ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformations across industries, but also introduced new challenges into workplaces, including the difficulties of effectively socializing with colleagues when working remotely. This challenge is exacerbated for new employees who need to develop workplace networks from the outset. In this paper, by analyzing a large-scale telemetry dataset of more than 10,000 Microsoft employees who joined the company in the first three months of 2022, we describe how new employees interact and telecommute with their colleagues during their "onboarding"period. Our results reveal that although new hires are gradually expanding networks over time, there still exists significant gaps between their network statistics and those of tenured employees even after the six-month onboarding phase. We also observe that heterogeneity exists among new employees in how their networks change over time, where employees whose job tasks do not necessarily require extensive and diverse connections could be at a disadvantaged position in this onboarding process. By investigating how web-based people recommendations in organizational knowledge base facilitate new employees naturally expand their networks, we also demonstrate the potential of web-based applications for addressing the aforementioned socialization challenges. Altogether, our findings provide insights on new employee network dynamics in remote and hybrid work environments, which may help guide organizational leaders and web application developers on quantifying and improving the socialization experiences of new employees in digital workplaces. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
The transformation of classical education into distance education has become increasingly relevant, especially given the challenging conditions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and military operations in our country. In these circumstances, distance learning requires practical educational materials that are easily accessible to students. This paper proposes criteria and indicators for selecting digital tools that can facilitate group work with educational content in distance learning. We analyzed the tools available on the Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Cisco Webex platforms and evaluated their suitability for managing students' group work in distance learning in institutions of higher education at various stages of the learning process including setting tasks, designing the learning environment, facilitating group interaction and communication, managing educational content and files, promoting teamwork and productivity, and presenting results. To obtain expert assessment of the defined criteria and indicators, we engaged seventeen researchers and educators who have practical experience using digital tools in distance learning. Our study identified three important criteria for selecting digital tools for group work with educational content, namely: design, functional-technological, education -communication ones. We determined the weight of the indicators for these criteria and assessed digital tools for group work with educational content in distance learning. Digital tools such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace was found to be more suitable for providing group work of students in a distance learning, while Cisco Webex was found to be the most suitable tool for organizing real-time group work. Other digital tools for group work of students in distance learning can be evaluated according to defined criteria and indicators.
ABSTRACT
As COVID-19 emerged and prolonged, various changes have occurred in our lives. For example, as restrictions on daily life are lengthening, the number of people complaining of depression is increasing. In this paper, we conduct a sentiment analysis by modelling public emotions and issues through social media. Text data written on Twitter is collected by dividing it into the early and late stages of COVID-19, and emotional analysis is performed to reclassify it into positive and negative tweets. Therefore, subject modelling is performed with a total of four datasets to review the results and evaluate the modelling results. Furthermore, topic modelling results are visualised using dimensional reduction, and public opinions on COVID-19 are intuitively confirmed by generating representative words consisting of each topic in the word cloud. Additionally, we implement a COVID-chatbot that provides a question-and-answer service on COVID-19 and verifies the performance in our experiments.
ABSTRACT
Previous research disclosed that teachers faced challenges while using different learning management systems during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study investigated teachers' perceptions of Microsoft Teams' functionalities and the extent to which they are related to teachers' time spent on it as well as the various factors associated with their syllabus coverage. Situated within human-computer interaction theory, 157 university teachers at Chouaib Doukkali University, Morocco, were administered a questionnaire that measured their perception of the functionalities offered by Microsoft Teams. Results indicated that teachers' perceptions of the functionalities offered by learning management systems also play an intervening variable in the deployment of these tools in teaching. Hence, this paper calls for an extension and re-adaptation of existing models such as the technology acceptance model and the system usability scale to include an evaluation of the functionalities offered by these tools.
ABSTRACT
In many countries, COVID-19 has made it harder for women to study because they are expected to do more housework and care for children. This article encompasses different data sources that can be used to figure out how the early pandemic of COVID-19 affected the number of studies done by females, in comparison with males. This data is add-on metadata that can be used with raw Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) from 2016 to 2020 of the Feb 6, 2021 dump. We retrieved open-source metadata from various sources, including LinkedIn, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, and linked bibliographic information to characteristics of the author's environments. It consists of published journals and online preprints, including each author's gender and involvement in the publication, their position through time, the h-index of their institutes, and gender equality in the professional labor market at the country level. For each record of papers, the data also includes the information of the papers, e.g., title and field of study. By gathering this evidence, our data can support the fact diversity in science is more than just the number of active members of different groups. It should also examine minority participation in science. Our data may help scholars understand diversity in science and advance it. The article ``The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on gendered research productivity and its correlates'' uses this data as the principal source (Kwon, Yun & Kang, 2021).
