Academic literature on the topic 'COVID-19 pandemic learning'

Il lavoro di ricerca di questa tesi è volto ad esaminare l’impatto che lo svolgimento della didattica della lingua Inglese a distanza durante la pandemia del Covid-19 ha avuto su due importanti fattori affettivi che caratterizzano l’apprendimento linguistico: motivazione e ansia. In particolare, sono stati indagati i fattori che durante la didattica della lingua Inglese a distanza hanno motivato o demotivato gli studenti, così come i fattori che hanno contribuito ad alzare o ad abbassare i livelli di ansia. Per rispondere alle domande di ricerca è stato utilizzato un questionario somministrato online agli studenti frequentanti una scuola superiore del Nord Italia. Contrariamente alle aspettative, i dati raccolti rivelano che gli studenti non hanno generalmente percepito il fattore distanza come negativo per quanto riguarda motivazione e livelli d’ansia sperimentati.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att studera och bidra till ny kunskap kring om, och i så fall på vilket sätt Covid-19 pandemin har påverkat studenter på Karlstads universitets resvanor. Studien avser även att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan studenters resvanor och behovet av att befinna sig på en viss plats för att genomföra en viss aktivitet. För att möjliggöra detta ska situationen under pandemin jämföras med situationen före pandemin, för att på det sättet upptäcka eventuella skillnader. För att uppnå syftet har två frågeställningar formulerats. Studiens frågeställningar är följande:  - Hur har Covid-19 pandemin påverkat studenterna på Karlstads universitets resvanor? - Hur har behovet av att befinna sig på en viss plats, för att genomföra en viss aktivitet, påverkats till följd av Covid-19 pandemin bland studenter på Karlstads universitet? Studien utgår från en kvantitativ metod i form av en enkät för att få studiens problemformuleringen samt frågeställningarna besvarade. Teorierna som studien utgår ifrån är tidsgeografi, aktivitetsansatsen samt den geografiska och virtuella rörligheten. Aktivitetsansatsen är en ansats som uppkommit ur tidsgeografin och båda dessa teorier ger möjlighet att analysera hur Covid-19 pandemin har påverkat studenter på Karlstads universitets resvanor. Den geografiska och virtuella rörligheten är en teori som förklarar att kommunikation med andra människor blir oberoende av avstånd i samband med att den virtuella rörligheten utvecklas. Sammanfattningsvis handlar det om att geografiska förflyttningar primärt grundar sig i människans behov att till exempel utföra ett visst ärende eller aktivitet samt möta människor på olika platser. Slutsatsen av studien är att respondenternas vardagsresande har minskat till följd av Covid-19 pandemin och att distansundervisningen har medfört att behovet av att befinna sig på lärosätet har minskat.<br>Our purpose with this essay is to study and contribute to new knowledge about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on students' traveling habits. The study also intends to investigate whether there is a link between students' mobility patterns and the need to be in a certain place to carry out an activity. To enable this, differences during the pandemic must be compared with prior to the pandemic. To achieve the purpose with this study, two question formulations have been formulated. The study's question formulations are the following: - How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected students at Karlstad University traveling habits? - How has the need to be in a certain place, to carry out a certain activity, been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic among students at Karlstad University? The study is based on a quantitative method where a survey was designed to get the study's problem formulation and the question formulations answered. The theories on which the study is based are time geography, the activity approach and the geographical and virtual mobility. The activity approach is an approach that has emerged from the time geography and both of these theories give the opportunity to analyze how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected students at Karlstad University's traveling habits. Geographical and virtual mobility is a theory that explains that communication with other people becomes independent of distance due to the development of virtual mobility. In summary, it is a matter of geographical movements primarily being based on the human need to, for example, carry out a certain task or activity and meet people in different places. The conclusion is that the respondents every day travelling has decreased as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic and that the distance learning has reduced the need to be at the centre of learning.

Elementary and secondary schools saw a major shift in how instruction was delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools across the United States shut down or participated in online learning. This shift to online learning led many to question how special education services should be delivered to students with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to gauge perceptions of special education services delivered in a remote learning environment during a public health crisis. Teachers, related service providers, and parents of students with disabilities (n = 108) from across the United States were surveyed. Results showed synchronous online learning to be the most prevalent form of providing special education services. However, participants largely viewed online instruction as ineffective at providing quality services for students with disabilities. Implications for improving online services for students with disabilities could include identifying specific reasons for participants' negative views which may lead to more actionable steps in improving online learning moving forward. In addition, examining actions taken by schools that have led to positive impressions of online learning among parents and educators could also be used to improve perceptions of online instruction for students with disabilities. Directions for future research are also discussed.

