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Rapid proliferation of mobile technology and the Internet in Eastern-Europe for the past decade has had a significant impact on information distribution and has facilitated the introduction of novel e-Learning systems and technologies. The rapid growth and use of technology, as well as the ongoing transition towards a knowledge-based society of the...
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... Many of these topics have been covered in Romanian literature, which saw an impressive increase as compared with the pre-pandemic period. The relative scarcity of the studies dedicated to online education may be attributed to the slow development and implementation of e-learning in Romania caused, among others, by resistance to change, lack of vision in creating medium and long-term policies, financial limitations, and lack of specific competences necessary to build the infrastructure, train the teachers, etc. (Goldbach & Hamza-Lup, 2017). The abrupt transition to the virtual environment has generated interest in aspects of virtual education/ digitization of education (mostly neglected due to the causes mentioned earlier)comprising topics such as students' perception on pandemic impact on higher education (Deaconu & Olah, 2022), educational, emotional, and social impact of COVID-19 pandemic on university students (Gavriluta, Galban & Ioan, 2022), the impact of COVID-19 on the quality of the educational process and emotional and social engagement in the English language classroom (Mihai et al., 2022).It should be noted that this unexpected opportunity to study various aspects of online education on a wide scale will hopefully not affect the understanding and practice of distance education as has been defined and conceptualized in the past decades but, on the contrary, help in building up more resilient educational systems. ...
Résumé. Si autrefois seulement les personnes qui savaient lire avaient accès aux informations en général, aujourd’hui les médias se battent pour faire connaître la vérité et encourager la liberté d’opinion. L’Internet sera un jour dépassé par d’autres technologies qui permettront à chacun de plonger dans les artefacts des événements, jusqu’à des artefacts ayant une conscience de soi. À l’avenir le réel et le virtuel ne seront plus discernables. Un jour, peut-être, la transmission de pensée permettra de transférer des souvenirs, des opinions, des goûts et même la conscience de soi à un hologramme, ou à toute autre sorte d’artefact. Les humains, au moins les plus riches et les plus puissants, seront alors devenus des algorithmes biochimiques immortels. De cette façon, la transmission d’information aura atteint son but: l’artificialisation du vivant.
Mots clé : les médias, l’information, le réel, le virtuel, l’artificialisation
... As a member of the European Union, the Romanian Higher Education system is aligned with the European Higher Education Area, the Bologna Agreement (Curaj et al., 2015), and the national policies concerning education and digitalization are directed by the EU level decisions (Goldbach and Hamza-Lup, 2017). In this context, digital inclusion has been one of the main priorities on the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research agenda and several major educational programs were centered around developing the ICT infrastructure and internet connection for Romanian education institutions. ...
The Covid-19 pandemic is the most disturbing event in the lifetime of most of our planet’s citizens. The lockdown measures directly impacted many areas of our lives, including the educational sector, because locking down countries meant implicitly locking down the educational system. Moreover, what was first considered a temporary solution for an extraordinary situation began to look more and more like a medium to long-term general rule. Nevertheless, the questions are: are we all ready to move the entire educational process online and fully understand the challenges and implications for all stakeholders involved? This two-part research aims to provide some answers to these questions by identifying and analyzing the perceptions of Romanian engineering students enrolled at “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi (TUIASI) regarding the changes registered in the past year once the emergency e-learning situation started. The first part of the research was conducted between April and May 2020 through an online survey among 134 engineering students. It aimed at identifying the students’ perception of the online learning systems provided by their university, considering the significant speed with which changes were imposed. In addition, this research phase focused on students’ access to resources and knowledge to use and integrate online learning into their study routine. The second part of the research was carried out after almost a year of e-learning between March and April 2021 and consisted of six online focus groups with 36 students and aimed at identifying the main advantages and challenges students experience throughout the online educational process. The research revealed that although students are digital natives, they still have difficulties harnessing e-learning’s advantages and integrating them into their study routine. Another significant aspect refers to the changing role of the professor perceived not only as an instructor but as a mentor during a time of crisis. The study results can offer higher education institutions insight and valuable information that can be used in designing and implementing online and hybrid activities and classes that better fit the students’ needs and expectations in terms of e-learning.
