ABSTRACT
Teleconsultation is a type of medical practice similar to face-to-face consultations, and it allows a health professional to give a consultation remotely through information and communication technologies. In the context of the management of the coronavirus epidemic, the use of teleconsultation practices can facilitate healthcare access and limit the risk of avoidable propagation in medical cabinets. This paper presents the monitoring of international teleconsultation referrals in the era of Covid-19 to facilitate and prevent the suspension of access to care, the most common architecture for teleconsultation, communication technologies and protocols, vital body signals, video transmission, and the conduct of teleconsultation. The aim is to develop a teleconsultation platform to diagnose the patient in real time, transmit data from the remote location to the doctor, and provide a teleconsultation. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Engineering programs emphasize students career advancement by ensuring that engineering students gain technical and professional capabilities during their four-year study. In a traditional engineering laboratory, students "learn by doing", and laboratory equipment facilitates their discipline-specific knowledge acquisition. Unfortunately, there were significant educational uncertainties, such as COVID-19, which halted laboratory activities for an extended period, causing challenges for students to perform and obtain practical experiments on campus. To overcome these challenges, this research proposes and develops an Artificial Intelligence-based smart tele-assisting technology application to digitalize first-year engineering students practical experience by incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms using the HoloLens 2. This application improves virtual procedural demonstrations and assists first-year engineering students in conducting practical activities remotely. This research also applies various machine learning algorithms to identify and classify different images of electronic components and detect the positions of each component on the breadboard (using the HoloLens 2). Based on a comparative analysis of machine learning algorithms, a hybrid CNN-SVM (Convolutional Neural Network - Support Vector Machine) model is developed and is observed that a hybrid model provides the highest average prediction accuracy compared to other machine learning algorithms. With the help of AR (HoloLens 2) and the hybrid CNN-SVM model, this research allows students to reduce component placement errors on a breadboard and increases students competencies, decision-making abilities, and technical skills to conduct simple laboratory practices remotely. © 2023 IEEE.
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The changes forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, have made educational institutions adopt new practices in the use of VLEs platforms and, one of these is to homogenize virtual classrooms, for which this study aims to diagnose how effective are the digital resources for cloned courses, taking as a pilot the subject of Linear Algebra. The development of this research is longitudinal, empirical-analytical, and quantitative. The study is carried out in two periods, from October 2021 to September 2022, at the Salesian Polytechnic University in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, with a total of 944 first year students of engineering careers. As a result, fewer courses for academic risk monitoring were obtained, as well as a higher satisfaction among students and professors involved. It is concluded that the cloned classrooms are a factor of improvement in the learning results to be achieved. © 2023 IEEE.
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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.
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The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of auditors' professional skepticism, audit risk, and auditor competence on audit quality in conducting remote audits in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. To determine this effect, the researcher used the Simple Random Sampling method by analyzing the data using primary data with a questionnaire as a tool to collect data. The results of this study indicate that the application of professional skepticism and auditor competence has a significant effect on audit quality. So that these two things are very important to note so that the resulting audit quality is good. Meanwhile, audit risk has no significant effect on audit quality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Audit risk can be minimized by using audit technology that is increasingly sophisticated from time to time. © 2022 ACM.