In our study, we deal with the experience gained during the Covid-19 pandemic in Slovakia in the replacement of full-time teaching of design in a distance way using non-commercial freely accessible communication and visualization programs. Based on the experience with these programs during the teaching of the studio of "Basics of design" we can say that although full-time teaching has many undeniable advantages, it can be replaced for some time, even a longer time, for example 2 semesters by distance learning, without appreciable losses of any qualitative indicators. In the article we publish the used programs and platforms used of works of students of the 1st year of design studies.

This thesis aims at exploring how remote learning has been performed in an Italian high school. The investigation has been carried out taking into account the opinions and the digital skills of students and teachers, as well as the economic and the psychological aspects. Both parts involved responded spontaneously and anonymously to an online questionnaire. The central question of this explorative study seeks to point out whether the change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has left something positive in the Italian educational system. The data that has been gathered confirmed that students and teachers are more aware of these new technological devices and more willing to integrate remote learning as a tool of learning support.

This study is a qualitative study on professionals' thoughts and experiences about autism in the wake of covid-19. To investigate this, three people who are professional psychologists in different fields with experience on people with autism participated through individual interviews via Zoom of between 25 to 55 minutes.         The results of the study are based on the material from these interviews that were reworked from audio file to transcription, which in turn was analyzed with thematic analysis carried out in a six-step process. The thematic analysis resulted in five themes: introverted/extrovert human autism, need for clarity when unclear, reduced risk of being identified as odd – the digital rescue, support and actions and  post-pandemic response and evaluation.          Conclusions that can be drawn from the results of the study are that as a result of the restrictions on social distance, people with autism and neurotypical people suffer approximately equally based on whether the person is socially interested or not. People with autism during the covid-19 pandemic may have gotten it in part better, those who previously asked for distance learning or opportunities to work remotely from their own home have now been given the opportunity. It is important that people with autism receive the support they need during the pandemic from, for example, school health teams. After the pandemic, evaluations of what worked and not during the pandemic for people with autism need to be carried out.<br>Föreliggande undersökning är en kvalitativ studie om professionellas tankar och erfarenheter om autism i spåren av covid-19. För att undersöka detta deltog tre personer som är yrkesverksamma psykologer inom olika områden med erfarenhet om personer med autism genom enskilda intervjuer via Zoom på  mellan 25 till 55 minuter.     Resultatet i studien är grundat på materialet från dessa intervjuer som bearbetades om från ljudfil till transkribering som i sin tur analyserades med tematisk analys som genomförs i en sexstegsprocess. Den tematiska analysen resulterade i fem teman: den introverta/extroverta mänskliga autismen, behov av tydlighet när det är otydligt, minskad riska att bli utpekad som udda – den digitala räddningen, stöd och insatser och utvärdering efter pandemin.     Slutsatser som är möjliga att dra utifrån studiens resultat är att till följd av restriktionerna om social distansering drabbas personer med autism och neurotypiska personer ungefär likvärdigt utifrån om personen är socialt intresserad eller ej. Personer med autism under pandemin med covid-19 kan ha fått det delvis bättre, dom som tidigare efterfrågat distansstudier eller möjligheter att få arbeta på distans från det egna hemmet nu har getts möjligheten. Det är viktigt att personerna med autism får det stöd de behöver under pandemin från till exempel skolhälsoteam. Efter pandemin behöver det ske utvärderingar om vad som fungerat och inte under pandemin för personer med autism.

The Corona pandemic and Covid-19 has affected the entire globe where we had to adapt to a new way of living and a new standard of doing things. For the universities in Sweden and around the world this generally meant that the universities had to switch to online teaching and digital examinations to the largest extent possible. Even though we have lived in this new kind of every day we know barely anything about how this has affected the grades of the students, and what we can learn about it to do things more effectively in the future. In this paper, I examine the possible effects on grades for students at the university level by using newly collected data from Linnaeus University’s department of economics and statistics. Results show that the grades after the decision to switch to online teaching and digital exams in March of 2020, overall became higher for both males and females but no significant difference between the genders were found.

