ABSTRACT
E-learning is a student-centered education system which enables students to study anything from anywhere and anytime according to their learning goals. Since the COVID-19 pandemic constrained people to commute, e-learning has been massively implemented to enable educational activities. This study aims to investigate the e-learning success factors and its influence on e-learning effectiveness in higher education. The systematic Literature Review (SLR) has taken into account in order to identify e-learning success factors. Through analyzing the selected literatures, extraction of e-learning success factor domains has been attempted based on the influencing factors and its impact. As a result, seven success factors related to technology, learner, instructor, content, and institution's support, are identified as influential in the effectiveness of e-learning implementation. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated safety recommendations of social distancing provoked an unprecedented shift from primarily in-person to online educational instruction. This paper details a curriculum of eight professional workshops designed to help faculty develop the knowledge and skills to meet their instructional learning goals and students’ accessibility needs in these unique and challenging circumstances. Results identified a number of digital tools and strategies that faculty and students found useful for both synchronous and asynchronous learning contexts. A detailed description of each module as well as faculty-provided recommendations are included herein for the benefit of instructors designing future online courses for alternative modes of instruction. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.
ABSTRACT
As part of a Dutch Science Foundation project called T-TRIPP, the authors developed the serious game Cards for Biosafety. The aim of Cards for Biosafety is to let young biotechnology researchers learn more about biosafety. Analyses of workshops with researchers from the biotechnology domain as well as results of interviews with several biosafety officers clearly indicated the need for such a serious game with a focus on educational learning. Cards for Biosafety is a physical (also playable online on Tabletopia) round-based card game and playable with up to eight players. The game itself consists of scenario, risk and measure cards, and the task of the players is to choose risk and measure cards that fit the scenario explained by the facilitator at the beginning of each round. To test the efficiency of Cards for Biosafety as a learning tool, the authors conducted two online-workshops with twelve participants. The results of these sessions have not only shown that Cards for Biosafety is a well-designed game, but also a successful game to achieve the intended learning goal. In addition, the authors recognized that ‘fun’ is an important element in the game which leads to ‘learning’ in a very effective way. Future research should focus on the role of such positive states in serious games and their influence on learning outcomes. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The COVID pandemic has brought many changes to the field of education so that educators are asked to have learning innovations that can help learners meet learning goals. This study aims to develop a facilitation model to develop conscientizacao during the COVID pandemic. This facilitation model utilizes SIPEJAR in compiling learning tools according to the learner's learning needs. The research method used was adapted from the R2D2 development model which showed the results that the facilitation model had been developed in accordance with predetermined indicators and in accordance with the learner's learning needs. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
To research teachers' priorities on what was to be taught and learned during the COVID-19 lockdown, we asked Spanish Primary and Secondary teachers to choose and describe the activity they preferred among those carried out with their students during the pandemic. Our interest was to investigate what really happened in the classrooms, the type of learning favored by the practices (reproductive vs. constructive), and the agreement between the teacher's goals and their teaching We obtained 272 activities that we analyzed according to the proposed goals, the types of learning worked (verbal, procedural, and attitudinal), and the kind of teaching promoted (content or student-centered). Results showed that most teachers proposed content-centered activities, oriented above all to verbal learning. There were clear differences between the proposed goals, partly student-centered, and what was really taught, essentially content-centered. We obtained two teaching profiles, one reproductive and the other constructive.
