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The advancement of information technology has stimulated the conversion of physical interactions to online activities, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, users' awareness and cyber hygiene need to be emphasized when they are involved in the cyber world. A browser extension named 'BEsafe' is developed to validate the websites and promote a safe browsing environment. It prevents users from falling prey to network-based attacks and raises their security awareness. To ensure users' privacy, the permissions needed for BEsafe are listed on the permission tab. Moreover, BEsafe will not be working on Incognito mode by default to promise that the private mode leaves no tracks. However, the user can still enable the extension to be functioning on Incognito mode by navigating to the Extension Details and turning on the relevant toggle. © 2023 IEEE.
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Operation of the coworking spaces (CSs) all over the world was strongly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those in Slovakia. The capital city's CSs and coworking spaces localised in non-metropolitan eastern part confirmed decline in co-worker presence that have also influenced financial aspect of the coworking spaces stability and resilience. Even though there have been several possibilities of national and local grants from public authorities, this support was not widely used and no CSs decided to contact the owners of premises in order to get rent deferrals and/or rent discounts. The pandemic also caused switch of physical events into online activities and activate those spaces located in the eastern part of the country as the number of the events in these spaces overall increased. Even the community spirit inside the CSs transformed to community events decreased due to the adaptation of government measures, cooperation outside individual CSs have strengthen and lead to establishing of formalised coworking association in Slovakia. In spite of the difficult situation the CSs have to face, many of them realised the need of adaptation and invested in ICT devices, change of already not sufficient marketing strategies but also see business opportunities as several new coworking spaces have started to operate. All these aspects point at the fact that flexible work arrangement coworking spaces offer could help to solve global economic crisis. © 2023, The Author(s).
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In recent years, science teaching and learning has been changed from onsite to online activity since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation affects students familiar with the online classroom. Regarding this situation, science teachers design their lessons with a combination of onscreen learning activities. In addition, digital boardgame has been recognized as an educational tool for motivating and engaging students in learning science concepts. In this study, we explored students' attraction toward digital boardgame while they participated in the board game. To examine students' experiences with the digital board game for learning the energy conversion concept, we used eye tracking software and hardware of the Tobii eye tracker to collect their eye behavior while they were playing the digital board game. The data collected from eye tracking was analyzed to reveal students' attraction. Data collection was carried out with 6 K-12 education students. The result of student attraction toward digital board game is discussed in this article. © 2023 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)
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Active participation and student engagement in virtual classrooms are fundamental for the student's learning experiences. Online teaching and learning in virtual classrooms may pose the challenge of leaving students behind without the instructor recognizing that students have not grasped the content delivered. Online platforms applied in some higher learning institutions provide one-way communication, whereby a lecturer delivers a presentation and students are allowed to ask questions at the end or during the session. Delivering a lecture where students opt to keep their videos off makes it difficult for the instructor to gauge students' participation and engagement in the virtual classrooms. The transition to online teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for teachers to develop ways to make virtual classrooms more engaging. This study seeks to answer if students that are not visual or audible can actively participate in online activities and be efficient in attending virtual classrooms. In seeking innovative ways to create an engaging environment for students in the virtual classroom, the author presents an online strategy that was designed and implemented. The methods entailed designing a structure and organized online strategy to assist students to navigate the online teaching and learning platforms using discussion forums, and online quizzes without draining their limited data. The results show that students can be present in the virtual classrooms and actively engage without being visually present and audible. Student participation and engagement were directly proportional to graded online activities. Although many online platforms encourage students to be online with their videos to ensure their participation, students can still engage actively even if the instructors do not see them or hear their voices. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In 2020, when COVID-19 struck, social media gained even more influence in people's lives due to increased online activity. This event led to a surge of false information and cyberbullying, making content moderation harder than ever. Given this challenge, exploring opportunities to explore content moderation solutions to reduce hate speech and fake news on social media is vital. In this paper, we examine if existing content moderation systems are enough during global pandemics and, if not, where gaps may lie. Due to its intriguing Decentralized Content Management System (DCMS), we chose Reddit as the key social networking platform for our hypothesis testing. We used 1.8 million Reddit posts from COVID-19-related subreddits from January 2020 to April 2021. Our findings reveal several significant trends regarding the effect of a worldwide event on content moderation methods designed to lessen the prevalence of hazardous content and fake news. In light of these considerations, we provide the results of comprehensive research conducted with particular attention paid to the user-generated material and the DCMS of Reddit. © 2022 ACM.
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The emergence of new business ecosystem such as virtual economy and digital economy has transformed traditional economic thinking and brought new opportunities for the development. Today, the global economy is gradually recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the coexistence and collision of real-world and online activities still exist, so by analyzing the experience of using individuals, the trust of the community, and the conflict and integration between the two, it may provide a good business ecosystem for Metaverse Era. © 2022 IEEE.
