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As the prevalence of online education grows, we see a burgeoning interest by educators, researchers and policymakers in investigating the impact of delivery modes on various aspects of teaching and learning effectiveness. Our study contributes to this expanding stream of research. We use objective and subjective measures of learning outcomes to compare learning effectiveness and student perceptions across three different delivery modes, traditional (face-to-face), hybrid (a mix of in-person and online asynchronous sessions), and online (asynchronous). For the objective measures, we use scores on Rote, Critical Thinking, and Engagement assessment tools in a required introductory international business course. For the subjective measures, we compare student perceptions by analyzing scores from the Student Evaluation of Instructor (SEIs) surveys administered at the completion of each course. We find differences in the Critical Thinking and Engagement components whereby students in the hybrid delivery group performed better than their traditional and online counterparts. Online students generally had lower scores across the board, especially on the Engagement dimension. In their totality, the objective data results support the value of in-person delivery for learning effectiveness. Regarding student perceptions, results show similar learning experience assessments for the traditional and hybrid modes across most dimensions. We also noted that students were more critical in assessing instructors and learning experiences in online course sections. The contribution of this study is that it champions a more refined approach in conceptualizing instrumental and affective measures of learning effectiveness by leveraging multiple dimensions of both performance and student satisfaction. We completed our research pre-COVID-19, and as such, it was not impacted by the many pedagogical and course delivery challenges faced during the pandemic. © 2022 Neilson Journals Publishing.
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The social distancing imposed by Covid-19 impacted the development of educational activities at all levels. Engineering education was specially challenged by the suspension of face-to-face activities, which paused the development of laboratory practices. The present work accounts for the design of virtual learning experiences in a Microcontrollers course. The free online tools 'Tinkercad Circuits' and 'Arduino' were used to simulate circuit programming and connections. These tools also allowed remote collaboration between students and teachers during lockdown. The results of the Mechatronics Engineering students (n=30) show that programming skills and hardware knowledge were developed. Additionally, the activities had a positive response from the students. On the other hand, according to the psychomotor domain taxonomy, the students had obstacles to their full development. It is concluded on the importance of integrating simulation to the development of activities and laboratory practices, as well as the advantages of hybrid teaching formats. © 2023 IEEE.
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PurposeThis study aims to investigate the entry-level student's awareness of environmental sustainability focussing on the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) campus and measure the effectiveness of the course materials. A comparison between the students who took the general education sustainability (GESU 121) course face to face and the ones who tool it online was applied. Design/methodology/approachThis study was descriptive in nature, and the data is obtained using a cross-sectional survey of the students attending the UAEU in 2020. The data collection was done in two semesters, Spring 2020 [face-to-face class] and Fall 2020 [online class, after COVID-19 effect]. A total of 160 participants responded to the survey. The Pearson's Chi-square test for independence was conducted and used to identify if any statistical differences exist between the studied variables. FindingsThis study revealed that the awareness of environmental sustainability was increased in both groups [face-to-face students and online students], after taking the course. In addition, around 80% of the students were interested to participate in sustainability initiatives on the UAEU campus. The students' perception of the statements about the UAEU campus environmental sustainability varied from Spring 2020 (53.3% were not sure that the UAEU campus is environmentally sustainable) to Fall 2022 (63% of the online students believed that the campus is environmentally sustainable). Originality/valueStudents' awareness and perception are very important to improve the environmental sustainability of the University campus. The novelty of this study is to examine the awareness of entry-level students among the environmental sustainability focussing on the UAEU campus and examine the effect of COVID-19 [online classes] on delivering the course knowledge. The findings of this study provide the information for the improvement of the course for the future semesters.
