International Students' Perceptions towards Their Learning Experience in an International Network Seminar in Japan: During and Post the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck educational experience systems around the globe. This paper investigates and evaluates the student participants' perceptions who joined the international exchange seminar on global citizenship and peace held at a University in Hiroshima, Japan. Approximately seventy students and faculty members from nine to ten different universities from around the globe joined this summer program in August 2021 (online) and 2022 (face-to-face). This study is a mixed-method study. The first part consists of a quantitative analysis of BEVI data obtained from the students in the seminar before COVID-19 and after. The research concludes that there are no changes in the effects of what students learn. The second part consists of qualitative data. The data shows the perceptions of students of online teaching versus hybrid teaching. It compares the differences in participants' perceptions reported in students' feedback on the programs during and post-COVID-19. Our results confirm prominent differences exist in the students' perceptions of their learning experience during the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods. The findings indicate based on lessons learned post-pandemic, universities need to strive and define the meaning and purpose of international seminars, which enable students to experience a high level of intercultural social interaction online and face-to-face. As the world becomes more interconnected, virtual environments, such as the ones presented within the International Seminar in Hiroshima, Japan, are vital to facilitating intercultural teaching environments and the implications within this paper indicate that these virtual mediums can promote inclusion, leading to a more sustainable world.

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.

Piloting a Flexible Solicited Diary Study With Marginalized Latina Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Little is known about the experiences of minority stress among Latina women who have sex with both women and men (WSWM), a sexual and gender minority group situated at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. The current article presents an exploratory study aimed at addressing this knowledge gap. The research utilized a flexible diary-interview method (DIM) to investigate stress-related experiences among Mexican American WSWM residing in an economically disadvantaged community in the U.S. during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A detailed description of the study is provided, including information on the background, methodology, participants' experiences, and how the project was managed remotely by a virtual research team. Twenty-one participants were asked to maintain a diary for a 6-week period spanning from March to September 2021. They submitted weekly entries in diverse formats (visual, audio, typed, and handwritten) through a user-friendly website or via mail while communicating regularly with researchers over the phone. Following the diarizing period, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to clarify pertinent information within the entries and validate researchers' preliminary interpretations. Out of the initial 21 enrollees, 14 participants stopped diarizing at different stages, and nine completed the entire study. Despite facing challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, participants reported the diary-keeping process as a positive experience that offered an authentic outlet to share parts of their lives they seldom reveal. The implementation of this study highlights two significant methodological insights. Firstly, it emphasizes the value of employing a DIM to explore intersectional narratives. Secondly, it underscores the importance of adopting a flexible and sensitive approach in qualitative health research, particularly when engaging individuals from minoritized groups.

Optimal Path Control of a Patient for Rapid Infection Testing

In this paper, we propose a path control framework for guiding and simulating the patient's path of travel to speed up virus testing in pandemic situations, such as COVID-19. We use geographic information and hospital state information to construct graphs to yield optimal travel paths. Pathfinding algorithms A* and Navigation mesh, which have been widely used, are efficient when applied to control agents in a virtual environment. However, they are not suitable for real-time changing cases such as the COVID-19 environment because they guide only predetermined static routes. In order to receive a virus infection test quickly, there are many factors to consider, such as road traffic conditions, hospital size, number of patient movements, and patient processing time, in addition to guiding the shortest distance. In this paper, we propose a framework for digitally twinning various situations by modeling optimization functions considering various environmental factors in real-world urban maps to handle viral infection tests quickly and efficiently.

Bringing Trauma Home: Reflections on Interviewing Survivors of Trauma while Working from Home

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home became the new normal for many professionals. While this was beneficial in managing the rapidly spreading virus, it had varying impacts on the mental health of those previously not accustomed to remote work. This paper provides a critical reflection of the researcher's experience of conducting interviews with survivors of trauma while working from home. The research aimed to understand the experiences of significant others supporting patients with severe burn injury in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). As an experienced ICU nurse, the researcher has well developed personal coping strategies for dealing with complex trauma and in working with significant others of patients with severe burn injury in hospital settings. Due to the pandemic, data collection moved from face-to-face in the hospital, as originally intended, to phone or videoconference interviews. 17 participants were recruited, with all participants given the option of videoconference (n = 3) or telephone interviews (n = 14). Interviews had an average length of 55 minutes. This paper discusses the strategies adopted to cope with the sharing of significant others' experiences of trauma while in the home environment. Careful consideration was needed for the researcher, the participants and those within the homes of both researcher and participant, in terms of psychological safety, ethical considerations and rapport building. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Qualitative Methods is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Entornos virtuales de aprendizaje como alternativa en la enseñanza de la materia de medicina crítica

