Distance Teaching Experience of Campus-based Teachers at Times of Pandemic Confinement

Amidst the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, distance education, where the learning process is conducted online, has become the norm. Campus-based programs and courses have been redesigned in a timely manner which was a challenge for teachers not used to distance teaching. Students' engagement and active participation become an issue;add to that the new emerging effects associated with this setup, such as the so-called "Zoom fatigue", a term coined recently by some authors referring to one's exhaustion feeling that stems from the overuse of virtual meetings. In realising this problem, solutions were suggested in the literature to help trigger students' engagement and enhance teachers' experience in online teaching. This study analyses these effects along with our teachers' experience in the new learning environment and concludes by devising some recommendations. To attain the above objectives, we conducted online interviews with six of our teachers, transcribed the content of the videos and then applied the inductive research approach to assess the results. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Status, Challenges and Trends in Videoconferencing Platforms

Although videoconferencing platforms were a growing market even before the Covid-19 pandemic, they became very popular and widely used within weeks of the beginning of the pandemic. The compulsion of social distancing, lockdown, the need to work from home have led to an exponential demand for videoconferencing applications and an adaptation of the way we carry out our current activities such as work, decision-making, communicating with family and colleagues, or education. With the diversification of the categories of users of videoconferencing systems and the contexts in which they were used, many other needs have emerged and the demand to adapt these platforms, both in terms of ease of use and functionality, as well as security. Videoconferencing systems are no longer meant only for decision-makers or trainers, but also for general public. This paper reviews various data regarding the use of videoconferencing systems in recent years, a number of problems encountered by users, and expected trends in the future.

Zoom and its Discontents: Group Decision Making in Pediatric Cardiology in the Time of COVID (and Beyond) : Aurthors.

The emergence of Covid-19 has led to change within hospital-based healthcare. An example, has been to reconfigure clinical decision making meetings from traditional in-person (Face-to-face, FtF) to online video-conferencing (VC) format inorder to decrease contagion risk. Despite its widespread uptake, there is minimal empirical data evaluating this format. This narrative review considers the implications on medical decision-making when clinicians communicate remotely via Microsoft Teams. The discussion is informed by the psychological literature and by commentary obtained from a survey of paediatric cardiac clinicians who participated in clinical meetings when video-conferencing was first introduced. Whist video-conferencing can optimize clinician presence, this is potentially offset by compromises in current imaging quality, the group discussion, information sharing and decision quality. Implementing a shift from face-to-face to VC within the group decision-making process requires an appreciation of the changed environment, appropriate adaptations and the implemention of new technology solutions. Meanwhile, healthcare should carefully consider the potential implications of clinical decision making using online video conferencing, be prepared to adapt and evaluate prior to a shift away from face-to-face formats.

Towards Zoomocracy - an Explorative Study on Virtual Democratic Decision Making in Swedish City Council Meetings in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Governmental decision making is essential to maintain democracy. The decision making formats and processes are institutionalized and follow strict formats for participation, debate and decisions. The constraints and lock-downs due to the covid-19 pandemic led to an extensive increase in the use of digital meeting tools to maintain democratic decision making through virtual meetings. Our main approach in this paper is to inductively explore the changes that occur when democratic meetings take place on-line through a quantitative text analysis and interviews. We delimit our focus to speech duration in recorded meetings. We find that the virtual meeting format changed meeting characteristics compared to on-site meetings. There were some changes in speech duration among councilors which has to be further investigated in a larger sample. The main contribution of this paper is the method to measure actual speech duration and compare how virtual meetings may influence the organization of democratic meetings. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Remote Working in the COVID-19 Era

The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest virtual experience for online work and employee engagement in the world. Millions of employees have been required to spend extended periods of time working on digital platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Team, and Skype. However, the nature of this work has resulted in a number of negative implications, such as lengthy work hours, virtual meetings, and the constant pressure to check and respond to business-related emails. In addition, several employees felt obligated to stay online to demonstrate that they were not avoiding their work responsibilities, which contributed to their psychological stress. In this research, a questionnaire was utilized to assess remote work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic's spread. The questionnaire consisted of four axes: work intensification, employee engagement and online presence, adapting to new working techniques, and demographic aspects of the respondents. According to the results, the abrupt change from physical to online work patterns increased work intensity, online presence, and job instability. We also observe that the transition to new methods of working from home is proceeding well. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Governing in the time of Covid-19: how board meetings went online and the implications of this for considering the role of the governing board

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 necessitated changes in the working practices of many organisations such that online meetings suddenly became the norm. Governing board meetings were no exception. However, little is known about the impact of online meetings on the work of boards. Here we draw on empirical evidence from observations of in-person and online board meetings in eight colleges of further education across the UK to address the question: in what ways do governing board meetings differ in online and in-person contexts? From this we consider what this tells us about the role of the board in the life of the organisation. We conclude that social gathering, which emphasises the importance of place, is of central importance in the work of the board.