... Forced by this new context, universities rapidly adjusted either by accessing third-party platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom or Zoom or by using their in-house Learning Managements Systems on Moodle or Blackboard. As a member of the European Union, policies of Romania concerning education and digitalisation are guided by decisions made at the EU level (Goldbach and Hamza Lup 2017) and so, digital inclusion has been a high priority on the Ministry of Education and Research agenda. Developing the ICT infrastructure and Internet connection for the Romanian education institutions, training professors, developing quality online resources, and providing access to online learning spaces were the core goals of the several major educational programmes (Grosseck, Holotescu, and Andone 2020). ...
This study aims to identify the factors affecting students’ satisfaction with online learning, examine the relationship between satisfaction and continuance usage intention, and explore the direct and moderating role of self-quarantine during a pandemic situation. The research model has been developed based on three theories, namely, Expectation Confirmation Theory, Diffusion of Innovation Theory, and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. Through an online survey, data were collected from 1193 university students from Oman, Iran, Bangladesh, Romania, and Malaysia and analysed using Structural Equation Modelling technique with SmartPLS V.3 software. Results indicated that factors affecting student’s satisfaction with an online learning vary in each sample. In all samples, satisfaction significantly influences students’ continuance usage intention with the online learning. In some samples, self-quarantine has a direct effect on continuance usage intention and plays a moderating role in Romania sample. The findings contribute to the universities and instructors how online systems factors elevate students’ continuance usage intention. The uniqueness of this study is the integration of three theories to obtain research objectives. The details of the results and both theoretical and practical implications have been described in the paper.
... The effectiveness of e-learning courses is also conditioned by cultural factors [4,5]. In Eastern European countries, there are also similar systems, problems and challenges in the field of academic education, and the problem with access to high-speed internet [6]. ...
... The respondents have also been asked to compare e-learning courses with traditional ones (Table 4). In order to make the presentation of the results more transparent, the responses were grouped into three main categories: (1) less/lower/smaller (answers: 1-4); (2) same (answer: 5); (3) more/higher/greater (answers [6][7][8][9]. Preparation and delivery of e-learning courses are perceived by respondents as more difficult (sixty-eight respondents, i.e. 86%, and thirty-three respondents, i.e. 42% respectively) and at the same time, more time consuming (sixty-two teachers, i.e. 79%) than in the case of traditional classes. It is worth noting that only three participants, i.e. 4%, thought of e-learning as less time-consuming. ...
The aim of the paper is to investigate the benefits and drawbacks resulting from the implementation of e-learning in accounting modules among educators. The primary source of data was a questionnaire conducted among 79 accounting lecturers, employed by the leading Polish economic universities. The results of the survey have shown that e-learning is not widely used by accounting academics in Poland. The most important benefits of the e-courses included the enhancement of efficiency and flexibility of the teaching process. The most serious difficulties were an extensive amount of work associated with designing and updating course materials and technical problems. The effectiveness of e-learning techniques in teaching accounting subjects is determined by the easiness of e-learning delivery, more regular learning process, greater development of students’ social competences during e-learning classes and a more effective process of verification of students’ progress, in comparison with traditional classes. Furthermore, the study provides evidence that lecturers, who decided to use e-learning, perceive this way of teaching as more efficient, and at the same time more demanding, in comparison to traditional classes. The paper contributes to the understanding of the use of e-learning in accounting education and offers findings that might be useful for both policymakers and practitioners.
... As Alsubait (2015) discussed, research on AQG goes back to the 70's. Nowadays, AQG is gaining further importance with the rise of MOOCs and other e-learning technologies (Qayyum and Zawacki-Richter 2018;Gaebel et al. 2014;Goldbach and Hamza-Lup 2017). ...
