Building on the success of the first North-South cross-continental collaborative educational robotics mission held in November 2015 1, this paper presents a practical model for scaling the event up ...into a program for developing countries, particularly those of Africa, where the first edition took place. Past participants in Remote Rescue Thymio II (R2T2) missions, students and educators alike, have shared qualitative observations about its positive educational impact, notably in the areas of Collaboration, Communication, Critical thinking, Creative problem solving, Computational thinking, and Cross-cultural exchange. The proposed framework for delivering R2T2 missions has been adapted to Africa, being specifically designed to tackle the critical challenges of internet connectivity, teacher training and program costs. In so doing, it strives to pave the way for collaboration with partners in African educational ecosystems and North-South funding bodies that share the vision of making collaborative STEM education more accessible and attractive to teachers and schoolchildren around the world.
Patient portals have been around for decades, but only became widely available to patients in the last 10 years as cultural shifts (i.e., patient-centered care) and policies (e.g., HITECH Act) ...encouraged healthcare organizations to offer patients electronic access to their medical records, as well as digital health services such as secure messaging with their healthcare team. Unfortunately, despite high interest among patients, research has documented generally slow uptake and low levels of use. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought new incentives to adopt and use portals (e.g., to access video visits, COVID-19 test results). While evidence from some healthcare organizations suggests that this has translated to higher patient engagement with portals, there have not been national-level studies to investigate this. Our cross-sectional survey addresses that gap by assessing a sample of U.S. adults' use, perceptions of, and satisfaction with patient portals at the end of 2021. We found high levels of portal awareness, adoption, and use, as well as satisfaction among survey participants that, in many cases, exceeds what has been found in past surveys of U.S. adults. In addition, while we did find some evidence of some disparities in portal adoption and use (e.g., lower adoption among those with lower levels of education completed), many of the factors that have been found in previous literature such as race were not associated with portal engagement in this study. Our results provide early evidence that there may finally be some progress in portal adoption and use, but more research is needed to understand what is driving this and whether and how this progress can be maintained post-pandemic. Addressing common patient concerns and suggestions may be one path forward.
This study aims to explore a learner's embodiment and movements during discussion which are represented on an avatar in a social virtual reality (VR) space. From a user study, we demonstrated the ...validity of social VR space in an active learning (AL) setting. It is unclear whether such information represented on an avatar affects turn-taking and facilitates group discussion during AL activities. Therefore, this study conducted an experiment and clarified that turn-taking in the social VR space occurs more than on a monitor, leading to a better discussion.
Flipped learning is a pedagogical approach that has evolved from the variations of blended learning and involves prior study which emphasizes self-directed learning. This study aims to design ...instructional materials to harness learning skills, strengthen the mastery of cognitive skills, and help learners thrive and succeed in the 21 st century. The flipped learning concept has been analyzed to design and develop learning widgets and instructional design models to learn Biology. The design of instructional materials was anchored on the framework for 21 st century learning that identifies the skills and knowledge that the students need to succeed in work and life in the 21 st century. The different learning tasks in the created instructional materials were appropriately designed to capture the 4 Cs - critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity of the students and were tailored fit for a flipped approach to learning Biology.
The delivery of teaching and learning along with its approach is essential to 21 st -century skills educational outcomes in the UAE. In today's society, it is crucial to identify specific ...competencies and skills to develop the learner and answer to the demand of what employers need for the future. The UAE Vision 2021's includes a directive for UAE Higher Education (HE) institutions to "listen closely to the needs of Emiratis and of their future employers" and to "balance their teaching to the demands of the workplace." To respond to this call, engineering education and training institutes need to implement a pedagogical model that aims to challenge the ever-changing and complex challenges in the workplace. As UAE employers look for engineering graduates with skills in various areas such as critical thinking, effective communication, innovation, and problem-solving, the pedagogy models adopted by HE institutes seldom addresses these needs. How best to acquire and practice these skills is overlooked mainly as this has to do with the embedded approach of traditional information transmission model. This paper, considers the essential pedagogical approaches to contribute to the development and mastery of twenty-first-century competencies and skills and proposes a model to advance the quality and effectiveness of vocational learning atHEinstitutes across the UAE.
Engaging youngsters with ancient approaches in education, especially reading, grows ever tougher in the face of their attachment to tablets and PC games. In this paper, we explore the digital ...storytelling more interesting and memorable for children. Digital storytelling is recognized as a motivating instructional approach that engages learners in 21 st century learning skills which will be essential to success in the future. Digital storytelling is one of the latest pedagogical approaches that can engage learners in computational thinking. Educators are in search of recent technologies and education approaches to engage students in computational thinking. Digital storytelling using MIT Scratch have the potential to meet this demand.
The emerging drone industry presents an ecosystem rich with STEM careers. This paper discusses the development of an integrated STEM curriculum, the Drone Innovators Program, designed to immerse ...middle school and high school students in STEM careers through drone education. A work in progress curriculum presented in this paper is a series of creative problem-solving online micro-courses for both online schools and brick-and-mortar classrooms. The curriculum is being piloted in an online charter school that serves students throughout the state of Pennsylvania, reaching a vastly diverse demographic. The course design uses research-based instructional models to capture a wide range of student interests, skills, and abilities. We will present the program framework and a lesson from our first unit.
The professional skills are the non-technical learning outcomes put forth by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) as part of the larger set of student learning outcomes that ...are required of all ABET accredited programs. The Computing Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is the only tool and method that is able to simultaneously assess all six of the computing professional skills at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This paper presents the results from the first comprehensive investigation of student attainment of the professional skills using the CPSA across a UAE-based computing program's 3 rd year, 4 th year, and masters level students. The results show that the students overall are weakest in learning outcomes related to the local and global impact of computing, and the ability to recognise when they need to seek additional knowledge. The proficiency results for each year provide useful insights into what and where weaknesses exist. With this information one can devise interventions in a program so as to improve student learning.
Improving eLearning to meet challenges in 21st century Gamage, Dilrukshi; Perera, Indika; Fernando, Shantha
2014 14th International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer),
2014-Dec.
Conference Proceeding
Elearning has been practicing for more than a decade, it is evolving and changing rapidly to meet the needs of users. Many countries are moving from an industrial-based to information-based economy ...and the education systems must respond to this change. The skills needed in a modern world are critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, metacognition, and motivation. Last couple of decade eLearning focused more towards the individual development and literally assessing the student's lower order thinking. The pedagogy supports to achieve learning outcomes based on individual performances leaving the learner in an isolated learning environment. The latest disruption in online learning is the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Many researchers assert that it provides sound pedagogical change leading to many advantages. Our research aims to address the gap between current and past outcomes produced by eLearning with that of next few decades to come. We used qualitative method Grounded theory to identify the factors affecting to an effective eLearning and ranked them according to the priority by using quantitative method Principle Component Analysis (PCA) in SPSS (Version 10.0 for Windows).
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