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PurposeThis paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities of shifting from physical to virtual employment support delivery prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. It investigates associated changes in the nature and balance of support and implications for beneficiary engagement with programmes and job search.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on longitudinal interviews conducted with beneficiaries and delivery providers from a neighbourhood-based employment support initiative in an English region with a strong manufacturing heritage between 2019 and 2021. The initiative established prior to the Covid-19 pandemic involved a strong physical presence locally but switched to virtual delivery during Covid-19 lockdowns.FindingsMoving long-term to an entirely virtual model would likely benefit some beneficiaries closer to or already in employment. Conversely, others, particularly lone parents, those further from employment, some older people and those without computer/Internet access and/or digital skills are likely to struggle to navigate virtual systems. The study emphasises the importance of blending the benefits of virtual delivery with aspects of place-based physical support.Originality/valuePrevious studies of neighbourhood-based employment policies indicate the benefits of localised face-to-face support for transforming communities. These were conducted prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and the more widespread growth of virtual employment support. This study fills a gap regarding understanding the challenges and opportunities for different groups of beneficiaries when opportunities for physical encounters decline abruptly and support moves virtually.
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The pandemic crisis compelled organizations to adopt telework to continue their activity. This study seeks to determine the perception of individuals regarding teleworking, and also the role of Information Systems in the paradigm shift along the pandemic period, in the Portuguese health sector. An online questionnaire was applied to health professionals working in Portugal, obtaining a sample of 264 professionals. The perceptions identified in relation to telework can be especially useful when considering the progressive incorporation of non-face-to-face activities in the health sector. Participants identify advantages in teleworking, namely in reducing travel costs, but also identify work overload as a disadvantage. Despite the difficulties, Information Systems are identified as facilitators in this process of change. Most participants express availability to work in a mixed regime, in the post-pandemic period. © 2022 Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao. All rights reserved.
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The purpose of this study is to compare critical thinking in online and face-to-face formats in an organic chemistry course and report the cognitive dimensions of revised Bloom's taxonomy. The sample used in this research was a 31 students group of grade 12 students at the Demonstration School of Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, in the academic year 2021, semester 2. The students took the online (N = 14) and face-to-face (N = 17) formats and were required to fill out an instrument designed to evaluate critical thinking skills in March 2022. The tools used for the test had 50 items, and 4 choices, with a confidence value of 0.83. The result shows that the face-to-face student has higher critical thinking scores than the online students along the highest cognitive dimensions;on the other hand, face-to-face and online formats did not affect remembering, understanding, and applying levels. These formats are effective for analysis, evaluation, and creation, the student's face-to-face has more of an analysis and evaluation level than the student's online. In contrast, online students have a more creative level than face-to-face students. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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This paper describes the implementation of a hybrid platform for experimental activities in engineering courses. The proposed platform can be used as a remote or face-to-face laboratory;it may also be ideal for the new normal after the Covid 19 pandemic. The proposal has the purpose to help engineering teachers to build this hybrid laboratory without specialized knowledge, requiring little time for its implementation and practically no economic investment. To validate the proposal, the process to build the course of a hybrid laboratory for Control System course is described in this paper, which is expected to have experimental activities within the university and from home. After the implementation, the full functionality of the laboratory will be carried out both in its remote and face-to-face format. © 2023 IEEE.
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Extensive research has demonstrated the importance of e-learning during COVID-19. However, a study to check whether the virus has caused a trend change in educational research lines is lacking. This paper reviews the temporal evolution of publications on virtual laboratories (VLs) in education, analyzing the relationship between its recent boom and the advent of COVID-19. For this purpose, a bibliographic study was carried out in the Scopus database seeking different VLs synonyms in the title, , and keywords of articles published between 1990 and 2022. The analysis results determine that the logistical needs imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have been found to magnify the use of VLs, increasing scientific production by more than 90% in 2021 compared to the average obtained between 2011-2020. It has also been estimated that with the return to face-to-face teaching, production has decreased by 20% in 2022 compared to 2021. © 2023 IEEE.
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As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented crisis has been generated in all areas of life. In education, this emergency led to the massive closure of face-to-face activities in educational institutions of all levels to prevent the spread of the virus and mitigate its impact. In response to this situation, nine public research centers of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) of Mexico, CIDETEQ, CIATEJ, CIATEQ, CIESAS, CIMAV, CIO, CIQA, COMIMSA, and ECOSUR, proposed a project through which a set of virtual laboratories would be established, both for teaching and to improve their technological infrastructure for teaching. The project would take advantage of the tools of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that allow remote access, which is the main challenge to develop educational tools that provide for distance education, and give continuity to graduate programs. © 2023 IEEE.
