Rethinking Pedagogy: Exploring the Potential of Digital Technology in Achieving Quality Education

(First Paragraph) The Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) is UNESCO’s Category 1 education Institute in the Asia-Pacific region devoted to education for peace and sustainable development, as enshrined in SDG Target 4.7. UNESCO MGIEP promotes the use of digital learning platforms where teachers and students can co-create and share a highly interactive learning experience. With the rise of the internet, there has been a proliferation of online content and digital resources intended to support teaching and learning, albeit widely varying in quality. Digital education media and resources, if carefully designed and implemented, have a significant potential to be mobilized on a massive scale to support transformative learning for building sustainable, flourishing societies

A safety tracking and sensoring system for school buses in Saudi Arabia

Technology can facilitate the daily movement of students to and from the schools. There are a number of IT systems that support the transportation of students, but the most important aspect is to ensure students’ safety. Especially with increasing accidents of forgotten students who fall asleep inside school buses. Such incidents may result in asphyxiation or death. This paper presents a system that contributes to reducing the accidents of forgotten the students inside the school buses by enabling the parents to track their children. It includes installing a sensor system in school buses to protect the students during their daily journeys to and from their School by utilizing IoT technologies

The Use of Technology to Continue Learning in Palestine Disrupted with COVID-19

This qualitative study examined how decision-makers and teachers have responded to offer education for all Palestinian students at the immediate onset of the COVID-19 outbreak and how technology is being used to continue education online. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants from parents, teachers and decision-makers in Palestine. Interview transcripts were coded using a grounded theory design with a constant comparative method. The findings show that participants identified that technologies such as mobile devices, social media and cloud computing would be useful for design and delivery of educational materials as well as raising safety awareness, and communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in Palestine. The findings also identify various challenges including the widening of the education\u27s digital divide and an increasingly negative attitude towards online education. The data also indicate that the first wave of the COVID-19 experience could be the roadmap for wave two and for the transition to sustainable online learning as a supplement to the traditional learning methods and not as a replacement. This research further demonstrates that teachers who are early adopters have a significant role in influencing both students and other teachers to adopt the transformation to online learning. In addition, the national and international initiatives with a multi-stakeholder partnership could provide sustained, long-term, real solutions for online learning

The State of Practice of Mobile Learning in Universitas Terbuka Indonesia

As a distance learning university, Universitas Terbuka (UT) uses mobile technology as an integral part of its online learning system. In addition to its mobile-interfacewebsite, online tutorials are also made accessible through mobile as well as handheld devices. In other words, UT students can literally study through their mobile devices from thevery first activity of registering for courses, paying the tuition fee, obtaining digital learning materials, accessing the digital library, reading online journals, as well as participating in online tutorials.With the continuous development of increasingly sophisticated smartphone technologies, it is important for UT to continuously improve its online learning system. The development of UT’s mobile learning, which was started in 2013, has gone through several phases. The first phase was the preparation of infrastructure, which includes the development of applications and frameworks. The second phase wasthe content development, which wasdone by the faculty using various media including text, audio, video, multimedia, and the utilisation of Open Education Resources (OER). The last and third phase wasthe program delivery, which involves tutors, technical/IT assistants, and other support systems to allow studentswith seamless accessto mobile learning using various mobile devices. This seems to be effective as shown by the data that demonstratesUT mobile learning is being accessed by students using different mobile devices with variousoperating systems.This chapter will give a glance on the state of practice of mobile learning in Indonesia as well as elaborate on the process and practice of mobile learning at Universitas Terbuka (The Indonesia Open University) as a dedicated distance learning university

Educational use cases from a shared exploration of e-books and iPads

E-books and e-book readers are becoming increasingly widely available, particularly for the general reader, and there have been many studies on their adoption. However, less is known about their use for educational and academic purposes. We report here on work carried out on e-books and e-book applications using iPads by academic and teaching staff. After considering pedagogical issues and reporting survey results, we identify a spiral of six key use case areas for e-books. This spiral of use cases moves from basic e-book use, through situational reading, e-books and learning, using multiple learning resources, collaborative/group learning, to e-book production. We discuss each of these use case areas and provide guidelines that will be of interest to practitioners and researchers alike

DICOM metadata: a useful resource for big data analytics

Postprint (published version

Similarity Reasoning over Semantic Context-Graphs

Similarity is a central cognitive mechanism for humans which enables a broad range of perceptual and abstraction processes, including recognizing and categorizing objects, drawing parallelism, and predicting outcomes. It has been studied computationally through models designed to replicate human judgment. The work presented in this dissertation leverages general purpose semantic networks to derive similarity measures in a problem-independent manner. We model both general and relational similarity using connectivity between concepts within semantic networks. Our first contribution is to model general similarity using concept connectivity, which we use to partition vocabularies into topics without the need of document corpora. We apply this model to derive topics from unstructured dialog, specifically enabling an early literacy primer application to support parents in having better conversations with their young children, as they are using the primer together. Second, we model relational similarity in proportional analogies. To do so, we derive relational parallelism by searching in semantic networks for similar path pairs that connect either side of this analogy statement. We then derive human readable explanations from the resulting similar path pair. We show that our model can answer broad-vocabulary analogy questions designed for human test takers with high confidence. The third contribution is to enable symbolic plan repair in robot planning through object substitution. When a failure occurs due to unforeseen changes in the environment, such as missing objects, we enable the planning domain to be extended with a number of alternative objects such that the plan can be repaired and execution to continue. To evaluate this type of similarity, we use both general and relational similarity. We demonstrate that the task context is essential in establishing which objects are interchangeable