ABSTRACT
Progress in schooling using competence-based teaching for students is a priority in setting up a quality-centered educational process. Thus, using ICT tools as teaching–learning techniques represents an important objective in reaching scholastic performance and the capacity to offer students various experiences in teaching. Starting with an analysis of research on integrating ICT tools in the educational environment, this study is aimed at presenting teaching opportunities for all students, seeing education through the lens of those instruments specific to a secondary school level, referencing the subject of geography. The applied research design includes mixed methods applied to a total of 674 students, based on results received before and after a written evaluation, to determine the level of knowledge of the students. The present study evaluates the learning environment in which a successful and practical integration of ICT tools is anticipated in the teaching and learning process, from the perspective of the comparative measurement of the impact on the tests, resulting from the formative assessment. The conducted experiment and the Google Forms questionnaires suggest, through the degree of involvement of all students, how technology can facilitate the teaching–learning process. The results showed that there are statistically significant differences between the experimental and the control group, and that information and communication technologies (ICT) represent an important tool for improving performance and developing participatory skills, having the ability to provide students with positive results.
ABSTRACT
Previous research disclosed that teachers faced challenges while using different learning management systems during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study investigated teachers' perceptions of Microsoft Teams' functionalities and the extent to which they are related to teachers' time spent on it as well as the various factors associated with their syllabus coverage. Situated within human-computer interaction theory, 157 university teachers at Chouaib Doukkali University, Morocco, were administered a questionnaire that measured their perception of the functionalities offered by Microsoft Teams. Results indicated that teachers' perceptions of the functionalities offered by learning management systems also play an intervening variable in the deployment of these tools in teaching. Hence, this paper calls for an extension and re-adaptation of existing models such as the technology acceptance model and the system usability scale to include an evaluation of the functionalities offered by these tools. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Identifying and exploring emerging trends in news is becoming more essential than ever with many changes occurring around the world due to the global health crises. However, most of the recent research has focused mainly on detecting trends in social media, thus, benefiting from social features (e.g. likes and retweets on Twitter) which helped the task as they can be used to measure the engagement and diffusion rate of content. Yet, formal text data, unlike short social media posts, comes with a longer, less restricted writing format, and thus, more challenging. In this paper, we focus our study on emerging trends detection in financial news articles about Microsoft, collected before and during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (July 2019 to July 2020). We make the dataset accessible and we also propose a strong baseline (Contextual Leap2Trend) for exploring the dynamics of similarities between pairs of keywords based on topic modeling and term frequency. Finally, we evaluate against a gold standard (Google Trends) and present noteworthy real-world scenarios regarding the influence of the pandemic on Microsoft. ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus pandemic has had a major impact on education. As a result of this crisis, instructors world-wide had to quickly adapt and shift to remote teaching. This paper presents and describes technologies (such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Virtual Worlds, etc.) to promote active student learning during a pandemic. It also provides general information about the coronavirus and the learning environment that it created.
ABSTRACT
HyFlex learning environments have been meeting the unique needs of students and institutions for nearly 20 years. However, it was the pandemic that gave HyFlex its widespread acceptance and application. Literature suggests that HyFlex may now be considered part of the new norm in education and therefore, further study is needed on how it affects both teaching and learning. Our flipped design thinking course leverages active learning requiring the instructor and students to interact extensively. We piloted a specific version of HyFlex we named "Interactive Synchronous HyFlex" where students can participate on a daily basis in person or synchronously online. In this specific instance of HyFlex we explore: (1) Does student academic performance differ in the HyFlex environment compared to the Face to Face only environment? And (2) Does student academic performance differ based on how they chose to participate in the HyFlex course? Data were collected for this quasi-experimental study design on overall semester grades and three significant design projects during the semester. We compared the course offered as a Face to Face only experience to the course offered as a HyFlex course enabling remote participation. Second, we parse students in the HyFlex course into two categories: those who did not participate remotely vs. those who participated remotely once or more times. Students in the HyFlex course had a significantly different grade distribution earning more A's and more F's than their Face to Face only counterparts. Given the positive results of the Interactive Synchronous HyFlex approach, we plan to continue implementing it in our introductory design course though we will increase our attention on the remote students as they may need additional scaffolding to be successful.
