Search results for: online learning higher-order learning attributes

Authors: Peter Ecke

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This research presents insights from a questionnaire study and autobiographic narrative analyses about the language and cultural backgrounds, challenges, interests, and needs, as well as perceptions about bilingualism and language learning of undergraduate students at a Public University in the southwestern United States. Participants were 650 students, enrolled in college-level general education courses, entitled “Becoming multilingual: Learning and maintaining two or more languages” between 2020 and 2024. Data were collected via pre- and post-course questionnaires administered online through the Qualtrix XM platform and complemented with analyses of excerpts from autobiographical narratives that students produced as part of the course assignments. Findings, for example, show that course participants have diverse linguistic backgrounds. The five most frequently reported L1s were English (about 50% of course participants), Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean (in that order). The five most frequently reported L2s were English, Spanish, French, ASL, Japanese, German, and Mandarin (in that order). Participants also reported on their L2, L3, L4, and L5 if applicable. Most participants (over 60%) rated themselves bilingual or multilingual whereas 40% considered themselves to be monolingual or foreign language learners. Only about half of the participants reported feeling very or somewhat comfortable with their language skills, but these reports changed somewhat from the pre- to the post-course survey. About half of participants were mostly interested in learning how to effectively learn a foreign language. The other half of participants reported being most curious about learning about themselves as bi/multilinguals, (re)learning a language used in childhood, learning how to bring up a child as a bi/multilingual or learning about people who speak multiple languages (distributed about evenly). Participants’ comments about advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual remained relatively stable but their agreement with common myths about bilingualism and language learning changed from the pre- to the post-course survey. Students’ reflections in the autobiographical narratives and comments in (institutionally administered) anonymous course evaluations provided additional data on students’ concerns about their current language skills and uses as well as their perceptions about learning outcomes and the usefulness of the general education course for their current and future lives. It is hoped that the presented findings and discussion will spark interest among colleagues in offering similar courses as a resource for college students (and possibly other audiences), including those from migrant, indigenous, multilingual, and multicultural communities to contribute to a more harmonious bilingualism and well-being of college students who are or inspire to become bi-or multilingual.

Keywords: autobiographic narratives, general education university course, harmonious bilingualism and well-being, multilingualism, questionnaire study

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Authors: Abdullah Mukhtar, Shehroz Mukhtar, Amina Mukhtar, Choudhry Shahid, Hafiz Raza Razzaq, Saif Ur Rahman

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The aim of this study is to find out the negative and positive impacts of social media platforms on the attitude toward learning and the educational environment of the student community. Social Media platforms have become a source of collaboration with one another throughout the globe, making it a small world. This study performs a focalized investigation of the adverse and constructive factors that have a strong impact not only on psychological adjustments but also on the academic performance of peers. This study is quantitative research adopting a random sampling method in which the participants were the students at the university. The researcher distributed 1000 questionnaires among the university students from different departments and asked them to fill in the data on the Lickert Scale. The participants are from the age group of 18-24 years. The study applies user and gratification theory in order to examine the behavior of students practicing social media in their academic and personal lives. The findings of the study reveal that the use of social media platforms in the Pakistani context has less positive impact as compared to negative impacts on the behavior of students towards learning. The research suggests that usage of online social media platforms should be taught to students; awareness must the created among the users of social media by means of seminars, workshops and by media itself to overcome the negative impacts of social media, leading towards sustainable education in Pakistan.

Keywords: social media, positive impacts, negative impacts, sustainable education, learning behaviour

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Authors: Khumbuzile M. Ngcobo, Seraphin D. Eyono Obono

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Science and technology has a major impact on many societal domains such as communication, medicine, food, transportation, etc. However, this dominance of modern technology can have a negative unintended impact on indigenous systems, and in particular on indigenous foods. This problem serves as a motivation to this study whose aim is to examine the perceptions of learners on the usefulness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) for learning about indigenous foods. This aim will be subdivided into two types of research objectives. The design and identification of theories and models will be achieved using literature content analysis. The objective on the empirical testing of such theories and models will be achieved through the survey of Hospitality studies learners from different schools in the iLembe and Umgungundlovu Districts of the South African Kwazulu-Natal province. SPSS is used to quantitatively analyse the data collected by the questionnaire of this survey using descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations after the assessment of the validity and the reliability of the data. The main hypothesis behind this study is that there is a connection between the demographics of learners, their perceptions on the usefulness of ICTs for learning about indigenous foods and the following personality an e-learning related theories constructs: computer self-efficacy, trust in ICT systems, and conscientiousness; as suggested by existing studies on learning theories. This hypothesis was fully confirmed by the survey conducted by this study except for the demographic factors where gender and age were not found to be determinant factors of learners’ perceptions on the usefulness of ICT's for learning about indigenous foods.

