Impact of extracurricular synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication between students and teachers on digital reading performance: Evidence from 53 countries/regions.

This study compared the effects of extracurricular synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ASCMC) between students and teachers on students' digital reading performance at different frequencies. 392,269 samples from 53 countries/regions that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 were collected. Multilevel regression analysis showed that SCMC negatively influenced digital reading performance across countries/regions. As the frequency decreased, the negative effect of SCMC diminished. In contrast, ASCMC at a moderately low frequency could facilitate digital reading performance in some countries/regions; however, as frequency increased, the positive effect became negative. These results showed that synchronicity played a role in predicting students' digital reading performance. This study also explored the mediating effect of metacognition with Nelson and Naren's metacognitive control-monitoring model. A multilevel mediation analysis proved that the effects of SCMC and ASCMC on digital reading performance were mediated by students' metacognition of assessing credibility. Practical implications and suggestions for students' self-paced learning were discussed with the purpose of promoting the effective use of extracurricular CMC between students and teachers and improving students' digital reading achievement in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era.

Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Effects on University Students' Behavioral Traits: How Community of Inquiry Can Support Instructional Design During Times of Changing Cognitive Habits

Recent investigations show how the pandemic has affected learners' behavioral traits. The results of three semi-structured surveys carried out in a major Italian university: 2020, 1st sem. (n=102);2022, 1st sem. (n=235);and 2022, 2nd sem. (n=61) under COVID-19 containment measures, manifest deviations in students' perceptions about social patterns, learning routines, and expectations. During the two-year emergency remote learning, students revealed a progressive downsize of social expectancy and increasing self-management behaviors in relation to a higher degree of independence. The Community of Inquiry principles were adopted to observe student motivation and self-direction in a Moodle-based learning environment. Conversely, the focus on English as a Foreign Language as the main subject represents an uncharted perspective in the research contexts around the Community of Inquiry. Future expansions may enlarge the sample to further education bodies and broaden the range of e-learning tools.

Self-paced Multi-view Learning for CT-based severity assessment of COVID-19.

Prior studies for the task of severity assessment of COVID-19 (SA-COVID) usually suffer from domain-specific cognitive deficits. They mainly focus on visual cues based on single cognitive functions but fail to reconcile the valuable information from other alternative views. Inspired by the cognitive process of radiologists, this paper shifts naturally from single-symptom measurements to a multi-view analysis, and proposes a novel Self-paced Multi-view Learning (SPML) framework for automated SA-COVID. Specifically, the proposed SPML framework first comprehensively aggregates multi-view contexts in lung infection with different measure paradigms, i.e., Global Feature Branch, Texture Feature Branch, and Volume Feature Branch. In this way, multiple-perspective clues are taken into account to reflect the most essential pathological manifestation on CT images. To alleviate small-sample learning problems, we also introduce an optimization with self-paced learning strategy to cognitively increase the characterization capabilities of training samples by learning from simple to complex. In contrast to traditional batch-wise learning, a pure self-paced way can further guarantee the efficiency and accuracy of SPML when dealing with small and biased samples. Furthermore, we construct a well-established SA-COVID dataset that contains 300 CT images with fine annotations. Extensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate that SPML consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. The SA-COVID dataset is publicly released at https://github.com/YishuLiu/SA-COVID.

Can Students with Dyslexia Learn Independently? A Seven-Week Study of Chinese Character Learning in an Informal Learning Environment

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects primary school students, which is difficult to tackle through traditional school learning due to limited resources. To this end, large-scale digital learning presents new opportunities to address the need for inclusive education. A unique challenge for students with dyslexia in Hong Kong is learning Chinese characters. In this paper, we investigate whether students with dyslexia can learn the writing of Chinese characters independently in an informal learning environment. For that purpose, we developed a mobile application for learning to write Chinese characters with three different writing conditions. First, students learn new Chinese characters in Condition 1: Grid+Contour+Instruction. Then, students strengthen their memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 2: Grid+Contour. Finally, students retrieve the memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 3: Grid Only. Students with dyslexia demonstrated a significant improvement after practicing with the three-condition design. For example, they wrote much slower than students without dyslexia before the study but caught up over time. This study contributes an approach to facilitate the self-paced learning of students with dyslexia at scale. IEEE

Self-Paced Learning in Exploring Noli Me Tangere During the Covid-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippine government made sure that learning was still in force in the country’s basic education system by utilizing a modular approach in delivering its programs. All lessons were to be completed without a teacher on-hand, where students will simply rely on their self-paced learning style in understanding and answering the written activities given in the modules. This study describes the self-paced learning process and experiences of students in the exploration of Jose Rizal’s literary masterpiece, Noli Me Tangere. A phenomenological approach was adopted for this study, focusing on the lived experiences of the research participants during this period of learning under a protracted lockdown. Axial Coding was utilized to construct linkages among data to reveal codes, and emerging themes were analyzed. It is found that students were able to practice self-paced learning despite some negative feedback, while the stakeholders’ support for students during the pandemic is individualized and vital to the student’s learning experience. © 2022, North American Business Press. All rights reserved.

