ABSTRACT
Supportive digital technologies for the community practice of Faith remain relatively under-explored in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We report on interviews with 12 members of a Buddhist community in the UK who self-organized and used video-conferencing tools to remain connected to their faith community during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to understand how they adopted online tools for their practice while shaping new collective experiences. Findings from Reflexive Thematic Analysis were combined with autoethnographic insights from the first author, also a community member. We evidence qualities of the practice that were valued by participants before and during the pandemic, and the limitations of existing tools and screen-based interactions. We contribute empirical insights on mediated religious and spiritual practice, advancing HCI discourses on Techno-Spirituality, Tangible Embodied Interaction, Soma Design and More-than-Human Worlds. We further develop design considerations for enriching spiritual experiences that are meaningful to practitioners in communities of faith. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
The social distancing imposed by Covid-19 impacted the development of educational activities at all levels. Engineering education was specially challenged by the suspension of face-to-face activities, which paused the development of laboratory practices. The present work accounts for the design of virtual learning experiences in a Microcontrollers course. The free online tools 'Tinkercad Circuits' and 'Arduino' were used to simulate circuit programming and connections. These tools also allowed remote collaboration between students and teachers during lockdown. The results of the Mechatronics Engineering students (n=30) show that programming skills and hardware knowledge were developed. Additionally, the activities had a positive response from the students. On the other hand, according to the psychomotor domain taxonomy, the students had obstacles to their full development. It is concluded on the importance of integrating simulation to the development of activities and laboratory practices, as well as the advantages of hybrid teaching formats. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In the current society, mobile devices have become common in modern culture along with which the Internet transcends time and location constraints to become a widespread learning tool. This gave rise to digital learning which reached a new peak due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Not every student has the same learning opportunities. In order to make education more egalitarian, effective policies and programs must be implemented-And perhaps your unique data analysis could assist disclose the solution. Current research indicates that educational outcomes are far from egalitarian. The COVID-19 epidemic aggravated the imbalance. There is an immediate necessity for a higher standard of acknowledgement and quantify the range and impact of COVID-19 on the mentioned partisanship. This paper aims to understand the digital learning trends in the current times and visualize the inclination towards the use of different online learning tools. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 stopped all outreach and educational activities with in-person participation. The ALICE collaboration soon adapted to the new situation imposed by lockdowns and other restrictions. The multitude of online tools and platforms available allowed us to continue reaching out to the public. In-person visits and talks were replaced by virtual visits and virtual talks, done with dedicated equipment and allowing remote audiences to see the experiment and interact with scientists. Masterclasses for high-school students were also adapted and were held online;web-based versions for the analysis programs were developed, making it easy for students at home to take part in this exciting hands-on activity and become scientists for a day. This new format made it possible to reach out to new audiences, both students and general public, who normally would not have the opportunity to travel and participate;it also motivated more colleagues to be involved in outreach. We will discuss how these online activities were implemented and the experience gained. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ABSTRACT
Inclusive employment opportunities for individuals living with disabilities have been an ongoing issue in society, creating barriers and challenges for this community. Digital assistive technologies (DAT) are, and continue to be, helpful tools in aiding in this inclusivity, but they have not always been accessible to all. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, where online work became the "new normal", has bought this into sharp focus, giving individuals access and the ability to utilize different online tools that support individuals living with various disabilities in doing work. To better understand the current context concerning DATs and remote working for individuals living with disabilities, we conducted a scoping review in 2021/2022. We identified relevant papers that aided in identifying validated digital assistive technologies. Our study aims to continue supporting individuals living with disabilities to access the technology needed to join, or remain within, the workforce and work towards dismantling barriers that prevent this. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Since December 2019, the world still fighting to beat coronavirus (COVID-19). However, coronavirus is continuing its spread in many countries and claimed the lives people. It is not easy to differentiate between COVID-19 symptoms and simple flu symptoms, especially at the first stage of the infection. This is the main challenge where we have to run many tests as possible and isolate any suspicious people 14 days at least to make sure that they are not carrying the virus. This will increase the cost and people may lose their jobs. Therefore, the economy has to continue. Companies and organization start running their business using online tools, this will draw different future and employee need to gain special task to continue their work. In order go back to the normal life, we have track the virus and stay away from infected area or people. In this paper, we propose a secure cloud-based health framework to record patients' readings, give initial diagnose to identify infected areas and control the spread of the virus. The proposed framework will be running in a secure environment to protect patient's records. