Fermatean Fuzzy DEMATEL and MMDE Algorithm for Modelling the Barriers of Implementing Education 4.0: Insights from the Philippines

Technological transitions in the education sector of developing economies are faced with a range of barriers, involving resource scarcity, socio-cultural concerns, and issues related to management and policy. The popularity of Industry 4.0 has prompted Education 4.0 (EDUC4), an approach to learning that involves transformation using advanced technologies. While a recent work reported a comprehensive list of barriers to EDUC4 implementation, particularly in developing economies, further analysis to identify those priority barriers remains a gap. Thus, this work addresses this gap by introducing a novel methodological extension of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method following the integration of Fermatean fuzzy sets (FFS). The FFS, compared to other fuzzy environments, could capture higher levels of uncertainties that are associated when eliciting judgments necessary for the DEMATEL. Such integration is aided by the maximum mean de-entropy (MMDE) algorithm, which analytically determines the threshold value crucial for constructing the prominence-relation map of the DEMATEL. Following its application in evaluating the implementation of EDUC4 in Philippine universities, the critical barriers are the lack of training resources, costs, insufficiency of available technologies, skills gap of human resources, knowledge gap, and the complexity of the learning platforms. Among this set, barriers related to cost and lack of training resources are deemed the most prominent ones. The statistical test on the impact of addressing the two prominent barriers shows that addressing the barrier related to costs yields statistically more favorable results regarding the mitigation of other EDUC4 implementation barriers. Although these insights may contain idiosyncrasies, they can serve as starting points of discussion in other relevant developing economies. These methodological and practical contributions advance the development of analytical tools under uncertainty that can handle pressing problems such as the EDUC4 implementation.

Scientific Institutions Should Support Inclusive Engagement: Reflections on the AAAS Center for Public Engagement Approach

Scientists’ engagement with society on critical environmental and health issues is essential to reaching positive and equitable long-term outcomes. We argue that stronger institutional support for public engagement is necessary and that inclusive practices should be built into public engagement training and relationships. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)’s Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology provides a model of support for scientists that we believe other scientific institutions can replicate and expand on. This model prioritizes representative and accessible science communication training, resources (e.g., funding and staff and peer support), opportunities to practice engagement, and rewards and incentives for doing engagement. We describe our programs in each of these areas and reflect on how well each builds scientists’ engagement skills and institutional capacity, and whether each embodies and models thoughtful, accessible, and representative engagement. Through these various approaches, the Center communicates to other scientific institutions that engagement by scientists should be valued, celebrated, and supported, and builds capacity for individual scientists to do effective engagement. We argue that these supports can be applied by other scientific institutions to reflect and incorporate society’s diverse needs and concerns, thus truly serving the public and making science and scientific institutions stronger for it.

Investigation for utilization of training resources in technical education: A comparative study

This research study presents a comparative study between the quarter and the semester systems in the technical institutes, in terms of scheduling, training, and utilizing the training resources such as classrooms/halls capacity and employing the instructors. The size of the study sample was represented by the total number of students in classrooms/halls for the study courses in the quarter system by 8836 students distributed over 363 sections. While in the semester system 10360 students distributed over 358 sections. Thus, a comparison was made based on one training year between the two training systems for basic skills courses. The samples were used to know the effect of class capacity and teaching loads on the training system by making initial comparisons, and statistical tools were used where averages of class capacity and teaching loads were calculated to know the status and trends of the data using the plot box. In addition to descriptive statistics (Two samples F-test for variance) and finally, (t-test: Two samples assuming unequal variance) were selected. The p-value less than 0.05 of single-tailed confirmed that classroom capacity and instructors’ load were higher in the semester system compared to the quarter system.

Research data management and services: Resources for different data practitioners

The emergence of data-driven research and demands for the establishment of Research Data Management (RDM) has created interest in academic institutions and research organizations globally. Some of the libraries especially in developed countries have started offering RDM services to their communities. Although lagging behind, some academic libraries in developing countries are at the stage of planning or implementing the service. However, the level of RDM awareness is very low among researchers, librarians and other data practitioners. The objective of this paper is to present available open resources for different data practitioners particularly researchers and librarians. It includes training resources for both researchers and librarians, Data Management Plan (DMP) tool for researchers; data repositories available for researchers to freely archive and share their research data to the local and international communities. A case study with a survey was conducted at the University of Dodoma to identify relevant RDM services so that librarians could assist researchers to make their data accessible to the local and international community. The study findings revealed a low level of RDM awareness among researchers and librarians. Over 50% of the respondent indicated their perceived knowledge as poor in the following RDM knowledge areas; DMP, data repository, long term digital preservation, funders RDM mandates, metadata standards describing data and general awareness of RDM. Therefore, this paper presents available open resources for different data practitioners to improve RDM knowledge and boost the confidence of academic and research libraries in establishing the service.

Phase Tracking Sequences for 5G NR in 52.6-71 GHz Band: Design and Analysis

This paper presents a novel approach to the phase tracking reference signal (PTRS) design for phase noise impact compensation in the 5G NR communication systems intended to work in a new 52.6 GHz to 71 GHz frequency band. For detailed problem illustration, the phase noise compensation algorithms are discussed and explained, from the basic common phase error (CPE) compensation to the MMSE-base inter-carrier interference (ICI) filtering. Performance of the different phase noise compensation algorithms is investigated for the baseline PTRS accepted in the current 5G NR specification and compared with the newly proposed approach to the PTRS design. This approach is based on nulling the subcarriers adjacent to the reference signals to minimize influence of the ICI on the estimation process. It was shown that new nulling PTRS design outperforms currently used distributed PTRS structure. In addition, numerical results represent a trade-off between the filter size and the amount of the allocated training resources to achieve better performance. It was shown that proposed PTRS structures and processing algorithms give ICI compensation level very close to optimal scheme and thus, different approaches (such as time domain compensation) may be required for further progress.