: The general objective of this research work was to determine the feasibility of incorporating EVA as a didactic alternative in the teaching of critical medicine in postgraduate students. The study population was selected through an intentional sampling for convenience and was made up of 90 students and 23 teachers of the postgraduate degree in Critical Medicine from two private universities in Ecuador. The results obtained made it possible to determine the feasibility of incorporating EVAs in the academic training of critical medicine postgraduate students, thus also allowing the reduction of hospital absence times due to the academic training received virtually. Keywords: Learning, teaching, EVA, critical medicine, postgraduate. 1.Introducción El desarrollo de la tecnología en los últimos 5 años ha permitido a las personas contar con un mejor y mayor desarrollo en casi todas las áreas especialmente la educativa.

Use of Cloud-Based Virtual Reality in Chinese Glove Puppetry to Preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage

Chinese traditional glove puppetry is a folk art with a long history. It is worth inheriting and safeguarding this distinguished intangible cultural traditional art using virtual reality. With this background, this study integrates the digital resources of glove puppetry from the perspective of satisfying users' performance needs. In this study, a multi-user, cloud-based virtual reality glove puppetry system was developed that enhances the classic works of glove puppetry. Each user has a unique perception of the virtual environment and can interact remotely. The system involves human–computer and human–human interactions. This study also describes the design and control of glove puppets. The virtual reality system provides a unique entertainment experience to users of all ages. Through a questionnaire administered to 30 subjects after the user play, this study investigated the operation and experience of this system. According to the research findings, the proposed cloud-based VR system is not only easy to use, but also helps to preserve traditional intangible culture. Our research has high theoretical value and can help preserve traditional glove puppetry. Our cloud-based virtual reality system offers a new application for disseminating and preserving intangible cultural heritage.

Virtual labs for the study of enzymatic stirred tank bioreactors

Virtual laboratories have successfully proven to be very versatile and intuitive when simulating experiments in science, biotechnology, and engineering. These tools must complement the experiments carried out in real labs or pilot plants. This study describes the creation of a virtual laboratory through the Easy JavaScript Simulation platform. A web‐based simulation of an enzymatic stirred‐tank bioreactor has been built using a dynamic model. This simulation reproduces the behavior of a continuous bioreactor, including the deviations of ideal mixing conditions as by the use of an in tanks‐in‐series model for nonideal flow. This article describes the continuous dynamic model in a stirred tank bioreactor, as well as the operation of a tool capable of carrying out virtual practice with students. Practice scripts have been developed that should be used by students during the practical classes. This interactive tool is powerful and useful to develop many experiments by varying the different input parameters, saving time and resources. In addition, the tool allows following teaching sessions in specific situations such as the health situation derived from the pandemic caused by COVID‐19.

Advanced Dance Choreography System Using Bidirectional LSTMs

Recently, the craze of K-POP contents is promoting the development of Korea's cultural and artistic industries. In particular, with the development of various K-POP contents, including dance, as well as the popularity of K-POP online due to the non-face-to-face social phenomenon of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) era, interest in Korean dance and song has increased. Research on dance Artificial Intelligent (AI), such as artificial intelligence in a virtual environment, deepfake AI that transforms dancers into other people, and creative choreography AI that creates new dances by combining dance and music, is being actively conducted. Recently, the dance creative craze that creates new choreography is in the spotlight. Creative choreography AI technology requires the motions of various dancers to prepare a dance cover. This process causes problems, such as expensive input source datasets and the cost of switching to the target source to be used in the model. There is a problem in that different motions between various dance genres must be considered when converting. To solve this problem, it is necessary to promote creative choreography systems in a new direction while saving costs by enabling creative choreography without the use of expensive motion capture devices and minimizing the manpower of dancers according to consideration of various genres. This paper proposes a system in a virtual environment for automatically generating continuous K-POP creative choreography by deriving postures and gestures based on bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM). K-POP dance videos and dance videos are collected in advance as input. Considering a dance video for defining a posture, users who want a choreography, a 3D dance character in the source movie, a new choreography is performed with Bi-LSTM and applied. For learning, considering creativity and popularity at the same time, the next motion is evaluated and selected with probability. If the proposed method is used, the effort for dataset collection can be reduced, and it is possible to provide an intensive AI research environment that generates creative choreography from various existing online dance videos.