Keywords: e-learning, indigenous foods, information and communication technologies, learning theories, personality

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Authors: Paul Lam, Chi Him Chan, Alan Tse

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Language laboratories have been widely used in language learning, starting in the middle of the last century as one of the earliest forms of educational technology. They are designed to assist students’ language learning with technological innovations. Traditional language laboratories provide individual workstations that allow students to access multimedia language resources. In this type of facility, students can train their listening and speaking abilities, and teachers can also assess the performance of an individual student. Although such a setting promotes a student-centered pedagogy by encouraging students to work at their own pace and according to their own needs, it still favours a traditional, behaviourist language learning pedagogy which focuses on repetitive drilling. The change of pedagogies poses challenges to both the teachers and the facilities. The peer-learning pedagogy advocates that language learning should focus on the social aspect, which emphasizes the importance of everyday communication in language learning. The self-access, individual workstation language laboratories may not be able to provide the flexibility for interaction in the new pedagogies. Modern advancement in technology is another factor that drove our language laboratory renovation. In particular, mobile and wireless technology enabled the use of smaller and more flexible devices, making possible much clever use of space. The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) renovated nine existing language laboratories to provide lighter and more advanced equipment, movable tables, and round desks. These facilities allow more flexibility and encourage students’ interaction. It is believed that the renovated language laboratories can serve different peer learning activities and thus support peer-learning pedagogies in language teaching and learning. A survey has been conducted to collect comments from the teachers who have used the renovated language laboratories and received forty-four response. The teachers’ comments reveal that they experienced different challenges in using the renovated language laboratories, and there is a need to provide guidance to teachers during the technological and pedagogical transition. For example, teachers need instruction on using the newly installed devices such as touch-monitor and visualizer. They also need advice on planning new teaching and learning activities. Nevertheless, teachers appreciated that the renovated language laboratories are flexible and provide more spaces for different learning activities.

Keywords: language laboratories, language learning, peer-learning, student interaction

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Authors: Yolina A. Petrova, Georgi I. Petkov

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The paper presents a symbolic model for category learning and categorization (called RoleMap). Unlike the other models which implement learning in a separate working mode, role-governed category learning and categorization emerge in RoleMap while it does its usual reasoning. The model is based on several basic mechanisms known as reflecting the sub-processes of analogy-making. It steps on the assumption that in their everyday life people constantly compare what they experience and what they know. Various commonalities between the incoming information (current experience) and the stored one (long-term memory) emerge from those comparisons. Some of those commonalities are considered to be highly important, and they are transformed into concepts for further use. This process denotes the category learning. When there is missing knowledge in the incoming information (i.e. the perceived object is still not recognized), the model makes anticipations about what is missing, based on the similar episodes from its long-term memory. Various such anticipations may emerge for different reasons. However, with time only one of them wins and is transformed into a category member. This process denotes the act of categorization.

Keywords: analogy-making, categorization, category learning, cognitive modeling, role-governed categories

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Authors: J. Knight, E. Barberà

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Language learning strategies have been defined as thoughts and actions, consciously chosen and operationalized by language learners, to help them in carrying out a multiplicity of tasks from the very outset of learning to the most advanced levels of target language performance. While research in the field of Second Language Acquisition has focused on ‘good’ language learners, the effectiveness of strategy-use and orchestration by effective learners in face-to-face classrooms much less research has attended to learner strategies in online contexts, particular strategies in relation to technological tool use which can be part of a task design. In addition, much research on learner strategies and strategy use has been explored focusing on cognitive, attitudinal and metacognitive behaviour with less research focusing on the social aspect of strategies. This study focuses on how learners mediate with a technological tool designed to support synchronous spoken interaction and how this shape their spoken interaction in the opening of their talk. A case study approach is used incorporating notions from communities of practice theory to analyse and understand learner strategies of dyads carrying out a role play task. The study employs analysis of transcripts of spoken interaction in the openings of the talk along with log files of tool use. The study draws on results of previous studies pertaining to the same tool as a form of triangulation. Findings show how learners gain pre-task planning time through technological tool control. The strategies involving learners’ choices to enter and exit the tool shape their spoken interaction qualitatively, with some cases demonstrating long silences whilst others appearing to start the pedagogical task immediately. Who/what learners orientate to in the openings of the talk: an audience (i.e. the teacher), each other and/or screen-based signifiers in the opening moments of the talk also becomes a focus. The study highlights how tool use as a social practice should be considered a learning strategy in online contexts whereby different usages may be understood in the light of the more usual asynchronous social practices of the online community. The teachers’ role in the community is also problematised as the evaluator of the practices of that community. Results are pertinent for task design for synchronous speaking tasks. The use of community of practice theory supports an understanding of strategy use that involves both metacognition alongside social context revealing how tool-use strategies may need to be orally (socially) negotiated by learners and may also differ from an online language community.

