Analysis of graduate students' perceptions of the use of gather town in the virtual Classroom

During the Covid-19 pandemic, courses in virtual environments now became commonplace and over time, applications for virtual meetings were enhanced, molding themselves to the needs of various sectors of society. In the context of a globalized society, digital information and communication technologies (ICT) embody the network culture. In this sense, we also have another virtual meeting application such as Gather Town, which has features similar to Zoom Meeting and Google Meet, its differential being designed as a networked electronic gaming environment. This research aimed to analyze the perceptions of the students in the application and use of the virtual environment in a discipline of the graduate course at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). This study used qualitative and quantitative approaches, with the purpose of broadening and deepening the understanding (GIL, 2017). As for the objectives, this is a study of descriptive nature and as for the procedures, it was carried out data survey organized into categories through the content analysis of Bardin (2011). The analysis of the results shows the use and knowledge of Gather Town, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of videoconferencing programs according to the perceptions of the participants, being listed the difficulties and facilities encountered in the use of Gather Town. The results show the interest in knowing the videoconference platform Gather Town and its advantages, corroborating significantly as a pedagogical resource with more flexibility to mobilize the participation of the teacher and the students in groups and subgroups in synchronous classes in a playful way in the same virtual environment similar to electronic network games. © 2022 Thesaurus Editora de Brasilia Ltda.. All rights reserved.

Methodology for Monitoring Vital Signs in Virtual Classes Using Low-cost Sensors in Online Classes

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to certain patterns in the different actions people take. One of the areas in which this pandemic has impacted most strongly is related to educational activities and children were the most affected. They went from studying in their schools where they have all the conditions, to a physical space at home. This strong change in the environment added to the high levels of contagion, have caused students to present certain manifestations such as the level of stress which can be manifested by many factors such as the main vital signs such as oxygen saturation and heart rate. In this paper we present a methodology to perform these measurements in order to evaluate these measurements when students are attending classes from home. © 2022 ACM.

Students Experience Testing in the Implementation of the 'Gather Town' Meeting Platform as an Alternative Learning Media other than Zoom Cloud Meeting Application

The COVID-19 pandemic has limited the mobility of everyone in the world. Education is one of the most affected sectors because education systems have been done face to face. Most educational institutions switch to online learning by using online meeting platforms. We discovered an online meeting platform called 'Gather town' which looks more attractive in increasing learning motivation and may be an alternative solution for online education. This paper aims to test student experience using 'Gather Town' as a new learning medium and compare the effectiveness with Zoom Meeting Application. We compare the User Experience of both applications by letting respondents try the application and ask for feedback from our questionnaire. The result from the questionnaire shows that Gather Town has excellent potential as an alternative new learning media. © 2022 IEEE.

Tracking Student Attendance in Virtual Classes Based on MTCNN and FaceNet

All classes are held online in order to ensure safety during the COVID pandemic. Unlike onsite classes, it is difficult for us to determine the full participation of students in the class, as well as to detect strangers entering the classroom. Therefore, We propose a student monitoring system based on facial recognition approaches. Classical models in face recognition are reviewed and tested to select the appropriate model. Specifically, we design the system with models such as MTCNN, FaceNet, and propose measures to identify people in the database. The results show that the system takes an average of 30 s for learning and 2 s for identifying a new face, respectively. Experiments also indicate that the ability to recognize faces achieves high results in normal lighting conditions. Unrecognized cases mostly fall into too dark light conditions. The important point is that the system was less likely to misrecognize objects in most of our tests. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Recognizing Students' Attention in a Virtual Class through Facial Expressions using Machine Vision

The COVID-19 has resulted in schools to pause face-to-face classes in traditional classrooms and shifted to online classes in virtual classrooms across the globe. Unfortunately, students' ability to pay attention in class is uncertain. Hence, this study developed models that detect student attention in a virtual class through facial expression. In this study, for every 15-second video segment, statistical values such as the mean, median, and variance of Facial Action Units of each volunteer participant were extracted. Same video segments were labeled independently by three domain experts with attentive or inattentive to form the dataset. Such dataset was then split into 80-20 training-testing split ratios. Results showed that the model developed by the Decision Tree classifier using the Information Gain split criterion gave the best performance with an accuracy of 90.00% and a kappa of 0.796. The presented rate of the accuracy implies a high percentage of correctly predicted observations, while the high kappa value implies a very strong agreement between our human annotators and the machine in labeling students' level of attention. © 2022 IEEE.