Mentoring as a potential means to assist consumer representatives contribute effectively to the assessment of health technologies in Australia: a pragmatic review

Objectives This project was implemented on behalf of the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Consumer Consultative Committee (CCC) to explore training to support and retain new consumer representatives to participate effectively in HTA committees. These committees are key parts of the Australian Government's health system. Currently, there is no training available to them, specific to their roles in HTA committees. Hypothesizing that mentoring is appropriate, the project team undertook a literature review to identify definitions of mentoring, its benefits, skills requirements, resources, examples of best practice, and how mentoring might support consumer representatives in formal health technology assessment committee structures. Methods A rapid review was commenced by the project team and fifty-seven articles were identified and read independently. Following discussion, the team revised its approach as there was little evidence to assess and drew upon thirty-five articles where elements of mentoring were described. Discussion was followed by a thematic qualitative analysis exploring mentoring models. Results The project team agreed that features of mentoring programs were necessary to design a mentoring program under the headings of definitions, mentors’ qualities, benefits of training, resources, other considerations, and evaluation. These assist the design of a pilot project to test mentoring's effectiveness. Conclusion Mentoring may assist consumers working in the health technology area to develop their skills and competencies and contribute to representing the needs of health consumers in the approval of applications. A pilot mentoring program is currently being designed and will run with one mentor and one mentee in an HTA committee.

Distance Work with the Preparation of Future Managers of Physical Culture in the Conditions of a Post-Pandemic Society

Due to the spread of the Covid-19 virus, all countries began to introduce quarantine measures, which led to the closure of all higher education institution indefinitely. They were forced to switch to a distance learning process in a short time. The readiness for this process was different, purely technical problems arose - the lack of the Internet, computers, educational materials on the network. And most importantly, the teachers are not ready for distance learning. The IT industry was the first to respond to the needs of teachers and students in physical culture and sports: the power of channels was increased, a large number of services and tools for teaching appeared. For video conferencing, the ZOOM tool turned out to be very popular, a large number of blogs with training recommendations were published on social networks, distance courses were held on the development of training resources and the organization of training. After the weakening of quarantine in the world, it became clear that humanity has entered a new stage of development, where distance learning will play a big role. Therefore, it is important to analyze the results of the distance learning process and determine the priority ways of developing online education in training future managers of physical culture and sports. The article is devoted to the problems of using distance work in the training of future managers of physical culture and sports.

Educators’ Reasons for Not Practising 2SLGBTQ+ Inclusive Education

In this article, we analyze educators’ self-reported reasons for not addressing LGBTQ topics in their schools in order to develop a clearer picture of the barriers that prevent educators from engaging in LGBTQ-supportive practices. Using hierarchal OLS (ordinary least squares) and logistic regression models to analyze the impacts of demographic, individual-based, and school-based barriers to practising LGBTQ inclusive education, we found that the most common reasons for inaction reported by educators were a lack of training/resources and general fear of opposition from various sources; however, educators who felt that confidence in the level of support for LGBTQ-inclusive education at the school level were less likely to give these as reasons for inaction.

Generalisation Gap of Keyword Spotters in a Cross-Speaker Low-Resource Scenario

Models for keyword spotting in continuous recordings can significantly improve the experience of navigating vast libraries of audio recordings. In this paper, we describe the development of such a keyword spotting system detecting regions of interest in Polish call centre conversations. Unfortunately, in spite of recent advancements in automatic speech recognition systems, human-level transcription accuracy reported on English benchmarks does not reflect the performance achievable in low-resource languages, such as Polish. Therefore, in this work, we shift our focus from complete speech-to-text conversion to acoustic similarity matching in the hope of reducing the demand for data annotation. As our primary approach, we evaluate Siamese and prototypical neural networks trained on several datasets of English and Polish recordings. While we obtain usable results in English, our models’ performance remains unsatisfactory when applied to Polish speech, both after mono- and cross-lingual training. This performance gap shows that generalisation with limited training resources is a significant obstacle for actual deployments in low-resource languages. As a potential countermeasure, we implement a detector using audio embeddings generated with a generic pre-trained model provided by Google. It has a much more favourable profile when applied in a cross-lingual setup to detect Polish audio patterns. Nevertheless, despite these promising results, its performance on out-of-distribution data are still far from stellar. It would indicate that, in spite of the richness of internal representations created by more generic models, such speech embeddings are not entirely malleable to cross-language transfer.

Stakeholder Experiences, Attitudes and Perspectives on Inclusive Education for Children with Developmental Disabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa: a Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies

Inclusive education (IE) is a key strategy in addressing the needs of children with autism and other developmental disabilities (DD) in sub-Saharan Africa, who rarely access specialist care or quality education. We aimed to systematically review qualitative research on stakeholder experiences, attitudes and perspectives on IE for pupils with DD in mainstream schools in sub-Saharan Africa. We searched five databases and selected relevant studies through a two-stage screening process. We synthesised the papers identified through template analysis of the Results and Discussion sections, guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. Thirty-two publications met the inclusion criteria. The studies were conducted in seven countries and explored the experiences of pupils with DD, parents, peers without DD and teachers. Multiple barriers (e.g. unclear policies, insufficient training and support for teachers) and opportunities (e.g. teachers’ commitment to inclusion, collaboration between teachers, the work of NGOs) for implementing IE for pupils with DD in sub-Saharan Africa were identified, occurring across national and community contexts and school, classroom and individual teacher levels. To effectively implement IE for pupils with DD, teachers need access to appropriate training, resources and support. Governments can capitalise on motivated teachers and relevant work of NGOs.