Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development - Challenges for Higher Education: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Interactive ... (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 390) 3030939065, 9783030939069

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Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 390

Michael E. Auer Hanno Hortsch Oliver Michler Thomas Köhler   Editors

Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development Challenges for Higher Education Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021), Volume 2

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems Volume 390

Series Editor Janusz Kacprzyk, Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Advisory Editors Fernando Gomide, Department of Computer Engineering and Automation—DCA, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering—FEEC, University of Campinas— UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil Okyay Kaynak, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Türkiye Derong Liu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Witold Pedrycz, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Marios M. Polycarpou, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, KIOS Research Center for Intelligent Systems and Networks, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Imre J. Rudas, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary Jun Wang, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

The series “Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems” publishes the latest developments in Networks and Systems—quickly, informally and with high quality. Original research reported in proceedings and post-proceedings represents the core of LNNS. Volumes published in LNNS embrace all aspects and subfields of, as well as new challenges in, Networks and Systems. The series contains proceedings and edited volumes in systems and networks, spanning the areas of Cyber-Physical Systems, Autonomous Systems, Sensor Networks, Control Systems, Energy Systems, Automotive Systems, Biological Systems, Vehicular Networking and Connected Vehicles, Aerospace Systems, Automation, Manufacturing, Smart Grids, Nonlinear Systems, Power Systems, Robotics, Social Systems, Economic Systems and other. Of particular value to both the contributors and the readership are the short publication timeframe and the world-wide distribution and exposure which enable both a wide and rapid dissemination of research output. The series covers the theory, applications, and perspectives on the state of the art and future developments relevant to systems and networks, decision making, control, complex processes and related areas, as embedded in the fields of interdisciplinary and applied sciences, engineering, computer science, physics, economics, social, and life sciences, as well as the paradigms and methodologies behind them. Indexed by SCOPUS, INSPEC, WTI Frankfurt eG, zbMATH, SCImago. All books published in the series are submitted for consideration in Web of Science.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15179

Michael E. Auer Hanno Hortsch Oliver Michler Thomas Köhler •

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•

Editors

Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development Challenges for Higher Education Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021), Volume 2

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Editors Michael E. Auer CTI Global Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Hanno Hortsch Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Sachsen, Germany

Oliver Michler Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Sachsen, Germany

Thomas Köhler Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Sachsen, Germany

ISSN 2367-3370 ISSN 2367-3389 (electronic) Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ISBN 978-3-030-93906-9 ISBN 978-3-030-93907-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publications 2022, 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

ICL2021 was the 24th edition of the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning and the 50th edition of the IGIP International Conference on Engineering Pedagogy. This interdisciplinary conference aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. ICL2021 has been organized by Technische Universität Dresden and University of Applied Science Dresden, Germany, from September 22 to 24, 2021, as a hybrid event. This year’s theme of the conference was “Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development – Challenges for Higher Education”. Again, outstanding scientists from around the world accepted the invitation for keynote speeches: • Gyeung Ho Choi, Professor at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea. Speech title: Challenges for Future Mobility • Thoralf Knote, Head of Department, Fraunhofer Institute IVI, Germany. Speech title: Involvement of Students in the Project Work at Fraunhofer IVI • Krishna Vedula, Founder and Executive Director of IUCEE, India. Speech title: Addressing the Challenges of Engineering Pedagogy in India • Stefan Odenbach, Dean of Studies for Mechanical Engineering at TU Dresden, Germany Speech title: Practical Courses without Presence – is this possible? • David Guralnick, Kaleidoscope Learning, USA Speech title: Successful Learning Experiences Design • Lars Seiffert, Board Member, Verkehrsbetriebe AG Dresden, Germany Speech title: Priority for Public Transport – Fair and Green • Ulrike Stopka, Professor for Communications Economics and Management at TU Dresden, Germany

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Speech title: Challenges and Opportunities for a Transport Sciences-Oriented Study Program The following very interesting workshops have been held: • Modern Vehicle Engineering Training up to Connected and Automated Driving Facilitators: Oliver Michler, Professor for Traffic Telematics at TU Dresden, Germany, and Toralf Trautmann, Professor for Mechatronics at University of Applied Sciences Dresden, Germany • From Face-to-Face to Hybrid Events – Experiences with the Digital Transformation of a Conference Series Dealing with Online Network Research Facilitator: Thomas Köhler, Professor for Media Technology at TU Dresden and Director of the Center for Open Digital Innovation and Participation at TU Dresden We would like to thank the organizers of the following Special Sessions: • Games in Engineering Education (GinEE) Chair: Matthias C. Utesch, FOS/BOS Technik München, Germany • Entrepreneurship in Engineering Education 2020” (EiEE’20) Chair: Jürgen Jantschgi, HTL Wolfsberg, Austria • Engineering Education for “Smart Work” and “Smart Life” (IPW) Chair: Steffen Kersten, TU Dresden, Germany • Assessing and Enhancing Student online Participation and Engagement Chair: M. Samir Abou El-Seoud, The British University in Egypt • Smart Education of Digital Era Chair: Irirna Victorovna Makarova, Kazan Federal University, Russia Since its beginning, this conference is devoted to new approaches in learning with a focus to collaborative learning and engineering education. We are currently witnessing a significant transformation in the development of education. There are at least three essential and challenging elements of this transformation process that have to be tackled in education: • the impact of globalization and digitalization on all areas of human life, • the exponential acceleration of the developments in technology as well as of the global markets and the necessity of flexibility and agility in education, • the new generation of students, who are always online and don’t know live without Internet. Therefore, the following main themes have been discussed in detail: • • • •

Collaborative Learning Mobility and Smart Cities New Learning Models and Applications Project-Based Learning

Preface

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

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Game-Based Education Educational Virtual Environments Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) Teaching Best Practices Engineering Pedagogy Education Public-Private Partnership and Entrepreneurship Education Research in Engineering Pedagogy Evaluation and Outcomes Assessment Internet of Things and Online Laboratories IT and Knowledge Management in Education Approaches of Online Teaching Virtual and Augmented Learning Mobile Learning Applications Connection between Universities and the Labor Market Further Education for Engineering Educators As submission types have been accepted:

• • • •

Full Paper, Short Paper Work in Progress, Poster Special Sessions Workshops, Tutorials.

All contributions were subject to a double-blind review. The review process was very competitive. We had to review more than 500 submissions. A team of about 240 reviewers did this terrific job. Our special thanks go to all of them. Due to the time and conference schedule restrictions, we could finally accept only the best 156 submissions for presentation. The conference had more than 250 online and on-site participants from 42 countries from all continents. Our special thank goes to Prof. Dr. Thomas Köhler and his team of Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, who made the hybrid conference a reality. We thank Sebastian Schreiter for the technical editing of this proceedings. ICL2022 will be held in Vienna, Austria. Michael E. Auer ICL General Chair Hanno Hortsch ICL2021 Chair

Committees

General Chair Michael E. Auer

CTI, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

ICL2021 Conference Chair Hanno Hortsch

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

International Chairs Samir A. El-Seoud Neelakshi Chandrasena Premawardhena Alexander Kist Alaa Ashmawy David Guralnick Uriel Cukierman

The British University in Egypt (Africa) University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka (Asia) University of Southern Queensland (Australia/Oceania) American University, Dubai (Middle East) Kaleidoscope Learning New York, USA (North America) UTN, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Latin America)

Honorary Advisors Hans J. Hoyer Panarit Sethakul Hans Müller-Steinhagen Roland Stenzel Viacheslav Prikhodko

IFEES/GEDC General Secretary KMUTNB, Thailand TUDAG Dresden University of Technology, Germany Moscow Technical University, Russia

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Committees

Technical Program Chairs Oliver Michler Toralf Trautmann Sebastian Schreiter

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany University of Applied Sciences Dresden, Germany IAOE, France

Workshop and Tutorial Chairs Barbara Kerr Manuela Niethammer Claudio Teneiro Leivo

Ottawa University, Canada Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany University of Talca, Chile

Special Sessions Chair Thomas Köhler

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

Publication Chairs Steffen Kersten Sebastian Schreiter

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany IAOE, France

Awards Chairs Stephan Abele Tiia Rüütmann

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Local Arrangement Chair Friedrich Funke

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

Senior Program Committee Members Andreas Pester Axel Zafoschnig Cornel Samoila Doru Ursutiu Eleonore Lickl George Ioannidis

The British University in Egypt Ministry of Education, Austria Transylvania University of Brasov, Romania University of Brasov, Romania College for Chemical Industry, Vienna, Austria University of Patras, Greece

Committees

Tatiana Polyakova Tiia Rüütmann

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Moscow State Technical University, Russia Technical University Tallinn, Estonia

Program Committee Members Alexander Soloviev Buri Triyono Christian Guetl Demetrios Sampson Despo Ktoridou Hants Kipper Herwig Rehatschek Igor Verner Istvan Simonics Ivana Simonova James Wolfer Jürgen Mottok Martin Bilek Matthias Utesch Monica Divitini Nael Barakat Pavel Andres Rauno Pirinen Santi Caballé Teresa Restivo Stavros Nikou Stamatios Papadakis

Russia Yogyokarta State University, Indonesia Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria Technion, Haifa, Israel Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary University of Hradec Kralove, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic Indiana University South Bend, IN, USA OTH Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany University of Hradec Kralove, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany NTNU, Gløshaugen, Norway University of Texas at Tyler (UT-Tyler), TX, USA Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic Laurea Universities of Applied Sciences, Vantaa, Finland Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain Universidade de Porto, Porto, Portugal University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK The University of Crete, Greece

Local Organizing Committee Members Sven Eckelmann Dirk Engert

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany University of Applied Sciences Dresden, Germany

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Jörg Neumann Jacob Romankiewicz

Committees

Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

Contents

Teaching Best Practices Efficacy of Training Conditions and Methods for medical Students – A large Sample qualitative longitudinal Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stefan Kerschbaumer, Michaela Meier, and Herwig Rehatschek Upgrading Engineering Education for the Chemical Industry of Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irina V. Pavlova, Andrey A. Potapov, Gulnaz Fakhretdinova, and Phillip A. Sanger Introduction of IDEEA (International Design & Engineering Education Association) 2021 Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kwanju Kim and Seungil Lo Innovative and Scientific ECO Environment: Integration of Teaching Information and Communication Technologies and Physics . . . . . . . . . . Olha Kuzmenko, Marina Rostoka, Sofiia Dembitska, Yana Topolnik, and Maryna Miastkovska Lessons Learned During a Global Pandemic: Teaching Takeaways . . . . Teresa L. Larkin STEM Digital Education During COVID-19 Pandemic: Student’s Perspective and Future Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eugenio Cataldo, Bert De Vleeschouwer, Elif Yildiran, Ioana Neamtu, and Yoel Alonso

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Transforming a Course into the Online Delivery Mode on a Global Platform: Benefits and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Artem Bezrukov and Dilbar Sultanova

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Flexible Learning as a Way of Integrating Russian Doctoral Programmes into European High Education Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Julia Lopukhova, Elena Makeeva, and Tatyana Rudneva

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An Analytical Study of Factors Related to TVET Implementation in Thailand as the Centre of Excellence in the Past Decade . . . . . . . . . . Adisorn Ode-sri, Thomas Köhler, and Pisit Wimonthanasit

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Need Analysis of Stakeholders’ Perspectives Regarding the Challenging Factors in Establishing the CoE for TVET in Thailand . . . Adisorn Ode-sri, Thomas Köhler, and Pisit Wimonthanasit

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Overcoming National Stereotypes of Undergraduate Students: Implementing Culturally Diverse Materials and Role-Playing in an EFL Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Elina Murtazina, Raushan Valeeva, and Olga Y. Khatsrinova Chemical School for Gifted Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Liliya Ibrasheva, Marina Zhuravleva, Rezeda Bagatova, and Elvira Valeeva Methodi Quantitative: A Ludic Way for Learning Quantitative Methodology in Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Olga Rodríguez-Jiménez, Jose Ignacio Garcia-Pinilla, Brayam Pineda, Jennifer Andrea Malaver, and Edwin Ariel Galindo León From a “Brick-and-Mortar” Project to a MOOC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Wanessa do Bomfim Machado and Mario Gandra Converting a Face-to-Face Laboratory into a Remote Solution System: A Case Study in the Industrial Networks Laboratory . . . . . . . . 135 Virgilio Vasquez-Lopez and Luis Villagomez The Peculiarities of Teaching English as a Foreign Language Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Diana R. Giniyatullina, Gina V. Ryabkova, Rosa V. Gataullina, Yuliya N. Zatsarinnaya, and Maria M. Volkova The Effect of Covid-19 Pandemic on the Regional Universities Research Culture and the Quality of the Engineering Education . . . . . . 154 Tanya Stanko, Elena Chernyshkova, Oksana Zhirosh, Alexandra Melnichenko, Yulia Antokhina, Irina Laskina, Marina Khodyreva, Sofya Chernogortseva, Alexey Lopatin, Natalia Sluzova, Sergey Ryabchenko, and Svetlana Lavrova Research in Engineering Pedagogy Poster: The Role of Mathematical Disciplines in Engineering Practice . . . S. V. Rozhkova and I. G. Ustinova

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System of Quality Assurance in the University Education During COVID-19 Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Pavel Andres, Roman Hrmo, and Lucia Krištofiaková The Impact of the Pandemic Crisis on Technology Standard of Traditional University Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Pavel Andres, Dana Dobrovská, David Vaněček, and Juraj Miština Learning Motivation and Quality of the Educational Process . . . . . . . . 199 István Szőköl Dedicated Assignments as a Means of Advancing Junior Students’ Systems Thinking and Abstract Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Aharon Gero, Aziz Shekh-Abed, and Orit Hazzan Communication Skills of Educators and Students of an Engineering University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Mansur Galikhanov, Alina Guzhova, and Inna Zagidullina The CEFR for Languages: Research Perspectives in Foreign Language Teaching in Engineering University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Gulnaz Fakhretdinova, Liliia M. Zinnatullina, Farida T. Galeeva, and Elvira Valeeva Foreign Language Training in Engineering Universities: Prospects of Distance Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Tatiana Polyakova, Liudmila Branitskaya, and Liudmila Zabolotskikh Educating AI Software Engineers: Challenges and Opportunities . . . . . 241 Mugdim Bublin, Sigrid Schefer-Wenzl, and Igor Miladinović Improving the Quality of Training Future Engineering Personnel on the Basis of the Partnership “University-Industrial Enterprise” . . . . 252 Olga Y. Khatsrinova, Julia Khatsrinova, Elina Murtazina, and Anna Serezhkina Peculiarities of Aggression Manifestation in the Educational and Professional Activity of Students in Online and Offline Learning . . . . . . 267 Valery Viktorovna Khoroshikh, Elena Borisovna Gulk, Tatiana Anatolyevna Baranova, and Marina Vasilyevna Olennikova Features of Coping Strategies of Students of a Technical University with Different Experience of Participation in Group Activities . . . . . . . . 275 Aleksandra Vladimirovna Komarova, Tatyana Viktorovna Slotina, Konstantin Pavlovich Zakharov, Valery Leonidovich Sitnikov, and Artem Vasilevich Sugorovsky Overseas Study Tour Organization as a Factor of Intercultural Communication Development of Engineering University Students . . . . . 283 Ekaterina Tsareva, Leisan Khafizova, and Elena Yurievna Semushina

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Enhancing Leadership Skills of Undergraduate Engineering Students Through Events and Festivals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 Petr Osipov, Julia N. Ziyatdinova, Liudmila Dulalaeva, and Gulnaz Fakhretdinova Innovative Teaching Methodology in Engineering Education: Accepting the Challenges of 4.0. Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Guzel Rafaelevna Khusainova, Alina Rafisovna Ibatullina, Veronika Vladimirovna Bronskaya, Ramil Ravilyevich Mingaliev, Liudmila Anatolevna Kitaeva, and Farida T. Shageeva Possibilities of the Collage Method in the Formation of Soft-Skills of Future Engineers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Aleksandra Vladimirovna Komarova, Tatyana Viktorovna Slotina, Konstantin Pavlovich Zakharov, Elena Borisovna Gulk, and Olga O. Kunina Providing Physical and Virtual Mobility for a Regional University-Based Technology Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Alexander Gerashchenko, Tatiana Shaposhnikova, Alena Egorova, Olga Gordienko, and Victoria Vyazankova Research Area as a Cornerstone of Developing Engineering Education in Global Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Natalia E. Tiourina, Vladimir V. Nasonkin, Dmitry V. Bondarenko, Svetlana V. Barabanova, and Maria S. Suntsova Employers Requirements for Graduates of Vocational Education and Training in Study Branches Transport and Automotive Service and Repair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Alena Hašková, Dominik Zatkalík, and Martin Zatkalík Importance of Relationships of Key Competences to Activating Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 István Szőköl and Simona Benková Teacher Communication in Online Distance Education at a Czech Higher Education Institution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Ludmila Faltynkova, Ivana Simonova, and Katerina Kostolanyova Example of Gamification Supporting Elimination of Shortcomings in Pupils’ Learning Achievements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 Ján Záhorec, Alena Hašková, and Peter Brečka Typical Engineering Thinking and Consequences for the Methodology of Teaching in Engineering Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Steffen Kersten

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Factors Determining the Student's Prior Mathematical Experience . . . . 385 Anna Vintere and Liga Zvirgzdina Distance Education Technologies and the Present Situation Influenced by the Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396 Ján Hargaš, Darina Matisková, and Juraj Miština Study of Relationship Between the Learning Methods and the Assessment Methods of Engineering and Management Students Studying the Internet of Things Knowledge Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408 Arjun Singar Development of Engineering Education in Russia: A Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 Andrey Morozov, Roman Kupriyanov, and Nailya Sh. Valeyeva Students Perceptions of Online Laboratory Reporting in Electronics Engineering: Analysis on Merits and Demerits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Elisha Didam Markus and Ntombizanele Maqache Engineering Pedagogy Education Poster: Design and Evaluation of an Extracurricular Educational Program for Developing the Basic Skills as a Member of Society . . . . . 441 Kazuya Takemata, Akiyuki Minamide, Satoshi Fujishima, and Arihiro Kodaka Poster: Practical Examples of Basic Data Science Course for Junior High and High School Students in Club Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449 Satoshi Fujishima, Kazuya Takemata, and Akiyuki Minamide Tailor-made Hybrid Learning for Engineering Students in Peripheral Colleges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456 Eran Gur Focusing a Technology Teacher Education Course on Collaborative Cloud-Based Design with Onshape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Dan Cuperman, Igor Michael Verner, Laura Levin, Moshe Greenholts, and Uzi Rosen Integrating Sustainability into Language Teaching in Engineering University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478 Gulnaz Fakhretdinova, Liliia M. Zinnatullina, and Ekaterina N. Tarasova STEM Student Recruitment Tools in Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 Tamas Kersanszki and Istvan Simonics

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Correlation Between Successful Study Material Comprehension in Distance Learning and Students’ Personality Traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497 Irina Zaripova, Nailya Sh. Valeyeva, Roman Kupriyanov, and Renat Zaripov The Relationship Between Motivation for Studying and Academic Adaptation Levels of First-Year Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506 Dzhamilia Nugmanova, Roman Kupriyanov, and Nailya Sh. Valeyeva Organizing Academic Mobility of Engineering Students to Universities of France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 Natalia V. Kraysman, Farida T. Shageeva, and Andrei B. Pichugin Integrative Psychological and Pedagogical Disciplines at an Engineering University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 Tatiana A. Starshinova and Natalia V. Kraysman Reflection in Teaching Psychological and Pedagogical Disciplines in Multi-level Engineering and Science Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528 Tatiana A. Starshinova, Evgeniia L. Vavilova, Natalia V. Kraysman, and Vladimir V. Kondratyev The Study of Subjective Content and Conditions for Generating the Professional Development Path in University Environment . . . . . . . . . . 536 Elena Yu. Turner, Tatiana N. Nikitina, Natalia V. Kraysman, Fyodor G. Myshko, and Alla A. Kaybiyaynen Features of Practical Engineering Teacher Education in Hungary . . . . . 544 Ildikó Holik and István Dániel Sanda Updated Curriculum for Engineering Pedagogical Continuing In-Service Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556 Tiia Rüütmann, Ivar Annus, Jakob Kübarsepp, Urve Läänemets, and Jaak Umborg Problems of Awareness in Choosing of a Future Profession . . . . . . . . . . 568 Dilbar Sultanova, Anna Maliashova, and Ekaterina Zimina Technology of Using Mind Maps Based on a Polyisomorphic Model of Semantic Features of Mindmapping Services Description . . . . . . . . . 576 Denys Kovalenko, Juergen Koeberlein-Kerler, Liudmyla Shtefan, Larysa Bachiieva, and Viktoriia Kovalska Training of Future Engineers-Teachers of Interdisciplinary Communications Modelling with Using of Computer Technologies . . . . 584 Olena Kovalenko, Juergen Koeberlein-Kerler, Nataliia Bozhko, Tatjana Yaschun, and Tetiana Bondarenko

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Training of Students of Engineering and Pedagogical Specialties of Developing Educational Internet Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592 Olena Kovalenko, Juergen Koeberlein-Kerler, Nataliia Briukhanova, Nataliia Korolova, and Olha Lytvyn Simulator for the Formation Programming Skills Based on Solving Problems of Controlling a Virtual Robot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600 Tetiana Bondarenko, Vasyl Yahupov, Oleksandr Kupriyanov, Evhenyi Hromov, and Nataliia Briukhanova CCTV as an Element of the Quality Management System of the Learning Process in Education Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608 Tetiana Bondarenko, Vasyl Yahupov, Volodymyr Streltsov, Olha Ahieieva, and Luís Cardoso Predicting the Educational and Cognitive Activity of Teaching Engineers in Computer Science Based on Mathematical Models . . . . . . 616 Olena Kovalenko, Liudmyla Shtefan, Tatjana Yaschun, Tetiana Bondarenko, and Kyrylo Ohdanskyi Transformation of the Role of University Teacher in the Digital Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624 Elena Borisovna Gulk, Victor Nicolaevich Kruglirov, Konstantin Pavlovich Zakharov, and Olga O. Kunina Development and Implementation of the Module “Engineering, Education and Pedagogy in Industry 4.0” in the Structure of the Curriculum “Innovative Pedagogy for Teachers of Engineering Universities” (iPET) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632 Vladimir V. Kondratyev, Ulyana A. Kazakova, and Maria N. Kuznetsova Priorities of Vocational Training of Educators of Engineering Universities in the Formation of Their Psychological and Pedagogical Competency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644 Ulyana A. Kazakova, Vladimir V. Kondratyev, and Maria N. Kuznetsova From Career Guidance of Schoolchildren to Professional Training of Future Engineers at University of Engineering and Technology . . . . 654 Aleksey M. Kuzmin, Olga O. Kunina, Artem M. Fedorov, and Julia V. Timofeeva Ontological Modeling of Electronic Educational Resources . . . . . . . . . . 661 Andrii Guraliuk, Marina Rostoka, Anna Koshel, Yevheniia Skvorchevska, and Olga Luchaninova Information Technology in Forming Engineering Competencies in Technological University Students During Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . 669 Zulfiya K. Kadeeva and Natalia V. Kraysman

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Using Business Games to Build Engineering Competencies in Technological University Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 Zulfiya K. Kadeeva, Natalia V. Kraysman, and Elena N. Kadeeva Blended Learning: Design and Organization Features on the Basis of the Use of Online Training Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684 Natalia P. Goncharuk, Farida T. Shageeva, and Evgeniya I. Khromova Feminization of Engineering in the Situation of Modern Technological Revolutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696 Larisa M. Bogatova, Natalia V. Kraysman, Venera M. Tokar, and Petr Osipov Lessons Learnt in an Online Teaching Environment, and Cues for the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702 Gaganpreet Sidhu, Seshasai Srinivasan, and Dan Centea Volunteering as One of the Ways of Developing Engineering Students’ Soft Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709 Petr Osipov, Liudmila Dulalaeva, Gulnaz Fakhretdinova, and Alla A. Kaybiyaynen Metacognitive Skills of Engineer Students of Different Levels of Education in EFL Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717 Nailya Sh. Valeyeva, Roman Kupriyanov, and Elvira Valeeva Special Aspects of Organizing Teaching Activities by Simultaneous Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 726 Natalya N. Gazizova, Nataliya V. Nikonova, Maria S. Suntsova, Svetlana V. Barabanova, and Irina A. Strelnikova Information Security in Educational Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737 Ekaterina Tsareva, Roza Bogoudinova, and Gulnara F. Khasanova Culture and Multitude of Learning Models: Using Digital Educational Resources in Solving Applied Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 743 Svetlana R. Enikeeva, Alexander V. Troitsky, Nataliya V. Nikonova, Svetlana V. Barabanova, and Maria S. Suntsova Use of Specially Designed Simple Experimental Device Based on Raspberry Pi by Students for the Conceptual Understanding of Rotational Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 753 Georgios Kalantzis, Charilaos Tsihouridis, Marianthi Batsila, and Dennis Vavougios A Comparative Study of the Organization of a Remote Mathematics Study Process During the Covid-19 Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764 Anna Vintere, Eve Aruvee, and Daiva Rimkuviene

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Smart Cities Demo System Supported with Online Tools Used in Engineering Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 776 Gabriele Schachinger, Martin Izaak, Gerald Kalteis, and Clemens Leidenmühler Work-in-Progress: The Potential of Interactive Scripts – Supporting Conceptual Understanding and Collaborative Problem-Solving Skills . . . Katrin Temmen, Peter Kersten, and Dominik Schäfer

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Work in Progress: Educational Ecosystem of Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language in Technical Universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 792 Elena Makeeva, Julia Lopukhova, and Ekaterina Gorlova European Digital Competence Frameworks and Engineering Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800 Joachim Hoefele Entrepreneurship in Engineering Education The Potential for Transformation into the Virtual Organization of Remote Experiment Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815 C. Samoila, D. Ursutiu, and H. Modran The European Awards “VET Innovator” and “The Entrepreneurial School” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826 Jürgen Jantschgi and Markus Liebhard The Phenomenon of ‘Opportunity Recognition’ Among Engineering Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837 Judith Klamert-Schmid, Sabine Zangl, and Maximilian Lackner The Role of Legislative Policy Entrepreneurs in Bridging the Digital Gaps for Immigrants in Host Communities Amidst Global Health Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 846 Muhammad Hassan Bin Afzal Entrepreneurship Education and Innovation Transfer Through Student Practice Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858 Thomas Wala and Christine Salmen The Usage of Challenge-Based Learning in Industrial Engineering Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 869 Manuel Woschank, Corina Pacher, Phillip Miklautsch, Alexander Kaiblinger, and Mariaelena Murphy Transition, Innovation and Sustainability Environments, TISE: A Showcase of Education Geared Towards Societal Challenges and Future Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 879 Kay Mühlmann, Liliya Satalkina, Lukas Zenk, and Gerald Steiner

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Beyond Simple: Entrepreneurship as a Driver for Societal Change . . . . 888 Liliya Satalkina, Lukas Zenk, Kay Mühlmann, and Gerald Steiner Project Based Learning Poster: Educational Effects of PBL Education in Collaboration with Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899 Akiyuki Minamide, Kazuya Takemata, Satoshi Fujishima, and Arihiro Kodaka Interactive and Collaborative Activities of the Extra-Curriculum Project Team of Undergraduate Students Under COVID-19 Pandemic Situation and Their Educational Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 906 Makoto Hasegawa Project-Based Learning: For Teachers and School Students . . . . . . . . . 913 Olga Y. Khatsrinova, Irina V. Pavlova, and Inna M. Gorodetskaya Online Offshore Delivery of a Multidisciplinary Study-Abroad Engineering Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 926 Avinda Weeakoon and Nathan Dunbar Project Activity in the Formation of Subject Competencies . . . . . . . . . . 939 O. V. Yanuschik, I. G. Ustinova, O. N. Imas, and S. V. Rozhkova The Adaptation of Online Project-Based Learning in Computer Engineering Education Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 947 Yunfei Hou, Fadi Muheidat, Amir Ghasemkhani, Qingquan Sun, Haiyan Qiao, Miranda McIntyre, and Montgomery Van Wart Water Management in Several Types of Soil – A Hands-On Science Experiment for Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 956 Amélia Caldeira, Sofia O. Lopes, Maria Teresa Malheiro, Rui M. S. Pereira, A. Manuela Gonçalves, Nuno Araújo, and Paulo A. Pereira Theory or Practice: Student Perspective on Project Based Learning Versus Module Based Learning to Improve Technical Skills Among IT Undergraduates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 968 Uthpala Samarakoon, Kalpani Manathunga, and Asanthika Imbulpitiya Virtual and Augmented Learning New Trends in Training Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 983 Dana Dobrovská and David Vaněček Engineering Experiential Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 991 Nael Barakat, Aws Al-Shalash, Mohammad Biswas, Shih-Feng Chou, and Tahsin Khajah

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Collaborative Multi-user Augmented Reality Solutions in the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1004 Stefano Masneri, Ana Domínguez, Miguel Sanz, Iñigo Tamayo, Mikel Zorrilla, Mikel Larrañaga, and Ana Arruarte Use of VR in Engineers Certification at Hazardous Production Facilities in Petrochemical Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1012 Alina Fanisovna Domracheva, Gulnara F. Khasanova, and Mansur Galikhanov Immersive Virtual Training for Vocational Training High School Students’ Milling Machine Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1019 Jungmin Shin and Sang-Youn Kim VR-Technologies in Foreign Language Learning for Engineering Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027 Julia N. Ziyatdinova, Gulnaz Fakhretdinova, Diana R. Giliazova, and Irina V. Pavlova Digitality as a Challenge - Digital Learning as an Answer? Consequences of Engineering Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1035 Ralph Dreher Data Processing and Visualization with Matlab: Introducing an IT Component to Training Chemical Engineers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1048 Artem Bezrukov and Dilbar Sultanova Digital Spaces as an Opportunity for Supporting Complex Learning Strategies in Human-Machine Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1059 Andrea Dederichs-Koch and Ulrich Zwiers Immersive Learning in Healthcare and Medical Education Technical Guidelines for the Creation and Deployment of 360° Video-Based Virtual Reality (VR) Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1073 Fotos Frangoudes, Eirini C. Schiza, Kleanthis C. Neokleous, and Constantinos S. Pattichis Data Modelling for Visual Entities to Streamline Virtual Patient Re-purposing in Virtual Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1085 Lazaros Ioannidis, Panagiotis Antoniou, and Panagiotis Bamidis Repurposing a Reusable Learning Object on Effective Communication with Adolescents to an Interactive 360° Immersive Environment by Adapting the ASPIRE Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1096 Matthew Pears, James Henderson, and Stathis Konstantinidis

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Immerse Yourself in ASPIRE - Adding Persuasive Technology Methodology to the ASPIRE Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1106 Michael Taylor, Heather Wharrad, and Stathis Konstantinidis Digital Soft Skills of Healthcare Workforce – Identification, Prioritization and Digital Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1118 Stathis Konstantinidis, Liza Leonardini, Claudia Stura, Peggy Richter, Paola Tessari, Marjolein Winters, Olivia Balagna, Riccardo Farrina, Ad van Berlo, Hannes Schlieter, Oscar Mayora, and Heather Wharrad Correction to: Use of Specially Designed Simple Experimental Device Based on Raspberry Pi by Students for the Conceptual Understanding of Rotational Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Georgios Kalantzis, Charilaos Tsihouridis, Marianthi Batsila, and Dennis Vavougios

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Correction to: Improving the Quality of Training Future Engineering Personnel on the Basis of the Partnership “University-Industrial Enterprise” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olga Y. Khatsrinova, Julia Khatsrinova, Elina Murtazina, and Anna Serezhkina

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Correction to: From a “Brick-and-Mortar” Project to a MOOC . . . . . . Wanessa do Bomfim Machado and Mario Gandra

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Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1131

Teaching Best Practices

Efficacy of Training Conditions and Methods for medical Students – A large Sample qualitative longitudinal Study Stefan Kerschbaumer1(B)

, Michaela Meier2

, and Herwig Rehatschek3

1 Department of Radiology, Division of Nuclear Medicine, Medical University of Graz Austria,

Graz, Austria [email protected] 2 Institute of Psychology, Karl-Franzens-University Graz Austria, Graz, Austria 3 Department for Learning with Media, Medical University of Graz Austria, Graz, Austria

Abstract. To investigate medical students’ learning preferences is the key to successfully adapt to the changing demands and technological opportunities. Between 2014 and 2019 we sent out 14916 anonymous questionnaires once a year to all medical students at the Medical-University of Graz Austria. A share of 18% (N = 2799) of invited participants completed the survey. The challenge for students is time management. Students can learn efficiently, if bureaucracy do not get out of hand. The examination system has significant effects on the way and quality of learning and on time management. Especially for in-depth learning, it is difficult and time consuming to select from the available resources and to sort out the relevant examination material. The preferred learning resources for exams are still lecture material and books. The learning preferences do not change much during the course of studies, furthermore the gender differences are in general slightly more noticeable at the beginning but they even out fast during the course of medical school. To reach the goal of producing well trained graduates, the education institution has to guide the students from a more school-like setting at the begin of their education in the preclinical years to self-employed physicians at the end of their studies. Keywords: Medical teaching · Virtual learning · Best practice

1 Introduction Not only the starting situation of medical students, but also the medical profession, the professional environment, the technological progress in medicine and the nature and needs of patients are more diverse than any time in the past. For these named reasons it is hardly surprising that the requirements and also the challenges [1, 2] posed to the students provide a wide and valuable field of research. Even the daily newspapers have recently discussed the quality of medical education and training [3–5]. But all common arguments seem to be unilateral and do not go into depth of the problems of the students © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 3–14, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_1

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and look even less into possible solutions and advances. Therefore, this survey was conducted in order to study the learning behavior and the preferred learning strategies from the student’s point of view. “The environment that people live in, is the environment that they learn to live in, respond to, and perpetuate. If the environment is good, so be it. But if it is poor, so is the quality of life within it.” from Ellen Swallow Richards. The preparation for this project began in 2013. The first objective of our project group was to improve the level of knowledge transfer. During the initial discussion of this project, it was apparent that in order to do so, it is essential to gain a better understanding of the needs of the students. All the needs of the individual students and the academic teaching are inextricably linked [6, 7]. Bearing in mind that this study focuses on the student’s needs, it represents just this part of the educational system [8]. According to the learning objectives, those results should subsequently lead to improved teaching and quality of the medical studies. An anonymous questionnaire was developed to evaluate demographic data and six different learning dimensions: time management, medical interest, learning methodologies, learning strategies, learning motivation, and learning appreciation. Present research topics oftentimes cover individual aspects of the students’ needs. Comparable studies were more commonly conducted in the area of adult education or business-consulting. Although findings from other disciplines may have some relevance, they cannot be transferred blindly due to the specific requirements of medical students. Hillard [9], found in his research that the study methods are significantly determined by the assessment method. Multiple choice questions fostered rote memorization and surface learning, whereas free response written questions and clinical examinations encourage in-depth learning. The term “in-depth” or “deep-learning” is here used in opposite to superficial learning without an interrelated understanding [10]. An in-depth learning approach to studying is linked with academic success [11]. Learning styles are extensively discussed in current research. Pashler [12] concluded that “there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice.” The recent scientific findings do not provide any evidence in favor of one of the known learning style models [13]. Teaching has many different dimensions like expertise, technical performance, and joy of teaching or social skills [14]. All these depend on the education, experience and personality of the educator. On the one hand, expertise and technical performance can be easily evaluated and developed. The evaluation and development of didactic skills and joy of teaching or social competence on the other hand, is much more difficult [15, 16]. Information technologies provide a wide range of opportunities. E-learning has already become an extensive part of the education system [17–20]. It has the potential to provide benefit to academic learning [21]. With the introduction of new IT-systems, computer skills and acceptance of those systems were examined. Link [18] found that only a small percentage of students lack basic computer skills and/or are very skeptical about e-learning. About 12% make little or no use of existing e-learning offerings. Wynter [1] concluded that the increasing use of question banks raises the risk of poor alignment to medical school curricula. Han [22] summarized that students in the preclinical and clinical years need different educational technology.

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Kılıç [23] assumed that learning differences between males and females could be related to motivation, authority orientation and responsibility. There are contradictory findings whether or not women and men have different learning orientations. Cultural differences do not play a significant role in students’ preferred learning methods or learning styles [24, 25]. In adult education it is most important to achieve the expected goals and the ability to put the knowledge into practice. Adults are in general more open for different didactic methodologies and they therefore endorse non-conventional procedures [26].

2 Methods The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Graz) was established 1863 and became an independent university in 2004. The degree program is limited to 336 students per year for human medicine and 24 for dental medicine. Due to an entrance exam the dropout rate is less than 10% and more than 82% complete within the designated time plus one semester. From 2014 to 2019 an anonymous questionnaire was sent to all medical students by e-mail (students’ account) once a year. They had one month to complete the survey. EvaSys Ver. 7.1 (Electric Paper Evaluationssysteme GmbH Lüneburg, Germany) was used for sending the link to the online-questionnaire by e-mail and to administrate the results. The questionnaire was sent to 14916 students in total (2486 per year). The number of completed questionnaires was 2799, which resulted in an annual response rate of 18 ± 4%. The e-mail contained an information notice regarding the project and a link to the questionnaire. The online questionnaire was structured in seven sections: demographic data, time management, medical interest, learning methodologies, learning strategy, learning motivation, and learning appreciation – in total 41 questions (including four free text questions) were asked. To avoid even the slightest impression of judgement and manipulation no ordinal or metric scales were applied [27]. To evaluate the free text questions the ranking of the frequently used words (term frequency) were evaluated visually as table- and as bar-chart – also separately filtered for male and female. In case the context of the investigated words was crucial, all text passages for this specific word were analyzed. The data from EvaSys are available in the form of an ASCII files in CSV format. Python (Version 3.7.1) [28] under Jupyter Notebook (Version 5.7.0) [29] were used to calculate and display the numerical and statistical results. Pandas (version 0.24.2) [30] were used as a data analysis library. Numpy handled the data arrays (version 1.16.4) [31]. Matplotlib (version 3.1.0) [32] was used as plotting library. The curriculum for medical students is structured in three study sections. The first section lasts two years, and covers pre-clinical subjects, fundamental knowledge and comprehension, and the basis for the cause of the disease, professional doctor-patient interaction and includes a clinical internship. The second study section lasts 3 years and provides putting their theoretical knowledge into practice within the clinical context. The purpose is to be able to explain and apply clinical skills. It covers the different clinical disciplines, as a base for scientific work, psychology, ethic and law. The last section

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lasts for one year and is the “clinical internship year” and the program concludes with a diploma thesis. The entire course is scheduled for a duration of 12 semesters. The data arrays were filtered for gender and for the academic years in groups of the first two years (first and second year – preclinical students), the subsequent four years (until the 12th semester – clinical students), the following three years (clinical internship students) and a separate group for students beyond (long-term students). The last question was adopted from Steve the Shazer. He invented the miracle question for the solution-orientated brief therapy. The miracle question has the advantage to focus on the solution instead of the problem. It is well suited to substantiate the desired states and express the necessary steps to reach those [33].

3 Results Demographic Information The gender distribution of respondents to the online survey was 51% (1433) female and 49% (1366) male. The students per group were 1225 preclinical students, 1233 clinical students, 291 clinical internship students, and 50 long-term students. The majority, which consists of 37% (1029) of the students, did not work during the semester. This decreases from 42% for preclinical students, 30% for clinical students, 29% for clinical internship students to 13% for long-term students. Students who only worked during their holidays also decrease from 39% for preclinical students, 28% for clinical students, 24% for clinical internship students to 14% for long-term students. The number of students who worked half-time increased from 13% for preclinical students to 30% for preclinical students, 29% for clinical internship students, and 47% for long-term students. A minority of 3% worked more than half-time and 5% worked in the evening or at night. Time Management The majority, which consists of 38% (1066), had enough time to study and 37% (1048) experienced stress before exams. The remaining percentage of 24% (685) claimed that they have too little time to study. Within the first 2 years of their studies, 44% of the male and 30% of the female students had the feeling they had enough time and 36% male and 45% female students experience stress before exams – 20% of the male students and 25% female students did had too little time for their study. These gender differences aligned in the higher semesters. The majority, which consists of 68% (1901) started to study a few weeks before an exam, 22% (602) study on an ongoing basis with a short preparation period before an exam and the remaining 11% (296) studied and learned on an ongoing basis. The most efficient time to study was before noon (43% female, 34% male), followed by the night (25% female, 32% male). While more females (18% female, male 14%) preferred the early morning and more males 21% (14% female) preferred the evening.

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Medical Interest The preference for specific medical disciplines rose during academic training. For the first two years, this was 56% (686) and increased to 79% (971) for clinical students and 86% (251) for clinical internship students. In total 30% (850) of the students did not choose a specific discipline. The highest interest level was 19% in internal medicine followed by 17% for surgery and 15% for other medical divisions (e.g. cardiology, endocrinology, hepatology), 6% for general medicine (without specialization), 4% for neurology, 3% basic medical disciplines (e.g. anatomy, physiology, cytology), and 2% for diagnostic medicine (e.g. in-vitro diagnostic, radiology, nuclear medicine) and 2% for medical research. In total 52% (1460) of the students (55% female, 46% male) had only gotten a rough vision about their future professional practice. A percentage of 28% (796) had a fairly clear and precise vision, 10% (270) of students had a clear and precise vision and the remaining 10% (273) had not even a rough vision about their future professional practice. A free-text question asked for the main strengths for the professional practice as a physician. The most important group of characteristics mentioned was “empathy” (766 times) and “social competency” (385 times). Secondly “know-how” and “expertise” was mentioned 650 times followed by “calmness” and “patience” for 300 times and “endurance” and “perseverance” mentioned 291 times. Learning Methodologies As best teaching setting – classroom-teaching style was claimed in 5% (145) while a mixture of classroom teaching and practice dominates with 66% (1884). The remaining 28% (770) voted for a practical clinical setting. For 86% (2397) of the students new topics should start with an overview to provide orientation, 8% (230) would like to start a new topic with information about the latest research findings and 6% (172) would like to hear important details and features about the new subject first. 65% (1826) of students believe that patient cases which are used for training should contain all the relevant information and 30% (844) of students are satisfied using cases mixed with complete and with incomplete patient records. Only 5% (129) chose incomplete and therefore more practical patient records for their training. For didactic teaching-cases 54% (1521) voted for complete information of cases and 46% (1278) voted for incomplete and therefore more practical cases – this rises from 50% for preclinical students and 56% for clinical students up to 64% for clinical internship students. The preferred time to obtain additional information about a case study is debriefing for 54% (1511) of students. For 19% (532) it is in a preparatory discussion and for 27% (758) it is during the presentation of the case. A contemporary association between theory and practice was important to 60% (1754; from 64% for preclinical students, 60% for clinical students to 55% for clinical internship students and 47% for long-term students). Additional case studies were required by 15% (436; rising from 11% for preclinical students, 14% for clinical students up to 21% for clinical internship students). The discussion with experts stayed at 6% (171) during the whole study. To build skills and competences 43% (1199) voted for independent work under supervision. Second choice with 27% (754; 29% female, 23% male) was to work under guidance and 16% (446; 18% female, 13% male) are interested in attending case discussions. The remaining percentage of 7% (201) saw exhaustive

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learning and reading about the cases as well as watching medical examinations and treatment as most educational. Theoretical learning matter was favorably managed in self-study (49% – 1359; including e-lectures and the possibility to ask a teacher) – 22% (606) of the students preferred classroom-style lectures, 17% (465) claimed groups and ensuing discussion with the educator were preferable and 13% (369) wanted to learn in small student groups. Learning Strategies Special literature for learning was used several times a week in 54% (1515) and in 19% (534) at least once a week. A proportion of 23% (640) used special literature only for selected exams. Using special literature less than once per month was claimed by 2% (68) and another 2% (42) did not use them at all. Electronic media was used to study by 79% (2222) several times a week and in 11% (297) at least once a week. A proportion of 2% (66) used electronic media once a month and 8% (214) claimed not to use any electronic media for learning. Learning platforms were used by 87% (2435) of all students – 62% (1721) used the internet, 50% (1400) used e-books and e-journals and 35% (980) used internet offers from other universities. The biggest benefit was seen in interactive simulation and learning games 27% (752; 29% female, 24% male) and e-lectures with audio streaming and presentation material (e.g. PowerPoint) 26% (731; 30% female, 22% male). Small learning groups were claimed to be ideal by 21% (585) – social networks by 4% (108), online discussion groups by 3% (76), anonymous live feedback for teachers 3% (79) and for other than those mentioned above by 6% (178). A free-text question asked for other potential technologies – students mentioned audiovisual e-lectures 23 times, Amboss (AMBOSS GmbH, Köln, Germany) 11 times and improved lectures (e.g. better structure, higher qualified lecturers) 7 times. Learning Motivation Preclinical students learned uninteresting topics most frequently (55%, 1529) only for the exam – 26% (738) learned with little effort, 18% (515) because of the joy of learning and the remaining 1% (17) did not learn uninteresting topics at all. Clinical students who only learned for the exam accounted for 51% (1421) – the percentage who learned with little effort was 35% (973). Clinical internship students most often (53%, 1493) learned with little effort, 36% (1002) did not learn uninteresting topics at all and 9% (255) only for the exam – the remaining 2% (49) learned because of the fun of doing so. In total 46% (1298) claimed that uninteresting topics reveal themselves as interesting and important while studying – for 23% (648) those topics remained uninteresting, for 22% (622) those topics turned out to be interesting and important in further studies, and the remaining 8% (231) claimed that those topics stayed uninteresting, however needed to be learned. Preferably, uninteresting topics were learned independently from textbooks (52%, 1445) and together with other students (23%, 646). For interesting subjects, independent learning from textbooks was favored in 72% (2009) and 9% (253) together with other students. The favorite learning resource to learn from were lecture materials and books in 48% (1350) of the students (multiple answers were possible), 29% (811) of students learned from former exam questions, 21% (590) learned in groups with other students and 18% (512) preferred learning in courses (16%, 453 in lectures, 15%, 431 in seminars).

