Measuring Student's School Engagement in Blended Learning Model

The development of technology in the last decades made blended learning implemented wider, especially in the covid-19 pandemic last years. Online learning activities has some new issue to be defined. One of them is the difficulty of school engagement (disengagement). School counselors have the role of supporting student development tasks to avoid student disengagement. This research aims to measure the students' school engagement, especially in the blended learning context. This research design used a quantitative survey. Research subjects include students in the city of Malang. The instrument used is the school engagement inventory. The study results indicate that students with mid-levels of school engagement have slightly more numbers than students with high levels of school engagement. Support engagement is a finding in this study as the specific aspect of engagement in the blended learning model. The suggestion is a more practical assessment of the demographic conditions of students to test and get a more appropriate construct of support engagement. © 2022 IEEE.

The Challenge and Value of Dashboard Development during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Decision makers in crisis situations need relevant, accurate and complete information. Today, technologies provide a plethora of options for generating, accumulating and processing information. Technologies also enable that information to be managed and presented through dashboards. Recent emergencies have precipitated a surge in the use of dashboards, a prime example of these developments. In particular, for the duration of the crisis, the availability of large quantities of information and the demand for a more holistic approach to emergency responses incentivized the development of(digital) dashboards. However, the design of such dashboards requires costly investments, especially during when resources are scarce during crises. In this paper, we examine the development of dashboards as part of the response to COVID19 in the Netherlands. We explore the motivation for developing different dashboards and the added value that accrues to emergency services in times of crisis. © 2022 IEEE.

Optimization of physician resources in primary care during a pandemic: A ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ team approach

Summary Background Healthcare in rural localities has faced unique pressures in the midst of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Methodology The Marathon Family Health Team physicians created a novel pandemic model that divides active physicians into ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ teams with a “sideline” reserve based on physician infectious status and ongoing exposure risk, in order to address the potential instability of small medical groups in isolated situations. Results Implemented in stages, the model maximizes group agility and healthcare provisions, while minimizing the risk of physicians as vectors for transmission or a possible healthcare system collapse from simultaneous physician incapacitation. Conclusion The hot/cold pandemic model can be applied to various healthcare facilities, including but not limited to hospitals and assessment centres, and the model's scale can be further adjusted for larger settings. By making use of incapacitated physicians who have been “sidelined” due to illness or burnout but still able to work from home, this model is integrative, efficient and innovative.

The Perspective Projects Promoting Sustainable Mobility by Active Travel to School on the Example of the Southern Poland Region

The paper presents a discussion concerning the development of projects regarding active travel with the policy of sustainable mobility, with active school transport in southern Poland being taken into special consideration. The implementation of the idea of sustainable school travel planning involves linking several social groups, including traffic planners and organizers, school administrators, governments, parents, and children. This, in turn, requires considering the criteria reported by all parties when choosing a scenario for the region’s development in terms of transport solutions. The following study was based on the methodological foundations of multicriteria decision-making analysis. The research purpose of this paper is to identify and classify the actions, policies, and scenarios of active travel projects for the sustainable development of mobility based on the cities of southern Poland. The evaluation was carried out through expert methods with multicriteria decision-making tools based on the MULTIPOL (MULTI-criteria and POLicy) prospective analysis technique. It allowed for the selection of the most probable policy, which covered the six actions considered by the experts to be the most significant for the development of the active school transport system in the analyzed region. Such actions are as follows: identification of walking school bus routes, modernization of crosswalk lines, planning of walking and cycling routes to schools, promoting safety educational programs, distribution of active school transport booklets and cycling, and pedestrian skills training workshops. The paper presents a new method to evaluate the policies and actions regarding promoting sustainable (active) travel to school. The innovative approach results from assembling a mixed group of people (stakeholders) as experts. The mix of experts consisting of users (pupils and parents), practitioners, and scientist experts in this field allowed us to score policies, actions, and scenarios, enabling a wider spectrum of assessment than before.

Guidelines for the development of a critical software under emergency.

Context: During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, an international and heterogeneous team of scientists collaborated on a social project to produce a mechanical ventilator for intensive care units (MVM). MVM has been conceived to be produced and used also in poor countries: it is open-source, no patents, cheap, and can be produced with materials that are easy to retrieve. Objective: The objective of this work is to extract from the experience of the MVM development and software certification a set of lessons learned and then guidelines that can help developers to produce safety-critical devices in similar emergency situations. Method: We conducted a case study. We had full access to source code, comments on code, change requests, test reports, every deliverable (60 in total) produced for the software certification (safety concepts, requirements specifications, architecture and design, testing activities, etc.), notes, whiteboard sketches, emails, etc. We validated both lessons learned and guidelines with experts. Findings: We contribute a set of validated lessons learned and a set of validated guidelines, together with a discussion of benefits and risks of each guideline. Conclusion: In this work we share our experience in certifying software for healthcare devices produced under emergency, i.e. with strict and pressing time constraints and with the difficulty of establishing a heterogeneous development team made of volunteers. We believe that the guidelines will help engineers during the development of critical software under emergency.