2nd International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering Research and Development, ICRAMERD 2021

The proceedings contain 79 papers presendted at a virtual meeting. The special focus in this conference is on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering Research and Development. The topics include: Firmware of Indigenous and Custom-Built Flexible Robots for Indoor Assistance;Automation of AM Via IoT Towards Implementation of e-logistics in Supply Chain for Industry 4.0;Evaluation and Optimization of Process Parameter for Surface Roughness of 3D-Printed PETG Specimens Using Taguchi Method at Constant Printing Temperature;Evaluation of Preventive Activities of COVID-19 Using Multi-criteria Decision Making Method;mechanical Characterization of Concrete with Rice Husk-Based Biochar as Sustainable Cementitious Admixture;Ranking of Barriers for SSCM Implementation in Indian Textile Industries;Framework to Monitor Vehicular GHG Footprint;solution to Real-Time Problem in Shifter Knob Assembly at Automobile Manufacturing Industry;performance of Chemical Route-Synthesized SnO2 Nanoparticles;a Numerical Study to Choose the Best Model for a Bladeless Wind Turbine;Effect of Tissue Properties on the Efficacy of MA on Lungs;effect of Process Parameters and Coolant Application on Cutting Performance of Centrifugal Cast Single Point Cutting Tools;Study and Analysis of Thermal Barrier Application of Lanthanum Oxide Coated SS-304 Steel;recovery of Iron Values from Blast Furnace Gas Cleaning Process Sludge by Medium Intensity Magnetic Separation Method;fatigue Analysis of Rectangular Plate with a Circular Cut-Out;protection of Vital Facilities from the Threat of External Explosion Using D3o Material;investigation on Coefficient of Heat Transfer Through Impact of Engine Vibration;electrical Modulus and Conductivity Study of Styrene-Butadiene Rubber/Barium Hexaferrite Flexible Polymer Dielectrics;preface.

Seeing the faces is so important—Experiences from online team meetings on commercial virtual reality platforms

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online meetings became common for daily teamwork in the home office. To understand the opportunities and challenges of meeting in virtual reality (VR) compared to videoconferences, we conducted the weekly team meetings of our human-computer interaction research lab on five off-the-shelf online meeting platforms over 4 months. After each of the 12 meetings, we asked the participants (N = 32) to share their experiences, resulting in 200 completed online questionnaires. We evaluated the ratings of the overall meeting experience and conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the quantitative data to compare VR meetings and video calls in terms of meeting involvement and co-presence. In addition, a thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed genuine insights covering five themes: spatial aspects, meeting atmosphere, expression of emotions, meeting productivity, and user needs. We reflect on our findings gained under authentic working conditions, derive lessons learned for running successful team meetings in VR supporting different kinds of meeting formats, and discuss the team's long-term platform choice. Copyright © 2023 Bonfert, Reinschluessel, Putze, Lai, Alexandrovsky, Malaka and Döring.

Effects of Digital Avatar on Perceived Social Presence and Co-presence in Business Meetings Between the Managers and Their Co-workers

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, more people in the workforce, especially in the IT industry, started working from home. This brought a set of issues and challenges for both workers and companies across the globe such as losing touch with other co-workers. This could potentially result in decrease of the performance and innovation. This paper investigates effects of using digital avatar robots in virtual meeting environment, specifically, focusing on the perception of social presence and co-presence between workers and their managers. Our experiment results showed that majority of participants felt an improvement in social presence, co-presence and overall virtual meeting experience while using digital avatar for their meetings, especially to those who has a meeting with less familiar persons or persons from the higher corporate hierarchy. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

IRRMA: An Image Recommender Robot Meeting Assistant

The number of people who attend virtual meetings has increased as a result of COVID-19. In this paper, we present a system that consists of an expressive humanoid social robot called QTRobot, and a recommender system that employs natural language processing techniques to recommend images related to the content of the presenter’s speech to the audience in real time. This is achieved utilising the QTRobot’s platform capabilities (microphone, computation power, and Wi-Fi). © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Computer-Vision Based Attention Monitoring for Online Meetings

Due to the appearance of COVID-19, virtual video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet have become one of the main alternative ways to conduct virtual meetings and presentations. While the virtual platforms are cheaper and more flexible, presenters and meeting hosts are likely less efficient at assessing audience attention and engagement due to the lack of body language. In this paper, we propose a system for estimating and monitoring participant attention in virtual meetings by using computer vision. Our approach mainly focuses on changes in a person's presence, gaze direction, and head orientation as a computer camera has a limited field of view. We first created a module to detect and extract participant video cells to isolate users and process their attention individually. Using those videos, we then monitored the user's presence, using YOLOv3 and DeepSORT, and their gaze direction and head orientation, using PTGaze. Through this monitoring, the system is able to record and graph a user's attention over the total amount of frames and return a collective attention level graph for the entire meeting. We believe that our system has potential usage in settings where attention is critical, such as academic lectures or collaborative business meetings. © 2022 IEEE.

