IADIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WWW/INTERNET

19-33

Authors: Gerald E. Evans, Daniel C. Evans and Michael V. Harrington

This paper explores the impact on faculty and students of the forced transition to eLearning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A review of the literature on eLearning modalities and the issues involved in transitioning from face-to-face instruction is followed by a series of reports on the experiences of 11 faculty and in making the change from traditional instruction to various modalities of eLearning. The impacts on students were assessed through a survey of students in classes during the pandemic. The methodology employed is an adaptation of the grounded theory approach used in sociology along with survey research. The results indicate that the primary advantages to the transition to eLearning were the flexibility afforded both faculty and students and the ability to continue delivering quality instruction during the pandemic. The primary negatives were the difficulty in engaging students in the new delivery modalities and the significant challenges involved in proctoring exams. Prior experience with online and blended learning on the part of the faculty and students made the transition smoother.

46-66

Authors: Rusudan Makhachashvili and Ivan Semenist

The global pandemic led the higher educational sphere worldwide to the amplified emergency digitalization measures, that sprang from the necessity to take quick comprehensive action to transform educational workflow and both standard and dynamic educational scenarios into digital, blended, and hybrid formats. As a result, there are identified several challenges that higher educational institutions had to face and overcome in a manner that was efficient and expedient: 1) to activate comprehensive complex skillsets, otherwise latent or underutilized in the educational process; 2) to boost ICT competence and digital literacy of all participants of the educational process, relocated to the computer realm. The study objective is informed by the research task to conduct a structured, case-based diagnostics of viral development of digital skills and their application to construe interdisciplinary competencies and professional linguistic competences of students of European and Oriental Languages major programs at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University (Ukraine), that took place over the span of 2020-2021 due to lockdown measures. The inquiry is founded on the identification of various soft and communicative competency principles and estimated digital literacy components that inform the meta-digital competence in Foreign Languages Education. The empirical study is derived from the comprehensive survey data that disclosed digital literacy components and e-skills implementation in various tiers of professional linguistic and FLE activities. The inquiry determines structural interoperability between different groups of applied e-skills, linguistic competence components and soft skills, necessary for the development of the interdisciplinary professional capacity of Foreign Languages students in Ukraine.

17-36

Authors: Stine Ordemann, Marita Skjuve, Asbjørn Følstad and Cato Alexander Bjørkli

Chatbots are changing customer service interactions, enabling higher reliance on self-serving behavior. There seems to be an emphasis on designing these chatbots to be as humanlike as possible. One drawback is that such humanlike design might lead users to apply the same mental models when interacting with chatbots as they do when interacting with human customer service personnel. Arguably, this may cause issues in the chatbot interaction because the technology may not be capable of handling interactions at the same level of sophistication as human personnel. Thus, the mental models that users apply are important for successful system interactions, but little research have been dedicated towards understanding these mental models. To close this research gap, we asked 16 users to interact with two customer service chatbots to explore the mental models guiding their interactions. Based on qualitative interviews and screen-captured videos of the participants’ dialogues, an exploratory analysis indicated that the participants drew on two types of mental models to understand, predict, and interact with chatbots: a human-oriented model and a technology-oriented model. We discuss our findings and their theoretical and practical implications.

54-70

Authors: Jeferson Gonçalves de Oliveira, Cristiana Fernandes De Muylder, Fernando Hadad Zaidan, Ana Maria Pereira Cardoso and José Nelio Januário

Many recent studies have underscored the complexity of public health systems. At the same time, information systems are discussed from a strictly technological point of view to break away from a social context in which they are inseparable. Furthermore, the literature lacks research on the implementation of these systems in environments that target social innovation. To explore these relationships, this study seeks to answer the following question: What are the relationships/influences between the Social Information System, public health and social innovation? Thus, the purpose of this research is to develop an analysis model of the relationship between the studied constructs and apply it to the reality of the Neonatal Screening Program of the State of Minas Gerais (PTN-MG). To do so, the study was applied within the SUS, in the state of Minas Gerais, using the program's 15-year database. For testing the relationships between model constructs, statistical techniques of multivariate data analysis were employed. Key findings confirm that healthcare networks are configured as complex systems that require information systems with features that respect this concept. In addition, it is noted that the information system is a fundamental pillar in social innovation in health, as it has shown a significant relationship with the reduction of health problems and with the PTN-MG quality indicators. From this new tested model, others will emerge pointing to the scientific and social contribution of this research, organized in documents.