Keywords: learner strategy, tool use, community of practice, speaking task

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Authors: Susan Diamond

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Machine Learning workloads have traditionally been run in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, where users log in to dedicated machines and utilize the attached GPUs to run training jobs on huge datasets. Training of large neural network models is very resource intensive, and even after exploiting parallelism and accelerators such as GPUs, a single training job can still take days. Consequently, the cost of hardware is a barrier to entry. Even when upfront cost is not a concern, the lead time to set up such an HPC environment takes months from acquiring hardware to set up the hardware with the right set of firmware, software installed and configured. Furthermore, scalability is hard to achieve in a rigid traditional lab environment. Therefore, it is slow to react to the dynamic change in the artificial intelligent industry. Watson Deep Learning as a service, a cloud-based deep learning platform that mitigates the long lead time and high upfront investment in hardware. It enables robust and scalable sharing of resources among the teams in an organization. It is designed for on-demand cloud environments. Providing a similar user experience in a multi-tenant cloud environment comes with its own unique challenges regarding fault tolerance, performance, and security. Watson Deep Learning as a service tackles these challenges and present a deep learning stack for the cloud environments in a secure, scalable and fault-tolerant manner. It supports a wide range of deep-learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, Caffe, Torch, Theano, and MXNet etc. These frameworks reduce the effort and skillset required to design, train, and use deep learning models. Deep Learning as a service is used at IBM by AI researchers in areas including machine translation, computer vision, and healthcare. 

Keywords: deep learning, machine learning, cognitive computing, model training

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Authors: Carole A. South-Winter

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Research-based learning gives students the opportunity to experience problems that require critical thinking and idea development. The skills they gain in working through these problems 'hands-on,' develop into attributes that benefit their careers in the professional field. The partnerships developed between students and industries give advantages to both sides. The students gain knowledge and skills that will increase their likelihood of success in the future and the industries are given research on new advancements that will give them a competitive advantage in their given field of work. The future of these partnerships is dependent on the success of current programs, enabling the enhancement and improvement of the research efforts. Once more students can complete research, there will be an increase in reliability of the results for each industry. The overall goal is to continue the support for research-based learning and the partnerships formed between students and industries.

Keywords: global healthcare, industry partnerships, research-driven decisions, short-term study abroad

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Authors: Xun Li, Haojie Wang

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Federated learning is a kind of distributed training and centralized training mode, which is of great value in the protection of user privacy. In order to solve the problem that the model is vulnerable to backdoor attacks in federated learning, a backdoor attack detection method based on a weighted k-medoids algorithm is proposed. First of all, this paper collates the update parameters of the client to construct a vector group, then uses the principal components analysis (PCA) algorithm to extract the corresponding feature information from the vector group, and finally uses the improved k-medoids clustering algorithm to identify the normal and backdoor update parameters. In this paper, the backdoor is implanted in the federation learning model through the model replacement attack method in the simulation experiment, and the update parameters from the attacker are effectively detected and removed by the defense method proposed in this paper.

Keywords: federated learning, backdoor attack, PCA, k-medoids, backdoor defense

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Authors: Anum Ali, Kashaf ad Dooja, Asif Saleem

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The future smart cities trend will be towards Internet of Things (IoT); IoT creates dynamic connections in a ubiquitous manner. Smart cities offer ease and flexibility for daily life matters. By using small devices that are connected to cloud servers based on IoT, network traffic between these devices is growing exponentially, whose security is a concerned issue, since ratio of cyber attack may make the network traffic vulnerable. This paper discusses the latest machine learning approaches in related work further to tackle the increasing rate of cyber attacks, machine learning algorithm is applied to IoT-based network traffic data. The proposed algorithm train itself on data and identify different sections of devices interaction by using supervised learning which is considered as a classifier related to a specific IoT device class. The simulation results clearly identify the attacks and produce fewer false detections.

Keywords: IoT, traffic security, deep learning, classification

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Authors: Anastassis Kozanitis, Diane Leduc, Alain Stockless

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This paper presents preliminary results from a two-year funded research program looking to analyze and understand the relationship between high cognitive engagement, higher order cognitive processes employed in situations of complex learning tasks, and the use of active learning pedagogies in engineering undergraduate programs. A mixed method approach was used to gauge student engagement and their cognitive processes when accomplishing complex tasks. Quantitative data collected from the self-report cognitive engagement scale shows that deep learning approach is positively correlated with high levels of complex learning tasks and the level of student engagement, in the context of classroom active learning pedagogies. Qualitative analyses of in depth face-to-face interviews reveal insights into the mechanisms influencing students’ cognitive processes when confronted with open-ended problem resolution. Findings also support evidence that students will adjust their level of cognitive engagement according to the specific didactic environment.

