Current State of High-School Students’ Multiliteracy after a Year of Online Lessons in the Context of Chile

<p style="text-align: justify;">The worldwide pandemic Coronavirus disease, affected every aspect of people’s lives due to being locked at their homes, therefore many difficulties began to appear, especially in education. Scholars were the leading group that has been affected the most due to the online lessons that began from one day to another, without any kind of previous training specifically in these types of contexts at home. According to some national diagnostical studies, most of the students could not achieve the minimum educational objectives in mathematics and language, which are the essential subjects in Chilean education. In this study, in which qualitative phenomenology analysis was used, the aim was to reveal the current state of students after a whole year of online lessons in terms of personal technological use and personal perceptions about e-learning. In this study, in which the criterion sampling was used, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adolescents from different sorts of schools who experienced online lessons using their previous personal knowledge in Information and Communication Technologies. The data were analyzed in Nvivo node tree, which revealed six main themes that define the experience and personal perception of the participants: adaptation to the new order, learning by their own, how to use better the technology, use of social media, new ways of personal knowledge sharing, importance of classmates. It is believed that the results obtained from this study will contribute to schools’ view of learning and teaching education in the 21st century and to improve students’ experiences in online lessons.</p>

Examining Technology Acceptance in Learning and Teaching at a Historically Disadvantaged University in South Africa through the Technology Acceptance Model

The exponential growth in the use of technology for learning and teaching in the higher education sector has imposed pressure on academics to embrace technology in their teaching. The present study sought to examine factors underlying technology acceptance in learning and teaching at a historically disadvantaged university in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Premised on the mixed methods approach and undergirded by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), both a pre-coded and an open-ended questionnaire were used to collect data. Data from the pre-coded questionnaire were analysed through the descriptive statistical approach. The qualitative data from the open-ended questionnaire were analysed through content analysis. The study found that most academic staff believe and see the value that ICTs bring in their teaching and learning practices. In addition, they are aware that technology use in education improves learning and teaching, and they are willing to embrace the use of technology to improve their practices. Based on the findings, we recommend intensification of lecturer training in the use of technology for teaching and learning to enable them to embrace it in their teaching practice. Furthermore, the institution needs to put in place support systems for academic staff to empower them to have continuous access to devices and internet connection for technology integration in teaching and learning. We recommend establishment of e-learning communities of practise in the university that will allow lecturers to assist each other as well as share best practices in the use of technology for teaching and learning.

Processes of Proliferation

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

Exploring How Secondary STEM Teachers and Undergraduate Mentors Adapt Digital Technologies to Promote Culturally Relevant Education during COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic presented unprecedented challenges to K-16 educators, including the closing of educational agencies and the abrupt transition to online teaching and learning. Educators sought to adapt in-person learning activities to teach in remote and hybrid online settings. This study explores how a partnership between middle and high school teachers in an urban school district and undergraduate STEM mentors of color leveraged digital tools and collaborative pedagogies to teach science, technology, and engineering during a global pandemic. We used a qualitative multi-case study to describe three cases of teachers and undergraduate mentors. We then offer a cross-case analysis to interpret the diverse ways in which partners used technologies, pedagogy, and content to promote equitable outcomes for students, both in remote and hybrid settings. We found that the partnership and technologies led to rigorous and connected learning for students. Teachers and undergraduates carefully scaffolded technology use and content applications while providing ongoing opportunities for students to receive feedback and reflect on their learning. Findings provide implications for community partnerships and digital tools to promote collaborative and culturally relevant STEM learning opportunities in the post-pandemic era.

