Proceedings of ICVL 2018 (ISSN 1844-8933, ISI Proceedings)

The 13th International Conference on Virtual Learning
VIRTUAL LEARNING – VIRTUAL REALITY
Phase II - Period 2010-2020: e-Skills for the 21st Century

Phase III - Period 2020-2030: Intelligence Learning –
Knowledge Society and Learning Culture
www.icvl.eu | www.cniv.ro
The ICV and CNIV projects supports Digital Agenda-Europe 2020
ISSN: 1844-8933 - ISI Proceedings, accessed

via Web of Science, since year 2006
ICVL 2018 dedicated to The Centenary

of the Great Union from 1918
ICVL and CNIV Coordinator: PhD. Marin Vlada, University of Bucharest
The printing of Proceedings was sponsored by the Romanian Ministry of Research and
Innovation, EUROPE – ROMANIA
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publishers represent violations of the intellectual property rights legislation
and are punishable under the criminal and/or civil law in force.
Proceedings of the 13th
International Conference
On Virtual Learning
OCTOBER 26-28, 2018
MODELS & METHODOLOGIES, TECHNOLOGIES, SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

, 2018
ICVL and CNIV Partners: Grigore Albeanu, Mircea Popovici, Radu Jugureanu,
Adrian Adăscăliței, Olimpius Istrate
www.icvl.eu www.cniv.ro
ISSN: 1844-8933 – ISI Proceedings,

accessed via Web of Science, since year 2006
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MOTTO
“The informatics/computer science re-establishes not only the unity between

the pure and the applied mathematical sciences, the concrete technique and the
concrete mathematics, but also that between the natural sciences, the human
being and the society. It restores the concepts of the abstract and the formal and
makes peace between arts and science not only in the scientist' conscience, but in
their philosophy as well..”
Grigore C. Moisil (1906-1973)

Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bucharest,
Member of the Romanian Academy,
Computer Pioneer Award of IEEE, 1996
http://www.icvl.eu/2006/grcmoisil
“We are born with the need to learn and live with it throughout our lives. It is
for the human being what is the breath for the human body”
Solomon Marcus (1925-2016)

Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bucharest,
Member of the Romanian Academy, An encyclopedic personality and a pioneer in
the fields of Mathematical Linguistics, Grammars and Finite Automata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Marcus
“Learning is evolution of knowledge over time”
Roger E. Bohn
Professor of Management and expert on technology management,
University of California, San Diego, USA,
Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
http://irps.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty-directory/roger-e-bohn.htm
GENERAL CONTENTS
About ICVL 2018 ................................................. 15
Section M&M
MODELS & METHODOLOGIES .................................................... 25
Sections TECH
TECHNOLOGIES & VIRTUAL LABORATORY ................................ 297
Sections SOFT
SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS ............................................................. 381
Section Intel® Education

INNOVATION IN EDUCATION AND RESEARCH ............................ 447
Authors Index ..................................................................... 535

C O N T E N T S
Paper Page
No.
PAPER TITLE AND AUTHOR(S) No.
Section Models & Methodologies
Grigore C. Moisil, Computer Pioneer Award and the founder of Romanian
Computer Science/Informatics
1 27
Marin Vlada
Digital Encyclopedia “Romania 1918. People, moments and images”
2 39
Radu Jugureanu, Magda Stan, Daniela Mironov Bănuță, Bogdan Gornea
Ozias Adler (1928-2001), The Romanian Digital Printing Pioneer
3 45
Alexandru Adler, Radu Jugureanu
An OWL Prototype Educational Ontology for Functional Programming
4 51
Mihaela Oprea
A Model for Teaching University Courses by Integrating Modern
Technologies and its Application to the Artificial Intelligence Course
5 57
Mihaela Oprea, Silviu Teodor Groza, George Bogdan Bucur
Blended Learning Methodologies and ePedagogical Approaches Used
in an Electrical and Computer Engineering Education Program
Leading to International Accreditation
6 63
Ashraf Salah El-Din Zein El-Din, Adrian Adăscăliței, Marinel
Temneanu, Sebastian Arădoaiei
Blended Learning Approach Applied to Electrical Engineering Courses
7 78
Arădoaei Sebastian Teodor, Adăscăliței Adrian
Teacher’s feedback using Moodleand blend learning
8 87
Dineva Snejana
Importance of the Positive Atmosphere in the Blended Learning for Active
Learning of the Students
9 92
Ducheva Zlatoeli, Pehlivanova Margarita
Understanding and Supporting student’s collaboration and communication in
blended learning
10 99
Nedeva Veselina, Dineva Snejana
Improving the quality of study assessment
11 106
Dineva Snejana, Nedeva Veselina, Zlatoeli Ducheva
The 13th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2018 9
Differentiated success rate in e-testing of students of pedagogical specialties