Digital games in engineering education: systematic review and future trends

The application of digital games in higher education is on the rise in engineering. With the recent COVID-19 restrictions and the move to virtual learning, the interest in and the need for virtual laboratories and technology-enhanced experiential learning tools like digital games are expected to rise. This paper presents a review of the current practices in digital game-based learning for engineering education. Most importantly, it provides insight into the application of digital game-based learning across diverse engineering disciplines. It also provides researchers and practitioners with insights into relevant journals and conferences, available games, research designs and assessment methods being used in digital game-based learning in the context of engineering. Based on predefined inclusion criteria, a total of 51 articles published within the last decade were analysed in detail. Software engineering education was found to evaluate the educational use of games most extensively. Eighteen empirical studies also reported some learning gains with digital games using different assessment methods. The findings of this review indicate increase in the dissemination of games research and possibly in the use of games for engineering education. This paper closes by highlighting future trends in digital game-based learning for engineering education.

VR-Enhanced Cognitive Learning: Method, Framework, and Application

Both constructivist learning and situation-cognitive learning believe that learning outcomes are significantly affected by the context or learning environments. However, since 2019, the world has been ravaged by COVID-19. Under the threat of the virus, many offline activities, such as some practical or engineering courses, have been subjected to certain restrictions. Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging, promising, and rapidly developing technology that enables users to obtain a near-real immersion experience by combining technologies such as computer science, communication, vision, etc. In the context of COVID-19, the advantages of VR immersive experiences are highlighted. By constructing a virtual learning environment, VR technology can greatly compensate for the shortage of traditional teaching conditions and help learners to carry out cognitive learning better. However, currently, VR-enhanced cognitive learning is still in its infancy, along with numerous problems and limitations. Therefore, this paper first conducted an in-depth study of some related concepts, such as constructivist learning and situated cognition learning. Then it proposes a general VR-enhanced cognitive learning framework and designs the general steps for constructing learning situations with VR technology. Based on the proposed model and framework, it developed a campus knowledge-learning APP using VR tools. Through a case study, it verified the validity and performance of the model and strategies. Questionnaire survey and experimental results show that the new model achieves a good learning effect and improves the efficiency of learning by at least 20% compared to the traditional learning methods.

A Novel Multi-Objective Cat Swarm Technique for an Efficient Cloud Manager for Data Handling in Cloud Environment

The three key advantages of cloud computing are adaptability, scale, and availability. These features were produced by combining virtualization techniques with internet services. The conventional management techniques and tools, unfortunately, appear inadequate in comparison to the scalability and flexibility of cloud services since they often require local software installation with ongoing upgrades and modifications. System administrators still do a major portion of the manual work involved in deploying and managing cloud configurations. Working with cloud services from multiple providers is also challenging since the solutions are sometimes private and only adhere to the cloud service capabilities of certain service providers. Incorporating autonomy into cloud management would mean giving the cloud manager the capacity to autonomously upgrade or decrease the variety of deployed images and virtual machines to fulfill Customer service contracts for efficiency, etc. In this paper, we introduce Multi-objective Cat Swarm - Aurora (MCS-Aurora), a highly scalable infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud manager that enables access to cloud services even in the scenario that the manager itself fails. By providing network automation, MCS-Aurora and the role-based access control mechanism provide flexible and effective resource management. Enhancing user authentication, data access mechanisms, and data security are the main goals of the suggested manager. The manager is in charge of achieving the cloud's service level agreement for handling and storing data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the system, the suggested technique is contrasted with current methods.