STEM Program for Female Students during COVID-19 Pandemic

Despite helping to solve problems in society and the environment and enabling financial independence, a disproportionately low number of women enter engineering careers. Contributing factors may include a lack of female role models and activities that would increase the interest and confidence in STEM pathways during the developing years. Our university has initiated activities to provide exposure to role models and STEM activities to young females. This year Ron Burton Training Village (RBTV) started a new STEM program for female students grades 6-11 which would span over 6 years. The students would attend a different experience every weekend and conclude the yearly experience with a capstone project. Our university partnered with RBTV for one weekend workshop experience. The program was intended to be an in-person event but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was conducted synchronously through Zoom virtual meetings. Our university is well known for “hands-on” learning, and we decided to keep the experience hands-on even if it had to be virtual. Students participated in STEM-related hands-on projects, connecting them to real life applications and boosting students' interests in different STEM disciplines. The program represents part of our university's ongoing efforts to interest young women in STEM. The core of the half-day workshop was three 45-minute STEM modules: Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The students rotated between the different workshops. The three modules are presented in this paper. Civil Engineering project was Soil Testing, Electrical Engineering project was Food Battery, and Computer Science project was Smart Picker. 38 female students participated in this new STEM program. A survey was conducted at the end of the event to evaluate the content of the program. Students were excited about our program, learning, and experiencing different fields of engineering. We received very positive feedback from the students. The students really enjoyed the hands-on experience. Students reflected that they would like to participate in more STEM related activities in the future. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Virtual Versus Face-to-Face meetings: A study Regarding the Perceptions of the Romanian Managers during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

The new coronavirus disease was first observed in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. A couple of months later it was recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as SARS CoV-2 and nominally named COVID-19 (European Council, 2021). In just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced individuals all over the world to adapt their behavior, both personally and professionally, social distance becoming a necessity by reducing the spread of the virus (Tang, et al., 2020). These restrictions have resulted in a dramatic increase in the use of technology for remote meetings, including video conferencing tools. And although this process was happening in a mostly unfamiliar environment, due to its necessity and one's incapacity of replacing face-to-face interactions with anything else it has become a day-to-day activity in a matter of weeks. Although there are some particularities as a result of cultural diversity, in Romania the adoption of such tools was in line with what was happening all over the world, although because of the decreased level of digitalization in public administration it was more difficult for some part of the society to adapt. The present study has the objective to reveal what Romanian managers think about virtual conferences versus face-to-face conferences, taking into consideration the period before the COVID-19 pandemic (until March 2020), but also the pandemic period (from March 2020 until January 2022). Data has been collected using in depth interviews with Romanian managers who worked before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that there was a change in one's behavior when having to use only virtual conferences tools, becoming more aware of their time and in general making the most out of it by having a clear agenda for almost all types of virtual meetings. A hybrid solution is seen by most of the managers as being optimal by reducing time lost between face-to-face meetings, but the results also indicate that a full replacement of face-to-face meetings with virtual meetings is not a solution as direct interaction between individuals cannot be replaced with the use of virtual tools.

Virtual meetings and wellbeing: insights from the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between virtual meeting participation and wellbeing. Based on the conservation of resources theory, we hypothesize that participation in more virtual meetings is associated with both negative and positive wellbeing indicators. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was sent to 3,530 employees across five Belgian universities in April 2020. Useful data from 814 respondents was collected and analyzed to test the hypothesized relationships. Findings The authors find support for their hypotheses, namely that participating in more virtual meetings is associated not only with negative wellbeing indicators (workload, stress and fatigue) but also with a positive wellbeing indicator, namely work influence. Research limitations/implications Given the unique work-from-home context during the pandemic, the generalizability of our findings may be limited. Nevertheless, this study contributes to the literature on Meeting Science and Virtual Work, as it is the first study to empirically relate virtual meetings to wellbeing indicators, including a positive one. Practical implications As virtual meetings and work-from-home are expected to remain prevalent, understanding wellbeing implications is of high managerial importance. Their findings can be useful for (HR) managers who develop flexible work policies for a post-pandemic world. Social implications The findings draw attention to the importance of maintaining a healthy balance between productivity and wellbeing in creating a sustainable work(-from-home) context. Originality/value The COVID-19 lockdown provided a unique opportunity to obtain insight on the relationship between virtual meetings and wellbeing at an unprecedented scale.