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an undeniable acceleration of time when social distancing measures were in place. Digital natives are the population group that was most accustomed to online tools, which allowed them to stay in contact and carry out their daily activities during the most critical stage of the pandemic. An important element that strengthens interaction in digital media is trust, both in the sources of information and in the medium. For this reason, quantitative research was developed in which the associations between trust in social networks and other digital communication tools in Mexican youth were analyzed. The study was conducted with students from public and private universities during 2021, when strict confinement measures still prevailed in Monterrey, Nuevo León. The study confirms some of the findings of other research in which trust is a fundamental variable in effective communication through digital channels. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Laboratory courses were forced to switch to online format during the COVID-19 pandemic, with students losing access to laboratory equipment in on-campus facilities. This paper reports on adapting a senior-level Control and Vibration Laboratory curriculum to enable students to complete exercises remotely, using the Arduino platform and its accessories. The results show that the remote-learning format is a viable and sometimes preferable learning solution based on students' positive feedback. The paper also identified several other online tools and platforms, including Discord and Tinkercad, that contributed to the overall learning experience. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutes quickly turn to the use of online tools, radically transforming the modes of teaching and communication with students. This educational shift significantly affected the conduct of artistic laboratory courses, where physical presence is essential for students and teaching staff. In order to address this shift, the teaching staff for the laboratory course 'Digital Artistic Creation 2', of the Department of Digital Arts and Cinema of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens adopted a project-based learning methodology and used a combination of teleconferencing tools and multiuser 3D Social Virtual Environments, to teach the creation of interactive and possibly dynamically evolving 3D assemblages and spatial compositions. This paper presents a research study which aims at investigating the result of this teaching course with regards to the educational impact and the experience of the students. The study was conducted at the end of the semester with the use of questionnaires delivered to the students in order to explore the learning experiences, outcomes and improvisation suggestions concerning this novel, combined form of teaching, as well as to detect the emerging collaborative and self-regulated learning patterns that emerged throughout the course. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
ASSISTments is a free online learning tool for improving students’ mathematics achievement by providing immediate feedback and hints to students, detailed information on how students performed to teachers, and instructional suggestions for teachers to use. Researchers at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation conducted an intrinsic, longitudinal multiple-case study of 7th-grade mathematics teachers’ implementation of ASSISTments and its impact on their instruction before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study examined teachers’ use of ASSISTments in three instructional contexts: in- person only, remote only, and both in-person and remote. Our findings indicate that teachers in all contexts changed their instructional practices for homework review and for determining whether their students had understood lessons. Teachers used the ASSISTments auto-generated reports to focus their homework reviews, based on their students’ performance, and to provide instructional interventions and/or re-teaching. They also used the instructional suggestions provided by the ASSISTments platform to plan lessons to re-teach concepts or to review prior instruction with their students. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Student mental health in higher education has been an increasing concern. The COVID-19 pandemic situation has brought this vulnerable population into renewed focus. Governments had to close several sections, including educational institutes and universities, around the world suddenly in March 2020. Hence, emergency remote learning was adopted as alternative and as an immediate response to the ongoing situation using whatever available online tools. As a result, both students and instructors were forced to adapt to this new situation. While there were several studies that addressed several issues related to preparation, contents, course delivery, readiness, etc., there are few ones that were intended to address the mental challenges resulted from the shift to emergency remote learning. The main motivation behind this study is to understand the mental challenges and effects of the sudden transformation into emergency remote learning considering engineering students as case study and improve the delivery and experience of learning for both the instructors and the students. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
With the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 all outreach and educational activities with in-person participation had to stop. The ALICE Collaboration adapted to the new situation and continued reaching out to the public using the multitude of online tools and platforms available. Here we focus on two of our main outreach activities, virtual visits and masterclasses. With the cancellation of all in-person visits, virtual visits became the only way to explore the experiment. ALICE had already been offering virtual visits for remote audiences with equipment installed in the ALICE Run Control Centre (ARC). We recently acquired dedicated mobile equipment for the virtual visits to the cavern and developed a scenario which includes both the cavern and the ARC as well as a Q&A session. In this way, visitors from many countries have the opportunity to interact with scientists and to see parts of the experiment that they would never be able to see during a real visit. Concerning the International Masterclasses (IMC) programme, ALICE has been participating ever since measurements based on LHC data were introduced in it. The packages used had been developed by simplifying the ALICE event display and were based on ROOT. With the spreading of the COVID pandemic the 2020 IMC programme was interrupted. In 2021, with most activities taking place remotely, it was obvious that web-based versions were needed. The implementation of such versions allowed us to hold remote masterclasses for high-school students, thus ensuring the continuity of this important outreach activity of our community. In addition we reached new countries and also involved high-school teachers in this global effort. © 2022 Institute of Physics Publishing. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
