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.

Nurturing Social Presence in a Blended Learning Environment

The ambition of this development study is to explore the opportunity to put the knowledge gained during the COVID-19 pandemic into practice in a blended, post-COVID, learning environment. The focus is to explore how a combination of digital and face-to-face activities may allow for fostering social presence among undergraduate students. The Social Presence model and the five elements of Affective Association, Community of Cohesion, Instructor Investment, Interaction Intensity, and Knowledge and Experience, encompass the theoretical framework of the study. The contextual setting is the first course of The Marketing Programme at Linnaeus University in Sweden, a bachelor program with a 50% Swedish intake and 50% international intake. Given the diverse background of the students in this course, challenges are typically encountered in relation to community building. Empirical data was collected during the fall of 2022 among the enrolled students using an online questionnaire. While the results from this study should be seen as preliminary, they offer an inspiring glimpse of how to nurture social presence in a blended learning environment. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Online learning during COVID-19

This chapter focuses on the challenges unique to online learning environments, how students responded to the abrupt shift to remote learning, and how this impacted their ability to thrive in the midst of a global pandemic. It illustrates how instructors' ability (or inability) to smoothly transition from in-person to online environments impacted students' learning. The chapter examines some of the challenges students faced with online learning, including changes in learning environments, communication with instructors, and classroom dialogues. It explores instances of students thriving in online learning environments. The inherent unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic and some institutional inconsistencies created challenges to building an environment in which students could thrive. Although the University attempted to create an online environment that allowed students to continue their education during the pandemic, significant issues arose that forced students to teach themselves, often with little support from faculty. The challenges of learning online were compounded with the loss of on-campus resources such as access to quiet study spaces and the University library. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

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.

Immersive Education: Designing for Learning

This book focuses on designing and being a designer of immersive education. It introduces readers to the human experiences within immersive learning environments and contributes research evidence on the effectiveness of immersive technologies in K-12 and post-secondary contexts. Through the chapters, illustrative contextual examples and vignettes demonstrate immersive learning in real-world educational practice. Readers will be equipped to design engaging and culturally relevant immersive experiences for learning in a post-COVID world. Immersive Education: Designing for Learning brings researchers, designers, and educators together to offer pedagogical strategies and design guidelines. The originality lies in integrating theoretical and practical knowledge to design meaningful immersive experiences, with attention to sustainability, community, and creativity. Valuable insights are provided to support students and teachers as immersive learning designers and storytellers. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Structured Cabling Development in 3D Virtual Learning Environment en OpenSim

Virtual Learning Environments in 3 Dimensions can be considered a valuable tool in Education, especially in this context of Virtual Education due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which is why after determining some problems related to this type of platform. That is why the present investigation has been guided under the Design Science Research Methodology, where the investigation has to go through the 6 phases iteratively: Identification of the problem, Design, Development, Demonstration, Evaluation, and Communication of the results., that is why the present platform developed in OpenSim has been used for the construction of the present virtual world. The results have been evaluated using the Technologies Acceptance Model methodology. Finally, it can be determined that the results indicate that this type of platform can be considered by students as a useful tool and also that there is no greater resistance to its use due to its ease of use. © 2023, Ismail Saritas. All rights reserved.

Work in Progress: A Virtual Educational Robotics Coding Club Framework to Improve K-6 Students Emotional Engagement in STEM

Educational robots allow students deepen their knowledge of mathematics and scientific concepts. Educational Robotic coding clubs provide a learning environment for K-6 students that promotes coding through STEM digital literacy. Students in educationally disadvantaged families may not have the educational and financial capital to engage in STEM learning. Closures of schools and afterschool services during the COVID-19 pandemic increased this digital divide. This research proposes a framework for delivering a virtual robotic coding club in an educationally disadvantaged community. The framework develops young people's emotional engagement in STEM through robotic coding. Synchronous online classes were delivered into family homes using Zoom. Results demonstrate that children achieved emotional engagement as reported through high levels of enjoyment and increased interest after participating in the programme. The research shows promise in increasing children's STEM skills and knowledge, and in improving positive attitudes towards STEM for children and parents. © 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.

Factors to improve online education: A study on the impact of COVID-19 on Delhi students

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, people worldwide had to self-quarantine in their homes, resulting in the youth having to continue their education online. The lockdown and the effects of the pandemic impacted students' mental health, exhibiting frustration, stress, and depression. The latter is not ideal for a healthy learning environment, as it involves many coping mechanisms. This study analyzed a database compiling the habits of 1182 individuals in different age groups at various educational institutes in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), India. It identifies factors leading to proposing recommendations to improve students' online education experiences worldwide and facilitate their learning while caring for their mental health. A CRISP-DM methodology was followed to build a model capable of predicting students' satisfaction ratings for online classes by analyzing the students' demographic information and daily habits. © 2023 IEEE.

