Informatics in Education

Programs in bioinformatics, offered in many academic institutes, are assumed to expand women’s representation in computer science (CS). Women’s enrolment in these programs is high; Our questions are: Do these programs attract different women from those attracted to CS programs? What factors underlie women’s decision to enroll in bioinformatics programs? How do these factors differ from those of women who choose CS, if at all? What career opportunities do these women anticipate and pursue? Using questionnaires and interviews, we found a statistically significant difference between the factors that motivate women to choose bioinformatics and others to study CS. Many bioinformatics students did not consider CS as an alternative. Post-facto they learned to love computing, albeit with a biology-oriented purpose. “Computing with purpose” underlies many participants’ pursuit of careers in research, CS, and bio-tech. We thus conclude that bioinformatics programs do indeed expand women’s representation in CS.

Nowadays, the rapid development of ICT has brought more flexible forms that push the boundaries of classic teaching methodology. This paper is an analysis of online teaching and learning forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, as compared with traditional education approaches. In this regard, we assessed the performance of students studying in the face-to-face, online and hybrid mode for an engineering degree in Computer Science at the Lublin University of Technology during the years 2019-2022. A total of 1827 final test scores were examined using machine learning models and the Shapley additive explanations method. The results show an average increase in performance on final tests scores for students using online and hybrid modes, but the difference did not exceed 10% of the point maximum. Moreover, the students' work had a much higher impact on the final test scores than did the study system and their profile features.

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student programming behavior can be modeled as a Markov process. The resulting transition matrix can then be used in machine learning algorithms to create clusters of similarly behaving students. We describe in detail the state machine used in the Markov process and how to compute the transition matrix. We compute the transition matrix for 665 students and cluster them using the k-means clustering algorithm. We choose the number of cluster to be three based on analysis of the dataset. We show that the created clusters have statistically different means for student prior knowledge in programming, when measured on a Likert scale of 1-5.

This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation. However, measuring motivation is complex, there are several scales already carried out to do that job, but only a few of them consider the longitudinal follow-up of motivation throughout the courses. The EVC Light was applied to 245 undergraduate students from four universities. The Omega coefficient, scale items intercorrelation, item-total correlation, and factor analysis are used to validate and measure the reliability of the instrument. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses supported the structure, consistency, and validity of the EVC Light scale. Moreover, a significant relationship between motivation and student results was identified, based mainly on the Expectancy and Cost factors.

The main goal of this research is to enhance the understanding of quality criteria for DB metadata for assessment and recognition as factors increasing their value in higher education (HE). To attain this goal, a case study approach centered in one HE institution was used, aiming (a) at an analysis of the status quo description of metadata of DBs issued by the HE institution to identify the value of DBs in terms of assessment and recognition procedures, and (b) a list of quality criteria for DB description metadata was proposed on the basis of academic research and on expert interview results. The results of the research demonstrate that in the institution under research, these criteria are not present in most cases of DB descriptions as teachers do not provide them. Distinct assessment and recognition criteria make an important quality factor for the DBs to become valid and valued digital credentials in HE.

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of the penetration of mobile technology through all strata of society. Mobile technologies including cell phones, tablets, and even some e-readers are used for surfing the web, running apps, reading email, posting to social media, conducting banking transactions, etc. This liberation from desktop and laptop machines and from the requirements of a specific geographic location raises concerns regarding the problems and challenges of maintaining security while traversing cyberspace. The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the attitudes, behaviors, and security practices of business students using mobile devices to access online resources. One group of students surveyed received no specific training regarding mobile security while a second group was surveyed following the completion of an online training program. Results show no significant difference in the security practices of the two groups, indicating that commercially available security training programs are largely inefficacious with respect to modifying student behavior and that additional research on training efficacy is needed.

Programming is one of the basic subjects in most informatics, computer science mathematics and technical faculties' curricula. Integrated overview of the models for teaching programming, problems in teaching and suggested solutions were presented in this paper. Research covered current state of 1019 programming subjects in 715 study programmes at total of 218 faculties and 143 universities in 35 European countries that were analyzed. It was concluded that while most of the programmes highly support object-oriented paradigm of programming, introductory programming subjects are mainly based on imperative paradigm.

This research explores the effect of mobile technology in Lebanese higher education classrooms. Three components were utilized to evaluate the impact: student attitudes, student achievements, and educational process. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the research questions. The main sources for data collection were surveyed, discussion group, achievement scores, and classroom observations. Thirty-eight volunteer students participated in this study in the spring 2013 term. The findings of this study showed that when Mobile with 3G technology used in education, it affected students' attitudes such as take pleasure in class, positive learning experience, and student prospects of the common effectiveness of mobile technology. Mobile technology, was also found to have positive influenced on students learning outcomes. It was also positively impacted the interactions between students as well as between the instructor and students.

While researchers working within the Student Learning Research framework have developed or adapted questionnaires to gather information on students' experiences of blended learning, no questionnaire has been developed to enquire about teachers' experiences in such learning environments. The present article reports the development and testing of a novel questionnaire on `approaches to e-teaching', which may be employed to investigate the experience of teaching when e-learning is involved. Results showed suitable reliability and validity. Also, when exploring associations between the novel questionnaire scales and those of the well-known `approaches to teaching' inventory (Prosser and Trigwell, 2006), results from correlation and cluster analyses suggest that student-focused approaches to teaching are needed for significant use of digital technology to emerge. For practice, this relevant outcome implies that teaching needs to be considered holistically when supporting teachers to incorporate e-learning in their practice: because it seems they approach online teaching coherently with the face-to-face side of the blended experience.

With the growing awareness of the scholarship of teaching and the appropriate incorporation of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in higher education, there is a need for university lecturers to reflect upon and share their practice in the use of ICT in teaching and learning. This paper aims to study the way lecturers communicate their ICT teaching experience. Specifically, it tries to identify the key elements that are needed to form a model to make sharing of practice more effective. An action research approach was adopted to explore the issue. Nine teacher educators and nine university lecturers participated in different study stages. This paper provides evidence that the use of an issue-based model together with Benzie's (1999) evaluation dimensions, the sharing process and discussions are focused and cover a wide range of aspects in relation to the teaching context, and support a discussion of pedagogy rather than merely technical issues.