Promoting Students' Soft Skills in a Telecommunication Engineering Course with an Elevator Pitch Activity

An elevator pitch is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a process, product, service, organization, or event and its value proposition. The name comes from the idea that it should be possible to deliver the sum-mary within the time span of an elevator ride, so anywhere between 30 sec-onds and 2 minutes, which means the key points need to get across quickly. In this particular educational context, technical students have been encour-aged to defend, under the typical rules of the elevator pitch, the knowledge acquired during the semester in a specific subject. This contribution focuses on the classroom experience and how the transversality of the activity can help students to strive and think in a different way than they are used to in the classroom of a technical career.

BASAER Team: The First Arabic Robot Team for Building the Capacities of Visually Impaired Students to Build and Program Robots

the purpose of this study was to examine whether visually impaired students can build educational robots and program them if they receive adapted materials and instructions with guided instruction from well-trained educators in the fields of inclusive STEM Classrooms. Discussion of the technologies and our experimental approach is presented in this paper and validated through the continued successful effort with visually impaired students for two years of the program and specialists in the field of visual impairment and STEAM, we also validated our approach by performing experimental classes for students with different visual impairments and ages. The results indicated that the approach used by BASAER team was successful in enabling the blind and visually impaired students to build and program educational robotics and to participate effectively in national and international STEAM programs and competitions, with some limitations and Challenges encountered and explored during this research. The results from this study will be used to suggest a fully adapted system to support full inclusion for blind and visually impaired students in educational robots in STEAM context and to promote the adoption of this study and similar studies toward Inclusive STEM Classrooms.

Students Engagement and Development of Generic Skills in Gamified Hybrid Service-Learning Course

Hybrid Service-Learning, an emerging trend of combining co-curriculum course embedded with service-learning instructional strategies in online settings, has increasingly gained popularity, as many service-learning educators are moving into online platforms. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated its needs, thus forcing education systems worldwide to find alternatives to face-to-face instructions, one of them being Hybrid Service-Learning. This has prompted many researchers to attempt utilising gamification in online courses to increase students’ engagement. The purpose of this research was to report a gamified Hybrid Service-Learning (GAMYSEL) through students’ level of engagement proposed by Schlechty, used as a data classification to compare students’ scorings in their earning of points, badges, level and leaderboards. The results of the study indicated that, the students’ levels of engagement were relatively high through Advocacy Hybrid-Service Learning approach, where majority of them achieved the Strategic Compliance and Optimal Engagement categories. The students’ generic skills were further analysed with one-way repeated measures ANOVA and it was discovered that, GAMYSEL had positive impacts in developing these skills in five stages of service-learning. Both of these findings suggest that student’s engagement and generic skills had a significant effect on students learning after the use of GAMYSEL.

Wikis as a Tool for Co-constructed Learning in Higher Education – An Exploratory Study in an Albanian Higher Education

This study explores the effectiveness of wikis in a teaching course in teacher formation and its pedagogical implications with the aim of determining whether wikis will influence the learning experiences and the learning out-comes of the students in a middle-income, post-communist country as Albania. For this, we implemented student-generated wikis into a master’s course on teaching and examined student reflections on their learning outcomes and other pedagogical effects. A mixed method methodology was employed. The findings of the study were informed by triangulating data from the analysis of the student-generated wikis, students’ reflections on the experience, as well as a comparison of the learning outcomes based on the exit exams of this group of students and the group of the prior academic year. Our data suggest that wikis help support collaborative learning, but at the same time they also encourage independent thinking. Teachers’ authority is minimized, empowering students’ ownership and authorship, leading to a continuous process of modification and improvement through interactions among group members via wikis. The data present compelling evidence in favor of wikis, as an organic tool to facilitate co-constructed learning which students seem to enjoy.

Use of the Key Performance Index Evaluation Model for a Comparative Analysis of the Professional Teaching Quality of Economic Management

The key performance index (KPI) evaluation provides a guarantee for discipline construction, talent training, and research development and planning in colleges. Based on KPI evaluation model, this paper compares the professional teaching quality of economic management of different types of colleges, different teaching models, and different disciplines, through KPI appraisal. The results show that: teaching quality can be evaluated by several important indices, namely, teaching attitude, teaching content, teaching method, and teaching effect; the most important indices are teaching attitude and teaching content, followed by teaching effect and teaching method. The index scores of professional education mode were much higher than those of general education mode. Teaching effect is the highest rated index among students of accounting, and teaching attitude is the highest rated index among students of business administration. The research results lay the theoretical basis for colleges to improve KPI appraisal system and appraisal supervision system.