'The Obstacle is the Way': Methodological Challenges and Opportunities for Video-Reflexive Ethnography During COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted research. In this article, we explore the opportunities and challenges presented by the pandemic to a group of researchers using video-reflexive ethnography (VRE) - a methodology used to understand practices, grounded in: exnovation, collaboration, reflexivity, and care. To understand how the pandemic impacted researchers using VRE, we facilitated two focus groups with 12 members of the International Association of Video-Reflexive Ethnographers. The findings suggest the pandemic exacerbated existing methodological challenges, yet also provided an opportunity reflect on our own practices as researchers, namely: accessing sites, building relationships, facilitating reflexive sessions, and cultivating care. Due to public health measures, some researchers used insiders to access sites. While these insiders shouldered additional burdens, this shift might have empowered participants, increased the salience of the project, and enabled access to rural sites. The inability to access sites and reliance on insiders also impeded researcher ability to build relationships with participants and generate the ethnographic insights often associated with prolonged engagement at a site. In reflexive sessions, researchers had to learn how to manage the technological, logistical, and methodological challenges associated with either themselves or participants being remote. Finally, participants noted that while the transition to more digital methodologies might have increased project reach, there needed to be a mindfulness around cultivating practices of care in the digital world to ensure psychological safety and protect participants data. These findings reflect the opportunities and challenges a group of researchers using VRE had during the pandemic and can be used to stimulate future methodologic discussions.

A Novel Statistical and Neural Network Combined Approach for the Cloud Spot Market

The price of virtual machine instances in the Amazon EC2 spot model is often much lower than in the on-demand counterpart. However, this price reduction comes with a decrease in the availability guarantees. Several mechanisms have been proposed to analyze the spot model in the last years, employing different strategies. To our knowledge, there is no work that accurately captures the trade-off between spot price and availability, for short term analysis, and does long term analysis for spot price tendencies, in favor of user decision making. In this work, we propose (a) a utility-based strategy, that balances cost and availability of spot instances and is targeted to short-term analysis, and (b) a LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) neural network framework for long term spot price tendency analysis. Our experiments show that, for r4.2xlarge, 90 percent of spot bid suggestions ensured at least 5.73 hours of availability in the second quarter of 2020, with a bid price of approximately 38 percent of the on-demand price. The LSTM experiments were able to predict spot prices tendencies for several instance types with very low error. Our LSTM framework predicted an average value of 0.19 USD/hour for the r5.2xlarge instance type (Mean Squared Error [Formula Omitted]) for a 7-day period of time, which is about 37 percent of the on-demand price. Finally, we used our combined mechanism on an application that compares thousands of SARS-CoV-2 DNA sequences and show that our approach is able to provide good choices of instances, with low bids and very good availability.

Automated Building of an Environment for Secure Software Development in Web Technologies Courses

This paper investigates the automated building of verified software environments that can be used in university courses. Over the last couple of years, it has become obvious that using online environments, video meetings, virtual lectures, online teaching, and learning is not a matter of choice. The coronavirus pandemic forced all parts of the education systems, and even of life, to go online. Deepening the research and development in the software automation field can lead to using various ways to allow university students and learners to "get in touch with” the real-world problems in software development. We developed such an approach by defining the steps, developing and evaluating specific automation processes of building an environment for secure software development. We defined both the functional and nonfunctional requirements for such a system, and the next major steps in development, such as virtualization setup (kvm), virtual environment (virtual machines) definition and creation, database configuration and management of user settings, have been defined and developed. The evaluation is performed according to the specifics defined in the Web technologies course, but the results and use are not limited to that course alone. In conclusion, the results of the evaluation conducted in a laboratory setting have been presented and appropriate scenarios, applications and future work have been defined. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Digital Competencies in Teachers of Regular Basic Education in Tacna-Peru

For some years, teachers' digital skills have been critical to the educational process;nevertheless, with the health catastrophe released by Covid-19, they have become critical. So, the purpose of this study was to examine and quantify the degree of digital literacy among instructors of Regular Basic Education at UGEL Tacna. The study used a hybrid quantitative-qualitative methodology and was mostly descriptive in nature. There were 1,329 teachers in the population and sample. The questionnaire and the interview were employed as instruments. The findings suggest that 49.89% teachers had a high degree of digital competence, while 12.19% have a basic level, which includes instructors at the elementary, primary, and secondary levels. Instructors get knowledge about web 2.0 technologies and their utility and application via interviews;it is advised that teachers enhance cognitive digital abilities. That is, the investigative skills geared toward the virtual environment and their development in pupils. It concludes by identifying the most critical training needs associated with the cognitive digital domain's medium-low level, establishing the necessity of developing a strengthening plan for cognitive digital skills that have not been developed satisfactorily, particularly in the creation of digital educational materials and related educational projects. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Digital Transformation and Technological Innovation on Higher Education Post-COVID-19

