Chinese Parents’ Perception of Emergency Remote K-12 Teaching-learning in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic

After Chinese government firstly released COVID-19 outbreak news in the world, the Chinese educational system launched the emergency remote teaching-learning (ERT) as the response to COVID-19 as new virus pandemic with the mission of “suspending schools without stopping teaching-learning”. The challenges that teachers, students and parents encountered and the ed-tech strategies that teachers and schools used in terms of effective remote teaching-learning has got the attention from the countries around the world. Since parents are the significant stakeholders of K-12 education, for better understanding the challenges in emergency remote teaching-learning from parents’ lens, their reactions are worth a word. In this qualitative case study, parent participants (N=741) from 16 provinces in mainland China gave responses to four open-ended questions in the web-based questionnaires released on wjx.cn (问卷星). The themes emerged from the thematic analysis. The participants emphasized that online teaching-learning can’t replace face-to-face one in the brick-and-mortar classrooms in terms of “no learning atmosphere” from the perspectives of students’ behavior, cognitive and emotion engagement. Parents held a pessimistic attitude towards the quality of online teaching. Parents argued that remote teaching-learning would be a disaster for students with poor self-regulation and learning autonomy. In depth, the parent participants’ concerns about emergency remote teaching-learning mirror the challenge of accountability in remote education. The current study suggests the school administrations to develop the systematic professional development programs for training the collaboration among in-service teachers, students and their parents how to develop online learning community and keeping student engagement in remote learning

Learning from the Emergency Remote Teaching-Learning in China When Primary and Secondary Schools Were Disrupted by COVID-19 Pandemic

China educational system launched the emergency remote teaching-learning (ERT) as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic with the mission of “suspending schools without stopping teaching-learning”. When schools moved to temporary remote instruction, teachers, students and parents encountered challenges in terms of deep remote teaching and learning. In the current study, parent (N=741) and teacher (N=145) from 16 provinces in China gave responses to four open-ended questions in the web-based questionnaires released on wjx.cn. The themes arose from the thematic analysis. The participants emphasized that online teaching-learning can’t replace face-to-face one in the brick-and-mortar classrooms in terms of the glitchy technology, engaging students into learning, enhancing students learning and leaning atmosphere. Teachers felt unprepared for teaching online. Teachers and parents also argued that remote teaching-learning only benet those students with good self-discipline and high autonomy in learning. The current study suggests the provincial governments equipping schools with a standardized online teaching-learning management system (LMS), followed by the instructional technology professional development for ensuring online teaching quality at timely manner. This might make ERT teaching evaluation possible. Schools can develop a checklist of prioritized perspectives and actionable strategies for preparing students and their parents for online learning success

Chinese Parents’ Perception of Emergency Remote Teaching-learning in COVID-19 Pandemic in China

After Chinese government firstly released COVID-19 outbreak news in the world, the Chinese educational system launched the emergency remote teaching-learning (ERT) as the response to COVID-19 as new virus pandemic with the mission of “suspending schools without stopping teaching-learning”. The challenges that teachers, students and parents encountered and the ed-tech strategies that teachers and schools used in terms of effective remote teaching-learning has got the attention from the countries around the world. Since parents are the significant stakeholders of K-12 education, for better understanding the challenges in emergency remote teaching-learning from parents’ lens, their reactions are worth a word. In this qualitative case study, parent participants (N=741) from 16 provinces in mainland China gave responses to four open-ended questions in the web-based questionnaires released on wjx.cn (问卷星). The themes emerged from the thematic analysis. The participants emphasized that online teaching-learning can’t replace face-to-face one in the brick-and-mortar classrooms in terms of “no learning atmosphere” from the perspectives of students’ behavior, cognitive and emotion engagement. Parents held a pessimistic attitude towards the quality of online teaching. Parents argued that remote teaching-learning would be a disaster for students with poor self-regulation and learning autonomy. In depth, the parent participants’ concerns about emergency remote teaching-learning mirror the challenge of accountability in remote education. The current study suggests the school administrations to develop the systematic professional development programs for training the collaboration among in-service teachers, students and their parents how to develop online learning community and keeping student engagement in remote learning

A rapid and sensitive determination of paclitaxel in rat plasma by UPLC-MS/MS method: Application to a pharmacokinetic study

AbstractA rapid and sensitive method for quantitative determination of paclitaxel in rat plasma was developed and validated by using ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). Docetaxel was used as an internal standard and diethyl ether was the liquid–liquid extraction agent. Multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode via positive electrospray ionization (ESI) was applied to detect paclitaxel and IS at the transitions m/z 854 → 286 and m/z 808.48 → 527.3, respectively. This method covered a linearity range from 5 to 5000 ng/ml, with the total run time of 3.0 min. In summary, a high-throughout UPLC-MS/MS method was successfully developed to measure paclitaxel in rat plasma and was applied to pharmacokinetic study after intravenous administration of paclitaxel

A mimicking technique of back pressure in the hardware-in-the-loop simulation of a fuel control unit

In the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation of the fuel control unit (FCU) for aero-engines, the back pressure has a great impact on the metered fuel, thus influencing the confidence of the simulation. During the practical working process of an aero-engine, the back pressure of the FCU is influenced by the combined effect of the pressure of the combustion chamber, the resistance of the spray nozzles, and the resistance of the distribution valve. There is a need to study the the mimicking technique of FCU back pressure. This paper models the fuel system of an aero-engine so as to reveal the impact of FCU back pressure on the metered fuel and come up with a scheme to calculate the equivalent FCU back pressure. After analyzing the requirements for mimicking the pressure, an automatic regulating facility is designed to adjust the FCU back pressure in real time. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify its performance. Results show that the mimicking technique of back pressure is well suited for application in HIL simulation. It is able to increase the confidence of the simulation and provide guidance to the implementation of mimicking the FCU back pressure

Learning to Solve Tasks with Exploring Prior Behaviours

Demonstrations are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for facilitating solving tasks with sparse rewards. However, the tasks in real-world scenarios can often have varied initial conditions from the demonstration, which would require additional prior behaviours. For example, consider we are given the demonstration for the task of \emph{picking up an object from an open drawer}, but the drawer is closed in the training. Without acquiring the prior behaviours of opening the drawer, the robot is unlikely to solve the task. To address this, in this paper we propose an Intrinsic Rewards Driven Example-based Control \textbf{(IRDEC)}. Our method can endow agents with the ability to explore and acquire the required prior behaviours and then connect to the task-specific behaviours in the demonstration to solve sparse-reward tasks without requiring additional demonstration of the prior behaviours. The performance of our method outperforms other baselines on three navigation tasks and one robotic manipulation task with sparse rewards. Codes are available at https://github.com/Ricky-Zhu/IRDEC