Education Commons^™

Sigite'23 Poster And Extended Abstract: The Proof Of Gold Is Fire: Measuring Stress To Show Impact Of Gender Based Initiatives In Computing Education, Alina Berry, Sarah Jane Delany

Other resources

Many initiatives across the world try to address the issue of gender imbalance in computing education. Evaluation of the impact of these initiatives is not always straightforward. Some interventions are able to demonstrate impact based on recruitment and retention numbers of underrepresented gender groups, in particular, women, often requiring a longer-term study to see impact. Others, especially shorter term interventions and those taking place during the teaching and learning process, frequently use feedback and other instruments as a measure of impact. This work reviews existing evaluation methods from the literature, categorises them as using statistical data, feedback or instruments, grouping …

Exploring The Integration Of Patient Generated Health Data In A Fair Digital Health System In Low-Resourced Settings: A User-Centered Approach, Abdullahi Abubakar Kawu, Rens Kievit, Adamu Abubakar, Mirjam Van Reisen, Dympna O'Sullivan, Lucy Hederman

Conference papers

This article presents the initial user-centered research exploring the opportunities in the collection of Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) within the context of a project aimed at improving health management and outcomes among residents in African countries. Through interviews with a doctor, a patient and two data managers, the local status and opinions regarding PGHD collection, integration and use are investigated. The findings suggest that PGHD have only been encountered in paper forms - and are mostly patient driven, however opportunities for PGHD for the facility and patient were identified and included supporting the treatment of whitecollar hypertension, treatment planning and …

The Ukicer 2022 Conference Poster: Techmate: A Best Practice Toolkit For Driving Sustainable Acceleration Towards Gender Equality In Technology Disciplines In Heis., Alina Berry

Conference papers

TechMate is a research project that is being developed to enhance gender balance in technology disciplines, in particular computing higher education in Ireland and beyond. Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue: in Ireland, less than 15% of the student population in computer science, ICT and related disciplines are women. Despite a significant amount of research and practical work conducted in the recent decades, the problem still persists and this research initiative aims to improve the situation.

Among the main aims of this project, there is a development of a toolkit to drive sustainable acceleration towards gender equality …

Machine Learning With Kay, Lasith Niroshan, James Carswell

Conference Papers

Computational power is very important when training Deep Learning (DL) models with large amounts of data (Wooldridge, 2021). Hence, High-Performance Computing (HPC) can be leveraged to reduce computational cost, and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) provides significant infrastructure and services for research and development to both academia and industry. A portion of ICHEC's HPC system has been allocated for institutional access, and this paper presents a case study of how to use Kay (Ireland's national supercomputer) in the remote sensing domain. Specifically, this study uses clusters of Kay Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for training DL models to extract …

The World Is Our Classroom: Developing A Model For International Virtual Internships - The Global Innovations Project, Paul Doyle, Brian Keegan, Damian Gordon, Anna Becevel, Paul J. Gibson, Zhiying Jiang Phd, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

In the aftermath of COVID-19, remote working has become the norm, and graduates now need an even wider range of skills, which traditional classrooms and internships do not always provide. Working in multiple time zones, within global multi-cultural teams, and only ever meeting colleagues through online technology are just some of the challenges, which require a new type of global graduate. Transversal skills including leadership, collaboration, innovation, digital, green, organization and communication skills are critical. The disruption from COVID-19 also presents unprecedented opportunities to develop more inclusive approaches to internships and international experiences, to level the playing field for students …

All Things Merge Into One, And A River Runs Through It: Exploring The Dimensions Of Blended Learning By Developing A Case Study Template For Blended Activities, Damian Gordon, Paul Doyle, Anna Becevel, Tina Baloh

Articles

The BLITT (Blended Learning International Train the Trainer) Project is focused on developing a training programme to equip teachers to become proficient in championing the use of Blended Learning in the classroom. The training programme will be developed in two phases, in the first phase involves the development of a series of case studies relevant to Blended Learning, followed by a second phase where the BLITT training programme will be designed and developed, using input from these cases. In developing the blended learning case studies, two key documents were identified as being essential, first, a case study tracking template to …

"What's In A Name?”: The Use Of Instructional Design In Overcoming Terminology Barriers Associated With Dark Patterns, Andrea Curley, Damian Gordon, Dympna O'Sullivan