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Although athlete activism has gained tremendous popularity in all levels of competition over the years. With the Covid 19 pandemic, we started to witness numerous acts of activism such as protests and rallies that counted with the presence and support of some of sport's biggest names. Moreover, this topic, in specific the fan reaction to athlete activism remains vastly understudied. To better understand the manners in which Portuguese sports fans react to athlete activism on social media there is a need to deepen our understanding on this topic. Much of the academic research and studies performed on the area of athlete activism and fan reaction to said activism has been mostly conducted in the USA. To better comprehend the state of activism by professional athletes today as well as to have a better historic comprehension around athlete activism, a systematic literature review process was used to collect relevant literature. Consequently, this provides a solid theoretical framework that can back up an empirical investigation with a quantitative approach about Portuguese sports fans reaction to professional athlete's activism on social media. This process served the fundamental purpose of identifying relevant and valid literature in a systematic and organized manner while observing that the majority of the studies around this thematic used a qualitative approach. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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The objective of this research is to analyze the level of satisfaction and effectiveness of pre-professional practices in university students, before and during the pandemic. The analyzed data was collected through surveys applied to 67 students. The data was analyzed with a descriptive approach, using tables to summarize the results, while in the analysis of the difference in means in the effectiveness and satisfaction scales, the ANOVA method was used, obtaining a p- value= 0.1134, the same as indicated that there is no variation in the means of the scales. For the correlation analysis, the Pearson coefficient was calculated, whose value indicated a strong correlation between the satisfaction scale of the place where the practice was carried out and the level of satisfaction (0.637). Finally, a web page model is proposed that is capable of better guiding the choice of the place where the students will carry out the pre-professional practices. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Engineers must engender trust in order to collaborate successfully to produce solutions that the world needs. As part of building this confidence, students with an accredited degree must meet learning outcomes i.e. demonstrate skills to an acceptable standard. Cheating during such assessments reduces professional integrity and future work quality. Through careful assessment practice and encouraging a professional culture with ethics, we may minimise student's opportunity and motivation to take short-cuts. With this in mind, it is useful to understand which technical and professional skills are most affected. Cheating is evolving, with more collaborative online opportunities. Previous research suggests a majority of student's admit to dishonesty at least once, and that there are several motivations, including individual, demographic, institutional, and societal. We describe today's engineering education environment in terms of how it affords cheating behaviours and their methods, including the popularity of online services such as Chegg. By analysing potential cheating methods against a current agreed inventory of contemporary engineering skills, we highlight where educators might focus efforts to reduce bad learning practices. We also consider how the covid pandemic with more online and remote studying amplifies the situation. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
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Using a qualitative research-based approach, this study aimed to understand (i) the way home-based teleworkers in France perceive and organize their professional activities and workspaces, (ii) their teleworking conditions, (iii) the way they characterize the modalities and the nature of their interactions with their professional circle, and more broadly (iv) their quality of life ‘at work'. We performed a lexical and morphosyntactic analysis of interviews conducted with 28 teleworkers (working part-time or full-time from home) before the COVID-19 crisis and the associated establishment of emergency telework. Our results confirm and complement findings in the literature. Participant discourses underlined the beneficial effects of teleworking in terms of professional autonomy, flexibility, concentration, efficiency, performance, productivity, and being able to balance their professional and private lives. Nevertheless, they also highlighted the deleterious effects of teleworking on temporal workload, setting boundaries for work, work-based relationships and socio-professional integration. Despite the study limitations, our findings highlight the need for specific research-based and practical strategies to support the implementation of a sustainable telework organization in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. © 2022 by the authors.
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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed certain operations and paved the way to strict travel restrictions. This also meant that the traditional face-to-face process for accreditation inspection was affected. With this, to adapt to the situation, many institutions switched to relying on technology. This study aims to address the digitalization of the Professional Regulation Commission of the Philippines' monitoring and accreditation system. Hence, the objective of the study is to develop an effective digital system for the Professional Regulation Commission of the Philippines. The Agile Development Lifecycle will be implemented in constructing the system. Mobile Application Test and Performance Test are tests designed to evaluate the system's capabilities and usefulness. The outcomes met the study's goal, which led to the tests being successful. © 2022 ACM.