Keywords: cognitive engagement, deep and shallow strategies, engineering programs, higher order cognitive processes

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Authors: Luis H. Gonzalez-Guerra, Armandina J. Leal-Flores

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Students attending classrooms nowadays are habituated to use digital devices all the time and for multiple things. They have been familiar with digital technology throughout their lives so they have developed skills that should be naturally adopted as part of their study strategies. New learning styles require taking in consideration the use of models that support and promote student motivation for learning and development of their creative thinking skills. To achieve student learning in programming courses, different strategies are used. One of them is a collaboration between students, which is a tool which faculty can take advantage of when teaching these kinds of courses. Moreover, cooperation is an essential skill that society should reinforce in order to promote a healthy social environment and cohabitation. Nevertheless, students will still require support and advice to get a complete and correct programming solution to successfully address and solve the problems given throughout the course. This paper present a model where collaboration between students is associated with an automatic tutoring platform providing an excellent approach for the individual learning in collaborative activities in programming courses, and also motivates students to increase their knowledge regarding the topics covered in the classroom.

Keywords: automatic tutoring, collaboration learning, creative thinking, motivation

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Authors: Matthias Grunke

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In this qualitative study, we interviewed a young man with learning disabilities who played professional baseball for two years. Individuals with severe academic challenges constitute one of the most vulnerable groups of our society. Science has to find ways on how to arm them against life’s challenges and help them to cope with the many risk factors that they are usually confronted with. Team sports like baseball seem to be a suitable means for that purpose. In the interview, our participant talked about his life as a student with severe learning difficulties and related how his career in baseball made his academic challenges appear much less significant. He gave some meaningful insights into what helped him to build a happy and fulfilling life for himself, not only in spite of his challenges but also because of what he's learning disabilities taught him. Support from significant others, a sense of purpose, his fighting spirit ignited by sports, and the success that he experienced on the baseball field were among the most relevant factors. Overall, this study highlights the importance of finding an outlet for young people with learning disabilities where their academic difficulties retreat into the background and their talents are validated.

Keywords: baseball, inclusion, learning disabilities, resilience

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Authors: Shoba Bandi-Rao

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The lack of college readiness is one of the major contributors to low graduation rates at community colleges, especially among educationally and financially disadvantaged students. About 45% of underprepared high school graduates are required to complete ‘remedial’ reading/writing courses before they can begin taking college-level courses. Mobile apps present ‘bite-size’ learning materials that can be useful for practicing certain literacy skills, such as vocabulary learning. The convenience of mobile phones is ideal for a majority of students at community colleges who hold full or part-time jobs. Mobile apps allow students to learn during small ‘chunks’ of time available to them outside of the class—during subway commute, between classes, etc. Learning with mobile apps is a relatively new area in research, and their effectiveness for learning new words has been inconclusive. Using Mishra & Koehler’s TPCK theoretical framework, this study explored the effectiveness of the mobile app (Quizlet) for learning one hundred common college-level words in ‘remedial’ writing class over one semester. Each week, before coming to class, students studied a list of 10-15 words presented in context within sentences. Students came across these words in the article they read in class making their learning more meaningful. A pre and post-test measured the number of words students knew, learned and remembered. Statistical analysis shows that students performed better by 41% on the post-test indicating that the mobile app was helpful for learning words. Students also completed a short survey each week that sought to determine the amount of time students spent on the vocabulary app. A positive correlation was found between the amount of time spent on the mobile app and the number of words learned. The goal of this research is to capitalize on the convenience of smartphones to (1) better prepare them for college-level course work, and (2) contribute to current literature on mobile learning.

Keywords: mobile learning, vocabulary learning, literacy skills, Quizlet

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Authors: Samiah Alammari, Nassim Ammour

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When providing a massive number of tasks successively to a deep learning process, a good performance of the model requires preserving the previous tasks data to retrain the model for each upcoming classification. Otherwise, the model performs poorly due to the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed a successful continual learning deep model for remote sensing hyperspectral image regions classification. The proposed neural network architecture encapsulates two trainable subnetworks. The first module adapts its weights by minimizing the discrimination error between the land-cover classes during the new task learning, and the second module tries to learn how to replicate the data of the previous tasks by discovering the latent data structure of the new task dataset. We conduct experiments on HSI dataset Indian Pines. The results confirm the capability of the proposed method.