A Scenario of the Formative E-assessment Based on the ARCS Model: What Is the Impact on Student Motivation in Educational Context?

The purpose of this research is to measure the motivation of nursing students, option: multi-skilled nurse (n=58), following their participation in an e-learning activity in the form of formative quizzes. The pedagogical scenario was based on Keller's ARCS motivation model. Data were collected through the IMMS questionnaire adopted from the ARCS model. The results show that the students were motivated by the e-learning activity (mean score = 4.22±, 51091), and that the motivation variables studied correlated positively with the overall motivation score (p-value < .001). Through this research, it was found that an instructional scenario based on the ARCS model had a positive impact on students' motivation for e-learning, thus encouraging allied health educators to design educational tools that can motivate nursing students.

Teachers’ Roles in Online Environments: How AI Based Techniques Can Ease the Shift Challenges from Face-to-Face to Distance Learning

The Covid-19 emergency has brought a mandatory shift to online systems in the education sector worldwide. This document gives an overview about the online teaching challenges encountered from the teachers’ point view, restitutes how the teacher’s role in online settings can be determining in the successfulness of the learning experience and more importantly provides insights into Artificial Intelli-gence techniques that can solve the equation of transferring the role of teachers in face-to-face settings to distance learning environments.

A Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Students’ Performance in Virtual Learning Environment

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), such as Moodle and Blackboard, store vast data to help identify students' performance and engagement. As a result, researchers have been focusing their efforts on assisting educational institutions in providing machine learning models to predict at-risk students and improve their performance. However, it requires an efficient approach to construct a model that can ultimately provide accurate predictions. Consequently, this study proposes a hybrid machine learning framework to predict students' performance using eight classification algorithms and three ensemble methods (Bagging, Boosting, Voting) to determine the best-performing predictive model. In addition, this study used filter-based and wrapper-based feature selection techniques to select the best features of the dataset related to students' performance. The obtained results reveal that the ensemble methods recorded higher predictive accuracy when compared to single classifiers. Furthermore, the accuracy of the models improved due to the feature selection techniques utilized in this study.

Teachers' Perspective on Personal Learning Environments via Learning Management Systems Platform

In recent years, the landscapes of teaching and learning has changed because of the utilization of information and communications technologies. In this context, the most illustrative innovations are Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Despite of the LMS and PLEs popularity in ed-ucational contexts as well as the expand set of tools and services that they offer to learners and teachers; they are still in fancy stages. In order to present the challenges Personal Learning Environments were presented; however, it is obvious that PLEs will not replace LMS. Therefore, both types of environments should coexist and interact. In this manner, the current study took teachers’ perspective on integrating the third generation LMS into PLEs. In addition, this study conducted to find out the teachers’ perspective on how the LMS could enhance PLEs in terms of planning before applying the PLE's; designing a framework in the PLE’s; imple-menting the PLEs; interacting in PLEs; managing the learning process through the PLEs and utilizing technolo-gy in PLEs. The participants of the study were 575 teachers who were selected randomly from Saudi Arabia schools. The findings of this study found that teachers must apply a positive teaching approach, holding that knowledge is composed upon student-to-student interaction as well as student-to-teacher interaction. Further-more, this study revealed that teachers must enterprise, deliver, and support K-12 online learning.

Internship Effect Prediction for Physical Education Majors Based on Artificial Neural Network

Professional internship offers college students a golden chance to apply their theoretical knowledge to practice. Through internship, physical education (PE) majors can match the professional knowledge and skills learned at school with the competencies required by actual jobs. The relevant studies at home and abroad mainly attempt to improve the internship effect. This paper explores the influence of the diversity of job competencies on the internship effect of PE majors, and establishes a prediction model based on artificial neural network (ANN). Firstly, an evaluation index system (EIS) was constructed for the internship quality of PE majors, and a table was prepared for four types of internship jobs for PE majors, as well as their core competences. Then, the sample data for quality evaluation of PE majors’ internship were preprocessed and subjected to feature extraction, in the light of their sequential property. After that, a prediction model was proposed for the internship quality of PE majors, along with its optimization algorithm. The proposed model was proved effective through experiments.