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The most important goal for the students was the improvement of medical skills (60%, 1667) – interesting cognition was crucial for 15% (418), reaching a personal goal for 13% (359), self-affirmation was for 7% (192) and the grade was major for 6% (163). Students were satisfied in 24% (683) with their success when the grade was the average range, in 24% (658) the grade did not matter, in 21% (581) when the grade was “good” or “very good”, in 20% (569) when the evaluation was positive (the remaining 11%, 308 for others not mentioned). The reason for successful studies was 46% (1286) for personal initiative and diligence, 45% (1256) for good teachers (didactic quality) and 31% (864) for fellowship among students. Learning Appreciation Bad lecturing methods were most unpleasant for 65% (1832) of the students, lack of relevance for practical application for 14% (396), lack of prior knowledge for 8% (218), lack of interest for 7% (187) and lack of motivation for 6% (166). The most disturbing influence on learning was lack of prior knowledge in 37% (1035; 40% female, 33% male) restrictions to details in case of lacking overview 30% (843), lack of interactivity 12% (335), other reasons 12% (335), and disturbance caused by other students 9% (264). A free-text question asked for further undesirable influences. The lack of dedicated learning objectives claimed by 70 students, the lack of adequate or up-to-date learning material or explicit references by 37 students. Another 37 students claimed too little time considering the extensive amount of subject matter to learn, 31 students named multiplechoice questions as too detailed or disconnected from reality. Another 17 students were against compulsory attendance. For the quality of practical learning the sufficient opportunity to practice was most important (47%, 1304); for 35% (980) professional guidance was the major factor – 9% (257) claimed for the possibility to ask questions and discussing them and another 9% (257) wanted to watch and assist leading experts. The biggest challenge for 42% (1175) of students was proper time management, 23% (650) claimed to crosslink different areas of expertise was the major challenge, 19% (534) claimed self-motivation and 10% (292) claimed professional understanding and the remaining 5% (148) saw the sourcing of information as most demanding. Miracle Question “If you have one wish to change an aspect of the courses, what would it be?” – 1754 answers were evaluated and analyzed. The most frequently named issue (170 times) was the topic “time management”. The second issue was “reduction of compulsory attendance” (107 times) – followed by “more practical training” (75 times), “better scripts” (63 times), “inexpedient exam questions” (57 times), “clear determination of the subject matter of the examination” (33 times) and “e-lectures” (25 times).

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4 Discussion Time Management There is no doubt that time management is one of the crucial success factors for efficient studying. Time management concerns the procurement of documents, attendance at the lectures, seminars and tutorials, learning for an exam and time for administrative tasks. Learning blocks for specific exams seem to be the most efficient way of learning. Continuous learning on an ongoing basis seems to be not manageable for most of the students – mainly caused due to the many parallel topics and activities. It is likely that this behavior were adopted following the experiences from secondary school. The majority of students prefer the time before noon to learn – the timetable of the curriculum should consider this. The university finds itself in an area of conflict between a too much school-alike and a more unguided way of studying. A more school-like system is clearly an advantage for younger students – advanced students need more freedom to develop. School-alike strategy has the advantage of a straight and tight organization. For one thing, students like and increasingly request the convenience of a school-alike system. It makes many things easier and more predictable. Then again, they do not like strict guidelines and obligations, because they restrict the freedom and affect the time management negatively. The overregulation also patronizes the students and does not encourage independent working, which is important for unsupervised work and scientific results. The relationship between student and teacher trends in some respects towards pupils and teacher. Humboldt’s idea of a university was to combine teaching and research, aiming to teach and expand insight into the nature. He stressed the need that the relation between student and teacher is not like at school. Rather, both should exist for scientific purposes [34, 35]. The organization of the university can contribute a lot to an efficient time management for the students. These measures are to streamline bureaucracy for the students, provide guidelines and standards for the curriculum, and provide clear targets for the exams. Medical Interest A large proportion of students (especially female) in the first and second year have not yet chosen a specific favorite medical discipline. It is thus evident that the experience during the studies often influences the career decision. The comparison to Osenberg [36] in 2010 from a survey in Germany including 4037 students shows on the contrary an indication for medical discipline for the majority of participants (3.794). The assumption from Osenberg can be confirmed that different prerequisites may apply for a medical career in other countries even if this study is fairly old and curricula and other conditions have evolved since. Medical students are aware that empathy and social competence are most important for being a physician. The medical profession requires social skills and there is little indication that the education lacks in learning or practicing these skills. Furthermore, medical expertise, patience and endurance were also considered important.

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Learning Methodologies The most preferred method is the contemporary combination of classroom teaching and practice; clinical internship students increasingly demand the practical clinical setting. The classroom style as a single method shows very poor results. From the majority of students’ point of view, lectures with dominant theoretical learning matter or in the fundamentals of medicine shall be learned with clear demands in self-study and accompanying e-lectures without any compulsory attendance. The information on the patient are often like fragments from a puzzle. The responsibility therefore lies with the physician to deduce the proper therapy based on the existing – and in this sense often times incomplete – information. It is often possible, that one single piece of information can completely change the course of action for a patient. This specific knowledge is crucial, but shall not be used as an obstacle for the student. For clinical case studies, students prefer to receive the complete information to solve the case, while for teaching cases also incomplete information about cases is accepted evenly. Debriefing following the examined or presented cases is preferred. Learning Strategies New IT technologies have changed the way of learning significantly. Lecture material and e-lectures can be consulted online or even offline, and it is now possible to prepare oneself for the complete lecture. Students can concentrate on the speaker, because it is no longer necessary to take extensive notes from the lecture. On the other hand this is very (almost too) convenient and does not promote autonomous/independent acquisition of knowledge. Whether this trend is beneficial depends on the efficient use of electronic media. The way of learning and the use of learning resources do not change during the studies. Students use special literature, online media and learning platforms and the internet frequently. Interactive simulations and learning games are seen as the greatest potential for an application of new IT technologies. Female students in particular, see benefits in e-leaning and interactive learning games. The learning strategy is strongly influenced by the available time and the nature of the exam. Insufficient learning time (start learning too late) and multiple-choice questions in combination with available question banks tempt to rote memorization which leads to surface learning (see also [9]). Verbal exams should be favored whenever possible over electronic multiple-choice tests. Students want to learn intensively for an in-depth learning approach. The conditions for that are disposable time, availability of good learning materials, appropriate exam questions and clear determination of the subject matter of the examination. Learning Motivation Uninteresting topics are most frequently only learned for the exam. Especially in the clinical internship, there is little effort spent on uninteresting topics. A large portion of students recognizes that these topics turn into interesting and important ones while learning. The majority of students seem to prefer to learn alone from textbooks – for interesting topics, this is significantly more pronounced in comparison with learning uninteresting topics. Lecture materials and books are the preferred learning sources.

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The most important goal for the students is to improve their medical skills. The grade plays a different role for different students. For the clinical internship the grade plays a minor role. The requirement for successful studies is evaluated differently – personal initiative and diligence is about equal with demand for experienced and engaged teachers. Learning Appreciation Most disagreeable for students are bad lecturing methods like bad didactical skills, but this has not been pointed out as an existing issue. Especially for females, the most disturbing influence in learning is the lack of prior knowledge as well as restrictions to details in case of lacking overview. The lack of learning objectives is frequently mentioned as an additional disturbing influence. Sufficient opportunity to practice is stated as very important. This does not change during the course of the studies. The need for more practical training is frequently demanded. Time management is mentioned as the biggest challenge for the students.

5 Conclusion This study offers a great inside view to the medical student’s life. Many results are nowadays generally valid, but some may be restricted to the local boundary conditions and the implementation of the curriculum at the Medical University of Graz. The most important goals seemed to be shared between the university and the students. The university wants well-qualified graduates – and the students want to improve their skills to be responsible and competitive. That means that students need to make the best possible use of the available time and to eliminate unnecessary burdens. Information technology and media didactics shall be used wisely to reach this goal. This study only covers the students’ point of view and a further study investigating the teachers’ point of view is highly suggested for a deeper understanding of the overall system. Acknowledgments. The authors are grateful to all students who participated in this study. We also thank the Medical University of Graz and the Executive Department for Teaching with Media for supporting the data collection and making this study possible.

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7. Senge, P.M.: Die Hochschule als lernende Gemeinschaft. Ein Widerspruch in sich oder realisierbare Zukunft?, In: Laske, S., Scheytt, T., Meister-Scheytt, C., Scharmer, C.O. (eds.) Universität im 21. Jahrhundert. Zur Interdependenz von Begriff und Organisation der Wissenschaft. Mering: Rainer Hampp, München, pp. 17–44 (2000) 8. The Heallth Foundation: Quality Improvement Training for Healthcare Professionals. The Heallth Foundation, London (2012) 9. Hilliard, R.I.: How do medical students learn: medical student learning styles and factors that affect these learning styles. Teach. Learn. Med. Int. J. 7, 201–210 (1995) 10. Marton, F., Säljö, R.: On qualitative differences in learning: i—outcome and process. Br. J. Educ. Psychol. 46, 4–11 (1976) 11. Mattick, K., Dennis, I., Bligh, J.: Approaches to learning and studying in medical students: validation of a revised inventory and its relation to student characteristics and performance. Med. Educ. 38, 535–543 (2004) 12. Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., Bjork, R.: Learning styles: concepts and evidence. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 9, 105–119 (2008) 13. Newton, P.M.: The learning styles myth is thriving in higher education. Front. Psychol. 6, 1908 (2015) 14. Ramani, S., Leinster, S.: AMEE Guide no. 34: teaching in the clinical environment. Med. Teach. 30, 347–364 (2008) 15. Sutkin, G., Wagner, E., Harris, I., Schiffer, R.: What makes a good clinical teacher in medicine? A review of the literature. Acad. Med. 83, 452–466 (2008) 16. Dejene, W., Bishaw, A., Dagnew, A.: Preservice teachers’ approaches to learning and their teaching approach preferences: secondary teacher education program in focus. Cogent Educ. 5, 15 (2018) 17. Al-Ajlan, A., Zedan, H.: Why moodle. In: 2008 12th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (2008) 18. Link, T.M., Marz, R.: Computer literacy and attitudes towards e-learning among first year medical students. BMC Med. Educ. 6, 34 (2006) 19. Masic, I.: E-learning as new method of medical education. Acta Inform. Med. 16, 102–117 (2008) 20. Kellogg, S.D.: Scaffolding, learning styles, and web-based tutorials. In: Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, vol. 10, pp. 1–10 (2005) 21. Ruiz, J.G., Mintzer, M.J., Leipzig, R.M.: The impact of e-learning in medical education. Acad. Med. 81, 207–212 (2006) 22. Han, H., Nelson, E., Wetter, N.: Medical students’ online learning technology needs. Clin. Teach. 11, 15–19 (2014) 23. Kılıç, D., Sa˘glam, N.: Investigating the effects of gender and school type on students’ learning orientations. In: Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 2, pp. 3378–3382 (2010) 24. Nooriafshar, M., Maraseni, T.N.: A comparison of learning preferences and perceptions of students for statistics concepts and techniques. Int. J. Math. Teach. Learn. 1–9 (2005) 25. Mazumder, Q.H.: Comparative analysis of learning styles of students of USA and Bangladesh. Int. J. Educ. Pract. 1, 101–109 (2013) 26. Kerschbaumer, S.: Evaluation von Führungskräftetrainings – Was beeinflusst das Urteil der Teilnehmerinnen? Master Thesis. Vienna (2009) 27. Bishop, P.A., Herron, R.L.: Use and misuse of the likert item responses and other ordinal measures. Int. J. Exercise Sci. 8, 297–302 (2015) 28. Rossum, Van G.: Python programming language. In: USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2007) 29. Kluyver, T., et al.: Jupyter Notebooks – a publishing format for reproducible computational workflows. ELPUB (2016)

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Upgrading Engineering Education for the Chemical Industry of Russia Irina V. Pavlova1 , Andrey A. Potapov2 , Gulnaz Fakhretdinova1 , and Phillip A. Sanger3(B) 1 Kazan National Research Technological University, Kazan, Tatarstan, Russian Federation 2 Kazan State Power Engineering University, Kazan, Tatarstan, Russian Federation 3 Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A.

[email protected]

Abstract. The future of the domestic chemical industry depends on quality staffing. This article analyzes and attempts to understand the problem of modernizing the chemical industry in the Republic of Tatarstan as the basis of a new paradigm of the engineering education system. The modernization of the chemical industry is the cumulative result of the global interdependence between knowledge, technology, science and education. The essence of the problems of learning and re-training of technical personnel associated with the transition of the chemical industry to an innovative development model is discussed and the ways to overcome them are shown. The article suggests ways to improve the educational programs in Russian technological universities thru active learning approaches, thru dual learning with time in industry as well as the university, thru project-oriented learning, and immersive learning and finally thru stimulating the formation of an environmental competitiveness cluster. Keywords: Training of specialists · Project-based learning · Chemical industry · Dual learning · Industry 4.0 · Immersive learning

1 Introduction In today’s world, the modernization of the education system is considered a vital pathway for developing the economy and society. It is education that should become a catalyst for innovative processes of effective renewal of the economy and industry. The Russian chemical industry, and the Republic of Tatarstan in particular, is currently facing systemic challenges, including both global trends in the development of the chemical and petrochemical industries, and internal barriers to development. This industry, with its high-tech equipment and research foundation, requires professional personnel with new approaches to the production of products. Specialists today should not only be able to implement and control the technological process, but also operate effectively in teams, carry out marketing research, develop new technologies, appreciate the value of “LEAN” production, plan measures for labor protection and ensure quality management of product [1]. To improve the efficiency of the petrochemical complexes of the Republic of Tatarstan and to make fuller use of its natural resources, it is necessary to create © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 15–22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_2

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conditions for the continuous replenishment of these industries with qualified personnel who cannot only use ready-made solutions to emerging problems, but also are able to generate, implement and manage innovations. People looking for jobs in the chemical manufacturing industry can expect to face intense competition, especially those looking to work in the industry for the first time. In manufacturing, those with experience and continuing education are preferred. For professional and managerial positions, candidates with experience and a degree have the best prospects. In addition, some job opportunities will arise from the need to replace workers who change jobs, retire or leave the workforce for other reasons. Furthermore, sustainable development of chemical enterprises can be strengthened by preserving and strengthening the natural environment, by creating favorable environmental and social working conditions for their employees and by searching for innovative solutions aimed at resource-saving and energy-saving technologies. The goal of the study is to find ways to improve the training of specialists as the basis for the modernization of the chemical industry in the region.

2 Status of the Chemical Industry in Tatarstan Chemical enterprises in Europe and Asia need more and more specialists who are ready for multifactor technological solutions with an expanding range of products, who can technologically combine different types of work, ready for a rational combination of typical and innovative technological solutions at all stages of production. The chemical industry is an important sector of the development of the Republic of Tatarstan. The material and technical sustainability of chemical enterprises in the Republic of Tatarstan implies the optimal use of non-renewable energy sources, as well as the use of innovative technologies of lean production and minimization of waste. All this requires the improvement of personnel training to meet the needs for innovation dictated by the economic and social requirements of the region [2]. Nowadays, more and more attention is being paid to lean production and the preservation of a favorable environmental situation in the region. A recent change for the petrochemical enterprise in Tatarstan is the cluster intensification around environmental competitiveness that considers the ecological situation of the region. This cluster could greatly contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of chemical enterprises by introducing processes that are safer for the environment. Enterprises and organizations included in the environmental competitiveness cluster in the Republic of Tatarstan are [3]: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

manufacturers of chemical products, suppliers of raw materials (oil and gas) and refineries, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, plastics, industrial rubber goods, the ministries that regulate industry at the state level, and universities and research institutes of the republic, providing the chemical industry with specialists and developing innovative projects for industrial enterprises.

The productivity of chemical plants can be increased through a variety of intelligent manufacturing technologies, such as predictive asset management, process control, and

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production simulation. Improving business operations comes in two ways: increasing productivity and reducing risk. Risk mitigation, however, involves managing supply chains and internal operations to respond to changing customer needs and improve safety and quality [4]. The solution to these problems is possible through the integration of the chemical industry and the system of secondary and higher professional education, as well as cluster development and improvement of educational programs, considering the specific requirements of the industry representatives. However, as noted by the general director of Tatneftekhiminvest-holding R. Yarullin: “In the Republic of Tatarstan there is no real systemic character for secondary, higher education, as well as retraining of personnel in a number of demanded professions; there is no unified and publicly available base that accumulates information on specialties and professions in relation to educational institutions. It is also necessary to adapt the professional skills and knowledge of graduates to the conditions of real production” [5]. The educational organizations of the Republic of Tatarstan should work for the needs of enterprises in the real sector of the economy. It is noteworthy that industry is in the “fourth industrial revolution” or Industry 4.0, where computers and automation are driving down production costs. Rapid advances in technology are changing the way we interact, communicate, and analyze information to achieve operational efficiencies and improve productivity. The shift to real-time data access and the combination of digital and physical technologies have enabled companies to become more responsive, pro-active, and productive. Multi-user cloud applications, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data analytics are just a few of the many technologies that underpin Industry 4.0. In the future, this will lead to the modernization of pedagogical technologies, where one of the key roles will be played by immersive learning, which implies the implementation of the principle of visibility in education, supported by modern information technologies.

3 Proposed Changes for Chemical Industry Training Based on a review of pedagogical approaches and the needs of the Tatarstan chemical sector, the following ways to improve educational programs in the universities and eliminate the contradictions between the content, quality of education and the requirements of the labor market of the Republic of Tatarstan are proposed: 1) the need to develop learning tools that engage the students’ interest in vocational technology education, 2) the introduction of dual learning: a system of alternating learning and work, 3) the development of softer conditions for entry level employees, 4) the intensification of a chemical industry cluster around environmental competitiveness achieved through strong and active interaction between enterprises, science and educational institutions, 5) the implementation of a practice-oriented model for training a specialist for the chemical and petrochemical industry using project-based learning, and 6) immersive teaching methods using augmented reality.

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3.1 Active Learning in Vocational Training Games. The use of business games has been shown to increase interest and motivation for learning. 70% of the surveyed third-year mechanical engineering students of the Kazan Technological College confirmed that blitz games can be effective in the following disciplines: “Organization and performance of work on the operation of industrial equipment”; “Organization and implementation of installation and repair of industrial equipment.” Several games were demonstrated and tested. The game “I am a mechanic” has the goal of developing a sequence of repairing sliding bearings while also developing professional, communication, individual and social work skills. The topic of the module was “Repair of common assemblies and equipment parts”. Scenario: As a mechanic, you need to draw up a technological route for repairing split bearings and to do this, you need to sequence 15 actions during the repair. In a second game called Machine Repair, the game focuses on the preparatory work for the repair of equipment. In this 20-min game, when repairing a machine, it is necessary to adhere to a certain order of actions for the clearest organization and best performance of repair work. Competitions: The experience of universities in organizing and conducting WorldSkills championships proves its positive impact on improving the training of engineers in colleges. WorldSkills formats allow prospective workers to successfully improve their professional skills in blue-collar jobs related to their engineering specialties. They gain professional experience and competencies, plus learn professional standards. It is difficult to overestimate the pedagogical effect of participation in such championships for the students themselves, particularly in the Russian culture. They gain valuable professional experience, develop new competencies, internal in future activities, immerse them in the real environment of professional activity, learn about professional standards. They train and work at professional facilities and simulators that maximally recreate the production process. The participation of KNRTU students in the WorldSkills Championships in in Abu Dhabi in 2017 and at the 2019 45th WorldSkills World Championship in Kazan, Russia, resulting several gold medals. 3.2 Dual Learning (Often Referred also as Cooperative Learning) Dual learning is a promising system for developing specialists for the chemical industry. It is widely used in educational institutions in several countries in Europe and Asia. Currently, in the countries of Western Europe, the system of dual education has been actively developed. It is a mechanism of cooperation between vocational education organizations and industrial organizations. The meaning of this cooperation lies in the fact that within the walls of an educational institution, students receive a theoretical knowledge base, while, at the industrial enterprises, they receive practical knowledge. Dual-system students usually spend part of each week at the college or University and the other part at the manufacturing organization. Dual education usually lasts two to three and a half years. Since from all European countries Germany is famous for the best results of dual education. When German students choose a profession and vocational

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school, it is important to find a company that concludes a contract with them and directs them to study the profession required for the company. In the U.S., this type of program is called a cooperative program where students spending whole semesters working at a company. These semesters are mixed in between semesters at the university. While these extra semesters can extend the time to graduations, the students are well paid and, with satisfactory completion, are employed by the company. At the end of the 2000s, the practice of dual education came to the Russian Federation. Thirteen regions participated in a pilot project to implement dual learning in the Russian Federation. In 2013 the Republic of Tatarstan launched a project to introduce dual education in secondary vocational education. The project was supported by the Rimera group of companies, which allocated space on the territory of the Alnas plant for an educational complex, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic, which purchased many learning laboratories and the Almetyevsk Professional College, which developed practice-oriented training programs in conjunction with specialists from the plant “Alnas”. The regions participating in the project formalized the results of dual education in the form of didactic materials, provisions on the organization of practical training, samples of cooperation agreements, forms of educational programs, etc. [6]. With the further spread of dual education, issues related to licensing and accreditation of educational organizations and industrial enterprises participating in the implementation of the model should be resolved. Scaling and replicating the dual learning model to most educational organizations will be problematic without making changes and additions to educational legislation. Elements of dual education are continuing in some educational institutions of the Republic of Tatarstan. For example: The TATNEFT Group of Companies is actively involved in the preparation of educational programs for the Almetyevsk Petrochemical College and the Almetyevsk State Oil Institute. Students of these educational institutions undergo practical training at the enterprises of the TATNEFT group of companies. Up to 80% of graduates of these educational institutions work in their chosen specialty. And the satisfaction of employers with the competencies of graduates has increased by 50%. 76% of students note an increased interest and motivation for learning, as well as an emerging confidence in the future. In addition, a Corporate University has been created, which provides in-house training for the personnel of TAFNEFT enterprises. This made it possible to increase labor efficiency by 28%, to reduce the cost of retraining personnel outside the enterprise by 70%, and staff turnover at enterprises decreased 5%. 3.3 Improved Integration of New Personnel in Industry For graduates of vocational education institutions to work in their specialty at enterprises, comfortable working conditions need to be created within the enterprises. At most enterprises of the Republic of Tatarstan, comfortable conditions for starting work are created for young people. At some enterprises, young specialists under 30 are paid bonuses, provided with a hostel or a soft loan for the purchase of housing in the region. Young specialists are assisted by mentors from among experienced workers with many years of experience in the enterprise. Leading companies in these efforts are Tatneft, KAMAZ, Nizhnekamskneftekhim, the Zelenodolsk plant named after A.M. Gorky, and Zelenodolsk Mechanical Plant. A well-developed social infrastructure is

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being created for all employees of the enterprises: sports complexes, swimming pools, clubs of interest. Competitions of professional skills and sporting events are held. Additionally, workers are trained here in the principles of lean manufacturing. The creation of simulators for teaching the principles of lean manufacturing at Russian enterprises is a relatively new phenomenon. A similar project is being implemented at the Tatarstan enterprise of PJSC KAMAZ, where they are very sensitive to the best practices in the field of increasing labor productivity. A training center named the “Process Factory” was established at KAMAZ in 2013 to train personnel in the principles of lean production with the help of innovative educational technologies [7]. The specialists of the enterprise implementing lean production studied the experience of training for the personnel of leading enterprises. The result of this study was that, in order to increase the effectiveness of training, it is necessary to introduce a format of innovative training. It allows students to immediately apply the theoretical knowledge gained in practice, simultaneously sorting out the difficulties that arise with the teacher, which increases interest and motivation for learning. For each direction, instructional materials have been developed that have a close relationship with the real processes taking place at the enterprise. Therefore, employees easily and with great interest are involved in training, learn to see losses, formulate and solve problems, and balance processes. This is a fully interactive teaching format that does not have boring theory and long slides but has a lot of practice. Internal trainers challenge the group of trainees: to optimize the production flow with concrete, measurable performance indicators that should increase from shift to shift. And in the process of solving this problem, expert trainers teach how this can be done with the help of lean manufacturing tools. Process Factory trainings are always based on real production. During the training, students go to the workshop and see how the process of manufacturing the same parts is organized in reality. This is a great way to convince people that Lean principles really work. 3.4 Strengthening the Environmental Competitiveness Cluster in Tatarstan Petrochemical enterprises are of great importance for the industry of the Republic of Tatarstan. At the same time, it is one of the main consumers of energy and a serious source of environmental pollution. A new cluster initiative has been adopted for petrochemical enterprises: cluster intensification of environmental competitiveness. This cluster will significantly increase the competitiveness of petrochemical enterprises by accelerating the implementation of production processes that are more cost-effective and better for the environment [8]. Projected 15-year benefits of the cluster are double digit increases in energy efficiency (15%), reduced production costs (50%), major reduction in pollution (75%), and value chain cost reductions (40%). Furthermore, the action plan will accelerate the development of research programs, the piloting and demonstration of innovative technologies and the transfer of knowledge and technology. The activities of the research program are fully integrated along the value chain: from basic and applied research to piloting, testing and demonstration of innovative technologies on a semi-industrial scale, to scaling up new technology at the manufacturing plant [9]. The action plan for cluster intensification of environmental competitiveness is to fine-tune the development and implementation

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of innovative technologies in cooperation with interested organizations. All activities will be integrated into the existing structures of the partners. 3.5 Implement Practice-Oriented, Project Based Learning Russian President V.V. Putin, in his 2014 speech at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education, noted the following: “Unfortunately, we still train a significant number of engineers in universities that have long since broken away from the real production base, advanced research and development in their fields. Future engineers should be taught not only by scientists, but also by practitioners. We need not only engineers, but also leaders of large teams capable of implementing large-scale projects. In this regard, it is necessary to create conditions for the development of project-oriented education of engineering personnel” [10]. The project-based teaching method is widely used at the Kazan National Research Technological University [11]. It is implemented in both general engineering and graduating departments. The inclusion of real projects in the programs of study at the university provides an increase in the quality of education. Project-based learning is one of the modern technologies that universities in many countries of the world use to train engineers that are much needed in various industries, focused on the practical application of their knowledge, skills and abilities. Projects within the framework of project-based learning programs require serious theoretical learning and the ability to apply the knowledge gained in practice. The result of project activities is an increase in interest and motivation for learning, a practical orientation of educational programs, a more effective formation of future specialists with improved professional, communication and team-work skills. At the end of the classes, a survey of students was conducted, which showed that 80% of respondents liked working on the project, 74% noted an increased interest in teamwork, 78% are sure that the knowledge gained while working on the project will be useful to them in the future. However, when using project-based teaching, a number of systemic difficulties arise not least of which is a needed radical reform of the educational process, special training of teachers, and the projects take more time. All this requires substantial refinement of the project-based teaching method to the realities of our educational system. 3.6 Virtual and Augmented Reality Technologies Also, virtual and augmented reality technologies are increasingly being integrated into the training process, and the increasing availability of equipment for the implementation of these approaches determines their key positions in the near future, especially in the educational sphere. For example, 3D visualization and virtual reality have a high educational potential for training engineers, operators and maintenance personnel. The Siemens immersive training simulator, for example, provides a virtual experience of different situations on the spot. Students can “walk” through the simulated facility, “operate” equipment and instruments, and “cope” with security situations. They can also collaborate with their peers, and instructors, mentors or tutors can supervise individual

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and group performances. Trainees can also access real plant data created with digital twins. In addition to training and forecasting, 3D virtualization also helps students prepare for getting started in the enterprise.

4 Conclusions At present, much attention is paid to teaching specialists for Russian chemical enterprises based on the existing curricula of educational organizations. In this connection, an advanced educational program is needed for training production personnel for the Russian chemical and petrochemical enterprises in Russia and the Republic of Tatarstan meeting the high requirements of their customers. Advanced training of innovative personnel for petrochemical enterprises must include the professional and personal skills needed for the development and implementation of scientific results in professional activities. Innovative teaching of personnel includes the participation of students in scientific research, dual education, immersive technologies and project-oriented learning.

References 1. Chebotarev, S.S., Kokhno, P.A., Dyundik, E.P.: An innovative model of personnel learning. Sci. Bull. Def. Ind. Russ. 1, 3–7 (2014) 2. Yushko, S.V., Galikhanov, M.F., Kondratyev, V.V.: Integrative training of future engineers to innovative activities in conditions of postindustrial economy. Higher Educ. Russ. 28(1), 65–75 (2019) 3. Program for the development and deployment of the productive forces of the Republic of Tatarstan based on the cluster approach until 2020 and for the period until 2030. https://xn----dtbhaacat8bfloi8h.xn--p1ai/index.php?q=program-development-placem ent-productive-forces-Republic-Tatarstan-cluster-approach (2020) 4. Moshev, E.R., Meshalkin, V.P.: Concept and practical implementation of a problem-oriented system for information support of the life cycle of chemical technological equipment. Math. Methods Eng. Technol. 4, 124 (2018) 5. Yarullin R.A.: Petrochemistry of Tatarstan will grow in Siberia, Time and Money, no. 2 (2012). https://www.e-vid.ru/index-m-192-p-63-article-39381.htm 6. Ovsienko, L.V., Zimina, I.V., Yesenin, E.Y.: Dual education as an important factor in increasing the investment attractiveness of the region, T. 17, no. 5, pp. 339–344. Bulletin of Kazan Technological University (2014). https://elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=21342592 7. Imai, M., Gemba kaizen: The way to reduce costs and improve quality. Alpina Business Books, p. 346 (2005) 8. Lubnina, A.A., Ostanina, S.S., Sharafutdinova, M.M., Lushchik, I.V.: Specificity of the potential of innovative forms of cooperation of industrial enterprises. Bull. Volgograd Inst. Bus. Educ. 1(38), 51–55 (2019) 9. Kotov, D.V., Kachalkina, K.G.: Modern stage of development of cooperation in the oil and gas industry. Actual Probl. Econ. Manage. 1(17), 45–53 (2018) 10. Meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education: http://kremlin.ru/events/pre sident/news/45962 (2014) 11. Sanger, P.A., Pavlova, I.V., Shageeva, F.T., Khatsrinova, O.Y., Ivanov, V.G.: Introducing project based learning into traditional Russia engineering education. Adv. Intell. Syst. Comput. 715, 821–829 (2018)

Introduction of IDEEA (International Design & Engineering Education Association) 2021 Program Kwanju Kim(B) and Seungil Lo Hongik University, Wausan-ro, Mapo, Seoul 04066, Korea {kwanju,loseungil}@hongik.ac.kr

Abstract. IDEEA program provides a platform for academia and industry to meet, exchange ideas, foster collaboration and make new friendships. The IDEEA program, which started in 2019, is on its third year this year. The purpose of this program is for students to find solutions of innovative designs or strategies as potential answers to a given set of requirements. Engineering design tasks for specific purpose drones have been carried out for the past two years, but this year, the development of future mobility was selected as the subject. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of future automobile using C (Connected), A (Autonomous), S (Shared), and E (Electric) as the keywords, 215 engineering and design students from 26 universities around the world form 16 teams. In addition, despite the Covid 19 pandemic environment, various online tools are being used to efficiently cooperate globally. The contents of this project are to design, model, and package an innovative future mobility design and engineering concept. In November of 2020, the program was launched with a general announcement of this year’s assignments. In December, team composition started, and the entire student team formation was completed and the collaboration started in March. It was easier for students to focus on conducting the project during “the team collaboration phase 1”, when all universities around the world were offering classes. The teams had to select a megacity. Then they would develop ideas and define concepts for the future mobility, appropriate for their selected metropolitan area. The midterm presentation took place on May 14th, and the purpose of this presentation was to determine how well cooperation among participating students have been progressing. Students will carry out user-needs research, industrial design and the engineering specifications and develop a “soft” precision mock-up and a CAD model of their final solution. They will present a series of development processes and their virtual mock up on the final presentation, scheduled to be on July 26–27. The IDEEA program faces many challenges due to the wide variety of the participating universities, different majors, semester starting dates and media restrictions in different countries. At the same time, the challenges of the global student teams form the foundation for an important teaching content of the course. The students can experience the collaborative work of engineers and designers in developing real world products in advance. This program will give recommendations for implementing an international, multidisciplinary collaboration course. A structured approach will be documented regarding the organization and project design, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 23–28, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_3

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K. Kim and S. Lo the team initiation, teaching concept and the project outcome in terms of quality of the delivered results as well as the learning success of the students. Keywords: Engineering design · Future mobility · International collaboration · Multidisciplinary

1 Outline of IDEEA Program IDEEA program was launched in January 2019 by the universities worldwide to succeed the PACE (Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education) program [1] sponsored by General Motors from 1999 to 2018. IDEEA program [2] provides a platform for academia and industry to meet, exchange ideas, foster collaboration and create new relationships. The 2021 project is to design future mobility solution for megacities for 2025 using C (Connected), A (Autonomous), S (Shared), and E (Electric) as the keywords, and a series of processes for the development of transportation vehicles have been carried out. 215 design and engineering students and 31 faculty members from 10 countries, 26 universities, are participating this year. In order to systematically educate students’ engineering design ability, design thinking lectures are offered by Prof. Dresselhaus of Portland State University via YouTube [3]. After an eight-weeks online team collaboration (Team collaboration phase 1), there are midterm presentations and consecutively 12 weeks of team collaboration in fulfilling each respective team designs using CAD until the final presentation. (Team collaboration phase 2).

2 IDEEA2021 Program The main theme of this year’s project is “to create new mobility solutions in megacities in 2025”, and the objective of this project is to design, model, and virtually mockup a new and innovative on-road future mobility design and engineering concept based upon a selected specific megacity. It is important that the students provide the framework which is to conceptualize future mobility solutions for densely populated urban areas and to understand the social, economic, technological and mobility contexts and trends for 2025. 2.1 Program Schedule of IDEEA2021 In November of last year, the program was launched with a general announcement of this year’s assignments. Figure 1 shows the timeline of this year’s future mobility project. In December, we teamed up with participating students with the support of universities that are willing to participate. In order to provide the knowledge of engineering design process, the design-thinking course prepared by Professor Dresselhaus was provided to students via YouTube in January 2021. In February, the entire student team formation was completed. During “the team collaboration phase 1”, from February 23rd to May 14th, when all universities around the world were offering classes, it was easier for students to conduct early research and ideation assignments without interfering with

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other external factors such as summer internships. The teams had executed empathic contextual and discovery research to define real-world application needs within their mobility application category. Then, they would develop ideas and define concepts for the mobility design solutions that would meet their identified key category of human needs. The midterm presentation took place on May 14. The purpose of this midterm presentation was to determine the degree of collaborative activities in each team. Since then, until July 26–27, when the final announcement is expected, is “the team collaboration phase 2”. Students finalize the engineering specifications and develop a “soft” precision mockup and a CAD model of their final mobility solution concept design. They will present a series of devel opment processes and their mockup on the final presentation. The description of the project schedule stipulated so far is shown in the following figure.

Fig. 1. IDEEA 2021 project schedule

2.2 Issues for Success of the Program The IDEEA program faces many challenges due to the wide variety of the participating universities. Organizationally, different curriculum contents, semester starting dates, and media restrictions in different countries should be managed carefully. In recent years, the Covid-19 pandemic has also been considered as an issue. Deliberate caution is required for the smooth operation of the program. Issues to consider during the project are listed as follows: Select an Adequate Topic. It is important to consider the following aspects to select the appropriate program theme: • Participating mentors’ suggestions, interests, and/or knowledge • Topics that require both design and engineering • Products that are neither too simple nor too complicated, expecting each team consists of approximately 10 participants for better communication • Technology which can be available in the next five years Teaming Up. Although there was a lot of interest and curiosity from participating schools, it was not easy to get a list of all the schools at the beginning of the assignment punctually. The items considered during team configuration are as follows:

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• Each team will include both engineering and design students • Students on all continents will be included in a team as much as possible Role of the Mentors. The role of mentors is critical for the smooth progress of the project. This year, 16 teams are formed with two mentors for each team. Mentors usually supervise weekly meetings with their teams. Milestones for Checking Team Progress. In order to make sure that teams are working cooperatively, the midterm presentation was held on May 14th where they had to present their progress for five minutes. This year, two design reviews were conducted to closely check the progress of the project.

2.3 The Performance of the IDEEA 2021 “future Mobility Project” and Its Outcome This year’s topic for the students is to create mobility solutions for megacities in 2025 [4]. This is a change of topic from drones which have been carried out for the past two years. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of future automobile development, keywords of C (Connected), A (Autonomous), S (Shared), and E (Electric) were outlined as technology trends in the automotive sector. More detailed description of the project is as follows: • Generate a case study by choosing a megacity and implementing the chosen solution: understand the social, economic, technological, and urban mobility contexts and trends for 2025 • Identify user problems with existing means of transportation and use these insights for the creation of new mobility solutions that increase the quality of transport • Identify large demographic potential user groups that both require a new mobility solution and would be likely to utilize it • Design and engineer a concept vehicle that responds to the context research of the selected megacity, and solves user mobility issues for a large demographic group and responds to their needs in their lifestyle and transportation environment The IDEEA2021 performance has been outstanding with 16 teams that have done intensive research and have chosen global megacities such as Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Seoul, to tackle the congestion from a systems level and vehicle design level to solve target users’ pain points (Fig. 2). Anticipated Outcome. The purpose of the project is for participating students to find solutions of innovative designs or strategies as potential answers to a given set of requirements. Students can have an opportunity to experience and advance the collaborative work of engineers and designers in developing real world products. They should go through the typical design thinking process, i.e. research – definition – ideation – making – testing [5]. During the research phase, every team should select their respective target metropolitan areas and trends to define which target customer they would focus

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Fig. 2. A rendering and schematic of how one team’s mobility solution would be to maximize efficiency of a platform by using a modular vehicle with an interchangeable top.

on, and they should collaboratively conduct customer research to discover user needs and patterns. Students need to brainstorm solutions to solve customer issues in ways that honor their needs, value and lifestyles. The divergent phase and the convergent phase are conducted to define the desired transportation for each team. It is also recommended to develop and define the infrastructure to support the selected design solution. After students decide their mobility type, they deal with activities such as comparing, investigating, analyzing, and selecting among ideas from the pool in order to fulfill their own mobility’s performance.

3 Conclusion The IDEEA project was initiated in 2019 by the universities which had actively participated in the GM PACE program, and the IDEEA2019 Forum was successfully held at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico, and the IDEEA2020 program took place online due to Covid 19. This year’s schedule is also fully conducted online. More than 20 universities worldwide team up to create a unique educational experience for engineering and design students. The number of participating universities and students have been increasing over the past three years. The IDEEA course may face some challenges due to the variety of the participating universities. Organizationally, due to different curriculum contents, semester starting dates, and media restrictions in different countries should be managed carefully. At the same time, the challenges of the student teams form the foundation for an important teaching content of the course: the independent organization of project work in a team, across the boundaries of time zones, working culture, and language barriers. This program can provide a guideline for implementing an international, multidisciplinary collaboration course. Based on the experience from the past two years, a structured approach will be documented regarding the organization and project design, team initiation, teaching concept, and the project outcome in terms of quality of the delivered results as well as the learning success for the students.

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Acknowledgements. This program was partly supported by the 2020 Hongik University Research Fund.