ABSTRACT
Introductory hands-on courses such as our smartphone-based coding course, SuaCode require a lot of support for students to accomplish learning goals. Online environments make it even more difficult to get assistance especially more recently because of COVID-19. Given the multilingual context of SuaCode students—learners across 42 African countries that are mostly Anglophone or Francophone—in this work, we developed a bilingual Artificial Intelligence (AI) Teaching Assistant (TA)—Kwame—that provides answers to students’ coding questions from SuaCode courses in English and French. Kwame is a Sentence-BERT (SBERT)-based question-answering (QA) system that we trained and evaluated offline using question-answer pairs created from the course’s quizzes, lesson notes and students’ questions in past cohorts. Kwame finds the paragraph most semantically similar to the question via cosine similarity. We compared the system with TF-IDF and Universal Sentence Encoder. Our results showed that fine-tuning on the course data and returning the top 3 and 5 answers improved the accuracy results. Kwame will make it easy for students to get quick and accurate answers to questions in SuaCode courses. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic forced many institutions to offer online courses from March 2020 through June 2021. A challenge in the online setting is assessing student work while maintaining academic integrity. This paper reports on augmenting traditional written exam problems with short video explanations of student solutions. These exam videos share some of the learning goals of oral exams and technical interviews, getting a more complete understanding of students' thinking process on the way to a solution. While these exam videos were originally designed to combat non-authorized answer-seeking and answer-sharing practices (cheating), they were a positive learning tool for students. Over 85% of surveyed students want exam videos in future courses, even when returning to in-person instruction. The benefits expressed by students include getting a chance to reflect on the solution under less time pressure, correcting mistakes as they explain solutions, and demonstrating a more complete understanding. The main benefit for the instructor was to see and hear students' problem-solving processes. The time to record and watch videos was an additional task for both students and the instructor, so this solution may not scale to large classes. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the need for promoting efficient online learning. Without external pressure and guidance, fully online learners are expected to self-monitor their learning process and find paths to achieve learning goals;such abilities are considered self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. To become a self-regulated learner, the first step is to learn how to set effective learning goals. However, this is difficult for learners with lower SRL skills, since they may not have enough knowledge on selecting and adopting the appropriate goal setting strategies. Thus, there is a need for supporting fully online learners on setting effective learning goals. This study introduces a new approach of enhancing students' goal setting skills by interacting with a chatbot, which embedded some guiding questions based on a goal setting strategy. Students in an online course were invited to complete a goal setting activity prior to class, and their perceptions of the activity were collected via interviews. The findings from this study shed light on future designs of chatbot supporting SRL activities. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused many institutions to shift from in-person learning to online delivery of course content, including laboratory courses. At the University of California, Davis, the Mechanical Properties of Materials Laboratory course instructors only had two and a half weeks to prepare for a Spring quarter conducted without any in-person interactions. With the rapid transition to online-only instruction, it was impossible to meet the learning goals of developing hands-on experimental skills alongside analysis and data communication topics. Instead, the instructional team reimagined the course learning objectives. A greater emphasis was placed on data analysis methods such as statistics. We also chose to prioritize written communication, including constructing arguments and problem statements. These topics were taught in guided one-hour discussion sections with the Teaching Assistants (TAs), while the weekly one-hour lectures focused on the labs' scientific content. This paper reports on the adapted course content and reflections from the instructor, TAs, and students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
Many higher education (HE) institutions struggle to connect their lofty goals for exiting students with their operational decisions around programming, especially when those programs are offered fully online. Scholarship is showing that the root of this disconnect often lies in the instructional designs (ID) of programs and the teaching and assessment approaches these designs support. The study forms part of a larger study whose aim was to apply a macro/meso/micro-driven action research initiative to align ID models being used by instructors with 21st century goals and contemporary learning theories. The aim of the study was to determine the impact of this initiative on learner profiles. The study focussed on working adult students (n=2,300), the majority from socially and academically disadvantaged backgrounds, enrolled in a 2-year full time technical institute in Chile. An action-based research approach was used involving both qualitative and quantitative data collection tools including focus groups, extensive field notes, observations and surveys. The data collection took place over 8 months, between 2020 and 2021, during which time changes to the ID model, teaching approaches and virtual pedagogical resources were mediated. Perceptions of students and teachers of the changes were collected through pre, mid and post questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Results show a salient transition among students from thinking and learning autonomously, i.e alone, in isolation, to self-directed behaviours that involve engaged participation in social collaborative learning opportunities within and beyond the virtual learning program. Importantly, evidence also revealed many students evolving from positions of disadvantage and lacking to ones depicting confident, communicative, involved and aspiring identities. These findings underline the potential that wider application of such ID models in online learning practice could have for educational development. The research could be a contribution to the emerging instances of online learning which are increasing rapidly in the wake of the COVID pandemic both in Chile and abroad. The results not only have theoretical relevance for e-learning research, but also provide empirical evidence for understanding and effective decision-making in a cross-section of institutions that offer programs through this modality. © the authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.