Conference Papers

Many users experience a phenomena when they are shopping on-line where they feel they are being pressured to either spend more money than they had intended, or to share more personal data than they wanted. In academic circles we use the term “Dark Patterns” to describe these deceptive practices, and categorize them as being within the discipline of User Experience (Narayanan, 2020). As academics it is important to name phenomena, and to categorize them, so that we can discuss and analyze these issues. However, this particular topic is one that all users should be made aware of when interacting online, …

Evaluating A Peer Assisted Learning Programme For Mature Access Foundation Students Undertaking Computer Programming At An Irish University, Nevan Bermingham, Frances Boylan, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

Access Foundation Programmes are a widening-participation initiative designed to encourage engagement in higher education among under-represented groups. This includes socioeconomic and educational disadvantage. Mature students in particular enrolled on these programmes experience greater difficulties making the transition to tertiary education, especially when they opt to study disciplines traditionally considered difficult. Computer programming is perceived as a traditionally difficult subject with lower pass rates and progression rates typically than other subjects.

This paper describes the first of a three-cycle action research study examining the perceived effects of a structured Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Programme for mature students enrolled on a computer …

The 4c’S Of Pal – An Evidence-Based Model For Implementing Peer Assisted Learning For Mature Students, Nevan Bermingham, Frances Boylan, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

Peer Assisted Leaning (PAL) programmes have been shown to enhance learner confidence and have an overall positive effect on learner comprehension, particularly in subjects traditionally perceived as difficult. This research describes the findings of a three-cycle Action Research study into the perceived benefits of implementing such a programme for mature students enrolled on a computer science programming module on an Access Foundation Programme in an Irish University. The findings from this study suggest that peer learning programmes offer students a valued support structure that aids transition and acculturation into tertiary education whilst simultaneously improving their subject-matter comprehension and confidence. An …

Power, Passion And Politics: A Grounded Theory Study Of Academic Experiences In Policy Development And Implementation In Higher Education, Marie Brennan

Doctoral

This research study is designed to investigate the lived experiences and perspectives of the academic community on policy development in Irish higher education. A review of the current policy landscape in Ireland and Europe and in particular empirical studies concerning policy implementation provided the focus of the study. The initial study focused on contemporary literature on policy development practices affected by globalisation and subsequently the issues at a national level. Where the gaps in knowledge were identified were in terms of policy implementation at the local level and where the study is aligned. The participants in the study are academics …

A Novel Parabolic Model Of Instructional Efficiency Grounded On Ideal Mental Workload And Performance, Luca Longo, Murali Rajendran

Articles

Instructional efficiency within education is a measurable concept and models have been proposed to assess it. The main assumption behind these models is that efficiency is the capacity to achieve established goals at the minimal expense of resources. This article challenges this assumption by contributing to the body of Knowledge with a novel model that is grounded on ideal mental workload and performance, namely the parabolic model of instructional efficiency. A comparative empirical investigation has been constructed to demonstrate the potential of this model for instructional design evaluation. Evidence demonstrated that this model achieved a good concurrent validity with the …

The Design Of A Framework For The Detection Of Web-Based Dark Patterns, Andrea Curley, Dympna O'Sullivan, Damian Gordon, Brendan Tierney, Ioannis Stavrakakis

Conference Papers

In the theories of User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience (UX), the goal is generally to help understand the needs of users and how software can be best configured to optimize how the users can interact with it by removing any unnecessary barriers. However, some systems are designed to make people unwillingly agree to share more data than they intend to, or to spend more money than they plan to, using deception or other psychological nudges. User Interface experts have categorized a number of these tricks that are commonly used and have called them Dark Patterns. Dark Patterns are varied …

The 12th Annual Graduate Research Symposium 2021 Poster Tu Dublin: How To Recruit And Retain Women In Computer Science, Alina Berry, Susan Mckeever, Brenda Murphy, Sarah Jane Delany

Other resources

While in recent decades a number of efforts have been coordinated to address the issue of gender imbalance in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, the problem still persists. Many authors speak of the ‘leaky’ pipeline metaphor that describes the loss of women in STEM areas before reaching senior roles. Research shows that women who leave are unlikely to return. The issue is particularly severe in the area of computer science, where women represent less than 20% of the labour force across the EU.