References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

PACE program homepage, http://www.pacepartners.org IDEEA program homepage, http://www.ideea.network Professor Dresselhaus’ Design Thinking homepage, http://billdresselhaus.fatcow.com Future mobility project guideline: http://www.ideea.network Larsen, P., et al.: A multidisciplinary engineering summer school in an industrial setting. Eur. J. Eng. Educ. 34(6), 511–526 (2009)

Innovative and Scientific ECO Environment: Integration of Teaching Information and Communication Technologies and Physics Olha Kuzmenko1(B)

, Marina Rostoka2 , Sofiia Dembitska3 and Maryna Miastkovska5

, Yana Topolnik4

,

1 Flight Academy of the National Aviation University, 1 Dobrovolskogo Street,

Kropyvnytskyi 25005, Ukraine 2 V.O. Sukhomlynskyi State Scientific and Pedagogical Library of Ukraine, National Academy

of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, 9/of.31 M. Berlynskoho Street, Kiev 04060, Ukraine 3 Vinnytsia National Technical University, 95 Khmelnitskoe Highway, Vinnytsia 21027, Ukraine 4 SHEE “Donbas State Pedagogical University”, 19 General Batyuk, Sloviansk 84116, Ukraine 5 Kamianets-Podilskyi Ivan Ohienko National University,

61 Ohienko, Kamianets-Podilskyi 32300, Ukraine

Abstract. Given the trends of digitalization, the main directions of improving the educational process in institutions of higher education and the requirements for the next generation, it is important to develop a model of the innovative scientific ECO environment, where the modernized methodology will properly implemented in teaching physics in integration with ICT based on STEM education. Physical and technical training of future specialists (in particular, aviation) is a component of their professional training, which forms personally and professionally important qualities, readiness for training in the specialty “Aviation Transport”. Each of the disciplines (Avionics, Flight Dynamics, Aerodynamics, Radio Equipment, Flight Simulator etc.) of professionally oriented training has a positive effect on the level of professional competence of future professionals. Therefore, the method of teaching physics and professionally-oriented disciplines using ICT based on STEM-approach should promote the development of student’s critical thinking, creativity, skills of quick orientation and response in difficult situations. The effectiveness of the developed methodology based on STEM technologies is con-firmed by the conducted pedagogical experiment in technical institutions of higher education in Ukraine. The authors substantiate a model of innovative-scientific ECO environment; develop a methodological system for the formation of student’s knowledge of physics-based on fundamental end-toend generating concepts, taking into account, transdisciplinary and professionally oriented approaches to technical disciplines based on STEM technologies. Keywords: Innovative-scientific ECO-environment · STEM-technologies · Physics · ICT · Pedagogical experiment

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 29–36, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_4

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1 Problem Statement At the stage of modern transformational changes in society in general, and in the field of education in particular, the formation of an innovative-scientific ECO environment (hereinafter – ISD-ECO) of an educational institution becomes an urgent problem. This allows talented young people to develop their research skills and acquire relevant life and special professional competencies based on STEM education. Today, the introduction of innovations that are part of the ISD-ECO, taking into account the principles of STEM education is a challenge to the rapid postpandemic space. In addition, in the Ukrainian educational space, these implementations have some state support and are regulated by current regulations. After all, Ukraine is gradually joining the international educational standards of quality of natural sciences and mathematics; at the same time forming a civil society that requires an appropriate level of professional training, including in the technical field of education. Thus, Ukrainian scientists study in detail the experience of different countries (UK, Italy, China, Poland, Singapore, USA, etc.) on the development of STEM education. Based on certain trends in education, in particular, in STEM education, own retrospective experience and results of scientific activity, taking into account analytical data on the study of primary sources for the rational construction of the model of innovationscientific ECO environment (hereinafter – M-ISD-ECO), it is necessary to strengthen the identified contradictions between: the needs of society in highly qualified, competitive professionals (not taking into account the demands of employers), able to quickly adapt to new requirements of today and in complete compliance of the Ukrainian education system, its quality in terms of training of technical training; the latest scientific achievements of subjects in physics education based on the integration of information and communication technologies (hereinafter – ICT) based on STEM education in higher education institutions (hereinafter – HEI) and traditional methodological approaches to the formation of professional training teaching; introduction of innovative approaches (transdisciplinary, competence, professionally-oriented, systemic) teaching of physics and ICT and their fragmentation in the process of formation of professional competence, which is formed in the development of ISD-ECO based on STEM education. Thus, the lack of systematic methodological basis for the introduction of methods of integrated teaching of ICT-oriented physics in the context of STEM education, insufficient level of theoretical study of this problem and practical implementation, its importance for training highly qualified specialists, allows to develop a methodical system of teaching physics and ICT, by studying natural sciences and professionally-oriented disciplines in the free economic zone of technical direction based on creating an innovative scientific model of ECO environment.

2 Analysis of Recent Research and Publications Achieving pedagogical goals and effectiveness in teaching will contribute to the functioning of our proposed innovative scientific ECO environment based on STEM education in terms of integration of teaching physics and ICT. In this context, research into the implementation of the idea of STEM education (abbreviation first proposed by American scientist R. Colwell) showed interest S. Galata,

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H. Gonzalez, N. Honcharova, D. Kuenzi, O. Kuzmenko, O. Korshunova, D. Lenhdon, N. Morze, K. Nikols and etc. The solution of the main task of the modern education system is determined by the trajectory of innovations, which are aimed at preparing a new generation of people who have certain abilities for self-improvement, self-development, self-education and finally – for self-realization in the profession. That is, the educational system, in our opinion, should contribute to the creation of adequate conditions for the formation and development of human capital of the state (scientific, intellectual, labour potential of the country) as an important component of the knowledge economy. At the same time, the legitimate transience of the emergence of information resources – technical means, production technologies and management affects the development of innovative educational systems of developed countries. This suggests that the leading factor in the modernization of education in most countries is the STEM component. For example, the national program for the training of STEM educators is already functioning in the USA [1]. For example, the factors that stimulate ECO innovation and the formation of the above-mentioned environment are outlined in the works of Chinese scientists (Jun Chena, Jinhua Cheng, Sheng Dai, 2017), who point to the importance of innovations, modernized technologies and their sale in the economic market. Examining the corporate ECO environment (Fang Hea, Xin Miaoa, Christina W.Y. Wong, Stacy Lee, 2018), scientists focused on factors such as stakeholder requests, ECO innovation drivers, ECO innovation systems, ECO design, science interactions, business and government, which are important factors for the implementation of innovative trends in the educational space for the development of the technical industry [2, 3]. Thus, the system should become an innovative and educational ECO environment, for the formation of which it is important to understand the essence of the concepts of “information and educational environment”, “interactive learning environment” and “virtual environment”. In this vector, the term field of the semantic-logical construct “information-educational environment” is understood as a single space where the integration of necessary information through various media in the educational process, including the teaching of physics and ICT. The semantics of the term “interactive learning environment” mainly reveals and supports the structured interaction between learners (outlining the demands of the younger generation on the quality of education). The ontology of the concept of “virtual environment” includes in its content various types of interactions, and is also considered as software for the provision of educational services in the teaching of physics in integration with ICT based on STEM education. According to V. Bykov and M. Shyshkina [4], the structure of the learning environment determines the internal organization, relationship and interdependence between it’s elements. Scientists V. Vovkotrub and N. Manoilenko [5] consider the learning environment like an office or laboratory in the context of a system with an “experimental setup” (demonstration, laboratory) and an experimenter (teacher, pupil or teacher, student) to increase its efficiency, which is one of the goals of ergonomics of educational physics experiment. The concept of “cloud-based learning environment”, which is an important component of innovation-scientific ECO environment, V. Bykov [6] defines as an ICT environment HEI, in which certain didactic functions, as well as some fundamentally

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important functions of research, include expedient coordinated and integrated use of cloud computing services and technologies. Focusing on the scientific work of V. Bykov, A. Gurzhii and M. Shyshkina [7], we note that to increase the efficiency of the process of forming an ISD-ECO it is necessary to comply with such basic requirements as strengthening the material and technical base of HEI; creation of a reliable system of delivery of STEM-teaching aids and necessary equipment in the process of integration of physics and ICT teaching; development of pedagogical methods of effective use of STEM-learning tools; application of specific organizational and pedagogical conditions for the effective use of teaching aids, including modern ICT and digital equipment; creation of an information base of knowledge on the development and implementation of STEM-teaching tools in the educational process of free economic education; funding for the STEM development program.

3 Statement of Basic Material and the Substantiation of the Obtained Results Summarizing the results of analytical research, it can be argued that in science at present there is no clear concretization of the semantic and logical justification of the essence of the concept of “innovation-scientific ECO environment”. However, we consider it expedient to introduce it into scientific circulation, at this stage of the formation of modern education. In accordance with the above, we offer the model developed in the course of our study of the ISD-ECO (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Model of innovation-scientific ECO environment.

The components of M-ISD-ECO have certain integration relationships, which are established in the system of teaching physics and information and communication technologies, taking into account the basic provisions of transdisciplinary, systemic, competent, professionally-oriented approaches. Note that the change in the qualities of these components causes a change in the quality of the educational environment. Indeed, the component components of the ISD-ECO are interdependent, systematically integrated and determined by the general goals of the educational process of free economic education, in particular technical. Consider M-ISD-ECO on the example of its implementation in HEI – Flight Academy of the National Aviation University (hereinafter – FA NAU); Vinnytsia National Technical University; Kamianets-Podilskyi Ivan Ohiienko National University.

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For example, we give a certain factual analysis of the environment of FA NAU. We state that the professional training of highly qualified specialists in the field of 272 “Air Transport” is an integral part of this environment, as the next generation needs to acquire the following competencies: be able to quickly find non-standard, effective solutions to scientific, industrial, social and other problems, based on basic theoretical knowledge and practical skills of personal research in the integration of physics and ICT; feel the need for constant, systematic replenishment and updating of acquired knowledge and soft-skills, without stopping the process of self-improvement, self-education and selflearning throughout life; rethink and apply in practice the necessary information of the research direction based on STEM approach. In the educational ECO environment, it is possible to perform both real and virtual experiments. For example, a real physics experiment makes it possible to observe the results of the impact on the system under certain initial conditions, considering the ontological visualization of structures [8]. In addition, the results are analyzed and conclusions are drawn about the physics nature of the phenomenon. But the real experiment does not always give a complete picture of the process under study. Therefore, the formulation of a real experiment should be carried out whenever possible to achieve the goals. In the context of the introduction of information and cloud technologies in the educational process of teaching physics, a virtual experiment becomes important [9]. A deeper study of a physical phenomenon can be done through its modelling. Phenomena models more fully reflect the essential properties of the object or process under study. The authors of the study developed a method of teaching physics based on STEM technologies [9]. Thus, in the process of studying the topic of solid mechanics for aviation students, it is very important to understand the concept of the gyroscope and its principle of structure, as it underlies the control of the aircraft. Therefore, we offer an example of the use of the ARDUINO program with inertial measuring sensor MPU 6050 by students of FA NAU, with the help of which students get acquainted with the basic concepts and laws of rotational motion. The experiment is entitled: “Study of the gyroscope with ARDUINO inertial measuring sensor MPU 6050”. Requires certain equipment: Arduino board or Arduino clone (Freeduino); MPU 6050 sensor; wires for connection, software: Arduino IDE; Processing IDE. Note that the use of inertial sensors ARDUINO (Fig. 2a) are used in smartphones, unmanned aerial vehicles, balancing robots, electronic gadgets. This program has a built-in motion processor. It processes the values of the accelerometer and gyroscope to provide accurate 3D values. This sensor measures linear acceleration but does not respond to turns. Both sensors can fully describe all types of movement. The main advantage of a gyroscope over an accelerometer is that it responds to movement in any direction. The Arduino coding fragment is shown in Fig. 2b by which students can observe the reading of data from the accelerometer and gyroscope to determine the characteristics of rotational motion.

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а)

b)

Fig. 2. Program Arduino MPU 6050 tutorial

The effectiveness of the proposed method in the integration of teaching physics and information and communication technologies based on STEM education in terms of MISD-ESO was confirmed by the results of a pedagogical experiment. 153 students of the control group and 161 students of the experimental group took part in the experiment. The experiment was conducted based on FA NAU. The dynamics of the formation of the cognitive level of quality of student achievement in the physical workshop is reproduced graphically (Fig. 3), which confirms an increase of 22% provided the integration of physics education with ICT (using 3D modelling, cloud-based learning tools, robotic kits, etc.) than the traditional teaching method.

Fig. 3. Dynamics of indicators of quality of educational achievements of students in the process of performing a physics workshop based on STEM-technologies.

The study, adjustment and generalization of the results of approbation of the proposed method of practical and experimental tasks by physics students were conducted through selective attendance, discussion with teachers of opportunities to improve the learning process in physics in experimental groups, analysis of efficiency and effectiveness in the context of STEM education. To identify statistically significant differences in the levels of knowledge of students of control and experimental samples, the authors used the method of testing null and alternative hypotheses by Pearson’s criterion (χ 2 ), because all the necessary conditions are met, ie: both samples are random; the samples are independent and the members of each of the samples are independent of each other; the scale of measurements is a scale of names from 7 categories. The results of the third stage of the pedagogical experiment indicate the effectiveness of strengthening the role and importance of methods of teaching physics in the development of STEM education, namely the organization of student’s practical tasks, skills and abilities in performing physics workshops using STEM technologies. Thus, our proposed M-ISD-ECO has a certain dependence on the psychological and pedagogical support of its use in the educational process in the integration of physics and ICT. The factors of its effectiveness include:

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1. Compliance with the didactic principles of clarity on the methods and forms of experimental presentation of educational material in classes that take place in the integration format of physics and ICT based on STEM education. 2. Ensuring openness in the selection of means of conducting a physics experiment. 3. Motivation of purposefulness to study physics according to professionally oriented and integrated approaches under the condition of full-fledged formation of the student concerning the purpose of the experiment, stimulation of cognitive activity which is directed on achievement of the set purpose. 4. Implementation of personal performance of a physical experiment based on the individualization of the learning process. It is necessary to take into account a differentiated approach to the formation of student competencies. 5. Acquisition of new STEM competencies involves the use of teaching aids that should be aimed at the development of logical and systematic thinking. 6. Motivation to perform a physics experiment by students increases interest in learning and the emotional component of the process promotes interactive learning. 7. Creating constant feedback between the subjects of study, which makes it impossible to make mistakes when experimenting. 8. The formation of methods of flexible learning, which contributes to the organization of independent decision-making by students in terms of organizational aspects of the experiment. Then students have the opportunity to feel like a subject of this process, which has the right to make suggestions. 9. Providing timely assistance to students in planning and implementing a system of experiments to study integral physical systems.

4 Conclusions Industry 4.0. and implementation of innovative approaches translates the innovation process in physics in combination with integration with ICT on the basis of STEM education in HEI to a specific technological task, which is solved due to the use in ISDECO: design technology for innovation in physics and ICT in technical free economic zone; clear forecasting of the purposes of innovation and guaranteed achievement of results of innovative activity of students in the course of training of physics on the basis of STEM-education; the formation of the optimal volume and sequence of actions and operations required to obtain the predicted results of students in teaching physics with a combination of ICT; reduction of terms of performance of certain stages and operations of educational process on physics on the basis of STEM education; creation of opportunities for change of algorithm of actions, simplification or complication of operations at change of conditions of realization of innovations, growth of innovative potential of HEI. The ISD-ECO and methods of teaching physics in integration with ICT and professionally-oriented disciplines proposed by the authors, allows us to highlight the following relevant aspects: modelling methods (physical, mathematical), which are components of STEM-technologies; in the conditions of educational physical experiment STEM-technologies are means for interpretation of the observed physical processes and phenomena that allows establishing transdisciplinary interrelations between STEMelements (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Based on this, we believe that

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the method of teaching physics should be consistent with the use of new equipment, technical means of teaching, reflect the current level of scientific achievements in physics, take into account the individual characteristics of students to improve knowledge, skills and abilities HEI technical profile of education and properly solve the problem of formation and development of the personality of each student in the context of the development of STEM education. The results of the experiment and their processing using this technique confirmed its effectiveness and relevance of the proposed topic.

References 1. Rostoka, M.L., Cherevychnyi, G.S.: Transdisciplinary paradigm the STEM-management the a knowledge in the context of the adaptive approach. World Sci. 10(38), 4–9 (2018). https:// doi.org/10.31435/rsglobal_ws/31102018/6180 2. Chena, J., Cheng, J., Dai, S.: Regional ECO-innovation in China: an analysis of ECO-innovation levels and influencing factors. J. Clean. Prod. 153(1), 1–14 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2017.03.141 3. Hea, F., Miaoa, X., Wong, C.W.Y., Lee, S.: Contemporary corporate ECO-innovation research: a systematic review. J. Cleaner Prod. 174, 502–526 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro. 2017.10.314 4. Bykov, V., Shyshkina, M.: Theoretical and methodological principles of the cloud based university environment formation. Theor. Pract. Soc. Syst. Manage. 2, 30–52 (2016) 5. Vovkotrub, V.P., Manoilenko, N.V.: Strengthening the practical orientation of experimental tasks in the system of natural sciences and subject-profile integrative courses. Scientific notes. Ser. Prob. Methods Phys. Math. Technol. Educ. 11, 59–65 (2017) 6. Bykov, V.Y.: Knowledge Society and Education 4.0. Education for the Future in the Light of ´ the Challenges of the XXI Century. (EDUKACJA W KONTEKSCIE ZMIAN CYWILIZACYJNYCH). Bydgoszcz, Widawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, pp. 30–45 (2017) 7. Bykov, V.Y., Hurzhii, A.M., Shyshkina, M.P.: Conceptual bases of formation and development of the cloud-oriented educational and scientific environment of the institution of higher pedagogical education. Mod. Inform. Technol. Innovative Teach. Methods Training Methodol. Theor. Exp. Probl. 50, 20–25 (2018) 8. Rostoka, M., Guraliuk, A., Kuzmenko, O., Bondarenko, T., Petryshyn, L.: Ontological visualization of knowledge structures based on the operational management of information objects. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 832–840. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68201-9_82 9. Kuzmenko, O.S., Dembitska, S.V.: STEM-education as a basic identity in the update of innovative technologies in the process of physics training in the higher educational institutions of the technical profile. Scientific notes. Ser. Prob. Methods Phys. Math. Technol. Educ. 11(3), 73–76 (2017)

Lessons Learned During a Global Pandemic: Teaching Takeaways Teresa L. Larkin(B) Department of Physics, American University, Washington, DC, USA [email protected]

Abstract. Over the past year, the global pandemic caused by Covid-19 challenged educators from around the world to almost instantaneously become experts in online teaching and learning. While these challenges were often intense, frustrating, and very time-consuming, faculty from institutions of higher learning stepped up to the plate. As all courses ranging from A-Z across all levels of undergraduate and graduate studies went online and faculty scrambled to revise syllabi and reframe learning outcomes, many lessons were learned. As we prepare to potentially resume face-to-face teaching very soon, it may be prudent to pause and ask ourselves the following question: What has worked or is working in the online teaching and learning environment? The primary goal of this paper is to shed some light on the lessons that we learned – both the good and the bad. A secondary goal is to take the positive experiences and reshape them into longer-term teaching takeaways. Keywords: Community-building in online teaching platforms · Distance teaching and learning · e-learning pedagogies · Online teaching strategies

1 Introduction When the pandemic struck in March 2020, many of us were caught very much off guard and we had to almost instantaneously reshape the in-person classes we were teaching to become some type of online counterpart. For many of us, this was easier said than done. We had to scramble, literally overnight, to restructure our classes. Post-pandemic we all had to learn how to modify our class activities and assessment measures in order to fit within the online learning platform. In his article, The World After Coronavirus, Harari encourages us to think about how the choices that we made at that time, might have a more lasting impact [1]. He further predicted that many short-term emergency measures adopted as a result of the pandemic may become a more permanent fixture in the future. From an education standpoint, these “permanent fixtures” are in some ways parallel to what I am referring to as “teaching takeaways.” To achieve the broad aims as outlined above, this paper will focus on the introductory physics courses that I taught online during the pandemic; and, bring together relevant scholarly work to reshape the lessons learned into teaching takeaways. In this context, teaching takeaways are methodologies, innovations, and approaches that actually worked © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 37–44, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_5

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in the online teaching and learning environment. In fact, in some cases, some approaches worked just as well if not better in an online environment. For example, holding office hours in an online environment allowed students to screen-share their work making it very easy for the professor to assist them. And having the ability to record lectures, office hours, etc. and post them to an online web-based course platform allowed students a great deal of flexibility in terms of how and when they learned. Results of informal discussions with some students who participated in the physics courses will also serve to underscore some of the teaching takeaways. These teaching takeaways can then be used to inform and enhance any pedagogical changes that might be necessary when in-person classes resume. Following a brief overview of the introductory physics courses, this paper will present an overview of some of the online teaching strategies designed to build community while simultaneously enhance student learning. The first challenge was that most of us had but a few days to try and acquire some level of expertise in online teaching. Before describing the format of the courses and the associated online classroom activities, a brief overview of the related literature will be presented.

2 Literature Overview Many of us ascribe to the pedagogical benefits of teaching using an active learning approach as we know this method of teaching is supported by extensive classroom research as being very effective in terms of enhancing student learning [2–5]. Active learning can occur in many forms including such things as laboratory work, team- and group-based activities, and short writing assignments given both in and out of class. Cooperative, team- and group-based pedagogies have long been praised for their effectiveness in keeping the learner more active and hence enhancing their overall learning experience as well as increasing their learning gains [6]. Short writing assignments have also been shown in the literature to be very effective in helping students learn [7, 8]. As is widely noted in the literature and as I think we would all agree, it is very important to make sure that our students know they are a valued member of the classroom community [9, 10]. Others, both pre- and post-Covid have looked at various strategies for building community within the online classroom environment [11–13]. An environment that embraces diversity and inclusion is one that will help students feel appreciated and respected. Ultimately this type of classroom can provide an enhanced and more positive learning experience. An inclusive learning environment is vital to the building of community regardless of the format of the classroom. The section that follows will provide an outline of the introductory physics courses and an overview of some of the pedagogical approaches employed both pre- and postCovid. A brief background of the typical student clientele will also be shared. A subsection devoted to the pedagogical changes brought about as a result of the pandemic will then be presented.

3 Introductory Physics When the pandemic struck, I was teaching two introductory second-level physics courses for non-majors. These courses were entitled Light, Sound, Action (LSA) and Changing

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Views of the Universe (CVU). Besides teaching these courses during the pandemic I have also taught a first-level, laboratory-based introductory course for non-majors entitled Physics for the Modern World (PMW). What these courses have in common is that they are all courses that are a part of our general education core of courses. In the subsection that follows, an overview of the courses and the student clientele that enroll in them will be presented. The intent here is to illustrate the diverse range of backgrounds of the students that often take these courses. 3.1 Course Overviews and Student Clientele PMW is a fairly traditional first-level, algebra-based introductory course that includes a laboratory component. The primary topics covered include general motion concepts, Newton’s Laws, conservation of momentum and energy, and fluid mechanics. Students meet twice a week for a 75-min lecture and once a week for a 2.5-h lab experience. The LSA course is a second-level introductory algebra-based course that follows nicely from PMW. The topics covered in LSA include sound and waves, electricity and magnetism, and light, color and optics. The LSA course is taught in a workshop format where the students work in teams of 2–3 to complete a number of interactive engagement experiences. Students meet once a week for 75-min and once a week for 150-min. The CVU course is quite unique. In essence it is a history of the universe course that is taught within the physics department. The topics covered in the course range from the Big Bang up until the present day. Because the potential range of topics cover a time span of about 14 billion years, the topics covered from semester to semester vary somewhat depending on current events and the background of the professor teaching the course. The students that enroll in all these introductory physics courses often do so in order to complete the university’s general education requirements. Typically these students are non-majors from a wide range of departments and programs on campus. In addition, once the pandemic hit, many of our international students went home to be with their families. So more often than not, students attending these classes were in a multitude of different states and countries; and hence, different time zones. The next subsection provides a brief a look at some of the pedagogical changes that were necessary as a result of moving from an in-person to an online learning environment. While these changes were necessitated by the pandemic, and essentially had to happen almost instantaneously, the broad goals of enhancing student learning and building community remained at the forefront. 3.2 Pedagogical Changes Made Post-covid When the pandemic hit, almost overnight instructors like myself who had never taught a course online were suddenly supposed to somehow magically know how to do so. I think most of us were in a learn-as-you-go type of mode. I was teaching the LSA and CVU courses in spring 2020. The CVU course was a little easier to move online as there was no laboratory or hands-on component to it. But the LSA course was quite a different story as it is very equipment and demonstration-oriented. In LSA my students were in the middle of doing a number of hands-on, team-based electric circuits activities when classes went online. I scrambled to bring as much lab and demonstration equipment home

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as I possibly could and then I started making videos. I made videos of the demonstrations that I normally did during in-person classes and I made videos of the remainder of the electric circuits activities students were scheduled to do together. During the summer and fall of 2020 I managed to finish making videos for literally all of the demonstrations that I normally do when I teach these classes in person. While I could have went online and found some videos made by other people I chose not to do that. In fall 2020 I taught the PMW course. This course has a lab component and was very challenging to move to the online format. Using software called Pivot students would collect data from experiments presented via video [14]. A considerable focus was placed on analyzing the data the students collected using spreadsheet techniques. Some changes were made in all of the courses that I taught as to how assessment was done. More details on this will be presented in the next section. There I will discuss some of the lessons that I learned teaching courses online. This includes things that went well; and, things that didn’t go quite so well.

4 Lessons Learned: What Did and Didn’t Work So Well There is no doubt that the pandemic has made some lasting impacts on how and what we do as educators, both in and out of the classroom. Over the past year as the pandemic raged on, more and more articles emerged that seemed to focus on what didn’t work in terms of educating our students, rather than what did [15]. I’d like to share my own experiences as to what didn’t work so well and offer some of the adjustments that I made as I traversed a very steep learning curve. I will end the section on a positive note and shed some light on some things that actually seemed to work very well in the online environment. 4.1 What Didn’t Work Very Well In regards to assessment, what I found was that giving traditional exams online just didn’t work well. There were many reasons for this, but besides issues of academic integrity, I found online exams very time consuming to both write and grade. In a physics class where students had to demonstrate their ability to solve problems, there just wasn’t an easy way to do this online. I felt I had to come up with a better way to assess my students. Some faculty used software that would lock down a student’s computer so that they wouldn’t be able to use it to browse the internet during an exam. But of course, the student could simply use a different computer or their cell phone to browse the internet. Other faculty mandated that students had to keep their cameras on during exams and that their hands and faces needed to be visible during the testing period. Of course, this made many students very nervous, and when they are nervous they are most likely not performing at their best. What I personally chose to do was to eliminate many of the longer hour exams and replace them with short quizzes and other lower-stakes assessments instead. This seemed to work much better. Students seemed to appreciate having less material to study when they prepared for the quizzes as well. Having students in many different times zones was also very challenging. Students in China, for example, were especially impacted given the approximate 12-h time difference. As a result, it was challenging to find a good time for office hours that would not

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preclude some students from being able to take advantage of them. Fortunately, I had some teaching assistants that were willing to offer some late night office hours while I offered them in the early morning and that combination seemed to work fairly well. The pandemic also took a more personal toll on many students. When the university closed the dormitories, many students went home to ride it out with their families. This created a large number of issues such as access to reliable internet. Being at home also made many students feel isolated and alone. I found many students needed individual Zoom sessions just to help them feel connected to the class. I also worked hard to use many community-building strategies. For example, I would start each class by having one or two students share a “happy picture.” Students loved sharing them and I gave them a bonus point when they did. Each student could earn two bonus points over the semester. Because of the added stresses the pandemic put on many students, due dates had to be more flexible. I found it very challenging to keep up with these flexible due dates and assignment extensions. Many students found it challenging to keep their cameras on during class for a variety of different reasons. Some just didn’t feel comfortable letting their classmates see their home environment. This resulted in a class that looked like a bunch of “postage stamps” on the screen. It was so difficult when students didn’t turn their cameras on. I did find that my community building efforts helped more students to feel comfortable turning their cameras on. However, there was still a void that was hard to fill when I couldn’t see my students’ faces as the lightbulbs turned on in their heads when they finally understood a difficult concept. For me, this is what I went into teaching for! Thus, not always being able to see my students’ eyes was perhaps the most difficult part of my online teaching experience. Now that we’ve addressed some of the things that didn’t work so well, let’s focus on the good part – the things that did actually work well in the online platform. These will help shape the teaching takeaways that will hopefully serve to inform our teaching as we move to in-person classes in fall 2021. 4.2 What Did Work Well The pandemic has forced all of us in higher education to rethink many things, especially those related to our students and what is best for their learning. Certainly moving entirely to an online format is most likely not going to become the norm. But, there will perhaps be some remnants related to our experiences that will impact our teaching once we go back to in-person classes. Eric Mazur, a well-known educator and innovator at Harvard University is convinced that online teaching is the way to go [16]. While Mazur scrambled to get his courses online just like the rest of us after the pandemic hit, he seems to have come out the other side on a positive note. In fact he echoes one of my key points in terms of what works and that is in the online environment, every learner essentially gets a front row seat. Moreover, it has been my personal experience that the online Zoom environment dramatically leveled the playing field and perhaps gave students that otherwise might not have spoken up a new voice.

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One additional strategy I used related to community building was to log into Zoom 15 min prior to the start of each class and I would always stay 15 min after class if students wanted me to. Many students took advantage of this. Because my PMW and LSA classes are very demonstration-oriented, I found that the students really appreciated all of the video demonstrations I made to illustrate key physics concepts. I believe that having an arsenal of video demonstrations will come in handy when we go back to in-person learning. Another positive that came from the online experiences is that it was very easy to invite guests to give a lecture. When things were in-person, I was only inviting guests that lived in the local area to class. The Zoom platform essentially allowed me to invite guest speakers from anywhere in the world. The last item I will mention is that I found myself relying less and less on hour exams and more and more on things like short quizzes and writing assignments to assess my students. In my CVU class I also utilized a creative project activity that replaced the final exam. In this activity, students chose a topic and then created a piece of art, a piece of music, etc. to demonstrate what they had learned in the class. This worked incredibly well. The following section builds upon the ideas presented thus far as well as from informal discussions with students. With a focus on things that actually worked well post-Covid some teaching takeaways are offered as we prepare for in-person classes in the fall.

5 Teaching Takeaways Over the past year, a number of articles have been published suggesting that having to take our classes online didn’t work and in fact, was a virtual disaster. But the question we might genuinely ask based on both our own, as well as the experiences of our students is: Was it really a complete disaster as some have indicated? My response to this question is no – teaching online was not a complete disaster; and, in many respects, some things worked very well in the online environment. The more pressing question is: What will students and professors continue to expect once we all go back to in-person classes? A related thought is perhaps all of us will expect some type of ability to work from home part of the time, as this aspect of online learning certainly had its advantages. In my case, I saved over two hours every day just in drive time commuting to and from my campus. Based on informal discussions that students have shared with me over the past year, one takeaway is that students would still like to have access to class recordings once classes resume in-person. I don’t know what this would look like going forward as the thought of everyone having the technology to record every in-person class session seems a bit formidable. That said, I think this is something that we need to think seriously about. Considering everything my students have shared with me, another takeaway which is primarily something I’d like everyone to think about is that I suspect students may continue to request (and expect) flexible due dates going forward. The pandemic forced that upon many of us. Was it a bad thing? A good thing? I think the jury is still out.

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Regardless of how we handle this one, I think some permanent changes to our syllabi will be forthcoming for all of us. The last takeway I will present is that students really liked online office hours and one-on-one Zoom sessions with their professors. My plan once classes resume in person is to always keep Zoom on even when I’m holding office hours in my actual office. That way the students have the option of staying at home or coming in to the office in order to get some extra help.

6 Summary and Pedagogical Implications Because many of us in higher education had very little or no experience teaching in a distance learning environment prior to the pandemic, it is hoped that this paper will encourage us to take the time to assess what actually worked well and what didn’t in our own classrooms over the past year. Rather than take these lessons and put them on a shelf, we can learn from them and use them to inform our teaching going forward. Finally, it is hoped that some of the pedagogical implications and teaching takeaways suggested here will be useful for others interested in building upon the lessons learned during our online experiences as we did our best to provide high quality teaching to our students during a global pandemic.

References 1. Harari, Y.N.: The World After Coronavirus. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/19d 90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75. Accessed 20 Mar 2020 2. Laws, P.W.: Calculus-based physics without lectures. Phys. Today 44(12), 24–31 (1991) 3. Beichner, R.J., Saul, J.M., Allain, R.J., Deardorff, D.L., Abbott, D.S.: Introduction to SCALEUP: student-centered activities for large enrollment university physics. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, Seattle, Washington, Session 2380 (2000) 4. Larkin, T.L.: The evolution of assessment within an introductory physics course. In: International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP), vol. 3, special issue 1, pp. 39–48. Kassel University Press GmbH, Kassel, Germany (Jan 2013). https://doi.org/10.3991/ijep.v3iS1. 2393 5. Redish, E.F., Steinberg, R.N.: Teaching physics: figuring out what works. Phys. Today 52(1), 24–30 (1999) 6. McNeal, A.P., D’Avanzo, C.: Student-Active Science: Models of Innovation in College Science Teaching. Saunders College Publishing, Fort Worth, TX (1997) 7. Kalman, C.S.: Successful Science and Engineering Teaching in Colleges and Universities, 2nd edn. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC (2017) 8. Yoritomo, J.Y., et al.: Examining engineering writing instruction at a large research university through the lens of writing studies. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (2018) 9. Agrawal, R.: Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life. Workman Publishing, New York, NY (2018) 10. Drewsbury, B., Brame, C.J.: Inclusive teaching. CB Life Sci. Educ. 18(fe2), 1–5 (2019)

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11. Wehler, M.: Five Ways to Build Community in Online Classrooms. Faculty Focus: Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/ online-education/online-student-engagement/five-ways-to-build-community-in-online-cla ssrooms/. Accessed 11 July 2018 12. Stone, K.: Building Community in Online Courses. CDLT Research to Practice Blog. American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE), News & Press: CDLT News. https://www.aaace.org/news/272788/Building-Community-in-Online-Courses. htm. Accessed 3 Feb 2016 13. O’Malley, S.: Professors Share Ideas for Building Community in Online Courses. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/07/26/ideasbuilding-online-community. Accessed 26 June 2017 14. Pivot Interactives. https://www.pivotinteractives.com/ 15. Felder, R.: Remote Learning Has Been a Disaster and it Can’t Continue. The Telegram & Gazette. https://www.telegram.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2020/06/09/randyfeldman-remote-learning-has-been-disaster-and-it-cant-continue/113754514/. Accessed 9 June 2020 16. McMurtrie, B.: Why an Active-Learning Evangelist is sold on Online Teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter. https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/teaching/2021-0527?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2396038_nl_A cademe-Today_date_20210528&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=410379. Accessed 27 May 2021

STEM Digital Education During COVID-19 Pandemic: Student’s Perspective and Future Actions Eugenio Cataldo(B) , Bert De Vleeschouwer, Elif Yildiran, Ioana Neamtu, and Yoel Alonso Board of European Students of Technology (BEST), Brussels, Belgium [email protected]

Abstract. Technological advancements have been playing a big role in the development of education to be more optimized and student-tailored. This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted STEM education. It provides a comprehensive overview of digital teaching approaches in the areas of teaching methods, assessment techniques, digital tools, and equipment used for supporting those in an online environment. It locates trends, pain points, and innovative solutions that emerged in the response of European STEM Universities to the pandemic, reporting the students’ perspective on it, through interviews and workshops in 47 European STEM universities. The paper concludes by stating best practices and recommendations for an effective and digital-enhanced learning experience, to inspire educators. It also advises actions and techniques that university management can take to support educators with achieving proficient digital education, thus setting another step towards rethinking higher education in a postpandemic world. Keywords: Digital education education

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· STEM students · Post-pandemic

Introduction

The technological progress have brought important advances in fields such as connectivity and accessibility of information. With the increasing number of portable electronic devices, people are more and more connected to technology, wherever they are. This context has brought countless improvement opportunities for various fields, including education. Digitalisation refers to the use of digital means and technology in order to improve existent processes or create new ones [1]. In the last decades, the trends were showing a tendency towards digitalisation in the field of higher education as well [2,3]. Although some universities put effort into adapting their curricula and tools to the digital era, higher education was not yet ready for the transition [4]. In this context, the sudden outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic worked as a c The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022  M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 45–57, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_6

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catalizer, forcing most of the universities to switch from fully offline scenarios to fully remote. The main aim of this paper is to centralise the knowledge generated during the pandemic on European universities regarding online teaching methods, assessment methods, tools and digital competences. In addition, the paper evaluates the approaches to adapt education to the online environment, assessing the engagement level and learning outcomes for students. Finally, the paper focuses on providing a list of good practices and student’s opinions on the approaches tried out by universities and professors. All in all, this research is trying to answer to answer the following questions: How was higher STEM education impacted by the pandemic? What students think about the measurements imposed by their university and what impact had this measurements on the quality of their studies? How did the students perceive the transition of teaching and assessment methods to the online environment.

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Methodology

The data used for this paper was gathered through focus groups of students ran between February and April 2021 in 15 European STEM universities divided over 8 different countries. 147 students partook in these focus groups (the size of each group was between 4 and 17 participants with an average of 10). These focus groups are part of a larger research project started in September 2020 that also involved interviews with students from 50 different European STEM universities about the measures that their universities took to face the pandemic. The content of these interviews is summarized in other publications from the authors. Even if the whole research was kept in mind for formulating the discussions and conclusions if this paper, only the data from the focus groups are presented here. The focus groups consisted of two different main activities: a survey-like statements voting and a world cafe. Both the activities were designed to cover the areas of the digital competences of students and educators, the tools and teaching methods used for online teaching, online assessment methods, and students’ interaction. In the first, a short presentation was showed to participants with the statements to vote upon, polling the students’ opinion on various aspects of the online education that their university has provided (divided into the aforementioned areas). The options were generally the same for each questions: strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree, and not applicable (NA). Additionally, a few relevant terms were defined in this presentation to all participants. We will use these definitions for the rest of the paper: – Theoretical lecture: Lecture with one-way information transfer – Practical lecture: Lecture with a high level of interaction between students and educators

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– Students’ engagement: The degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimist, and passion that students show when they are learning and being taught – Students’ learning: The amount of notions, skills, and competencies that students acquire from the course During the second stage of the input gathering process, students took part in a world cafe. Here the students were divided in groups, one group per each of the areas mentioned above. Each group brainstormed both the problems and opportunities that they encountered due to the digital move. After 5 min, each group changed the area they were focusing on, expanding on what the other groups already did. Once all subgroups provided their contributions to each of the areas, a facilitator summarised the identified problems and opportunities in a report, that was sent to the authors of this paper to be analyzed. This data was then analysed by the authors through content analysis [5] and thematic analysis [6] techniques.

3

Digital Competences

The current section aims at understanding the role of the digital competences in the learning process. In more detail, it looks at how the students’ digital competences influenced their learning experience while studying online, and whether the digital skills level of the educators hindered students’ engagement or learning. We based our study on the European Commission study on digital competences [7], therefore we considered the following competences: Information and data literacy, Communication and collaboration, Digital content creation, Safety, and Problem solving. This was also part of the concepts that were presented to the students during the workshops, to have a uniform definition on “digital competences” to refer to in the focus groups’ discussions. 3.1

Observations

During the statements voting activity, the students were probed on how much the digital competences of themselves and of their educator were limiting the students’ learning and engagement (terms defined in the methodology section). Figure 1 shows the results for the students’ digital competences. We can see in Fig. 1a that most of the students considered their digital competences enough to proficiently learn in an online environment. However, a small but noninsignificant minority still considered this impactful (strongly agree). Figure 1b asks the same question on engagement, and it mostly shows the same trend. On the other hand, Fig. 2 shows how the educators’ level of digital competences limits the students’ learning experience from the perspective of learning and engagement. On these matters, the opinion of the students was more divided, skewing towards the agreeing side as seen in Fig. 2a and Fig. 2b. These data were also confirmed from the problems and opportunities pointed out in the world cafe activity. Students from 13/15 universities mentioned that

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 1. Histogram showing students’ opinion about how their digital competences impact their (a) performance and learning process in online courses (b) engagement and active participation in online courses.

(a)

(b)

Fig. 2. Histogram showing students’ opinion about how the educators’ digital competences impact their (a) performance and learning process in online courses (b) engagement and active participation in online courses.

the educators’ couldn’t efficiently display information due to their poor digital competences, while 6/15 mentioned that professors were reluctant to use technological means for conveying the information in a more appealing way to students. Looking at the opportunities brought by the move to online, students have mentioned that they got the chance to improve their digital skills (9 out 15 universities) and also that professors had a opportunity to practice and improve their digital skills (6 out of 15 universities). 3.2

Discussion and Conclusions

All in all, we found that the students considered positive how the online move allowed them to improve or simply put in practice their digital competences.

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The general opinion was that students were ready to receive and create information in an online format, to collaborate, and to solve problems. They were not considering that their digital competences hindered in any way their learning experience in the digital environment (Fig. 1). One roadblock, in the students’ opinion, was the level of digital competences of educators. Both the statements-voting and the world cafe activities revealed that this was limiting the learning experience of students, saying that the effectiveness of information transfer was impacted, and that the educators did not find space to innovate. There can be some negative bias in the students’ opinion on the educators’ performance. However, the fact that the digital competences of educators seemed to be the bottleneck can be justified by the fact that it requires much more effort and preparation to effectively deliver information in a new environment rather than receiving it. Innovating in teaching while at the same time having to learn technicalities of the new environment can easily become overwhelming. To counter this problem, we advise universities to invest resources in training their educators in digital literacy, by creating trainee-ships or single courses. This would build expertise in this new way of creating and conveying information. From the data seen in this section, this is more of a priority for educators than for students, probably because the students’ generation is more tech-savy, and because the job of educators is the most challenging in this regard.

4

Digital Tools and Teaching Methods

In this section, we investigate how the digital tools used during teaching, and the teaching methods empowered by those, impacted the learning and engagement of students. 4.1

Observations

Figure 3 shows the response from the students in the statements activity on whether the tools that they had supplied were sufficient to run theoretical and practical lectures. In Fig. 3a, about theoretical lectures, we can see a skew towards the agreeing side, while in Fig. 3b, about practical lectures, we can see a skew towards the disagreeing side. This was also reflected in the World Cafe activity, in which students came up with problems and opportunities with online teaching. In 7/15 universities, the students mentioned that recorded lectures were a positive point, because of their flexibility to adapt to each learners’ schedule, and the possibility of controlling speed and rewinding. In 5/15 workshops, the fact that video-conference tools are external, well-known, and well-documented also came up as a positive point. On the opposite note, in 8/15 workshops the fact that educators didn’t experiment with tools and stuck to the classical video-conference ones was mentioned as a problem, as these were considered not fit for more interactive activities. In 7/15 workshops, the students generally mentioned that the tools were unfit for

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 3. Students’ opinion about how the technological tools used in their education was sufficient for (a) their theoretical lectures and (b) their practical lectures.

different reasons, either because there was lack of collaboration tools/platforms between students, lack of tools to simulate practical activities or labs, or the university platform/server was crashy/buggy. Figure 4 shows the response that the students gave in the statement activity on whether the tools used had an impact on their engagement or learning. The students of the 15 analyzed workshops were mostly equally divided, without a clear trend on any of the sides.

(a)

(b)

Fig. 4. Histogram showing the students’ opinion about how the technological tools used in their education impacted (a) their theoretical engagement and (b) their practical learning.