12 112
Ivanka Nikolaeva Shivacheva-Pineda
Education influence of artistic elements and principles on the street network
13 119
Vaska Sandeva, Katerina Despot, Zlatin Zlatev
Application of optical device in methodology for teaching analysisof
essential oils
14 124
Zlatin Zlatev, Stanka Baycheva
How student collaboration influence on student success
15 130
Educational Situation as a Tool for Communication Activity Motivation in
the Virtual Learning Environment
16 136
Iryna Vereitina, Yurii Baidak, Oksana Popel
Advantages, Disadvantages and Limitations of Using Google Forms for
17 Online Tests (A Case Study of a Russian University) 142
Natalia Sazonova, Svetlana Ivanova, Anastasia Lavrova
Distance education as a condition of elderly’s social activity
18 149
Olga Volkova, Polina Ananchenkova, Oksana Besschetnova
Using of distance learning technologies in the educational process of orphans
and children left without parental care
19 155
Olga Volkova, Polina Ananchenkova, Oksana Besschetnova
Distance learning technologies as a tool in managing corporate knowledge
system
20 159
Polina Ananchenkova
The motives of a choice of e-learning system of training by students of
colledge and higher education institution
21 163
Polina Ananchenkova, Dilbar Amonova
Features of distance learning of personnel in the sphere of philanthropy and
social entrepreneurship
22 167
Petrova Mariya, Petrova Alla
Distance learning for social service: case-study of the Department of Church
charity and social service of the Russian Orthodox Church
23 174
Petrova Alla
Using the method of case-study in distance learning system at training young
entrepreneurs
24 179
Martirosyan Oksana
10 University of Bucharest and “1 December 1918” University of Alba Iulia
Social Network Analysis in E-Education

25 184
Branka Lasković, Zorica Bogdanović, Tamara Naumović, Marijana
Despotović-Zrakić, Božidar Radenković
Nowadays education and long-life learning
26 190
Dineva Snejana
Creating online evaluation system using new technologies
27 197
Doru Anastasiu Popescu, Camelia Ioana Toma
Learning model using predefined blocks
28 205
Doru Anastasiu Popescu, Ovidiu Domșa
Characteristics of the Items Administered in the NationalEvaluation Science
Testing 6th grade
29 210
Gabriela Deliu, Cristina Miron, Cristian Opariuc-Dan
Exploratory Analysis of the Equivalence of Tests, applied to National
Evaluation Tests - Mathematics and Natural Sciences - 6th grade
30 217
Gabriela Deliu, Cristina Miron, Cristian Opariuc-Dan
The internet - Information resources for students in the study of children's
literature
31 223
Oana Stoican, Cornelia Ștefănescu, Valeriu Ștefănescu
Educational software - Learning resource for pupils in primary education
32 229
Cornelia Ştefănescu, Oana Stoican, Valeriu Ștefănescu
Online Learning Readiness Level of High School Teachers
33 236
Ersun İscioglu
Impact of Online Learning on the Environmental Awareness: An Opinions of
Secondary School Teachers
34 240
Ersun İscioglu, Deniz Iscioglu
Perceived intensity and causes of criticism within romantic relationships.
Findings from a Romanian sample
35 246
Andreea Ursu
A Comparative Approach to the Impact of 2D Animations and 3D Computer
Animated Movies in Students’ Cognitive Process of Comprehension
36 253
Stanca-Maria Iurean
A curriculum of all the talents-problem solving case
37 259
Tripon Cristina
Aspirations for tomorrows-education plan for active citizens
38 265
Cristina Tripon
Usefulness of Web Sources in Geography Bibliographical Research and

