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Computer support of teaching is linked to terms like e-Learning, Technology-enhanced learning and Educational technology. Despite the very high level of the global IT services, networks, and actual clouds, which are also used in education, from a personalized teacher point of view, this is mostly only technological infrastructure that can be used f...
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... in real life, a teacher uses commonly multiple home or work computers, i.e. client computers and notebooks, including virtual spaces of clouds and networks. Figure 2 illustrates such personal infrastructure which was developed within the long-term research on TEL to overcome the technological barriers mentioned above. ...
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... matter whether a teacher teaches ten to hundred bachelor students or he solves automation of personal processes. To overcome this time barrier, it is important to identify which activities he must often repeat, in order to write appropriate programming codes. As regards the computer-computer file transmission when using the ICT infrastructure in Fig. 2, one has various alternatives, i.e. using USB, file manager, Windows Explorer or WIFI to copy/move or download/upload the files. However, if he often needs to transfer files between folder C:\AA and D:\BB he can automate it e.g. by the command written into the bat ...
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... must transmit files between home computers, IBM BOX cloud and faculty's cloud. The quickest way is by using IBM BOX cloud, which enables synchronization, so, it is possible to write the following bat-file command: XCOPY C:\AA\file.* C:\USERS\…\BOX SYNC\file.* (i.e. to copy the file into BOX Sync-folder on teacher's computer). In the case as in Fig. 2 that WPad is installed both on the faculty's cloud and client computers/notebook (actually Windows 10) the bat-file command could be: XCOPY C:\AA\file.* \\TSCLIENT\D\BB\file.* As regards the transmission of BIKE(E)/WPad-files (database tables), it is possible to save them directly to the BOX Sync-folder. As was presented within the FTC ...
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... mentioned. Basically, the life-cycle of technological tools is too short (3-5 years), while the teacher needs the technology for much longer periods. The authors' research has shown that the best solution to this problem is to develop both their own educational software and personalized ICT infrastructure for educational data transmission (see Fig. 2). In other words, the sustainability of the computer support of long-term teaching was achieved by using the all-in-one software application BIKE(E)/WPad (it has been in use for more than ten years). The application was continually developed as an all-in-one software while teaching around two thousand bachelor students under umbrella ...
Citations
Research on IT integration into teaching is an interdisciplinary field that has both educational (didactics) and informatics components. In particular, the situation with the Covid 19 pandemic has forced a push to address personal IT support for teachers in distance education. However, this runs into the problem of the lack of personal educational software, so that in practice the teacher has to adapt to existing technology and test how it can be used for teaching. In this context, the work of a university teacher requires the mass creation of educational content, its transfer between offline computers (laptop, classroom computers) and online environments (web, virtual learning environments, academic information systems, clouds, networks). Given the nature of university teaching, IT support solutions for self-study also face a challenge. However, no single technology covers such a broad scope, so there is a lack of universal solutions. The authors minimize this gap by programming universal software tailored to the needs of the teacher and by building a combined offline/online IT infrastructure on which to conduct the research. Collaborative research by an international team using the infrastructure is a solution to automate the creation of educational packages, including the multi-lingual support. The article clarifies the categories of barriers that the team had to overcome, either from a didactic or an informatics perspective. Here, a new paradigm using a specific data structure (called virtual knowledge) for the rapid reduction and concentration of educational content was proven to simulate virtually any teacher activity. Therefore, the goal of further research is to use the results and experiences to date to build a multilingual learning portal.KeywordsIT integrationDistance learning educational softwareCollaboratively researchMultilingual educational portal
Current learning technologies do not meet the needs of teachers and individuals. There is an information overload and the academic field has also become technology driven. Rather than technology operating according to the teacher’s needs, individuals are required to adapt to the existing software. Due to the incompatibilities between software, hardware and the formats of computer files, information chaos is growing to huge proportions. Unless educational algorithms (i.e., what is done with educational content) are defined, computer algorithms, software, and systems for the integration of IT into teaching cannot be designed. As part of our research into the automation of knowledge-based processes, which includes educational processes, we have managed to solve the problem of how to simulate human knowledge and pass it on to a computer, so that it can ‘understand’ it. Our solution is a model of virtual knowledge that can be processed quickly by a computer. The computer ‘understands’ this as a universal representation of knowledge, while from a teacher's point of view, it is an ordinary table into which the teacher inserts educational content. This virtual knowledge (having the structure of a database table) acts a kind of knowledge container that isomorphically connects the mental processes of the teacher with the physical processes of the computer. Our WPad educational software is programmed to control the structure (content), so, it is possible to create educational knowledge tables and personal knowledge base for any activity that the teacher performs during teaching, or research. The teacher does not need to adapt to the technology; instead, the technology adapts to the teacher's activities. Since the software runs on every Windows computer and works as a multiple-in-one educational IT tool for a variety of lessons, it is probably the most efficient and cheapest technology solution. It is used to support the integration of technology into classroom and distance learning. Future research will focus on the creation of multilingual educational packages.