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Background: COVID-19 pandemic has caused limitations, in patients' accessibility in clinical and research settings. We sought whether telenutrition could be applied interchangeably with face-to-face interview for dietary intake assessment by 24-hour recall in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method(s): Sixty-eight females with T2DM aged 50-55 years were enrolled randomly in a descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study. The patients completed three consecutive 24-hour dietary recalls. The first one was a face-to-face interview, and the subsequent two recalls were conducted by telephone call. The total energy and 18 selected nutrients intake were calculated for the three interviews. Result(s): The mean (+/- SD) age of participants was 53.97 +/- 2.14 years. The face-to-face interview resulted in significantly higher total energy and 18 selected nutrients intake than the two telenutrition interviews (P value range: 0.031-0.001). No significant differences were found between the data provided from the two telenutrition interviews. Conclusion(s): Telenutrition underreports and underestimates the total energy and nutrient intakes compared with the face-to-face interview in the 24-hour dietary recall. Therefore, it cannot be recommended to be applied interchangeably with a face-to-face interview for dietary intake assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in patients whose nutrition assessment is of clinical importance. A combination of the two methods using new communication applications (e.g. WhatsApp) may cover the defects of telenutrition method.Copyright © 2023, Kerman University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.
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This article examines how representatives of Swedish civil society organisations (CSOs) reflected on and acted to provide daily functional social work to people living precarious lives during the early phase (March-April 2020) of the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden. The empirical material consists of 20 qualitative interviews with representatives of CSOs. The results highlight how the CSOs, and their venues, constituted a safe place where visitors were considered grievable and that working face-to-face with the visitors was deemed necessary. However, the pandemic posed challenges for how the CSOs were used to organise their social work, while many visitors lacked other alternatives. When Covid-19 hit, it meant adapting and responding to deliver well-functioning social work and a place for people lacking other alternatives despite the pandemic. The measures taken implied possible challenges to the relationship between the CSOs and their visitors. Still, there were indications that the visitors saw the measures as a protection, as rituals of grievability. However, not all measures were welcomed by the representatives or visitors. Turning people away or prioritising among visitors were challenging and cannot always be said to frame people as grievable. Regardless, it seems that the challenging measures taken during the pandemic were already embedded in everyday practices where the visitors were treated relationally and considered grievable before the pandemic. This embeddedness made it possible to extend grievability throughout the pandemic, even when social distancing measures were used, thus emphasising the importance of places of grievability being accessible to people before societal crises occur. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, online education has become one of the most important options available to students around the world. Although online education has been widely accepted in recent years, the sudden shift from face-to-face education has resulted in several obstacles for students. This paper, aims to predict the level of adaptability that students have towards online education by using predictive machine learning (ML) models such as Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN), Support vector machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR) and XGBClassifier (XGB).The dataset used in this paper was obtained from Kaggle, which is composed of a population of 1205 high school to college students. Various stages in data analysis have been performed, including data understanding and cleaning, exploratory analysis, training, testing, and validation. Multiple parameters, such as accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, F1 count and precision, have been used to evaluate the performance of each model. The results have shown that all five models can provide optimal results in terms of prediction. For example, the RF and XGB models presented the best performance with an accuracy rate of 92%, outperforming the other models. In consequence, it is suggested to use these two models RF and XGB for prediction of students' adaptability level in online education due to their higher prediction efficiency. Also, KNN, SVM and LR models, achieved a performance of 85%, 76%, 67%, respectively. In conclusion, the results show that the RF and XGB models have a clear advantage in achieving higher prediction accuracy. These results are in line with other similar works that used ML techniques to predict adaptability levels. © 2023, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. All Rights Reserved.
