Development and implementation of the MobILcaps application for the teaching and development of information literacy in Higher Education

This paper aims at develop, implement and evaluate the effectiveness of the MobIlCaps mobile application. On the basis of cognitive, constructivist and connectivist theories, it has been developed on an instructional design model, based on the user experience. In the context of mobile teaching in higher education, an innovative application is proposed for the self-learning of information literacy by students of Social Sciences. With the collaboration of both teachers and students, the application was developed, following the ADDIE model, through the phases of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. The last phase provided the improvement proposals for the optimization of the final version of the tool, a progressive open access website. The application is organized into six capsules that follow the framework of ACRL (2015): learn, search, evaluate, create, research and disseminate. It includes multimedia resources in the form of microcontents that highlight readability, organization and visualization as characteristics. The app focuses on the user and is a relevant instrument to facilitate teaching The different analyses, followed by proposals for improvement and revisions, led to the achievement of a very useful application for students, teachers and librar

Gamification in education: game design elements in the 'Solutions second edition' EFL textbook set

The students today are often referred to as ‘digital natives’ who have grown up in the digital age and as a result think and process information differently than the previous generations (Prensky 2001). Living in a digital age with digital natives, whose perception of learning differs from that of the generation(s) preceding them, it is the duty of educators to be receptive to new methodologies of learner engagement that might help to shape a learning environment better suited to the new type of learners (Dyer 2015:65). The need for a new approach to teaching and learning in general is stated also in the Estonian Lifelong Learning Strategy 2020, a document that guides the developments in education in Estonia in 2014-2020. Gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al. 2011), is said to have great potential also in education as it helps to increase both user engagement and motivation Simões et al. (2013). The aim of this thesis is to locate and analyse gamification elements in a textbook set used in Estonian schools and to see how the elements present exploit the potential of gamification in the context of language teaching. This would provide an idea of what the starting point would be in using gamification in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons and what kind of support it could give for gamifying EFL classes. Knowing game elements would help teachers incorporate the elements into the methods they are already familiar with (Keramidas 2010). The thesis consists of an introduction, two core chapters and a conclusion. The introduction explains the reasons for addressing the topic, states the research questions and introduces the structure of the paper. The first chapter presents the definition of gamification, provides examples of gamified systems, discusses criticism towards gamification and the following response, and introduces different gamification taxonomies. It also includes the list of game elements used in the analysis conducted in the second chapter. The list of game elements is compiled based on game element taxonomies suggested by Cugelman (2013), Blohm and Leimeister (2013 in Seaborn and Fels 2015:19), and Robson et al. (2015). The second chapter gives a short overview of the Solutions Second Edition textbook set, introduces the game elements found in different parts of the set, and discusses the gamification potential of the set. The conclusion provides a summary of the findings.http://www.ester.ee/record=b477553

A Comprehensive Survey of Convolutions in Deep Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends

In today's digital age, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a subset of Deep Learning (DL), are widely used for various computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. There are numerous types of CNNs designed to meet specific needs and requirements, including 1D, 2D, and 3D CNNs, as well as dilated, grouped, attention, depthwise convolutions, and NAS, among others. Each type of CNN has its unique structure and characteristics, making it suitable for specific tasks. It's crucial to gain a thorough understanding and perform a comparative analysis of these different CNN types to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, studying the performance, limitations, and practical applications of each type of CNN can aid in the development of new and improved architectures in the future. We also dive into the platforms and frameworks that researchers utilize for their research or development from various perspectives. Additionally, we explore the main research fields of CNN like 6D vision, generative models, and meta-learning. This survey paper provides a comprehensive examination and comparison of various CNN architectures, highlighting their architectural differences and emphasizing their respective advantages, disadvantages, applications, challenges, and future trends

Social Effectiveness of Tertiary Education for Adults in Mid-life

No abstract available

Mini-COVIDNet: Efficient Lightweight Deep Neural Network for Ultrasound Based Point-of-Care Detection of COVID-19

