Perception of the Internationalization Process by the University Employees: The Case Study of Innopolis University

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a game changer for many aspects of the educational environment worldwide. Together with positive aspects of digital acceleration, there have also been obstacles in keeping internationalization processes on track. In this paper, we consider a case study of an educational institution: Innopolis University. We analyze the perception of teaching and research staff for what concerns internationalization. We organized a survey involving Innopolis staff and survey questions aimed at revealing their attitude and understanding of the process and its relevance. The outcome is twofold: on one hand the understanding of the perception will be instrumental for the International Relation Office to better involve the faculty in the process;on the other hand, sharing the result with the scientific community will help other organizations to reflect on their own progress and to better involve their staff. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Investigating EAP Online Teaching Constraints During Covid-19 Outbreak: Teacher's Perception

The requirement for English proficiency in tertiary education positions EAP in an advantageous position in language teaching and research. EAP's strengths stem from broad theoretical foundations and a commitment to research-based language education. As a result, the course has begun to reveal some of the constraints that participants must overcome. As part of the EAP course, EAP Teachers face obstacles and challenges throughout the teaching-learning process, particularly during the pandemic, when teaching and learning must take place entirely online. The purpose of this study was to determine the constraints faced by teachers when teaching EAP online to non-English language students. The research was conducted through a qualitative case study involving 15 UNS Language Center EAP teachers. Semi-structured and open-ended interviews were used to collect data. This study discovered that there are some applications used by the teachers to conduct online learning such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom Meeting, Google Meet, Google Classroom, and Quizziz. Teachers faced numerous constraints when teaching EAP, including the heterogeneity of students' English skills within a class, teachers' inexperience with online teaching media, communication gaps, time management, students' motivation, anxiety caused by a new system, and limited internet access. This study concludes that online learning presents difficulties for both teachers and students when it comes to learning EAP. The findings of this study are expected to provide an overview of online EAP learning, allowing for the identification of solutions to these difficulties and the future improvement of online EAP learning. © 2021 ACM.

Remote IoT teaching across the North-Atlantic

The ability to offer courses over the Internet between remote teacher(s) and students enhances curricula and can improve quality in university work regarding both teaching and research. This is particularly true for small universities that struggle to offer comprehensive curricula due to lack of professors and students. In the spring semester of 2021, the University of Iceland offered a course on the Internet of Things taught by a professor emeritus in Atlanta, Georgia, assisted by a local professor. The lectures were given on Zoom and all assignments and exams were given over the Internet. In this paper, this course's framework will be described, how it was implemented and what was accomplished. The authors will also share their thoughts on the future of this kind of university work that has to some extent developed due to the Covid situation. © 2022 IEEE.

Discovery and use of electronic information resources by higher education students during the COVID19 pandemic

Discovery (locating) and use of information resources in academic community (in general) are two essential activities supporting teaching and research. Recent generations of university students are commonly focused on e-resources which offer them easy access to up-to-date data and information in various research areas. However, not all e-resources are of the same quality or easily usable in the higher education environment and therefore research user studies should be caried out to get insight into perception of students about discovery and use of e-resources. The research study of students carried out at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia in December 2021 showed frequent use of selected types of scientific and professional e-resources. E-resources are accessed mostly by mobile devices suggesting their ability of use of e-resources at different locations. The problem arose with trust in librarians when locating e-resources, however, librarians were chosen for recommending e-resources. In this research study, students identified most important advantages of e-resources that server as selection criteria for e-resources for studying. The findings confirmed students' high confidence in value of e-resources for studying. Finally, the findings confirmed that the COVID19 pandemic influenced students to use e-resources more frequently than before. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Construction and Effect Analysis of MOOC-Based Self-organized Teaching and Research Model for Primary and Secondary School Teachers

The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has promoted the development of online teaching and research for primary and secondary school teachers, and has forced them to improve their informatized teaching abilities rapidly. This research is guided by the basic principles of online teaching and learning, integrated into the 'Internet +' thinking, and adopts literature research and theoretical deduction to determine self-organized teaching and research steps, which includes 'Clear needs and starting evolution-Spontaneous learning, triggering ups and downs- Interactive communication and cause mutations- Generating results and triggering transitions-Migration practices, gathering and bifurcating'. This research gives full play to the supporting role of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platforms, resources and tools. Finally, the MOOC-based self-organized teaching and research model for primary and secondary school teachers is constructed. On this basis, this research relies on the 'Smart Classroom Teaching' on the Chinese University MOOCs Platform, and the quasiexperimental research method is used to carry out the practical application of the self-organized teaching and research model. Effect analysis shows that this model can improve the teaching and research performance of primary and secondary school teachers in a short period, prompting teachers to achieve a deep understanding of smart classroom teaching, and effectively solve real-world education and teaching problems. © 2021 IEEE.