85-100

Authors: Aidrina Sofiadin

The world is moving towards achieving sustainable development goals that benefit the environment, society, and the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many education institutions to shift from traditional learning to online learning. Since 1960, e-learning has been delivering through the website. However, there is a rise in e-learning security and ethical issues that lead to poor education quality and an unsustainable e-learning system. Thus, security and ethics components need to be integrated into a sustainable e-learning and gamification framework. Interestingly, e-learning needs to integrate the gamification context to increase online learning quality and secure learners' education while promoting lifelong learning. To identify the relationship between security and ethics in gamified e-learning, this paper examined and assessed various types of security threads and learners’ ethics and well-being in the e-learning environment. The framework intends to increase e-learning strength in promoting a better e-learning environment, well-being, and lifelong learning among their learners. Thus, enabling sustainable education through a reliable e-learning system.

16-28

Authors: Bahareh Zarei and Martin Gaedke

An increasing number of companies offer their capabilities as Web services and publish them through public registries. Such Web services enable users to access and manipulate online data programmatically. Moreover, they can be deployed in service-based systems (SBS) or composite web applications and mashups to offer value-added services. A crucial step in deploying Web services is the Web service Discovery. Selecting the best Web service candidates to address the needs of service requesters (e.g., SBS designers) is an important task in SBSs and can influence the quality of the resulting composite web application. So far proposed solutions for addressing this challenge, which are mainly categorized into Syntactic-based and Semantic-based, are either too complex for end-users which hinders their large-scale adaptation or suffer from low precision and recall. Considering the recent trend of shifting the development activities more and more towards the end-users, we propose an approach based on chat-bot technology to allow end-users to select a set of best-fitting Web services according to their goals. Conversational Interfaces also known as chatbots aim at providing users a more natural framework to interact with web applications and devices. The advantage of DISCO compared to the state-of-the-art approaches is leveraging the natural language as the communication medium and alleviating the need for end-users to have technical knowledge about the service’s structure and location. We conducted sets of experiments by recruiting 8 test subjects to query the chatbot. The results achieve high precision and recall.

41-56

Authors: Bráulio Alturas and Junior Marimbique

Higher education institutions are characterized by the growth of the student population, the need to align their programs with market demand, and the adoption of new management and service delivery techniques, making it essential to use information technologies. This research project aims to design an information system prototype for a higher education admission management information system and propose open source software engineering tools that can assist its development. This paper presents the main concepts related to information systems, higher education and open source software. The prototype was designed following the object-oriented software development methodology and the software engineering tools were based on the comparison of two tools to three information system software elements namely forms, reports and web portal.

76-88

Authors: Roumen Vragov and Nanda Kumar

Over the last 20 years scientists from many disciplines have proposed mechanisms that allow decision-makers to negotiate directly on common outcomes. The Internet-enabled versions of these mechanisms can allow citizens to practice direct democracy and thus increase participation in governance. This study investigates the information requirements of one of these mechanisms – the Online Compensation Election. More specifically the study tests if the level of detail of the information available to a voter about the preference intensities of other voters affects voting behavior. We find that a decrease in the granularity of the real preference intensity information about others does not affect voting behavior and the referendum’s compensation outcomes We discuss the implications of these results and possible future directions for research.