In the scientific literature, educational technology is often criticised as not being always optimised for effective teaching, as mostly technology-driven, not derived from knowledge as the basic key element of teaching. In this context, teaching is a typical knowledge-based process, which requires to deliver a concentrated educational knowledge within strictly limited time. Although digital technology should be knowledge-driven, a computer does not know what knowledge or educational knowledge is. An interdisciplinary definition of knowledge does not exist. Within the long-term research under an umbrella of technology-enhanced learning, this problem was solved by design of universal knowledge representation. This representation, so called- ‘virtual knowledge’, is both machine-readable and human-readable. It enables an individual user (teacher, student) to construct, transmit and share educational knowledge and content using all-in-one educational software in a user-friendly way and without a need of specific computer skills. This paper explains the essence of the design of the knowledge-based educational technology, which is based on the virtual knowledge and development of the educational software that enables the batch-based knowledge processing using the virtual knowledge and transfer of educational content through a shared infrastructure. The infrastructure consists of a combination of off-line (teacher’s computers, classroom computers) and online (clouds, virtual machines) environments. The following sections present the use of the educational knowledge tables and modelling the educational packages and language corpora to support writing scientific articles to explain a way of the knowledge-based educational design.
The current trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, known as Industry 4.0, has also an impact on engineering education. This has a significant influence on the field of research on information communication technology (ICT) for education. It means that the digitalization of teaching processes requires not only suitable supporting software tools but also a suitable infrastructure for managing the flow and transmission of educational knowledge within this infrastructure (clouds, remote desktops, virtual spaces, personal computers). In this context, the authors aim to fill a gap in universal ICT support for teaching, and the state of the art in ICT in general. This gap involves reassessing the actual issues in modern education technology and applications, and requires a more universal approach, because global software or cloud and Web services are not automatically suitable solutions for use in personalized teaching situations where the key players are teachers, i.e. individuals. An approach (also supported within the international research Consortium V4+ACARDC), is illustrated by examples such as testing clouds (cloud content management), virtual spaces, and the development of educational packages and supporting software for visually impaired people.
Lecture recording is sometimes considered a disruptive technology which has the potential to supplant the traditional higher education model through fundamentally changing how students are taught. Despite this, there is limited evidence that lecture recordings affect student attendance or attainment, and so it is not clear why lecture recording is considered so disruptive. An evaluation was run in a large Russell Group Institution in the UK in 2018 as it rolled out an institute-wide lecture recording programme. In this study, in-depth interviews with 13 staff members and free-text responses from 159 first-year student survey respondents were analysed using constructivist grounded theory to explore why lecture recording is viewed as disruptive, and what the implications of this are for teaching. Both staff and students were concerned with issues which happened inside the classroom (proximate) and wider issues about education (ultimate issues), but these concerns manifested differently between the groups. Overall, the act of recording a space was considered transformative, creating a digital artefact which was both highly valued by students as a ‘tool’ to improve their learning, but impacting on the overall ‘show’ that lecturers felt was a core aspect of the lecture. Ultimately, staff were also concerned that recordings ‘canonised’ the material, and made students too reliant on lectures, whereas students viewed the recordings as a safety net. The implications of this transformative power of recording for teaching are discussed.
A design of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) represents a big challenge from an informatics point of view. In general, any computer support of teaching requires existing didactic algorithms for design of the informatics algorithms and writing programming codes. In comparison with technical processes, which are well-standardized, due to the complexity of teaching processes, such algorithms are missing. Moreover, the computer support of collaborative activities requires using the virtual spaces of servers, networks and clouds. Additionally, the lifetime of software and hardware is too short for supporting long-life learning. Contextually, a complex, didactic-technology approach is not researched enough within the fields such as technology-enhanced learning (TEL) or educational technology. This paper presents the authors’ didactic-informatics approach related to these challenges. It is based on developing the in-house education-specific software, knowledge representation, personalized IT infrastructure, and a specific way of solving the knowledge transmission between off-line and online environments to support collaborative activities of teachers and researchers. This complex personalized approach seems to be beyond the state-of-the-art (e.g., a utility model is used).
