Emerging educational technologies
E.A. Salimi; M. Rezaei Ghahroudi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: The idea that the world is facing global emerging trends, technologies, and innovations lead the world to experience an uncertain, complex, and unstable future. Therefore, of the many diverse, controversial, and attractive challenges humankind deal with today, the most intense ...
Read More
Background and Objectives: The idea that the world is facing global emerging trends, technologies, and innovations lead the world to experience an uncertain, complex, and unstable future. Therefore, of the many diverse, controversial, and attractive challenges humankind deal with today, the most intense and critical is understanding the effect of the new technology revolution in various fields, especially in education. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent quarantines have created a significant technological leap in the modern life landscape, leading to drastic and unexpected changes in education. As Covid-19 is a force to make the transition from face-to-face to online education, this study seeks to investigate whether distributed ledger technologies can help successfully tackle this new and major challenge. In this light, the researchers of the present study aimed to examine the impacts and implications of these technologies on the education system to see if they would improve the quality of education in the future.Methods: The current study was conducted adopting a qualitative approach to provide in-depth insights and experiences of the participants. The target population of the present research included sixty-three males and females from five groups of people including higher education policymakers, teacher training instructors, information and communication technology specialists, educational technology experts, and future researchers of the educational system recruited through purposive sampling. The required data were collected through different types of interviews and narrative analysis which was conducted through WhatsApp network. The interview was selected since it was practically more convenient than other qualitative research instruments. This instrument, due to its nature, could provide a trustworthy contextualized and deep understanding of the research issue. Narrative analysis was used as the second fruitful instrument due to the centrality and impressive role digital environments play in human life. Since time and space constraints have reduced face-to-face interactions, such a flexible and attractive instrument could provide an interactive and collaborative environment for participants to tell their stories either synchronically or Asynchronically. The process of data collection continued until saturation was reached, based on which 25 interviews were conducted and 38 members participated in narrative inquiry. To analyze the data and for the themes to be extracted, thematic analysis including initial coding, focused coding, and axial coding was conducted.Findings: The results of the data analysis led to the following themes extracted: curriculum diversity, assessing students' academic performance, quality management of learning achievements, recording management of learning outcomes, academic certificate administration, and lifelong learning. Each of the themes represents one of the blockchain implications in future education. The analysis of the interviews and narrative inquiry indicated that Blockchain, due to its specific features such as security, trust, transparency, immutability, privacy, integrity, authentication, robustness, accountability, and decentralization, plays a critical role in transforming future education.Conclusion: The results of the present study can inform policymakers, educators, managers, leaders, practitioners, and all stakeholders of the education system, especially higher education, of the global emerging trends, technologies, innovations, and developments and their effects on future education. Now that the day-to-day penetration of technological advancements coincides with the Corona virus epidemic around the world, it is necessary to apply technologies and take all necessary changes to recreate the education system in order to take a step towards improving the quality of education. It is hoped that the present study will be a reliable source for further future researches on education.
E-Lerning
Kh. Sarboland
Abstract
Background and Objective Implementing training and improving human resources allows people to effectively continue their activities and increase their efficiency in accordance with organizational and environmental changes. As a result of the increasing complexity and wast development of specializations ...
Read More
Background and Objective Implementing training and improving human resources allows people to effectively continue their activities and increase their efficiency in accordance with organizational and environmental changes. As a result of the increasing complexity and wast development of specializations in the last century, the traditional education has been criticized for cost-effectiveness, being time-consuming, being prescriptive, having ack of creativity and poor focus on education instead of business results. This type of training is not enough to meet the needs of employees and manage complex affairs in organizations. In this regard, organizations have taken advantage of e-learning to be able to keep their employees up-to-date and active in terms of knowledge and skills required in line with the development of technology. The purpose of this study was to provide an e-learning model on teachers' satisfaction of learning in branches of Ardabil Islamic Azad University. Methods: The study was conducted on the basis of Delphi and survey models of research. In the first stage, the participants of this study were the lecturers and faculty members, and in the second stage, they were the faculty members of Management in all branches of Ardabil Islamic Azad University. Samples of the first stage were 136 subjects and in the second stage 20 subjects. The sampling method in the first stage was random-stratified and in the second stage it was purposive sampling. Data collection instrument was an e-learning researcher-made questionnaire. For data analysis Structural Measurement Model (Confirmatory Factor Analysis) was used and for specifiying e-learning, Delphi three-staged method was used. Findings: Findings included 77 concrete variables and 8 basic concepts (IT infrastructures, quality of educational system, self-learning, learners' support, identifying and recording educational needs, management of values, educational materials, society-based learning). In the first stage, the appropriacy of the model was approved and showed that the structures were in a satisfactory level of validity, and in the second stage, the quality of educational system, IT infrastructures, self-learning and learners' support, were identified as the dimensions of e-learning. Conclusion: Based on the findings of the research, it is suggested that the officials of the units of the Islamic Azad University of Ardabil Province implemented e-learning with a consistent approach in line with the organization's strategy and instructors’ satisfaction. In this regard, the units of Islamic Azad University of Ardabil can form a specialized department of human resources in relation to e-learning of professors and faculty members in addition to identifying talents, building e-learning processes, structures and systems to promote their e-learning processes. Eventually, all systems cannot sustain functioning without evaluation. E-learning does not work in a static environment and must be formed in a dynamic or organized way. Therefore, the units of Islamic Azad University need to adjust the e-learning of their professors based on its characteristics and to establish feedback and evaluation systems (internal and external evaluation system).