New tools for online teaching and their impact on student learning

In the context of the global Covid-19 crisis, a practical introductory Geosciences course was redesigned to aid student learning in a 100% virtual format. New materials were created to i) improve disciplinary language range and concept acquisition;ii) make classes more dynamic;iii) provide tools for self-regulated learning and assessment and iv) maintain student motivation. Usefulness of the new materials was evaluated using a voluntary online survey that was answered by 40% of the students. Additional information was obtained from the university's student evaluation survey. All tools were well-rated, but self-assessment quizzes and class presentations had the highest overall scores. Students commented on their usefulness in terms of knowledge acquisition and self-assessment. Perhaps not surprisingly, self-assessment quizzes were the one tool students felt kept them more motivated. These were closely followed by class presentations and short inclass quizzes. Students found the online access to all lesson materials very useful for self-paced learning. According to a majority of students, the in-class quizzes and student participation using the digital the whiteboard made classes more dynamic. Overall, the new strategies succeeded in improving students' learning and independence, but more work is needed to make classes more dynamic, and especially to improve student motivation. Intrinsic motivation is perhaps the most difficult to improve because in a 100% virtual course, it is difficult to promote student-student interactions and receive visual feedback from the class. In view of the survey results, we introduce bonus activities in order to improve extrinsic motivation.

Impact of Course Scheduling on Student Performance in Remote Learning

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a need to change course syllabi in order to completely transition to a remote learning model. In the case of subjects comprising programming tasks, taking into account the availability of tools and resources that provide opportunities for independent work without teacher supervision, it was necessary to decide whether students should be allowed to work under self-paced learning, or, similar to traditional classes, fixed-schedule learning. Experiences from MOOCs demonstrated that course scheduling is not without impact on the learning process, and may affect the level of student satisfaction with the course. This study determines how course scheduling affected the performance of students attending a database course. The students were divided into two groups, and completed the first module without teacher supervision. During the learning process, they solved programming tasks which were assessed automatically, and then took quizzes to verify what they learned. One of the groups worked with the materials and took the quizzes in accordance with a schedule, and the other group did so without any time constraints. The results demonstrate that students perform better when working under the fixed-schedule model, without any impact on their level of satisfaction with the course. The system of learning not only affected the quiz results in the module where different scheduling was used, but student performance in later parts of the course as well. The results presented in the paper should be of interest to teachers designing remote courses involving self-learning. © 2022 ACM.

Enhanced engagement through instructor-created interactive video assignments in a flipped electrical engineering classroom

Blended learning using flipped classroom has emerged as a remarkable model for bridging the digital divide between geographically- and socio-economically-disadvantaged students during the Covid pandemic, especially for those situated in remote locations with limited internet connectivity. This paper presents an investigation of a blended learning framework using flipped teaching through interactive video lectures for an Introduction to Electrical Engineering course held in online mode for a first-year batch of engineering students. The analysis includes observations from two sets of students who took this course over the last two academic years, referred to as control and treatment groups, respectively. The paper also reports a simple preliminary framework for utilizing the analytics available from interactive video assignments for identifying students with poor engagement and understanding so that the instructor may adopt timely measures and interventions to address the need of all students. The success of the video assignments are validated both qualitatively (through student feedback and performance) and quantitatively (using t-test). Results show that the flipped teaching model has both empirical approval and support of a majority of students, especially in the distance learning mode. Statistical analysis shows a significant difference in the performance of students with and without video-based flipped teaching in online mode. © 2022 IEEE.