Keywords: continual learning, data reconstruction, remote sensing, hyperspectral image segmentation

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Authors: David Ofosu-Hamilton, John K. E. Edumadze

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Universities have come to recognize the role Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills plays in the daily activities of tertiary students. The ability to use ICT – essentially, computers and their diverse applications – are important resources that influence an individual’s economic and social participation and human capital development. Our society now increasingly relies on the Internet, and the Cloud as a means to communicate and disseminate information. The educated individual should, therefore, be able to use ICT to create and share knowledge that will improve society. It is, therefore, important that universities require incoming students to demonstrate a level of computer proficiency or trained to do so at a minimal cost by deploying advanced educational technologies. The training and standardized assessment of all in-coming first-year students of the University of Cape Coast in Information Technology Skills (ITS) have become a necessity as students’ most often than not highly overestimate their digital skill and digital ignorance is costly to any economy. The one-semester course is targeted at fresh students and aimed at enhancing the productivity and software skills of students. In this respect, emphasis is placed on skills that will enable students to be proficient in using Microsoft Office and Google Apps for Education for their academic work and future professional work whiles using emerging digital multimedia technologies in a safe, ethical, responsible, and legal manner. The course is delivered in blended mode - online and self-paced (student centered) using Alison’s free cloud-based tutorial (Moodle) of Microsoft Office videos. Online support is provided via discussion forums on the University’s Moodle platform and tutor-directed and assisted at the ICT Centre and Google E-learning laboratory. All students are required to register for the ITS course during either the first or second semester of the first year and must participate and complete it within a semester. Assessment focuses on Alison online assessment on Microsoft Office, Alison online assessment on ALISON ABC IT, Peer assessment on e-portfolio created using Google Apps/Office 365 and an End of Semester’s online assessment at the ICT Centre whenever the student was ready in the cause of the semester. This paper, therefore, focuses on the digital culture approach of hybrid teaching, learning and paperless examinations and the possible adoption by other courses or programs at the University of Cape Coast.

Keywords: assessment, blended, cloud, paperless

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Authors: Qing Wu, Fei-Yan Li, Heng-Chang Zhang

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Multitask learning support vector machines (SVMs) have recently attracted increasing research attention. Given several related tasks, the single-task learning methods trains each task separately and ignore the inner cross-relationship among tasks. However, multitask learning can capture the correlation information among tasks and achieve better performance by training all tasks simultaneously. In addition, the asymmetric squared loss function can better improve the generalization ability of the models on the most asymmetric distributed data. In this paper, we first make two assumptions on the relatedness among tasks and propose two multitask learning proximal support vector machine algorithms, named MTL-a-PSVM and EMTL-a-PSVM, respectively. MTL-a-PSVM seeks a trade-off between the maximum expectile distance for each task model and the closeness of each task model to the general model. As an extension of the MTL-a-PSVM, EMTL-a-PSVM can select appropriate kernel functions for shared information and private information. Besides, two corresponding special cases named MTL-PSVM and EMTLPSVM are proposed by analyzing the asymmetric squared loss function, which can be easily implemented by solving linear systems. Experimental analysis of three classification datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed multitask learning algorithms.

Keywords: multitask learning, asymmetric squared loss, EMTL-a-PSVM, classification

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Authors: Nirit Raichel, Dorit Alt

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Although university teaching is claimed to have a special task to support students in adopting ways of thinking and producing new knowledge anchored in scientific inquiry practices, it is argued that students' habits of learning are still overwhelmingly skewed toward passive acquisition of knowledge from authority sources rather than from collaborative inquiry activities. In order to overcome this critical inadequacy between current educational goals and instructional methods, the LLAF consortium is aimed at developing updated instructional practices that put a premium on adaptability to the emerging requirements of present society. LLAF has created a practical guide for teachers containing updated pedagogical strategies based on the constructivist approach for learning, arranged along Delors’ four theoretical ‘pillars’ of education: Learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. This presentation will be limited to problem-based learning (PBL), as a strategy introduced in the second pillar. PBL leads not only to the acquisition of technical skills, but also allows the development of skills like problem analysis and solving, critical thinking, cooperation and teamwork, decision- making and self-regulation that can be transferred to other contexts. This educational strategy will be exemplified by a case study conducted in the pre-piloting stage of the project. The case describes a three-fold process implemented in a postgraduate course for in-service teachers, including: (1) learning about PBL (2) implementing PBL in the participants' classes, and (3) qualitatively assessing the contributions of PBL to students' outcomes. An example will be given regarding the ways by which PBL was applied and assessed in civic education for high-school students. Two 9th-grade classes have participated the study; both included several students with learning disability. PBL was applied only in one class whereas traditional instruction was used in the other. Results showed a robust contribution of PBL to students' affective and cognitive outcomes as reflected in their motivation to engage in learning activities, and to further explore the subject. However, students with learning disability were less favorable with this "active" and "annoying" environment. Implications of these findings for the LLAF project will be discussed.

