From Brick to Click Classrooms: A Paradigm Shift During the Pandemic—Identifying Factors Influencing Service Quality and Learners’ Satisfaction in Click Classrooms

The most crucial determinant of success in any service environment is the perception of the customers about the service quality or the product quality as it derives satisfaction and loyalty. Considering this imperative, the present review focuses on the service quality of online teaching, which has become a new normal during the pandemic. The pandemic has resulted in a paradigm shift of imparting education from brick to click classrooms. Hence, this article reviews the literature on the factors influencing service quality of click classrooms and mentions the parameters that lead to learners’ satisfaction. The systematic review helps in understanding how the research in this field has progressed. It is evident from this review that creating an interactive learning environment, giving prompt feedbacks, providing rich digital resources and course content, competent and skilled faculty members and continuous student support play a crucial role in enhancing the service quality of click classrooms leveraging learners’ satisfaction. The findings of this study support the educational institutions towards developing a sound and sustainable online learning environment by comprehending the students’ expectations about the service quality of an online learning environment. The study aims to propel future research works towards improving the service quality of click classrooms and enriching learners’ experience to impart quality education for all the stakeholders.

A Distinctive Method of Online Interactive Learning in STEM Education

A breakthrough that has occurred in recent years is the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has affected various sectors of society, including the educational sector. It has prevented students from performing group-oriented hands-on activities and has eventually transformed their active learning environment in schools into virtual passive lectures at home. Therefore, to solve this impedance, we exercised several online STEM programs (five online STEM programs with repetitive cycles) for school students, including 140 students (middle and high school), 16 undergraduate (UG) secondary mentors, and 8 primary STEM professionals. Thus, the study revealed the results of a distinctive interactive online STEM teaching model that has been designed to overcome the virtual classroom’s impediments. The employed teaching model demonstrates an interactive learning environment that ensures students’ engagement, retention, and participation, driving them to STEM innovations. Various digital tools, including PowerPoint presentations, videos, online simulations, interactive quizzes, and innovative games were used as teaching aids. Both the synchronous and asynchronous means in a student-centered approach, along with the feedback mechanism, were implemented. Finally, the employed method’s effectiveness was revealed by the maximum student retention and STEM innovation rates, along with the model’s potentiality towards its replicability and sustainability. Thus, the outlook of such initiatives could further be broadened by its sustainability and replicability aspect towards vulnerable student communities such as academically introverted and specially challenged students.

Jordanian university instructors' perspectives on emergency remote teaching during COVID-19: humanities vs sciences

PurposeThe study aims to probe into university instructors' reactions to adopting the remote online learning model brought by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The study investigates the instructors' perspectives, in the humanities and science classes, on the effectiveness of the emergency remote teaching (ERT) compared to face-to-face teaching.Design/methodology/approachThe data for the study were compiled from the responses of 127 instructors representing two private universities in middle and northern Jordan. The sample included 66 faculty members in the humanities and 61 in the sciences. The instructors' responses were elicited through a Likert-type questionnaire consisting of 20 items.FindingsThe present study's findings have shown that online instruction is becoming more common despite the presence of some major challenges facing instructors. The results showed that the e-learning system seems to better suit the humanities courses compared to the sciences courses. The findings also showed that faculty members in the humanities are more satisfied with the effectiveness of the assessment tools utilized in the online courses than their colleagues in the sciences. In addition, humanities e-courses seem to provide a more interactive learning environment than e-courses in the sciences.Practical implicationsMore training for instructors on how to design online course syllabi to ensure effective delivery is needed. Instructors need to develop ways to encourage students to interact in virtual e-classes to the same level as the on-ground classes. Instructors also need to adopt the “blended learning” system as a transitional stage before switching completely to online learning.Originality/valueDifferent studies have investigated how COVID-19 has impacted education. The current study brings to light the perspectives of the Jordanian teaching staff on transitioning to ERT during the COVID-19 crisis taking into account the differences between humanities and sciences classes.

The Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network: An Open-Source and Interactive Learning Environment

Lockdowns and “stay-at-home” orders, starting in March 2020, shuttered bench and field dependent research across the world as a consequence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continues to have an impact on research progress and career development, especially for graduate students and early career researchers, as strict social distance limitations stifle ongoing research and impede in-person educational programs. The goal of the Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network (BVCN) was to reduce some of these impacts by helping research biologists learn new skills and initiate computational projects as alternative ways to carry out their research. The BVCN was founded in April 2020, at the peak of initial shutdowns, by an international group of early-career microbiology researchers with expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology. The BVCN instructors identified several foundational bioinformatic topics and organized hands-on tutorials through cloud-based platforms that had minimal hardware requirements (in order to maximize accessibility) such as RStudio Cloud and MyBinder. The major topics included the Unix terminal interface, R and Python programming languages, amplicon analysis, metagenomics, functional protein annotation, transcriptome analysis, network science, and population genetics and comparative genomics. The BVCN was structured as an open-access resource with a central hub providing access to all lesson content and hands-on tutorials (https://biovcnet.github.io/). As laboratories reopened and participants returned to previous commitments, the BVCN evolved: while the platform continues to enable “a la carte” lessons for learning computational skills, new and ongoing collaborative projects were initiated among instructors and participants, including a virtual, open-access bioinformatics conference in June 2021. In this manuscript we discuss the history, successes, and challenges of the BVCN initiative, highlighting how the lessons learned and strategies implemented may be applicable to the development and planning of future courses, workshops, and training programs.