This poster introduces a summary of findings from the literature on how to effectively recruit …

You Can't Lose A Game If You Don't Play The Game: Exploring The Ethics Of Gamification In Education, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Brendan Tierney, Emma Murphy, Michael Collins, Anna Becevel

Articles

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the …

Existing Competencies In The Teaching Of Ethics In Computer Science Faculties, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

This report is one of the deliverables for the Ethics4EU project. It presents results obtained from a survey conducted in early 2020 that polled faculty from Computer Science and related disciplines on teaching practices in Computer Ethics in Computer Science across Europe. The survey was completed by respondents from 61 universities across 23 European countries. Participants were surveyed on whether or not Computer Ethics is taught to Computer Science students at each institution, the reasons why Computer Ethics is or is not taught, how Computer Ethics is taught (for example, as a standalone course or embedded within other courses), the …

European Values For Ethics In Digital Technology, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

Digital Ethics deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. It covers a wide spectrum of societal and ethical impacts including issues such as data governance, privacy and personal data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithmic decision-making and pervasive technologies. Importantly, it is not only about hardware and software, but it also concerns systems, how people and organizations and society and technology interact. In addition, with Digital Ethics comes the added variable of assessing the ethical implications of artefacts which may not yet exist, or artefacts which may have impacts we …

Virtual Tutor Personality In Computer Assisted Language Learning, Johanna Dobbriner, Cathy Ennis, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

The use of intelligent virtual agents in language learning has increased in recent years. Studies into several aspects of personalisation aiming to increase user engagement are an ongoing research topic with avatar personality being one such aspect. As a step towards our development of intelligent virtual avatars, we present two of our initial experiments to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities -- P1: open-minded, friendly and sociable and P2: closed-off, curt and distant. Each user interacted with a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that P1 would be …

Hublinked: A Curriculum Mapping Framework For Industry, Paul Doyle, Cathy Ennis, Anna Becevel, Stephane Maag, Radu Dobrin, Mojca Ciglarič, Yunia Choi, Alan Fahey, Deirdre Lillis

Conference Papers

A key aim of HubLinked is to improve the effectiveness of University-Industry linkages between CS faculties and ICT companies. One of the problems identified as core to the Project was to match Learning Outcomes from different curricula with the requirements dictated by the ICT industry with the final aim to enhance students Graduate Skills and employability. Based on agreed core U-I linkage attributes, lower-level curriculum L0s have been designed and reviewed by industry partners. To enable the replication of this process, a tool was designed to make the comparison of graduates' skills from different institutions easily accessible. Using this tool …

Sustainable International Engagement Using A Partner Co-Hosted Teaching Model, Brian Gillespie, Paul Doyle, Zy Jiang, Derryl Humble

Conference Papers

Internationalisation is a significant activity of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) worldwide and is typically embedded within the aims, ambitions, vision, and strategy of the institution. It incorporates the policies and procedures required to facilitate participation within a global academic environment, and is often considered to be a transformative process that impacts practices in teaching and learning, research, and administration. With formal protocols to establish partnerships, such as memoranda of understanding and articulation agreements, the business of formally creating international partnerships is well defined. However, the motivations, corresponding metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) of successful partnerships are not as well …

Homo Ludens Moralis: Designing And Developing A Board Game To Teach Ethics For Ict Education, Damian Gordon, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Andrea Curley

Conference papers

The ICT ethical landscape is changing at an astonishing rate, as technologies become more complex, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways, the resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is vitally important that the developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum; that they think about the uses and abuses of their creations, and take some measures to prevent others being harmed by their work.

To equip these developers to rise to this challenge and to create a positive future for the use …

Incorporating Digital Ethics Throughout The Software Development Process, Michael Collins, Damian Gordon, Anna Becevel, William O'Mahony

Conference papers

The media is reporting scandals associated with computer companies with increasing regularity; whether it is the misuse of user data, breach of privacy concerns, the use of biased artificial intelligence, or the problems of automated vehicles. Because of these complex issues, there is a growing need to equip computer science students with a deep appreciation of ethics, and to ensure that in the future they will develop computer systems that are ethically-based. One particularly useful strand of their education to incorporate ethics into is when teaching them about the formal approaches to developing computer systems.

There are a number of …

A Collaborative Online Micro: Bit K-12 Teacher Pd Workshop, Roisin Faherty, Karen Nolan, Keith Quille

Conference Papers

This poster describes the use of online technology to deliver K12 teacher professional development (PD) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. Traditionally these sessions are delivered in person, with a focus on hand-on activities, but the sudden changes faced by the closures in Ireland required an alternative approach for delivering these sessions. The PD session presented in this poster was a more technically challenging micro:bit workshop, which was delivered online using the micro:bit classroom. This is typically used as an in-class, one to many instructor tool, and trialing this as a PD collaborative tool, was a novel approach. This poster …

