Navigating the Digital Classroom: Tips for Online Success

In today’s fast-paced educational landscape, the digital classroom has become an integral part of the learning experience. As students adapt to virtual environments, mastering the art of online success is crucial. One key aspect is effective time management—balancing coursework, assignments, and personal commitments. Embracing technology is another vital component, with proficiency in online tools enhancing communication and collaboration. Moreover, staying organized is paramount; utilizing digital planners and calendars can help keep track of deadlines and lectures. For those seeking additional support, services like UK assignment help can provide valuable assistance, ensuring that students navigate the complexities of virtual learning with ease. By implementing these tips and leveraging relevant resources, students can thrive in the digital classroom and achieve academic success.

Research Impact

Professor Mark Reed, Director of Engagement & Impact at Newcastle University, has analyzed impact case studies from around the world, and proposes ten types of research impact considering benefits and innovation in a real-world context:

  • Understanding and awareness – meaning your research helped people understand an issue better than they had before
  • Attitudinal – your research helped lead to a change in attitudes
  • Economic – your research contributed to cost savings, or costs avoided; or increases in revenue, profits or funding

  • Environmental – benefits arising from your research aid genetic diversity, habitat conservation and ecosystems

  • Health and well-being – your research led to better outcomes for individuals or groups

  • Policy – your research contributed to new or amended guidelines or laws

  • Other forms of decision-making and behavioural impacts

  • Cultural – changes in prevailing values, attitudes and beliefs

  • Other social impacts –such as access to education or improvement in human rights

  • Capacity or preparedness – research that helps individuals and groups better cope with changes that might otherwise have a negative impact.

Professor Reed’s book, The Research Impact Handbook, is highly recommended – even required reading – if you’d like to learn more about each of these areas, and how to understand the potential outcomes of your research in each area.

Roblox: fun and imagination

Roblox is a 3D online platform for users to play and create own multiplayer games. It was created in 2006, with release for IOS in 2013 and Android in 2014 and XBox One in 2015. Games are coded under an object-oriented programming LUA Language to manipulate the environment of the game.

it host occasionally real-life events and award ceremony which also functions as a fundraiser.

In 2020 reached a large number of users from 35 million to 150 million in 2021… Due to the pandemic its valuation increased from $4 billion to $29.5 billion. Similar effect experienced by the majority of gaming industry as players in particular children below 16 are spending more time indoors playing video games.

Roblox has a community of educators to inspire children’s creativity, curiosity and entrepreneurship.

Roblox allows both the import of files with own formats (.rbxm) and generics formats that the video game industry usually works with (.obj, .fbx, .stl, etc)

Scientific Studies about Roblox indicates both drivers ( educational tour) and barriers (uncensored users, bullying and unsafe platform for children )

Literature Review

SEARCH RELEVANT PAPERS

  1. Define your topic. Do you have central question you want to answer?

  2. Narrow down what you want to research. Can you focus more deeply, rather than skimming the surface of your topic?

  3. Structure your topic into key concepts ( themes) to make it easier to search and look up information

  4. Use your learning material to identify key authors or theories that relate to the themes and make them your starting point

  5. Do your learning material suggest any further reading? If so, track it down

  6. Use an online library and open repositories to locate academic opinion and theory

  7. Use search engine for scientific literature (academic research database):

  • Scopus is one of the two big commercial, bibliographic databases that cover scholarly literature from almost any discipline. Beside searching for research articles, Scopus also provides academic journal rankings, author profiles, and an h-index calculator.

  • Web of Science also known as Web of Knowledge is the second big bibliographic database. Usually, academic institutions provide either access to Web of Science or Scopus on their campus network for free

  • For education sciences, ERIC is the number one destination. ERIC stands for Education Resources Information Center, and is a database that specifically hosts education-related literature.

  • IEEE Xplore is the leading academic database in the field of engineering and computer science. It’s not only journal articles, but also conference papers, standards and books that can be search for.

  • ScienceDirect is the gateway to the millions of academic articles published by Elsevier. 2,500 journals and more than 40,000 e-books can be searched via a single interface.

  • The DOAJ is very special academic database since all the articles indexed are open access and can be accessed freely of charge.

  • Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines.

  • Microsoft Academic takes a different approach and generates for each paper that is indexed an overview page that allows to easily explore top citing articles and references of the article

  • CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers.

  • Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

  • Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. It’s mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

ORGANIZE YOUR OWN LIBRARY Use the browser extension to import automatically your paper into your digital library, then:

  1. Organise your literature using a scientific content manager (Mendeley, Zotero, Paperpile): store any paper copies in folders and files, grouped into themes

  2. Read and annotate the literature you have sourced

  3. Establish a criteria including a code system to tag only relevant literature

  4. Tag only the relevant literature using the key themes you have identified

Collaborative Annotation

Protocol for collective research with consistency and flexibility

Compare NVivo, MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti to code transcripts from teams or zoom

Source: caqdasblog

1.Working collaboratively

There are various software tools and cloud-based applications to support individual research such as ATLAS.ti; Dedoose; MAXqda; NVivo and NVivo 9 Server; QDA Miner; and Transana… However, the big challenge is to find a good platform for collective research.

A few solutions proposed by teams are: 1. Merging software projects and the completed work, after working individually.

2. Working in serial and exporting work

3. Synchronous working by multiple users

Annotate PDFs Collaboratively Using Google Drive

  • Upload a PDF to your Google Drive (New>File upload, or click-and-drag the PDF into your Google Drive).

  • Click the PDF to preview it.

  • (Optional) Click the share button in the upper right to add other people, or get a link to share.

  • Click on the annotate icon in the upper right to start adding notes. Highlight text or illustrations throughout the document to comment on them.
  • The ability to annotate PDFs, or at least open in a PDF reader that will, without having to download the file, annotate, and upload.

Google, Asana, Trello

2.Ways to collaborate in NVivo

Many projects involve multiple researchers working together—NVivo provides two ways to approach collaboration:

  • Share projects using NVivo Server—this is the best solution for team work since everyone in your team can work on the same project at the same time. They can code, annotate and link source content and have immediate access to the changes made by other team members.

  • Work in copies of a standalone project and merge them into a master project at appropriate intervals—making use of user profiles to track changes.

While teams offer higher productivity and a richer perspective, they also present a number of management challenges. Early in a project it is important to determine the approach your team will take to:

  • Collecting and organizing data

  • Creating and cataloguing themes and topics (the node structure)

  • Coding the data

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3.Managing Teamwork

Whether you work with NVivo Server or collaborate in a standalone project you might want to consider the following:

  • Appoint a team leader who will keep the team on track and make final coding decisions.

  • Have regular team meetings to discuss interpretations, address issues and assign tasks—record the outcomes in a memo.

  • Have each team member keep a memo to record their progress, including any hunches, suggestions or questions—you could also do this in a single ‘teamwork journal’.

  • Early on, have multiple team members code the same collection of sources, then compare coding (using coding stripes or a Coding Comparison query)—this can help ensure a consistent approach.

  • To start with, make a node hierarchy for each team member. After team discussion, you can refine, merge and reorganize.

  • Aim for a clear node structure and use descriptions (in node properties) to make the purpose of a node clear for all team members.

  • To help team members understand the meaning of nodes, create a codebook that lists the nodes and their descriptions—refer to Export a codebook for more information.

  • As the project progresses, see which nodes have been created or modified and by which team member—do this in Node List View or by running a Node Summary report.

  • While a common node structure is important for efficiency and reliability— it should remain flexible so that new insights and exciting ideas are not lost.

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4. Coding together

If multiple researchers are coding the same data, you may be interested in the consistency of their coding. NVivo provides a number of ways to check consistency or coder reliability:

  • Run a Coding Comparison Query to determine the percentage of agreement and disagreement between coders.

  • Display coding stripes for users—you can open a data source and see the coding done by each researcher.

  • Filter the content of a node to see only the references coded by selected researchers

Remember that inconsistency in coding is not necessarily negative— it may prompt productive debate and deeper insights into the data.

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Related topics

videos

NVIVO

https://youtu.be/fYG4enIoAeQ

ATLAS.TI

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Evaluation Framework

The evaluation framework is a strategic plan that describes the approach to guide the data generation, analysis and interpretation of a research project. It replies key questions to support evaluators to carry out the evaluation (McDonald et al., 2001):

  1. Why the evaluation is being conducted?

  2. What will be done?

  3. Who will do it?

  4. When will it be done?

  5. How evaluation findings will likely be used?

The evaluation framework should include a concise description of:

  • the program objectives and its goals

  • resources and scope of the evaluation

  • evaluation objectives and questions

  • outputs, outcomes, and measures

  • data sources and data collection methods

  • ethical considerations

  • data analysis strategy

  • timelines and anticipated reporting dates

  • roles and responsibilities

  • strategy for disseminating results and developing recommendations

The evaluation framework is designed to help evaluators to operationalize the research questions in the context of the project and how these questions will be measured. Key outputs and outcomes must be identified for each question and measures (indicators) for each output and outcome.