Learning
39 272
Oana-Ramona Ilovan, Sorin-Alin Kosinszki, Maria Eliza Dulamă, Marian
Marin
Visual Materials from Web Sources in Studying Regional Geography Topics
40 278
Ioana Cristina Magdaș, Oana-Ramona Ilovan, Maria Eliza Dulamă,
Cosmina-Daniela Ursu
Can microlearning be an alternative in training for textile industry staff?
41 285
Liliana Buhu, Adrian Buhu
Virtual solutions for industrial automation education
42 290
Robert Beloiu
Section Technologies & Virtual Laboratory

Augmented Virtuality as an Instrument for a Better Learning of
History
43 299
Dragoș Gheorghiu, Livia Ștefan
Light Intensity Control Using Arduino and LabVIEW

44 306
Mihai Bogdan
Monitoring and Alarming the Level of Liquid in a Tank
45 311
Mihai Bogdan
Gas Detector Using Arduino and LabVIEW

46 315
Mihai Bogdan
ECOKT Pilot project – Open Knowledge Technologies: Mapping and
validating knowledge
47 319
Octavian-Marius Preda, Mihaela Garabet, Dorothea Caraman
Lucr-49 BEACONING Project
48 325
Octavian-Marius Preda, Mihaela Garabet, Dorothea Caraman
Could we objectively evaluate the process of teaching? A critical overview
about teaching, e-teaching and distance teaching
49 332
Andreea C. Buzduga, Petru-Adrian Istrimschi, Ovidiu Stofor
Distance learning in support of social entrepreneurship: the russian
experience (case-study)
50 336
Petrova Mariya
Virtual Image Processing E-Learning System Re-architecture on Cloud

Platform Service
51 342
Eugen Zaharescu, Atena Georgeta Zaharescu
E-training tutorial for the enhancement of the clothing designer technical
skills
52 349
Avadanei Manuela- Lacramioara, Loghin Emil- Constantin, Ionescu Irina,
Ionesi Savin- Dorin, Dulgheriu Ionut
A simple physics experiment with unexpected results revealed by using the
of augmented reality tool and methods
53 355
Sorin Trocaru, István Bartos-Elekes
Blockchain and its Potential in Education
54 361
Cristina Turcu, Cornel Turcu, Iuliana Chiuchișan
COVEO – an e-learning tool for the induction and continuous training of IT
employees
55 368
Sorina Chircu
Study of a Learning Method based on Energy Optimization of
Electromechanical System
56 374
Mariana Iorgulescu
Section Software Solutions

E-environment platform for learning the management of the protected areas
57 383
Radu Rădescu, Alexandru-Cristian Trifan
E-learning application for studying video conversion and video editing
58 390
Radu Rădescu, Mihail-Cristian Stancana
Experimental Elearning Application for Distributed Data Mining Systems
59 397
Pupezescu Valentin, Dragomir Marilena-Cătălina
E-Learning Improvement Using Computer Vision
60 403
George Suciu, Muneeb Anwar, Cristian Vasilescu, Hussain Ijaz
Digital, e-Learning models of learners and teacher based on text and image
analysis in Artificial Intelligence
61 409
Cristian Vasilescu, Cristian Mocanu
SoMeDi: Successful Internship Programs Matching Job Offers with
Candidates Skills
62 415
George Suciu, Adrian Pasat, Ioana Rogojanu
Video tutorials' scenarization: development and implementation for