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The unexpected closure of schools, including kindergartens, due to the coronavirus pandemic in the past two years transformed face-to-face teaching into online teaching, which was not a common practice for kindergarten teachers. As research reveal, kindergarten teachers are generally inexperienced in teaching online, so they need ongoing support and interactive professional training like building a community of practice (CoP) for switching to online teaching. Yet, limited research has investigated the impacts of building an online CoP as a teacher professional development approach in early childhood education. Thus, this study examined the effects and sustainable factors of the CoP groups provided by a university for online teaching in early childhood education through intensive training and quadripartite collaboration among kindergarten teachers, teacher trainers, preservice teachers, and eLearning specialists. To have an in-depth investigation, this study employed a case study of three kindergartens, semi-structured interviews with eight kindergarten teachers and three university teacher trainers were conducted via Zoom. Then, multi-sourced data, including artifacts and interview data, were analyzed by thematic analysis based on the CoP Theory to elucidate participants' experiences of an online CoP as an approach for teacher professional development. Based on the findings, this study revealed that the CoP empowered kindergarten teachers to teach online by (1) developing their technical and leadership skills through (2) building up a supportive network for idea exchanges;and (3) accumulating resources, skills, and tools they needed for online teaching from the domain, community, and practice dimension accordingly. In addition, the findings indicated that content relevance to the school curriculum, availability of time for collaboration, continuous technical support, and self-learning resources are important factors for sustaining the online teaching practices learned from the CoP groups. This study recommended an establishment of an ongoing online CoP for facilitating more sustainable teacher professional development in early childhood settings. © 30th International Conference on Computers in Education Conference, ICCE 2022 - Proceedings.
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Digital transformation (DT) is typically described as a strategic, top-down initiative where new digital technologies fundamentally disrupt an organisation's structure, procedures, and processes to enhance its value proposition. We propose a middle-range theory which highlights that DT of professional practices in healthcare follows a different path. To build this theory, we transpose the metaphor of a "fitness landscape” from evolutionary biology to a professional healthcare context to build an intermediate conceptualisation, which is then refined through an empirical study. Our theory highlights that external events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, changing patient behaviours or the availability of new digital resources, transform the "value landscape” upon which healthcare professionals create and deliver healthcare services to patients. Empowered by their professional autonomy and driven by their service orientation, healthcare professionals search for new paths and peaks for value creation and delivery across a rugged landscape. As digital resources are leveraged, new value propositions in practice emerge, and professional healthcare practices are digitally transformed. © The Operational Research Society 2023.
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International organizations notes that the main weakness for innovation in Latin American countries is that their national research organizations only evaluate and stimulate pure academic personnel by publications and citations, forgetting those who work in industry, losing a vast potential in each country. Higher education institutions must increase the development and innovation if they want to contribute to the third mission, which means the economic development of a country, in addition to the traditional advanced education and research, to adapt to new realities for the knowledge-based economies. Commercial war, SARS COV-2, and energy crisis drive policymakers and university managers to rethink and redesign institutions. This work offers an approach to measure the research, development, and innovation capabilities of three telecommunications engineering careers in three Latin American universities in Mexico and Ecuador looking for to increasing capabilities when doing collaboration. Results confirm that the knowledge contribution in engineering is proportional to the number of supported engineering careers, even mapped to national and international rankings. Also is confirmed that research is related to the academic production, but development and innovation are more related to an effective relation to industry. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
CONTEXT The ongoing coronavirus pandemic required us to quickly adapt and familiarise ourselves with new skills and technologies in the shift to online teaching. Irregular communication due to extended lockdowns has meant that while knowledge on effective online teaching has been developed, this knowledge has not been properly disseminated to our junior teaching staff. As they operate predominantly in student-facing positions, it is essential that our junior staff be equipped with information on best practice in online teaching as well as with an awareness of the resources available to support them. PURPOSE OR GOAL To address the gap outlined above, we developed a new professional development program for our junior teaching staff, focusing mainly on online teaching. The goal was to share our collective knowledge on best practice in online teaching, and to demonstrate how various technologies could aid in promoting active learning in an online setting. The program also aimed to initiate a community of practice around teaching and the online teaching space. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS In designing our program, we considered student feedback from previous semesters, and more recent feedback on the online teaching experience from 2020. The final program covered the following topics: general advice, navigating Zoom and physical setup for online teaching, online tools for active learning, engagement within teaching teams, online feedback, and blended synchronous learning. Tools and technologies showcased in the program were embedded in the delivery to allow first-hand experience. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES An exit survey indicated that in general, participants found the program useful, with an average rating of 8.27 (out of 10). The top areas that participants indicated that they would like more assistance were quizzes and tools for active learning (31%), providing feedback to students (22%), and blended synchronous learning (20%). Zoom (12%) and the physical setup for online teaching (15%) did not rank highly, in line with our observation that a large percentage of participants had some prior experience with online teaching in 2020. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY In summary, we piloted a professional development focused mainly on online-teaching for junior staff. The program was well-received, and the collected feedback will used for implementation and improvement of future run. Copyright © Lionel Lam, Raquel de Souza, Catherine Sutton, Eduardo Araujo Oliveira, Glen Currie, Ryan Hoult, Leila Meratian Esfahani, Leigh Canny, Christopher Honig, and Gavin Buskes, 2021.