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Low vaccination rates, inferior-quality vaccines, limited testing, and a lack of funding forced many institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa into online-learning-only environments for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instructors scrambled to put classes online. Only in 2022 did some face-to-face classes resume. Unforeseeable and unprecedented circumstances forced university personnel to function with reduced budgets and without regard for the return to in-person classes. We taught, studied, and analyzed a cohort of third-year Sub-Saharan African students who spent their first two years of studies online. We describe the struggles they faced and what can be done to make up for their shortcomings and missed opportunities. We quantify the shortcomings through focus groups, an analysis of what parts of an accredited program would have fallen short, interviews, and through anecdotal evidence. Our findings can help those who suffered a similar fate. These observations can be applied to non-STEM disciplines. © 2023 IEEE.
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BACKGROUND: While the COVID-19 crisis has had numerous global negative impacts, it has also presented an imperative for mental health care systems to make digital mental health interventions a part of routine care. Accordingly, through necessity, many Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) programs transitioned to telehealth, despite little information on clinical outcomes compared with face-to-face treatment delivery. This study examined differences in client engagement (i.e. attendance) of DBT: delivered face-to-face prior to the first COVID-19 lockdown in Australia and New Zealand; delivered via telehealth during the lockdown; and delivered post-lockdown. Our primary outcomes were to compare: [1] client attendance rates of DBT individual therapy delivered face-to-face with delivery via telehealth, and [2] client attendance rates of DBT skills training delivered face-to-face compared with delivery via telehealth. METHODS: DBT programs across Australia and New Zealand provided de-identified data for a total of 143 individuals who received DBT treatment provided via telehealth or face-to-face over a six-month period in 2020. Data included attendance rates of DBT individual therapy sessions; attendance rates of DBT skills training sessions as well as drop-out rates and First Nations status of clients. RESULTS: A mixed effects logistic regression model revealed no significant differences between attendance rates for clients attending face-to-face sessions or telehealth sessions for either group therapy or individual therapy. This result was found for clients who identified as First Nations persons and those who didn't identify as First Nations persons. CONCLUSIONS: Clients were as likely to attend their DBT sessions over telehealth as they were face-to-face during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. These findings provide preliminary evidence that providing DBT over telehealth may be a viable option to increase access for clients, particularly in areas where face-to-face treatment is not available. Further, based on the data collected in this study, we can be less concerned that offering telehealth treatment will compromise attendance rates compared to face-to-face treatment. Further research is needed comparing clinical outcomes between treatments delivered face-to-face compared delivery via telehealth.
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Background: The cognitive impairment associated with the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for teleneuropsychology (1). Moreover, neurologic diseases associated with mental deterioration usually require the use of the same neuropsychological instrument to assess cognitive changes across time. Therefore, in such cases, a learning effect upon retesting is not desired. Attention and its subdomains can be measured using Go/no-go tests, such as, the Continuous Visual Attention Test (CVAT). Here, we administered the CVAT to investigate the effect of modality (online vs. face-to-face) on attentional performance. The variables of the CVAT measures four attention domains: focused-attention, behavioral-inhibition, intrinsic-alertness (reaction time, RT), and sustained-attention (intra-individual variability of RTs, VRT). Methods: The CVAT was applied face-to face and online in 130 adult Americans and 50 adult Brazilians. Three different study designs were used: (1) Between-subjects design: healthy Americans were tested face-to-face (n = 88) or online (n = 42). We verified if there were any differences between the two modalities. (2) Within-subjects design: Brazilians participants (n = 50) were tested twice (online and face-to-face). For each CVAT variable, repeated measures ANCOVAs were performed to verify whether modality or first vs. second tests differ. Agreement was analyzed using Kappa, intraclass correlation coefficients, and Bland-Altman plots. (3) Paired comparisons: we compared Americans vs. Brazilians, pairing subjects by age, sex, and level of education, grouping by modality. Results: Assessment modality did not influence performance using two independent samples (between-subjects design) or the same individual tested twice (within-subjects design). The second test and the first test did not differ. Data indicated significant agreements for the VRT variable. Based on paired samples, Americans did not differ from Brazilians and a significant agreement was found for the VRT variable. Conclusion: The CVAT can be administered online or face-to-face without learning upon retesting. The data on agreement (online vs. face-to-face, test vs. retest, Americans vs. Brazilians) indicate that VRT is the most reliable variable. Limitations: High educational level of the participants and absence of a perfect balanced within-subjects design.