With the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 all outreach and educational activities with in-person participation had to stop. The ALICE Collaboration adapted to the new situation and continued reaching out to the public using the multitude of online tools and platforms available. Here we focus on two of our main outreach activities, virtual visits and masterclasses. With the cancellation of all in-person visits, virtual visits became the only way to explore the experiment. ALICE had already been offering virtual visits for remote audiences with equipment installed in the ALICE Run Control Centre (ARC). We recently acquired dedicated mobile equipment for the virtual visits to the cavern and developed a scenario which includes both the cavern and the ARC as well as a Q&A session. In this way, visitors from many countries have the opportunity to interact with scientists and to see parts of the experiment that they would never be able to see during a real visit. ALICE has been participating in the International Masterclasses (IMC) programme ever since measurements based on LHC data were introduced in it. The packages used had been developed by simplifying the ALICE event display and were based on ROOT. With the spreading of the COVID pandemic the 2020 IMC programme was interrupted. In 2021, with most activities taking place remotely, it was obvious that web-based versions were needed. The implementation of such versions allowed us to hold remote masterclasses for high-school students, thus ensuring the continuity of this important outreach activity of our community. In addition we reached new countries and also involved high-school teachers in this global effort. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ABSTRACT
This work introduces a low-latency, searchable web tool for biologist and healthcare researchers to quickly explore a large number of host-pathogen interactions (HPI) reported in scientific publication. Our database contains 23,581 generic HPI and 257 COVID-19 related HPI extracted from 32 million PubMed s. The data was automatically collected by running our high-precision biomedical text mining system, which consumes much less effort than manual curation while still provides reliable output. Web URL: philm2web.live © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
We have developed a new tool to look at how students interact with circuits during the troubleshooting process. The online tool was originally designed to analyze individual troubleshooting strategy for large classes, but it also works well in the COVID-era to facilitate remote learning. While there are a number of tools that allow students to virtually interact with circuits, none supported both breadboard graphics and recording all student interactions, which were necessary to create an authentic troubleshooting situation that could be analyzed by the researchers afterwards. Therefore, we created our own circuit and data analysis tool using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, which utilizes breadboard imagery from Fritzing and runs on most modern browsers. Unlike a traditional paper-and-pencil test, the interactive, online tool allows us to see how students react to new information and measure domain knowledge beyond theory-including interpreting physical circuits and making measurements. Instead of relying on students to tell us everything on their mind, we can use their actions as a proxy for their thought processes. This paper describes how we developed the tool and some preliminary data on how students debug. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
ABSTRACT
The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption process of digital online tools for social communication across disciplines regardless of cultural backgrounds. Design to had to quickly migrate a considerable portion of its activities to the Internet, making it the preeminent platform in which a large portion of workshops take place nowadays. This swift change from a ‘face-to-face’ to ‘online’ reality is by no means without problems and hurdles, a significant one among these, is the scarcity of academic documentation that deals with the workshops from a communication point of view (beyond the technical aspects). This study aims to identify communication problems within ‘Online Design Workshops’ allowing the organizers to reroute efforts, from a technical and administrative point of view to the quality of the design output itself. The research method adopted was participatory research praxis based on the comparison of survey outputs taken during ‘face-to-face’ and ‘online’ workshops conducted between years 2012 ~ 2019, and 2020, respectively. Using the SMCR model as a framework of communication analysis it was discovered that the most critical aspects are those related to ‘understanding’ (between participants, of the online tools, and of the contents). Accordingly, a first attempt at optimal heuristic paths to the improvement of design stages within online workshops with focus on communication are proposed. Further design workshops can be approached using the process outlined in this paper, adding to the robustness of the heuristics. © PDE 2021.
ABSTRACT
Since Learning Management Systems (LMS) appeared some 20 years ago, their experimentation grew slowly, compared with the explosion that occurred after the Covid-19 emergency. Due to the closure of schools and universities worldwide, every educational institution and their teachers had to move towards the usage of LMSs for Online Distance Learning (ODL). This obliged the teachers to quickly familiarize with such kind of didactics and every kind of course faced these new opportunities. Machine Drawing is a course that requires much interaction between teachers and students and may not exploit validly many modalities invented in LMS. This paper presents the experiences done implementing online didactics, trying to apply all the online tools to the traditional way of teaching. Mainly laboratory activities, made online, must reproduce the interaction made in-person. Nevertheless, online connections opened new ways to try stricter relationships between the teacher and those students, who have less skill, even shyness, and then may accumulate delays. Differentiating the way in which didactics (lecture and laboratory) may be delivered, some traditional techniques have been improved. Employment the video recording of all activities done has given students the opportunity to repeat the more delicate steps of some topics. The check online of designs and elaborations by instructors allows students to be more concentrated on explanation, which may be done collectively or singularly. Comparing the results of exams before and after online didactics revealed that the number of students that passed the exam and the average of reached grade grew significantly. © PDE 2021.