101-115

Authors: Hideki Okita, Hayato Hoshihara, Norihisa Komoda and Toru Fujiwara

We propose a dynamically prioritized failure management method according to the reliability model that the failure rate of virtual machine varies in its life cycle. When using a combination of server monitoring with ping and network connection check with Ethernet OAM, the system sets higher priorities to the port connected to a long running server, and the port within a certain time after the connection change or virtual machine addition is set. The system then selects the ports from the higher priority port to be monitored by Ethernet OAM. As a result of the evaluation by the simulation, by dynamically selecting the port to be monitored for Ethernet OAM using the proposed method, it was confirmed that more than a third of all failures were detected with Maintenance End Points which number is only a tenth of that of servers in a data center. In the data center for cloud services running many VMs, it is possible to shorten the recovery from VM failure while suppressing the number of objects monitored by Ethernet OAM by using this method.

14

Authors: Joshua Kofi Doe

This study examines the effect of online brand community customer engagements on brand loyalty,through various online customer-to-community relationships, and trust. Data was randomly collected from 720 members of an online brand community page using an online questionnaire and analysed with Structural Equations Modelling (SEM). The study found that online brand community activities influenced customer-product relationships, and not customer-brand nor customer-company relationships. None of the customer relationships mediate the link between online brand community and trust. Trust, however partially mediates between customer-product relationships and brand loyalty, as well as between customer-company relationships and brand loyalty. Trust of the online community was confirmed to lead to loyalty. For industry practitioners, these findings support the need to ensure favourable customer/product related activities, experience and word of mouth within the online community. It also demonstrates the possibility of brand extension and brand trust at lower costs. The paper contributes to industrial and academic knowledge of virtual brand community and its effects.

14

Authors: Mohammed Baidada, Khalifa Mansouri and Franck Poirier

Our research work falls within the context of the use of recommendation systems for the personalization of contents in e-learning environments. We present in this paper the results of a second experiment that was recently conducted to evaluate a hybrid recommendation approach in an online learning environment. The approach consists of combining the two approaches of content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to improve the relevance of the educational resources recommended to learners. A first experiment was carried out in 2019 and gave convincing results, which led us to repeat a second experimentation in order to confirm the results on the one hand, and on the other hand, to modify the way learners evaluate the resources by transforming the "like" by a voting mode from one to five, in order to verify whether this will bring an improvement in the recommendations. This second experiment was also an opportunity to integrate an engine that guides learners' searches by adding criteria relating to their preferences and to check their satisfaction with the use of this engine. The results were globally positive.

18

Authors: Guilherme Alves da Silva and Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida

The digital divide/digital inclusion concepts have been of interest to policymakers, particularly since the 1990s. However, the social transformation promised with ICTs adoption and diffusion is more complicated than just providing access. Qualitative studies have emphasized the importance of analyzing skills, appropriation, and negotiation. Authors in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies and in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies also argue that studying technology non-use is also valuable as it broadens the concept of user/non-user beyond a binary look, diving in to understand how people engage or disengage with technologies, besides bringing relevant outputs about why some people do not or cannot become an Internet user. In this paper, we take this approach to analyze national sample surveys carried out in the three most populated countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia). Data from those surveys have directly been used to help formulate public policies in the three countries. We seek to identify indicators related to non-use present in the surveys, analyzing them in order to suggest the broadening of their scope. Besides specific questions about each survey, we find that all of them do not provide data, for example, on people who have stopped using the Internet (as a whole or part of it); do not consider people who access the network indirectly, by other people; and often bring, among motivations for non-use, sentences that do not reveal whether non-use is voluntary or involuntary. At the background of the discussion, we propose that further studies on technology non-use should be done in order to question technology determinism, the idea that everybody should and will become an Internet user.