Finally, the students also presented a large series of problems and opportunities that the technological tools brought or could bring. Apart from the ones already mentioned, the most notable are: on the positive side, in 8/15 workshops it was mentioned that the high variety of available tools like online board for

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collaboration or platform for quizzes could facilitate a better education. The specific advantages mentioned were having more varied and interesting lectures thanks to different activities, easing collaboration thanks to online boards, and better fixing information thanks to quizzes. Also, in 3/15 workshops a forum-like tool to ask questions to professors in which everyone sees the answers was mentioned as an advantage and, in the same number of workshops, a general improvement of the university IT infrastructure was mentioned as a positive outcome of the pandemic. On the negative note, in 9/15 workshops possible issues with equipment or internet, both for professors and students, were mentioned as a negative points, with 4/15 mentioning that the university did not invest in better equipment for professors, lectures, or students. In 4/15 workshops, the lack of a good digital platform for examination was explicitly mentioned. In 6/15 workshops the high variety of tools used from different educators for the same purpose was mentioned as a problem, and in 8/15 workshops the little knowledge and training about the tools platform, both for students and educators, was mentioned as a problem. 4.2

Discussion and Conclusions

Figure 3 shows that the tools used were mostly considered sufficient for theoretical lectures, while lacking for practical lectures. This was also reflected in some of the negative points from the world cafe. But we also saw many positive aspects that students pointed out: theoretical lectures worked well overall, with the recordings being a often-mentioned advantage. Also some additional opportunities that tools like a forum-like platform unlocked were welcome by the students. This could reflect the fact that there are a series of activities for which live interaction is hardly replaceable, and that will likely continue to be live. For more one-way or directly interactive communication instead, all the techniques tried out during the last year and a half could be an improvement even in a post-pandemic world, to empower a more student-tailored and flexible learning experience. Finally, the other problems mentioned in the world cafe were mostly related to low quality of the tools/platforms used, or the non-uniformity of those throughout different courses. This could be related by the fact that educators lacked a central guidance and support on the tools to use. As mentioned in the previous section on digital competences, the educators were already struggling in adapting their information transfer to the digital environment. Also having to figure out which platforms to use can easily become overwhelming and hinder innovation, apart from few excellencies. This could also explain the very mixed trend of Fig. 4, in which the high variance of the answers can be caused by the high variability of educators’ approaches. We advise educators and universities to keep these findings in mind when designing post-pandemic education, maintaining an online/flipped format for theoretical lectures, to keep all the advantages it brings. To support this, we

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advise university managements to allocate a dedicated body to set up the IT infrastructure of the institute, and customize it to support the needs of the different stakeholders (students and educators mainly). This, if combined with the right training, would allow more uniformity and focus, also leaving more space to educators to innovate.

5

Assessment

In this section, we discuss students’ perspective on the challenges and opportunities brought by the changes in assessment methods due to the online move. This area had 2 related questions for the statements voting activity. For the world cafe, 3 out the 15 universities did not contribute to this section either because their assessment methods were not changed to a different format (1/3), or because the data was lacking (2/3). 5.1

Observations

In Fig. 5a we see a clear trend: students found an assignment based assessment to improve their learning. On the same note, in the world cafe some students also mentioned that mid-term exams and projects can help reducing the workload of final exams, additionally stating that continuous assessment (mainly in the form of assignments) helps students with developing a deeper understanding of the subject matter (4/12). Having alternative and more diverse assignment types was also mentioned as an opportunity (3/12). Case studies, projects with international teams of students, 24 h exams with a more project-oriented assignment, inter-university and interdisciplinary projects were all proposed during the workshops. However, a possible negative impact on students’ well-being and capabilities due to the shift to online assignment-based assessment came out from the workshops. Almost all of the world cafe groups (8/12) explicitly mentioned that they were overworked by the larger number of assessment that were used to (partially) replace traditional exams. Some students even stated that they were suffering from burnout. Finally the online-only format of a lot of group projects and labs was considered less efficient causing students to spend more time on these tasks (4/12). Some assignments also cannot be properly translated to an online format which causes the related projects to be less impactful for learning (3/12). Figure 5b shows data about another type of exam: classic written examinations moved to an online environment. Specifically, it probed on whether the lack of monitoring and the possibility of cheating of these exams affected their final preparation and learning on the subject. Significant majority of students mentioned they have developed knowledge gaps in their curriculum because they counted on being able to cheat rather than learning some subjects. On this note, the world cafe revealed many ways that universities used to try counteracting what mentioned above. Some students mentioned as a problem that the exam was made harder than previous years (5/12), more strict

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(b)

Fig. 5. (a) Histogram showing the students’ opinion on how assignment-based assessment improved their learning. (b) Histogram showing the impact that the possibility of cheating in online written exams had on the final learning on the course

time requirements (4/12) and students not being allowed to go back to modify answers they submitted previously (4/12). Despite these measures, students still found that cheating was possible with relative ease (5/12. Interestingly, it got mentioned both as a positive and negative point). Furthermore, students’ performance during assessments was disrupted both by logistical issues (lack of a quiet room, internet issues, etc.) and by a misunderstandings as to how certain digital tools worked (5/12). Students also showed a preference for open book exams compared to closed book exams as this format focuses more on reflection and understanding of the subject (3/12), partly working around the issue of preventing cheating. Lastly, the world cafe also revealed some other general points about online assessment. The most-mentioned advantage of online assessment was that this kind of assessment (be it oral exams, project presentations, thesis defences, etc.) was less stressful because it did not require the students to be in physical proximity of their professor and peers. This lack of stress had a positive impact on performance at the exam (8/12). Furthermore, online assessment was considered to be more convenient and time-saving (3/12). 5.2

Discussion and Conclusions

We have seen in this section how students perceived different online assessment methods. Assessments in an online format were stated to be less stressful and more convenient. However lower efficiency when working on assessments online combined with a shift towards more assignment-based evaluations caused students to be overworked. Adaptation to the exam format adaptations to prevent cheating were also stated to be a source of stress and totally ineffective at preventing cheating.

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One trend that emerged in the section is that students displayed a preference towards open book exams and project-based assessments. These were not only considered as less stressful, but were also considered to help in the final learning outcome of the subject, helping to fix concepts throughout the course rather than at a final exam, and more close to a real-life application of the subject. For all these reasons, a (partial) assignment-based technique for assessment seem to have many benefits, both in terms of learning outcome, relevance of the examination, and stress levels, provided that the workload is kept at a reasonable level. We advise educators to (at least partially) integrate this in their courses, independently on the online or offline environment. To boost and support this, we advise universities to promote or enforce to educators that a certain percentage of the final grade depends on assignments, where possible.

6 6.1

Interaction Observations

Figure 6a shows how productive did students experience online group work, compared to physical classes. The plot has a slight trend towards the disagreeing side, considering online group work less productive than its offline counterpart. However, there were still a significant number of “strongly agree” answers. Still related to overall productivity, in 5/15 university students mentioned as an opportunity that they could more flexibly plan their schedule around online education. In specific, they have been using different kinds of tools during the class, they had the chance to join classes from anywhere and they were more in control of their time, since they were not commuting to the school. Figure 6b shows how being physically present at the school and having live interactions impacted the students. There is a visible skew on the agreeing side, indicating an impact of physical presence on how engaged students feel in the lecture. In the world cafe, 7/15 university students mentioned as a problem that there have been ineffective communication with their peers and teachers, and that this resulted in not being able to understand the class, to performing badly on the group projects and exam, and to receiving lower grades. On Fig. 6c, we can see how comfortable students find asking questions in online lectures, compared to classroom lectures. We observe that, for most of the students, this did not make a difference. Outside that, there is a slight skew on the agreeing side, mentioning that it was more comfortable to ask questions while online. Students from 2 universities mentioned that online classes has been more comfortable for introverted students. Being able to use the chat box during the classes, encouraged them to ask more questions and be more active than they would have during physical classrooms.

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(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 6. Histograms showing (a) how productivity changed for students in online group work (b) how the lack of physical interaction affected the students’ participation to the class, (c) how comfortable students feel to ask questions during the online classes, compared to physical classes.

6.2

Discussion and Conclusions

The impact of a shift towards online education with regards to interaction and productivity seems to be divisive between students. While there are slight preferences when looking at averages there is always a significant number of students with opposing views: 32% of students found online group work to increase their productivity whilst 44% did not. 42% found online lectures less intimidating for expressing themselves whilst 56% felt no difference (including “neither agree nor disagree”) This suggests that there exists different segments of students with varying preferences based on (but not limited to) their degree of introversion/extroversion and need for flexibility (e.g. due to a long commute). The majority of students did agree that lack of physical proximity had a negative impact on their participation in and engagement with lectures mainly due to online media making communication less effective and clear.

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The flexibility that a hybrid education model gives could be the key for universities to satisfy these many different needs. For at least the most theoretical part of the courses, educators could provide students with both options of live classroom attendance or streamed video-conference. This all while still employing live interaction with the whole when needed, like for more practical classes or group work.

Appendix A: Overview of Universities

University name

Country

Number of participants

Mediterranean University of Albania

Albania

14

National Technical University of Greece Athens

12

University of Aveiro

Portugal

10

University of Belgrade

Serbia

12

Transilvania University of Bras, ov

Romania

17

Slovak University of Technology Slovakia in Bratislava

12

Universit´e libre de Bruxelles

Belgium

10

Polytechnic University of Bucharest

Romania

4

Ghent University

Belgium

6

KU Leuven

Belgium

6

University of Lisbon

Portugal

10

UC Louvain

Belgium

8

University of Novi Sad

Serbia

10

University of Porto

Portugal

13

University of Zagreb

Croatia

12

Number of universities

Distinct countries Total (average) number of participants

15

8

147 (10)

References 1. Sen Gupta, M.: What is digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. ARC Advisory (2020). https://www.arcweb.com/blog/what-digitization-digitalizationdigital-transformation

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2. Allen, J.: How technological innovation in education is taking on COVID-19. Forbes (2020). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanneallen/2020/03/13/how-technologicalinnovation-in-education-is-taking-on-covid-19 3. University of Kansas - School of Education and Human Sciences: The evolution of distance education in 2020. The University of Kansas (2020). https:// educationonline.ku.edu/community/distance-education-evolution-in-2020 4. Toquero, C.M.: Challenges and opportunities for higher education amid the COVID19 pandemic: the Philippine context, PEDAGOGICAL RES, vol. 5 (2020) 5. Bengtsson, M.: How to plan and perform a qualitative study using content analysis. NursingPlus Open 2, 8–14 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.npls.2016.01.001 6. Xu, W., Zammit, K.: Applying thematic analysis to education: a hybrid approach to interpreting data in practitioner research. Int. J. Qual. Meth. 19 (2020). https:// doi.org/10.1177/1609406920918810 7. Carretero, S., Punie, Y., Vuorikari, R.: The digital competence framework 2.0. EU Science Hub (2019). https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp/digital-competenceframework

Transforming a Course into the Online Delivery Mode on a Global Platform: Benefits and Challenges Artem Bezrukov(B)

and Dilbar Sultanova

Kazan National Research Technological University, 68 Karl Marx Street, 420015 Kazan, Russian Federation [email protected]

Abstract. This paper describes developing an online alternative of an offline course within the framework of a newly created “Smart Materials” Master’s degree program. For an engineering education course with an experimental component, the authors accomplished significant modifications of course materials meant to be delivered online. From course benchmarking and discussions with the management team, it was clear that just creating an online copy of an existing offline course is not a successful approach. The authors of the course had to unwind an entire Master’s program that course belonged to. The process of the online course development required blending the best components of the respective offline program into an integrated and standalone course that resembles its offline counterpart but is an independent academic product. The most challenging and time-contributing aspect of this online course development was transformation of experiments with labs on chips and numerical simulations software into compact and intuitive videos. The course attracted audience from 70 + countries with over 90% of positive feedback. Keywords: Smart materials · Global platform · Online course · Lab on chip

1 Introduction Academic mobility is a necessary prerequisite for the development of an engineering student as a future competitive specialist in a global multicultural [1–5] and mutilingual [6–9] environment and innovative economy [10–14]. Global awareness of students in important for successful implementation of project-based learning programs [15–17] and development of soft skills [18, 19]. Global academic programs involving international mobility of enrolled students are developed by all the universities, which consider internationalization and networking as one of their development priorities [20–24]. But what happens when academic mobility becomes limited or even frozen due to unexpected lockdowns in the international education environment? In time of restricted academic mobility opportunities, we are seeking options to deliver international academic programs in the remote teaching mode [25, 26]. Global platforms with millions of users are excellent solutions that advertise your academic program to a broad multinational audience [27, 28]. Transformation of offline programs into © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 58–65, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_7

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an online mode is, however, challenging, especially in terms of experimental practicums [29–32]. This paper describes the results of a large state-funded project implemented by Kazan National Research Technological University in Russia. The project was a part of sustainable activities at the university aimed at developing engineering education programs in international, intercultural, innovative, and socio-psychological aspects [33– 39]. The main goal was to develop an online alternative of a course within the framework of a newly created “Smart Materials” Master’s degree program [40]. This online course was to be accepted by a global platform with a more than ten million audience. The general hypothesis was that just a straight transformation of offline course materials into videos and tests is not the best plan for such an academic product. For an engineering education course with an experimental component, the authors would have to accomplish significant modifications of course materials meant to be delivered online.

2 Approach to Online Course Development The authors implemented several methodological tools at the planning stage, during the course development, and after the course was launched. The first tool was benchmarking. Over 20 online courses were analyzed at global platforms such as Coursera, edX, and Udemy. The second tool was brainstorming related to the course content with the management team that uploads new courses to one of these platforms. Both these tools were used to justify changes in course development practices required to create a successful online alternative of an existing offline course. The third tool was a questionnaire that analyzed statistical information and expectations of users from the online course. Totally, over 200 survey responses were collected. Finally, analytical tools of the platform were used after the course was launched, so feedback of users was collected and analyzed. The last two tools were used to justify if the course structure were met positively by users or not.

3 Course Development Outcomes: Challenges and Benefits Revealed The initial motivation behind this project was to develop an online course for research methods in smart materials. This course was taught online as a standalone discipline within the framework of the Master’s programs entitled “Smart Materials” and “Molecular Engineering”. A detailed analysis of Coursera and edX platforms revealed, however, that there was no direct analogue of the course entitled “Smart Materials”. These online platforms demonstrate a great interest of their audience to materials science and multiple programs focus on advanced materials, biomaterials, and so on. The initial idea of an online course turned out to be too specific. With the management team, it was decided to develop a broader analogue of the course, which included research methods for smart materials only as a module among several other modules. Another challenge was that the initial offline course was an integral part of a previously advertised offline Master’s program. As a standalone product, its online analogue

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required additional features that were supposed to attract attention of potential online audience. To face these two challenges, we had to unwind an entire offline Master’s program that course was a part of. The resulting scenario of the online course included broader topics, such as introduction to smart materials, structure-property correlations, and application trends. We also added a special module that introduced lab on a chip approach for development of smart materials. Microfluidics attracts considerable attention today, so we expected to broaden the online course audience. The resulting online course included five different modules each intended for one week of learning. The first module introduced to smart materials and their classification. The second module provided a glance into a molecular and supramolecular structure of materials to reveal a correlation between their structure and smart properties. The third module covered an original idea to represent research methods that are suitable for characterization of smart materials. The fourth module introduced benefits of microfluidics for synthesis of soft matter smart materials [41]. Finally, Module five highlighted inspiring trends in applications of smart materials. After the course scenario was ready, the major challenge appeared. The original course included 18 academic hours of lectures and several experimental practicums. We had to transform original 18 offline hours into 3 h of intensive lecture videos. Each video was only 5–10 min long, the total number of these short videos was 35. The experimental practicums were also transformed into 5 videos, where real laboratory experiments were staged. The experimental videos were the most labor-intensive among all the online course materials. The example of such videos is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Experimental practicums transformed into the online delivery mode: a frame from the video.

The remaining course content, such as tests and lecture notes were not as challenging as the videos and required only using specific templates offered by the online platform. The course scenario also included an external link to the Google questionnaire. Course users answered a series of 5 questions intended to reveal their prior exposure

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to the topic of smart materials. The number of responses reached 200+ by the time this paper was composed. These questions are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

How did you know about this course? Prior knowledge or exposure to a topic of smart materials What do you expect to learn about? Technology fluency What country or part of the world are you from?

The predominant answer on the first question is the “Online platform website” (79%), with other 20% found the course information on the internet or followed recommendations of colleagues. Over 67% of students reported that the topic of smart materials was totally new to them, or they have only basic knowledge of smart materials. Responses confirmed the original course idea as “Research Methods for Smart Materials” was too specific, and the audience required a broader course content. A predominant number of students (63%) answered the Question 3 indicating that they planned to learn about smart materials in general, while 31% of them wanted to study online course for better results offline. Therefore, every third student among online course attendees plans to use the knowledge gained to boost their offline learning experience. This online course is, thus, an attractive platform to advertise the respective offline academic products. The responses on the Question 4 refer directly to the original course idea, so they are summarized in Fig. 2. As we can see, the majority of students have no or little experience in research methods, although around 30% have certain practical experience in experimental methods. Therefore, the original idea of the course on research methods could work, but the respective online course would have attracted much less students than its current broader analogue.

Fig. 2. Selected questionnaire results on technology fluency in research methods related to smart materials.

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The last question reveals the course enrollment geography. The course audience is represented by 70+ countries with the majority of students from India, USA, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The geography by continents is shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3. Online course geography by continent.

Figure 3 demonstrates that the online course attracted users from all the continents and their distribution approaches the average distribution of popular courses in the platform. It confirms that the topic of smart materials attracts attention of students across the world and providing a broader online alternative of a specific offline course was a right approach.

4 Conclusions Transforming an existing offline engineering course into an online delivery mode on a global platform turned out to be not a straightforward process. From course benchmarking and discussions with the management team, it was clear that just creating an online copy of an existing offline course is not a successful approach. The major challenge is that the online course at a global platform is supposed to be intended for not only for Bachelor’s or Master’s or PhD students, but to be suitable for potential attendees of a broader range of ages and professional expertise. We had to unwind an entire Master’s program that course belonged to and contribute its content to developing an integrated and a standalone online course that “catches” attention of a broader audience. It was also necessary to focus on exciting aspects of the course topical area that may help to catch the attention of the online platform audience. Another major challenge is to adapt the course content to online timing. Online course elements are much more dynamic, so the authors of this paper had to perform

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compacting 18 h of offline lectures into 3 h of course videos with 35 individual short videos 5–10 min each. The most challenging and time-contributing aspect of this online course development was transformation of experiments with labs on chips and numerical simulations software into compact and intuitive videos. These challenges, however, are not critical and the benefits overweight them. In case of this project, over 1,000 users from dozens of countries enrolled to the newly developed online course months after it was launched. The course attracted audience from 70+ countries with over 90% of positive feedback. Another benefit of the online course created from the offline content is an excellent opportunity to advertise the respective offline academic product among our international partners in time of limited international academic mobility, so we can expect a more dynamic application campaign in the forthcoming academic years.

References 1. Bezrukov, A., Ziyatdinova, J., Sanger, P., Ivanov, V.G., Zoltareva, N.: Inbound international faculty mobility programs in russia: best practices. In: Auer, M.E., Guralnick, D., Simonics, I. (eds.) ICL 2017. AISC, vol. 715, pp. 260–265. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-319-73210-7_31 2. Panteleeva, M., Sanger, P.A., Bezrukov, A.: International approaches to the development of cross-cultural education at high school. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2016) 3. Ziyatdinova, J., Bezrukov, A., Ivanov, V.: Professional growth of engineers in global multicultural environment. In: 2015 ASEE International Forum (2015) 4. Volkova, E., Semushina, E.Y., Tsareva, E.: Developing cross-cultural communicative competence of university students in the globalized world. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1328, pp. 405–416. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-68198-2_38 5. Valeeva, R., Ziyatdinova, J., Osipov, P., Oleynikova, O., Kamynina, N.: Assessing intercultural competence of engineering students and scholars for promoting academic mobility. In: Auer, M.E., Tsiatsos, T. (eds.) ICL 2018. AISC, vol. 917, pp. 815–825. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11935-5_77 6. Kuproyanov, R., Kozlova, I.: Developing double degree bilingual master’s program “social work in industry”. In: 2013 International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning, ICL 2013, pp. 633–635 (2013) 7. Tsareva, E., Gulnaz, F., Murtazina, E.: Developing students’ intercultural competence during the professional oriented course in English as a foreign language. In: IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2020, pp. 1110–1114 (2020) 8. Fakhretdinova, G., Dulalaeva, L., Suntsova, M.: Integrating soft skills into English language teaching in engineering education. In: IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2020, pp. 1352–1356 (2020) 9. Ziyatdinova, J.N., Osipov, P.N.: Integrative approach to intercultural competence development in engineering education. In: 2012 15th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning, ICL 2012 (2012) 10. Burylina, G., Sanger, P.A., Ziyatdinova, J., Sultanova, D.: Approaches to entrepreneurship and leadership development at an Engineering University. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2016)

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11. Shageeva, F.T., Kraysman, N.V.: Development of the ability for professional interaction in future engineers at a research university. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 118–128. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-682019_12 12. Kondratyev, V.V., Galikhanov, M.F., Osipov, P.N., Shageeva, F.T., Kaybiyaynen, A.A.: Engineering Education: Transformation for Industry 4.0 (SYNERGY 2019 Conference Results Review). Vysshee Obrazovanie v Rossii 28(12), 105–122 (2019) 13. Kraysman, N.V., Shageeva, F.T., Pichugin, A.B.: Modern pedagogical techniques in teaching french to prepare engineering university students for academic mobility. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 107–117. Springer, Cham (2021). https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68201-9_11 14. Khusainova, G.R., Galikhanov, M.F.: Work-in-progress: development of the discipline “innovations in engineering pedagogy” as part of an advanced professional training for educators of engineering schools in higher education institutions. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 3–10. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-68201-9_1 15. Sanger, P.A., Ziyatdinova, J., Ivanov, V.G.: An experiment in project based learning: a comparison of attitudes between Russia and America. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2012) 16. Tarasova, E.N., Khatsrinova, O., Fakhretdinova, G.N., Kaybiyaynen, A.A.: Project-based learning activities for engineering college students. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 253–260. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-68201-9_26 17. Sultanova, D., Sanger, P.A., Maliashova, A.: Introducing real-world projects into a chemical technology curricula. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1328, pp. 362– 370. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68198-2_33 18. Fakhretdinova, G.N., Osipov, P., Dulalaeva, L.P.: Extracurricular activities as an important tool in developing soft skills. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 480–487. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68201-9_47 19. Ibatullina, A.R.: The impact of engineering students’ communication behavior on the teams’ performance (case study: chemical process engineering classes). J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 1889(2), 022117 (2021) 20. Ziyatdinova, J., Bezrukov, A., Sanger, P.A., Osipov, P.: Best practices of engineering education internationalization in a Russian Top-20 university. In: ASEE 2016 International Forum (2016) 21. Ziyatdinova, J., Bezrukov, A., Sukhristina, A., Sanger, P.A.: Development of a networking model for internationalization of engineering universities and its implementation for the Russia-Vietnam partnership. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2016) 22. Ziyatdinova, J., Bezrukov, A., Osipov, P., Sanger, P.A., Ivanov, V.G.: Going globally as a Russian engineering university. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2015) 23. Sukhristina, A., Bezrukov, A., Ziyatdinova, J.: Industrial networking through academic cooperation. In: ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings (2016) 24. Osipov, P., Ziyatdinova, J., Girfanova, E.: Factors and barriers in training financial management professionals. In: Auer, M.E., Tsiatsos, T. (eds.) ICL 2018. AISC, vol. 916, pp. 167–175. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11932-4_17 25. Purkayastha, N., Sinha, M.K.: Unstoppable Study with MOOCs during Covid 19 Pandemic: a study. Paper presented at the Library Philosophy and Practice (2020) 26. Duggal, S., Dahiya, A.: An investigation into research trends of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Paper presented at the International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Systems (2020)

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27. Bezus, S.N., Abduzhalilov, K.A., Raitskaya, L.K.: Distance learning nowadays: the usage of didactic potential of MOOCs (on platforms Coursera, edX, Universarium) in Higher Education. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series 2020, pp. 14–19 (2020) 28. Palacios Hidalgo, F.J., Huertas Abril, C.A., Gómez Parra, M.E.: MOOCs: origins, concept and didactic applications: a systematic review of the literature. Tech. Know. Learn 25(4), 853–879 (2020) 29. Mu, H., Xue, L., Xue, Y., Wang, J.: Discussion on “online hybrid” teaching of engineering drawing course under the background of epidemic situation. In: 2021 10th International Conference on Educational and Information Technology, ICEIT 2021, pp. 76–82 (2021) 30. Yang, B., Song, C., Zhang, W., Sun, X.: Discussion on online and offline teaching mode of data structure. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series 2020, pp. 32–35 (2020) 31. Feng, G., Lv, W., Chen, Q., Ma, R., Liang, Y.: Exploration of online and offline mixed teaching mode of data structure. In: Proceedings - 2020 International Conference on Modern Education and Information Management, ICMEIM 2020, pp. 263–266 (2020) 32. Song, C., Wang, H., Yang, B., Zhang, W.: Online and offline teaching mode of C language programming. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series 2020, pp. 207–210 (2020) 33. Zhuravleva, M., Bashkirtceva, N., Klimentova, G., Kotova, N., Valeeva, E.: Interdisciplinary sustainable development module for engineering education. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1328, pp. 737–743. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-68198-2_69 34. Valeyeva, N.S., et al.: The managerial mechanism of social sphere future specialists’ professional world view formation. Int. Rev. Manage. Mark. 6(2), 135–141 (2016) 35. Tsareva, E., Bogoudinova, R., Volkova, E.: Metalinguistic awareness in technical communication. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1328, pp. 232–240. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68198-2_21 36. Lefterova, O., Giliazova, D., Valeeva, E., Ziyatdinova, J.: Poster: computer-aided translation course for students majoring in engineering. In: Auer, M.E., Hortsch, H., Sethakul, P. (eds.) ICL 2019. AISC, vol. 1135, pp. 154–158. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-40271-6_16 37. Giliazova, D., Valeeva, E.: Poster: engineering education: outcomes assessment. In: Auer, M.E., Rüütmann, T. (eds.) ICL 2020. AISC, vol. 1329, pp. 552–557. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68201-9_54 38. Khaertdinova, A., Sultanova, D., Iskhakova, D., Karimov, A.: Recycling of polymers-an opportunity or a threat to the economy? E3S Web Conf. 161, 01058 (2020) 39. Valeyeva, N.S., Kupriyanov, R.V., Valeyeva, E.R.: The role of the socio-psychological disciplines in the training of engineers (KNRTU experience). In: ASEE 2016 International Forum (2016) 40. Bezrukov, A., Sultanova, D.: Development of a “smart materials” master’s degree module for chemical engineering students. In: Auer, M.E., Hortsch, H., Sethakul, P. (eds.) ICL 2019. AISC, vol. 1135, pp. 169–180. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03040271-6_18 41. Bezrukov, A., Sultanova, D.: Application of microfluidic tools for training chemical engineers. In: Auer, M.E., Hortsch, H., Sethakul, P. (eds.) ICL 2019. AISC, vol. 1135, pp. 496–504. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40271-6_49

Flexible Learning as a Way of Integrating Russian Doctoral Programmes into European High Education Area Julia Lopukhova1

, Elena Makeeva1,2(B)

, and Tatyana Rudneva3

1 Samara State Technical University, Samara, Russian Federation 2 Samara State University of Social Sciences and Education, Samara, Russian Federation 3 Samara University, Samara, Russian Federation

Abstract. Doctoral education in the modern globalised world is a dynamic field in which key challenges of higher education and research come together. The recent transition to a three-level system led to considerable changes in the training of doctoral students. Currently in Russia, much attention is paid to improving the structure and quality of doctorate education in the European context of the Bologna process and the Lisbon objectives. The purpose of this study is to examine the experience of Russian universities in the course of reforming their doctoral programmes, to analyse best foreign practices and then develop an approach to establishing such a doctoral education model that would best integrate into the global high educational area and contribute to the training of a competitive scientific elite. The paper also presents key results of more than a decade of doctoral education reforms in Russia, which has been marked by the introduction of the so-called third stage of higher education with its regulatory documents and requirements. It shows that this change led to a significant decrease in the number of doctoral candidates and doctoral graduates. The authors then introduce a model of a doctoral education programme divided into stages and individual elements that represent independent objects of study for Russian and European researchers. The basis for this programme is flexible learning. Keywords: Doctoral education · Flexible learning · Education reforms · Doctoral programmes

1 Introduction The paper presents key results of more than a decade of doctoral education reforms in Russia, which has been marked by the introduction of the so-called third stage of higher education with its regulatory documents and requirements. It shows that in many institutions this change led to a significant decrease in the number of doctoral candidates and doctoral graduates [1]. The authors then introduce a model of a doctoral education programme divided into stages and individual elements that represent independent objects of study for Russian and European researchers on the basis of flexible learning and survey results. The study also considers some best practices and organizational techniques © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 66–78, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_8

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used by world universities to improve the performance of doctoral studies. Potentially the research could help in the dissemination of good practices within Russian high education community. The identified trends in this area and open challenges will enable university authorities to contextualise their own strategies and practices in doctoral education in a broader international context. This sharing of practices at the institutional level might prove to be an excellent method to build up a common framework of doctoral education that takes into account the specificities of different practices.

2 Project Description Currently in Russia, much attention is paid to improving the structure and quality of doctorate education in the European context of the Bologna process and the Lisbon objectives. The purpose of this study is to examine the experience of Russian universities while reforming their doctoral programmes, to analyse best foreign practices and then develop an approach to establishing such a doctoral education model that would best integrate into the global high educational area and contribute to the training of a competitive scientific elite. Another aim of this study is to provide an up-to-date picture of different approaches to doctoral education existing in this country, in Europe and in the United States stressing that fact that it rests on the practice of research, which makes it fundamentally different from the first and second cycles. The authors also aim to show that, beyond the diversity of practices in doctoral education, it is possible to jointly create and develop ideas that inspire most institutions, being adapted to their own legal and academic contexts. For this purpose, this paper examines main problems and trends in both Russian and foreign scientific discussion about the improvement of doctoral studies and existing doctoral education practices. It is based on the fact that doctoral education reform has taken place in the context of significant shifts in higher education in general. The foundation of the research is flexible learning theory as well as the methods of observation and analysis. The research consists of three parts. In the first part, the background of doctoral education and ongoing reforms in Russia and the state of things based on different surveys and policy papers are presented. The authors present a retrospective review of the Russian model of doctoral studies. In the second part, they go into and recount European experience in this field. The research demonstrates main approaches to the analysis and selection of best management solutions in the organization of doctoral studies taking the experience of Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States as examples. It underlines the diversity of doctoral education on both national and institutional levels, and identifies key topics related to doctoral education such as its organisation and funding, career development of doctoral candidates and transversal skills training. In the third part, the authors present their research done at Samara State Technical University and draw conclusions based on survey results.

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3 Research Background 3.1 The Russian Model of Doctoral Studies: From Soviet Period to Present Days The beginning of the training of scientific and pedagogical staff in Russia is associated with the appearance of the first state universities in Moscow and Kazan after the decree of Alexander I in 1804. Doctoral students could choose a professor and work under his supervision for 7–9 years. The official term “a PhD student” and description of PhD programmes were mentioned for the first time in July 1925 after adopting “Regulations on the Procedure for Training Scientists at Higher Educational Institutions and Research Institutions”. In January 1934, the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union adopted a resolution “On academic degrees and titles”, which established two academic degrees in the country: Candidate of Science (PhD) and Doctor of Science [2]. This two-tiered degree system, which follows the German tradition, still exists. A key role in setting the requirements for thesis defense and the system for awarding academic degrees was assigned to the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC), which had been created some years earlier. HAC has the same role nowadays. PhD students were trained both at higher educational institutions and at research institutes. In 1939 a correspondence PhD programme was established in the USSR, which gave young people the opportunity to improve their research skills without leaving the job. The publication of the Order “On Measures for Improving the Training of Scientific and Pedagogical Staff through PhD Studies” in 1948 opened a new stage in developing Doctoral Programmes [3]. It prescribed to improve the educational and training process through conducting an annual certification of PhD students. The author’s abstract of the dissertation also became obligatory. It has to be distributed among scientific society and is published in an amount of 100 copies. This certification is still valid today. The features of the system began to take shape and remained that way to the end of the Soviet period: a relatively low share of PhD students studying at research institutes, a high proportion of PhD students studying at correspondence programs, a low percentage of successful graduation—in some years graduation requirements included a defence, in others not. From 1957 till 1962 a defence was not obligatory, but in 5 years the experiment was deemed unsuccessful and a defence was returned. The system of training PhD students in the Soviet period was based on the premise that PhD programs served to train teaching and research staff for universities and research institutes (including the Russian Academy of Sciences). As a rule, its own graduates were admitted to PhD programs of the university after completing a 5-year undergraduate program. For admission to a PhD program, a university graduate had to receive a recommendation upon graduation. This depended on academic success and the level of the completed thesis, as well as on the recommendation from the Komsomol and party organizations. Completion of a PhD was a prerequisite for building an academic career, and PhDs were assigned to work in universities or research institutes. PhD programs in the sectoral context were determined by the needs of the industry [4]. Accordingly, the dominant share of PhD students was in technical specialties, and there was only a small proportion of PhDs in the humanities.

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With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a transformation of PhD programs began. From the mid-1990s there was a significant increase in the total number of PhD students, which continued until 2010, and in many respects the growth in these 15 years was determined by the emergence and explosive growth of the fee-paying segment of PhD programs (previously all students studied at the state’s expense). Considering this as a revenue stream, universities in many cases accepted university graduates with very poor training and those not interested in an academic career. In 2015, every third PhD student was tuition-paying. It must be understood that this expansion occurred during the most difficult period for universities. The scholarship, which state-funded PhD students continued to receive, was no longer enough to survive on. PhD students began to work en masse, full-time and often in areas that had nothing to do with their studies. During this period, the number of universities accepting PhD students also increased (from 398 in 1990 to 748 in 2010), while the number of research institutes that train PhD students decreased both in relative and absolute terms (from 834 to 809) [5]. The growth of the “university” component of PhD programs was because a PhD gave its holders higher social (and not just academic) status and therefore was in demand by those who were not going to pursue a career in science or education. In addition, feepaying PhD students were a source of additional income for universities. Universities began to tolerate the combination of work and study, taking into account that neither the teaching salary, let alone the scholarship, provided PhD students with a decent existence, and they simply had to look for additional sources of income. Today, the PhD scholarship remains very low, however, there are more opportunities for graduate students to earn additional income through participation in research projects and teaching. Despite the increase in the number of PhD students, the share who defend their thesis remains low. Thus, doctoral education in the modern globalised world is a dynamic field in which key challenges of higher education and research come together. In Russia, doctoral education follows in long-standing traditions which began to form in the early 1900th . In the Soviet times it acquired clear contours and in the last decade it has been undergoing a complex process of reforms. This is largely due to the need to integrate Russian education into the international educational area. Up to 2010th , there existed a two-level system of higher education in Russia. In 2014, Federal standards of a new generation for postgraduate programmes based on a competence-based approach were adopted. Thus, the transition to a three-level system (according to the norms of the Bologna Process) started in the country. This process led to considerable changes in the training of doctoral students in general. According to the newly adopted documents, doctoral studies have become the third final stage of higher education. After the entry into force of the Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation of September 02, 2014, №1192 “Transition of Specialties”, universities began to reorganize their doctoral programmes and achieved different results [6]. However, until now the scale of change has not been measured. 3.2 European and American Experience in This Field of Doctoral Studies: Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States as Examples Different countries practice different types, forms and duration of doctoral students training, and the quality of training depends not only on the status of the educational

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institution, but also on the combination of educational and research components in doctoral programmes [7–9]. Our study of international experience in this field shows that the university sector is still responsible for doctoral training and conducting scientific research in most countries. There are two competing models of postgraduate education in the world, that is the European one (Great Britain, France and Germany) and American. It is also important that in 2008, the European Universities Association (EUA) established the Council for Doctorate Education (CDE) to acknowledge the significant changes made across Europe in the delivery of PhD programmes. The general direction of the CDE is towards the structured approach and generic/transferable skills [10]. They published a report with clear recommendations for improving doctoral education in Europe [11]. The British model traditionally assigns the main role in doctoral training to the university sector, which at the moment includes several categories of universities offering educational and research programs with the award of academic degrees. As a rule, British doctoral programmes significantly differ from one another depending on the university, though all programmes meet the educational standards developed by the Agency for Quality Control of Higher Education [12]. A PhD in the United Kingdom mainly requires an original doctoral thesis that could contribute to the academic field and does not involve coursework [13]. There is also a distinction between research and professional doctorate degrees in Britain. Research doctorates are awarded only on the basis of several strongest scientific departments in the UK. Usually, the award of a research doctoral degree requires a dissertation, and a series of previously published research papers. Professional doctorates include the conduct of research by graduate students closely related to professional development and practice (for example, in the field of pedagogy, business administration, literature, theater arts, etc.) [14, 15]. The duration of full-time doctoral programmes is about 3.5–4 years, and it is 5–6 years for part-time students. At present, doctoral students decided to enroll in a professional doctorate program instead of a traditional Doctor of Philosophy as it offers the flexibility for professionals to enjoy the rigorous education at the doctoral level and its curriculum allows graduates to apply both theories and practical applications directly into their current workplace [13]. In 2002, 34 British universities for the first time launched a nationwide initiative, the New Route PhD, which is an alternative to, but not a substitute for, traditional doctoral studies. The training under this project consists of a four-year integrated doctoral programme, which includes in-depth subject studies, interdisciplinary research to expand the field of subject knowledge, teaching skills, business and entrepreneurship, knowledge of intellectual property rights, specialized knowledge of information technology, communication skills, group work, problem solving. This doctoral programme was developed in order to meet the demands of today’s economy, which requires teaching professional and managerial skills to all doctoral students. Unlike the traditional thesis-only PhD, the New Route PhD requires students to complete a one-year study as part of the first phase. The New Route degree can be achieved in two directions. For the first direction, students spend their first-year writing and finalizing their research thesis proposal as master level students; they conduct their formal research in their second and third year. For the second direction, students spend their first year of study attending research

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methodology training courses for academic enhancement; their formal research follows in their second and third years [16]. Approximately 30–40% of the programme labour intensity consists of teaching (the main subject and interdisciplinary modules relevant to the chosen field of study), and 60–70% is devoted to general and special training in research activities and writing a dissertation. The German experience of reforming the national system of higher education is of particular interest to Russia, since before the signing of the Bologna Agreement, the educational systems of Germany and Russia were basically similar, and German postgraduate education was represented by postgraduate and doctoral studies, which corresponded to the levels of Russian post-university education. As early as the mid1980s, the need for new approaches in doctoral training was tabled by the German Science Council [17]. Now the second educational stage is being abolished in the country, and doctoral studies are becoming the only level in the training of highly qualified specialists and the third stage of higher professional education. In Germany, only universities and equivalent educational institutions have the right to award doctoral degrees. Most doctoral students prefer to study in a classical type of doctoral programmes, which implies a high level of independence of the candidate for the academic degree: the programme of each candidate for the doctoral degree is planned and implemented individually. The dissertation is usually carried out under the supervision of a professor. The candidate for a doctoral degree is required to be capable of independent scientific work, and the dissertation work must contain new scientific conclusions. Since there are no officially approved training programmes, it is not possible to specify the duration of doctoral programmes in Germany. During the studies, doctoral students attend theoretical classes and work on their dissertation. A so-called structured doctoral programmes with an international focus, which have recently appeared, include not only communication with the supervisor on the topic of the dissertation, but also a full-fledged training program (conducting research seminars, participating in applied projects, teaching the method of analyzing specific situations, creating scenarios and forecasts, preparing research projects, etc.) [17]. In this type of doctoral programme, the level of foreign applicants for an academic degree is higher than in a traditional doctoral programme, largely due to the teaching in English. In their first year of study, doctoral students attend lectures, seminars and participate in scientific discussions. In the next two years, they are engaged in writing a dissertation. More and more universities are now offering structured PhD programmes to increase quality, attract international students and prepare them better for employment [10]. In France, all universities have the right to implement doctoral programmes and award doctoral degrees. However, in modern conditions, classical universities are less competitive with other alternative educational institutions for several reasons, including the underfunding of the higher education sector, which has a direct impact on the quality of university education through the quality of the teaching staff and material and technical support. A Doctorate can be done in all of the universities as well as in most engineering, management and even art Grandes Ecoles, which are generally associated with a university. The Doctorate is awarded after 3 years (in natural and technological sciences) to a maximum of 6 years (in social sciences and humanities) [18].

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When entering doctoral programmes since 2009, a doctoral contract is signed between the applicant for a doctoral degree and a higher education institution or research organization, in which the place of study in the doctoral programme is recognized as the main place of work. The contract is concluded for three years, but the term can be extended for one year due to objective circumstances. Within the framework of the doctoral contract, the activity of a postgraduate student consists exclusively in scientific and educational work, for which the student receives a fixed payment. Doctoral studies take three to four years. During the training, the best students get the opportunity to start writing a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science. The highest level in the American higher education system is known as a Doctoral Degree, which is awarded to those who have fully completed an academic programme in a chosen field of studies and plan to pursue research and/or teaching activities. In North America the PhD was introduced only in the mid-19th century [13]. At the moment, a PhD requires the completion of a set of modules and a doctoral dissertation. Doctoral programmes in the American education system are offered by public and private higher education institutions, among which the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education has identified a separate group of universities offering doctoral programmes [19]. Within this group, universities are differentiated according to the aggregate indicators of research and development performed, as well as the graduation of Doctors of Science (universities in this group must award at least 20 doctoral degrees per year). As a rule, doctoral students have to study for three years to obtain a doctoral degree. The doctoral degree is awarded on the basis of the exams passed by the candidate after completing the course, as well as on the results of the dissertation defense. The requirements for the content and volume of a PhD thesis are approximately the same as in Russia, but American universities themselves set the rules for writing dissertations. A commission of three to five people reviews the content of the study and decides whether the author is worthy of an academic degree or not. Thus, the duration of postgraduate studies is not fixed and can vary within several years depending on the student’s conditions in many countries. This provides PhD students more time to write their thesis and to take courses and internships. For example, in some countries, a PhD student is eligible for courses not directly related to the PhD topic. The option to extend the duration of study in doctoral school is also essential if a PhD student wants to change the topic of his work or even entirely change the scope of the research.

4 Survey and Discussion The analysis of doctoral programmes in Russia and other countries all over the world showed that despite the differences every country tries to find ways to improve doctoral education and increase the number of doctoral students who defend their doctoral theses in time. To do this we have to realize that it is the greatest time in history because learning technology is changing at an exponential rate, and our doctoral students can thrive with it. With the resources available today for use, such as interactive software, digital imaging, audio and video creation tools, on-demand video libraries, computers and Web 2.0 tools, the hardest job may be choosing which tool to use and how to integrate it into our lives.