Change in Students' Peer Evaluations of Requirements Elicitation Interviews Across the Pre-Pandemic and Pandemic-Affected Semesters

Successful development of an information system to solve a business problem depends on the analyst's ability to elicit system requirements from a user. This complex competency could be trained via critical peer evaluation of the requirements elicitation (RE) interviews. In this study, 294 students across four pre-pandemic and two COVID-19 pandemic-affected semesters evaluated recorded sample RE interviews of low and high quality. A piecewise regression modeling was used to examine the change in students' evaluations separately for the pre-pandemic and pandemic-affected semesters. Current results showed that students exhibited inflated evaluation scores (relative to instructors' scores) for the high-quality, but not for the low-quality interview. While students' evaluations for the low-quality interview remained stable across the pre-pandemic semesters, a significant decrease in evaluation scores for the high-quality interview reduced the gap between the students' and instructors' evaluations. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a significant increase in students' evaluation scores, which decreased during the second pandemic-affected semester. Moreover, females inflated their evaluations compared to males, specifically for technical, rather than soft skills. Current findings shed light on several important trends in students' peer evaluations in the context of RE training and possible effects of massive learning disruptions, such as the pandemic.

Requirements Engineering for Internet of Things (loT) Software Systems Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is growing, affecting human life and aiming to solve problems in the real world, i.e., in education, healthcare, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and other areas. However, it is a fact that the development of IoT systems is complicated compared to that of traditional software systems, especially in relation to requirements engineering (RE). The RE of IoT systems is not implemented frequently due to their broad aspects, such as the variety of user needs, making these systems difficult to construct. In this sense, the use of loT-based systems has not been well explored by the research community in order to provide well-planned proposals to improve the quality of their performance. In this work, we present a comprehensive and inclusive review of the RE of loT-based systems. To accomplish this, a systematic mapping study (SMS) is presented to evaluate the use of parameters based on the existing literature. SMS is a methodology used for research in the medical field and has recently been implemented in software engineering (SE) to sort and organize research publications to gain knowledge on progress and identify research gaps. In this article, we aim to classify the existing research publications in the current scientific literature regarding RE proposals for IoT software systems and review their implications for future research. This will make it possible to establish lines of research in order to improve the quality of the development of future IoT systems.

Role of inclusive market systems development in promoting resilience: evidence from World Vision projects

Evidence on whether market systems development (MSD) programmes for extremely poor smallholder farmers in low-income countries are associated with resilient outcomes when shocks/stressors appear is limited. We discuss the role of the inclusive MSD (iMSD) approach to generate resilience among vulnerable populations and report empirical evidence from World Vision's project areas (with iMSD activities) and comparison communities in Tanzania and Rwanda. The panel data collected between 2017 and 2021 provide evidence on differences in household-level resilience in the face of COVID-19 shock. Descriptive estimates from the 2021 survey show project households had statistically greater food security, market participation, and perception of being fully/partially recovered than comparison households in both Tanzania and Rwanda. Integration in market systems helped buffer participants. Though food insecurity declined between survey rounds in Tanzania, it worsened in Rwanda, but more so among comparison households. Respondents in Rwanda experienced stricter COVID-19 'lockdowns' and more limited iMSD activities than Tanzanians. © 2022 Practical Action Publishing. All rights reserved.

Innovation Performance in Romania and EU's Member States - A Comparative Approach

Romanias innovation performance did not improve in the last years. Consequently, the country remained in the Modest/Emerging innovators category in the European Innovation Scoreboard. Considering the importance of innovation for the economic development and recovery after Covid-19 pandemic, the present research aims to compare the development of the RD&I systems in five Member States- Romania and other four states with better performance in EIS. The main objective of the study is to investigate Romania s situation regarding the RD&I system development compared with EUs average and other Member States in order to identify the existing problems and the causes that led to its low performance in the EIS. The research methodology consists of an exploratory study conducted using secondary data analysis collected from the European Innovation Scoreboard database. The results of the analysis revealed that Romania registered upward trends only regarding four indicators: exports of knowledge- intensive services, high-tech exports, presence of venture capital funds and broadband penetration. The analysis of innovation activities revealed a constant underfunding of the research and innovation field, which also has repercussions on the quality of scientific activity, the attractiveness of the academic environment and on the number of applications for patents, brands and design.

Systems Development in Pandemic Times: The Case of a Vaccination Registration Service: Some Well-Known Lessons Might Be Learned Again

There are several theoretical frameworks as well as practical experiences on how to improve the development, implementation, and operations of e-government services. The paper shortly describes the case of the Hungarian COVID-19 vaccination registration service for citizens that was inappropriately designed from the organizing point of view. Application of two general principles, that could have been used during the design of the service, are presented in the paper as an afterthought. Though the lack of reliable data does not allow to identify the root causes of the improper building of the vaccination registration service, it is argued that some well-known lessons could be learned again: e-government services are socio-technical systems that should be designed with systems thinking in mind. © 2021 ACM.