Keywords: problem-based learning, higher education, pedagogical strategies

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Authors: J. Bartnicka, J. A. Piedrabuena, R. Portilla, L. Moyano - Cuevas, J. B. Pagador, P. Augat, J. Tokarczyk, F. M. Sánchez Margallo

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Orthopaedic surgeries are characterized by a high degree of complexity. This is reflected by four main groups of resources: 1) surgical team which is consisted of people with different competencies, educational backgrounds and positions; 2) information and knowledge about medical and technical aspects of surgery; 3) medical equipment including surgical tools and materials; 4) space infrastructure which is important from an operating room layout point of view. These all components must be integrated and build a homogeneous organism for achieving an efficient and ergonomically correct surgical workflow. Taking this as a background, there was formulated a concept of international project, called “Online Vocational Training course on ergonomics for orthopaedic Minimally Invasive” (Train4OrthoMIS), which aim is to develop an e-learning tool available in 4 languages (English, Spanish, Polish and German). In the article, there is presented the first project research outcomes focused on three aspects: 1) ergonomic needs of surgeons who work in hospitals around different European countries, 2) the concept of structure of e-learning course, 3) the definition of tools and methods for knowledge assessment adjusted to users’ expectation. The methodology was based on the expert panels and two types of surveys: 1) on training needs, 2) on evaluation and self-assessment preferences. The major findings of the study allowed describing the subjects of four training modules and learning sessions. According to peoples’ opinion there were defined most expected test methods which are single choice test and right after quizzes: “True or False” and “Link elements”. The first project outcomes confirmed the necessity of creating a universal training tool for orthopaedic surgeons regardless of the country in which they work. Because of limited time that surgeons have, the e-learning course should be strictly adjusted to their expectation in order to be useful.

Keywords: international e-learning, ergonomics, orthopaedic surgery, Train4OrthoMIS

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Authors: Ram A. Giri, Amna Bedri, Abdou Niane

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Exclusion in education on the basis of language in multilingual contexts operates at multiple levels. Learners of diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds are often expected to learn through English and are pushed further down the learning ladder if they also have to access education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The paper explores marginalized children’s lived experiences in accessing technology and English in four low-income countries in Africa and Asia. Based on the findings of the first phase of a multinational qualitative research study, we report on the factors or barriers that affect children’s access, opportunities and motivation for learning through technology and English. ICT and English - the language of ICT and education - can enhance learning and can even be essential. However, these two important keys to education can also function as barriers to accessing quality education, and therefore as zones of exclusion. This paper looks into how marginalized children (aged 13-15) engage in learning through ICT and English and to what extent the restrictive access and opportunities contribute to the widening of the already existing gap in education. By applying the conceptual frameworks of “access and accessibility of learning” and “zones of exclusion,” the paper elucidates how the barriers prevent children’s effective engagement with learning and addresses such questions as to how marginalized children access technology and English for learning; whether the children value English, and what their motivation and opportunity to learn it are. In addition, the paper will point out policy and pedagogic implications.

Keywords: exclusion, inclusion, inclusive education, marginalization

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Authors: Yuqing Sun

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Chinese has been regarded as one of the most difficult languages in learning due to its complex spelling structure, difficult pronunciation, as well as its varying forms. Since vocabulary acquisition is the basic process to acquire a language, to express yourself, to compose a sentence, and to conduct a communication, so learning the vocabulary is of great importance. However, the vocabulary contains pronunciation, spelling, recognition and application which may seem as a huge work. This may pose a question for the language teachers (language teachers in China who teach Chinese to the foreign students): How to teach them in an effective way? Traditionally, teachers have no choice but teach it all by themselves, then with the development of technology, they can use computer as a tool to help them (Computer Assisted Language Learning or CALL). Now, they move into the Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) method to guide their teaching, upon which the appraisal is convincing. It diversifies the learning material and the way of output, which can activate learners’ curiosity and accelerate their understanding. This paper will focus on actual case studies occurring in the universities in China of teaching the foreign students to learn Chinese, and the analysis of the utilization of WeChat channel as an example of MALL model to explore the active role of MALL to enhance the effectiveness of Chinese vocabulary acquisition.

Keywords: Chinese, vocabulary acquisition, MALL, case

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Authors: Bryan Crompton, Daniel Giger, Tanay Mehta, Apurva Mody

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The task of classifying radio frequency (RF) signals has seen recent success in employing deep neural network models. In this work, we present a combined signal processing and machine learning approach to signal classification for cochannel anomalous signals. The power spectral density and cyclostationary signal processing features of a captured signal are computed and fed into a neural net to produce a classification decision. Our combined signal preprocessing and machine learning approach allows for simpler neural networks with fast training times and small computational resource requirements for inference with longer preprocessing time.