submittedVersio

Towards the development of learning through microlearning

Esta investigación está referida a la aplicación de una metodología denominada microaprendizaje que incluyó la creación de píldoras o cápsulas de contenido que le brindaron al estudiante un aprendizaje accesible en cualquier momento y en cualquier lugar gracias a su ubicuidad y contexto virtual, para la aplicación del microaprendizaje en un ámbito instruccional. Se siguió un diseño que ayudó a mejorar la práctica pedagógica. El objetivo principal de esta investigación fue determinar cómo el uso del microaprendizaje influye en el aprendizaje del área de Ciencias Sociales en estudiantes de secundaria. Este estudio tuvo un enfoque cuantitativo, diseño experimental, nivel preexperimental, donde se tomó como muestra a estudiantes del tercer grado de secundaria del Perú. Para la recolección de datos se aplicaron técnicas de encuesta con el fin de comparar el rendimiento académico con respecto al pre y post test de la aplicación del microaprendizaje. Los resultados del estudio revelaron que el microaprendizaje influyó satisfactoriamente en el aprendizaje en el área de ciencias sociales ya que esta metodología de aprendizaje es fácil, accesible, flexible, ubicua y didáctica, demostrando que puede ser un gran recurso didáctico para el docente en la enseñanza. del Area. This research is referred to the application of a methodology called microlearning that included the creation of content pills or capsules which provided the student with learning accessible at any time and in any place thanks to its ubiquity and virtual context, for the application of microlearning an instructional design was followed that helped to improve the pedagogical practice. The main objective of this research was to determine how the use of microlearning influences learning in the area of Social Science in secondary school students. This study had a quantitative approach, experimental design, pre-experimental level, where students in the third grade of secondary school in Peru were taken as a sample. For data collection, survey techniques were applied in order to compare academic performance with respect to the pre- and post-test of the application of microlearning. The results of the study revealed that microlearning had a satisfactory influence on learning in the area of social sciences since this learning methodology is easy, accessible, flexible, ubiquitous and didactic, showing that it can be a great didactic resource for the teacher in the teaching of the area

Students’ reflection on co-design: A cross-disciplinary collaboration between two SADC countries

This reflective article responds to the question: “What values and lessons can be gained from co-design in a culturally and disciplinarily diverse cross-university student project?” The Polar Project is regarded as just such an initiative and was intended to boost innovative product development across fields of study between two higher education institutions (HEIs) located in Southern African Development Community (SADC) region countries.As lecturers, facilitators and mentors, the article’s authors adopted a qualitative and interpretive approach for analysing student “reflections-in-action”, using both reports and reflective questionnaires during the project’s co-design process. We formulated our own analysis methods for the process of critical reflection, based on Schön’s (1987) “reflection-on-action” model, to establish a way forward for the project. Through these reflections, the following critical themes were identified: (1) rewards for cross-cultural exchange; (2) multiple appreciations for collaboration; and (3) communication and miscommunication in cross-disciplinary groups.These themes provide an account of the practical implications for extracurricular activities geared towards the agenda of internationalising higher educational practices, such as those applied in conducting this project. The contribution we hope to make is that, as HEIs enter onto internationalisation agendas, the voices and experiences of students should be recognised if, as important beneficiaries of the university system, they are to be properly considered

UNO STEM Strategic Plan

The following document is a strategic plan for STEMeducation at UNO as of September 5, 2013. Thedocument represents nearly six months of strategicplanning discussions, meetings, and conversationsbetween those of us on the writing team and many ofyou, our colleagues and friends that share our passionfor excellence in STEM education at UNO. It is alsothe result of a review of our local STEM statistics, theprofessional literature on STEM learning, and a sampleof what other universities are doing to enhance STEMlearning on their campuses. The document is intended tobe a very dynamic one that will be revisited yearly as wecontinue to move steadily forward. In an appendix, wehave listed more than 120 individuals who have alreadyeither reviewed the document or contributed to it in someway. We have received feedback and contributions on theplan from so many people over a relatively short periodof time that it has been difficult to keep track of everyonewho has contributed, and we apologize if we missedincluding anyone on the list. As a strategic planningteam, we are certainly appreciative of the many sharedideas, suggestions, and thoughts, and we continue tolook forward to working with everyone who is interested in contributing to the ongoing UNO STEM education conversations and efforts

Representation Learning for Texts and Graphs: A Unified Perspective on Efficiency, Multimodality, and Adaptability

[...] This thesis is situated between natural language processing and graph representation learning and investigates selected connections. First, we introduce matrix embeddings as an efficient text representation sensitive to word order. [...] Experiments with ten linguistic probing tasks, 11 supervised, and five unsupervised downstream tasks reveal that vector and matrix embeddings have complementary strengths and that a jointly trained hybrid model outperforms both. Second, a popular pretrained language model, BERT, is distilled into matrix embeddings. [...] The results on the GLUE benchmark show that these models are competitive with other recent contextualized language models while being more efficient in time and space. Third, we compare three model types for text classification: bag-of-words, sequence-, and graph-based models. Experiments on five datasets show that, surprisingly, a wide multilayer perceptron on top of a bag-of-words representation is competitive with recent graph-based approaches, questioning the necessity of graphs synthesized from the text. [...] Fourth, we investigate the connection between text and graph data in document-based recommender systems for citations and subject labels. Experiments on six datasets show that the title as side information improves the performance of autoencoder models. [...] We find that the meaning of item co-occurrence is crucial for the choice of input modalities and an appropriate model. Fifth, we introduce a generic framework for lifelong learning on evolving graphs in which new nodes, edges, and classes appear over time. [...] The results show that by reusing previous parameters in incremental training, it is possible to employ smaller history sizes with only a slight decrease in accuracy compared to training with complete history. Moreover, weighting the binary cross-entropy loss function is crucial to mitigate the problem of class imbalance when detecting newly emerging classes. [...