ABSTRACT
As the epidemic normaliztion continues, more and more enterprises chose telecommuting as their working mode. However, telecommuting has greatly reduced the opportunities and time for employees to socialize in the workplace. In that case, the workplace loneliness may induced by the lack of quantity and quality of employees' social contact, which would seriously affect the job satisfaction, organizational commitment and even the physical and mental health of employees. Based on the self-determination theory and the theory of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this study explored the impact of self-efficacy on workplace loneliness, with professional identity and social support for mediation. The results showed that self-efficacy has a negative influence on the workplace loneliness, and professional identity and social support in the relationship between self-efficacy and workplace loneliness the chain intermediary role. Corporate managers should pay more attention to the harm of workplace loneliness. According to these findings, suggestions for organization managers and department of human resources, especially on alleviate workplace loneliness, were proposed and discussed. © 2022 ACM.
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E-sports and online games represent an entertainment industry that before the 2020 year was characterized by an incredible development. The COVID19 emergency has further accelerated the global process of diffusion of e-sports and online games, consecrating it as the leading economic industry in the entertainment and technology sector. This paper presents a study that is part of the URBAN GAMERS LAB project (in progress), that describes the role of conscientiousness and toxic behaviors. The study involves 227 professional e-gamers aged between 15 and 34 y.o. This project it is part of an interdisciplinary project that involves a municipality in the Emilia-Romagna region, schools' teachers, and researchers from University of Bologna: departments of psychology, architecture, and engineering. The main objective of the study is to investigate the relationship between the conscientiousness (measured by variables such as responsibility, traditionalism, orderliness, industriousness, virtue, self-control) and disturbing toxic behaviors (Mediocritizing, Sabotaging, Hostage Holding, Flaming), played by e-gamers during different phases of the online game League of Legends (LoL). Preliminary results show that for conscientiousness, there are no significant correlations with age but there is a significant correlation with gender and be part of an e-sports team. The latter is negative correlated with gender, positive correlated with been playing League of Legends and play ranked games. This aspect is positive correlated with age and been playing League of Legends. Regarding toxic behaviors, age does not seem to play an important role, that is, no correlations have been found between age and toxic behaviors. While there is a negative correlation with sabotaging and Hostage Holding and a positive correlation with flaming. Considering instead, how long they have been playing LoL, being more experienced negatively correlates with sabotaging, played with teammates who showed little mastery and positive correlated with being a victim of flaming in chat during a game Turning on been part of an eSports team, results show that this aspect positive correlates with being a victim of flaming in chat during a game and decided to mute the chat because of it. Finally, playing ranked games negatively correlates with sabotaging, and positively correlates with being a victim of flaming in chat during a game and decided to mute your chat because of it. © 2022 IEEE.