Blended Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of e-Learning Implementation in Nigeria Tertiary Institutions Due to COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic has changed the landscape of education globally, posing restrictions and widespread closure of schools, thereby, introducing the paradigm shift from Physical to Virtual, and then blended (Mix mode) learning environments. Hence, teaching and learning process should evolve to accommodate the new normal. It is important to create efficacious virtual learning, however, the behavioral responses of the end-users (students) towards the implementation and adoption of a virtual learning environment are necessary. This paper, therefore, aim to examine students' perception, preferences, and adoption of technology-enabled virtual learning environments and causal factors in process of implementing virtual classes in Nigeria's tertiary institutions. The study seeks to explore the behavioral characteristics of students in virtual classes. The population of the study consists of eight hundred (800) students selected using the non-probability sampling technique. The results of the study reveal that most students still prefer physical to virtual classes. Students faced a series of difficulties during virtual classes which might lead to student failure. It is significant to know that virtual classes cannot replace physical classes but are complementary. © 2022 IEEE.

Impact of Covid-19 on Education

The world is reeling in the midst of the novel corona virus pandemic with fear of rising toll due to the deadly virus. This situation caused complete lockdown in many countries thus posing one of the biggest challenges to educational institutions and academicians to continue the teaching learning process involving students. E-learning system is very important to ensure successful delivery, effective use, and positive impacts on learners. In order to engage learners while at home as well as to utilise their time and complete syllabi, the process of teaching-learning and assessment need to be streamlined. However, while doing so, the institution should keep in mind various skills related as well as infrastructure related constraints on the part of school, teacher, student and parents. But, in reality, majority of the institutions are conducting online classes in urgency regardless of skill and experiences of concerned teachers and students. It is even more challenging when teachers and academicians alike are not well trained at technological tools for virtual/online classes. Students at large are also not acquainted with technologies and much help can’t be expected from their parents in this regard. The goal of this chapter is to investigate students’ opinions for virtual classes focusing on their learning and behaviour during COVID-19. The said study is validated through the student satisfaction survey involving directly students from different institutions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Exploring Intervention Strategies for Distracted Students in VR Classrooms

As one of the manifestations of virtual reality (VR) in education, virtual classroom allows students to enjoy a near-real classroom experience. VR class creates much better engagement and helps to stimulate interest and motivation in learning, making it an ideal solution to online teaching and learning activities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distraction is an unavoidable problem in immersive virtual classes, which has a great detrimental impact on learning. However, how to intervene in students' distraction behaviors in immersive virtual environments has not been thoroughly investigated up to now. In this paper, inspired by teachers' instructional techniques in real-life classes, we propose three intervention strategies, namely eye contact, verbal warning and text warning, and explore the intervening effects of these strategies on the inattention of students seated at the front or back of a virtual classroom via eye tracking. Our results show that all of the proposed intervention strategies have positive impacts on the attention of students. This research gives evidence that teachers' instructional techniques in the real world can be transferred to the virtual class, which provides a new insight for the future design of educational VR. © 2022 ACM.

Real-time monitoring system for attendance and attentiveness in virtual classroom environments

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, classroom environments have been subjected to revolutionary changes via the employment of virtual classrooms and allied technological advancements. The traditional methodologies are proving to be inefficient in such an environment for teaching as well as managerial tasks. Also considering their cumbersome nature, the need for a newer, stronger, and better model is evident. As of now, many Deep Learning techniques have been employed for the purpose, ranging from the usage of standard object detection APIs or even CNNs and their variants. Our study proposes a model based on SVM embedded on top of embedding vectors combined with a Single-shot detector for real-time monitoring of attendance and attentiveness of students in a virtual classroom set up making use of video feed. A small comparative study between the proposed model and dlib, a standard library for the purpose as well is performed. The results show that our model outperforms dlib methodology significantly with high accuracy and performance efficiency. We had done experimentations on the fer2013 dataset particularly for emotion detection and custom datasets in general. Even though the model performs well in our experimentations, the need for a stronger and better dataset is high for evaluating the model and implementing it in real-life scenarios. © 2022 IEEE.

A Survey of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) and Methods to Mitigate the Attack

Industries all around the world seek realistic predictions for new threats that might appear in new future that will affect their business and the security of their data. Year 2020 was full of uncertainty due the Covid19 pandemic, entire world had to change the way they do business by shifting to the digital world. The new working methods introduced new threats which will persist, and potential continue to grow in coming few years. Cyber security predictions address challenges and threats caused by the pandemic such as the huge increase of ransomware attacks in the coming year. Almost every organization changed their option to access work and used new software that will allow them to operate from home. Education sector for example uses virtual classes, healthcare sector use web to deliver and communicate with patients and so on. The more individuals and business rely on technology, the more it becomes part of their lives and cannot be replaced. Cyber criminals realized this fact and increased the demand for higher ransom. The goal of this paper is to study the trend and the influence of Ransomware as a service in today era. This paper is proposed steps to reduce the impact of Ransomware attack to individuals and organizations. The discussion on how ransomware as a service work, statistic of ransomware cases, methods of improving operational security of the organizations and technical countermeasures that should be taken by organization and also individuals are included in this research paper. © 2021 IEEE.