ABSTRACT
The government issued orders to implement social distancing or physical distancing. Social distancing is a method of maintaining a distance of at least one meter from other people. This is useful for reducing/preventing disease transmission (virus) and reducing the chain of the spread of covid-19. So the hospital can provide optimal service. For this reason, this research is structured to create a system that can detect violations of social distancing in an open place. This system uses the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm. The developed system uses a pre-Trained Yolov4 model to detect 80 object classes. Testing of this system is carried out based on several scenarios. The system is programmed using Python, with tools for coding Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Anaconda. The best result from creating the detection mode is obtained from a dataset ratio of 90% train data and 10% test data, with the mean average precision results obtained being 54.11%. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease in Nigeria and all over the world in 2019/2020 caused havoc on the world's economy and put a strain on global healthcare facilities and personnel. It also threw up many opportunities to improve processes using artificial intelligence techniques like big data analytics and business intelligence. The need to speedily make decisions that could have far-reaching effects is prompting the boom in data analytics which is achieved via exploratory data analysis (EDA) to see trends, patterns, and relationships in the data. Today, big data analytics is revolutionizing processes and helping improve productivity and decision-making capabilities in all aspects of life. The large amount of heterogeneous and, in most cases, opaque data now available has made it possible for researchers and businesses of all sizes to effectively deploy data analytics to gain action-oriented insights into various problems in real time. In this paper, we deployed Microsoft Excel and Python to perform EDA of the covid-19 pandemic data in Nigeria and presented our results via visualizations and a dashboard using Tableau. The dataset is from the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) recorded between February 28th, 2020, and July 19th, 2022. This paper aims to follow the data and visually show the trends over the past 2 years and also show the powerful capabilities of these data analytics tools and techniques. Furthermore, our findings contribute to the current literature on Covid-19 research by showcasing how the virus has progressed in Nigeria over time and the insights thus far. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper draws on theoretical concepts from political science and comparative education to explore policy-makers' responses to COVID-19 in Georgia. The findings show how the Ministry of Education of Georgia has sought external endorsements from global actors–Microsoft Corporation and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)–as legitimising authorities to claim policy effectiveness domestically. The findings indicate that in a political environment with low public support for the government, this approach has contributed to further deepening of public discontent. Moreover, such external endorsements have created conflicts of interest, as private authorities in education have acted simultaneously as policy advocates and service providers. The changed role of a government in creating markets through public–private partnerships (PPPs) and serving the business interests is a well-studied phenomenon. This paper goes beyond documenting policy influences and the growing role of businesses in education by considering the additional roles that corporations play: endorsers and legitimators of education policies. The pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of education and created even bigger markets promoted by governments in exchange for external political support. Finally, the paper offers a new analytic term ‘digital compradors' and conceptualises this emerging phenomenon in relation to PPP. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 has had a significant impact on teaching/learning processes around the world. As a result, education practitioners in Jordan and elsewhere have had to adapt quickly and switch to distance education: social media, including Facebook, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Social networks play an indispensable role in teaching/learning French as a Foreign Language, while providing a wide range of authentic materials. They make it easy for students to interact and provide the opportunity to discover online tools to develop their skills. Internet and all other forms of computer-mediated communication help learners to accelerate their acquisition, while being up-to-date and independent. However, as a result of our feedback from the field, it turned out that Zoom and Microsoft Teams play an important role in all kinds of interactions between teacher and students and between students themselves. These two applications allow a live interaction;as the classroom is virtual, participants will have the ability to exchange ideas in a synchronous manner. It is possible to create groups for each given course. In this article, we will try to highlight the positive aspects of using social networks, especially Facebook, to improve the skills of our learners in the French language department at the University of Petra. Then, the use of Zoom will be analyzed. Finally, and based on a theoretical and practical analysis of a group created in Microsoft Teams, the latter will be studied in order to show the positive aspects of any insertion of such an application in the Jordanian context. © 2022 DSR Publishers/ The University of Jordan.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest virtual experience for online work and employee engagement in the world. Millions of employees have been required to spend extended periods of time working on digital platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Team, and Skype. However, the nature of this work has resulted in a number of negative implications, such as lengthy work hours, virtual meetings, and the constant pressure to check and respond to business-related emails. In addition, several employees felt obligated to stay online to demonstrate that they were not avoiding their work responsibilities, which contributed to their psychological stress. In this research, a questionnaire was utilized to assess remote work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic's spread. The questionnaire consisted of four axes: work intensification, employee engagement and online presence, adapting to new working techniques, and demographic aspects of the respondents. According to the results, the abrupt change from physical to online work patterns increased work intensity, online presence, and job instability. We also observe that the transition to new methods of working from home is proceeding well. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Many faculty were forced to teach online with inadequate training or resources, affecting student academic performance because of COVID-19. The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive, embedded, single-site case study is to describe teaching online and the use of Microsoft Teams as a student engagement tool as perceived by the faculty in a rural middle school in North Carolina. This study explored how middle school teachers used Microsoft teams to engage students, perceived benefits and challenges, and best practices. Microsoft Teams was chosen because it was one of the most searched for online conference tools by educators during the pandemic. Questions were developed for an online survey, interviews, and a focus group. Data were collected from 19 teachers and administrators in one middle school. Using the adolescent community of engagement framework, interview data were analyzed with categorizing and connecting strategies. Findings indicated that teachers engaged students through MS Teams features of Livestream, chat box, recordings, student-teacher interaction, and class discussion. Using MS Teams included allowing students to be connected to the class, asking questions live, and allowing learning to continue during the pandemic, providing an emotionally safe environment. MS Teams provided interactive features of livestream and the chat box. The challenges of using MS Teams included unprepared teachers who had inadequate training, lacked time to plan and prepare and disengaged students. Students did not join livestreams because they had trouble logging in, navigating the tool, and attending was not required. Recommended practices include training teachers and students in using the features of MS Teams and incorporating interaction and collaboration into lessons. Future research could be repeated in another middle school in a non-pandemic environment in an online or hybrid course. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Hybrid approaches to teaching, where there is a proportion of online (asynchronous or synchronous) teaching as well as face-to-face synchronous teaching, were adopted almost ubiquitously by UK higher education institutions throughout the 2020/2021 academic year amidst disruption caused by national and international Covid-19 restrictions. One example of this was the introduction and use of software such as Microsoft (MS) Teams as a learning tool and platform to continue education provisions. As such, this study reports on the implementation of MS Teams to deliver a foundation year physical science curriculum within a hybrid learning context over the 2020/2021 academic year and within multiple learning contexts. In-built data analytics from MS Teams were used to measure student engagement and activity on the software. Additionally, a questionnaire was used to capture student perspectives of MS Teams and their use as a learning tool. These data show that the like-for-like replacement of face-to-face teaching with an online alternative within this hybrid approach did not produce a clear like-for-like learning environment for students, except in the case of small-group collaborations where students found clear utility for the platform. Significant thought needs to be given to the use of online and hybrid alternatives to traditional face-to-face instruction and, in order to facilitate student learning and engagement effectively, a bottom-up approach to redesign may be required instead of simply substituting teaching tools. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Online synchronous classes and seminars are increasing in universities along with the outbreak of COVID-19. Since the online classes are not in-person condition, it is difficult for a teacher to monitor the learners. In the field of distance education, the need to support learner's concentration has been identified. More effective methods adapted to online classes in universities should be discussed. In this paper, we focus on the teacher's and learners' attention to the material in online real-time classes. We then propose a system that provides feedback on the differences in learners' gaze in order to improve the followability of learners. The proposed system assumes an online environment using Microsoft Teams PowerPointLive and acquires the "gazing point" at every slide-material and "page change history" of the teacher and learners. The results of using the proposed system suggest that it can improve the learner's followability to the teacher. © 2022 Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age, CELDA 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Several industry-specific metadata initiatives have historically facilitated structured data modeling for the web in domains such as commerce, publishing, social media, and so forth. The metadata vocabularies produced by these initiatives allow developers to "wrap” information on the web to provide machine-readable signals for search engines, advertisers, and user-facing content on apps and websites, thus assisting with surfacing facts about people, places, and products. A universal iteration of such a project called Schema.org started in 2011, resulting from a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to collaborate on a single structured data model across domains. Yet, few studies have explored the metadata vocabulary terms in this significant web resource. What terms are included, upon what subject domains do they focus, and how does Schema.org represent knowledge in its conceptual model? This article presents findings from our extraction and analysis of the documented release history and complete hierarchy on Schema.org's developer pages. We provide a semantic network visualization of Schema.org, including an analysis of its modularity and domains, and discuss its global significance concerning fact-checking and COVID-19. We end by theorizing Schema.org as a gatekeeper of data on the web that authors vocabulary that everyday web users encounter in their searches. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for Information Science and Technology.
ABSTRACT
Microsoft released a new communication platform, Microsoft Teams, in 2017. Due in part to COVID-19, the popularity of communication platforms, like Microsoft Teams, increased exponentially. Given its user base and increased popularity, it seems likely that digital forensic investigators will encounter cases where Microsoft Teams is a relevant component. However, because Microsoft Teams is a relatively new application, there is limited forensic research on the application particularly focusing on mobile operating systems. To address this gap, an analysis of data stored at rest by Microsoft Teams was conducted on the Windows 10 operating system as well as on Android and Apple iOS mobile operating systems. Basic functionalities, such as messaging, sharing files, participating in video conferences, and other functionalities that Teams provides, were performed in an isolated testing environment. Cellebrite UFED Physical Analyzer and Magnet AXIOM Examine tools were used to analyze the mobile devices and the Windows device, respectively. Manual or non-automated investigation recovered, at least partially, the majority of artifacts across all three operating systems. In this study, a total of 77.6% of the populated artifacts were partially or fully recovered in the manual investigation. On the other hand, forensic tools used did not automatically recover many of the artifacts found with the manual investigation. Only 13.8% of artifacts were partially or fully recovered by the forensic tools across all three devices. These discovered artifacts and the results of the investigations are presented in order to aid digital forensic investigations.