Using Embossed QR Codes on Product Packaging for People with Visual Impairments

Vision impairment severely impacts quality of life among adult populations. People with vision impairment often have to deal with a number of problems in their every-day life. One of them is related with their shopping and after sales experience. They need assistive tools so that they can get information about the products they shop and store in their home. QR codes is a well-known technology that contains a link and directs mobile users to a specified website. This website can include various and multimodal information related to a product that can easily be received through audio from peopled with visual impairments. In this paper we propose a solution for people with visual impairments in order to improve the way they shop. From the company’s side, QR code labels are printed and placed on the product’s packaging while on the same time a mobile application that supports QR code reading has been implemented. The users, scanning the QR code of a product using the mobile application, can seamlessly be redirected to the product-related audio information. The proposed approach and the implemented mobile application were tested by a group of people with vision impairment in order to assess its usability, satisfaction and intention to use. The evaluation results revealed that people with vision impairment find the provided mobile application useful and easy to use, while they are totally satisfied with the proposed approach, and they intend to use it in the future

Facebook and Moodle integration into instructional media design courses: A comparative analysis of students’ learning experiences using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model

Despite the educational potential of Facebook and Moodle, there are still unanswered questions about their impact on the student learning experience in a well-defined instructional design framework. This study aimed to compare the learning experiences of students who used Moodle (control group) and Facebook (experimental group), in terms of Community of Inquiry presence indicators, i.e., cognitive, teaching, and social presence. Several learning activities for the development of learning environments were carried out by 97 students who were enrolled in instructional media design courses. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analysis indicated that students using either Moodle or Facebook as their learning platform had similar perceptions of teaching and cognitive presence; however, Facebook users had a better social presence in the Community of Inquiry than their Moodle counterparts. Another point worth noting is that the experimental group’s female participants had better teaching presence, cognitive presence, and overall learning experience than their male peers

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

Developing a student model for distance education.

The current thesis describes a number of educational problems which arise in asynchronous distance education, such as discontinuity of educational sessions or lack of effective student supervising, and explores how such problems may be addressed by the use of Student Models. A number of typical examples of Student Models that have been developed are reviewed, in order to indicate the uses and the achievements of Student Models in education. The question of how Student Models could potentially be useful in asynchronous distance education is discussed, in addition to criteria for testing the applicability of such models. Furthermore, the pilot implementation of a student model called See Yourself Improve (SYIM) and the application of this model to a real asynchronous distance education session as a field test is described. The thesis closes with an evaluation of the feedback provided by the field test participants, and the modifications/recommendations for further improvement of the SYIM model

Identification of Conflicting Questions in the PARES System

Student testing and knowledge assessment is a significant aspect of the learning process. In a number of cases, it is expedient not to present the exact same test to all learners all the time (Pritchett, 1999). This may be desired so that cheating in the exam is made harder to carry out or so that the learners can take several practice tests on the same subject as part of the course. This study presents an e-testing platform, namely PARES, which aims to provide assessment services to academic staff by facilitating the creation and management of question banks and powering the delivery of nondeterministically generated test suites. PARES uses a conflict detection algorithm based on the vector space model to compute the similarity between questions and exclude questions which are deemed to have an unacceptably large similarity from appearing in the same test suite. The conflict detection algorithm and a statistical evaluation of its accuracy are presented. Evaluation results show that PARES succeeds in detecting question types at about 90% and its efficiency can be further increased through continuing education and enrichment of the system’s correlation vocabulary

Artificial intelligence and internet: a web-based education environment for asynchronous distance education employing students models and case based reasoning techniques

The scope of this Phd thesis is the implementation of a web based education Enviroment that remedy the educational disadvantages of Asychronous Distance Education. The environment is called See Yourself Improve (SYIM) andis based on two inhavative axis; α) The use of Student Models β) The employment of Core Based Reasoning in Asychronous Distance Educations. SYIM emphasize on procedures that monitor students learning styles in order to construct the relevant Student Model, in addition with procedures responsible for the provision of personalised distance education services. SYIM contributes to the improvement of the tutors ability to monitor the individual learning needs of each student and to keep a truck of the feedbsck provided to the latter. On the other hand, SYIM provides to the students the benefit of the intense supervision related to their individual learning needs, and the effective support and guidance on how to overcome a misconception or a performance gap towards the achievement of better context comprehension SYIM's formative and summative evaluation , during a pilot testing session demonstrated that SYIM is a quite usefull web based Education Environment