ABSTRACT
The development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become widespread due to the technology development and the COVID-19 pandemic;consequently, internet use has increased and impacted different social areas, like communication, education, and the way people relate. Therefore, increasing the cases of bullying and cyberbullying in children and teenagers. In addition, instructional tools, such as microlearning, have emerged in education, allowing for compressing and massifying educational content from different areas of knowledge. This tool aims to reduce learning time and can be deployed on any platform without using traditional means of learning. This paper presents an overview of a method for creating learning capsules in the domain of bullying and cyberbullying named LeCCMe. This method is based on the ADDIE instructional model and incorporates a diffusion phase to reach the largest possible population. Finally, a case study is presented, in which a learning capsule has been created to prevent bullying and cyberbullying. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The development and advancement of technology during the COVID-19 pandemic have been a major contributor to the innovation in pedagogy. Teaching in virtual or hybrid classrooms brought challenges as well as opportunities, particularly for classes with large student enrollment. Many educators quickly learned to use the appropriate instructional technology to be able to not only teach in remote or hybrid mode, but also to keep the students engaged in the process. Keeping in mind the social distancing rules as prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and personal preferences of both the students and the instructors alike, several large Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) courses at the University of Connecticut were offered either remotely or in a hybrid setting during the academic year (AY) 2020-21. This transition was feasible with the financial as well as instructional support from the university. This paper discusses three such courses taught by the authors: Applied Mechanics I and Soil Mechanics in Fall 2020, and Mechanics of Materials in Spring 2021. All these courses had large enrollment (over 100) and were taken primarily by upper-class students to fulfil the requirements of their majors. Several changes were made in the course delivery, method of student engagement, and assessment techniques to adjust for remote as well as hybrid teaching modes. To verify the effectiveness of those changes, both mid-semester surveys and annual student surveys were conducted in all three courses and the results are shared in this paper. With the availability of vaccines and by enforcing the mask mandate, most of the CEE courses were offered in person in the Fall of 2021. During this new normal, two of the large civil engineering courses (Principles of Construction I and Soil Mechanics) were taught by the authors in person. Based on the lessons learned during the pandemic (AY 2020-21), some of the virtual instructional tools were used in these in-person courses to improve student engagement. The purpose of this paper is to describe those instructional tools and their effectiveness in improving the pedagogy as well as the students' learning using the data collected during the mid-semester and annual student surveys. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.