Online Simulations for Teaching Professional Legal Skills

Experiential learning approach in legal education is a global influential trend. Legal clinics is one of the most obvious examples of including experiential learning approach into the educational curriculum for law students. The main educational value of legal clinics is a providing training opportunity for students to apply their legal knowledge and skills in professional simulations like role plays of interviewing, counselling, negotiations, mock trials (first instance hearing) and moot courts (appeal hearing). These type of training programs allow law students to test their ability to client-oriented and problem-solving. The Russian legal clinics community has been actively developing since the mid of 1990s for more than 30 years. More than 100 Law Schools over Russia have own legal clinics. Clinicians overview their experience and share this experience between clinicians community. At the same time only relevantly small part of law students have access to effective training of legal skills because of various reasons, but mostly because of relevantly small number of legal educators who use the experiential-learning approach. Transition of experiential-learning best practices into online format is a good tool of scaling the number of students who could be trained in legal skills significantly. The paper describes the collection of unsupervised online learning modules devoted to legal skills, including case strategy, interviewing, counselling, legal writing and trial skills. These unsupervised online learning modules are developed based on modern instructional approaches to developing of online educational courses. The piloting of the unsupervised online learning modules demonstrates that these modules might be used as a supplementary educational tool and as a part of main educational curriculum for law students.

Supervised Learning for Arrival Time Estimations in Restaurant Meal Delivery

Restaurant meal delivery companies have begun to provide customers with meal arrival time estimations to inform the customers’ selection. Accurate estimations increase customer experience, whereas inaccurate estimations may lead to dissatisfaction. Estimating arrival times is a challenging prediction problem because of uncertainty in both delivery and meal preparation process. To account for both processes, we present an offline and online-offline estimation approaches. Our offline method uses supervised learning to map state features directly to expected arrival times. Our online-offline method pairs online simulations with an offline approximation of the delivery vehicles’ routing policy, again achieved via supervised learning. Our computational study shows that both methods perform comparably to a full near-optimal online simulation at a fraction of the computational time. We present an extensive analysis on how arrival time estimation changes the experience for customers, restaurants, and the platform. Our results indicate that accurate arrival times not only raise service perception but also improve the overall delivery system by guiding customer selections, effectively resulting in faster delivery and fresher food.

Houston Ship Channel Expansion Improvement Project – Navigation Channel Improvement Study : ship simulation results

In 2020, the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, provided technical oversight during a navigation study to assist the Galveston District evaluation of different channel widening alternatives for larger ships transiting the Houston Ship Channel (HSC), Texas. The widening proposals encompassed several areas of the HSC including the Bay Section, the Bayport Ship Channel, Barbours Cut Channel, and the Bayou Section. The study was performed at the San Jacinto College Maritime Technology and Training Center (SJCMTTC) Ship/Tug Simulator (STS) Facility in La Porte, TX. The SJCMTTC STS is a real-time simulator; therefore, events on the simulator happen at the same time rate as real life. A variety of environmental forces act upon the ship during the simulation transit. These include currents, wind, waves, bathymetry, and ship-to-ship interaction. Online simulations of the project were conducted at SJCMTTC over a 3-week period – May through June 2020. Several mariners including Houston Pilots and G&H tugboat Captains participated in the testing and validation exercises. ERDC oversight was performed remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results in the form of engineering observations, track plots, and pilot interviews were reviewed to develop final conclusions and recommendations regarding the final design.

Practical Work or Simulations? Voices of Millennial Digital Natives

Students nowadays grow up with electronic devices and are adept at navigating the virtual world. Practical activities may be more of a novelty for them than simulations. Using the topic of electric circuits as a context, we examined the ways in which Grade 11 students perceived and learned from practical work and simulations, respectively. In this quasi-experiment study, a group of 19 students used a free online simulations package “Circuit Construction Kit,” while another group of 17 students learnt through practical work. We administered a validated instrument to both groups and found that practical work and simulations supported students’ learning in similar ways. The interventions were then reversed so that all participants experienced both practical work and simulations. Finally, seven students from each group were selected for a group interview. Through the interviews, we identified features of simulations and practical work respectively that students believed contributed to their learning.

MABWISER: Parallelizable Contextual Multi-armed Bandits

Contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms are an effective approach for online sequential decision-making problems. However, there are limited tools available to support their adoption in the community. To fill this gap, we present an open-source Python library with context-free, parametric and non-parametric contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms. The MABWiser library is designed to be user-friendly and supports custom bandit algorithms for specific applications. Our design provides built-in parallelization to speed up training and testing for scalability with special attention given to ensuring the reproducibility of results. The API makes hybrid strategies possible that combine non-parametric policies with parametric ones, an area that is not explored in the literature. As a practical application, we demonstrate using the library in both batch and online simulations for context-free, parametric and non-parametric contextual policies with the well-known MovieLens data set. Finally, we quantify the performance benefits of built-in parallelization.

COVID-19 Inspired a STEM-Based Virtual Learning Model for Middle Schools—A Case Study of Qatar

An unprecedented turn in educational pedagogies due to the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the students’ learning process worldwide. This article describes developing a STEM-based online course during the schools’ closure in the COVID-19 epidemic to combat the virtual science classroom’s limitations that could promise an active STEM learning environment. This learning model of the online STEM-based course successfully developed and exercised on 38 primary–preparatory students helped them to overcome the decline in their learning productivity. Various digital learning resources, including PowerPoint presentations, videos, online simulations, interactive quizzes, and innovative games, were implemented as instructional tools to achieve the respective content objectives. A feedback mechanism methodology was executed to improve online instructional delivery and project learners’ role in a student-centered approach, thereby aiding in the course content’s qualitative assessment. The students’ learning behavior provided concrete insights into the program’s positive outcomes, witnessing minimal student withdrawals and maximum completed assignments. Conclusions had been drawn from the course assessment (by incorporating both synchronous and asynchronous means), student feedback, and SWOT analysis to evaluate the course’s effectiveness.

Online Simulations and Gamification

Higher education has seen a dramatic increase in the number of courses and programs offered in an online environment over the past two decades. As most online educational courses are asynchronous in nature, ensuring that applied learning happens in scenarios that replicate real-life events is of utmost importance especially in certain disciplines such as emergency and disaster management. With the advent of newer and advanced technologies, online gamifications and simulations offer a learning method that requires the students to use decision-making, problem solving, and critical thinking skills in a fictional scenario that imitates events that individuals in the particular career field will experience. This chapter is an examination of the use of gamifications and simulations in online higher education highlighting a holistic approach to gaming and simulations designed and implemented across an undergraduate emergency and disaster program.