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Our survey shows the importance of flexible learning as a way of integrating Russian Doctoral Programmes into European High Education Area because now-a-days high percentage of doctoral students are benefiting from online learning. Many doctoral students are joining in European online courses concerning doctoral studies. It helps to use technology fully and creates a learning environment that gives users on demand access to the content, tools, training, information, and support they need to create and enhance learning relevance and efficacy. Flexible learning provides doctoral students with choices about where, when, and how learning occurs. Flexible learning is concerned with the pace, place and mode of learning: – pace typically focuses on different delivery schedules, which may be part-time, accelerated or decelerated, either as complete programmes (for example a three-year Doctoral programme) or within a programme (so allowing students to work at an individual pace within broad overall deadlines and opportunities to choose courses); – place is concerned with the physical location, which may be work based or at home, on public transport while commuting, or abroad when travelling; – mode covers learning technologies, and blended learning or distance learning. For example, in the context of Technology Enhanced Learning, technology can clearly support flexible schedules, with the options to access online materials outside of prescriptive timetables enabling flexible pace; and work-based learning can be provided and supported via technology, thus offering flexible places of learning. In terms of the mode of learning, learning technologies provide new and flexible approaches to enable distance and blended learning through the wide range of ICT products and upcoming developments [20]. Experimental work has been carried out in Samara State Technical University in 2020/2021 among the first-year doctoral students of all majors. To analyse students’ learning preferences and needs, the researchers offered an online anonymous survey (questionnaire) designed in Google Forms which is an online survey creator. Google Forms allows educators to easily create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking and graphing. The authors designed a 28-question survey for doctoral students to complete. This approach made it possible to quickly collect students’ answers and track trends in their attitudes. 125 doctoral students answered the survey questions which are divided into three parts. The first part contains questions about an individual pace of doctoral students through the possibility to choose courses. In the second part doctoral students were asked about a preferable place for studying. The third part has questions about digital tools that can be used for improving doctoral studies and cutting down the time for preparing theses. In the first part of the survey our doctoral students were offered to choose courses for their variable part (elective courses) of the programme. The variable part of any doctoral curricular contains 21 ECTS/7 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) per year for full-time doctoral students. In general, all Federal State Educational Standards (FSES) for Doctoral programmes demand the following structure of doctoral curricular (see Table 1).

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J. Lopukhova et al. Table 1. Doctoral curriculum structure required by FSES

Programme component Block 1. “Disciplines (modules)” Core courses

Labour intensity (ECTS) 30 9

Disciplines (modules) including those aimed at postgraduate examinations Elective courses Disciplines (modules) including those aimed at postgraduate examinations Disciplines (modules) aimed at teacher training Block 2. “Practical training”

21

141

Elective courses Block 2. “Scientific research” Elective courses Block 2. “State final examination”

9

Core courses Doctoral programme labour intensity

180

Students were given a choice of 18 courses (1 ECTS labour intensity each). Every doctoral student was supposed to choose 7 elective courses which he/she considered to be most useful for their research work and future careers. The elective courses suggested for doctoral students’ choice are as follows: Scientific writing, Conference presentation, Grant writing, Principles of peer review, Popularizing science, Efficient communication and convincing speech, Academic pitching, Science communication, Project management, Property rights, Interpersonal skills, Leading a creative organization, Open Science, Career opportunities and job application, Organizing a career seminar, PhD career course, Learning in higher education, Constructive alignment in course design. Figure 1 shows that 7 courses elected by the students are undisputed leaders as most students chose them from the list (see Fig. 1). All seven courses which were chosen by the students are well integrated and correlated with European doctoral programmes. The offered courses have an explicit international focus, and they were taught in English as English is often the language of communication in laboratories and research teams. English is used for training courses, writing articles, and public presentations and talks. By introducing different PhD tracks, students can choose a fundamental or applied research track. This flexibility allows universities to attract a wider range of applicants with a variety of requests. We reduced the share of compulsory courses in their PhD programme to enroll students in the courses they consider necessary. However, this is their conscious choice, not a duty. The choice of courses also helps to prepare and defend interdisciplinary work. Greater disciplinary openness gives students increasing focus on scientific writing skills an opportunity to train how to write a research article

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Fig. 1. Elective courses selected by doctoral students.

that will be accepted for publication in an international journal. In addition, doctoral students are usually offered specialized courses in academic writing that allow them to develop and practice other writing skills. The other courses help to develop soft and transferable skills. Participants of our study often noted that during PhD programs, students also learn soft skills that can be applied beyond their own field, for example, planning, self-management, public speaking and presentation skills. As a result, recent doctoral students already have diverse work experience, and it increases their chances of employment. As for the second part of our survey we would like to note that place concerned with the physical location is extremely important for doctoral students. 117 doctoral students among 125 prefer to have 80% of classes in a distant way to communicate with teachers via Zoom or other platforms and 20% face-to-face classes at the university. We included the third part into our survey which is concerned about digital tools that can be used for improving doctoral studies and cutting down the time for preparing theses because while training our doctoral students we found out that doctoral students at Samara State Technical University lacked the digital literacy skills required for advanced level research. Digital skills are particularly important for doctoral students whose indepth research requires the use of such technological tools as databases, content management systems, citation management programmes, etc. Although widely researched in the undergraduate education context, digital literacy instruction has received little attention concerning doctoral students. In addition, even less attention has been paid to the effectiveness of citation management tools in educational research. We gave doctoral students a list of some useful (and almost free) tools that can help them during PhD writing their theses and asked if they had either heard about these resources or if they had already used them before in scientific or practical work. The resources are divided into 6 groups according to their function and purpose:

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1. For saving all your work and materials: such cloud-based tools & apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or Box, etc. 2. For managing papers and bibliography: EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, JabRef, etc. 3. For drawing vectorized figures: Microsoft PowerPoint (simplest tool), Inkscape, or Microsoft Visio. 4. For making graphs from data/results: Excel, MATLAB, gnuplot, matplotlib, RStudio, etc. 5. For taking notes which allow you to make and use quick synchronizing notes on the go: Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Ulysses, Simplenote, Atom, etc. 6. For searching up-to-date scientific literature: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia, ArXiv (the largest pre-prints archive), IEEE Xplore (for engineering students). Figure 2 above shows that most students are ignorant of resources from Groups 2 & 6 and need training as these tools can be of invaluable help. To fill in the gap we are planning to design a new course “Digital tools for researchers” next year. During this course, doctoral students will find out how digital tools can help them to explore modern literature and recent publications on the subject, connect with other researchers, write, publish and evaluate results they obtain and enhance the visibility of their research.

Fig. 2. Digital tools and their use by doctoral students.

5 Conclusion This research presents the results of an extensive study of doctoral education in Russia and abroad. It provides an overview of the deep transformation that has taken place in

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doctoral education over the past century and assesses the degree of change showing that a doctorate today is really different from that of a decade or more ago. The authors put forward an assumption about the development of the Russian scientific discussion on the problems of doctoral studies in the context of foreign experience. Russian universities have adopted the international experience of providing specialized courses to teach research skills and competencies required for a successful academic career. It is too early to talk about the effectiveness of implementing those practices in Russian universities, as the first doctoral students enrolled after adopting the new rules will only graduate in 2022–2023. But now it is already clear the main directions of improving doctoral studies in Russia. They are flexibility, digitalisation and exchange of experience in implementing doctoral education enhancement practices at a national and cross-national level which will improve thesis and degree completion rates and will have positive effects on the scientific, economic and technology development in Russia.

References 1. Krasinskaya, L.F., Klimova, A.S.: Doctoral programs are in anticipation of change: postgraduates and their scientific supervisors’ readiness. Vysshee Obrazovanie v Rossii 29(3), 24–36 (2020) 2. Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of January 13, 1934 “On academic degrees and titles”. http://www.consultant.ru/cons/cgi/online.cgi?req=doc;base=ESU; n=16435#0726020954403946. Accessed 01 May 2021 3. Order “On Measures for Improving the Training of Scientific and Pedagogical Staff through PhD Studies” (1948). http://www.economics.kiev.ua/download/ZakonySSSR/dat a04/tex16326.htm. Accessed 01 May 2021 4. Sergacheva, E.V.: Historical and theoretical preconditions and stages of development of postgraduate studies in a technical university. Modern problems of science and education, vol. 6 (2016). http://science-education.ru/ru/article/view?id=26033. Accessed 29 Apr 2021 5. Yudkevich, M.: PhD programs in Russia: from the Soviet legacy to the present day. Herb [Higher Education in Russia and Beyond] 4(25), 12–14 (2020) 6. Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation of September 02, 2014 No 1192 “Transition of Specialties”. http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_ LAW_144446/. Accessed 01 May 2021 7. Usher, R.: A diversity of doctorates: fitness for the knowledge economy? High. Educ. Res. Dev. 21(2), 143–153 (2002) 8. Neumann, R.: Doctoral differences: professional doctorates and PhDs compared. J. High. Educ. Policy Manage. 27(2), 173–188 (2005) 9. Halse, Ch., Levy, G.: The Future of the Doctorate in the 21st Century (2014). https://doi.org/ 10.13140/2.1.2685.7603 10. O’Carroll, C., Purser, L., Wislocka, M., Lucey, S., McGuinness, N.: The PhD in Europe: developing a system of doctoral training that will increase the internationalisation of universities. In: Curaj, A., Scott, P., Vlasceanu, L., Wilson, L. (eds.) European Higher Education at the Crossroads, pp. 461–484. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht (2012). https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-94-007-3937-6_26 11. EUA: Salzburg II recommendations’ for improving doctoral education in Europe. European Universities Association (2010). http://www.eua.be/Libraries/Publications_homepage_ list/Salzburg_II_Recommendations.sflb.ashx. Accessed 05 Mar 2021

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12. Bourner, T., Bowden, R., Laing, S.: Professional doctorates in England. Stud. High. Educ. 26(1), 65–83 (2001) 13. dos Santos, L.M., Ho, F.L.: The development of doctoral degree curriculum in England: perspectives from professional doctoral degree graduates. Int. J. Educ. Policy Leadersh. 13(6) (2018). http://journals.sfu.ca/ijepl/index.php/ijepl/article/view/781. Accessed 04 Apr 2021 14. Scott, D., Brown, A., Lunt, I., Thorne, L.: Professional Doctorate: Integrating Professional and Academic Knowledge. Open University Press, Maidenhead, UK (2004) 15. Scourfield, J.: Professional doctorate programmes in social work: the current state of provision in the UK. Brit. J. Soc. Work 40(2), 567–582 (2010) 16. Wellington, J., Bathmaker, A.M., Hunt, C., McCulloch, G., Sikes, P.: Succeeding with Your Doctorate. Sage, London, UK (2005) 17. Lachmann, D., et al.: Regulations and practices of structured doctoral education in the life sciences in Germany. PLoS ONE 15(7), e0233415 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0233415 18. What is involved in a doctorate in France? 2017 CAMPUS FRANCE. https://www.campus france.org/en/what-involved-Doctorate-France. Accessed 22 Mar 2021 19. A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the U.S. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC (2011). https://grants.nih.gov/training/research_doctor ates.pdf. Accessed 01 May 2021 20. Gordon, N.: Flexible Pedagogies: Technology-Enhanced Learning. Executive Summary. The Higher Education Academy, New York (2014). https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.2052.5760

An Analytical Study of Factors Related to TVET Implementation in Thailand as the Centre of Excellence in the Past Decade A Case Study: History & Current State of Art+ a Comparison Study of TGPES and GTDEE Adisorn Ode-sri1(B) , Thomas Köhler2 , and Pisit Wimonthanasit1 1 Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Chiangmai 50220, Thailand 2 Technische Universität Dresden, Weberplatz 5, 01217 Dresden, Germany

[email protected] Abstract. The case study of the Excellence Project under the main supervision and co-operation of the German-Thai Chamber of Commerce and German International Cooperation under the project title German-Thai Dual Excellence Education (GTDEE) will be selected. It is generally acknowledged that Thailand is trying to adopt the dual system of education, which is a highly-international accepted vocational education management system and has a prototype from Germany. Such efforts have been genuinely used in practice, but in the form of modification, not the entire system used due to legal restrictions, supporting regulations, including there is no any legal obligation for Thai vocational education sector, Industry Federation, the Chamber of Commerce, and industrial sector or establishments to completely commit to the entire dual system of education similar to Germany. But the above reasons, in the matters of incompletion of the regulation, Laws, or legal ties between related sectors, also make the researcher suspicious, as in fact, the dual education system has been officially started for more than 60 years. In 1959, there was an establishment of the “Thai-German Technical School”, with the assistance of the Federal Government of Germany in both economic and academic matters. It is regarded as the beginning the dual system of education was used to train Thai mechanic students for the first time. But, why the readiness is unavailable till these days? Therefore, the comparative study of “Thai-German Technical School” and GTDEE” project should be a challenging topic which is a good comparative and responds to the objectives of this research most. Keywords: Centre of excellence · Dual system · Vocational education

1 Introduction: Principles of Case Studies In this preliminary step, clarification is required, on the effort in exploring the establishment of TVET project or center of excellence in Thailand, to obtain case study appropriate to the research. According to the latest data from 2015, the researcher found examples of vocational institutions that if considering the basic information, could be classified into category of “center of excellence with specific certification”and are covered in two subgroups of this particular category. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 79–90, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_9

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1.1 Certifications from Specialized Bodies These vocational institutions have submitted application for an assessment based on the procedures and criteria of the Office of the Vocational Education Commission: OVEC, an agency under supervision of the Ministry of Education. The assessment will be judged on an annual basis. Those vocational schools will be assessed on inputs, process, and outputs, totally 6 aspects [1]: 1) student quality; 2) curriculum management and academic work; 3) management; 4) relationship between educational institutions, parents, and community; 5) personnel and personnel management; 6) Outstanding aspects of the institution. There are also many minor details and evaluation/judgment criterion which will not be referred to. In 2017, 33 of the 910 vocational education institutions (426 [2] state vocational education schools and 484 [2] private institutions under the supervision of the Bureau of Private Vocational Education Administration) received the “Royal Academy Award” from HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. They are divided into 12 small, 10 medium and 10 large vocational education institutions. This award is not relevant to the general education quality assessment. 1.2 Certifications and Special Awards from Special Bodies Is a group of vocational education institutions having been certified or given an outstanding status, having excellence in a specialized field in order to promote as a model and the main force in creating, preparing specialized manpower in line with national development policies and the needs of the labor market in the Southeast Asia region. An example of their categorization is as shown in Table 1. Table 1. Examples of Thailand vocational education institutions with excellence or distinctive specialized field. (adapted from [3]) Cluster

Excellence

Institutions/Centres

Transportation

Maritime

Nakhon Si Thammarat Seaboard Industrial College

Rail transport

Thai-Austrian Technical College

Chemical and Petrochemical Petrochemical Petroleum Food

Map Ta Phut Technical College Hatyai Technical College

Food Safety Technology Phayao College of Agriculture and Technology Food Safety Technology Suphanburi College of Agriculture and Technology

Molds and Auto parts Tourism Electrical and Electronics

Molding Technique

Samutsongkhram Technical College

Automotive Parts

Chachoengsao Technical College

Hotel and Tourism

Chiang Rai Vocational College

Hotel and Tourism

Ubonratchathani Vocational College

Electric Power

Mae Moh EGAT The College of Technology and Management

Electronic Power

Nakornnayok Technical College

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The above are examples of Thai vocational education institutions that have been given the status of excellence in the forms described in a brief manner. However, if these vocational education institutions are used as a case study for data analyzing, synthesizing in different dimensions, the researcher has determined that there are several disadvantages, ranging from the definition and the nature of excellence having been reviewed, to public benefit provided by the research, for example: 1. For Royal Award wining vocational education institution, there are 33 schools of excellence of the same nature using the same judging criteria, which is differ with the definition of excellence that only one should be outstanding or superior. 2. Criteria and evaluation of excellence still lack of interesting issues challenging universality, collaboration, recognition, and international competition. 3. The vocational institutions mentioned above, in the category having been certified by the royal prize, are overall accredited, not specify expertise or excellence in specific field, i.e. there is too extensive data. 4. Vocational education institutions described above; in the categories certified, selected by the Thai government; demonstrate some limitations on the attainment of the status of excellence as well as may have reluctance to be awarded that status or may have need for action to achieve direction of excellence in accordance with government policy. This might imply that the status of excellence is yet to accomplish but is going to be developed or built in the future. 5. Access to governmental information, particularly the judging results and the deliberations, is quite a complicated process expected to affect the completeness of the information to be used, published openly.

2 Research Methodology The researcher decided to use the Qualitative research as our research methodology. The reason for utilizing such methodology was due to the researcher’s reliance on interview of facts, history, and professional opinion from experts in vocational education arena both in Germany and Thailand. The experts, who directly involved in setting up the trajectory for excellence, are Asst. Prof. Dr. Panarit Sethakul, Chairperson, Committee for Development of Assessment Systems for Vocational Education, Assoc. Prof. Suthi Aksornkitti, Executive Board of the National Research. Council of Thailand and Prof. Dr. paed. habil. Hanno Hortsch, President of International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1. Descriptive research through the case study between GTDEE and TGPES under qualitative research

In additions, the researcher used past and present data/information to analyze and evaluate the characteristic of events, components, and factors positively and negatively affected the establishment of TVET center of excellence in Thailand. This is also a unique benefit of Descriptive Research which intend to describe characteristics of a phenomenon being studied through the comparison using the case study between TGPES and GTDEE.

3 Analysis: Dual System, a New Issue in Thailand 3.1 Agricultural Era and the Advent of “Dual System” Thailand in A.D. 1959 was still an agricultural country with only old- fashioned farming knowledge, not having a status of Argo-industry, while the period of the industrial revolution of Germany appeared between A.D. 1815–1914 [4] or some sources dating from A.D. 1800–1914 [5] Despitevarious developments; especially, new methods of production lagged behind the leaders in industrial development (Britain, France and Belgium) because the country was divided up into so many small states [6]; and being busy itself with national unification until 1871 [7] too. However, the country had considerable assets: a highly skilled labor force, a good educational system, a strong work ethic, good standards of living and a sound protectionist strategy based on the Zollverein [8]. Such things were the impetus for Germany to completely take pace and was one of the leaders in the world of industrialization along with Britain and the United States in 1900 [9]. The

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difference of the eras between agriculture and industry is one of the reasons Thailand is unable to thoroughly adopt the Dual System like other Southeast Asian countries that have been encouraged to use the system despite having some difference in the access time. In addition, Thailand also has always been facing the situation of “Diversity of vocational education system”, although it sometimes seems like a good opportunity to learn from the differences, but sometimes it is like a blindfold too. If study the development of vocational education in Thailand including the Southeast Asian member states, will find that they receive cooperation, assistance, and various supports from the group of industrialized nations, including the importing of diverse vocational education systems. If classified only after the German “Dual System” was introduced into Thailand in 1959 and counted in the period of about 10 years later, it would be seen that the introduction of foreign vocational education system into Thailand is not lower than 3, as shown in Table 2. Table 2. Examples of countries bringing in vocational education to Thailand between 1959–1969 Year

Country of origin, vocational education system

Educational Institution in Thailand at the moment (current status)

1959

Germany

Thai-German Technical School (King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok: KMUTNB)

1960

Japan

Nonthaburi Telecommunication Training Center (King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang: KMITL)

1963

Germany

KhonKaen Technical College (Rajamangala University of Technology ISAN Khonkaen Campus: RMUTI)

1969

Austria

Thai-Austrian Technical College or Sattahip Technical College

The diversity of these systems suggests the researcher that there are many more to be brought in any manner, including from foreign direct imports, as well as the Thai government has sent people to study at a higher level, or study visit, seeking foreign cooperation, then return to propose or push the agency related to Thai vocational education. This factor is similar to an obstacle for purely having the “Dual system” in the Thai vocational sector. 3.2 “Factory in School”, Utilizing as a Makeshift Until Deep-Rooted and Falling off from the Ideal In the past 60 years, Thailand has no modern technological, innovative, industrial knowhow similar to Germany who has developed a “Dual system” of education. The readiness

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regarding the industrial establishment also has not been existed, similar to that of the teaching staff, trainers. It is about starting all over again on the unreadiness, however, it has to be done in order to make something “begin”. This resulted in emerging the feature of the “factory in school” system in Thailand by creating a “factory or virtual workshop” within the school, and with the support of the German government, various mechanical devices were installed at “Thai-German Technical School” (now is King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok: KMUTNB). The assistance of the Federal Government of Germany in both economic and academic matters is regarded as the beginning of importing the dual system education to train Thai mechanic students for the first time. Moreover, since 1959, the teams of specialists from Germany have been dispatched to the“Thai-German Technical School”. Those German teams of experts are responsible for joint-management education and performing as a trainer to produce technicians on the “Dual system” approach that may be required for accommodating future changes and developments in Thailand. There are a number of learners who have been developed by getting a higher level of education to later on become trainers, instructors till manpower for this sector increased. But it consumes time so long before the Thai government and related agencies to agree upon or do things more in concrete. Until 1984, the Cabinet had approved the Ministry of Education to conduct the training of professional technicians in the field of industrial technics under the cooperation program between the Department of Vocational Education, the Federation of Thai Industries, and the enterprises in order to organize “School in factory” system for technicians training. In 1989, the opening for student admission under this partnership was first experimented at Taluang Technical College in the field of industrial maintenance technician for 30 persons with the support from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany. It appears that this vocational training system provides satisfactory outcome and gain more interested people. As a result, more fields of professional have been offered, and later on the Department of Vocational Education has developed a policy to further extend this professional education system to other fields too [10]. Thailand engrossed in long-standing efforts to reform and develop the management of vocational education system, as well as the “Dual system” education that experiences problem of unreadiness since the beginning. Many vocational institutes adopted the policy, but incapable to action to gain development toward the status of the original “German”. In other words, with the- have to begin with-setting up the “factory in school” educational institutions, this particular education model then, was identically transferred throughout nation, whether or not, the curriculum, procurement, employment, importing of machine, equipment, and etc. Majority of the educational management styles are school-based. That is, there has been insufficient number or quality of establishments, industrial companies, to the level that none is available for some provinces in the regions, to accommodate the “dual system” ideal, as a consequence, the instruction for both theory and practice have to be delivered within the school.

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4 What GTDEE Show? - Pull the Consciousness of the Thai Vocational to Look at the Original “Dual System” “… Now dual vocational education is on the national agenda as one of the strategies for Thailand economic growth. What we found out during our work and would like to put forward is that the understandings about what dual vocational system actually is, still need to be expanded. More importantly, Thailand needs to focus on the quality development of the trainers and teachers in order to head to success. GTDEE will continue our good work and strive to be sustainable with the aspiration to contribute to the overall improvements in Thai dual vocational education sector.” [11]. The above statement from the Executive Director of the German-Thai Chamber of Commerce is quite clear about the purpose of the vocational education excellence project such as “German-Thai Dual Excellence Education: GTDEE” that wants to demonstrate a full-fledged educational management on the foundation of the “Dual system” and a successful implementation that can be accomplished, especially in the matter of quality, and that relied on referencing to excellence of the leading industry, company, and establishments which are the partnership in education. If preliminary consider, this particular section will be consistent with the definition and type of “Center of Excellence with External Affiliation” that has been previously defined and classified by the researcher. Roland Wein’s suggestion suggests that he and his team see the problem of “Dual System” in Thailand, but do not elaborate on the issues they clearly saw, but show commitment in the way that “Will persist in building up understanding about what dual vocational system actually is” under a very well study on the direction of future Thailand’s development, the vocational sector will have a very important role as stated in the plans of the nation, which is so true, especially in the matter of promoting the use of “Dual system” for the education management in vocational institutions all over the country. The policy information, particularly only relevant issues, will be raised here as an example to confirm that the implementation of GTDEE is truly in line with the direction of the Thailand development plan, education section, namely, in 2016 the issue of vocational reform has been proposed to the Thai government by the National Reform Steering Assembly: NRSA on the development of the dual vocational model that. “… There are currently around 100 colleges in the country that implement vocational dual system education. Some colleges offer dual vocational training for all programs whilst some colleges only offer for some programs. The reform issue began by emphasizing the 100 colleges, which already have dual vocational education in place, to develop as a model for further extension in the rest of the college with targeting time frame of 18 months of operation. The development of such prototype covers the development of teachers, extension of Curriculum and programs, Public relations… When the development of the prototype, has been completed, expansion will be carried out to 200 colleges in the next 3 years and 400 in the next 5 years, respectively…” [12]. These days, this project is a subset of the project set up in 2013 by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) of Germany, called “The Vocational Education and Training Network: VETnet” and coordinated by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). VETnet stands for German Chambers worldwide network for cooperative work-based Vocational Education and Training and promotes pilot projects in the field of dual vocational trainin [13]. VETnet has 11 partner countries:

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Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Brazil, China, India, Russia and Thailand. However, the true foundation of the initiative and the GTDEE establishment plan have commenced since 2012 by “the German-Thai Chamber of Commerce (GTCC) and German International Cooperation (GIZ) brought it to Thailand in co-operation with founding company partners B. Grimm, BMW (Thailand) and Robert Bosch.” [14] The co-founding agencies wish to bring the “Dual Vocation” concept, developed by the German government, to apply widely with the strength - the learners must work and study at the same time- which will result in personnel and manpower created from this educational system having qualification, potential and readiness to respond to current labor market needs. The co-founding agencies wish to bring the “Dual System” concept; developed by the German, and applied widely with the strength - the learners must work and study at the same time - that will result in personnel and manpower created from this educational system having qualification, potential, and readiness to respond to the current labor market needs; into practice as a pilot example to the Thai vocational sector of “how the process of the dual system that is close to the German’s ideal or prototype looks” and also expect to contribute to the production of human resources through the education of such system to German companies or industrials in the first place, and then this will lead to other expansions in the future. “From the beginning, the Ministry of Education in Thailand has shown strong support for promoting dual vocational education in Thailand … … GTDEE has grown rapidly since starting out with its three founding members in 2013. I am particularly pleased that the interest in the programmes is not only from German companies, but that an increasing number of Thai companies are also showing interest in joining our programme, recognising the benefits of vocational training in colleges combined with on-the-job training.” Phongsakdi Chakshuvej said as the President of German-Thai Chamber of Commerce. [11]. In 2014, GTDEE committees were set up to carry out various relevant tasks, including drafting the Ordinance of Vocational Education, the development and arrangement of concepts of appropriate operating procedures for enterprises and education institutions, planning the student selection process, development of an examiner handbook, practical seminars to build good relationships between the personnel of the enterprises and the target educational institution respectively. Until October 2014, the pilot PAL examination with apprentices in Bosch Mechatronics Apprenticeship Programme (BMAP1) was held, which is regarded as an experiment for an actual operation from the results obtained, thus leading to a proposing the signing of the major MOUs signed with Office of Vocational Education Commission (OVEC) Ministry of Education, Department of Skill Development (DSD) Ministry of Labour, Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), Thai Chamber of CommerceMajor MOUs signed with Office of Vocational Education Commission (OVEC), Ministry of Education, Department of Skill Development (DSD), Ministry of Labour, Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), Thai Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade of Thailand (BOT), and numbers of new companies partners.For further development of other aspects from 2015 to 2018, they have been methodically arranged in a hierarchical fashion similar to education planning, although at some phase involve activities related to collaboration seeking through interaction, including supporting activities of the relevant agencies,

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but it is an essence of finding the answer of the ready-made and efficient formula for GTDEE project implementation, which can be summarized as shown in Table 3. From all the tables, if considered by taking the original German Dual system as a main focus, organizing the first centralized final examinations in the 4 programs: Automotive Mechatronics, Electrics Power, Mechatronics, and Mechanics for their company partners must be regarded as a vital step in the standardization of the education and training process. The examination will be a key part that will illustrate the measurement results to every relevant agencies that whether or not the projects of GTDEE successfully accomplish the purposes, and how? According to the plan, the operation up to the present is still be under the framework of VETnet phrase 2 until September 2018. Table 3. Development and activities of the GTDEE between 2015–2018 [11] Duration

Development and activities

2015: TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT January

Launched Cyber University web based e-learning platform for college partners

May

Curricular adjustments for new professions; added Mechanics, Industrial Electronics, Agricultural mechanics, and Plant sciences

June

Organized ‘Train the Trainers in Business’ course for company partners

July

Implemented School Development-Quality Assessment (DVQD). Developed concept for college observation and online survey; 3 main characters to be observed are management, infrastructure, and methods of teaching

October

Organized Teach the Teachers ‘Project-based teaching method’ for college partners, in cooperation with King Mongkut University of Technology North Bangkok Started VETnet phrase 2

2016: EXAMINATIONS March

Organized final examination in Electrics Power for B.Grimm apprentices

April

Signed MOU with KMUTNB for the implementation of a Thai-German Meister programme Organized centralised examination in Automotive Mechatronics for Mercedes Benz and BMW apprentices Developed mini projects as part of project-based learning; based on the holistic-learning approach

July

Organized centralised final examinations in Mechatronics and Mechanics for Bosch (BMAP2) and Grohe Siam apprentices

August

Introduced game-based learning to stimulate interplay between trainers and teachers on mobile application

2017: IMPROVEMENTS April

Planned examinations in Automotive Mechatronics, Mechanics, Electrics Power, Agricultural Mechanics, and Plant sciences

2018: SUSTAINABILITY September

Finish of VETnet phrase 2

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5 Summary After the beginning of the development of old agriculture to Argo-industry; there has been an increase in the appearance and expansion of the industry sector; the increase in the number of department stores including various types of the establishments, companies, stores, shops due to the economic development of the country; then, out-of-school setting-education management for the practical sessions is able to gradually start to be developed on the principle of “Dual system”; but entire system cannot be implemented as Thailand’s growth is relatively an inequality growth in each province and region. It results in dividing main model of vocational education in Thailand into 2 categories. 1) The normal course: organizing only school-based learning for delivering of the theory and the practice, or may have the apprenticeship included, depending on the course and the field of study (another term is “factory in the school” for program of technicians and Industrialist or “establishments in school” for commercial program) 2) Dual system: Learn the theory - the basic practice in the school, and later practice in the workplace (another term is “school in the factory” for program of technicians, Industrialist, or “school in the enterprise” for program of commercial) In the past, Thailand had the number of people studying in the first type of vocational education school more than the second. It led to the problem of the “Labor productivity is not in line with the Demand site, which is, not responding to the needs of the labor market, both in terms of qualifications and skills.” This is a problem of quality, not quantity. The problem in managing normal-course vocational education is classified in 3 dimensions: inconsistent, scarcity, and quality system, as shown in Table 4. Table 4. Problems of “normal course” vocational training (Summarized and applied from [15]) 1. The content is inconsistent with the skills needed for the profession 1.1 Vocational curriculum designed does not suit the students’ readiness and ignore the basic knowledge skills 1.2 Course content is not linked to the skills required in the real work world 1.2.1) The school does not offer programs that meet the needs of the establishment - Vocational education College can choose to teach any fields without considering the needs of the establishment - The lack of a labor market database system that can be used to help plan manpower production 1.2.2) Even in the case that the right course is offered but the course content does not match the knowledge/skills required by the employer - The curriculum content design system is mainly determined by the instructors in the vocational college - Nearly all faculty members do not have private sector work experience - There is no guarantee whether the instructors graduating from the production system of Thai vocational education teacher have an expertise in technician skills 1.2.3) Although the course teaches the skills/knowledge that employers need, but the learners still lack the expertise to properly handling the tasks - Many mechanic skill sets rely heavily on skill expertise, basic knowledge which Thai vocational students still absence, and the vocational curriculum does not address this weakness

(continued)

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Table 4. (continued) 2. Resource shortage in vocational education system 2.1 Thai vocational education system has inadequate teachers - Vocational education of the Thai government sector has 4 teachers/100 students [16] 2.2 The Thai vocational education system has insufficient materials 2.2.1) Thai vocational education has not been sufficiently invested in materials 2.2.2) Thai vocational education has insufficient material budget for the practice 3. There are shortcomings in the quality assurance system of vocational education colleges 3.1 Internal quality assurance is lack of effectiveness because of using a self-assessment mechanism 3.2 External quality assurance systems have no effectiveness because they focus on indicators that are not directly relevant to learning- teaching quality. Moreover, they do not help to improve the quality of vocational colleges, but add burden to, causing actual quality issues were not discovered and unresolved

From the reason of inequality, differences on the development in each province and region in Thailand basically having quite large gap, as well as lack of awareness of the principle of converting the “Dual system” ideal into actual practice to reach the right and effective target of this particular education system has brought about the problem of education management under the framework of “Dual system” in the context of Thailand, as described in Table 5. Table 5. Problems of vocational education training, “dual system” version (summarized and applied from [15]) 1. Current dual system promotion measures cannot prevent scrambling the person receiving training investment from the participating establishments, or the so-called “Free-riding” 2. lack of quality assurance systemin dual vocational training 2.1 Quality assurance of the curriculum by processing the curriculum development or certification based on professional skills standards 2.2 Quality Assurance of Establishments by Inspection and Certification of Establishments delivering standardized instruction 2.3 Quality Assurance of Graduates through Competency-Based assessment based on professional skills standard and provide certificate to the successful test taker 3. Lack of intermediary organizations to assist in the management of dual vocational training systems 3.1 Absence a coordinating center for job placement between learners and businesses 3.2 Lack of a set of professional skills standards to serve as a framework for defining dual vocational training content and as a framework for quality assurance

The data in Table 5; although, is a research report from a credible research organization, the Thailand Development Research Institute: TDRI, and may be used at the government level to create national development plan in various dimensions; but problem analysis is still lacking in viewing into or referencing to the proper structure of “Dual System” education that deserve to be extracted lessons learned from Germany to

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compare with what the Thai vocational sector is missing in order to fulfill the system to more complete.

References 1. Office of the Vocational Education Commission. A guide to vocational education assessment for the royal award. Office of the Vocational Education Commission: Ministry of Education (Thailand) (n.d.) 2. VEC Thailand Homepage. http://www.vec.go.th/. Accessed 06 May 2021 3. Ode-sri, A.: A Comparative Study on Scientific Approaches for Center of Excellence in TVET Sector Under the Scientific Aspect of the Demands in Thai Education System. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden (2019) 4. Kiesewetter, H.: Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland 1815–1914. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (1989) 5. Henning, F.W.: Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914. Paderborn, Schöningh (1973) 6. ERIH Homepage. https://www.erih.net/how-it-started/the-industrial-revolution-in-europe/. Accessed 06 May 2021 7. Wikipedia Homepage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Germany. Accessed 06 May 2021 8. Geiss, I.: The Question of German Unification: 1806–1996. Routledge, New York (2013) 9. Intro Books. History of Germany. Can Akdeniz (2017) 10. Sawangsak, T.: Strategies for Success in Vocational Education Administration. Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok (1999) 11. GTDEE: Culminating Report 2013–2016. German-Thai Chamber of Commerce, Bangkok (2017) 12. National Reform Steering Assembly: Driving the Reform of Vocational Education into Dual Vocational Training (2016) 13. AHK Thailand Homepage. http://thailand.ahk.de/berufsbildung/about-vetnet/. Accessed 20 Aug 2018 14. AHK Thailand Homepage. http://thailand.ahk.de/en/vocational-education/about-the-gtdeeprogramme/. Accessed 20 Aug 2018 15. Rukkeatwong, N.: Vocational Reform in Thailand. TDRI, Bangkok (2013) 16. VEC Thailand Homepage. http://techno.vec.go.th/default.aspx. Accessed 19 Oct 2020

Need Analysis of Stakeholders’ Perspectives Regarding the Challenging Factors in Establishing the CoE for TVET in Thailand Adisorn Ode-sri1(B) , Thomas Köhler2 , and Pisit Wimonthanasit1 1 Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Chiangmai 50220, Thailand 2 Technische Universität Dresden, Weberplatz 5, 01217 Dresden, Germany

[email protected]

Abstract. Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in Thailand is familiarized with education quality assurance both being internal assessment and external assessment. They are accountable for quality assurance of the colleges. It is possible that many institutions and their internal organizations possess higher standard and can be developed into being excellent and beyond which lead to public recognition. Some of the institutions might have already been excellent but have never been accredited for excellence. However, some institutions do not have any of the qualities for being excellent but more or less exaggerate to build good image for the institutions for public acceptance. The researcher hopes it helps to clarify the significance of these issues. It is intended to make a contribution to the broader issue of how the concept of excellence can promote adherence to standards in agencies in education sector and drive quality enhancement. The ultimate goals of the research is to seek, study, compare and analyze to provide answers to the question that “In what dimension does Thailand need TVET Center of Excellence (CoE)?”. In order to achieve completeness of the content of this research; the researcher thus developed a questionnaire to examine and request opinions concerning “Center of technical and vocational excellence in the outlook or perception of the stakeholders” to gain an understanding of the real demands of stakeholders regarding the CoE for TVET in Thailand context. Keywords: Centre of excellence for TVET in Thailand · CoE in Thailand

1 Introduction 1.1 Excellence in TVET History “Excellence” is referred to as an institution or a person has a higher position or function or in a special field. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has given the most comprehensive definition to the word “excellent” as “the quality of being excellent” [1]. Aspects of excellence are widely spoken in the field of business and industry competition via the image of accreditation that the organizations, products or persons are brought into the system of consideration process by central authority who determines © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 91–103, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_10

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the measures, along with criterions having been established to be used as a measuring instrument leading to the achievement of a reward or guarantee in such a way the person, the organization, those things are in the state of excellence and more marvelous more than anyone, anything, any organization. Besides; this also includes the status of excellence awarded without passing any complicated process; but could be depending on a matter of a long experience; of consistency in any action or operation; of fame, newness, oldness, or public acceptance; and there are many people who have announced themselves having a status of excellence by thinking that they are or do so well in that particular thing. Today is not just business sector, influence of excellence is also widely utilized in the education sector through various features, such as ranking, assessment, competition, and the application of business rules to the education sector. Amid the popularity that moves in the same direction with business sector; but still be unable to reach any certain conclusion or referential theory what structure, format, or norm the definition of excellence and the scientifically explainable and tangible practice to achieve or maintain the status of excellence have if views from the education organization’s corner. In the world of vocational and technical education, there is an intentional effort toward this direction as well, but seemingly many countries still be unable to reach it. Many countries in the East are trying to look at and follow the West while Western countries are also looking for common ground on excellence through community forum or global vocational and technical education network. In the TVET history, the history of effort searching for excellence through “Skill” become major result in 1950. The 1st International Vocational Training Contest took place at “Virgen de la Paloma” Vocational Training Institute in Madrid and were held only between Portugal and Spain. In 1953, contestant from Germany, Great Britain, France, Morocco, and Switzerland took part in it. The event was later renamed to the World Skills Competition (WSC). The World Skills International (WSI), a non-profit association that promotes Vocational Education and Training (VET) internationally in traditional trades and crafts as well as in multi-skilled vocations, is monitoring and working within the six key areas of Research, Promoting Skills, Career Building, Education and Training, International Cooperation and Development, and Skills Competitions. World Skills has a goal to be the global hub for skills excellence and development with ongoing activities nationally, regionally and globally [2]. The WSC is recognised by many as the pinnacle of excellence in VET [3]. These competitions provide a benchmark for high performance and an objective way to assess vocational excellence. They also provide an opportunity to research the various dimensions of vocational excellence [4]. 1.2 Thailand’s Vocational Education Policies in the Direction of Excellence Development In September 2016, Primeminister Prayuth Chan-ocha, General Dapong Ratanasuwan, Minister of Education have issued a policy to enhance excellence in vocational education especially vocational institutions under Office of the Vocational Education Commission to have their own unique expertise in 16 fields that meet career standard of ASEAN. Office of the Vocational Education Commission have considered and selected pilot institutions in fiscal 2016 to encourage investment in six super industrial clusters as follows:

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1. Communications Cluster Program in Maritimeat Nakhon Si Thammarat Seaboard Industrial College 2. Chemical and Petrochemical Cluster, Program in Petrochemical at Map Ta Phut Technical College 3. Food Cluster in Food Safety Technology program at Phayao College of Agriculture and Technology 4. Molds and Auto parts cluster, Program in Molding Technique at Samutsongkhram Technical College 5. Tourism and Hotel cluster, Program in Hotel and Tourism at Chiang Rai Vocational College 6. Electrical and Electronics Cluster, Program in Electric Power at Mae Moh EGAT The College of Technology and Management And there are six projects for the fiscal year 2017 as follows; 1. Communications Cluster, Program in Rail transport at Thai-Austrian Technical College 2. Chemical and Petrochemical Cluster, Petroleum Program at Hatyai Technical College 3. Food Cluster in Food Safety Technology program at Suphanburi College of Agriculture and Technology 4. Molds and Auto parts cluster, Program in Automotive Parts at Chachoengsao Technical College 5. Tourism and Hotel Cluster, Program in Hotel and Tourism at Ubonratchathani Vocational College 6. Electrical and Electronics Cluster, Program in Electronic Power at Nakornnayok Technical College The Deputy Director-General of the Vocational Education Commission, Mr. Wanich Uamsri (2015) [5], said that “the consideration and selection of Potential colleges based on previous development and the participation of enterprises, the 12 programs were recruited to pilot has been popular today and are interested by a large number of students. Moreover, enterprises can reserve potential students before they graduate. From now onwards, there will be four years’ phases development plan with collaboration from enterprises”. There is constant movement in building vocational education excellence in the context and understanding of Thailand. On December 23, 2016, the Public–Private Collaborative Committee (E2: Competitive Workforce) held a signing ceremony of projects cooperation “Excellent Model School” for schools under the Office of Vocational Education Commission of 46 schools and 14 leading private organizations to jointly develop the model school for dual education with a prominent expert and potential in the specific field. The model school will be the house of combined school and enterprise that attract young learners into vocational education system [6]. The 14 leading private organizations are from diverse industries such as business services, trade business and tourism that took part in DVE: Dual Vocational Education with an emphasis on 46 vocational schools to build a strong professional background. The private sector will

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work with the vocational colleges in designing curriculum that meet the requirements of business sector. Moreover, the private sector will provide support for training, for students in technology programs and consider recruiting them when graduate.

2 Research Methodology The researcher decided to use the Quantitative research as our research methodology. In order to achieve completeness of the content of this research; therefore, it should be more than theories in various universal contexts that have been employed already to introduce, reference, and support; investigations to gain an understanding of the real demands of stakeholders regarding the TVET Center of Excellence in Thailand context is no less important than knowledge from other sources; the researcher thus developed a questionnaire to examine and request opinions concerning “Center of technical and vocational excellence in the outlook or perception of the stakeholders”. The questionnaire has 3 sections as following: Section 1) Personal information and basic information Section 2) Basic understanding of Excellence and CoE and Section 3) Suggestions and others. Questionnaire respondents consisted of 3 groups of people; all of whom were stakeholders; i.e. student’s parents; students; and professors, experts, and entrepreneurs; initially a total number of more than 50 people was targeted. 2.1 Basic Statistics Used in the Research 1) Arithmetic mean x = can be calculated from the formula x = Where



x

n

xis the arithmetic mean, x is the sum of all data values and n is the total number of data. The data obtained from the questionnaire; there is an interpretation of the mean score into the level of 5 from the rating scale data 2) Value of P% or percentage P% =

Desired amount × 100 Total amount

2.2 Analysis of Variance [7] ANOVA is an analysis technique used to test a hypothesis for comparing the mean of more than 2 groups, while independent variables are clustered variables and dependent variables are quantitative variables. 1) Tested at a statistical significance level of 0.5, means only 5% of the error is allowed in the hypothesis testing (α = 0.5) If sig = (Qn_pol + Qn_solv);0]; end The total script developed by the students included about 50 lines of code with comments. To learn more about all the advantages for problem solving with numerical tools, we encourage students to use a rich visualization toolbox of Matlab. The following visualization scenarios were implemented: animation, 3D plots, and 2D plots. Figure 2 demonstrated the 3D plot with four variables (x, y, and z coordinates and the colormap for concentration). The students developed a Matlab code for the cross-linking reaction involving hydroxyethyl cellulose and calcium chloride.

Fig. 2. Visualization of product concentration distribution created by students from the Matlab numerical solution data.