Learner and Advisor Perceptions of Online Advising During a Pandemic

In this article, the authors describe two research studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the perceptions of online advising from the perspective of learners and learning advisors working in a self-access centre at a university in Japan. Advising is a one-to-one reflective dialogue between a learner and a learning advisor with the purpose of promoting learner autonomy. Advising normally takes place in person, and this article explores user perceptions and whether advisors are able to create an autonomy-supportive climate in a synchronous online setting. Although participants in both studies acknowledged challenges, overall online advising was conducted effectively, with learning advisors anticipating the needs of learners and utilising online tools accordingly. Although initially nervous about attending online sessions, learners felt positive emotions during and after the online session and felt supported by learning advisors.

Empowering Health Care Education Through Learning Analytics: In-depth Scoping Review.

BACKGROUND: Digital education has expanded since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A substantial amount of recent data on how students learn has become available for learning analytics (LA). LA denotes the "measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs." OBJECTIVE: This scoping review aimed to examine the use of LA in health care professions education and propose a framework for the LA life cycle. METHODS: We performed a comprehensive literature search of 10 databases: MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, ERIC, Cochrane Library, PsycINFO, CINAHL, ICTP, Scopus, and IEEE Explore. In total, 6 reviewers worked in pairs and performed title, abstract, and full-text screening. We resolved disagreements on study selection by consensus and discussion with other reviewers. We included papers if they met the following criteria: papers on health care professions education, papers on digital education, and papers that collected LA data from any type of digital education platform. RESULTS: We retrieved 1238 papers, of which 65 met the inclusion criteria. From those papers, we extracted some typical characteristics of the LA process and proposed a framework for the LA life cycle, including digital education content creation, data collection, data analytics, and the purposes of LA. Assignment materials were the most popular type of digital education content (47/65, 72%), whereas the most commonly collected data types were the number of connections to the learning materials (53/65, 82%). Descriptive statistics was mostly used in data analytics in 89% (58/65) of studies. Finally, among the purposes for LA, understanding learners' interactions with the digital education platform was cited most often in 86% (56/65) of papers and understanding the relationship between interactions and student performance was cited in 63% (41/65) of papers. Far less common were the purposes of optimizing learning: the provision of at-risk intervention, feedback, and adaptive learning was found in 11, 5, and 3 papers, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We identified gaps for each of the 4 components of the LA life cycle, with the lack of an iterative approach while designing courses for health care professions being the most prevalent. We identified only 1 instance in which the authors used knowledge from a previous course to improve the next course. Only 2 studies reported that LA was used to detect at-risk students during the course's run, compared with the overwhelming majority of other studies in which data analysis was performed only after the course was completed.

Students' Emotional Perceptions and Attitudes Toward English Teacher Feedback in Cloud Classroom Learning Environments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cloud classrooms are catching increasing attention in English teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Via multiple correlation analysis, path analysis, and data collected from randomly selected 230 participants, this study examined the effects of students' emotional perceptions and attitudes towards teaching feedback in cloud classroom learning environments. It was concluded that all emotional perceptions were significantly and positively correlated, and learning motivation caused the most significant effect, followed by interest. Learning motivation could predict the perceived teaching feedback. Students with strong self-confidence had strong learning motivation and interest in English learning. High-score students preferred more profound and euphemistic comments;medium-score students hoped to catch more attention and obtain positive feedback from teachers;poor-score students favored direct and explicit evaluations. This study is helpful to future research into non-verbal and peer feedback in technology-based learning environments.

Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments and Adaptive Learning Systems - Development of Functionality Taxonomies

Especially against the background of the current coronavirus crisis, technology-enhanced learning environments (TELEs) increasingly characterize teaching at universities. For the successful use and integration of TELEs, it is important to understand the functionalities of the technologies used. Based on the state of the art and following [1], we develop two taxonomies. The first taxonomy depicts eleven functionalities with different dimensions relevant for successfully designing TELEs. Sound knowledge of the functionalities supports research on adaptive learning within TELEs and the implementation of student-centered learning opportunities, which is structured in a second functionality taxonomy for adaptive learning systems (ALSs). We contribute to current research on TELEs and ALSs by providing a structured overview of functionalities and suggestions for further research with our research opportunities. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Student performance prediction in e-learning system and evaluating effectiveness of online courses

In recent years, the number of online courses in India has skyrocketed especially due to the Covid pandemic. The most significant increments have happened in degree colleges, where 85% concur that internet based courses are important for their drawn-out procedure when contrasted with 60% in 2015. The distribution of online courses has evolved dramatically as technology has advanced. Web-based platform provides new challenges for both teachers and students. Teachers should be clear about the effectiveness of online learning in teaching students. For that, the possibilities of online learning should be compared with traditional learning. Students are evaluated based on their focus on online learning. This study aims to determine the efficacy of online courses by predicting student performance in an e-learning system. These research findings evaluate modern learning methods, highlight students' potential and help teachers understand how to assess and lead students on online platforms. © 2023 IEEE.