31

Authors: Johan Stymne

In outdoor learning with mobile technology, students use mobile technology for learning in an outdoor setting, for example in a park or a garden. To understand how mobile technology has been used in outdoor learning, a systematic review was carried out. A number of reviews on mobile learning and on specific sub-areas of mobile learning, such as language learning or computer education have been published in scientific journals and at conferences. So far, however, no systematic review has focused on outdoor learning with mobile technology. To guide the review the following research questions were posed: “Which are the educational subjects and educational levels in outdoor learning with mobile technology?” and “What types of technologies for positioning or navigation, augmentation, and methods for data collection and annotation are used in outdoor learning with mobile technology?”. In total 87 articles, published between 2004 and 2019 were included in this review. Conclusions were that biology was the most common subject, primary or elementary school the most common educational levels, GPS was the major technology used for positioning and navigation, AR was the most common technology used for augmenting the outdoor learning environment, and taking photos and taking notes were the most common methods for data collection in outdoor learning with mobile technology. Building on the conclusions of this review and on previous reviews, suggestions are made for future research.

13

Authors: Paul Lam, Carmen K. M. Lau, Kevin Wong and Chi Him Chan

Student Response Systems (SRS) allow all students to participate in the classroom using their own devices. While it is an effective tool for promoting active participation and classroom interaction, previous studies argue that overuse of the technology can pose a problem of student disengagement. This paper reports on a quantitative study of the relationship between the number of SRS questions disseminated and the number of students’ responses, drawing on data from a locally-developed SRS that was used campus-wide between 2012 and 2015 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Although the number of questions per session varied among different disciplines, likely due to the differences in learning objectives, our results show that student responses were generally stable with virtually no significant drop at the end of the lessons regardless of the number of questions asked. However, other factors may have affected the number of student responses. Our results suggest that continuous use of the technology does not lower student participation, but the design of learning activities may influence the effectiveness of SRS.

14

Authors: Karine Aoun Barakat and Amal Dabbous

Conversational user interfaces also known as chatbots have become widely adopted within the banking sector, as they present numerous advantages such as cost reduction, increased efficiency and quicker servicing of customers. However, these benefits only materialize if organizations ensure the sustained use of these technologies. Hence, identifying the main factors that drive the sustained use of these services is critical to assess new technology adoption given that a very high number of IT implementations fail. Researchers have relied on technology acceptance models to analyze the adoption of these new technologies within organizations; however, little is known about the factors that ensure their sustained use. The concept of sustained use is considered by researchers not simply as an extension of adoption behavior, but rather as having a long-term focus and as being determined by different sets of antecedents. Using a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews with employees of a leading bank operating in a number of developing economies, this research addresses the gap in the literature by investigating the factors that contribute to the sustained use of conversational user interfaces. Findings reveal that eight main internal and external factors are essential to promote the sustained use of chatbots, the most prominent of which are: a positive human-technology relationship, a favorable corporate culture, an adequate regulatory framework and the technology’s high perceived efficiency.

15

Authors: Jun Iio

Twitter provides a list of trending topics, a list of social trends or issues that users of the social networking services (SNS) will be interested in at a given time. However, they are presented as a list of key phrases making it challenging to identify or infer the message of the trending topics. In an attempt decipher the meaning and the structure hidden in the list of trending topics provided by Twitter, we developed a system to visualize topic maps according to the co-occurrence structure of typical tweets that mention the trending topics. This paper describes an overview of the system structure, the main logic to construct topic maps, and a discussion on several findings from its operation between January 1 and June 30, 2019. Also the possibilities of modification to suit the system for the other languages is discussed.

17

Authors: Mairéad Hogan and Chris Barry

This paper presents a research project that used eye tracking technology to study optionality within the online transactional process. The focus was on how micro-decisions can be framed; the option type; the impact of decision default values; and the types of decision constructs. It elaborates and improves on a pilot study that was used to test the experiment design. Prior research that identified problematic decision constructs informed the types of decisions studied. The main findings relate to participant task error rates. Heat maps have also been used to further illustrate the findings.