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With the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts focusing on student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses have shifted towards engagement in online instruction, resulting in a need for increased understanding of how instructors adapt active learning from in person instruction to online learning. Active learning occurs in many different formats across different classrooms. Despite these broadly different formats, a common thread across all active learning is that using it in classrooms results in greater student engagement as compared to passive listening to lectures. Educational researchers have found that active learning has a positive impact on student outcomes, especially for underrepresented students in STEM.The research outlined in this paper seeks to understand how instructors are adapting from in person courses and the strategies they use to engage students in online STEM courses. To do this, we interviewed 20 instructors who were using active learning in teaching an online STEM course about the strategies they were using to engage their students in online activities. We coded these interviews using a grounded theory approach. After several rounds of coding, we found six overarching themes about how instructors viewed active learning in their online classrooms: Instructor Emotion, Instructor Strategy, Instructor Goal, Active Learning Example, Instructor Barrier, and Student Behavior. This paper focuses on the instructor strategy theme and its 55 individual codes. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The company participates in fulfilling the relevance of education and industry through field practice programs. To avoid the risk of spreading the covid-19 virus and ensure the program continues, the implementation of field practice is changed from face-to-face offline activities to online activities. The purpose of the research is to develop an online field practice information system using the agile scrum method and evaluate the effect of the information system (online mentoring activities (X1) and features contained in the application (X2)) on the level of availability of field practice activities (Y) in the company. The information system development method uses the agile scrum method was chosen because it is able to produce quality software and can adapt to changes continuously. The information system is intended to better organize field practice activities for participants and companies so that all parties can benefit from field practice activities. A survey was carried out by distributing questionnaires to respondents with a respondent profile of 90% of students, 8% of employees who became supervisors for field practices, and 2% of employees who became admins of field practices. This survey is distributed via a google form with 100% of respondents filling out and returning the survey results. The questionnaire distributed contained questions about online mentoring activities (X1) and the features in the application (X2) to measure the level of availability of the implementation of field practice through the information system (Y). Based on the evaluation results, it was found that online mentoring activities (X1) and features in the application (X2) have an influence of 63.4% on the availability of field practice activities (Y) in the company. © 2022 IEEE.
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Objectives: To investigate the association between online activities and the number of new obstetrics and gynecology senior residents. Methods: A nationwide web-based, self-administered anonymous survey was conducted to investigate recruitment and clerkship activities during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. An online questionnaire was sent to 576 obstetrics and gynecology training institutions in Japan between December 21, 2020, and January 31, 2021. Overall, 334 institutions that gave valid responses were included (response rate: 58.0%). Multivariate logistic regression analysis examined the association between online activities, including recruitment and clerkship activities, and the number of new obstetrics and gynecology senior residents in 2021. The stratified analysis by implementing face-to-face activities was conducted to clarify the association. Results: The number of new senior residents increased in 187 facilities (56.0%) and decreased in 147 facilities (44.0%). The facilities that implemented face-to-face and online activities were 185 (55.4%) and 120 (35.9%), respectively. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, an increased number of new obstetrics and gynecology senior residents was significantly associated with face-to-face activities (adjusted odds ratio (AOR)=2.58, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.11-5.97, p<.001) but not with online activities. In the stratified analysis, online activities were significantly associated with an increased number of new obstetrics and gynecology senior residents among the facilities without face-to-face activities (AOR=3.81, 95% CI: 1.40-10.32, p=.009) but not among those with face-to-face activities (AOR=0.87, 95% CI: 0.42-1.78). Conclusions: Online activities were associated with an increased number of new obstetrics and gynecology senior residents among the facilities that did not conduct face-to-face activities.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Gynecology , Internship and Residency , Obstetrics , COVID-19/epidemiology , Female , Gynecology/education , Humans , Obstetrics/education , Pregnancy , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
Online learning has been gaining the attention of students and instructors in recent years, a phenomenon that has only increased now that most courses are being delivered online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, challenges remain for students to properly manage their time and achieve satisfactory grades in the online learning environment. In this study, we investigate how the online learning environment and varying levels of task complexity affect students’ procrastination and academic performance. We collected 157 college students’ online activity data. The results show that the students procrastinated more in the online learning environment than in the face-to-face setting;they likewise procrastinated more when completing high-complexity tasks than low-complexity tasks. A significant interaction effect shows that the students reacted differently to deadlines for high- and low-complexity tasks in the online learning environment than they did to deadlines in the face-to-face setting. Our findings highlight the importance of taking into account course assignment complexity when designing face-to-face and online classes. © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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The Covid-19 pandemic imposed technological challenges so that education could continue during the imposed social isolation. One of the challenges of this pandemic is online assessments. This work presents experimental results of two plugins, one for facial verification and another for access reporting, both open source, available in the Moodle Learning Management System. The first plugin was tested with 31 users. The results show the feasibility of use, with an average approval rate of 76% through a questionnaire applied to 16 users in optional online activities performed in Moodle at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021. © 2021 IEEE.