Figure 2 shows a complex plot that is impossible to generate using standard visualization tools offered, for example, by Excel or Origin software. With Matlab, however,

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generation of this plot requires a single line of code that commands to make a numerical solution 3D plot for a certain domain of the Fig. 1 geometry. The codes students used to visualize data are simple and include no more than several lines. For Fig. 2 (left) only a single line of code is required: pdeplot3D(model,‘ColorMapData’,u(:,3)) The code is quite intuitive, and students easily understand that it is intended for 3D plotting of the mathematical model solutions results. The code for Fig. 2 (right) is a bit more complex but is still no more than several lines long. As a part of this practicum, we show students how to interpolate solution results, so they can create arbitrary plots visualizing their solution data: uintrp = interpolateSolution(results,XX,YY,ZZ,3); usol = reshape(uintrp,size(XX)); surf(usol) shading interp colorbar The students also visualized the results of numerical simulations as 2D plots. For example, Fig. 3 demonstrates concentrations of reagents and the product for the reaction between KOH and HCl.

Fig. 3. The 2D visualization of a chemical reaction occurring between KOH and HCl returned by the student-developed code.

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Such a visualization also requires just a couple of code lines added to the original script: uintrp = interpolateSolution(results,xq,yq,[1–3]); plot(xq, uintrp(:,1),xq, uintrp(:,2),xq, uintrp(:,3)); The computer code the students generated for the reactions selected for this practicum obtained a predictive power. The students used their codes to verify the experimental results they performed in laboratories. The changed the values of dimensionless coefficients in the code to test variable experimental conditions. Therefore, they did not have to develop specific codes for different experiments. The offline practicum was organized as a 2-h introductory lecture, followed by 4 h of model development and testing, and 2 h of experimental verifications. Its online alternative, however, required a complete transformation of the practicum structure. We started with developing the videos that were indispensable for online platforms. Totally, 5 videos 5–15 min each were recorded. They included an introductory video to Matlab, a video that explains how to develop a mathematical model, two screencast videos explaining code generations for specific chemical problems, and a video that provides experimental verifications of numerical simulations in a laboratory. The online version of the practicum also included a series of tests with a feedback. The specific terminology (such as Matlab scripts, boundary conditions, etc.) was summarized at a separate website: the Quizlet platform, which allows to learn terminology shown as virtual cards. This online version of the practicum was added to a module that focused on application of numerical tools to characterization of smart materials. The online course, which includes this module, attracted over 1,000 students across the world at the Coursera platform. The analytical instrumentation of this platform was used to assess the online practicum introduction results. The videos that introduced the practicums gathered positive feedback from the course audience (the ratio of likes/dislikes for the practicum elements is about 90/10). In the pre-course questionnaire, almost half of enrolled students (48%) indicated that they have a basic knowledge of numerical methods, however, only 13% of students were familiar with specific software tools. These students, therefore, are motivated to learn more about materials science and chemical engineering trends, but they are quite far from modern software tools as compared with students enrolled in programs related to IT. It confirms a general idea behind this paper that although modern students in chemical engineering and materials science are interested in IT and programming tools, they are still far from intensive introduction of programming tools to their daily educational practices. A survey among offline students was performed with a simple questionnaire. The students answered five questions: what was the most exciting and the most difficult in the proposed practicum and if this practicum was interesting, understandable, and useful. The answers are analyzed below. The most exciting part of the practicum was that the students were able to visualize their data with just several lines of code (60%) and represent chemistry as differential equations simplified into a code (30%). In general, all the students who tested this practicum were not very tolerant to partial differential equations, but their analogue

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as a Matlab code turned out to be more attractive. The reason is the students need to know only the values of partial differential equation coefficients to solve them in the respective numerical modelling software. These coefficients depend on chemical reaction conditions. It was a simple approach for the students to calculate the values of these coefficients for various process conditions. The most difficult was to generate code (for PhD students) and modify it for their specific processes (Master’s students). It confirms the fact that chemical engineering and materials science students are not closely familiar with programming code concepts. A set of sample codes was required with the explanation of each parameter to overcome this difficulty. In general, programming language fundamentals requires a separate course. Code samples, however, turned out to be extremely helpful if students prefer to stick to specific chemical problems and do not learn Matlab deeper. Almost all the students (95%) indicated that the practicum was interesting. All the content was understandable (80%), but code was initially difficult to comprehend (65%). About two thirds of students (71%) confirmed that the skills they gained during this practicum could be useful for their professional career. The students are, therefore, highly motivated to learn more about programming tools but current programs in materials science and chemical engineering offer less programming experience as compared to programs in IT. Numerical software tools, such as Matlab, can offer new dimensions to such academic programs including advanced model development and visualization options.

4 Conclusions A Matlab practicum for chemical engineering students was developed both on offline and online versions. The online version became a part of the course launched on a global platform with over 10 million audience. Master’s students were also introduced the Matlab practicum offline. During this practicum, they developed a model of a real convection-diffusion-reaction process, and visualized data they obtained via mathematical simulations. Students demonstrate high motivation to develop numerical models of chemical reactions as programming language scripts, although such an approach is not commonly taught within the framework of chemical engineering or materials science programs. Coupling IT with chemistry is not a self-evident trend for a chemical engineering education, but students feel high motivation to gain an intensive IT experience as part of their chemical engineering education. Modern software packages such as Matlab provide convenient instrumentation both to students and professors to leverage their skills in simulating complex chemical processes at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and materials science. The respective practicum offers complex approaches to visualization of experimental results in a convenient and a versatile way. In total, all these advantages of blending IT technologies and chemical engineering education, enhance the potential of future chemical engineers to become qualified specialists in the global digital economy.

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Digital Spaces as an Opportunity for Supporting Complex Learning Strategies in Human-Machine Interaction Andrea Dederichs-Koch1 and Ulrich Zwiers2(B) 1 Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany [email protected] 2 Hochschule Bochum, Bochum, Germany [email protected]

Abstract. This paper reviews the challenges and opportunities of utilizing digital spaces to provide hands-on learning environments for students enrolled in engineering programs. Besides the demand for highly specialized engineers, the increased complexity of state-of-the-art technologies necessitates interdisciplinary collaborations regarding different scientific areas and application domains. Digital spaces provide a great flexibility, both in terms of time and place, to bring together students of different backgrounds and to enable them to develop new learning strategies while working on practice-oriented projects. Referring to a course on human-machine interaction, a rather young topic with a wide range of application in robotics and interactive cyber-physical systems, this contribution outlines how digital spaces support cross-disciplinary learning and encourage critical discussions on new technologies. To this, the mechanical design of a humanoid robot and its control both in the digital space and in the real world is presented illustrating how fairly complex engineering systems can be introduced remotely and even at undergraduate level. Finally, based on gained experiences, a revised course design incorporating digital spaces is proposed. Keywords: Humanoid robotics · Cyber-physical system · Human-machine interaction

1 Introduction Educational institutions around the world are faced with the question how to prepare their students for a world of rapid change in technology, increasing interconnectedness, and new forms employment. As for engineering education, it appears to be common understanding that the development of scientific and technological literacy need to be balanced, complemented by fostering the ability to communicate, cooperate in teams, and work interdisciplinarily. Against the background of those fairly general demands, this paper is concerned with the practical aspects of providing a learning environment for complex problem-solving activities referring to a course on human-machine interaction. After a brief review of the technical context and relevant terms, the design of an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1059–1070, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_112

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actual course is outlined and the characteristics of digital spaces are reviewed. Then, the knowledge structuring is detailed and the practical use of the humanoid NAO robot as a learning tool in a digital space is shown, before the main findings of this contribution are summarized and recommendations for further work are formulated. 1.1 Cyber-Physical System Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are technical systems that are used more and more in smart work but also in smart home applications [1]. In order to use all functionalities of the CPS in an adaptive way, the design of human-machine interaction is essential. Future engineers have not only to learn the basic technical knowledge to applicate it to the design process of CPS, but should also be able to manage the complex application of those systems due to user’s requirements and create comfortable user interfaces in using design thinking strategies. This enables e. g. humanoid robots that are capable to socially interact with human beings and may be used to assist elder or handicapped people in every-day life. The development of cyber-physical systems involves a complex design process combining a variety of sensor systems and mechanical constructive components. These elements work together in a complex configuration controlled by specialized operating systems and system software. The simpler system configuration belongs to class I of mechatronic systems. Are those components highly integrated, that means integrated and synchronized, they are called systems of class II [2]. Are these highly integrated mechatronic systems connected to other systems or internet technology and dispose of graphical user interfaces or other components to react to human beings, the technical systems are specified as interactive cyber-physical system, as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Concept of (interactive) cyber-physical systems [2]

Based on fundamental actuatory and sensory system information, energy and material flow are converted through the function of a basic system. Especially the communication system enables the technological system a noncognitive, associative or cognitive

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regulative information processing flow. Interfaces are existing to the environment, to human or a network system enabling information flow to other CPS. Those CPS are gaining more and more significance and computer capacities allows the processing of great amounts of data, known as big data [3, 4]. Cognitive data processing facilitate new humanoid robot technologies featuring humanlike behavior and being intended to overshadow the technical aspects, which is confirmed by research projects that, for example, investigate the use of humanoid robots as support in elder home care or autism therapy [5]. Learning the complexity of robotics in relation to human-machine interaction requires a systematic approach for analysis and modeling of functional relationships between mechanical components, driving devices, sensors and control algorithms. Furthermore, knowledge of path planning, image processing, and design are additionally mandatory in order to implement a desired functionality. This complex knowledge is distributed in different disciplines such as technical computer science or mechanical and electrical engineering, partly already combined in mechatronic systems. Cyber-physical systems may be viewed as further developments of mechatronic systems combining the real and the virtual world to a holistic framework due to the functions they are designed for and lead to the architecture of cyber-physical mechatronic systems [6]. Special architectures of cyber-physical systems, such as humanoid robots, are deployed in industrial environment [7], but development also leads to complex robotic systems that are able to socially interact with people [8, 9], e. g., they can be used as an assistive system for elder people [10] or in autism therapy [11, 12]. Breazeal invents social robot interaction as an embodied machine that is able to recognize human emotions and interacts in expressing adequate emotion of the robot system in order to interact. Therefore, she creates six sub-systems that enable the robot to behave coherently and effectively, e. g. a behaviour system that organizes the robot’s task behaviors into a coherent structure or the motor system that arbitrates the robot’s expressions. This design of sociable robots show that technical components can be used to create interactive robotic systems. In social and humanoid robotics, the construction and mechanical modelling plays an important role leading to the topic of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) [13, 14], here digital and virtual tools are inevitable in order to implement and control the motion of the robotic system. Besides the estimation of motion stability, both statically and dynamically, collision detection is of great importance to ensure safe human-robot interaction. Hence, the possibilities and limitations of real and virtual tools working together in digital spaces are reviewed in order to deploy digital learning strategies of the complex knowledge that is the basis for pHRI. 1.2 Humanoid NAO Robot and Its Interactive CPS Architecture Humanoid robots that are able to socially interact are currently in the state of research and not yet robust enough to be commercially distributed and used, e. g., for assistive purposes. But they can be integrated as a learning tool for human-machine interaction. Depending on their physical appearance and functionality, they represent motivating and fascinating devices for supporting complex learning processes in engineering education. Most of those robots are individual constructions of special research groups and not

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available for basic robotic courses. However, the humanoid NAO robot is an available robot solution for student-centered courses [15]. Subsequently, experiences gathered with the study course “Technology of HumanMachine Interaction” utilizing the humanoid NAO robot serve as basis to analyze the applicability in a digital course that is mandatory to the actual pandemic situation. The research question is whether the digital transfer of the course design with a real robot is possible and to what extend digital and virtual tools are able to replace learning processes with a real robot. In the following, the NAO robot, the related complex knowledge for motion design and digital and virtual opportunities, advantages and disadvantages are analyzed and discussed. As introduced before, the NAO represents a motivating and fascinating learning tool in real learning processes. The NAO robot has been developed for education and research purposes, especially in the field of autonomous behavior and human-machine interaction [16–18]. It has a friendly appearance reflecting the vision of its inventor Bruno Maisonnier who intended to integrate the robot and its successor models into every-day life as an assisting tool, e. g., for elder or handicapped people. Therefore the hard- and software not only provides the technology to functional purposes but it also features an innovative human-robot interaction concept making the robot appear alive and interact with human beings in a human-centered way (Fig. 1) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Humanoid NAO Robot and Choreographe Software [19].

The robot’s size is roughly 58 cm, it has 25 degrees of freedom (2 in the head, 5 in each arm, 1 in each hand, 5 in each leg and 1 in the pelvis), and it is equipped with a variety of sensors (vision, tactile, auditory, sonar, etc.). The functions provided by NAOqi, the robot’s middleware, can be accessed by using the Choreographe software but NAO is also compatible with Microsoft Robotics Studio, Cyberbotics Webots, and Gostai Urbi Studio. NAOqi supplies also bindings for high-level languages, such as Python, C++

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and Urbi, to communicate with various motorboards which control the joint servos and read sensor data. In Choreographe, movements and interactive behaviors can be implemented by using the graphical user interface. This way, continuous sequences of movements can be recorded to operate the joints over time. Choreographe can also be used to create and simulate sequences of movements without connection to the real robot. 1.3 Course Design “Technology of Human-Machine Interaction” Learning the complexity of robotics in relation to human-machine interaction requires a systematic approach for analysis and modeling of functional relationships between mechanical components, driving devices, sensors and control algorithms. Furthermore, knowledge of path planning, image processing, and design are required to implement a desired functionality. This complex knowledge is distributed in different disciplines such as technical computer science or mechanical and electrical engineering, which poses a challenge to engineering education. The presented interdisciplinary and individual learning approach enhances the design of the technical components for the use of interaction and also encourages critical reflection on application design and realization of future technologies in the field of human-machine interaction. The concept is implemented in a practical approach using the humanoid NAO robot. The developed course on human-machine interaction addresses students from various study programs, namely mechanical and electrical engineering, mechatronics and computer science. Due to the study curriculum of the different disciplines involved the students can achieve 4 to 6 ECTS with a work load of 120 to 180 h. This difference must be considered when designing the project and its tasks assigned to the interdisciplinary team members. The study course consists of lectures, training and practical work. The introducing lecture is for teaching the basic theory of robotic systems and their features for interaction. Practical tasks have to be solved by each student. In their practical work, the students form interdisciplinary groups developing human-machine interaction for subjects that they can choose themselves involving all parts of interaction possibilities. During the lectures the project work is designed more and more in detail. At the end of the project work, the students present their work to each other, reflecting not only their working progress but also the constraints and possibilities of the technology of human-machine interaction. The actual course design consists of the following five parts: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Basics of human-machine interaction Mechanics and modelling Sensors and interactivity Behavioural interaction Project work: interaction design and modelling

As outlined before, the course is designed for students at the end of their undergraduate study, such as mechanical engineering or mechatronics, or as a preparation for studies of a master degree or as a supplement course for deepening acquired knowledge

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of a master study aiming on an insight to future technologies, such as cyber physical systems, humanoid robotics or human-machine interaction. 1.4 Constraints and Opportunities for Digital Spaces In order to transfer the course to digital spaces, a more detailed structuring of the underlying complex knowledge is mandatory. The knowledge structure provides the basis for the digital course design. The project-oriented group work is difficult to realize in digital space, therefore the knowledge that should be acquired by the students have to be structured deeply in order to implement it into a learning management tool, such as Moodle [20–22]. This has the advantage of defined constraints and self-consistent knowledge modelling when implementing it in the Moodle platform. In addition, the Webots complete simulation environment is available [23]. This environment can be used to simulate autonomous behaviour of the robot but is not useful for illustrating the fundamentals of HMI and reactive behaviour. The modelling of the movements of the robot can be easier realized by the graphical programming tool as introduced before, and designing a new environment leads away from interaction into complete virtuality and is not correlating with the intended learning objects of the course design with the real robot. So the learning process has to be planned in more detail and the main focus can be specified to modelling and simulation. This is dependent on the selected tools used for a digital course design [24]. As a learning management tool, Moodle can be chosen, because it is free of charge, has a great variety of interactive tools and methods and example courses already exist [25].

2 Knowledge Structuring Transfer to Digital Spaces 2.1 Detailed Knowledge Structure In digital spaces direct interactivity with a real robot has to be substituted by other tools and digital opportunities, such as an interactive learning management system, learning videos, interactive learning websites, tasks and video conferences. The programming of an application with the humanoid NAO robot is only possible indirectly by transferring the application to the robot and filming the behaviour via webcam. Direct interaction such as training of object recognition, face tracking and auditive interaction via dialogue modelling is not replaceable and have to be illustrated by learning videos, that have to be developed in addition. The more detailed structure according to the basic design and the constraints and opportunities outlined so far is as follows: 1. Basics of human-machine interaction a. Interactive components b. Modelling and simulation c. Project management basics

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d. Requirements engineering 2. Mechanics and modelling a. b. c. d.

Kinematics Trajectory planning Kinetics Simulation of motion

3. Sensors and interactivity 4. Behavioural interaction 5. Project work: interaction design and modelling The transfer process is outlined and illustrated in the following, focusing on the mechanical structure of the robot and the simulation tools and visualization of motion simulation. 2.2 Complex Knowledge Modelling In this section, the humanoid robot motion modelling and its impact on learning mechanics is reflected. With its 25 degrees of freedom the programming of stable motion is not easy to implement on the real robot and static and dynamic stability is not easy to predict. Therefore the motion modelling is supported by a certain strategy that stores all joints of the real robot in single poses and static stability can be directly seen through the real robot. Dynamic stability can also be realized in this way supported by the specialized software which derives mathematical Bezier curves between two trained poses that allow smooth motion from one pose to the other. Controlling motion and human-like behaviour requires a highly integrated system such as shown with interactive CPS with cognitive regulations, including the possibility to adapt the controlling structures. Adaptive behaviour also enables user-friendly or useroptimized strategies, but makes changes in the system difficult to realize. This supports learning processes through adaptability to the user but learning the basic mechanical correlation is difficult because it is overshadowed by comfortability and adaptability of the system. The humanoid NAO robot evokes a high motivation in learning processes [26]. Different approaches exist for managing the knowledge processes. For technical systems the distinction between signals, data, information and knowledge helps to understand complex issues [27]. A certain amount of signals with a definite syntax is called data, adding content meaning leads to information, building networks or structures knowledge can be generated. The acquisition of knowledge in correlation with the learning process can be described by Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy [28]. Here learning objectives are a combination of the dimension of knowledge and cognitive process dimension. The representation of knowledge of the different knowledge dimensions should not only be seen in relation to the learning process but essentially with the technical system, here the humanoid NAO robot.

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In a first approach, the categorization of knowledge and definition of learning objectives in correlation with the technical system is defined as it is already shown in the structuring model of microsystem technology [29]. This approach is used in the following to structure the knowledge of robotic kinematics for motion planning and generating. The basic level of knowledge is the construction of the robot and the dependency to walking motion (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. NAO robot construction and walking motion [30]

For realizing a walking motion, all joints and links of both legs are used representing a complex dynamic motion with several phases in which the robot is supported by one foot or both feet alternatively [31]. On the right side of Fig. 3, the leg and feet motion during the walking process and also the actual and next robot position are illustrated. It is shown that the robot moves in short steps and therefore relatively slowly forward, as too fast movements lead to dynamic instability. The construction of the robot also restricts the maximum and minimum step width (Fig. 4) due to the length of the links.

Fig. 4. Walk motion and step constraints [31]

When the robot walks in real space the navigation has to be controlled, that makes complex real-time calculations necessary. In the API of the robot, methods of calculation

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are available to control walking and navigation. The actual position of the robot can be determined and verified through sensors. The Position of one foot relative to the other is given by a translation (pX, pY) followed by a rotation of pTheta around the vertical axis. These three parameters are bundled in an ALMath::Pose2D. On the basis of the represented knowledge of the robot, walking programming method can be used to apply on new learning scenario tasks. This experimental application is shown as follows. 2.3 Experimental Application with a Real Robot Transfer to Digital Spaces One of the tasks for the participants of the study course consists of implementing the basic movement of walking and adapting the correlated API to the climbing of a podium. As an additional challenge, dynamic stability including pose estimation in three-dimension space must be archived. For estimating the stability, a simple offline-tool [32] is provided that should be integrated to transfer real robot movement to digital space. In Fig. 5 the new task of climbing a podium is illustrated.

Fig. 5. Learning scenario with the humanoid NAO robot: “Climbing a podium”

The NAO robot is in an instable state in the single support phase of the walking process, the critical movements can be seen in Fig. 5 in the first, third and fourth picture. At this, the velocity and arm movements play an important role. The movement is realized

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directly on the real robot [33]. In order to transfer the real movement to digital space, it is necessary to analyze it with the virtual robot and verify it with the help of the simple offline-tool (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Motion modelling of the NAO robot in learning scenario: “Climbing a podium” [33]

In addition, the movement is illustrated by a learning video. The sequential arrangement in the learning management tool is as follows: estimation of step width and height, division into several smaller robot poses and estimation whether the correlated center of mass of the pose lies in the support polygon.

3 Summary and Acknowledgement In this contribution the opportunity of transferring the course design “Technology of human-machine interaction” from real to digital spaces is outlined, including the different possibilities, constraints advantages and disadvantages. It is outlined that the structuring of knowledge as basis for digital spaces is mandatory and not all possibilities of humanmachine interaction can be transferred to a digital course design. The transferring process of complex knowledge is illustrated by the example of pHRI, modelling the motion of the humanoid NAO robot climbing a podium and analyzing the stability of the movement. Due to the results of the illustrated example certain parts of the course can be transferred without problems to digital space and structuring of the basic knowledge helps enhance the existing course design and making the learning process for the students more transparent. Understanding the theoretical and complex knowledge supported by learning videos may simplify and support the learning process. Digital and interactive features of a learning management system can help to activate individual access and provide student-centred course design. But in the long-term the project work has to be realized with a real robot in order to use all interaction features that the humanoid NAO robot provide for best application design. The basic correlations were elaborated in a study work project from these highly motivated students: Sean Christopher Jacob, Niklas Kost, Nico Martin, Wasim Sharafi, Niko Steden, thanks for the inspiring idea and motivation on experimental work.

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References 1. Carreira, P., Amaral, V., Vangheluwe, H. (eds.) Foundations of Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2020) 2. Gausemeier, J., Anacker, H., Czaja, A., Waßmann, H.: Auf dem Weg zu intelligenten technischen systemen. In: 9. Paderborner Workshop Entwurf mechatronischer Systeme, Band 310, Apr. 2013. Verlagsschriftenreihe des Heinz Nixdorf Instituts, Paderborn (2013) 3. Vogel-Heuser, B., Bauernhansl, T., ten Hompel, M.: Handbuch Industrie 4.0 – Allgemeine Grundlagen, Bd. 4. Springer Vieweg, Berlin (2017) 4. Reisinger, G., Komenda, T., Hold, P., Sihn, W.: A concept towards automated data-driven reconfiguration of digital assistance systems. In: 8th Conference on Learning Factories (2018) 5. Schiebinger, et al. (eds.) How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research, Report of the Expert Group “Innovation through Gender”. European Commission (2013) 6. Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e. V.: Entwicklung cyber-physischer mechatronischer Systeme (CPMS), Entwurf, VDI/VDE 2206 (2020) 7. Geisberger, E., Broy, M.: Integrierte Forschungsagenda Cyber-Physical Systems, acatech Studie – Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften e.V. (2012) 8. Breazeal, C.L.: Designing Sociable Robots, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002) 9. Dautenhahn, K., Bond, A. H., Canamero, L., Edmonds, B.: Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2002) 10. Schiebinger, L., Klinge, I., Paik, H.Y., Sánchez de Madariaga, I., Schraudner, M., Stefanick, M. (eds.) Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment (genderedinnovations.stanford.edu) (2011–2020) 11. Salleh, M.H.K., et al.: Experimental framework for the categorization of special education programs of ASKNAO. Procedia Comput. Sci. (2015) 12. Salleh, M.H.K., Miskam, M.A., Yussof, H., Omar, A.R.: HRI assessment of ASKNAO intervention framework via typically developed child. Procedia Comput. Sci. (2017) 13. De Santis, A., Siciliano, B., De Luca, A., Bicchi, A.: An atlas of physical human–robot interaction. Mech. Mach. Theory (2007) 14. Siciliano, B., Khatib, O. (eds.): Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32552-1 15. Gouaillier, D., et al.: The NAO humanoid: a combination of performance and affordability. Computing Research Repository (2008) 16. Gouaillier, D., Hugel, V., Blazevic, P., Maisonnier, B.: Mechatronic design of NAO humanoid. In: IEEE Int. Conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan (2009) 17. Alves-Oliveira, P., et al.: Towards dialogue dimensions for a robotic tutor in collaborative learning scenarios. In: RO-MAN: the 23rd IEEE International Conference (2014) 18. Kiryazov, K., Lowe, R., Becker-Asano, C., Montebelli, A., Ziemke, T.: From the virtual to the robotic: bringing emoting and appraising agents into reality. Procedia Comput. Sci. (2011) 19. Pot, E.; Monceaux, J.; Gelin, R.; Maisonnier, B.: Choregraphe: a graphical tool for humanoid robot programming. In: 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (2009) 20. Schoblick, R.: Blended Learning mit MOODLE – Elektronische Lehrmittel in den modernen Unterricht integrieren. Carl Hanser Verlag, München (2020) 21. Baumgartner, P.; Bergner, I.: Einige feedback-arten für online-lernen: taxonomie und realisierung von feedback-mustern für multiple-choice-tests in moodle. In: Wächtler, J. et al. (ed.) Digitale Medien: Zusammenarbeit in der Bildung, Waxmann Verlag GmbH (2016) 22. Dückert, S.: Das Netz als lern-infrastruktur. In: Erpenbeck, J.; Sauter, W. (eds.) Handbuch Kompetenzentwicklung im Netz – Bausteine einer neuen Lernwelt. Schäffer-Poeschel Verlag, Stuttgart (2017)

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23. Webots. https://cyberbotics.com/doc/guide/nao. Last Accessed 31 May 2021 24. Schoblick, R.: Multimedial Lehren und Lernen – Digitale Lerninhalte Erstellen Mit H5P. Carl Hanser Verlag, München (2021) 25. Moodle. https://moodle.org. Last Accessed 31 May 2021 26. Dederichs-Koch, A.; Zwiers, U.: Der NAO-Roboter als motivierendes Medium zur Unterstützung des gendergerechten Lernens komplexer mathematisch-technischer Sachverhalte. ipw-Tagung, Siegen (2014) 27. Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e. V.: Wissensmanagement im Ingenieurwesen, 5610. VDI (2009) 28. Krathwohl, David R.: A revision of bloom’s taxonomy: an overview. In: Theory into Practice. 41(4) (2002) 29. Krömker, H.; Hoffmann, M.; Huntemann, N.: Wissensstrukturierung für das Lernen in den Ingenieurwissenschaften. ipw-Tagung, Hamburg (2016) 30. Gouaillier, D.; Collette, C.; Kilner, C.: Omni-directional closed-loop walk for NAO. In: IEEERAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots. Nashville, TN, USA (2010) 31. NAO robot. https://developer.softbankrobotics.com/nao6/. Last Accessed 31 May 2021 32. Zwiers, U., Dederichs-Koch, A.: A simple tool for offline stability analysis of the NAO robot. In: 14th International Workshop of Research and Education in Mechatronics (2013) 33. Jacob, S. C., Kost, N., Martin, N., Sharafi, W., Steden, N.: Stabilitätsanalyse des humanoiden NAO Roboters beim Treppenaufgang (Podest). Entwicklungsprojekt, Fachbereich Mechatronik & Maschinenbau, Hochschule Bochum (2019)

Immersive Learning in Healthcare and Medical Education

Technical Guidelines for the Creation and Deployment of 360° Video-Based Virtual Reality (VR) Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) Fotos Frangoudes1,2

, Eirini C. Schiza1,2(B) , Kleanthis C. Neokleous1 and Constantinos S. Pattichis1,2

,

1 CYENS Centre of Excellence, Nicosia, Cyprus

[email protected] 2 Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

Abstract. Medical education has become more challenging, with a lack of resources and clinical environments where students can prepare for their clinical practice. New technologies are being used to fill this gap in education, with 360° videos providing a viable and effective solution. However, the creation of such resources has not been well documented, which forces educators to face the same setbacks during this development process. This paper presents technical guidelines for the creation of a Virtual Reality (VR) application using 360° videos with medical content for an undergraduate-level course. The guidelines are presented through the various decisions that were taken during the development process of the application, providing the rationale behind each one and their necessity. The guidelines validate the effective design of a technologically enhanced learning tool as an addition to the existing methods used in medical education. Keywords: Technical guidelines · 360º video · Virtual reality · Medical education · Co-creation

1 Introduction Healthcare professionals are facing increased challenges in their quest to enhance their educational practices in the clinical environment. Available resources are scarce, with a lack of clinical rooms and equipment that can be used for training and practice. The prerequisite for medical graduates is their ability to identify and solve new problems by gaining additional knowledge where appropriate and objectively analysing new information. The educational process, therefore, needs to develop autonomous and driven learners who can recognise their skills and shortcomings and strive to become better. The best way to achieve this is to provide personalized learning opportunities that are focused on the student [1, 2]. The use of 360° videos as educational resources has been gaining more interest recently, with various studies documenting early results and attempts at the use of the technology. The medium can be used to provide photorealistic captures, in an immersive © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1073–1084, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_113

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environment, providing a 360° view across the field of view of the user, placing the student in a real clinical environment [3, 4]. Various studies have been performed to measure the effectiveness of 360° videos in the curriculum. In general, the medium has been shown to provide a usable solution, that can improve knowledge retention, while also providing an increased sense of presence and engagement to the students [5]. Moreover, learning outcomes have been shown to be similar to that of traditional approaches [5–7], which makes their use as an alternative approach a viable one. At the same time, 360° videos can be more motivational for students, compared to other types of resources [5, 8]. The novelty of the technology, at least in the education domain, introduces various challenges that have been observed in the literature. Chinello and Koumaditis [9] documenting their attempt at developing an instructional video for health and safety during the operation of a robotic arm, highlight the extended resources and additional time that was required for the recording of the videos. In this paper, we propose a set of technical guidelines for a Virtual Reality (VR) application utilizing 360° videos as reusable learning objects (RLOs) for complementing the curriculum of medical schools [10]. RLOs [1] are self-contained modules created to fulfil a specific learning objective. Prior works have presented lessons learned during the development process of such resources [4, 11, 12], but no concrete guidelines exist, as far as the authors are aware of, for the complete process from content creation of the educational resources using 360° videos to deployment. This is the gap the paper is trying to fill. To accomplish this we use as a base the guidelines the Technical Evaluation Criteria for Learning Objects and Virtual Learning Environments specified by Kurilovas and Dagiene [2].

2 Resource Description The presented guidelines stem from the development of a VR resource for a clinical skills course at the Medical School of the University of Cyprus, as presented in our previous work [13]. The resource provides students with the ability to watch 360° videos that showcase two different scenarios: excision of skin lesions and wound suturing. Each of the two scenarios consists of a number of RLOs, i.e., short videos of a basic clinical skill/procedure. In total 7 RLOs were created covering the following areas: sterilizing hands/hands hygiene, surgical gloving technique, excision of skin lesion, glove removal, wound sterilization, local anaesthetic, wound suturing. Four of the above RLOs are used in both scenarios, with the remaining three, being unique to each scenario as shown in Fig. 1. Students also have the ability, while viewing the 360° videos, to switch to a Point-of-view shot and observe the performed activity from the eyes of the physician. All used videos were hosted on YouTube, and the application itself was developed using the Unity3D® game engine. In addition to the RLOs implemented using 360° videos, another RLO was developed as a simulated VR environment. This RLO allows students to select the instruments that are required to perform each of the two aforementioned scenarios. This RLO can be used as a self-evaluation tool, but also a training material for the students. Finally, the resource is available in both the English and Greek languages.

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1. Scenario A: Excision of skin lesion 1. Sterilize hands / Hands hygiene 2. Surgical gloving technique 3. Excision of skin lesion 4. Wound suturing 5. Glove removal

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2. Scenaior B: Excision of skin lesion 1. Sterilize hands / Hands hygiene 2. Surgical gloving technique 3. Wound sterilization 4. Local anesthetic 5. Wound suturing 6. Glove removal

Fig. 1. The two developed scenarios and the RLOs they use. Highlighted are the RLOs that are common between the two scenarios

3 Technical Guidelines: A Case Study 3.1 Overall Architecture and Implementation Scalability Scalability is a primary consideration in such frameworks, as they need to support a lot of users and host a large number of videos with minimal effort and maintenance. Based on the above, a decision was made to host all the content of the RLOs on YouTube. New content, can easily be added by the educators by uploading new videos on the platform (see Fig. 2). At the same time, the YouTube platform can provide an efficient and smooth experience for the students. The platform has been extensively used in similar works as well for the same reasons [4, 14, 15]. The application does not store any cloud-based user information, or additional content that would require could-based access, and the application itself runs on the users’ mobile devices, downloaded through the corresponding app stores. The above ensures that the system can easily be scaled up, and used by any number of users, without issues.

Fig. 2. The content-creation to distribution pipeline of the system.

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Fig. 3. The 360-degree video in the background, and the synced close-up video

Modularity (of the Architecture) Another factor is the modularity of the system, with an ability to easily be extended and support different hardware and software services. In effect, this means that the recording of new content and the hosting of said content should be decoupled, as is the hosting and the application itself. This allows for the swapping of any of the three modules – content creation, hosting and user front end – seamlessly without causing disruptions to the content creation to distribution pipeline. For our purposes, the content creation is independent of the video hosting. The video hosting site (i.e., YouTube), supports a multitude of video formats, of different codecs and resolutions, including both 360° and 180° degrees. The above standards, allow the support of a variety of hardware and video creation software, that can then export the videos to a YouTube compatible format. The recordings of all the 360° videos for the RLOs were done using an Insta360 Pro 2 camera. In addition to the 360° videos, close-up videos (Fig. 3) were also recorded at the same time using a separate camera time, which ensured the two videos, that can be shown interchangeably, were synchronized. The enduser application was also designed to support any video hosting server. This again allows changing the video hosting site, without disrupting the rest of the system and therefore the use of the application. The used video player supports the most common and standard video formats. The system also supports separate video and audio streams, which further enhance extension capabilities and the systems’ modularity. Finally, another component of our application is the virtual environment, where the user selects medical equipment used for different procedures (Fig. 4). This component can be used either in tandem with the video-based content and related with each procedure, but at the same time, it can be run independently on its own as well. Reasonable Performance Optimizations Designing for a mobile platform can be a challenging task, especially providing an application that can run efficiently from an energy-conservation perspective. This becomes even harder when developing a virtual reality-based application that has additional hardware requirements but also needs to ensure a smooth, motion-sickness inducing-free experience. This requires, ensuring the application can run in a variety of devices, even lower-end mobile devices that students could potentially own, without compromising the performance of the application.

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To increase performance, we utilized optimized graphical models, of low complexity and resolution, with a small number of triangles for each model. We also used shaders optimized for mobile applications to decrease the graphic-rendering requirements of the application. Also, transparent-based materials were only used wherever necessary. Finally, appropriate coding standards were followed to ensure optimal code execution, without unnecessary calls. On the other end, hosting all the video content online, reduced the overall size of the application during the initial download. This ensured the setup and initial execution of the application, which are crucial for any system. This means that any video content is then downloaded and streamed based on the application usage from the user and based on their network capabilities. Robustness Students do not always have access to high-end devices and cannot spend a lot of money on additional resources. This creates the need to ensure that the developed system can be as accessible to as many users as possible, using their existing devices, and at a low cost. We decided to use the lowest-end possible VR hardware available, which is the Google Cardboard or other similar hardware. These are cheap to buy, and in our case, the medical school provided them to the students. These low-end headsets do not have any additional hardware requirements, and their SDK is compatible with all mobile operating systems. Moreover, the SDK allows the application to run even if no hardware is present. This means, that even if a student does not own a Cardboard compatible headset, the application can still run and be controlled manually. Also, all interactions are dwell-based (i.e., buttons activate after looking at them for 1.5 s), without the need for any additional buttons on the hardware itself. The video quality of the RLOs can also be adjusted, from 720p up to 4 K based on the system capabilities of the running device and connectivity. This way, even if students have problems with their internet connection, can still go through the resources.

Fig. 4. The Virtual Reality simulation scenario

Ease of Use and Explainability Ensuring that the application can be easy to use is also of paramount importance, since the

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students should feel compelled to use it without any hindrances. Moreover, appropriate feedback and explanations should be provided for all the actions taking place within the application. The RLOs that we included in our application have a linear progression. Therefore, at each step, a pre-defined set of options and following actions are presented to the users that they can follow. To ensure this linear progression, we avoided using any openended options or any open-ended exploration of the system. Furthermore, this ensured that errors in the input could be minimized, and any invalid input from the user was minimal and easy to handle and provide the appropriate feedback. Any action the user could take was clearly defined and explained accordingly. Buttons or other interactable components in the application are highlighted when a user looks at them, providing both text-based and graphics-based explanations for each action. In the training simulation, where students could select multiple answers, clear feedback was provided if the students made the wrong choice as well. Finally, any system interruptions were handled appropriately. Mobile applications can be interrupted by external events, like phone calls, notifications, etc. at any moment of the usage of the application. The system handled the return to the application after an interruption accordingly, by continuing from the point when it closed. Installation, Dependencies and Portability As important it is for an application to be easy to use, the first impression is also of great importance. Therefore, any system provided should be easy to install on student’s devices without the need for complicated procedures or additional dependencies. As such, the application we developed was made available to students from the appropriate mobile store, where it could be easily accessed and installed on their personal devices. Security The importance of ensuring user privacy, is also another important element, with a need to follow all the appropriate standards and regulations. When designing our system, we took a conscious decision to avoid having any personal information in the application. This allowed the application to be used by everyone, without the need of having a user account or store any private information. 3.2 Personalization Localization In the global world that we live in, resources can easily be shared across borders. This provides an opportunity for the development of resources that be utilized by as a broad audience as possible. The system that we developed, was initially in the Greek language, and later extended to support the English language as well. However, for the ease of transition to a multilingual system, it’s beneficial to have the appropriate provisions in place for the support of different languages. For us, this meant the localization of the user interface, as well as the support for different audio streams for the voice-overs in the RLOs. To do that, we

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utilize the same video stream and then load the appropriate audio based on the selected locale. Accessibility With the population suffering from various medical conditions, ensuring that the user interface and all interactions can provide accessible features is also important. This can mean providing different colour schemes, for colour-blind people, the ability to change the size of the interface, providing subtitles for the videos, etc. 3.3 Content Creation Content Co-creation Related to content creation, it has been shown that the co-creation approach can offer a viable solution for the development of engaging and effective educational resources. This is also supported by the bibliography [1, 9]. Techniques used in such workshops include overhead diagrams, sketches, storyboards, prototyping, and enacting scenes [9]. The technique was also followed for the development of our resources. Workshops were held with the participation of the students, and validated by the educators, that guided the overall creation of the resources. More details about this can be found in our prior work [13]. Lesson Creation Tools The ability to easily create and add new content is very important, especially for the longevity of the application. Providing these tools to the educators can allow them to add new content, extended the application, ensure the adaptation of the resource based on the needs of the students. The use of content editors for augmenting resources with interactive elements and creating course plans has also been reported in other studies [19] with positive outcomes. A content editor was created for our application as well, where an instructor can select the individual video learning modules to be included in the application and create customized scenarios through them. The interface of the video editing component of the editor is shown in Fig. 5. Video Recording Setup The recording process of the resources also presents various considerations the content creator needs to take into account while recording. For instance, parameters like the distance of the camera from where the focus of the activity is, as well as the height of the camera and the view angle, all affect the final resource. The camera should be close enough to the action, allowing a comfortable viewing experience, but at the same time, it should not hinder the educator from performing the required activity. During the recording of the resources, we had placed the camera on a tripod at a distance of 3m away from the main activity. The tripod was later removed during the preprocessing of the videos. These are similar considerations as other works in the literature [11, 16, 17]. Related to the positioning of the camera, relevant is also the perceived optimal viewing angle for the resource. In our case, the educator was sitting

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in front of a table performing the different procedures. Therefore, we wanted whenever an RLO started the camera to align based on where the user was looking at, to face the educator performing the selected activity. This was done by specifying for each resource what the starting orientation should be using the content editor as described above, and then making sure that when the resource started playing, it aligned with the viewing orientation of the student. Other aspects that need to be considered, include external conditions during the recording, like lighting conditions, noise, etc. which can have an impact on the endquality of the resource. Especially lighting can be detrimental to the overall quality of the resource. Optimal conditions require homogeneous lighting and no overly bright lights. Similar findings have also been reported in other works as well [14]. To have a pleasant viewing experience for the students the final output video of the resource should also be at a high resolution, to prevent pixels from being visible while viewing the video. In our case, the recorded resources were recorded at 8K resolution, before being imported to YouTube which generated additional lower resolutions. The latter point also touches on another aspect that needs to be considered while recording video resources which is motion sickness. This can be an issue in VR environments, where the user can feel nausea, dizziness, etc. Having low-resolution images, a low frame rate or problems with camera stabilization can contribute towards motion sickness. Audio Integration Audio can play an integral role in VR experiences and help improve the feeling of presence of the user. Even though adding spatial audio, can be more beneficial and provide a better experience, it can be hard to be implemented. In addition, audio integration can be challenging both in regard to the recording process [14], but also the synchronization [9], with the use of separately recorded voice over a worthy consideration based on the requirements of the resource. During the development of our application, we also encountered issues especially with the synchronization of the audio. The audio was recorded using a microphone that was attached to the educator, and it was then synchronized based on the selected video. However, the developed resources were provided in both English and Greek languages. The initial recordings were made in the Greek language, and then for the resources presented in English voice-over audio was added replacing the original one. Because of the difference in grammar and vocabulary, the descriptive audio in the two languages had different lengths, and additional work was performed to synchronize the two. Interactivity An important factor when developing such resources for students is the addition of interactive elements, that can enhance the overall learning experience. Different elements can be used in 360° videos, like hotspots, zoom areas, different scenes or view-points, etc. [18]. The resources included in our scenarios were all recorded from a static position, using a single fixed camera. To enhance the user experience, we added the ability for users to view the working table at a close-up view, as seen in Fig. 3. There was also the

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Fig. 5. The content editor provided to educators

ability to add notes at different hotspots in the 360° view, that appeared in predefined periods. Evaluation Tools The evaluation of the learning outcomes by the students can also play an important role in the deployment of such resources. To accomplish this, we included a simulation scenario where the students were presented with different medical instruments, and they selected the instruments that are required by each presented scenario (Fig. 4). Feedback was provided at the end of the simulation, with the presentation of the correct answers. The integration of evaluations within the resources, and the systems that utilize them, has also been observed in other works [18].