The university is an important pillar in sustainable development;however, COVID-19 imposed new dynamics that called for rethinking university praxis to achieve this mission, and although the systematization of good practices is a powerful mechanism for understanding educational success, this perspective of positive change has been little developed. Hence, the present study aimed to identify positive cores of faculty in their successful post-COVID-19 performance. A qualitative methodological approach was deployed, with the Netnography method, complemented with elements of positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and management of formative potentialities. The online community consisted of 1238 university teachers from 10 Latin American countries, who participated for two months in an appreciative interview as an asynchronous journey of constructive proposals, for the active co-construction of post-COVID-19 success factors. The findings reveal multiple affirmative topics grouped into nine positive cores, identifying two target categories: digital transformation and technological innovation, as well as the processes directly associated with their dynamization. Finally, the epistemic implications of the findings in theory and practice, and their relevance in the creation of a formative agenda of positive change for Latin American Higher Education, are presented. © 2023 by the authors.

AN INNOVATIVE PROTOCOL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE TEAMWORK COMPETENCY IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

Under COVID scenario, it has been observed that the constraints derived from remote teaching makes harder an already challenging task: the achievement of teamwork skills and their assessment. This study, which is part of the UPC-ICE "EQUIPA'T” teaching innovation project, aims to design a new protocol for the development of academic projects and the individualized evaluation of university students regardless the field of knowledge within engineering. To that end, eight functionalities have been identified: (i) quantification of the individual contribution;(ii) group dynamics and individual roles;(iii) internal team management;(iv) communication;(v) creativity (brainstorming/concept map);(vi) design thinking;(vii) repository;(viii) content development (previous ideas about concepts). For each of them, a series of indicators, activities, and tools have been defined to allow the development of the aforementioned functions in face-to-face and remote environments. In addition, an analysis has been carried out to determine the implementation of the protocol by professors in the pilot stage of the project. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee AEIPRO, Spain.

Comparison of in-person and virtual Grand Canyon undergraduate field trip learning outcomes

Field learning is fundamental in geoscience, but cost, accessibility, and other constraints limit equal access to these experiences. As technological advances afford ever more immersive and student-centered virtual field experiences, they are likely to have a growing role across geoscience education. They also serve as an important tool for providing high-quality online instruction, whether to fully online degree students, students in hybrid in-person/remote programs, or students experiencing disruptions to in-person learning, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. This mixed-methods study compared learning outcomes of an in-person (ipFT) and a virtual (iVFT) geoscience field trip to Grand Canyon National Park, each of which highlighted the Great Unconformity. Participants included introductory and advanced geology students. In the ipFT, students collectively explored the Canyon through the interpretive Trail of Time along the Canyon rim, guided by the course instructor. In the iVFT, students individually explored the Canyon and studied its geology at river level. 360° spherical images anchor the iVFTs and serve as a framework for programmed overlays that enable active learning and allow for adaptive feedback. We assessed cognitive and affective outcomes in both trips using common measures. Regression analysis showed the iVFT to be associated with significantly greater learning gains. The ipFT students had significantly higher positive affect scores pre-trip, reflecting their excitement for the trip. Overall, our results provide clear evidence that high-quality iVFTs can lead to better learning gains than ipFTs. Although field trips are employed for more than just content learning, this finding may encourage greater use of iVFTs in coursework. © 2023 National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

Reflections From Implementing a Virtual Social Innovation Lab

Qualitative research methods had to quickly adapt to using online platforms due to the COVID-19 pandemic to limit in-person interactions. Online platforms have been used extensively for interviews and focus groups, but workshops with larger groups requiring more complex interactions have not been widely implemented. This paper presents a case study of a fully virtual social innovation lab on bioplastics packaging, which was adapted from a series of in-person workshops. A positive outcome of the online setting was diversifying the types of participants who could participate. Highly interactive activities such as icebreakers, networking, bricolage, and prototyping were particularly challenging to shift from in-person to online using traditional web conferencing platforms like Zoom. Creative use of online tools, such as Gather.Town and Kahoot!, helped unlock more innovative thinking by employing novel techniques such as gamification. However, challenges such as adapting facilitation for an online environment and exclusion of groups that do not have consistent access to internet and/or computers still need to be addressed. The reflections and lessons learned from this paper can help researchers adapt qualitative methods to virtual environments. © The Author(s) 2023.