educational purposes
63 421
Natalia Burlacu
Creating Multiple Courses in “Google Classroom” using Google’s Sheets
and Apps Script
64 428
Miroslav Karabaliev, Boyana Paarvanova, Bilyana Tachev
Solutions For Designing Software Modules Used By Android Devices In
Inventory Management
65 435
Liviu Şerbănescu
Design an assisted editing software module based on DBMS server side
programming
66 440
Liviu Şerbănescu
Section Intel® Education

Experimental Design of Passive House
67 447
Roxana-Elena Ion, Sanda Voinea
E-learning in the russian internet: an overview of major platforms and
resources
68 452
Elena Aksenova
E-learning: will distance education replace traditional one?
69 457
Elena Aksenova, Dilbar Amonova
E-learning as a tool for regional educational space virtualization
70 463
Tonkonog Victoriya, Polina Ananchenkova
Comparative analysis of satisfaction with distance learning among students
of different specialization
71 470
Tonkonog Victoriya, Polina Ananchenkova
The concept of system of remote training of specialists in the field of
advertising and public relations in the conditions of formation of uniform
72 educational space 476
Moreeva Elena
Some aspects of using distance technologies during vocational training of
unemployed citizens
73 781
Kuznetsov Mikhail, Dilbar Amonova
Virtual Learning Spaces With Go-Lab
74 486
Ristea Lidia
Didactic Excel tool for the study of elastic hysteresis

75 490
Ionel Grigore, Daniela Stoica, Mihai Popescu
Shaping Online Identity and future work identity
76 497
Magdalena Velciu
The aptitude for school education from different perspectives
77 502
Flavia Mălureanu, Luiza Enachi-Vasluianu
A study on disruptive communicative behaviour in school
78 507
Luiza Enachi-Vasluianu, Flavia Mălureanu
Developing ICT’s skills for women practicing a hobby
79 512
Magdalena Velciu, Grecu Liliana
Examination of Adolescents’ Media and Technology Usages based on
Various Demographics
80 517
Yalın Kılıç Türe, Özlem Dokumac
The Effect of XBOX Kinect in a Classroom Motivation
81 522
Yalın Kılıç Türel, Muhammad Muhammad Inuwa
E-learning and equal access to quality education
82 528
Dineva Snejana, Nedeva Veselina
About ICVL 2018
ICVL Project – www.icvl.eu

2010 – TOWARDS A LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY – 2030
VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
C3VIP: “Consistency-Competence-Clarity-Vision-Innovation-Performance”
© Project Coordinator: Ph.D. Marin Vlada, University of Bucharest, Romania

Partners: Ph. D. Prof. Grigore Albeanu, Ph. D. Mircea Dorin Popovici,
Prof. Radu Jugureanu, Ph. D. Adrian Adăscăliței, Ph D. Olimpius Istrate
Institutions: The Romanian Ministry of Research and

Innovation, University of Bucharest, SIVECO Romania
October 26-28, 2018 – ALBA IULIA, EUROPE-

ROMANIA
Location: “December 1st 1918” University of Alba Iulia –

The Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering - Department
of Exact Sciences and Engineering, ALBA IULIA,
ROMANIA
Organizers: University of Bucharest, “December 1st 1918” University of Alba Iulia, The
Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering, SIVECO Romania
Participate
The Conference is structured such that it will:
 provide a vision of European e-Learning and e-Training policies;

 take stock of the situation existing today;
 work towards developing a forward looking approach.
The Conference will consider the perspectives and vision of the i-2010 programme and
how this will stimulate the promotion, and development of e-Learning content, products
and services and the contribution of these to lifelong learning.
Participation is invited from researches, teachers, trainers, educational authorities,

learners, practitioners, employers, trade unions, and private sector actors and IT industry.
Conference Organisation
 General Chair Dr. Marin Vlada, Professor of

Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Research
Center for Computer Science (Romania), European
INTUITION Consortium member
 Technical Programme Chair Dr. Grigore Albeanu,

Professor of Computer Science, Spiru Haret University,
Research Center for Mathematics and Informatics
(Romania)
 Associate General Chair Dr. Dorin Mircea Popovici,

Professor of Computer Science, Ovidius University of
Constanta (Romania), CERV- European Center for
Virtual Reality (France)
 Associate General Chair Prof. Radu Jugureanu, AeL

eContent Department Manager, SIVECO Romania SA,
Bucharest, Romania
 Associate General Chair Dr. Adrian Adăscăliţei,

Professor at Technical University "Gh. Asachi" of Iasi,
Romania
 Associate General Chair Dr. Olimpius Istrate, Prof. at

University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and
Educational Sciences, Romania
Scientific Committee/Technical Programme Committee / Executive reviewers
Dr. Grigore Professor of Computer Science, Spiru Haret University,

Albeanu Research Center for Mathematics and Informatics, Romania
Professor of Electrical Engineering Fundamentals, Technical
Dr. Adrian
University "Gh. Asachi", Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Iasi,
Adascalitei
Romania
Professor of Electrical Engineering, Carinthia University of
Applied Sciences, School of Systems Engineering, Villach,
Dr. Michael E.
Austria
Auer
General Chair, ICL – Interactive Computer aided Learning,
http://www.icl-conference.org/
Research Associate Professor (INTUITION Coordinator,
Dr. Angelos http://www.intuition-eunetwork.net/), Institute of
Amditis Communication and Computer Systems, ICCS- NTUA
Microwaves and Optics Lab, ATHENS, GREECE
Professor of Computer Science (Virtual Reality), Mathematics
Dr. Rareş Boian and Computer Science, "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-
Napoca, Romania, http://www.ubbcluj.ro
Professor of Applied Science (Robotics), Rutgers – The State
Dr. Grigore
University of New Jersey, Director, Human-Machine Interface
Burdea
Laboratory, CAIP Center, USA
LISYC – Laboratoire d'Informatique des Systèmes Complexes,
Dr. Pierre
CERV – Centre Européen de Réalité Virtuelle (European Center for
Chevaillier
Virtual Reality), France, European INTUITION Consortium member
Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VIRART), School
Dr. Mirabelle of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering
D' Cruz (M3),University of Nottingham University, U.K., European
INTUITION Consortium member
Dr. Steve Noyce Visiting Professor of Computer Science, Grinnell
Cunningham College, Grinnell, Iowa, USA Department of Computer Science
Professor of Computer Science, Executive Editor of IJCCC,
Dr. Ioan Dzitac
Agora University,Oradea, Romania
Dr. Victor Professor of Computer Science, “Al.I. Cuza” University of Iasi,
Felea Faculty of Computer Science, Romania
Dr. Horia Professor of Computer Science University of Bucharest, Faculty
Georgescu of Mathematics and Computer Science, Romania
Dr. Radu Professor of Computer Science University of Bucharest, Faculty

Gramatovici of Mathematics and Computer Science, Romania
Dr. Felix Professor of Computer Science at Armstrong Atlantic State
Hamza-Lup University, USA
Dr. Angela Romanian Academy, Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Ionita (RACAI), Deputy Director, Romania
Dr. Olimpius University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational
Istrate Sciences, Bucharest, Romania www.elearning.ro
Prof. Radu AeL eContent Department Manager, SIVECO Romania SA,
Jugureanu Bucharest, Romania www.siveco.ro
Dr. Bogdan Professor at University of Buchares, Faculty of Psychology and
Logofatu Educational Sciences, Bucharest, Romania www.unibuc.ro
Dr. Jean-Pierre ISEN Brest (école d'ingénieurs généralistes des hautes
Gerval technologies), France, European INTUITION Consortium member
AFPA Direction de l'Ingénierie Unité Veille sur la Réalité
Dr. Daniel
Virtuelle MONTREUIL, European INTUITION Consortium
Mellet-d'Huart
member
Dr. Marius Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of
Măruşteri Medicine and Pharmacy Târgu - Mureş, Romania
Dr. Mihaela Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of Ploiesti,
Oprea Romania
Thomas Osburg Intel Education Manager, Europe www.intel.com/education
Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VIRART)/Human