4 Conclusion Throughout this paper, we have presented several guidelines regarding the various decisions that need to be made while developing RLOs using 360º videos. To conclude, we provide a complete list with the guidelines to be followed during the production of such resources: • Overall architecture and implementation – Scalability: ability to scale based on number of users and size of the content – Modularity: ability to swap different components of the system with ease, without interrupting content delivery to students – Performance optimization: ensure application can run in an optimized performance, regardless of the devices students own – Robustness: ensure the application can be accessible to everyone, and – Ease of use and Explainability: ensure the application is easy to use, with all functionalities easily understood, and feedback provided for any unsupported or erroneous action

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– Installation, dependencies, and portability: ensure the system is easy to be deployed to students’ devices without much hustle – Security: ensure users’ privacy is upheld • Accessibility – Localization: provide multiple languages to extend the audience of the application – Accessibility: provide a user interface that can support accessibility features • Content Creation – Co-creation: including all stakeholders in the content creation process can be beneficial for the creation of more effective resources – Lesson Creation Tools: providing tools that can be utilized by educators to create their own resources, can aid in the development of new content, and the active participation of all the stakeholders – Video Recording Setup: various parameters and conditions should be considered when recording these resources, from placement of the camera, lighting conditions, etc. – Audio Integration: the recording of the audio should be done to provide a pleasant experience to the students – Interactivity: adding additional interactions within the resource can provide a more engaging experience for the students – Evaluation Tools: incorporating evaluation tools within the resources can offer improved outcomes for the students The above guidelines can hopefully prove helpful towards the creation of more resources using 360º videos. The study does have some limitations regarding the scope of the provided guidelines. For example, more technical details regarding the recording of 360º videos, including the camera selection, recording steps and the post-processing process were not covered. RLOs can play a significant role in educational curriculums, and 360º videos provide an easy to develop resource that can increase students’ knowledge retention and motivation. However, various aspects need to be taken into consideration while developing these resources to maximize their effectiveness and acceptance from the students. Acknowledgement. This work described here is funded by the Erasmus+ programme, Action Strategic Partnerships for higher education (2018–1-UK01-KA203–048215), Co-creation of Virtual Reality reusable e-resources for European Healthcare Education (CoViRR) and also has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 739578 and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy.

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References 1. Konstantinidis, S.T.: Co-creating virtual reality reusable resources for healthcare and beyond. In: Teaching and Learning Conference 2019 (2019) 2. Kurilovas, E., Dagiene, V.: Learning objects and virtual learning environments technical evaluation criteria. Electron. J. e-Learn. 7, 127–136 (2009) 3. Jun, H., Miller, M.R., Herrera, F., Reeves, B., Bailenson, J.N.: Stimulus sampling with 360videos: examining head movements, arousal, presence, simulator sickness, and preference on a large sample of participants and videos. IEEE Trans. Affect. Comput. 1–1 (2020). https:// doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2020.3004617 4. Seo, J.H., Kicklighter, C., Garcia, B., Chun, S.W., Wells-Beede, E.: Work-in-progress: design and evaluation of 360 VR immersive interactions in nursing education. In: 2021 7th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), pp. 1–3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.23919/iLRN52045.2021.9459244 5. Pirker, J., Dengel, A.: The potential of 360° virtual reality videos and real VR for education-A literature review. IEEE Comput. Graphics Appl. 41, 76–89 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/ MCG.2021.3067999 6. Arents, V., de Groot, P.C.M., Struben, V.M.D., van Stralen, K.J.: Use of 360° virtual reality video in medical obstetrical education: a quasi-experimental design. BMC Med. Educ. 21, 202 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-02628-5 7. Snelson, C., Hsu, Y.-C.: Educational 360-degree videos in virtual reality: a scoping review of the emerging research. TechTrends 64(3), 404–412 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528019-00474-3 8. Fokides, E., Atsikpasi, P., Arvaniti, P.A.: Lessons learned from a project examining the learning outcomes and experiences in 360o videos. Journal of Educational Studies and Multidisciplinary Approaches. 1, 50–70 (2021). https://doi.org/10.51383/jesma.2021.8 9. Chinello, F., Koumaditis, K.: Virtual immersive educational systems: early results and lessons learned. In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Posters, pp. 1–2. ACM, Brisbane QLD Australia (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3355056.3364586 10. Schiza, E.C., Foka, M., Stylianides, N., Kyprianou, T., Schizas, C.N.: Teaching and integrating eHealth technologies in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula and healthcare professionals’ education and training. In: Konstantinidis, S.Th., Bamidis, P.D., Zary, N. (eds.) Digital Innovations in Healthcare Education and Training, pp. 169–191. Academic Press (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-813144-2.00011-8 11. O’Sullivan, B., Alam, F., Matava, C.: Creating low-cost 360-degree virtual reality videos for hospitals: a technical paper on the dos and don’ts. J. Med. Internet Res. 20, e9596 (2018). https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.9596 12. Patel, D., et al.: Developing virtual reality trauma training experiences using 360-degree video: tutorial. J. Med. Internet Res. 22, e22420 (2020). https://doi.org/10.2196/22420 13. Schiza, E.C., et al.: Co-creation of Virtual Reality Re-usable Learning objectives of 360° video scenarios for a Clinical Skills course. In: 2020 IEEE 20th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), pp. 364–367 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/MELECON48756. 2020.9140530 14. McKenzie, S., Rough, J., Spence, A., Patterson, N.: Virtually there: the potential, process and problems of using 360° video in the classroom. IISIT. 16, 211–219 (2019). https://doi.org/10. 28945/4318 15. Fukuta, J., Gill, N., Rooney, R., Coombs, A., Murphy, D.: Use of 360° video for a virtual operating theatre orientation for medical students. J. Surg. Educ. 78, 391–393 (2021). https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jsurg.2020.08.014

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Data Modelling for Visual Entities to Streamline Virtual Patient Re-purposing in Virtual Reality Lazaros Ioannidis(B) , Panagiotis Antoniou, and Panagiotis Bamidis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece {ilazaros,bamidis}@auth.gr, [email protected]

Abstract. Virtual patient cases are interactive, scenario-based simulations of real-world healthcare incidents. When applied in an educational context, they have been found to improve clinical reasoning, procedural and team skills. Many healthcare education institutions have allocated considerable resources to design and develop virtual patient cases. The challenges to integrate virtual patients into the curriculum along with their maintenance costs have highlighted the necessity for representing the cases in ready-to-repurpose formats. Legacy, text-based virtual patient cases consist of nodes, where the case script unfolds descriptively, and links, that lets the learner select different pathways to manage a health condition by means of evidence-based decisions. These cases could be transformed into virtual reality world scenarios and offer the learner a more realistic experience. In this paper we revisit the established model of typical virtual patient cases by enriching their nodes and links with data structures allowing them to be adapted to extended reality environments. Keywords: Virtual patients model · Co-creation

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Introduction: Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) in Experiential Healthcare Education

Constant advancements in medical research generate vast amounts of new knowledge that needs to be integrated in medical education courses and absorbed by learners. This exponential growth trend is not new; the yearly doubling of medical knowledge has been documented during the last four decades [1]. Technology has come to the educators’ rescue, in means of mechanisms to cope with the volume and critical nature of the learning content [2], while also ensuring universal access to healthcare skill development tools [3]. This work has been partially funded by the “Evaluating Novel Tangible and Intangible Co-creative Experiential medical education” (ENTICE) Knowledge Alliances for higher education project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (612444-EPP-1-2019-1-CY-EPPKA2-KA). c The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022  M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1085–1095, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_114

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Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have changed healthcare and wellness interventions since their inception. They reduced expenses and increased capacity for expansion and social equality, as well as improving treatment and diagnostic capabilities. A significant contribution of ICT to modern healthcare education is facilitating the use of versatile learning resources in healthcare-related educational activities [2]. The necessity for unrestricted access to clinical skill development resources, regardless of time or location, is the driving force for this strategy [3]. The growth of the Web and its underlying standards and the availability of intuitive learning situations with rapid, content-related input has amplified ICT’s potential in medical education [4]. Web [5], Multiuser Virtual Environments (MUVEs) [1], and even Augmented Reality [6] implementations have been used to provide ICT-based solutions for education. These modalities are a less expensive alternative to a virtual laboratory. Learner-centric educational activities (e.g., repeating content, accessing it at odd hours) are available in these environments, allowing students to stay motivated and involved in the educational process. They also enable for the development of laboratory skills in addition to knowledge transfer. A special case of such modality for healthcare education is virtual patient cases. While there are a handful of different meanings to the term “virtual patient” [7], the central interpretation that will be considered here will be that of the interactive learning scenario. In such a scenario, the specialist-designer creates connected snapshots that describe different situations of a healthcare incident or a medical condition. The trainee is asked to make a series of decisions, selected from a closed set, predetermined by the designer. The interactive scenario can be described with a network topology, as shown in Fig. 1. Snapshots are the nodes, while decisions are the links of the network. The network terminology will be used in the rest of this paper.

Fig. 1. Typical virtual patient network diagram. The leftmost node is the starting (root) node.

According to the medical specialty and the targeted group of learners, the virtual patient environment might only provide hypertext accompanied by noninteractive or barely interactive multimedia or be a three-dimensional representation in combination with a hypertext and multimedia. In recent years, attempts

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have been made to produce virtual patient scenarios that possess immersion and play features, in order to provide learners with more interesting learning experiences. For instance, scenarios involving surgical manipulations, virtual patients can be implemented as augmented reality applications with specialized input devices. These enhanced modalities can alleviate basic curriculum shortcomings, especially when medical students are not effectively trained with hands-on laboratory procedures due to cost, time, or safety concerns [8,9] and are often left theoretically educated but without clinical and lab skills [9]. When it comes to skill development, the usage of virtual patients appeared to improve clinical reasoning and medical procedures in a moderate to significant manner when compared to traditional techniques. For these reasons, the low-cost but high-impact virtual, augmented, and recently mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) technologies have been utilized in selected courses related to laboratory training. They have been shown to increase the impact of an educational event, affecting learning results significantly [10]. Many examples include experiencing world exploration [11] and visualisation of chemistry and physics laws that have a significant impact on student understanding and engagement [12–14]. These technologies’ immediacy and engagement both inspire and enable the learner to internalise knowledge about the instructed subject, lowering the likelihood of conceptual errors [15]. The rapid development of materials on the considerable depth and breadth of medical knowledge is the primary impediment to broad adoption of these modalities. According to [16], virtual patients pose a financial and maintenance burden that may be hard to overcome and repurposing cases is not widely practised. As a consequence, educators that want to utilize virtual patients in their courses are unable to discover suitable ones. This is where co-creative approaches come in handy, allowing non-technical contributors (doctors, students, etc.) to share some of the content creation burden. 1.1

Co-creation as Participatory Knowledge Sharing

The concept of co-creation was born out of marketing, notably product design. The practise of determining an item’s value offer through client engagement rather than traditional statistical surveying methods was initially known as value co-creation (VCC) [17,18]. Clients/users played a dynamic part in VCC, cocreating product value with the key stakeholder (firm, creators etc.) [17,19]. The important components of the cooperative endeavour for producing added value were found to be self-reliance, communication, involvement, and experience [20]. VCC outgrows the sum of these components as it moves past product generation to issues like product utilization and the whole chain of value delivery [17,21]. According to marketing research [22], the two components of VCC, referred to as Value in Use (ViU) and co-creation, have over 27 different meanings. Earlier literature considers these concepts as combination buyer skills and actual cooperative firm-client product co-creation [21,23,24]. In the form of co-production, co-creation provides dynamic support for new item enhancements to the product design process [25,26].

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Co-production entails direct or indirect “collaboration with clients” [27,28], as well as active participation in the product/service configuration process [29, 30]. Client investment can take the form of a passive component on the margins of a company’s workflows [29] or a dynamic, core component based on the sharing and learning of the firm’s experience and data [31,32]. Client association, or demonstrating joint physical, mental, and trade activity, as well as access to common masteries, has also been used to characterise co-creation [33]. Co-generation has been characterised as an arrangement of acts accomplished by actors (financial, social, and others) active in value chain networks [23,34]. It is carried out through coordination [35], exchange [36,37], and the inclusion of common assets in the value creation process [38]. The primary stakeholder (firm, creator) achieves both demonstrated client request fulfilment and exploiting customer experience for firm expansion when clients invest assets through co-creation forms [39,40]. Co-creation also allows the creative process to be decentralized while remaining within the key stakeholder area, which is a feature of co-production [41]. This technique allows clients to engage in the co-production process [42,43], with some research identifying mutualism, receptivity, and non-hierarchical relationships as valuable elements of co-production [32,39]. Because of this broad view of the cocreation process, research [18] has identified knowledge sharing as one of the most important variables in co-creation efficacy. 1.2

Aim and Scope of This Work

In the realm of medical education, this exact sharing of knowledge is used for the co-creative effort. The medical sector is the target group for medical education content, and this segment also possesses the professional knowledge that needs to be utilised in the design of medical education content. Given this motivation, the purpose of this research is to remodel the architecture of a typical virtual patient with the purpose of facilitating the co-creation of virtual worlds that can be repurposed by the educators and learners themselves.

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Materials and Methods

Repurposing existing virtual patients into MUVE’s has been tried in the past. Specifically, in [44], the manual transfer of some cases from the OpenLabyrinth platform to SecondLife (and OpenSim) was first attempted. Furthermore, there was an effort to automatically migrate virtual patients by identifying semantically significant concepts inside the text of the nodes and suggesting the respective construction guidelines for the virtual world builder to follow. At the time of this research, it was not practical to develop web-based MUVE’s, mainly because of the low penetration of 3D-capable web browsers in end users devices. Nevertheless the serializable representation of the virtual patient cases and their enrichment with XR-related data is still applicable as the means for rapid content development in the MUVE platform and will be

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used as a basis for the work in this paper. Currently, there are plenty capable devices and application platforms that may engage a virtual patient user, thus, the representation of the virtual patients should remain implementation agnostic. Beyond transfer-suitable representation lies the requirement of co-creation functionality. It includes versioning, collaborative authoring and as much adherence to open standards as possible. The latter is challenging in the AR fields, because there are very diverse kinds of XR experience in the market right now, accompanied with the respective devices and programming interfaces. In the co-creative digital content development pipeline described in [45], different kinds of resources are developed during the Technical Facilitation Stage. The rest of this paper tries to define the building blocks that will support these procedures, through a streamlined data model.

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A Reference Ontology Model for Co-created XR Virtual Patients

In our model ontology (shown in Fig. 2), every resource type has three mandatory properties: uri, version and uid. The first property, uri will allow designers to publish their resources separately, so that they can be reused. Property version defines a specific snapshot of the resource. Version can be used in conjunction with uri, by appending the former to the latter, as a URI fragment: uri#version. For instance, https://vp.example.com/resources/ links/3345#2021-05-31. Finally, uid, distinguishes the different instances of the same resource type. For example, in a virtual hospital, there are ten wards that have the exact same arrangement of beds and equipment. For the sake of rapid development the ward resource can be described once and reused multiple times, with each appearance carrying a different uid. While uid can follow an internally defined scheme, it is advised that it is generated according to standard methods, as a universally unique identifier (UUID) to avoid collisions when importing resources from an existing virtual patient case. In our reference model, the outer container for the rest of the entities instances is called cosmos. Every virtual patient case will have a single cosmos instance containing one or more scenes. A scene is actually a minor container which can be positioned in the cosmos coordinates, defines its own boundaries, and contains a set of presences. The scene boundaries are required so that entities cannot wander and get lost in the rest of the cosmos. Presences describe the instances of entities. For example, an examination table represented as a polygon mesh can get loaded as a three-dimensional resource into the resources library of the cosmos. Then, the same resource can be reused in different scenes, with each instance having its presence. A special kind of presence, agents, have additional attributes to support interactivity when they represent the player (healthcare provider) or the patients. In an augmented

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reality context, the presences do not have to be accompanied by a polygon mesh, because they come with their actual representation in the player’s viewport. At this point it is possible to implement a conventional virtual patient into the constructed cosmos. The two fundamental concepts of virtual patient cases, namely nodes and links are carried over by integrating them with the cosmos entities. In particular, the node assembly connects a virtual patient node with a specific scene, also defining modifications to the scene’s default presences. Ideally, the textual description of a virtual patient node can be completely realized into a scene, by placing the entities at the desired locations and enabling meaningful interactions enriched by animations. Similarly, selected interactions are considered crucial and lead to a transition from the current node to another, representing the links of the virtual patient case. The link assemblies provides the wrapped link with the interactions that can trigger its activation, together with a script to enhance the player experience during the transition. Possible types of triggers include mouse and keyboard input, hand gestures, countdown timers, use of other entities, speech recognition or other events that can be tracked by the implementing application.

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Discussion and Future Work

The reference model discussed in the previous section is intended to offer implementation guidelines to application developers that want to convert existing virtual patients to extended reality environments. To ease the repurposing of existing virtual patients, utility software and a reference implementation of an editor and a player needs to be developed. The editor should be able to consume a standard virtual patient case (for instance, in Medbiquitous VP format [46]) and, at least, create the link and node assemblies. At a later stage, the textual content of the nodes can give hints about the objects that need to be places as presences into the scene. The semantic annotation of this text, combined with information from open user repositories can streamline the experience of repurposing, cutting down time and cost. The taxonomy presented in [47], as well as its implementation, provide a machine discoverable and consumable data structure that can semantically annotate all assets of a virtual environment and encapsulate current or potential functionality for use by non-expert users through the use of a semi-automated visual authoring environment. In a carefully crafted AR environment the reference model can coordinate the virtual patient case scenario with artefacts and tools containing sensors. For very restricted environments, where the XR is not available, it could be interesting to convert the case back to text, by describing the scene and the possible interactions or rendering two-dimensional interactive representations.

Fig. 2. Reference model diagram. In blue, the original virtual patient case entity types.

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This work follows closely and supplements our previous work to conceptualize and implement a co-creative digital content pipeline [45]. The proposed Visual Data Structure of that work included the need for a subject matter semantic annotation, a user experience taxonomical annotation and a meaningful assembly of audiovisual assets and the VP structure (Case, Node, Link). The first two data modelling provisions are already described in a recent work from our team [47]. The present paper completes the Visual Data Structure (VDS) model proposed there, by fully linking the VP structure to 3d asset properties as they are consumable by contemporary game engines (e.g. Unity 3d). Based on this work, future efforts focus in implementing a prototype authoring environment for 3d XR educational resources as well as a educational resource player that will be able to create and consume such resources presenting them in various XR modalities. This work, when fully implemented will empower educators and learners to seamlessly co-create XR resources for their teaching and learning needs.

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Repurposing a Reusable Learning Object on Effective Communication with Adolescents to an Interactive 360° Immersive Environment by Adapting the ASPIRE Framework Matthew Pears(B)

, James Henderson , and Stathis Konstantinidis

University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK {Matthew.Pears,James.Henderson, Stathis.Konstantinidis}@Nottingham.ac.uk

Abstract. The efficacy of home visiting of adolescent who are at risk of selfharm has a great dependency on the communication between the patient and the healthcare professional. Face-to-face encounters with health care professional and patients have heightened importance to counteract negative COVID-19 related social isolation effect. One alternative to simulated learning is to use video sequences to recreate a variety of communication-based scenarios that may be encountered. The aim was to repurpose a web-based Reusable Learning Object (RLO) into an interactive 360° environment. This provides an immersive and interactive sense of interactivity with an adolescent. The usability of the immersive resource evaluated with 24 medical students from several institutions around the European Union. The ASPIRE framework was adapted for conversion of the initial material as the steps are flexible enough to adapt to the unique characteristics of 360° video and interactive elements. The System Usability Score (SUS) suggested the RLO had above average usability (73.5) and the Slater-Usoh-Steed Presence Questionnaire (SUS-PQ) results showed a moderate to high feeling of presence (4.6). The SUS scale suggested the RLO’s strengths were its ease of use, simplicity and rapid uptake. These 16 questions had a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.85 indicating good reliability of capturing the users’ experiences of the RLO. Discussion involved limitations of functionality and potential for Virtual Reality (VR), but with strength in the ASPIRE adaptions to facilitate the new direction of online co-creation processes. Keywords: ASPIRE framework · Mental health · Education · Communication · 360 Video · Co-design · Participatory development · Virtual reality

1 Introduction 1.1 Supporting Adolescents Who Self-harm Self-harm including suicidal harm, and suicidal non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) are significant issues in Global Heath within the adolescent population. Suicide rates are one © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1096–1105, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_115

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of the highest in Europe in adults, the second leading cause of death in individuals aged 10–24 [1], and is the leading cause of death for 10 to 19-year-olds in the USA [2]. The December 2020 Lancet report stated that ‘At present, the reduction in the use of healthcare services is perhaps the most important finding because self-harm often occurs at a point when an individual is in crisis or distressed.’ [3] They stated that health-care services need to be made accessible, and those who self-harm should be able to access the required interventions. Face-to-face encounters with health care professional and patients now have heightened importance to also counteract negative COVID-19 related social isolation effects. However, government restrictions to public areas may be an indirect barrier to the perception of reduce help available by professional services. Additionally, in many areas there are restrictions to visiting local services and home visits are in place, to reduce risk of COVID-19. This can exacerbate the relevant social and communication-based issues for adolescents. There is a plethora of factors which contribute to self-injury and/or suicide, including social media increase and reduced in-person communication [4, 5]. Self-harm which required medical attention has been associated with subsequent mortality, suicide, and recurrent self-harm. Costs may also increase for health care providers however it is imperative for interventions to be created to prevent the predictors/contributors from progressively manifesting undesired behavior and associated cognitions. Disruption to training mental health and social workers has reduced their access to simulation-based learning. Clinical skills can be rehearsed in simulation until a healthcare professional is able to manage a wide array of circumstances, they may encounter. This practice allows them to perform independently in the community, and makes transfer of skills into real-life environments substantially easier. Due to the pandemic effects on healthcare training, one alternative is to use video sequences to recreate a variety of communication-based scenarios that may be encountered. Simulated sessions can be recorded using 360-degree video cameras and packaged for professionals to use. This creates material that is valuable in training communication and other non-technical skills, such as decision-making and situational awareness. The efficacy of home visiting of adolescent who are at risk of self-harm has a great dependency on the communication between the patient and the healthcare professional. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to repurpose a previous computer-based Reusable Learning Object (RLO) into an interactive 360° environment. The previous limitation was absence of interaction for the users, and to engage and practice their decision-making. If decision paths were added, this would permit benefits of Serious Game design [6] and could be created through decision-trees during the repurposing of scenes. If the repurposed RLO is successful in its intended intervention, there is potential to further develop the resource into a 360° VR mobile app, as mobile VR is cheap to use, and smartphones are the most popular and practical devices worldwide to show the content. To be successful in this, an appropriate framework needed to be implemented which has a systematic approach to repurpose of content, interface, compatibility, and features, but also enable stakeholder participation in the design process. The APSIRE framework [7, 8] has been widely used to develop a catalogue of multimedia learning resources, specifically RLOs. The ASPIRE framework stands for Aims, Storyboarding, Population,

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Implementation, Release and Evaluation. One success of face-to-face RLO usage is demonstrated from occupational therapists’ skills in advising on fitness for work [9]. RLOs were shown to be equally effective, while they take less time and improve cost effectiveness [10]. This framework is most suited to conversion of the initial material as the steps are flexible enough to adapt to the unique characteristics of 360° video and interactive elements: i) Participatory workshop, ii) Specification writing, iii) Peer review of specification – followed by amendments, iv) Development of the RLO, v) Review of the RLO – followed by amendments, vi) Evaluation with stakeholders – followed by amendments, vii) Publish the RLO online. Figure 1 depicts the main development steps of the RLO based on the ASPIRE framework.

Fig. 1. RLO development process based on the ASPIRE framework

2 Method 2.1 Participants Participants were medical students from European institutions, these were Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Nottingham, UK. Participants were either from Greece or Cyprus and Bilingual with Greek as their first language and English as their second language. There were 24 participants; 14 females (58%), 9 males (37%) and 1 not defined. The average age was 23 years (SD = 6.67, Min = 19, Max = 47). Microsoft Teams facilitated the online meeting and recruitment was opportunistic by attendees during an online conference.

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2.2 Measures and Materials The original RLO is available on the University of Nottingham’s HELM Open resources site [9]. It was created by the ‘Our care through our eyes’ study, funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing. The aim was to enhance the intervention efficacy to children and young people admitted to hospital due to self-harm. Much like the ASPIRE process, participatory workshops with children, young people, and healthcare professionals were performed to recognize learning needs and aided in development of the original RLO. The RLO was shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK license (BY-NC) allowing to share and adapt the RLO as long as appropriate credit is given and indication of changes is evident, and the resource is not used for commercial purposes. The new specification of this material was created using the OpenLabyrinth platform- it allows creation of examples that relate to any situation and is a web-based interactive case or problem that can be solved or explored by users with their feedback provided [11, 12]. For example, an interactive snakes and ladders game with the OpenLabyrinth engine [13]. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used [10] and is a widely used and adopted usability questionnaire. It is popular due to its unbiased and agnostic properties, a nonproprietary, and quick scale of 10 questions. The Slater-Usoh-Steed Presence Questionnaire (SUS-PQ) was also used. This consists of 6 questions with a 7-point scale (1-Strongly Disagree, 7-Strongly Agree) and captures user experience of being subjectively present within a virtual environment. 2.3 Procedure The Storyboarding aspect of the ASPIRE process was adjusted to accommodate for a 360° video environment. This was achieved using an online storyboard which made use

Fig. 2. A snapshot from the OpenLabyrinth visual editor shows narrative, actions, and linked pathways for learning

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of dynamic graphic and process-based features versus the more traditional linear RLO template. An internal review of the content from the original RLO was performed by a Subject-Matter Expert (SME), a learning technologist and a facilitator, coming together to form a storyboarding workshop session in which new specifications were derived. The content was reworded to provide a first-person narrative compared to that of the third-person narrative in the previous RLO. The SME highlighted the importance of keeping some of the original video clips of the adolescent as it improved the sense of personal interaction in the RLO, particularly as the adolescent talked directly to the camera/learner about their experiences. Those videos were designed based on the needs of the stakeholders as depicted in the original storyboarding session of the RLO, as a reflection of the adolescent in a good or a bad communication with a health professional. To identify best practice in repurposing the existing content into VR compatible material, the specification of the new resource was initially built into the RLO template using the bespoke HELM RLO Specification development tool. However, the interactivity and the movement between the different scenes could not be depicted. Thus, scenes were created in OpenLabyrinth, and paths were added based on the decisions included into each scene as shown in Fig. 2. The rest of the ASPIRE process remained the same. The development was done in consultation with the SME and the technical evaluation was made based on exhaustive scenarios. Participants were met in an online meeting; ethical considerations were announced with emphasis on caution on VR headset usage.

Fig. 3. A snapshot from the OpenLabyrinth text editor showing various options in which the user can interact with

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Then participants were shown instructions for the final RLO via Microsoft Teams for 5 min, before a 1-h session allowing for a thorough, independent, menu-driven runthrough. The support provided, although agreed prior as sufficient and satisfactory, was limited to text via the chat facility (Figs. 3–5).

3 Results 3.1 Usability of RLO The 16 questions asked to participants after using the RLO had a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.85 (lower and upper bounds 0.79–0.91 95% CI). This indicated good reliability that the questions from the 2 surveys were closely related to the concept that was attempted to be captured; being a combination of usability and presence to form an overall capture of their experience of the RLO. SUS interpretation is performed by addition of all 10 questions and multiplication by 2.5. A 0 score is extremely poor perceived usability, and 100 is excellent perceived usability. Mean SUS score was 73.5. A SUS score above 68 is considered average therefore 73.5 suggested the RLO has above average usability [14]. SUS score for males was 74.17 and for females 71.96 suggesting a non-significant decrease in usability for female participants. This minor decrease may have been due to 4 of 5 of the issues stated occurred for female participants, therefore

Fig. 4. Mean System Usability Scores for the RLO. Note that questions 2,4,6,8,10 are negatively worded, therefore disagreement is desired.

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a reduction in the related questions. These were that 1 participant stated the RLO took them to the main page if a choice was not made quickly, for another participant 1 video froze midway, and for 1 participant they could not get back to the main menu without a manual refresh. 3.2 Experience of Presence The Slater-Usoh-Steed Presence Questionnaire (SUS-PQ) results showed a moderate to high feeling of presence (4.6) when 0–1 is low, 2–3 low/moderate, 4–5 moderate/high, and 6–7 high. There were no significant means observed between the questions and suggested consistency in these characteristics throughout the RLO usage. The mode scores showed that between 21–38% of participants selected the highest score of 7 (as ordered in Fig. 2, Q1 29%, Q2, 21%, Q3, 25%, Q4, 33%, Q5,38%, and Q6, 29%). Discussion for the loss of 2–3 points on these scores is presented below.

Fig. 5. Mean Presence score by the SUS-Presence Questionnaire. These are useful baseline scores that indicate simple images, audio, and video feedback can be sufficient to allow the users to be engaged with the learning material. The scores can be compared with future VR headset material.

4 Discussion This newly repurposed application intends to assist European health and social care workers and train students to improve their communication and management of difficult

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conversations with adolescents they visit in homes. Overall, the SUS scale suggested the RLO’s strengths were its ease of use, simplicity and rapid uptake. However, the functionality and inconsistency were possible bottlenecks in experience of users. Fortunately, this can be rectified with development and was expected at this first stage of iteration. Therefore, European social workers and students have access to an upgraded learning resource that facilitates emotional awareness and helps to communicate mannerisms that produce positive outputs from patients. The scores in this study allow a baseline comparison with any future VR adaptions of this material. The presence scores were captured using the web-based tool and the SME suggested keeping the original videos due to their first-person immersive qualities and initial stakeholders identified needs. There is caution in future VR development as although the presence scores may increase, the usability of a VR tool can be difficult to sustain as interface becomes more complex and novel, this may decrease the RLOs efficacy. This additionally emphasizes the need for the ASPIRE framework to be used as is has flexibility to facilitate the key development stages under a variety of conditions. The typical HELM storyboard creation process is linear in nature. This is problematic when a desired learning object may have flow that allows users to divert to different areas, and loop back to previous scenes. OpenLabyrinth was used as it encourages inclusion of such free choice and non-linear direction of scenes that provides exploration to improve engagement and free-will of playthrough. In this case, the ASPIRE adjustments worked as evidenced through the Evaluation above. Mostly due to time constraints some issues were apparent. For most participants, English was their second language; this may have impacted the results marginally if participants’ English language was not fully developed. There is scope for any language to be added. Functionality was temperamental across devices, while this was the first effort to develop such resources, more testing is needed and suggestions on deployment of mobile application in Google play and Apple App Store was adopted. Participants were asked in a group for any previous experiences, and three participants stated they had. However, a record and further specific probing may have helped to delineate those participants’ results if variations were present. This work is the first to describe the repurposing of an RLO into a 360-degree video immersive resource by using adapted tools following an adapted ASPIRE framework. ASPIRE has been adapted to fit the repurposing of a web-based case-based learning to a chatbot [15] and has also been used for the development of immersive resources, such as a 360-degree video mobile application for clinical skills [16] and online virtual learning packages for midwifery students to transform transnational intercultural sensitivity[17].

5 Conclusions The ASPIRE framework has high impact on the co-design of small web-based healthcare resources that address singular learning objectives [18, 19] and this paper demonstrated the adaption for its use in successful creation of an immersive educational resource. Future work should consider how to better support participants during testing, as well as obstacles encountered such as reduced video capture opportunities, and time to create the initial user interface. Online workflow is resilient to pandemic restrictions and all sections of the ASPIRE process were successfully adapted online.

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Acknowledgements. This work is supported by the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education “Co-creation of Virtual Reality reusable e-resources for European Healthcare Education (CoViRR)” (www.covirr.eu) (2018–1-UK01-KA203–048215) project of the European Union.

References 1. Patton, G.C., et al.: Global patterns of mortality in young people: a systematic analysis of population health data. Lancet 374(9693), 881–892 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1016/S01406736(09)60741-8 2. Ruch, D.A., Sheftall, A.H., Schlagbaum, P., Rausch, J., Campo, J.V., Bridge, J.A.: Trends in suicide among youth aged 10 to 19 years in the United States, 1975 to 2016. JAMA Network Open. 2(5), e193886–e193886, 2019 May 01, American Medical Association. https://doi.org/ 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.3886 3. Kapur, N., et al.: Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-harm. The Lancet Psychiatry 8, e4 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30435-1 4. Twenge, J.M., Joiner, T.E., Rogers, M.L., Martin, G.N.: Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clin. Psychol. Sci. 6(1), 3–17 (2018). https://doi.org/10. 1177/2167702617723376 5. Chen, R., et al.: A qualitative study of how self-harm starts and continues among Chinese adolescents. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2020.144 6. Overbeek, T., Lala, R., Jeuring, J.: Scenario smells: Signalling potential problems in dialogue scenarios in a serious game. Int. J. Serious Games 7(4), 51–73 (2020). https://doi.org/10. 17083/ijsg.v7i4.364 7. Wharrad, H., Windle, R., Taylor, M.: Designing digital education and training for health, pp. 31–45. Digital Innovations in Healthcare Education and Training, Elsevier (2021) 8. Hassan, N., et al.: Participatory approach in reusable learning object (RLO) development using ASPIRE framework: Taylor’s university’s experience. In: Nair, P., Keppell, M.J., Lim, C.L., Mari, T., Hassan, N. (eds.) Transforming Curriculum Through Teacher-Learner Partnerships, pp. 90–104. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, USA (2021) 9. Coole, C., et al.: Comparing face-to-face with online training for occupational therapists in advising on fitness for work: protocol for the CREATE study. Br. J. Occup. Ther. 83(3), 172–178 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/0308022619893563 10. Ablewhite, J., Coole, C., Konstantinidis, S.T., Fecowycz, A., Khan, S., Drummond, A.: Improving occupational therapists’ confidence in completing the allied health professions health and work report: results from the CREATE feasibility study. Res. Artic. Br. J. Occup. Ther. 0(0), 1–10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0308022621998582 11. Bamidis, P.D., Antoniou, P., Sidiropoulos, E.A.: Using simulations and experiential learning approaches to train careers of seniors. In: Proceedings – IEEE Symposium on Computer– Based Medical Systems. pp. 119–124 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1109/CBMS.2014.78 12. Bahrami, M., Hadadgar, A., Fuladvandi, M.: Designing virtual patients for education of nursing students in cancer course. Iran. J. Nurs. Midwifery Res. 26(2), 133 (2021). https:// doi.org/10.4103/ijnmr.ijnmr_327_20 13. “Start Here”. https://labyrinth.mvm.ed.ac.uk/mnode.asp?id=573. Accessed 28 May 2021 14. Lewis, J.R., Sauro, J.: Item Benchmarks for the System Usability Scale (2018) 15. Pears, M., Henderson, J., Konstantinidis, S.T.: Repurposing case-based learning to a conversational agent for healthcare cybersecurity. Stud Heal. Technol. Inform. 281, 1066–1070 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI210348

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16. Schiza, E., et al.: Co-creation of Virtual Reality Re-usable Learning Objectives of 360° Video Scenarios for a Clinical Skills Course (2020) 17. S. Konstantinidis, K., et al.: Co-creating digital virtual mobility learning packages for midwifery students to transform 18. Ferguson, M., Brandreth, M., Brassington, W., Leighton, P., Wharrad, H.: A randomized controlled trial to evaluate the benefits of a multimedia educational program for first-time hearing aid users. Ear Hear. 37(2), 123–136 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.000000000 0000237 19. Ablewhite, J., Coole, C., Th Konstantinidis, S., Fecowycz, A., Khan, S., Drummond, A.: Improving occupational therapists’ confidence in scompleting the allied health professions health and work report; results from the CREATE feasibility study. Br. J. Occup. Ther. [Online First] (2021) https://doi.org/10.1177/03080226219. https://doi.org/10.1177/030802 2621998582

Immerse Yourself in ASPIRE - Adding Persuasive Technology Methodology to the ASPIRE Framework Michael Taylor(B) , Heather Wharrad, and Stathis Konstantinidis University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK [email protected]

Abstract. With their ability to captivate learners and simulate real world scenarios it is little wonder that healthcare education is experiencing rapid growth in the use of Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Extended Reality (XR). Traditional learning resources still play an important role, but as demonstrated during this current global pandemic – simulation apps can really help to bridge the training gap for nursing students, particularly in areas such as clinical skills training. To help with the implementation of persuasive technologies into development practices, the HELM team at the University of Nottingham have started the important task of analysing and adapting a set of tools which are capable of combining our renowned ASPIRE development framework with the requirements of this new production methodology. For example, we will examine some of the factors behind the introduction of a Participatory design approach for bespoke tool development and review some of its potential benefits in comparison to using our existing Agile development practices. To this end we will consider the requirements that our international project stakeholders have provided through the creation of a scientific need’s analysis specification tool prototype. A prototype which will aim to observe our ASPIRE methodology whilst working holistically with other suited applications developed in our associated EU Erasmus + funded research projects. Keywords: Persuasive technologies · ASPIRE · Participatory design approach · 360 video and virtual reality · Immersive learning in health care education · Clinical skills training for nurses

1 Background/Rationale The use of immersive technology in Education has increased substantially in recent years. According to research, 96% of universities and 79% of colleges in the UK are now utilising augmented or virtual reality in some capacity [5]. Although research data available for VR use in Nurse Education both in the UK and worldwide is difficult to obtain, it is safe to believe that a similar high adoption rate is also taking place. This is partly due to the increasing affordability of specialist equipment, computers becoming more powerful and broadband being widely accessible in most countries across the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1106–1117, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_116

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globe. The recent global pandemic has further increased demand, as nursing lecturers and students denied physical access to clinical skills labs and traditional teaching methods through self-isolation, have turned wherever possible to the online and increasingly the virtual world to continue their training. A recent published study of nursing student’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic showed that except for the negative factor of desocialisation, students appreciated the shift to a more digitalized learning approach. The rise in demand for such virtual experiences has led to the emergence of initiatives such as the 360Visi and CoViRR projects, both funded by the European Union Erasmus + programme. Such projects encourage collaborative working practices involving University Academics and Learning Technologists who team-up with commercial MultiMedia Designers and developers to share knowledge and expertise. The partners for both projects are based in Norway, Spain, Finland, United Kingdom, Greece and Cyprus and their remit is to help fill an existing void by not only producing freely available rich immersive content, but also through the design and development of open-source tools that will allow anyone with basic computer skills the opportunity to create and share their own immersive content.

2 The ASPIRE Framework The ASPIRE framework has been designed, developed and successfully applied over many years by the Health E-Learning and Media (HELM) Team at the University of Nottingham to help scaffold the design and development of health education learning resources including Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs). There are various Open Educational Resource (OER) learning design frameworks available, [8, 9] but we believe the ASPIRE framework is particularly suited for the development of Immersive Technologies because it is flexible enough to adopt a community of practice focus to development. [3] ASPIRE has for many years been central to HELM’s many health-related learning resource projects. These projects have involved direct stakeholder participation often including health care professionals, patients, carers, academics, students, charities and other related health organisations. Such stakeholder involvement helps to identify and align the requirements of all the focused learner groups, this in turn helps to shape resource content and the way it is represented. The ability to share stakeholder knowledge and expertise helps ASPIRE to assist the development of quality reusable learning objects, which are fit for purpose and can be shared not only directly by all project stakeholders but also ultimately with the wider OER community. ASPIRE is an acronym of all the framework steps involved in resource creation. • Aims – helps project teams to focus on getting the right learning goals and objectives • Storyboarding – allows the sharing of initial ideas for resource content and enables a community-based approach to resource design • Population – combines storyboard ideas and allows the content author/s to write a fully formed specification, which includes a narrative and multimedia elements • Implementation – a specification/content peer review is provided by a suitable subject expert not yet involved in the project, allowing for suggestions and concerns to be raised and addressed before starting/implementing resource development.

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• Release – a second technical peer review is applied, and any issues are addressed and approved before resource release • Evaluation – using data tracking and feedback forms to collect data for research and development purposes to assess the resources impact.

3 Tools Currently Supporting the ASPIRE Framework A number of custom-built bespoke tools have been designed and implemented to help support the procedures required by the ASPIRE framework within any given project. They co-exist alongside one or two off-the shelf applications to provide full online access to all the ASPIRE development steps. It has been a long term overall aim of the HELM management team to eventually make all aspects of ASPIRE fully accessible as a distance learning strategy to all stakeholders, and by the start of 2021 this aim has been realised. The difficulties of meeting face to face during the global pandemic has helped to fast-track the implementation of online access by HELM for all development steps as opposed to the existing and currently unfeasible classroom-based methods. The challenge now is to ensure that current tools and practices can be adapted to cater for the differing needs of emerging technologies and thus future proof our development practices. All of the following bespoke tools have thus far been developed using an agile methodology and although they offer major improvements over previously used paperbased tool versions, it is fair to assume that the full needs and requirements of the whole community have not been met by employing such methods (Fig. 1). 3.1 The Specification Tool

Fig. 1. The current specification tool interface.

A bespoke online specification tool was developed in house by the HELM team using Agile methodology and although it has been well received by a large community group of

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around 300 registered uses, it has become increasingly apparent that it requires adapting to continue to work with new emerging technologies, such as 360 video, VR, AR and XR. Tool Strengths The tool is free to use once registered and enables content author/s the ability to create and write an unlimited number of specifications for an unlimited number of projects. Further strengths include: • support of the ASPIRE frameworks population step • general ease of use • good user documentation, as many Agile developed tools are released with little or insufficient documentation • its ability to provide a content author with script visibility control access, allowing a registered user to share with unregistered colleagues via a dynamically generated URL • implementation of version control via joint access by team members to a specification script • integration with an activity tool • the ability to display multimedia content to aid design understanding for project developer • completed specification can be easily shared for peer review stage by a subject expert not previously involved in the project • tool inclusivity supports and encourages a community of practice approach Tool Weaknesses We have already established that the specification tool works well with our more traditional RLOs but requires adapting to allow for its continued use in the development of other new and emerging technologies. I will discuss our preferred immersive features in more detail later in this paper. The following is a list of features which are currently unavailable to users wanting to develop our more traditional RLOs and would be desirable current additions to the tool. They are as follows: • the capability for authors to have more admin rights including the deletion of scripts that are no longer required • improved User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design of the interface • the ability to work with other project tools • user cannot customise, edit the form-based specification interface to cater for other projects 3.2 The Activity Tool The activity tool is included as part of the specification tool package and integrates well with the Specification tool. It contains of a catalogue of over 50 developed bespoke activities used in previous projects and allows the content author to browse, select and implement a preferred activity directly into the specification tool.

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Tool Strengths The benefits of the activity tool include: • potential inspiration for content authors who maybe lacking a creative spark when thinking about suitable specification activities • an activity categorisation section including a detailed pedagogical rational for each activity • a customisable interface allowing the user to search activities via keywords, imaged collections, tabular views, or pedagogical categories • the ability to add further activities into the catalogue Tool Weaknesses Disadvantages of the activity tool include: • the inability for the user to delete their activity catalogue entries • some activities do not meet current web accessibility standards • lack of development documentation for including activities into your own projects Aims/Questions We will answer the following questions as we progress through the next sections. • How suited is the ASPIRE framework for current and future immersive technology use? • What if any adaptations are required to the existing ASPIRE framework and associated tools? • How should the specification tool, currently developed to produce traditional RLOs be adapted to cater for immersive technologies? 3.3 Specification Tool Output Since replacing the paper-based specification form in 2016, the online Specification tool has become an important component of the ASPIRE and RLO development workflow. It’s ease of use and capability to be worked on simultaneously and accessed remotely by numerous authors, has led to its use in over 200 learning resource titles. The Specification tools support for a community of practice approach insures continued stakeholder involvement. TransCoCon is a successful project example which has utilized the Specification tools strengths. A total of five RLOs promoting ‘Internationalisation and Cultural Awareness in Nursing Practice’ were produced by teams based in five separate European countries. [14]. The Specification tool allowed the project teams to write, share and review their specifications online prior to development. The TransCoCon project was completed just before the global pandemic, in a world where travel without restriction was allowed. However, it soon became apparent that using the tool helped reduce the amount of time needed for team members to travel and meet in person. The tool therefore facilitated increased savings for participants both in time and expenditure. The travel factor became

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even more important during lockdown, as travelling for most was not permitted and many were restricted to home working. The following image (See Fig. 2) shows three TransCoCon RLOs which have been successfully developed using the Specification tool. Each RLO specification has been accessed in the tool for development purposes by at least: two content authors, two peer reviewers, one project mentor and one learning technologist. It is believed that access and participation is even higher for many other RLO specifications developed. For example, Students, other Stakeholders, and team members should also be considered; this was certainly true for most RLOs developed in the TransCoCon project. This increased participation at the specification writing stage is crucial and has only been made possible by the online accessibility provided by the tool.