Project-Based Learning Using Internet of Things as an Educational Tool in COVID 19 Era with a Hybrid Context for Engineering Students

Universities must develop disciplinary skills during the COVID-19 era due to virtual classes, even in laboratory practices. In this experiment, disciplinary skills during COVID-19 era are developed through Project-Based Learning (PjBL), which is a classroom approach to give students knowledge and skills, through projects focused on real world challenges and problems. The purpose of this study was to design PjBL using Internet of Things (IoT) to have quantitative evaluation, learning experience perception, course contents assimilation, perception of improvement in soft skills and critical thinking. The project consisted in the measurement and analysis of vehicle variables for an engine embedded in IoT with idle speed conditions. The vehicle variables to be measured and analyzed are: carbon oxide and dioxide gas emissions, gas emission temperature, engine bay temperature and humidity, engine RPM, oil temperature, engine inertial forces, engine block temperature, and accelerator pedal position. The results prove that PjBLs with IoT in a hybrid context improve the students' learning experiences in a similar way to the face-to-face context. The score grade before and during COVID-19 exhibited 1.59% of increment;the learning experience perception showed that the students preferred the hybrid (42.86%) model (remote and real) in similar percentage in comparison with the face-to-face (53.06%), the virtual model (remote) was not fully accepted (4.08%). The 81.6% of the students preferred to implement projects based on IoT for future courses or prototypes. © 2021 ACM.

How to Remember COVID-19 in the Post-pandemic Era A Virtual Class Environment as Conformist Interactive Art

In the unprecedented era of the COVID-19 pandemic, people lost a lot of face-to-face interactions in society. They have grown accustomed to virtual meetings via Internet services. People look at their computer displays to take part in most of their events. After the vaccinations and our immune system help them return to their normal life, how do they remember the virtual events? How to Remember COVID-19 in the Post-pandemic Era represents a virtual class environment in the pandemic and provides visitors with an experiential space as a theme park ride. This project focuses on indirect interactions with people in the virtual world and makes them rethink the visual-centric and restricted interface for virtual events. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

A Review of the Teaching Modalities Chosen by Faculty During the Global Pandemic

Universities, worldwide, are managing their course offerings during the coronavirus pandemic in different ways and numerous factors are considered when selecting an appropriate teaching modality. In this paper, a research question is posed as follows: how do faculty members prefer to teach during the pandemic and what are the implications? Data is provided from the engineering and computer science faculty members at The University of Texas at Dallas, where faculty are individually offered a choice among five different teaching modalities. The results are used to quantify our faculty's selection and explain reasons for selecting a particular teaching modality. The required preparation, and the support offered by the university to the faculty during the pandemic are also addressed. Half the faculty, who taught virtual classes, consider the student's performance on assessments comparable to the performance of students during previous semesters when the class was given in-person. A quarter considers the student's performance better and a quarter considers it worse. Beyond the pandemic, the majority of the engineering and computer science faculty prefer flexibility between the classroom and remote teaching. Otherwise, they prefer teaching in the office over working from home. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Edubot Project: Analyzing the Adaptation of Robotics Classes to the Remote Environment

Given the need for social confinement in response to the global pandemic caused by the Covid-19 disease, the Edubot project made the transition from classroom teaching methodologies to distance learning methodologies. To assess the effectiveness of this adaptation, a survey was developed where new students, who has never studied with Edubot before, could give their opinion on affinity and quality with regard to the new classes. The answers could be analyzed and displayed in graphs. Interpreting them, it is evident that although the virtual classes are fulfilling what they promise, there is a preference for the in-person mode. © 2021 IEEE.

MACHINE DRAWING: TROUBLES and OPPORTUNITIES in MANAGING LABORATORY ACTIVITIES in AN ONLINE CLASSROOM

Since Learning Management Systems (LMS) appeared some 20 years ago, their experimentation grew slowly, compared with the explosion that occurred after the Covid-19 emergency. Due to the closure of schools and universities worldwide, every educational institution and their teachers had to move towards the usage of LMSs for Online Distance Learning (ODL). This obliged the teachers to quickly familiarize with such kind of didactics and every kind of course faced these new opportunities. Machine Drawing is a course that requires much interaction between teachers and students and may not exploit validly many modalities invented in LMS. This paper presents the experiences done implementing online didactics, trying to apply all the online tools to the traditional way of teaching. Mainly laboratory activities, made online, must reproduce the interaction made in-person. Nevertheless, online connections opened new ways to try stricter relationships between the teacher and those students, who have less skill, even shyness, and then may accumulate delays. Differentiating the way in which didactics (lecture and laboratory) may be delivered, some traditional techniques have been improved. Employment the video recording of all activities done has given students the opportunity to repeat the more delicate steps of some topics. The check online of designs and elaborations by instructors allows students to be more concentrated on explanation, which may be done collectively or singularly. Comparing the results of exams before and after online didactics revealed that the number of students that passed the exam and the average of reached grade grew significantly. © PDE 2021.