USES OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA IN COLLEGE CLASSES: A SURVEY OF MANDI BAHA-UD-DIN AND BHALWAL COLLEGES

The paper explores the use of electronic media in college level classes in smaller cities of Punjab province. It is argued if electronic media is used in classes by the college teachers in the classes, it can enhance effectiveness and also learning to the part of the students. It may attract students, creating in them more interest in class activities and sharing of knowledge. The use of electronic devices and different applications; YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and electronic mails, and search engines such as Google Chrome, internet explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc., inculcates enthusiasm among the students and the teacher performance can become livelier fulfilling the objectives of learning in the class. The study has been undertaken by surveying a number of college teachers from various areas of the province of Punjab. Its results manifest that there is an increase of use of electronic media by the teachers in preparation as well as delivery of lectures. They also motivate the students to use these resources for learning skills. The study concludes if regular application of such technologies is made possible as a vibrant variable it would play a vital contribution to institutional competitiveness, improve the learning and teaching experience and meet students’ growing expectations of improved use of ICT (Sweeney, 2009)

ManyClasses 1: Assessing the Generalizable Effect of Immediate Feedback Versus Delayed Feedback Across Many College Classes

Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, which threatens the external validity of the results. In this article, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benefits of recommended practices across a variety of authentic educational contexts—a model we call ManyClasses. The core feature is that researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations. We report the first ManyClasses study, in which we examined how the timing of feedback on class assignments, either immediate or delayed by a few days, affected subsequent performance on class assessments. Across 38 classes, the overall estimate for the effect of feedback timing was 0.002 (95% highest density interval = [−0.05, 0.05]), which indicates that there was no effect of immediate feedback compared with delayed feedback on student learning that generalizes across classes. Furthermore, there were no credibly nonzero effects for 40 preregistered moderators related to class-level and student-level characteristics. Yet our results provide hints that in certain kinds of classes, which were undersampled in the current study, there may be modest advantages for delayed feedback. More broadly, these findings provide insights regarding the feasibility of conducting within-class randomized experiments across a range of naturally occurring learning environments.

Let’s be Buddhists for the Next Few Weeks!

This paper discusses the risks and rewards of integrating theory and practice in the study of yoga and meditation in college classes. It focuses on a case study of my Yoga, mindfulness, and Indian philosophy course. The course combines hatha yoga and meditation practice with the study of those practices and their origins. We use yoga and meditation to relieve stress and anxiety. We study Buddhist and Hindu worldviews. We examine ethical issues in the ways that yoga and meditation are appropriated and removed from their religious contexts (including the ways we’re using them in the course itself), we reflect on the ways in which our practice differs from traditional practices, we assess different types of contemporary practice, and we weigh the benefits and the costs of our Western embrace of yoga and meditation.

Intelligent Voice Instructor-assistant System for Collaborative and Interactive Classes

College classes are becoming increasingly large. A critical component in scaling class size is the collaboration and interactions among instructors, teaching assistants, and students. We develop a prototype of anIntelligent Voice Instructor-AssistantSystem (IVIAS)for supportinglargeClasses,in whichAmazon Web Services, Alexa Voice Services and self-developed services are used. It uses ascraping service for reading the questions and answers from the past and current course discussion boards, organizes the questions in JSON format and stored them in thedatabase, which can be accessed by AWS Alexa skills. When a voice question from a student comes, Alexais used fortranslating the voice sentence into texts. Then Siamesedeep LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)model is introducedto calculate the similarity between the question asked and the questions in the database to find the best-matched answer. Questions with no match will be sent to the instructor, and instructor’s answer will be added into the database. Experiments show that the implemented model achieve promising results that can lead to a practical system. IVIAS starts with a small set of questions. It can grow through learning and improving when more and more questions are asked and answered.

Framing Effects and Group Differences in Public Opinion about Prison Pell Grants

ABSTRACT After years of gridlock on the issue, a bipartisan group of members of Congress struck a deal in 2020 to restore eligibility for inmates to access Pell Grants. Evidence indicates that college education programs in prison reduce recidivism and, consequently, state corrections expenditures, but legislators in prior decades feared that voters would resent government subsidy of college classes for criminals. To assess the contemporary politics of the issue, we analyze data from a framing experiment embedded in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that Americans, on average, neither support nor oppose the proposal to restore inmates’ Pell Grant eligibility; however, exposure to arguments about the proposal’s benefits to inmates in particular and American society more broadly both increased subjects’ support. We further explore how this framing effect varies across political partisanship and racial resentment. We find that both frames elicited a positive response from subjects, especially among Democrats and subjects with low or moderate racial resentment.

Developing Collaborative Thinkers: Rethinking how we Define, Teach, and Assess Class Participation

Introduction: Class participation is a common component of many college classes and is typically defined as involving students’ active, oral engagement in class. Statement of the Problem: Class participation is often an under-utilized pedagogical tool for skill-building and development. Literature Review: We present an evidence-based framework that encourages instructors and students to rethink class participation as collaboration. Drawing on a review of over 40 years of research, we argue that this framework for defining class participation will lead to better classroom discussions, academic and social-emotional benefits for students, and prepare students with essential workforce readiness skills. Teaching Implications: We describe how instructors can adopt our framework with evidence-based suggestions for: (1) redefining participation as collaboration with explicit criteria (2) structuring course experience to develop students as active collaborators (3) working to build productive classroom teams, and (4) evaluating participation through a collaborative lens. Conclusions: We offer a novel framework for redefining participation through a collaborative lens, along with a suite of evidence-based suggestions for shifting the thought processes and behaviors of students toward collaboration.