While exam-style questions are a fundamental educational tool serving a variety of purposes, manual construction of questions is a complex process that requires training, experience, and resources. This, in turn, hinders and slows down the use of educational activities (e.g. providing practice questions) and new advances (e.g. adaptive testing) that require a large pool of questions. To reduce the expenses associated with manual construction of questions and to satisfy the need for a continuous supply of new questions, automatic question generation (AQG) techniques were introduced. This review extends a previous review on AQG literature that has been published up to late 2014. It includes 93 papers that were between 2015 and early 2019 and tackle the automatic generation of questions for educational purposes. The aims of this review are to: provide an overview of the AQG community and its activities, summarise the current trends and advances in AQG, highlight the changes that the area has undergone in the recent years, and suggest areas for improvement and future opportunities for AQG. Similar to what was found previously, there is little focus in the current literature on generating questions of controlled difficulty, enriching question forms and structures, automating template construction, improving presentation, and generating feedback. Our findings also suggest the need to further improve experimental reporting, harmonise evaluation metrics, and investigate other evaluation methods that are more feasible.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought major changes in our lives as teachers or students, but also came with a lot of uncertainty in the way knowledge is delivered to students. In the context of the ambiguous development of the COVID-19 pandemic, Higher Education Institutions approached different strategies to meet students learning needs as effectively as possible. The paper presents some of the conclusions the authors have drawn on how students relate to the use of e-learning tools in the post-COVID-19 era. The research was quantitative based on an online survey. Data was collected from students of the Politehnica University of Timisoara, one of the largest Romanian universities. The results of the research revealed that nearly half of the respondents would like to continue their studies using a blended learning approach especially because they can attend classes from any location.
The unanticipated COVID-19 pandemic renewed interest in the success of various pedagogic practices across populations to determine the universality of their importance. This article contrasts the findings of research conducted among Kazakhstan business students, and recently reported in the Journal Eastern European and Central Asian Research, to a population of business students at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Our empirical sample survey of 112 undergraduate students reveals a.) a greater satisfaction with online education, b.) the potential for a longer attention span, c.) agreement on techniques to improve pedagogy, and d.) better perceived online experiences versus Kazakhstani findings. This report shares additional actionable suggestions for lessening the instances of low online involvement, as well as suggestions for improving asynchronous online education, which is again found to be preferred to a synchronous modality. Insights provided by students from a different culture and hemisphere enhance understanding of student perceptions and ways to improve the online learning experience.
On January 6, 2021, a group of protesters contesting the results of the 2020 US Presidential election laid siege to the US Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., resulting in several deaths, hundreds of injuries, property damage, the temporary interruption of the certification of Electoral College votes by Congress, and, ultimately, in the second impeachment of former US President Donald Trump. Users on social media platforms have reacted by posting messages expressing their feelings towards these events, supporting or rejecting the actions of the protesters. The present paper aims to analyze the opinions the public posted on social media with respect to the incident, and their evolution over time. For this purpose, we gathered a dataset containing 50,618 English-language tweets posted during two periods: January 2021, when the original events took place, and January 2022, when the incident’s first anniversary prompted renewed interest on social media and among wider society. We train several machine learning and deep learning algorithms and use the best-performing model, RoBERTa, to carry out stance analysis on the dataset, classifying each tweet as neutral, in favor, or against the actions of the Capitol rioters. We then use the NRCLex emotion lexicon to identify emotions expressed for each class, comparing the evolution of opinions over the two periods. The results we present can be useful for social media stakeholders, government regulators, and the general public in order to better understand the relationship between social media communication and the political system, as well as highlight the threat posed to democracy by increasing political partisanship and polarization.
The purpose of this paper is to present an overview on the software solutions that contribute to the development of the e-learning in the Romanian undergraduate education system. This research relies on a study of the solutions provided by the Romanian private companies that dominate the market of the e-learning platforms. The software providers considered for the paper include SIVECO, Ascendia S.A,. Timsoft or InsideMedia. The platforms will be analyzed in terms of functionalities and characteristics. After the analysis, a series of common features will be identified, as well as the benefits and the drawbacks of each of the solutions. Based on the results, a profile of an adequate e-learning platform for the Romanian undergraduate education system will be drawn. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by identifying the existing and already integrated e-learning software solutions in the system at the present moment. Moreover, a comparison between them will be provided, leaving room for future directions the field of e-learning platforms in Romania can benefit from.