Adaptive Self-Paced Transfer Learning for COVID-19 Diagnosis with CXR Images

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become an unprecedented public health crisis since December of 2019. Compared with real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR), the computer-aided diagnosis machine learning algorithm based on medical images can vastly ease the burden on clinicians. Even so, despite existing hundreds of millions of confirmed cases worldwide, there has not been a mature, large scale, high quality, single standard shared image data set yet, which can lead to some problems. For instance, 1) Because the sources of medical images and the collection standards are not guaranteed, features extracted by the neural network may not be very ideal. 2) Due to the small number of samples, some outliers (e.g., blurry medical images, inconspicuous symptoms) may significantly descend the performance of the model. To address these problems, we propose an adaptive self-paced transfer learning (ASPTL) algorithm in this paper. Specifically, inspired by the process of human learning from easy to difficult, we also evaluated the learning difficulty of the samples. Samples with no obvious disease features or wrong labels are relatively difficult to diagnose, and the samples that are easy to diagnose are selected adaptively in the iterative process. In addition, we adopt transfer learning to select easy to learn samples on the pre-trained network by self-paced learning, and gradually fine-tune the pre-trained model in an iterative way. We designed two experiments to validate the ASPTL algorithm's performance on COVID-19. The reult prove the effectiveness on solving mentioned problems. © 2021 IEEE.

Self-paced learning in virtual worlds: Opportunities of an immersive learning environment

Digitalisation in education is inevitable and must be driven forward even more consistently. Accordingly, the current COVID 19 pandemic further underlines and accelerates this necessity. Instead of persistently philosophising about infrastructure and learning platforms, teachers and students are suddenly confronted directly with digital teaching and e-learning. Among technologies for digitalization there is one with a huge potential in the course of digitalisation in education, namely Virtual Reality (VR). VR can be applied as a powerful and multifunctional tool for accessing problems usually considered as hard to taggle. For education, VR can create a connection between theory and real-world scenarios and makes the presentation of facts and applications tangible for students. In addition to a theoretical and literature-based consideration of VR in the concepts of e-learning and blended learning, this paper presents the integration of learning content based on VR through the LMS platform OPAL and discusses the achieved results. Linking to this, an additional chapter will discuss the promotion of the learning process through an immersive learning environment, i.e., what opportunities and challenges arise. The idea and implementation of a virtual research lab modelled based on the physical Industry 4.0 research lab by Professor Christoph Laroque and his Team Industry Analytics is intended to highlight the possibilities and potential of an immersive environment and provide an outlook for future work. This paper addresses the questions to what extent and in which context an immersive learning environment can be more effective than traditional face-to-face learning environments in courses and seminars. Furthermore, challenges and difficulties regarding the use of immersive learning environments from the projects experience will be described. Thoughts and ideas on how these challenges and difficulties can be overcome sum up the considerations within this paper. © the authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.

HIGHER EDUCATION TURNAROUND SUPPORTING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Since years the education system was about to change. Specifically, the focus with this paper is on Germany where the schools and most universities are public. Rules are related to the past, skills like deep functional knowledge, topics memorised in detail and repetitive methods have been on top of the educational syllabus. After the trends of globalisation, the introduction of the term 'Industry 4.0' provocative production and automation. All of a sudden industry has been challenged globally with new skills and requirements asking the education system to support with a more profound skills of graduates being 'digital natives' per definition. To change a system takes time, infrastructure and advanced training. (cf. Catalano, 2019, p.25f) What if there is no time for this transformation? In the beginning of 2020 the Pandemic Covid-19 hit the world and all schools and universities been shut for people's safety. It started as a break but after a while people figured even arguing about the quality of online education versus in-person learning did not help. Remote education was the only way to get in contact with students and pure self-learning needed to be enriched by more motivating methods. All of a sudden, all parties had new roles. Some really felt overstrained and had very little experience. To start a mature semester in autumn, and moving from mainly remotely to an at least hybrid format for the rest of the year, teachers extended their knowledge of digital tools and exchanged it. Over the year faculty increased comfort and some approaches seems to remain even if all teaching could be in presence. (cf. Boivin et al., 2021, p.27ff) Not only the education system was challenged during the pandemic in 2020/21, the entire world and business world had to adapt. Comparing only with the new business requirements of production companies, shows that a lot of the skills the students learned in remote sessions will remain in business situations (e.g. video conferencing, online presentations, self-motivated learning). In addition, the speed of change increased and with the penetration of digital transformation everywhere, now is the time to change the main structure of curriculars adding more profound skill sets in human interaction, practical adaptation of skills versus just having knowledge building new characters for life-long learning. (cf. Meilleur, 2018) The questions are remaining;'What is the role of online-education past the pandemic?' 'What could be a new setting in education taking the learnings from the pandemic Covid-19 to map new requirements from the industry and for future jobs?' The paper will not be able to provide one clear answer but will provide a good start of research.