemic many people and institutions preferred online coaching instead of in person education. The problem with online is that it will be difficult to carry on interconnections between students and professors in that environment. The main constraint for conducting online session is that the people in remote areas may find a difficulty to connect to online sessions having network issues. Electronic mentoring (e-mentoring) is implemented like a website in which the mentor and mentee can communicate with each other. With the help of this mentoring the project can provide a best solution for both the mentor and mentee. They can communicate with each other with the help of online platform and even with the help of emails.This proposed method will help them to keep the track of their academic progress and achievements of students. This article mainly focus on the mentoring through physical and virtual environment in which the mentee will be interacting with the mentor to know the progress of their academics. This article discusses about the website which is developed to fulfill the needs of the student and it discusses about the various stages of development that helped in building the website. Students can share their difficulties and their achievements with the mentor who are assigned for them particularly. In future planning to implement artificial intelligence technique to online mentoring process, this is for the betterment of student's growth. © 2023 IEEE.

Higher Education for Students with Disabilities. An Overview Through the Lens of Text Min

Inequalities and exclusion from education were exposed and worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic;however, it forced us to recognize the need to make equality, equity, and social inclusion policies effective for all. Scientific and technological solutions to global threats depend on the formation of the maximum number of qualified human resources, which entirely relies on enabling everyone to acquire, update, and improve their knowledge, skills, and competencies through lifelong learning and higher education. To guarantee inclusive and quality education for all (UN Sustainable Development Goal 4) is hard to achieve at higher education or post-secondary levels. This research aims to provide an overview of the achievements and challenges that higher education institutions (HEI) face in fulfilling the requirements of students with disabilities (SWD). We analyzed a database of 104 s from reviews of SWD in HEI published in Scopus-indexed journals between 2018 and August 2022. After data preprocessing, the text mining analysis on the corpus was visualized in word clouds and graphs. From the results, we could identify that providing access to facilities and information still dominates the research on inclusive education, and visual disability is the most frequently analyzed. The graphs reveal published research on undergraduates with disorders like Autism Spectrum (ASD), learning disorders, and visual, hearing, physical, intellectual, and psychosocial disabilities. The authors also evidenced the lack of information on the barriers and needs of SWD in HEI and potential future research to address them. Concerning the strategies to attend and care for SWD inside the classrooms, the graphs highlight Universal Design as a promising trend leading to inclusivity in higher education. The results and analyses in current research provide essential information to educational stakeholders and decision-makers inside institutions so that they can take action to embrace diversity. © 2023 IEEE.

Instructional Usability and Learner-User eXperience Assessment in a Virtual Reality Educational Milieu: A Deductive Tech-Instructionality Model from EdTech

Educational Technology (EdTech) lacks a foundational, formal, scientific, epistemic theory. Therefore, it lacks native constructs/variables and an epistemological object of study for scientifically deploying its work. This study determines the existence (ontology) of the theorized constructs Instructional Usability (UsI) and Learner-User eXperience (LUX) and defines their characterization (epistemology). Both constructs were modeled and instrumented. Furthermore, a Tech-Instructionality Model (TIM) was theorized and developed in this paper, both analytically and empirically. The model integrates UsI and LUX as two pairs of constructs linked with two EdTech epistemological objects of study, the instructional interface and the instructional interaction in two assessment modalities, testing mode (user-learner view) and inspection mode (expert/designer view). Two instruments were developed and validated in this study for testing mode, the Instructional Usability Scale (SUsI) and the Learner-User eXperience Questionnaire (QLUX). Both instruments were tested in a non-immersive virtual reality educational milieu during the academic lockdown of the Covid19 pandemic. The results show that both SUsI and QLUX consistently measured UsI and LUX, thus, providing a valid assessment for tech-instructionality and a foundation for constructing a scientific theory of EdTech. © 2023 IEEE.

Augmented, Virtual and Immersive Reality as Learning Support in TEC21 Educational Model

Virtual, augmented, and immersive reality opens a world of possibilities in education by allowing students to recreate authentic situations, such as operating machinery, assembling a product, or training tool handling, to mention a few. In the TEC21 educational model, the core is the challenge: A project with a real-world challenge assigned by the training partner results in students offering solution proposals.The trigger that accelerated the development of virtual, augmented, and immersive reality activities in distance learning was COVID-19 confinement. During this, these technologies recreated the laboratory and its facilities' learning through augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences.Using these technologies in the classroom allows students to achieve a great learning experience and develop skills for postgraduate studies and professional futures.Furthermore, now that we have returned to our physical facilities and laboratories, we can accelerate the learning obtained at the training partners' facilities, recreating processes and machinery through these immersive technologies and a hybrid experience for our students.The present research shows the activity learning design process and the statistical treatment of the data to provide continuous feedback during the activity;we examine the three transcendental variables in the educational process: The learning (academic rigor), the development of competencies, and the involvement or immersion of the students in the classroom. © 2023 IEEE.

A Case Study on Student Experiences of Social VR in a Remote STEM Classroom

Extended reality (XR) technologies continue gaining traction in multiple higher education contexts. As XR becomes more commercially accessible to students and universities, its convenience for educational purposes presents a renewed potential for exploration. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, there is also a growing interest in cross-platform, socially orientated software for remote educational practices. However, the precise role of XR technologies and how they contribute to student experiences of remote learning, particularly the unique affordances of social virtual reality (VR) for evoking an embodied sense of presence, is relatively unknown. Based on real-world experiences, we present a case study on a social VR intervention in a remote higher education classroom to inspire Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers to investigate further the issues that arise from our practice-based research. Our motivations were to report, analyze, and summarize everyday virtual learning environment (VLE) challenges, identify design considerations for VLE technologies, and comment on social VR's utility in delivering Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects in a remote setting. We apply a practical approach to investigate and identify potential HCI problems, capture the unique experiences of STEM students during the lockdown, and explore the effects of tutorial activities that give students agency in constructing VLEs. The findings of this student-focused case study draw attention to the design of social VR activities that support conventional, web browser-based VLEs. © 2023 Owner/Author.