Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions to unexpectedly adopt online learning methods to teach their students. As students’ perspectives are vital to be understood to determine ...whether any teaching learning method is optimum for implementation, we conducted a questionnaire-based study of students of a medical college.
Aims and Objectives: The objective of this research study was to gain a better understanding of problems concerned with online learning methods.
Materials and Methods: Undergraduate 1st year medical students of four different medical colleges of India were the participants. After ethical committee permission, responses were invited for a Google form’s questionnaire. Students were asked in detail about their choices.
Results: Most students preferred the offline mode of study over the online mode. Majority of students preferred to keep their own camera off during online lectures. Biochemistry subject was considered comparatively easier and Anatomy was considered difficult to learn in online mode compared to offline mode. Few students felt comfortable with online learning of more than 5 h daily. Concentration in classes was difficult, deemed more difficult for online classes and majority of students felt a lack of motivation in online learning.
Conclusions: Institutes using the online mode of learning need to address student’s problems before they mandate certain rules like keeping students’ videos on. Lack of motivation and screen fatigue are common problems among students which needs to be addressed by counseling or mentoring if necessary. Subject specific preferences of students need to be taken care of.
It has been widely noted that society has moved away from seeing truth as an objective and, in some ways, important part of what it means to be educated. Varied conceptions of truth have existed and ...have been debated in the halls of academia for years but recently a shift has occurred in which truth has lost its status broadly as a virtue. In fact, in 2016, Oxford Dictionary declared "post-truth" as its international word of the year, defined as: 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'. Living in a world that is post-truth has direct implications on the education of a society's youth. This book will examine several broad conceptions of truth and present them as truth profiles considering their implications for education. This survey will consider the role of truth as it relates to teaching and the act of being a teacher, engage with challenging questions about what curriculum will be learned and its implications for our understanding of truth and specific consideration is attended to the impacts that one's conception of truth has for what they prioritize in the classroom, their instructional practice, and on learning itself. This book will take a focused look at the concept of truth and how varied conceptions of truth impact teaching and learning through theoretical, analytic, and practical examples.
The growing interest in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has resulted in enthusiasm in and active pursuit of improved methods of foreign/second-language (L2) teaching in Europe. ...However, the definition and scope of the term CLIL both internally, as used by CLIL advocates in Europe, and externally, as compared with immersion education in and outside Europe, indicate that the core characteristics of CLIL are understood in different ways with respect to: the balance between language and content instruction, the nature of the target languages involved, instructional goals, defining characteristics of student participants, and pedagogical approaches to integrating language and content instruction. We argue further that attempts to define CLIL by distinguishing it from immersion approaches to L2 education are often misguided. The aim of this article is to examine these ambiguities and to call for clarification of the definition of CLIL. Clarification is critical if CLIL is to evolve and improve systematically and if CLIL educators are to benefit from the experiences and knowledge acquired in other educational settings.
A seemingly unending controversy in the field of instruction science concerns how much instructional guidance needs to be provided in a learning environment. At the one extreme lies the claim that it ...is important for students to explore and construct knowledge for themselves, which is often called discovery learning, and at the other extreme lies the claim that providing direct instruction is more beneficial than withholding it. In this article, evidence and arguments that support either of the approaches are reviewed. Also, we review how different instructional approaches interact with other instructional factors that have been known to be important, such as individual difference, self-explanation, and comparison. The efforts to combine different instructional approaches suggest alternative ways to conceive of learning and to test it.
The increasing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) has provoked scholars' and educators' interest to explore its potential as a learning environment for various fields of education. Along this line, ...several literature reviews have analysed and synthesised the educational use of VR; however, scholar activity is lacking a recent review of VR on a specific field of interest such as language learning. Thus this paper delineates the contour of scholarly literature on VR as an emerging technology in language teaching and learning. Using 17 high-impact journals and conferences in the fields of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Educational Technology as a source, 26 scholarly manuscripts were retrieved from 2015 to 2018, analysed and synthesised under the following foci: (a) technologies used, language learning settings and duration of educational activities; (b) benefits and limitations from using VR as an educational tool in the language classroom; (c) future research directions regarding the educational use of VR based on the reviewed literature. This paper argues that VR is an invaluable tool in the language classrooms but entails challenges regarding its technical configuration, as well as its pedagogical grounding. The study concludes with some discussion and implications for researchers and practitioners.
Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT) are often seen as incompatible as they draw on different theories of language learning and language teaching. The ...position adopted in this article, however, is that both approaches are needed especially in instructional contexts where ‘pure’ task-based teaching may be problematic for various reasons. The article makes a case for a modular curriculum consisting of separate (i.e. non-integrated) task-based and structure-based components. Different curriculum models are considered in the light of what is known about how a second language is learned. The model that is proposed assumes the importance of developing fluency first. It consists of a primary task-based module implemented with focus-on-form (Long, 1991) and, once a basic fluency has been achieved, supported by a secondary structural module to provide for explicit accuracy-oriented work to counteract learned selective attention (N. Ellis, 2006): one of the main sources of persistent error. The article also addresses the content and grading of the task-based and structural modules. It considers the factors that need to be considered in the vertical and horizontal grading of tasks but also points out that, for the time being, syllabus designers will have to draw on their experience and intuition as much as on research to make decisions about how to sequence tasks. An argument is presented for treating the structural component as a checklist rather than as a syllabus so as to allow teachers to address selectively those features that are found to be problematic for their students when they perform tasks.
We propose a discrimination-aware learning method to improve both the accuracy and fairness of biased face recognition algorithms. The most popular face recognition benchmarks assume a distribution ...of subjects without paying much attention to their demographic attributes. In this work, we perform a comprehensive discrimination-aware experimentation of deep learning-based face recognition. We also propose a notational framework for algorithmic discrimination with application to face biometrics. The experiments include three popular face recognition models and three public databases composed of 64,000 identities from different demographic groups characterized by sex and ethnicity. We experimentally show that learning processes based on the most used face databases have led to popular pre-trained deep face models that present evidence of strong algorithmic discrimination. Finally, we propose a discrimination-aware learning method, Sensitive Loss, based on the popular triplet loss function and a sensitive triplet generator. Our approach works as an add-on to pre-trained networks and is used to improve their performance in terms of average accuracy and fairness. The method shows results comparable to state-of-the-art de-biasing networks and represents a step forward to prevent discriminatory automatic systems.
This article reports on the findings of a large-scale cross-sectional survey of the motivational disposition of English language learners in secondary schools and universities in China. The total ...sample involved over 10,000 students and was stratified according to geographical region and teaching contexts, selecting participants both from urban and rural locations. The investigation aims to present a balanced overview of the general level of L2 motivation in China through the lens of the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei 2005, 2009). The wealth of data obtained in the survey provide solid empirical description of the main features of language learning in China, and the detailed information presented in the study can also serve as a baseline for future research conducted to investigate temporal, social, and geographical variation and evolution.
O presente trabalho apresenta uma proposta de produção do gênero abstract utilizando-se uma metodologia de correção dialógica, orientada por uma perspectiva bakhtiniana, e focada na discursividade do ...texto. A abordagem teórica sustentar-se-á numa perspectiva dialógica para o ensino dos gêneros textuais, partindo de uma visão discursiva sobre o ensino de produção escrita. Adotamos como critério de análise quatro qualidades discursivas propostas por Guedes (1994), necessárias para a construção de um texto: unidade temática, questionamento, objetividade e concretude. Estas qualidades serão utilizadas como ferramenta de correção textual apresentando os movimentos de reescrita que evidenciam o trabalho com as qualidades discursivas mencionadas.
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