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During the Covid-19 lockdown from the end of January to March 2020, museums in China were forced to temporarily close, consequently devoting more attention to online activities. Apart from official websites, many museums increased their online activities on China-based video livestreaming platforms such as Kuaishou, Douyin and Bilibili, etc., as well as on the audio livestreaming platform Himalayan. Other online activities were carried out via social media and e-commerce platforms including WeChat, Vlog, Taobao, Tianmao, Jingdong, Meituan and Tencent. Shaanxi History Museum (SHM) represents one of the typical examples of cultural institutions that bolstered their online activities during the pandemic. This article explores the effects of Chinese museums’ livestreaming activities, which constituted the core of their online initiatives during the pandemic. By reviewing different types of livestreaming activities carried out by museums, as well as conducting online surveys, face-to-face interviews and analysing data surrounding the Shaanxi History Museum, it will critically discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese museums’ livestreaming activities, with potential implications for museums in China and worldwide. Ultimately, it suggests that Chinese museums’ development of online activities relies on applying a systematic, diversified and digitalisation-driven communication strategy.
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Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a significant increase in online gaming and other online activities, such as watching eSports and live streaming. This happened because the government require people to stay at home. Electricity used can be categorized as the scope 2 carbon emissions that have a negative impact to our environment. If there are more people do gaming activities, the carbon emissions produced will also be higher. Previous study shown that game spending affects the durations of gaming activities. This paper uses a qualitative research method by interviewing 18 respondents consisting of 17 gamers and 1 eSport expert. It is shown that during pandemic, the duration of playing video games increase significantly, this is also followed by an increase in their spending on in-game purchases and subscriptions. This can lead to the production of higher carbon emissions. Surprisingly, it was discovered that the electricity consumption of one server building is equal to the consumption of JABABEKA. This is considered as a big problem because gaming companies don't disclose concrete activities to reduce carbon emissions and tend to hands-off their wastes to other party. On the other hand, gamers tend to have low awareness about this issue. We suggest that gamers should be more aware about this issue and reduce their gaming activities, gaming related industries could do CSR by doing reforestation to help remove carbon dioxide, and government should expand the use of renewable energy to generate electricity. © 2022 ACM.
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During the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic era, poor internet availability hampered online activity, particularly in the sector of education in Malaysia. The most effective way to address this situation is through the construction of telecommunications towers. However, it takes time due to the significant costs involved. Outdoor use of FSO appears to be more advantageous due to the absence of licensing requirements and the high bandwidth it offers. However, there are limitations. We will explore these FSO restrictions in this paper. © 2021 Institute of Physics Publishing. All rights reserved.
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The World Health Organization's (WHO) coronavirus disease dashboard has recorded over 207 million confirmed infections and over 4 million deaths. There has been an increasing vulnerability in cybersecurity amongst businesses, gov-ernments and individuals worldwide because the COVID-19 pandemic has led to additional online activities. Accordingly, many people have turned to online work whilst the world is locked down. Thus, warnings have been issued by cybersecurity agencies that the number of cyber threat actors is increasing, and that they are improving in terms of stealing money, personal information and intellectual property. Opportunities for cybercrimes have increased, and COVID-19 is an effective lure. New methods for adverse artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered cyberattacks have been developed, or will be in the near future, using various weaponisations of AI under the COVID-19 umbrella. For this reason, this study reviewed and summarised how and when the most recent cyberattack trends can successfully exploit COVID-19 as a context for attack. Additionally, a summary of the state of knowledge of adverse AI is given, and its potential within the COVID-Themed security threats, including defenses, is discussed. © 2021 IEEE.
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Most universities stopped face-to-face instruction in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and completed the spring 2020 semester through online instruction and assessment. The online courses continued in summer 2020, fall 2020, and spring 2021 semesters. Rapid transition to online courses posed challenges for both students and instructors. Some students lacked access to high-speed internet and had unstable internet connection during lectures and exams. A significant challenge for instructors has been to engage students in online activities and maintain academic integrity. This paper analyzes the challenges faced by students and instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic and the approaches adopted to overcome them. The paper describes alternative methods used to assess student learning and the use of online proctored exams. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021
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With the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, many universities shifted to online teaching. However, some online instruction had already been implemented well before the pandemic. This study investigates (1) how engagement in blended CALL activities differed during the pandemic, and (2) in what ways the assessment outcomes were associated with student engagement during the pandemic. The study was conducted in an English for academic purposes (EAP) course at a Hong Kong university that had already implemented blended learning for several years. Adopting an analytics-based approach, 469,286 data logs in a learning management system were analyzed to measure students’ engagement and their respective self-directed behavior. The retrieved student data covered the time both before and during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that students were primarily engaged for assessment purposes;however, those in the pandemic cohort demonstrated better self-directed behavior, such as early and regular engagement. Although the results indicated a relatively strong association between student engagement and course outcomes, the students during the pandemic seem to have managed their learning more effectively. © 2022, equinox publishing.