Factors Group Innovative Technology Research Centre, School
Dr. Harshada
of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering,
(Ash) Patel
University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, U.K.,
European INTUITION Consortium member
Professor at Computer Science Department of Western
Dr. Dana Petcu University of Timisoara, Director at Institute e-Austria
Timisoara, Romania
Professor of Computer Science, Ovidius University of
Dr. Dorin
Constanta, Romania / CERV– European Center for Virtual
Mircea Popovici
Reality (France, European INTUITION Consortium member)
Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Advanced
Dr. Ion Roceanu Distributed Learning Department, "Carol I" National Defence
University, Bucharest, Romania
Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Lab., Department

Dr. Maria
of Computer Science, University College London, U.K.,
Roussou
European INTUITION Consortium member
CERV – Centre Européen de Réalité Virtuelle (European Center for
Dr. Ronan
Virtual Reality), Laboratoire d'Informatique des Systèmes
Querrec
Complexes, France
Professor of Computer Science, University "Politehnica" of
Dr. Luca-Dan
Bucharest, Romania and Professor at the "La Sapienza"
Serbanati
University, Italy, European INTUITION Consortium member
Dr. Leon Professor of Computer Science, "Babes-Bolyai" University, Cluj-
Tambulea Napoca, Romania
CERV – Centre Européen de Réalité Virtuelle (European Center
Dr. Jacques for Virtual Reality), LISYC – Laboratoire d'Informatique des
Tisseau Systèmes Complexes, France, European INTUITION
Consortium member
Dr. Alexandru Professor at “Al. I. Cuza” University of Iasi, FEAA, “Al. I.
Tugui Cuza” University Iasi, Romania
Dr. Marin Professor of Computer Science, University of Bucharest,
Vlada Romania, European INTUITION Consortium member
Research papers – Major Topics
The papers describing advances in the theory and practice of Virtual Environments for
Education and Training (VEL&T), Virtual Reality (VR), Virtual Laboratory (VirtLab),
Information and Knowledge Processing (I&KP), as well as practical results and original
applications. The education category includes both the use of Web Technologies,
Computer Graphics (CG) and Virtual Reality Applications, New tools, methods,
pedagogy and psychology, Case studies of Web Technologies and Streaming Multimedia
Applications in Education, experience in preparation of courseware.
Thematic Areas / Sections
 MODELS & METHODOLOGIES (M&M)

 TECHNOLOGIES & VIRTUAL LABORATORY (TECH)
 SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS (SOFT)
 "Intel® Education" – Innovation in Education and Research (IntelEdu)
Objectives
2010 – Towards a Learning and Knowledge Society – 2030

Phase III - Period 2020-2030: Intelligence Learning –
Knowledge Society and Learning Culture
Relevant topics include but are not restricted to:

 National Policies and Strategies on Virtual Learning
 National Projects on Virtual Universities
 International Projects and International Collaboration on Web-based Education
 Dot-com Educational Institutions and their Impact on Traditional Universities
 Educational Portals for education and training
 Reusable Learning Objects for e-Learning and e-Training
 Testing and Assessment Issues of Web-based Education
 Academia/Industry Collaboration on Web-based Training
 Faculty Development on Web-based Education
 Funding Opportunities for Projects in Web-based Education
Learning and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (I&CT) will
be examined from a number of complementary perspectives:
 Education – supporting the development of key life skills and competences

