Facilitating Engineering Students' Creativity and Teamwork Ethos Using Smart Learning Platforms during Covid-19

Covid-19 has brought some revolutionary changes in Higher Education with a shift from traditional face-to-face teaching and learning to online or hybrid-based delivery. There is a strong emphasis on the integration of technology and smart platforms to deliver an effective teaching and learning environment that can withstand the unpredictable challenges of the ongoing pandemic. But many researchers have noted a lack of social interaction and motivation among students in an online setting. Also, with limited face-to-face interactions, many students had issues with collaboration and other group-based activities. Now with the availability of pre-recorded lecture videos and course materials in several universities, there is a noticeable drop in student engagement. To retain and boost students' motivation in the current complex environment, there is an added pressure among educators to create teaching content by utilizing smart and innovative teaching approaches that are efficient and effective. Smart learning platforms might offer the potential solutions to address some of the issues with the changing landscape of teaching and learning due to the pandemic. Such platforms are versatile and therefore, can work seamlessly across in-person and virtual teaching and learning environments. They can provide an interactive platform to facilitate active learning and the quality of teamwork experience among students. The objective of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of some of the smart teaching-learning platforms used in the MSc Engineering Management programme in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology at the University of York. A survey was conducted among the cohort from this programme in the Summer of 2021 to review their engagement and experiences with these platforms. Can such smart platforms facilitate creativity and improve teamwork ethos among students? The paper will discuss the findings of this study and also highlight if such approaches can transform the educational setting post Covid-19. © 2022 IEEE.

Configuration and Use of Lightboard System in Online Environment: Lessons Learned During COVID 19 Pandemic

Teaching and learning environments include two basic modes - face-to-face and online environments. It is a known fact that most students prefer a face-to-face environment to an online environment for one main reason - engagement. Within the context of learning, engagement relates to how well students' senses are engaged and stimulated for learning. The design of course delivery and instructional technologies aim to engage students for effective learning. Teaching online has its advantages, but it also falls short of effective student engagements. Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, educators were forced to teach online and to find creative ways to deliver the courses in an engaging format. One of those course delivery and instructional technology is the use of the lightboard (glass board) system. Lightboard is a writing board with clear glass as the writing surface and special neon markers for writing. The instructor faces the camera/students when he/she writes, and the writing on the board glows from the light beam on the glass. Lightboard is set up in a low-light space with only the focus light directed at the glass board and the instructor writing on the glass board. In addition, a dark drop cloth hug behind the instructor is used to enhance the background and help to make the writing on the glass board crisp and clear. Lightboard setup allows instructors to write, diagram, illustrate, gesture, demonstrate, or explain a formula without blocking the board with their body and without turning their back to the camera/students. Because the writing on the glass board is backward in the direct view of a recording camera, the writing must be flipped in the video streaming system, and what the students see in real-time is a horizontally flipped video streaming from the online video-conferencing application. In this research, lightboard system as a tool is evaluated from the point of student engagement and the ability to reduce the transactional distance that may exist between the students and the instructors. This research follows a qualitative research method. The research examined the design, configuration, setup, and use of lightboard system for teaching synchronous online courses from home during the COVID 19 pandemic. The research evaluated students' perception of lightboard system as an effective course delivery and instructional technology. The research findings indicate that there are a few easy to find, affordable components, and open-source video recording and live streaming software that can be configured to create a lightboard system. The research findings also show that majority of the students found the use of the lightboard system as engaging. The research strongly recommends the use of lightboard system for online course lectures requiring drawing details, writing formulas, showing step-by-step computations on the board. In addition, the research recommends lightboard system for flipped classroom in cases where video capture of lectures entail diagrams, formulas, and computations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Innovation and Technology in Online Education: A Bibliometric Analysis

Online education is a teaching and learning environment over the internet. Hence, many educators and learners demonstrated using various innovations and technologies in delivering online education effectively during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to analyse the status quo and the recent advancement of technology utilization in online education system either by e-learning, also known as, online learning since the introduction of internet in mid 1970s. A bibliometric analysis research approach was carried out using the Elsevier-Scopus database, analyzing a wide range of bibliometrics’ key indicators such as total number of publications and citation analysis coupled with bibliometric networking analysis using visualization of similarities software, VOSViewer available in the public domain. It was an interesting find as the number of publications had increased significantly plus online education is a developing subject area among academic researchers utilizing innovation and technology in their teaching and learning pedagogy. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

Reconfiguring the boundaries between learning and assessment in a Vector Calculus course for engineering students

The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent calls for self-isolation necessitated a shift to a remote fully online teaching and learning environment. This required a reflection on traditional ways of teaching, ways we expect our students to learn and how we use assessment. Effective facilitation and monitoring of student learning on an online platform presented a challenge. Our experience has shown that students were often unable to identify gaps, establish, understand, and develop their own learning in the challenging Vector Calculus course. An appropriate online assessment platform offered to address these challenges by motivating students to learn, through focusing their attention on the concepts to be mastered whilst developing their capacity to self-assess. Importantly, this online assessment system provided student performance feedback to the course facilitator allowing the design of necessary support for successful student learning. In this paper the design of a Vector Calculus course and the various learning activities that were coordinated to achieve assessment as learning for 60 Vector Calculus students, taking their assessments through an online assessment platform is discussed. © 2022 IEEE.

Hybrid Teaching and Learning Environments to Promote Personalized Learning

This paper analyses the potential of hybrid environments to personalize learning, taking as a starting point some features of educational centres that have managed more quickly, easily, and effectively the difficulties caused by the impact of COVID-19. We focus on two main characteristics. First, the existence of an educational approach presided by the idea of personalization of learning, understood as a set of different organizational, curricular, and didactic strategies aimed at promoting and reinforcing the meaning that students attribute to school learning. And the second one is the use of digital information and communication technologies to shape learning environments that blur the boundaries between the face-to-face and the virtual, and between the school as well as the out-of-school. Within this framework, we explore the possibilities offered by hybrid environments for designing and implementing different strategies for personalizing learning are explored, as well as for the monitoring of students and coordination of teachers. This paper concludes with a reflection on hybrid personal learning environments as an ideal framework for the implementation of learning personalization strategies.