Fig. 2. Three TransCoCon learning resources which have been developed using the specification tool.

4 Methods The development methodology and tools together with immersive resource content in the above projects are being developed utilising the ASPIRE framework, a design methodology devised and introduced by the Helm team at the University of Nottingham. It is anticipated that through collective participation the ASPIRE methodology and existing

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development tools can be adapted successfully to further cater for 360, VR, AR and XR requirements. More detail about each of these bespoke tools is described above, (Sect. 2). To answer a previous question a needs analysis was carried out with the project partners to ensure that all desirable features are considered and added to make a successful adaptation of the ASPIRE methodology and associated tools. (See Table 1 and Fig. 3) The specification tool will have to include other bespoke tools created by our partners. An intuitive easy to use interface is also required to promote ease of use. A SWOT analysis will be considered as part of an overall review to help further inform of any required changes to the framework and/or tools. Recent collaborations with international development teams on immersive 360 VR projects has highlighted some of the limitations in some tools we use as part of the ASPIRE development process. For example, the current version of our bespoke Specification tool required manual modifications from each of the content authors – e.g. creating their own sections inside existing text boxes to enable the addition of features that all teams felt were essential for the completion of a fully rounded 360 VR specification. [7]. The 360 Visi project is an EU funded initiative comprising 4 European universities and 3 commercial multimedia companies with a basic remit to ‘Increase access in European Health Education through 360 video simulation technology.’ [5]. A team of 12 developers and academics met regularly at the early stages of the project to set some overall guidelines and create working practices. During one meeting the Nottingham team showcased their previously developed online RLO specification tool, which had the capability of being accessed and shared. Four 360, VR specifications belonging to each of the partners were examined for suitable use in the project. The results of these reviews and recommendations are presented below.

5 Results It immediately became apparent that each partner specification asked for slightly different data input. For example, the form used by the University of Stavanger had text fields to enter such information as the duration of each scene and camera placement. This differed from the Universidad Católica de Valencia who wanted further information about each individual medical case. Nottingham’s specification document asked for detailed prop information and the TUAS form was focused more on completing a simulation scenario. A decision was made by all partners to design a standard specification form that would include features that each partner deemed necessary for the development of immersive content. Although each partner recognised the tools potential, it was primarily designed to be used with Nottingham’s more traditional RLO format and it was agreed that it required amendments to fit immersive project needs. The results are entered below. (See Table 1).

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Table 1. Results of the critical review of the ASPIRE specification tool and required new fields for adaptation to 360 resources The University of Stavanger, (UiS)

• Pre-production section – common case understanding for all team members • Technical preparation – required equipment and how it should be used in project • Communication – documentation – consent forms • Community of practice – inform all relevant parties about project • Postproduction – Brief information on tools to develop content after the film shoot • Area to view test footage • Room description • Observation view - Where to place camera • Scenario description • Audio, Hotspot text and narration if required • Rationale for producing in 360 instead of 2D video

The Catholic University of Valencia “San Vicente Mártir”, (UCV)

• Specification learning outcomes • Case description (background information provided to student prior to accessing 360 video) • Hotspots – with or without static photos

The University of Nottingham, (UoN) [7]

• • • • •

Required props Required filming/lighting equipment Cognitive learning outcomes Scene description – Signs, external sound etc Filming approach – Camera settings – formats

Turku University of Applied Sciences, (TUAS)

• • • • • • •

Required props Simulator Set up/Manikin preparation Observer tasks Scenario lifesavers – Case Briefings Pre-material required Major problems encountered Non-technical co-operation – staffing

A visual representation of intended additions to the specification tool can be viewed in the following illustration, (See Fig. 3). The sections in green represent the current functionality available in the tool including the adding of: • text in the form of a narrative • multimedia assets • author ‘further comments’ pop-up box

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The subsequent blue sections represent the additions recommended as part of a basic need’s analysis through a series of meetings/consultations with 360 Visi project stakeholders. The following section explains in more detail the suggested tool functionality that each segment represents in the illustration, (See Fig. 3). Filming Equipment. Description of cameras, microphones, lights etc. required for each shoot. This is an essential checklist for all the production teams. Prop Listings. Detailed list of everything required in each scene e.g., from uniforms to nursing equipment through to everyday items such as bicycles, cars etc. Everything required in shot to make the scene as realistic as possible. Scene Area/Description. What is to be highlighted in each video clip, e.g., streetlamp to highlight lighting security at night, or key safe to support access issues. Observation View (Camera placement). Not always easy to predict, especially if the production team are unfamiliar with the area that is to be filmed. However, it does help focus production team on task at hand and gives a valuable guide on camera placement whilst on location. Audio Description. Used for narrative description of each scene. It helps guide user to where the action is located when using 360 clips. Scene Duration. Estimated length of scene, very useful whilst out on location and during post-production. Scene Learning Objectives. What leaning objectives will be met in each scene, they are broken down into Skills, Knowledge and General competence. Hotspot Learning Element Placement. Used mainly in post-production to show editor where each hotspot is required, this also very useful during filming sessions, as a potential hotspot could become lost in 360 camera’s stich line. This will lead when considering the camera placement for every scene. Hotspot Text. This information-based text is often overlooked by content authors and is left to the developer to write and include. This section would specify if an image, 2d video or audio clip is to be added as part of the hotspot for the learner.

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Fig. 3. The Specification tool including suggested revisions

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6 Discussion There is an overall necessity highlighted through our work with immersive technology for the adaptation of some stages of the ASPIRE framework. For example, a recent project undertaken by HELM on the repurposing of case-based learning helped introduce a modification to the Storyboarding stage of the ASPIRE process. ‘The aim of modifying the ASPIRE process was met, as the Storyboard stage was changed from previous collaborative visual idea generation to decision-making tree, and content driven discussion’.[2]. The content creators need also to realise that a VR, XR or interactive 360 video resource is more immersive and therefore training around both understanding the differences on the design with more traditional web based educational resources, but also how to describe the content is needed. [10]. Efforts to adapt the ASPIRE framework have been made to be used on the development of conversational agents as virtual patients [11] or to develop large virtual packages addressing multiple learning objectives [12]. Early adopters of the ASPIRE framework on 360 videos for clinical skills [13] identified the need of adapting the ASPIRE framework and for more concrete tool functionalities. This is in line with the recommendations that are made in this discussion. In conclusion, the ASPIRE process is a recognised development methodology for creating high quality digital resources. The needs analysis carried out during this project provided an opportunity to adapt our existing bespoke specification tool currently used in the ASPIRE process. 360 and VR technologies are the next generation of media and will be increasingly adopted for use within learning resources. Creating robust specifications prior to creating the media for these resources is crucial to ensure future high quality and efficiency in development.

7 Future Developments An introduction of other bespoke project tools such as the Open Labyrinth and a custom built 360 video editing tool developed by a partner team from Turku, Finland will be carried out as a second phase of development. It is hoped that both applications could be potentially adapted for use with the specification tool. Adaptation of existing paperbased tools is currently under review and our peer review forms will shortly be joining the other bespoke tools available in supporting the online implementation of the ASPIRE process. Acknowledgments. This work was supported by the ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance “Increase access to training in European health education through 360° video simulation technology (360Visi)” (www.360visi.eu) (www.covirr.eu/) and the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education “Co-creation of Virtual Reality reusable e-resources for European Healthcare Education (CoViRR)” (www.covirr.eu) (2018–1-UK01-KA203–048215) projects of the European Union.

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References 1. Langegård, U., et al.: Nursing students’ experiences of a pedagogical transition from campus learning to distance learning using digital tools. BMC Nurs. 20, 23 (2021) 2. Pears, M., Henderson, J., Konstantinidis, S.: Repurposing Case-Based Learning to a Conversational Agent for Healthcare Cybersecurity (2021). https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI21 0348 3. Wharrad, H., Windle, R., Taylor, M.: Designing Digital Education and Training for Health (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-813144-2.00003-9 4. Say, M.: VR and AR attract education sector interest. https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ vr-and-ar-attract-education-sector-interest/ 5. 360 ViSi Project: The Project Story. https://360visi.eu/ 6. CoViRR Project: Co-Creation of Virtual Reality Reusable E-Resources for European Healthcare Education. https://www.covirr.eu/ 7. Taylor, M., Fecowycz, A.: Adapting Specification Tool. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ntz alf/rlo-specs/index.php/public_spec/view/ 8. Molenda, M.: In search of the elusive ADDIE model. Perform. Improv. 42(5), 34–37 (2003) 9. Antoniou, P.E., Bamidis, P.D.: Devising a Co-Creative Digital Content Development Pipeline for Experiential Healthcare Education. In CC-Tel/Tackle@ EC-TEL (2018) 10. Konstantinidis, S., et al.: Training the trainers curriculum on co-creation of virtual reality reusable E-resources. In: 12th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, (Edulearn20). 5752–5761 (2020) 11. Dolianiti, F., Tsoupouroglou, I., Antoniou, P., Konstantinidis, S., Anastasiades, S., Bamidis, P.: Chatbots in Healthcare Curricula: The Case of a Conversational Virtual Patient. In: Frasson, C., Bamidis, P., Vlamos, P. (eds.) BFAL 2020. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 12462, pp. 137–147. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60735-7_15 12. Konstantinidis, S., et al.: Co-creating digital virtual mobility learning packages for midwifery students to transform transnational intercultural sensitivity. In: 13th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. EDULEARN21, Virtual (2021) 13. Schiza, E.C., et al.: Co-creation of virtual reality re-usable learning objectives of 360° video scenarios for a clinical skills course. In: IEEE 20th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), pp. 364–367. IEEE (2020) 14. TransCoCon Project: Transcultural Collaboration and Competence in Nursing. https://www. transcocon.ac.uk/

Digital Soft Skills of Healthcare Workforce – Identification, Prioritization and Digital Training Stathis Konstantinidis1(B) , Liza Leonardini2 , Claudia Stura3 , Peggy Richter4 , Paola Tessari5 , Marjolein Winters6 , Olivia Balagna7 , Riccardo Farrina7 , Ad van Berlo6 , Hannes Schlieter4 , Oscar Mayora5 , and Heather Wharrad1 1 University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

[email protected]

2 CO.GE.S. Don Lorenzo Milani Societa Cooperativa Sociale, Venice, Italy 3 University of Applied Sciences Kufstein, Kufstein, Austria 4 Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany 5 Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy 6 Smart Homes Cooperation, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 7 The Autonomous Province of Trento, Trento, Italy

Abstract. Digital technologies are increasingly embedded into healthcare aiming to improve quality of patient care, enhance patients’ safety and cut down economical costs. Healthcare professionals’ digital skills are indeed need enhancement with policies and initiatives have started working towards that, but digital soft skills are underplayed. Digital soft skills will be investable needed in the future healthcare workforce to enable transformation of health. Thus, this paper identifies and prioritizes digital soft skills for healthcare workforce based on 32 healthcare professionals, training providers and technology providers. From the analysis of the data collected by the interviews, it has become very clear that digital skills/competences can only be effectively put in practice in the Health and Care sector, if the following essential soft skills are enhanced: Communication, Open Mindedness, Positive Attitude, Critical Thinking and Empathy. This work also discuss potential training through role playing both as a face-to-face or as part of an immersive learning experience. Keywords: eHealth skills · Digital learning · IT skills · IT competences · Role-playing

1 Introduction Digital technologies are increasingly embedded into healthcare aiming to improve quality of patient care, enhance patients’ safety and cut down economical costs. Healthcare workforce need to foster digital skills in order to learn to work effectively with new digital advancements. Healthcare workforce perceptions can be influenced by the level © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1118–1129, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_117

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of confidence on their skills. Skills and competences of Healthcare workforce came into the forefront as lack of such skills have been widely identified [1, 2]. Initiatives and policies form different countries identified the need of upskilling the healthcare workforce. “Memorandum of Understanding between EU and US” [3] and the “Transatlantic eHealth/health IT Cooperation Roadmap” [4] set as a priority to enhance the digital skills of the healthcare workforce. The Digital Skills for Health Professionals Committee of the European Health Parliament [5] identified that the majority of 200 healthcare professionals interviewed “reported to have received no training, or insufficient training, in digital health technology”. Digital Learning Solutions Annual Survey Report 2020 [6], identified that “there is still a considerable need to provide staff with basic, digital literacy level skills and that in fact the need has increased in the past year”. While it should be noted that the organisation contributed to this report use NHS Digital products for years and therefore the skills of their workforces expected to be higher. It is also highlighted that the number of staff requiring entry level skills is likely to remain high for some considerable time. Furthermore, the healthcare workforce will require to manage new kinds of work life competences, such as collaborative learning, self-leadership and flexibility besides more traditional teamwork and social skills [7]. Soft skills are widely recognized as a must to a healthcare workforce [8], but also training in soft skills have been perceived by students as difficult task [9]. Enhancing digital soft skills can be also challenging as different technologies, different roles and different contexts might require different soft skills to be enabled. Schutt et al. suggested that simulated digital role playing may enhance the learning process of healthcare soft skills [10]. The ERASMUS+ project “Training Blueprint for the Digital Transformation of Health and Care (TBDTHC)” aims at increasing health professionals digital & soft skills in order to reduce the current existing gap between digital technology trends and their effective use in the health sector. In order to enhance digital soft skills of the healthcare workforce and facilitate the adoption of digital solutions in the Health and Care sector, there is a need of understanding what skills the healthcare workforce needed, but also how to effectively deliver them. Thus, this paper aims to identify and prioritize digital soft skills for healthcare workforce, and discuss potential training through role playing both as a face-to-face or as part of an immersive learning experience.

2 Methodology A questionnaire with both open ended and closed questioned were used. The questionnaire has been divided in three sections: the first two included open-ended questions, while the third one is based on the Likert scale system. The questionnaire based upon existing Digital competences frameworks, such as CARER+ Digital Competences Framework [11], the DigComp 2.1: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens with eight proficiency levels and examples of use [12], and the Health and Care Digital Capabilities Framework [13]. The first section aimed at investigating what are the soft skills needed for daily digital innovations used by respondents and it included a total of two open-ended questions. The second section, divided into 6 parts, studied the soft skills related to the six

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dimensions (Functional, Critical use, Creative production, Participation, Development and Self-actualising) and consisted of 19 open-ended questions. Finally, the third section addressed the perceived level of importance – perceived by professionals in the Health and Care sector – of different sets of soft skills needed to carry out their work. It featured 16 items evaluated through a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (“not important”) to 5 (“Very important”). The open-ended questions were designed to detect moods, opinions, attitudes without including them in the researcher’s pre-defined (and therefore potentially incorrect) vision. In order to make the data comparable to the next section, the study group tried – whenever possible – to use the same soft skills analysed in the third section as class of answers, paying particular attention to not influence the meaning of the answers given by respondents. For each class of answers, it has been established the frequency index, as well as for the items present in the third section. The outcome of the analysis is thoroughly reported below. Participants were purposively selected by the researchers in order to engage multiple stakeholders enabling health and social care such as health professionals, training providers and technology providers.

3 Results 3.1 Participants Participants came from six different countries, Italy, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, UK, Sweden, and Greece. 32 participants were health professionals (n = 17), training providers (n = 5) and technology providers (n = 10). Results for the different sections are presented in 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 subsections respectively. 3.2 Soft Skills Associated with the Use of Daily Innovation In this section the interviewees were asked to shortly describe a digital innovation used in the daily practice and what are the necessary soft skills he/she has to implement when using a digital innovation. All responders gave a brief description of digital innovation and associated soft skills. With the emphasis of this section on identifying soft skills the health professionals, training providers and technology providers, identified the “communication” and “positive attitude” as the soft skills that are most needed. In addition, technology providers recognized the “critical thinking” as a soft skill required in using digital innovation (see Fig. 1) (Table 1).

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Fig. 1. Soft skills needed using digital innovation.

Table 1. Definitions emerged from the interviewees’ descriptions. Soft skill

Description

Specific abilities

Communication Knowing how to communicate with others is as important in life as in the professional environment. The positive relational attitude towards colleagues, patients and innovators is appreciated. The ability to know how to communicate content, methods and procedures is also highly appreciated

• • • • •

Negotiation Persuasion Presentation Public speaking Write reports and proposals

Positive attitude Friendly attitude with others and efficient stress management

• Enthusiasm • Respect • Social intelligence

Critical thinking It is not a matter of being critical, but of possessing the ability to analyze a situation in its facets and make an informed decision. Whether working with data, providing training, proposing the use of an app to a patient, one must be able to understand problems, analyze them critically and find solutions

• • • •

Creativity Flexibility Innovation Problem solving

3.3 Soft Skills Associated per Competence Areas The interviewees were asked to name for each area of competence, any necessary soft skill when health professionals have to put digital skills/competences into practice.

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Specifically, from the open-ended questions, soft skills have been recovered and subsequently grouped into categories. For each of these categories the frequency rate was analyzed. Response rate, in relation to the different categories of interviewees, have highlighted that technology providers consider “open mindedness” as a significant soft skill when it comes to applying digital skills/competences. Next to this priority, health professionals also detected the “curiosity” as another relevant soft skill. Lastly, training providers identified the “empathy” as the most needed soft skill in using digital innovation. In general, in addition to the above-mentioned categories of soft skills needed, “communication” and “positive attitude” are perceived as necessaries. Furthermore, the high rate of the “no answer” response, showed that technology providers considered the questionnaire as particularly difficult to complete (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Soft skills identified and prioritized per healthcare role category.

The correlation between the different categories of soft-skills and the areas of competence was also analyzed. This particular analysis showed that “open mindedness” and “curiosity” are considered relevant soft skills needed specifically in the area of Functional Skills (ICT proficiency) and Critical Use (Information data and media literacies). “Open mindedness” is also considered important when it comes to the area of competence related to Creative Production (Digital creation, problem solving and innovation). Moreover, interviewees indicated the “communication” as the most necessary soft skill in all the six areas of competence, along with “empathy” and the already mentioned “open mindedness” (see Fig. 3). In this case, the “no answer” responses are concentrated in the Development and Self-Actualizing areas of responsibility. Finally, this section of the questionnaire examined the soft skills considered as transversely relevant in the various areas of competence by the different interviewees.

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Fig. 3. Soft skills needed in relation with different competences.

From the overall analysis of the data reported in this section, it clearly emerged that the soft skills considered as the most important from responders are: “open mindedness”, “curiosity”, “communication” and “empathy” (see Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4. Transversely soft skills identified and prioritized.

3.4 Main Soft Skills Required in Using Innovation in the Health Sector The results presented below, are categorised in relation to the type of responders. The most selected soft skill was “communication” and “Critical thinking” followed. Generally, both Technology and Training providers strongly believe in the necessity of soft skills development, in order to efficiently deal with the innovation introduction. On

Fig. 5. Major skills needed using digital innovation.

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the other hand, Health professionals seemed to believe substantially less in the need to possess soft skills to deal with the innovation introduction (Fig. 5). After the analysis of the different skills taken individually and combining the choices of the responders, it emerged that (Fig. 6): – In the “communication” field, 50% of respondents considered the ability of “active listening” something to be strengthened. – In the context of “critical thinking”, 35% of respondents considered “innovation” the skill that needs to be reinforced (Table 2).

COMMUNICATION

CRITICAL THINKING

50

40

40

30

30

20

20

10

10

0

0 ACTIVE LISTENING

PERSUASION

PRESENTATION

CREATIVITY

FLEXIBILITY

INNOVATION

PROBLEM SOLVING

CURIOS ITY

Fig. 6. Specific skills to be strengthened (a).

Table 2. Definitions of ability selected (a) Soft skill

Ability

Description

Communication Active listening It is the ability to evaluate requests and questions and to formulate adequate and convincing answers Critical thinking Innovation

It is about the ability to innovate and think outside the box. An open mind is certainly more capable of introducing innovative elements into one’s work

Analysing the other skills, in the area of “leadership” the three skills “Decision making”, “Conflict resolution” and “Team management”, resulted almost equally important. Otherwise, when the field of the “positive attitude” was analysed, it clearly showed that it is fundamental to be “enthusiastic people”. Instead, if we examine the area of “innovation”, as for leadership, the three skills “Innovative thinking”, “Process innovation” and “Inclusion of new tools”, emerged as almost equally important (Fig. 7) (Table 3).

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INNOVATION

POSITIVE ATTITUDE

LEADERSHIP

50

100

50

50

0

0

0

DECISION MAKING

INNOVATIVE THINKING

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

ENTHUSIASTIC PEOP LE

PROCESSES INNOVATION

TEAM MANAGEMENT

RESPECTABLE AND RESPECTFUL

INCLUSION OF NEW TOOLS

Fig. 7. Specific skills to be strengthened (b). Table 3. Definitions of ability selected (b). Soft skill

Ability

Description

Positive attitude Enthusiastic people It is a matter of possessing a positive emotional involvement regarding the work and values of the job as well as the relationships and the positive acceptance of the news

4 Discussion The technology continuously foster healthcare transformation and the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to that need. The need to improve the eHealth/IT competences of healthcare workforce has been frequently emphasized by policymakers with the action need further justification [3, 4, 14–16]. (eHealth Action Plan 2012–2020, CAMEI EU project, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for transatlantic Cooperation on eHealth/Health IT, Transatlantic eHealth/health IT Cooperation Roadmap, EU*US eHealth Work EU project, European Health Parliament 2016-Committee On Digital Skills For Health Professionals) A report published in 2019 in the UK [17] identified as the biggest internal threat to its future is the lack of strategy to secure an appropriately skilled, well trained and committed workforce. Following the £4.2 billion announcement in 2016 for technology investment in the NHS, Wachter et al. [18], emphasizes the need of workforce development mentioning that there should be “a major effort to place well-qualified clinicians with advanced informatics training in every trust”, while the NHS Topol Review also identify digital skills as vital to transform healthcare [17, 19]. The human factor and the digital soft skills are essential when it comes to technologies for effectively introducing digital transformation. From problem solving to critical thinking, from flexibility to the teamwork, from the ability to communicate effectively and empathically to being open minded. The need is a digital culture that coherently integrates technological knowledge and soft skills. Digital transformation projects often risk failing, due to acts of mismanagement: at times a separate digital strategy is developed rather than integrating a digital strategy into the company’s overall strategy and human resource management. In other cases, the focus is only on pilot projects, following technological trends of the moment without making a real cost/benefit analysis and planning a real change in the organization and its people.

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Moreover, the results suggest continuing the research in this field, emphasizing once again how soft skills are considered relevant to perform the work effectively. A subsequent study could focus on investigating how professionals (Health professionals, technology providers, training providers) in the Health and Care sector believe they own the soft skills they consider relevant, how school, training and professional paths helped them with the development of these specific abilities and what is the gap between the perception of having the competences and the levels they deem necessary to be able to effectively carry out their work. Soft skills are less often discussed and most of the times digital soft skills are ignored in healthcare education. While this piece of work already identifies the importance of digital soft skills for the healthcare workforce, by identifying the most needed ones for applying digital innovations into daily practice trying to prioritize them, the acquisition of such skills remains an open discussion. Role playing games is seen as a method to teach soft skills enabling a number of pedagogical strategies to be applied [20]. With Schutt et all confirming that virtual role plays have a constructive part to play, presenting and identifying benefits and challenges role play-based healthcare simulations [10]. For example Machinima is the converting scenarios based on entertainment or training and practice applications into video vignettes that tell a story, being connected through branching points, resulted that the exploitation of avatar actors in video-based instruction to be effective [21]. In TBDTHC Erasmus+ project the consortium identified topics that enable them to enhance the digital soft skills of participants. The digital soft skills targeted enables the learners through a role-playing approach, either face to face or online to enable such skills. Role-playing has been successfully used in medical education utilizing different virtual learning systems and approaches, such Virtual Patients (VPs) in OpenLabyrinth [22] or multi-user virtual environments like Second Life [23]. A series of flexible lifelong training labs of Digital Health Learning Lab organized and piloted. An example is the development of a conversational agent enhancing cybersecurity skills, both digital hard and soft skills through a participatory approach [24, 25].

5 Conclusion Digital soft skills will be investable needed in the future healthcare workforce to enable transformation of health. In this piece of work we already identify and prioritize digital soft skills needed for the current and the future healthcare professionals. During assessment, training and selection of personnel, the categories of soft skills that have emerged can be taken into consideration, evaluated, and developed. We also discussed possible training of healthcare professionals on soft skills based on role playing either in a face-to-face format or as part of a digital immersive learning. Acknowledgement. This work is supported by the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships for Vocational Education and Training “Training Blueprint for the Digital Transformation of Health and Care (TBDTHC)” – https://trainblue.eu/ – (Project No. 2018-1-IT01-KA202-006735).

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References 1. Li, S., Bamidis, P.D., Konstantinidis, S.T., Traver, V., Car, J., Zary, N.: Setting priorities for EU healthcare workforce IT skills competence improvement. Health Inf. J. 25(1), 174–185 (2019) 2. Konstantinidis, S.T., Li, S., Traver, V., Zary, N., Bamidis, P.D.: Actions to empower digital competences in healthcare workforce: a qualitative approach. Stud. Health Technol. Inf. 238, 253–256 (2017) 3. Memorandum of understanding between EU and US on Cooperation supporting health related information and communication technologies. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/new sroom/cf/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=1784 (2010) 4. Transatlantic eHealth/health IT Cooperation Roadmap. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-singlemarket/en/news/transatlantic-ehealthhealth-it-cooperation-roadmap (2013) 5. Committee on digital skills for health professionals. Digital Skills for Health Professionals (2016) 6. NHS Health Eduction England: Digital Learning Solutions Annual Survey Report 2020 (2020) 7. Karlgren, K., Paavola, S., Ligorio, M.B.: Introduction: what are knowledge work practices in education? How can we study and promote them? Res. Pap. Edu. 35(1), 1–7 (2019). https:// doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1677761 8. Kroning, M.: Fostering soft skills is a must for nurse leaders. Am. Nurse Today, 10(2) (2015). https://www.myamericannurse.com/fostering-soft-ski 9. Bergh, A.M., et al.: Medical students’ perceptions of their development of ‘soft skills’ part II: the development of ‘soft skills’ through ‘guiding and growing.’ South Afr. Fam. Pract. 48(8), 15–15d (2006) 10. Schutt, S., Holloway, D., Linegar, D., Deman, D.: Using simulated digital role plays to teach healthcare soft skills. In: 2017 IEEE 5th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), pp. 1–6 (2017) 11. Carer+ Project. Digital competence framework (2013) 12. Carretero Gomez, S., Vuorikari, R., Punie, Y.: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens with Eight Pro-ficiency Levels and Examples of use, EUR 28558 EN. Luxembourg (2017) 13. NHS: A Health and Care Digital Capabilities Framework (2018) 14. eHealth Action Plan 2012–2020 – Innovative Healthcare for the 21st Century. Brussles (2012) 15. Konstantinidis, S.T., Bamidis, P.D., Zary, N., Traver Salcedo, V.: CAMEI fosters IT skills for healthcare workforce. In: Proceedings of the 25th European Medical Informatics Conference (MIE2014) (2014) 16. Konstantinidis, S.T.: CAMEI: coordination actions in the scientific era of medical education informatics for fostering IT skills for healthcare workforce in the EU and USA. In: Proceedings of the LINQ2015: Learning Innovations and Quality, p. 61 (2015) 17. NHS England. The NHS Long Term Plan (2019) 18. Wachter, R.M.: Making IT work : Harnessing the Power of Health IT to Improve Care in England (2016) 19. NHS: The Topol Review: Preparing the Healthcare Workforce to Deliver the Digital Future (2019) 20. Dell’Aquila, E., Marocco, D., Ponticorvo, M., di Ferdinando, A., Schembri, M., Miglino, O.: Methodology and design of technologically enhanced educational role-playing games for soft skills training BT. In: Dell’Aquila, E., Marocco, D., Ponticorvo, M., Di Ferdinando, A., Schembri, M., Miglino, O. (eds.) Educational Games for Soft-Skills Training in Digital Environments: New Perspectives, pp. 39–61. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2017)

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Correction to: Use of Specially Designed Simple Experimental Device Based on Raspberry Pi by Students for the Conceptual Understanding of Rotational Motion Georgios Kalantzis, Charilaos Tsihouridis, Marianthi Batsila, and Dennis Vavougios

Correction to: Chapter “Use of Specially Designed Simple Experimental Device Based on Raspberry Pi by Students for the Conceptual Understanding of Rotational Motion” in: M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development - Challenges for Higher Education, LNNS 390, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_82

In the original version of the book, the following belated correction has been incorporated: In Chapter 82, the author affiliation has been changed from “University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece” to “Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications, School of Sciences, University of Thessaly, Greece”. The book and the chapter have been updated with the change.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_82 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, p. C1, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_118

Correction to: Improving the Quality of Training Future Engineering Personnel on the Basis of the Partnership “University-Industrial Enterprise” Olga Y. Khatsrinova, Julia Khatsrinova, Elina Murtazina, and Anna Serezhkina

Correction to: Chapter “Improving the Quality of Training Future Engineering Personnel on the Basis of the Partnership “University-Industrial Enterprise”” in: M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development - Challenges for Higher Education, LNNS 390, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_27

In the original version of the chapter, the following belated corrections have been incorporated: The chapter author names tagged in XML is interchanged “FamilyName and GivenName”, which has now been changed to “GivenName and FamilyName”. The chapter has been updated with the change.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_27 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, p. C2, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_119

Correction to: From a “Brick-and-Mortar” Project to a MOOC Wanessa do Bomfim Machado

and Mario Gandra

Correction to: Chapter “From a “Brick-and-Mortar” Project to a MOOC in: M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): Mobility for Smart Cities and Regional Development - Challenges for Higher Education, LNNS 390, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_14

In the original version of Chapter 14, the following belated correction has been incorporated: The author name “Machado Wanessa do Bomfim” has been changed to “Machado, W. B.”. The chapter has been updated with the change.

The updated original version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_14 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, p. C3, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6_120

Author Index

A Afzal, Muhammad Hassan Bin, 846 Ahieieva, Olha, 608 Alonso, Yoel, 45 Al-Shalash, Aws, 991 Andres, Pavel, 177, 187 Annus, Ivar, 556 Antokhina, Yulia, 154 Antoniou, Panagiotis, 1085 Araújo, Nuno, 956 Arruarte, Ana, 1004 Aruvee, Eve, 764 B Bachiieva, Larysa, 576 Bagatova, Rezeda, 111 Balagna, Olivia, 1118 Bamidis, Panagiotis, 1085 Barabanova, Svetlana V., 323, 726, 743 Barakat, Nael, 991 Baranova, Tatiana Anatolyevna, 267 Batsila, Marianthi, 753 Benková, Simona, 340 Bezrukov, Artem, 58, 1048 Biswas, Mohammad, 991 Bogatova, Larisa M., 696 Bogoudinova, Roza, 737 Bondarenko, Dmitry V., 323 Bondarenko, Tetiana, 584, 600, 608, 616 Bozhko, Nataliia, 584 Branitskaya, Liudmila, 233 Breˇcka, Peter, 361 Briukhanova, Nataliia, 592, 600

Bronskaya, Veronika Vladimirovna, 297 Bublin, Mugdim, 241 C Caldeira, Amélia, 956 Cardoso, Luís, 608 Cataldo, Eugenio, 45 Centea, Dan, 702 Chernogortseva, Sofya, 154 Chernyshkova, Elena, 154 Chou, Shih-Feng, 991 Cuperman, Dan, 465 D De Vleeschouwer, Bert, 45 Dederichs-Koch, Andrea, 1059 Dembitska, Sofiia, 29 Dobrovská, Dana, 187, 983 Domínguez, Ana, 1004 Domracheva, Alina Fanisovna, 1012 Dreher, Ralph, 1035 Dulalaeva, Liudmila, 290, 709 Dunbar, Nathan, 926 E Egorova, Alena, 313 Enikeeva, Svetlana R., 743 F Fakhretdinova, Gulnaz, 15, 225, 290, 478, 709, 1027 Faltynkova, Ludmila, 349 Farrina, Riccardo, 1118 Fedorov, Artem M., 654

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. E. Auer et al. (Eds.): ICL 2021, LNNS 390, pp. 1131–1134, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93907-6

1132 Frangoudes, Fotos, 1073 Fujishima, Satoshi, 441, 449, 899

G Galeeva, Farida T., 225 Galikhanov, Mansur, 217, 1012 Galindo León, Edwin Ariel, 119 Gandra, Mario, 127 Garcia-Pinilla, Jose Ignacio, 119 Gataullina, Rosa V., 146 Gazizova, Natalya N., 726 Gerashchenko, Alexander, 313 Gero, Aharon, 210 Ghasemkhani, Amir, 947 Giliazova, Diana R., 1027 Giniyatullina, Diana R., 146 Gonçalves, A. Manuela, 956 Goncharuk, Natalia P., 684 Gordienko, Olga, 313 Gorlova, Ekaterina, 792 Gorodetskaya, Inna M., 913 Greenholts, Moshe, 465 Gulk, Elena Borisovna, 267, 305, 624 Gur, Eran, 456 Guraliuk, Andrii, 661 Guzhova, Alina, 217

H Hargaš, Ján, 396 Hasegawa, Makoto, 906 Hašková, Alena, 331, 361 Hazzan, Orit, 210 Henderson, James, 1096 Hoefele, Joachim, 800 Holik, Ildikó, 544 Hou, Yunfei, 947 Hrmo, Roman, 177 Hromov, Evhenyi, 600

I Ibatullina, Alina Rafisovna, 297 Ibrasheva, Liliya, 111 Imas, O. N., 939 Imbulpitiya, Asanthika, 968 Ioannidis, Lazaros, 1085 Izaak, Martin, 776

J Jantschgi, Jürgen, 826

Author Index K Kadeeva, Elena N., 676 Kadeeva, Zulfiya K., 669, 676 Kaiblinger, Alexander, 869 Kalantzis, Georgios, 753 Kalteis, Gerald, 776 Kaybiyaynen, Alla A., 536, 709 Kazakova, Ulyana A., 632, 644 Kersanszki, Tamas, 485 Kerschbaumer, Stefan, 3 Kersten, Peter, 784 Kersten, Steffen, 373 Khafizova, Leisan, 283 Khajah, Tahsin, 991 Khasanova, Gulnara F., 737, 1012 Khatsrinova, Julia, 252 Khatsrinova, Olga Y., 104, 252, 913 Khodyreva, Marina, 154 Khoroshikh, Valery Viktorovna, 267 Khromova, Evgeniya I., 684 Khusainova, Guzel Rafaelevna, 297 Kim, Kwanju, 23 Kim, Sang-Youn, 1019 Kitaeva, Liudmila Anatolevna, 297 Klamert-Schmid, Judith, 837 Kodaka, Arihiro, 441, 899 Koeberlein-Kerler, Juergen, 576, 584, 592 Köhler, Thomas, 79, 91 Komarova, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, 275, 305 Kondratyev, Vladimir V., 528, 632, 644 Konstantinidis, Stathis, 1096, 1106, 1118 Korolova, Nataliia, 592 Koshel, Anna, 661 Kostolanyova, Katerina, 349 Kovalenko, Denys, 576 Kovalenko, Olena, 584, 592, 616 Kovalska, Viktoriia, 576 Kraysman, Natalia V., 513, 521, 528, 536, 669, 676, 696 Krištofiaková, Lucia, 177 Kruglirov, Victor Nicolaevich, 624 Kübarsepp, Jakob, 556 Kunina, Olga O., 305, 624, 654 Kupriyanov, Oleksandr, 600 Kupriyanov, Roman, 421, 497, 506, 717 Kuzmenko, Olha, 29 Kuzmin, Aleksey M., 654 Kuznetsova, Maria N., 632, 644 L Läänemets, Urve, 556 Lackner, Maximilian, 837 Larkin, Teresa L., 37 Larrañaga, Mikel, 1004 Laskina, Irina, 154

Author Index

1133

Lavrova, Svetlana, 154 Leidenmühler, Clemens, 776 Leonardini, Liza, 1118 Levin, Laura, 465 Liebhard, Markus, 826 Lo, Seungil, 23 Lopatin, Alexey, 154 Lopes, Sofia O., 956 Lopukhova, Julia, 66, 792 Luchaninova, Olga, 661 Lytvyn, Olha, 592

P Pacher, Corina, 869 Pattichis, Constantinos S., 1073 Pavlova, Irina V., 15, 913, 1027 Pears, Matthew, 1096 Pereira, Paulo A., 956 Pereira, Rui M. S., 956 Pichugin, Andrei B., 513 Pineda, Brayam, 119 Polyakova, Tatiana, 233 Potapov, Andrey A., 15

M Machado, Wanessa do Bomfim, 127 Makeeva, Elena, 66, 792 Malaver, Jennifer Andrea, 119 Malheiro, Maria Teresa, 956 Maliashova, Anna, 568 Manathunga, Kalpani, 968 Maqache, Ntombizanele, 431 Markus, Elisha Didam, 431 Masneri, Stefano, 1004 Matisková, Darina, 396 Mayora, Oscar, 1118 McIntyre, Miranda, 947 Meier, Michaela, 3 Melnichenko, Alexandra, 154 Miastkovska, Maryna, 29 Miklautsch, Phillip, 869 Miladinovi´c, Igor, 241 Minamide, Akiyuki, 441, 449, 899 Mingaliev, Ramil Ravilyevich, 297 Miština, Juraj, 187, 396 Modran, H., 815 Morozov, Andrey, 421 Muheidat, Fadi, 947 Mühlmann, Kay, 879, 888 Murphy, Mariaelena, 869 Murtazina, Elina, 104, 252 Myshko, Fyodor G., 536

Q Qiao, Haiyan, 947

N Nasonkin, Vladimir V., 323 Neamtu, Ioana, 45 Neokleous, Kleanthis C., 1073 Nikitina, Tatiana N., 536 Nikonova, Nataliya V., 726, 743 Nugmanova, Dzhamilia, 506 O Ode-sri, Adisorn, 79, 91 Ohdanskyi, Kyrylo, 616 Olennikova, Marina Vasilyevna, 267 Osipov, Petr, 290, 696, 709

R Rehatschek, Herwig, 3 Richter, Peggy, 1118 Rimkuviene, Daiva, 764 Rodríguez-Jiménez, Olga, 119 Rosen, Uzi, 465 Rostoka, Marina, 29, 661 Rozhkova, S. V., 169, 939 Rudneva, Tatyana, 66 Rüütmann, Tiia, 556 Ryabchenko, Sergey, 154 Ryabkova, Gina V., 146 S Salmen, Christine, 858 Samarakoon, Uthpala, 968 Samoila, C., 815 Sanda, István Dániel, 544 Sanger, Phillip A., 15 Sanz, Miguel, 1004 Satalkina, Liliya, 879, 888 Schachinger, Gabriele, 776 Schäfer, Dominik, 784 Schefer-Wenzl, Sigrid, 241 Schiza, Eirini C., 1073 Schlieter, Hannes, 1118 Serezhkina, Anna, 252 Semushina, Elena Yurievna, 283 Shageeva, Farida T., 297, 513, 684 Shaposhnikova, Tatiana, 313 Shekh-Abed, Aziz, 210 Shin, Jungmin, 1019 Shtefan, Liudmyla, 576, 616 Sidhu, Gaganpreet, 702 Simonics, Istvan, 485 Simonova, Ivana, 349 Singar, Arjun, 408 Sitnikov, Valery Leonidovich, 275 Skvorchevska, Yevheniia, 661 Slotina, Tatyana Viktorovna, 275, 305

1134 Sluzova, Natalia, 154 Srinivasan, Seshasai, 702 Stanko, Tanya, 154 Starshinova, Tatiana A., 521, 528 Steiner, Gerald, 879, 888 Strelnikova, Irina A., 726 Streltsov, Volodymyr, 608 Stura, Claudia, 1118 Sugorovsky, Artem Vasilevich, 275 Sultanova, Dilbar, 58, 568, 1048 Sun, Qingquan, 947 Suntsova, Maria S., 323, 726, 743 Sz˝oköl, István, 199, 340 T Takemata, Kazuya, 441, 449, 899 Tamayo, Iñigo, 1004 Tarasova, Ekaterina N., 478 Taylor, Michael, 1106 Temmen, Katrin, 784 Tessari, Paola, 1118 Timofeeva, Julia V., 654 Tiourina, Natalia E., 323 Tokar, Venera M., 696 Topolnik, Yana, 29 Troitsky, Alexander V., 743 Tsareva, Ekaterina, 283, 737 Tsihouridis, Charilaos, 753 Turner, Elena Yu., 536 U Umborg, Jaak, 556 Ursutiu, D., 815 Ustinova, I. G., 169, 939 V Valeeva, Elvira, 111, 225, 717 Valeeva, Raushan, 104 Valeyeva, Nailya Sh., 421, 497, 506, 717 van Berlo, Ad, 1118 Van Wart, Montgomery, 947 Vanˇecˇ ek, David, 187, 983 Vasquez-Lopez, Virgilio, 135

Author Index Vavilova, Evgeniia L., 528 Vavougios, Dennis, 753 Verner, Igor Michael, 465 Villagomez, Luis, 135 Vintere, Anna, 385, 764 Volkova, Maria M., 146 Vyazankova, Victoria, 313 W Wala, Thomas, 858 Weeakoon, Avinda, 926 Wharrad, Heather, 1106, 1118 Wimonthanasit, Pisit, 79, 91 Winters, Marjolein, 1118 Woschank, Manuel, 869 Y Yahupov, Vasyl, 600, 608 Yanuschik, O. V., 939 Yaschun, Tatjana, 584, 616 Yildiran, Elif, 45 Z Zabolotskikh, Liudmila, 233 Zagidullina, Inna, 217 Záhorec, Ján, 361 Zakharov, Konstantin Pavlovich, 275, 305, 624 Zangl, Sabine, 837 Zaripov, Renat, 497 Zaripova, Irina, 497 Zatkalík, Dominik, 331 Zatkalík, Martin, 331 Zatsarinnaya, Yuliya N., 146 Zenk, Lukas, 879, 888 Zhirosh, Oksana, 154 Zhuravleva, Marina, 111 Zimina, Ekaterina, 568 Zinnatullina, Liliia M., 225, 478 Ziyatdinova, Julia N., 290, 1027 Zorrilla, Mikel, 1004 Zvirgzdina, Liga, 385 Zwiers, Ulrich, 1059