 Research – emerging technologies and new paradigms for learning
 Social – improving social inclusion and addressing special learning needs
 Enterprise – for growth, employment and meeting the needs of industry
 Employment – lifelong learning and improving the quality of jobs
 Policy – the link between e-Learning and European / National policy imperatives
 Institutional – the reform of Europe’s education and training systems and how
I&CT can act as catalyst for change
 Industry – the changing nature of the market for learning services and the new
forms of partnership that are emerging
General Objectives
The implementation of the Information Society Technologies (IST) according to the

European Union Framework-Programme (FP7), Digital Agenda-Europe 2020
 The development of a Romanian Framework supporting the professional and

management initiatives of the educational community.
 The organization of the activities concerning the cooperation between the educational
system and the economical companies to find out an adequate distribution of the
human resources over the job market.
 To promote and implement the modern ideas for both the initial and continuing
education, to promote the team based working, to attract and integrate the young
graduates in the Research and Development projects, to promote and implement
IT&C for initial and adult education activities.
Particular objectives
The development of Research, projects, and software for E-Learning, Software and
Educational Management fields
 To promote and develop scientific research for e-Learning, Educational Software,

Virtual Reality and Virtual Laboratory.
 To create a framework for a large scale introduction of the e-Learning approaches
in teaching activity.
 To assist the teaching staff and IT&C professionals in the usage of the modern
technologies for teaching both in the initial and adult education.
 To improve the cooperation among students, teachers, pedagogues, psychologists
and IT professionals in specification, design, coding, and testing of the educational
software.
 To increase the teachers' role and responsibility to design, develop and use of the
traditional technologies and IT&C approaches in a complementary fashion, both
for initial and adult education.
 To promote and develop information technologies for the teaching, management
and training activities.
 To promote and use Educational Software Packages for the initial and adult education.
Thematic Areas/Sections
Models & Methodologies (M&M):

 Innovative Teaching and Learning Technologies
 Web-based Methods and Tools in Traditional, Online Education and
Training
 Collaborative E-Learning, E-Pedagogy,
 Design and Development of Online Courseware
 Information and Knowledge Processing
 Knowledge Representation and Ontologism
 Cognitive Modelling and Intelligent systems
 Algorithms and Programming for Modelling
Technologies & Virtual Laboratory (TECH):

 Innovative Web-based Teaching and Learning Technologies
 Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) technologies
 Web, Virtual Reality/AR and mixed technologies
 Web-based Education (WBE), Web-based Training (WBT)
 New technologies for e-Learning, e-Training and e-Skills
 Educational Technology, Virtual Laboratory, Web-Lecturing Technology
 Mobile E-Learning, Communication Technology Applications
 Computer Graphics and Computational Geometry
 Intelligent Virtual Environment
Software Solutions (SOFT):

 New software environments for education & training
 Software and management for education
 Virtual Reality Applications in Web-based Education
 Computer Graphics, Web, VR/AR and mixed-based applications for
education & training, business, medicine, industry and other sciences
 Multi-agent Technology Applications in WBE and WBT
 Streaming Multimedia Applications in Learning
 Scientific Web-based Laboratories and Virtual Labs
 Software Computing in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence
 Avatars and Intelligent Agents
Innovation in education and research (IntelEDU):

 Digital Curriculum, collaborative rich-media applications, student
software, teacher software
 Improved Learning Methods, interactive and collaborative methods to
help teachers incorporate technology into their lesson plans and enable
students to learn anytime, anywhere
 Professional Development, readily available training to help teachers
acquire the necessary ICT skills
 Connectivity and Technology, group projects and improve communication
among teachers, students, parents and administrators
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Virtual Environments for Learning (VEL):

 Web & Virtual Reality technologies
 Educational Technology and Web-Lecturing Technology
 Innovative Web-based Teaching and Learning Technologies
 Software and Management for Education
Virtual Reality (VR):