Using visual thinking for computer support in teaching the design of technological equipment

The aim of the work is to substantiate the possibility of using multidisciplinary visualization tools in the educational process based on a logical-semantic scheme (LSS), which acts as a methodological platform for building a system of automated support for engineering decisions in designing technological equipment. An interactive learning environment is examined, which, by actively interacting with students, significantly increases the effectiveness, being able to accommodate and coordinate together more multidisciplinary information. In a visual version, the characteristics of the technologization means are presented, in conditions of computerization having logical and semantic schemes about the studied subject area, and an example of a multidisciplinary presentation of a course for students on designing heater plates for injection molding of plastics is considered. A diagram is presented that illustrates the current state of theoretical knowledge. It allows visualizing the basic concepts, formation, structure and arrangement of the stated knowledge for students. It clearly shows the cause-and-effect relationship. This, on the one hand, makes it easier for a young specialist to understand the knowledge being studied, and on the other hand, it allows having deeper understanding of the design of technological equipment.

Blended Learning Through an Interactive Mobile Application for Teaching Autistic Kindergarten Students

The mobile applications industry has had significant growth in the last few years. Mobile phones are everywhere since we use them in every part of our daily lives for entertainment, communication and other various uses. Unfortunately, there was also a substantial increase the number of autism cases in kids around the world, which has prompted for a dire need of a therapy method that is cheap, reliable and accessible for everyone who needs it. Researchers have tried several methods, like robotics and virtual reality, to help in the therapy of autistic children. While their results were promising, these technologies are still out of reach of most users due to their high cost. Mobile phones, however, are much more accessible since everyone has one, and they have a wide array of useful gadgets that can be used in making the therapy sessions more engaging and fun such as cameras, accelerometers, speakers, microphones and others. This project aims to design and implement an interactive learning environment based on a mobile application for teaching kids with special needs.

SPEECH DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN IN KINDERGARTEN IN A TEXT-CENTRIC AND INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

This article presents an anonymous (for the purpose of objectivity) survey amongst 75 teachers from 27 kindergartens from all over the country. It analyses the kindergarten teachers’ attitude towards the role of text and interactivity when teaching Bulgarian Language and Literature. The online survey covers 20 questions divided into three semantic subgroups – teachers’ attitude towards the preliminary prep work for teaching; teachers’ point of view on the role of text in the speech development of children; teachers’ attitude towards the effects of using an interactive learning environment. Some of the questions are related to the presumption of the survey’s authors that part of the interactive methods (such as thinking cards, pictograms and book games) are not used actively enough to increase the effectiveness of language teaching in the modern kindergarten, that the text-centricity seldom departs from the framework of the traditional educational nuclei of working with literary text – Comprehension of the literary text and Recreation of the literary text. The data collected from these and the remaining groups of questions forms the basis of the conclusions on the speech development of children in mandatory preschool education groups.

The Bright and Dark Sides of Energy Efficiency Obligation Scheme: The Case of Latvia

Evidence collected by researchers over several decades suggests that the successful implementation of the Energy Efficiency Obligation Scheme (EEOS) may deliver significant, cost-effective energy savings over many years. However, before starting EEOS in Latvia, predictions by energy efficiency policy researchers envisaged that it is at high risk of savings shortfalls. This study aims to carry out an ex-post policy evaluation of EEOS in Latvia and assess its ability to deliver significant savings in the first phase of the new EEOS. This paper questions whether the new EEOS can reach savings goals without prior experience with voluntary agreement schemes and emulation of successful EEOS from other countries. The second goal of the research is to create a web-based optimization tool as an Interactive Learning Environment to help policymakers and EEOS-obliged parties to create goal-oriented strategies. The study has found that, contrary to expectations, Latvia has reached and even overfulfilled EEOS saving goals. Estimated cumulative savings obtained during the starting phase (329.2 GWh) are 68% higher than the cumulative savings planned by the policymakers for 2020 (234 GWh). This success is related to the enforcement of a stick-type approach in the policy. However, the study also revealed the dark side of EEOS implementation by discussing different types of energy efficiency measures applied by EEOS and the role of implementing and monitoring institutions. The ex-ante evaluation projected that 50% of the EEOS savings would be derived from information and education measures and 50% through contributions to the Energy Efficiency Fund or by implementing the most cost-effective energy efficiency measures. The ex-post evaluation shows that around 95% of savings are achieved through information measures and the rest by introducing energy efficiency measures on the consumer side. EEOS parties do not contribute to the Fund because the cost of information measures (on average 4 EUR/MWh) is significantly lower than the contribution to the Fund (70 EUR/MWh).