A Guide To A Successful Industry-Academia Collaboration, Hublinked Consortium

Reports

This report, developed by the HubLinked Consortium, aims at determining what works best when higher education institutions work with industry on software innovation. The range of potential mechanisms for U-I linkages is extensive and they differ in effectiveness. Many of them are examined in the following pages under different sections. This report tries to identify the most efficient ways for HEIs and companies to engage in different types of collaborations as well as identify different needs, obstacles, enablers, preferences and perceptions that CS faculties and industry hold. This research enables a better understanding of the dynamics of U-I linkages in …

An International Comparison Of K-12 Computer Science Education Intended And Enacted Curricula, Katrina Falkner, Sue Sentance, Rebecca Vivian, Sarah Barksdale, Leonard Busuttil, Elizabeth Cole, Christine Liebe, Francesco Maiorana, Monica M. Mcgill, Keith Quille

Conference Papers

This paper presents an international study of K-12 Computer Science implementation across Australia, England, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Scotland and the United States. We present findings from a pilot study, comparing CS curriculum requirements (intended curriculum) captured through country reports, with what surveyed teachers (n=244) identify as enacting in their classroom (the enacted curriculum). We address the extent that teachers are implementing the intended curriculum as enacted curriculum, exploring specifically country differences in terms of programming languages and CS topics implemented. Our findings highlight the similarities and differences of intended and enacted CS curriculum within and across countries and the value …

An International Benchmark Study Of K-12 Computer Science Education In Schools, Katrina Falkner, Sue Sentance, Rebecca Vivian, Sarah Barksdale, Leonard Busuttil, Elizabeth Cole, Christine Liebe, Francesco Maiorana, Monica M. Mcgill, Keith Quille

Conference Papers

There has been a growing interest and increase in work shared about national K-12 Computer Science Education (CSED) curriculum and implementation efforts around the world. Much of this work focuses on curriculum analysis, country reports, experience reports and case studies. The K-12 CSED community would benefit from an international strategic effort to compare, contrast and monitor K-12 CSED over time, across multiple countries and regions, to understand pedagogy, practice, resources and experiences from the perspective of teachers working in classrooms. Furthermore, there is a need for validated and robust instruments that can support comparable investigations into the current state of …

Presentations & Infographics, Quality Blended Learning Consortium

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial introduces the users to the fundamental concepts on how to create presentations and infographics, as well as provides guidance on the tools to be used, best practices, and mistakes to avoid. The tutorial includes quizzes for self-assessment.

An Evaluation Of The Reliability, Validity And Sensitivity Of Three Human Mental Workload Measures Under Different Instructional Conditions In Third-Level Education, Luca Longo, Giuliano Orru

Conference papers

Although Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has been researched for many years, it has been criticised for its theoretical clarity and its methodological approach. A crucial issue is the measurement of three types of cognitive load conceived in the theory, and the assessment of overall human cognitive load during learning tasks. This research study is motivated by these issues and it aims to investigate the reliability, validity and sensitivity of three existing self-reporting mental workload instruments, mainly used in Ergonomics, when applied to Education and in particular to the field of Teaching and Learning. A primary research study has been designed …

Interactive And Accessible Pdfs, Quality Blended Learning Consortium

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial introduces the users to the fundamental concepts on how to create interactive and accessible PDFs, as well as provides guidance on the tools to be used, best practices, and mistakes to avoid. The tutorial includes quizzes for self-assessment.

Three Decades Of Universal Design - Defining Moments, Margaret Kinsella

Articles

This paper contributes to the growing research on incorporating Universal Design in the Higher Education landscape by presenting a Practitioner's Perspective on Universal Design as delivered in the Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown (ITB) in the first year of a creative digital media degree as part of the first year experience. This first year experience is a transition time for many students and has many complexities; while being an exciting and fulfilling time, the transition can also be challenging and isolating. Through Universal Design, the aim is to enable students to 'Get connected' and 'Stay connected'. Universal Design for Learning is …

Programming: Predicting Student Success Early In Cs1. A Re-Validation And Replication Study, Keith Quille, Susan Bergin

Articles

This paper describes a large, multi-institutional revalidation study conducted in the academic year 2015-16. Six hundred and ninetytwo students participated in this study, from 11 institutions (ten institutions in Ireland and one in Denmark). The primary goal was to validate and further develop an existing computational prediction model called Predict Student Success (PreSS). In doing so, this study addressed a call from the 2015 ITiCSE working group (the second "Grand Challenge"), to "systematically analyse and verify previous studies using data from multiple contexts to tease out tacit factors that contribute to previously observed outcomes". PreSS was developed and validated in …