Over the last decades, machine learning research has considerably contributed to important solutions to numerous decision-making problems. Machine learning systems demonstrate enormous potential to generate decisions beyond the performance of humans or hand-crafted engineering systems, by utilising available feedback from environment and the decision history. In spite of significant efforts, challenges remain in developing a generic and consistent learning framework for modelling and optimising decision-making policies, especially applicable to multi-agent environments with frequent agent interactions and uncertain action outcomes. This thesis examines modelling and optimisation of decisions in highly dynamic and uncertain multi-agent environments. Specifically, we develop a general Markov Decision Process (MDP) based learning framework incorporating complex delayed rewards, aimed to optimise adaptive policies in presence of noise and dynamic agent interactions. In developing methods for this optimisation, we address a number of significant challenges: (a) presence of long delays in observing the action outcomes; (b) policy optimisation over complex and/or decentralised behaviours spanning multiple time steps; and (c) low learning efficiency due to the large search-space size. Two domains are selected to examine and resolve these challenges: (i) a large-scale agent-based model of the COVID-19 pandemic and response, with the task of optimising cost-effectiveness of centralised non-pharmaceutical interventions; and (ii) a simulated two-dimensional multi-agent soccer environment (RoboCup Soccer 2D Simulation), with the task of optimising decentralised policies for teams of autonomous soccer agents. Our studies uncover and resolve several interdependencies in modelling and learning action policies for decision-maker(s) in multi-agent environments. Firstly, we develop a general MDP-based framework capable of modelling action decisions at both global level (centralised actions) and local level (decentralised actions), addressing the question of (i) centralised policies versus decentralised policies. Secondly, we propose methods formulating delayed rewards, including short-term (tactical) and long-term (strategic) outcomes, which are applicable for efficient policy optimisation for both centralised and decentralised action decisions, thus addressing the dichotomy of (ii) short-term versus long-term outcomes of action decisions. Finally, we develop heuristics for preserving modular hierarchical decision-making structure, which narrow the search-space size, thus improving learning efficiency and addressing the dilemma of (iii) learning efficiency versus the size of search space.

När coronapandemin slog till våren 2020 var kemiundervisningen på gymnasieskolorna i Sverige planerad huvudsakligen som närundervisning och få skolor och lärare var förberedda på den snabbt beslutade omställningen till fjärrundervisning. Under vår VFU-period under vårterminen 2021 uppstod en unik chans att undersöka hur ett antal erfarna kemilärare ställde om och hanterade denna speciella situation av undervisning med förutsättningar som ständigt ändrades med kort varsel beroende på smittoläget i Sverige. Lärarna blev tvungna att använda digitala verktyg i sin kemiundervisning under perioderna när eleverna inte fick komma till skolan utan satt hemma framför sina datorer. Syftet med denna studie var att utifrån ett lärar- och elevperspektiv undersöka pandemins effekter på kemiundervisningen på gymnasiet som bedrivits i en hybrid delvis på distans, delvis i klassrummet samt ibland till och med båda samtidigt. En huvudsakligen kvalitativ undersökning har genomförts med data från semistrukturerade intervjuer av kemilärare på gymnasiet samt från elevenkäter som analyserades med tematisk analys. Analysresultatet pekar på att lärarna själva medger att de haft stora utmaningar med fjärrundervisningen som de upplever inte gett samma lärande som närundervisning. Trots denna försvårande omständighet upplevde lärarna att de generellt lyckades nå kursmålen tack vare ständiga omplaneringar, merarbete och med extrastöd till eleverna åstadkomma ett lärande i kemi i slutet på läsåret på ungefär samma nivå som tidigare år med enbart närundervisning. Elevernas uppfattning var att det var svårare att lära sig under distansperioderna vilket medförde stora tapp i motivation och de gav uttryck för att de hade föredragit att få vara mer i skolans lokaler för att lära sig mer av eget laborerande och kunna interagera lättare och mer med både lärare och klasskamrater.<br>A mainly qualitative survey was conducted using insights from semi-structured interviews of high school chemistry teachers and thematically-analyzed student surveys. The teachers admitted there were major challenges with using online methodologies and tools for education that had not provided the same level of learning as the traditional classroom environment. Despite the aggravating circumstances disrupting their classes, the teachers managed to generally achieve the course goals. However, it required continuous planning, additional time and extra support for them to help students reach the course goals at the same levels as previous years. The students perceived this initial period of remote learning to be more difficult which led toa reduction in motivation. They claimed that lab work was more conducive at school where they could interact more easily and engage with teachers and fellow classmates.