Keywords: signal processing, machine learning, cyclostationary signal processing, signal classification

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Authors: Kenneth N. Ohei, Roelien Brink

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For decades, teaching and learning processes have centered on the traditional approach (Web 1.0) that promoted teacher-directed pedagogical practices. Currently, there is a realization that the traditional approach is not adequate to effectively address and improve all student-learning outcomes. The subsequent incorporation of social software, Information, and Communication Technology (ICT) tools in universities may serve as complementary to support educational goals, offering students the affordability and opportunity to educational choices and learning platforms. Consequently, educators’ inability to incorporate these instructional ICT tools in their teaching and learning practices remains a challenge. This will signify that educators still lack the ICT skills required to administer lectures and bridging learning gaps. This study probes a methodological concept with the aim of developing a framework towards the adoption of social software in HES to help facilitate business processes and can build social presence among students. A mixed method will be appropriate to develop a comprehensive framework needed in Higher Educational System (HES). After research have been conducted, the adoption of social software will be based on the developed comprehensive framework which is supposed to impact positively on education and approach of delivery, improves learning experience, engagement and finally, increases educational opportunities and easy access to educational contents.

Keywords: blended and integrated learning, learning experience and engagement, higher educational system, HES, information and communication technology, ICT, social presence, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

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Authors: Marc Dorval, Marie-Hélène Jobin

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This work presents the various perspectives, dimensions, components and definitions given to quality in the operations management (OM) and healthcare services (HCS) literature in time, highlighting gaps and learning opportunities between the two disciplines through a thorough search into their rich and distinct body of knowledge. Greater and new insights about the general nature of quality are obtained with findings such as in OM, quality has been approached in six fairly distinct paradigms (excellence, value, conformity to specifications, attributes, satisfaction and meeting or exceeding customer expectations), whereas in HCS, two approaches are prominent (Donabedian’s structure, process and outcomes model and Lohr and Schroeder’s circumscribed definition). The two disciplines views on quality seem to have progressed much in parallel with little cross-learning from each other. This work then proposes an encompassing definition of quality as a lever and suggests further research and development avenues for a better use of the concept of quality by academics and practitioners alike toward the goals of greater organizational performance and improved management in healthcare and possibly other service domains.

Keywords: healthcare, management, operations, quality, services

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Authors: Laura M. Schwarz

Abstract:

WebQuests are an internet-based interactive teaching/learning tool and utilize a scaffolded methodology. WebQuests employ critical thinking, afford inquiry-based constructivist learning, and readily employ Bloom’s Taxonomy. WebQuests have generally been used as instructional technology tools in primary and secondary education and have more recently grown in popularity in higher education. The study of the efficacy of WebQuests as an instructional approach to learning, however, has been limited, particularly in the nursing education arena. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine nursing students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the Nursing WebQuest as a teaching/learning strategy for holistic nursing-related content. Quantitative findings (N=42) suggested that learners were active participants, used reflection, thought of new ideas, used analysis skills, discovered something new, and assessed the worth of something while taking part in the WebQuests. Qualitative findings indicated that participants found WebQuest positives as easy to understand and navigate; clear and organized; interactive; good alternative learning format, and used a variety of quality resources. Participants saw drawbacks as requiring additional time and work; and occasional failed link or link causing them to lose their location in the WebQuest. Recommendations include using larger sample size and more diverse populations from various programs and universities. In conclusion, WebQuests were found to be an effective teaching/learning tool as positively assessed by study participants.

Keywords: holistic nursing, nursing education, teaching/learning strategy, WebQuests

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Authors: Fabio Fabris, Alex A. Freitas

Abstract:

Hierarchical classification is a special type of classification task where the class labels are organised into a hierarchy, with more generic class labels being ancestors of more specific ones. Meta-learning for classification-algorithm recommendation consists of recommending to the user a classification algorithm, from a pool of candidate algorithms, for a dataset, based on the past performance of the candidate algorithms in other datasets. Meta-learning is normally used in conventional, non-hierarchical classification. By contrast, this paper proposes a meta-learning approach for more challenging task of hierarchical classification, and evaluates it in a large number of bioinformatics datasets. Hierarchical classification is especially relevant for bioinformatics problems, as protein and gene functions tend to be organised into a hierarchy of class labels. This work proposes meta-learning approach for recommending the best hierarchical classification algorithm to a hierarchical classification dataset. This work’s contributions are: 1) proposing an algorithm for splitting hierarchical datasets into new datasets to increase the number of meta-instances, 2) proposing meta-features for hierarchical classification, and 3) interpreting decision-tree meta-models for hierarchical classification algorithm recommendation.