As stated by Green and South (2006), “Having good, clear objectives in place will make the job of selecting indicators much easier”(p. 69).

The expected outcomes of a project need to be identified to guide the selection of the indicators of its success. To provide useful information(Patton, 1997), indicators for evaluation supported by ethical standards must be: relevant, valid, reliable, realistic and measurable.

The most relevant and practical indicators should be used. In case of research indicators that only measure something indirectly then the limitations must be acknowledged.

Examples of measures of RRI project activities:

  • The project’s capacity to meet stakeholders’ needs

  • The participation rate

  • Levels of stakeholders’ satisfaction

  • The efficiency of resource used

  • The efficiency of intervention (e.g. training)

Examples of measures of RRI project effects:

  • Changes in stakeholders’ behavior

  • Changes in community norms, policies, and practices

  • Changes in social innovation (e.g. quality of life, ..)

  • Changes in settings or environment around the project

What are the key components to describe how evaluation data will be generated?

  • A description of any participants

  • Sampling techniques

  • Participant recruitment strategy

  • Consent processes and how ethical concerns such as confidentiality are addressed

  • Data collection methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, surveys)

  • Whether collected data will be qualitative, quantitative, or both

  • If data is extracted from an existing database, a description of the original database is to be provided

  • If document reviews are used, an overview of how this is done and the nature of the documents being reviewed

  • A description of any available baseline measures, if applicable

  • Whether a literature review will be carried out, and if so, a description of the focus of the review and search strategy

  • A description of how access to third party data will be negotiated, if the evaluation will involve a third party; as well as, description of any information-sharing agreements, if applicable

What are some potential sources of data?

  • Stakeholders – beneficiaries (e.g., project participants’ access; community-members’ feedback; artifacts produced by program participants or community members)

  • Project providers (e.g., associates, collaborators and organisations supporting the project)

  • Observers or people who are not part of the project (e.g., public in general, external communities)

What are some of the methods for gathering evaluation data? (Posavac and Carey, 1997)

  • Written surveys

  • Interviews

  • Checklists

  • Tests

  • Summaries of records/documents

  • Focus groups

  • Extractions from administrative datasets

What are the suggestions to describe who will do what (team), when (time line) and how (procedures)?

Roles (Who/What):

  • Communicate the evaluation plan

  • Carry out literature reviews/collect background information

  • Develop tools, instruments, and consent procedures

  • Collect, enter and analyze data

  • Write-up and disseminate results

Schedule (When/How)

  • When the evaluation needs to begin

  • Overview of tasks that need to be completed i

  • How to obtain the information needed for the evaluation

  • Due dates for feedback and reports

  • When the evaluation needs to end

References

  1. Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Tri-Council Policy Statement: EthicalConduct for Research Involving Humans. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.pre.ethics.gc.ca/pdf/eng/tcps2/TCPS_2_FINAL_Web.pdf

  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[CDC].(1999). Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health. Retrieved fromhttp://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr4811a1.htm

  3. Green, J. & South, J. (2006). Evaluation: Key Concepts for Public Health Practice(1stedition). Berkshire, England: Open University Press

  4. Health Communication Unit (2007). Evaluating Health Promotion Programs Version 3.4. Health Communication Unit, Centre for Health Promotion, University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://www.thcu.ca/infoandresources/publications/EVALMaster.Workbook.v3.6.08.15.07.pdf

  5. KU Work Group for Community Health and Development. (2011). Chapter 36, Section 5:Developing an Evaluation Plan. Hampton, C: University of Kansas. Retrieved from the Community Tool Box: http://ctb.ku.edu/en/tablecontents/sub_section_main_1352.aspx

  6. Patton, M.Q. (1997). Utilization-Focused Evaluation (3rdEdition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications

  7. Posavac, E.J. & Carey, R.G. (1997).Program Evaluation: Methods and Case Studies (5th Edition).Boston: Prentice Hall.

  8. W.K. Kellogg Foundation. (2004). Logic Model Development Guide. Retrieved from http://www.wkkf.org/~/media/20B6036478FA46C580577970AFC3600C.ashx

  9. Alberta Health Services (2016). Evaluation Plan and Evaluation Framework.Retrieved from https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/res/mhr/if-res-mhr-eval-resources-plan-framework.pdf