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This Innovative Practice Full Paper examines the integration of Professional Scrum Trainings (PST) into an undergraduate class. The PST was integrated into the IT project management course in 2016. The course deals with challenges in IT projects, agile project management, intercultural project teams and IT project controlling. It is held in the Bachelor of Science programs Business Information Systems and Electronic Government, which is provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts -Hochschule Hannover in Germany. We integrate PSTs into the course with the aim to provide the opportunity to our students of a deep dive into the most commonly used agile method Scrum. Also, we collaborated with visiting lecturers from the industry mainly to include practice-relevant problems, challenges, and examples to the students. We prepared, planned, and performed the integration of the PST since 2016 in every term, except the summer term in 2020 due to Covid-19 reasons. This paper presents our approach to integrate PSTs as Scrum seminars into an undergraduate course in higher education. We also analyzed how the students value the integration of PSTs into the IT project management course. Based on our experience and learnings including the quantitative evaluation data, which we conduct regularly, we describe that the students value attending a PST in their studies and benefit from specific experiences related to Scrum in practice. The results include both, classroom and virtual distance teaching during Covid-19. Furthermore, we give three recommendations for other lecturers, which are interested integrating PSTs into their teaching activities. The recommendations refer to the collaboration with professionals from practice, the importance of providing practical relevant knowledge to the students and the possibility of integrating certification providers to the integrated PST. Thus, the paper contributes to an understanding how to integrate agile methods and professional trainings into a higher education context both in the classroom and virtual distance teaching environments. © 2022 IEEE.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous restrictions on face-to-face meetings, and one of the most impacted activities was engineering education. Most teaching professionals have adopted diverse solutions based on distance learning techniques. However, practical experiments that require laboratories could not be performed in most cases. One of the subjects studied in modern engineering that has been impacted is related to industrial automation systems. In April 2020, amidst tighter restrictions on social contact, we started cooperating with a local company to train our students on topics of interest to the corporation. Our research group was responsible for dealing with Industry 4.0 and its associated technologies. Over the past two years, we have conducted this interaction with the industry under the pandemic's constraints and obtained very interesting results. In this report, on an innovative experience in engineering education, we will describe our project's syllabus, how the relationship was between students and teachers through online tools, and mainly how we managed to ensure that students had access to experiments close to the industrial reality. © 2022 IEEE.
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Early career faculty are undergoing a stressful transition period and actively negotiating their professional identity. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily activities in early career faculty's personal and professional lives and thus complicated the negotiation process. This study explores how engineering faculty members redefine and reconceptualize what it means to be in their early career during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an emergent qualitative coding technique, we identified two themes: 1) the blurring of personal and professional boundaries, and 2) the renegotiation of different identities. The findings offer insights into how to better support early career faculty and allow them to balance these different dimensions of their academic identities. © 2022 IEEE.
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To most students the internal machinations of the university are a black box, very rarely are they permitted to see behind the curtain. While in many areas academia has started to move away from the sage-on-the-stage mentality, much of what is done still does not involve the students' voice. While they have the opportunity to provide feedback on individual subjects, the structure of students' whole degrees are still the domain of the sage.At the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) we are reviewing our professional practice program for engineering. This program sees students complete professional experience activities such as internships, reflections and professional skill development in order to give students the opportunity to develop as professionals. While the program is well received by most stakeholders, it has remained largely the same for some time. Changes in the Higher Education sector, changing student needs and learning from the COVID-19 disruption have resulted in a review looking to redevelop the program.Typically a program review would be an opaque process for students if they were aware of it at all. However, UTS sought to bring students into the program development from an early stage. Engineering and IT students from any year of study were invited to apply to join a seven-week co-design studio over their Summer semester to reimagine professional practice at UTS. They were taken through the design thinking process to imagine a future program that meets the needs of all stakeholders. Students worked through empathising with past and current students, program academics, Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) experts, industry professionals and others they identified as important stakeholders. Additionally, the students completed independent research on context topics they identified as critical to understanding the space.The results of the project were that students identified three key foci for their program:•Supporting the development of a diverse student cohort•Improving the feedback loop between students, industry, and the University•Fostering connection(s) between the University and industryTo meet these aims the students proposed innovative solutions including a degree structure with an exit point for a lower qualification should a student not need the full qualification, and a flexi-points system to provide students access to a flexible professional development scheme tailored to each students' needs.Throughout the studio the students independently developed both insights and ideas that had previously been raised by the University and new insights and ideas that the University had not considered. They developed their design thinking, professional practice, complex problem solving skills, and expressed an appreciation for the chance to better understand how and why the University works behind the scenes. From the perspective of subject designers, the process and engagement of students rein vigorated the academics affected by a long COVID-19 disruption that had seen diminished engagement from students.This process significantly benefited all involved through the development of skills and knowledge in students, the reinvigoration of academic staff, and the development of confirmatory and new insights and ideas for the University. This innovative practice will be broadened and continued at UTS and the co-design processes it supported as the norm rather than the exception when redeveloping course content and program structures. © 2022 IEEE.