A Study on Metaverse in Education

Most nations have used online meeting software platforms for distant education in some capaci ty during the COVID-19 epidemic. These software applications do, however, have substantial drawbacks that hinder engagement and fall short of simulating the classroom environment. Many of these restrictions are resolved by the newly forming Metaverse. In education in Metaverse, learners have the opportunity to engage with digital content and each other in a more interactive and immersive way. For example, learners can participate in virtual simulations, role -playing activities, and collaborative projects with other learners from around the world. They can also access a wide range of digital resources, such as virtual textbooks, lectures, and assessments, all within the same platform. This paper reviews different Metaverse models, frameworks for applying Metaverse in the field of education. © 2023 IEEE.

Adaptive 3D and VFX Films Virtual Learning Environments

In this study, the analysis of the topic 'Adaptive 3D and VFX Films Virtual Learning' has been provided. As virtual learning and 3D technologies use are increasing, the interest in their learning in academic discussion is increasing daily. However, there are various drawbacks to the use of3D for learning environments. To solve this drawback, the use of adaptive learning environments is increasing more, such as an environment that can dynamically adapt to the learner and the activities that can be performed by that specific learner. As the new ways of learning have been increasing over the past years (in the times of the COVID-19 Pandemic) through the use of computers in the educational sector. The learning environment has been widely adopted by the educational sectors in the case of obtaining promising outcomes. In recent years, these environments have evolved into more advanced environments with the implication of3D technology. With the help of 3D, these adaptive environments are helping learners according to their preferences. © 2022 IEEE.

Teaching-learning in virtual learning environments: a matter of forced compromises away from student-centredness?

In this phenomenographic study, we contribute with a critical view on teachers' understanding of the use of digital technology in education is at the core. By analysing engineering teachers in Sweden's qualitative different ways of experiencing teaching-learning in virtual learning environments (VLEs) pre-COVID-19 pandemic, we found three different approaches: (A) increased transmission possibilities, (B) outlined trail and (C) forced compromises. Based on our findings, the tensions between the possibilities in the virtual learning environment and teachers' teaching-learning intentions are discussed, and teachers' decreased room for action to design for learning is problematised. Notably, teachers with an increased breadth of awareness of teaching-learning appear to experience the greatest tensions, forcing them to compromise their student-centred intentions. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Art-Based Innovation Teaching and Learning: How Do Students, Teachers, and Administrators Experience STEAM Education Online?

STEAM education, incorporating the arts into traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) studies, is spreading globally. The arts component is called out to promote creative and innovative thinking among STEM learners. As with any novel educational trend, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) teaching and learning methods have been predominantly developing in the offline settings, especially given the creative nature, softness, and tacitness of learning goals brought in by the arts. However, this global digitalization trend which has been further enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the entire educational field to online spaces and STEAM studies had to follow. Given the relative novelty of STEAM, as well as the new normal of online settings that it has to adapt to, our knowledge and understanding of how STEAM studies will survive the shift to the digital era remain very limited. In this study, we analyze the case of a STEAM-based study program on innovation, which was conceptualized as an offline program before the pandemic and had to transform into a fully online format following the global lockdown. Applying the Community of Inquiry (COI) pedagogical framework we analyze in depth the perspectives of all the course participants—students, teachers, and administrative staff—their experiences, their adaptation to the shift into an online space and the lessons learned. Our study shares theoretical, practical, and policymaking implications on STEAM teaching and learning. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The engagement of students using the virtual platform tools. A successful case in a required subject of 1st year in mathematics in engineering (UPC)

Fonaments matemàtics is a required 1st year subject in engineering career at the university EPSEVG (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) with approximately 270 students enrolled each semestre that traditionally it had a medium pass rate. Over the last 6 years we have introduced gradual changes in the teaching planning of it with the idea of achieving: 1) that students work throughout the course, 2) leveling knowledge and 3) reduce the number of students not presented to any exam. The changes have been implemented and corrected based on our feedback from students (engagement, grades, acceptance and survey assessments). The introduction of the calculator, laptops and tablets in everyday life and the use of the tools of the UPC virtual platform have been key. In this contribution, we present the strategies used and the good results obtained. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

The teaching involvement of the users, the units and the whole UPC measured through the Moodle indicators of the virtual platform Atenea. An extension proposal of Atenea's BI platform

Atenea is the Moodle virtual platform of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) with about 31000 users and 5000 active subjects from 16 school centers. Atenea indicators give information on the teaching activity of the users and centers. This is specially relevant when teaching is online, as was the case in the Covid-19 period. The UPC already has a Atenea's Bussines Intelligent platform (BI), which has recently been launched. In this 1st phase the Institute of Science of Education (ICE) has actively participated in the design of the application. Currently it shows basic indicators over a period of time where one can filter or compare by centers or type of users. The paper presents this design and make a proposal for the extension of the BI, for the future, with respect to: 1) the inclusion of some key indicators for measuring the subjects' activity, 2) a proposal for cross-referencing data with academic performance. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.