Research on the Strategies of Promoting the Professional Ability of College Art Teachers by Network Research during the Epidemic Period

During the novel coronavirus pneumonia, teachers use WeChat, ding talk, and other new media to carry out network training, which can break through the obstacles of time and space, effectively carry out teaching seminars and enhance occupation ability. This paper summarizes the development process of network research, analyzes the current situation of a network teaching and research activities carried out by art teachers in Colleges and universities. The network training mode based on WeChat platform is constructed. This paper designs an ERT interactive mechanism based on the Ding Talk platform, including subject experts, subject researchers, and subject teachers. It explores the mode, process and effect of online research through multiple rounds of empirical research. During the epidemic period, the network research to promote the professional ability of art teachers in colleges and universities strategy: first, the use of ding talk to carry out virtual teaching and research activities, improve the information literacy and online teaching ability of art teachers;Two, we should use official account number and APP to conduct online learning to enhance the occupation morality and professional quality of art teachers. The practice has proved that during the epidemic period, the use of WeChat platform and Ding Talking platform to carry out network research activities has the advantages of low cost, high efficiency, and diversified information presentation, and has a good application prospect. © 2021 IEEE.

Promoting Critical and Design Thinking Activities to Tackle Sustainable Development Goals in Higher Education

Since 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came into force, and for the first time they include higher education. Therefore, higher institutions are finding ways to incorporate them into their teachings and research activities. This paper contributes to the literature on engineering education by providing new insights on how to implement the SDGs at the course level. It argues that combining core and transversal skills, along with case studies targeting the SDGs, is an efficient way to prepare the next generation of engineers to tackle the challenges of our society. Moreover, promoting critical and design thinking activities increases the desire of university students to put their technical knowledge and skills at the service of mankind and the planet. Finally, this paper reflects on the pedagogical changes induced by COVID-19. © 2021 IEEE.

Using Natural Language Processing to Facilitate Student Feedback Analysis

This research paper compares the results of a novel computer-assisted approach for analyzing a large volume of open-ended responses with those of a more traditional open coding approach. The work is motivated by the observation that in engineering education ecosystems, community members produce text through myriad activities both inside and outside of the classroom in teaching and research settings. In many of these cases, there is an abundance of text available to educators and researchers that could provide insight into various phenomena of interest within the system - student conceptual understanding, student experiences outside the classroom, how instructors can improve their teaching, or even shifts in collective conversations. Unfortunately, while these bodies of text have the potential to provide novel insights to educators and researchers, traditional analysis techniques do not scale well. For example, analyzing larger amounts of text can take one grader or researcher significantly more time than grading a small set of text responses. A larger body of text also creates more challenges for intrarater reliability. Likewise, expanding the size of the grading or research team can create interrater reliability challenges and the possibility of bias. To address this opportunity, we have created a natural language processing system that augments human analysis so as to facilitate and enhance the work of one person (or team). Specifically, we take minimally pre-processed text, embed them using a pre-trained transformer (a specific kind of neural network architecture trained to encode inputs and decode outputs), and perform a sequence of dimension reduction techniques capped with a final clustering step. Such a system can help reduce the amount of time needed to analyze the text by effectively running a first pass on the text to group similar responses together. The human user can utilize these groupings to perform further analysis to fine tune and identify meanings in ways that only a human could. The system also can help improve consistency by analyzing across the entire collection of texts simultaneously and grouping similar items together. This is in contrast with a single person or a team that would have to work in series, analyzing responses sequentially and thereby creating the potential for inconsistencies across time. In this paper we describe the system's architecture and data processing steps. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by applying the method on three questions from an end-of-semester feedback survey in a large, required introductory engineering course. The survey questions were part of a general feedback survey and asked students about their experiences in the transition to online learning subsequent to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.. Our results suggest that the pre-analysis text clustering can improve speed and accuracy of coding when compared with unassisted human coding-the system augments what we have traditionally done in coding, grading, or making sense of large quantities of textual data. As natural language processing techniques continue to develop, the engineering education research community should continue to explore potential applications to improve understanding and sensemaking from large volumes of underutilized text data from both within and outside of classroom settings. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021