Keywords: algorithm recommendation, meta-learning, bioinformatics, hierarchical classification

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Authors: Yashi Ye

Abstract:

Principles play vital roles in shaping the school culture and promoting teachers' professional learning by exerting their leadership. In the changing time of the 21st century, the creative leadership of school leaders is increasingly important in cultivating the professional learning communities of teachers for eventually improving student performance in every continent. This study examines under what conditions and how principal creative leadership contributes to teachers’ professional learning and school culture. Data collected from 632 teachers in 30 primary and middle schools in the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing in mainland China are analyzed using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping tests. A moderated mediation model of principle creative leadership effects is used to analyze professional teacher learning and school culture in which the mediator will be school culture and the moderator will be power distance orientation. The results indicate that principal creative leadership has significant direct and indirect effects on teachers' professional learning. A positive correlation between principal creative leadership, professional teacher learning, and school culture is observed. Further model testing found that teacher power distance orientation moderated the significant effect of principal creative leadership on school culture. When teachers perceived higher power distance in teacher-principal relations, the effects of principal creative leadership were stronger than for those who perceived low power distance. The results indicate the “culture change” in the young generation of teachers in China, and further implications to understanding the cultural context in the field of educational leadership are discussed.

Keywords: power distance orientation, principal creative leadership, school culture, teacher professional learning

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Authors: Peng Liu, Chyng Wen Tee, Xiaofei Xu

Abstract:

This paper integrates machine learning forecasting techniques into the multi-period portfolio optimization framework, enabling dynamic asset allocation based on multiple future periods. We explore both theoretical foundations and practical applications, employing diverse machine learning models for return forecasting. This comprehensive guide demonstrates the superiority of multi-period optimization over single-period approaches, particularly in risk mitigation through strategic rebalancing and enhanced market trend forecasting. Our goal is to promote wider adoption of multi-period optimization, providing insights that can significantly enhance the decision-making capabilities of practitioners and researchers alike.

Keywords: multi-period portfolio optimization, look-ahead constrained optimization, machine learning, sequential decision making

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Authors: Ida Fatimawati Adi Badiozaman, Augustus Raymond Segar

Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic transformed teaching contexts at an unprecedented level. Although studies have focused mainly on its impact on students, little is known about how emergency online teaching affects faculty members in higher education. Given that the pandemic has robbed teachers of opportunities for adequate preparation, it is vital to understand how teaching competencies were perceived in the crisis-response transition to online teaching and learning (OTL). Therefore, the study explores how academics perceive their readiness for OTL and what competencies were perceived to be central. Therefore, through a mixed-methods design, the study first explores through a survey how academics perceive their readiness for OTL and what competencies were perceived to be central. Emerging trends from the quantitative data of 330 academics (three public and three private Higher learning institutions) led to the formulation of interview guides for the subsequent qualitative phase. The authors use critical sensemaking (CSM) to analyse interviews with twenty-two teachers (n = 22) (three public; three private HEs) toward understanding the interconnected layers of influences they draw from as they make sense of their teaching competence. The sensemaking process reframed competence and readiness in that agentic competency emerged as crucial in shaping resilience and adaptability during the transition to OTL. The findings also highlight professional learningcriticalto teacher competence: course design, communication, time management, technological competence, and identity (re)construction. The findings highlight opportunities for strategic orientation to change during crisis. Implications for pedagogy and policy are discussed.

Keywords: online teaching, pedagogical competence, agentic competence, agency, technological competence

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Authors: Nurwati Djaman, Suradi Tahmir, Nurdin Arsyad

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The major objective of this study was to implement and evaluate the use of the implementation of social responsibility with the approach of Indonesian Realistic Mathematics Education (PMRI) in teaching and learning mathematics on students’ engagement and learning. The research problems investigated in this research: 1) What were the effects of the implementation of social responsibility with PMRI approach to learning mathematics? 2) What were the effects of the approach to students’ engagement? An action research and grounded theory methodology were adopted for the study. This study used mixed methods to collect, describe, and interpret the data. The data were collected through focus group discussion, classroom observations, questionnaire, interview, and students’ work. The participants in this study consisted of 45 students. The study revealed that the approach has given students the opportunity to develop their understanding of concepts and procedures, problem-solving ability, and communication ability. Also, students’ involvement in the approach improved their engagement in learning mathematics in the three domains of cognitive engagement, effective engagement, and behavioral engagement. In particular, the data collection from the focus group, classroom observations, and interviews suggest that, during this study, the students became more active participants in the mathematics lessons.

Keywords: Indonesian Realistic Mathematics Education, PMRI, learning mathematics, social responsibility, students' engagement

Procedia PDF Downloads 143