The Effect of Telework Frequency on Communication Media and Knowledge Sharing in Japan

Covid-19 has forced millions of office workers to telework without proper training or job redesign. This paper investigates how telework frequency has affected the use of communication media, and subsequently knowledge sharing. A large sample of full-time Japanese employees with no prior telework experience is examined using mediation analysis. Results suggest that telework resulted in a lower use of face-to-face meetings and phone calls, and in a higher use of chat and virtual meetings, and had no effect on email use. Moreover, phone call, chat, and virtual meeting frequencies were found to mediate the relationship between telework frequency and knowledge sharing. These findings highlight the importance of both existing and newer communication media in offsetting the loss of face-to-face meeting opportunities, and show that companies have found ways to achieve effective knowledge sharing during mandatory telework. Firms should therefore invest in tools and training to speed up the adoption of instant messaging and virtual meeting solutions. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Mentoring in Times of Crisis and Beyond.

During the global crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, university programs, meetings, and conferences have moved to virtual settings, with consequent erosion of mentorship opportunities for students and early-career professionals. This calls for mentorship platforms that are adapted to the new landscape in order to bring about a positive change. Our Viewpoint Article shares the perspective of the Transformative Education program and Mentorship Talks initiative at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, with the aim of providing insights that could stimulate other mentorship platforms.

Low Carbon Transport for a Modern Working Environment

Due to the impact of unexpected circumstances such as COVID-19, several adaptations have been made to the current working environment which makes it more conducive for less travel. For example, because of the pandemic more individuals are working from home and do not need to travel daily to and from a workplace. In addition, some workplace practices such as the ‘10-day fortnight’ have been introduced. Furthermore, due to virtual meetings and conferences there is less demand for international and domestic business flights. Although this potentially means less daily travel, this also has negative implications as individuals are more likely to choose a method of transport that's convenient and cost effective. This often means using a personal vehicle. Public transport has been negatively impacted because of the pandemic and will require a significant behavioural change to recover and consolidate its position as a viable alternative to the personal vehicles. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Virtual Meetings During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Communication Patterns and Practices in Companies in Croatia

Working from a distance and virtual meetings between stakeholders in business systems have become usual thing for many companies across the world. Speaking about maintaining continuity of business in COVID-19 pandemic limited business circumstances, many employees will say that virtual meetings have become crucial communication tool for conversation with stakeholders. Nevertheless, although video conferences have been in use for the last several decades, back in time since video conferencing systems became available for the commercial use, one should not neglect the fact that contemporary world tracked significant rise of global trend in video conferences and virtual meetings use just at the end of January 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a global emergency due to COVID-19 pandemic spread. Global trend of intensified use of virtual communication was followed by many companies who never used this type of communication, nor anticipated the intent to make significant transition of communication into virtual world. Therefore, the paper represents the results of various studies concerning the influence of virtual meetings on employees. This paper explores the significance, communication patterns and practices regarding the use of digital platforms for maintaining virtual meetings in Croatian medium sized and large companies. A survey was conducted with employees (N=177) in medium sized and large companies of various businesses in Croatia. Virtual meetings in medium sized and large companies are in focus because of the complexity of those communication systems in which the horizontal and vertical communication is necessity. The results show which digital platforms are mostly used for virtual meetings. Findings suggest that virtual meetings are conducted more often, but they do take less time, and the advantage is given to notebooks as a means for organization, running and participating in a virtual meeting. © 2021 Institut za društvena istraživanja u Zagrebu – Institute for Social Research in Zagreb Sva prava pridržana – All rights reserved.

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.

Predicting Meeting Success With Nuanced Emotions

While current meeting tools are able to capture key analytics (e.g., transcript and summarization), they do not often capture nuanced emotions (e.g., disappointment and feeling impressed). Given the high number of meetings that were held online during the COVID-19 pandemic, we had an unprecedented opportunity to record extensive meeting data with a newly developed meeting companion application. We analyzed 72 h of conversations from 85 real-world virtual meetings and 256 self-reported meeting success scores. We did so by developing a deep-learning framework that can extract 32 nuanced emotions from meeting transcripts, and by then testing a variety of models predicting meeting success from the extracted emotions. We found that rare emotions (e.g., disappointment and excitement) were generally more predictive of success than more common emotions. This demonstrates the importance of quantifying nuanced emotions to further improve productivity analytics, and, in the long term, employee well-being. IEEE