Association between preference and e-learning readiness among the Bangladeshi female nursing students in the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study

Background The COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized the traditional academic learning calendars due to the closing of all educational institutions across the globe. To keep up with the flow of learning, most of the educational institutions shifted toward e-learning. However, the students’ e-learning preference and e-learning readiness did not identify, particularly among the Bangladeshi female nursing students, where those can pose serious challenges. A cross-sectional study was carried out among the female nursing students between December 26, 2020, and January 11, 2021. A total of 237 students were recruited who have enrolled in e-learning at least the last 30 days of the participation. Multivariable linear regression models were fitted to find the association of students’ preference, e-learning readiness domains, and other variables. Results A cross-sectional study was conducted among the female nursing students to assess perceived e-learning readiness in the subdomains of readiness; availability, technology use, self-confidence, acceptance and training. The findings of the study revealed that the prevalence of preference for e-learning was 43.46%. The students did not prefer e-learning compared to ‘prefer group’ has significantly less availability of technology (β = − 3.01, 95% CI − 4.46, − 1.56), less use of technology (β = − 3.08, 95% CI − 5.11, − 1.06), less self-confidence (β = − 4.50, 95% CI − 7.02, − 1.98), less acceptance (β = − 5.96, 95% CI − 7.76, − 4.16) and less training need (β = − 1.86, 95% CI − 2.67, − 1.06). The age, degree, residence, parents’ highest education, having a single room, and having any eye problems were significantly associated with the variation of availability of technology, use of technology, self-confidence, acceptance, and training need of e-learning. Conclusions The outcomes of the study could be helpful while developing an effective and productive e-learning infrastructure regarding the preparedness of nursing colleges for the continuation of academia in any adverse circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experimentation and Start-up Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing

Recent scholarship argues that experimentation should be the organizing principle for entrepreneurial strategy. Experimentation leads to organizational learning, which drives improvements in firm performance. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the time-varying adoption of A/B testing technology, which has drastically reduced the cost of testing business ideas. Our results provide the first evidence on how digital experimentation affects a large sample of high-technology start-ups using data that tracks their growth, technology use, and products. We find that, although relatively few firms adopt A/B testing, among those that do, performance improves by 30%–100% after a year of use. We then argue that this substantial effect and relatively low adoption rate arises because start-ups do not only test one-off incremental changes, but also use A/B testing as part of a broader strategy of experimentation. Qualitative insights and additional quantitative analyses show that experimentation improves organizational learning, which helps start-ups develop more new products, identify and scale promising ideas, and fail faster when they receive negative signals. These findings inform the literatures on entrepreneurial strategy, organizational learning, and data-driven decision making. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education

Existing scholarship suggests that schools do the work of social stratification by functioning as “sorting machines,” or institutions that determine which populations of students are provided educational resources needed to help them get ahead. We build on this theory of social reproduction by extending it to better understand how digital technology use is implicated in this process of unequal resource allocation in schools. We contend that educational resources, like digital technologies, are also sorted by schools. Drawing on scholarship from both education research and science and technology studies, we show how educational institutions have long played a role in constructing the value of technologies to different ends, by constructing hierarchies of technological activity, like “vocational” and “academic” computer use, even when strikingly similar. We then apply this lens to three areas of inquiry in education research: the use of digital technologies for instruction, school use of student data, and college admissions. Each illustrates how education scholars can view technologies as part of school sorting processes and with implications for inequality within and beyond the classroom.

Digitalization and higher education for sustainable development in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic: A content analysis approach

Higher education for sustainable development (HESD) in the Covid-19 pandemic faces different challenges. Empirically few studies to date have introduced much on the digitalization of higher education for sustainable development. This study aims to explore and explain the digitalization of HESD from different attitudes and to build linkages of the digitalization in HESD. Furthermore, the study makes content analysis where 1,200 tweets on digitalization in higher education for sustainable development are collected from Twitter, and 19 documents have further categorized information data via NVivo. In addition, 22 students and 9 instructors were invited for a semi-structured interview to further supplement this study and confirm its findings. This study finds that attitudes towards digitalization in the study area can be divided into three correlated attitude layers. Teaching attitudes and educational attitudes are the first level, and the second level is the digital platform attitude, technology use attitude, and resource attitude. Furthermore, network attitude, service attitude, and development attitude are the third level. Thus, through the analysis, this study suggests higher education institutions should make improvements in digitalized teaching, education quality via innovation, technological development, resources use, and development via creating a better digital platform or environment is essential for genuinely promoting the HESD.