 Algorithms and Programming for Modeling
 Web & Virtual Reality-based applications
 Virtual Laboratory and Technologies
 Graphics applications for education & training, business, medicine,
industry and other sciences
 Software Computing in Virtual Reality
Knowledge Processing (KP):

 Mobile E-Learning, Communication Technology Applications
 Cognitive Modelling, Intelligent systems
 New Software Technologies, Avatars and Intelligent Agents
 Software Computing in Artificial Intelligence
Tournament ICVL Project (founded 2006, http://c3.icvl.eu/) and CNIV Project

(founded 2003, http://c3.cniv.ro/): Future vs. Vision.
Section
MODELS & METHODOLOGIES
Models and Methodologies (M&M):

 Innovative Teaching and Learning Technologies
 Web-based Methods and Tools in Traditional, Online
Education and Training
 Collaborative E-Learning, E-Pedagogy,
 Design and Development of Online Courseware
 Cognitive Modelling and Intelligent systems
 Algorithms and Programming for Modelling
Grigore C. Moisil, Computer Pioneer Award and the founder of
Romanian Computer Science/Informatics
Marin Vlada
University of Bucharest, 14 Academiei Street, RO-010014, Romania

E-mail: vlada[at]fmi.unibuc.ro
Abstract
The article describes the concerns and role of Gr. C. Moisil in the development of
Computer Science. Gr. C Moisil formed not a school, but several schools, including one of
mechanics, one of mathematical logic and one of algebraic theory of automatic mechanisms.
This is explained by the fecundity of his ideas, by the skill with which he was able to present
not a "ready-made" mathematics, but one that was built in the presence of the audience, and
where the open issues, the issues that could be improved were always underlined. His thinking
was essentially open, according to the observation he so boldly formulated somewhere: "No
problem has borders. Any answer has many". In every field he worked. Gr. C. Moisil linked
his name to an idea, a fact, a method. He grasped the importance of logic with more value, at
a time when they seemed just a bizarre, and then find them surprising applications in
technique. Moisil's point of view is aligned with that of Lotfi Zadeh (the creator of the fuzzy
crowd theory). In Romania he was one of those who campaigned for the construction of
Romanian computers and their use in solving problems in the Romanian society. Today, Gr.
C. Mosil is considered the father of Romanian Informatics/Computer Science.
Keywords: Computer Pioneer, Computer Sciences, Informatics, Romanian Informatics
MOTTO: "All what is correct thinking is either mathematics or

feasible to be transposed in a mathematical model."
Grigore C. Moisil
1 About mathematician Grigore C. Moisil
Grigore C. Moisil (January 10, 1906-May 21, 1973), The founder of Romanian
Informatics and Computer Pioneer Award of Computer Society (IEEE - 1996)
 Romanian mathematician, Professor at the University of Bucharest – Faculty of
Mathematics and Computer Science, member of the Romanian Academy, member of the
Academy of Sciences in Bologna and of the International Institute of Philosophy
 Grigore C. Moisil, 1996 Computer Pioneer Award "For the development of polyvalent
logic switching circuits, the Romanian School of Computing, and support of the first
Romanian computers."
Grigore C. Moisil pioneered the application of mathematical logic to computer science. In the
1950s, Moisil developed a new structural theory of finite automata and proposed what he called
"The trivalent Lukasziewiczian algebras applied to the logic of switching circuits" an important
contribution to the development of computer science in those early years. Ref.:
http://www.computer.org/
Grigore C. Moisil followed three years of engineering courses – the construction department
(with the exams), simultaneously with the courses at the Faculty of Mathematics, which he
continued - only on these, obtaining the doctorate in mathematics with the doctoral thesis
"Analytical Mechanics system of continuous systems" in 1929. Through those years of
professional training in both engineering and mathematics, perhaps the mathematician Gr. C.
Moisil was attracted and passionately concerned by the applications of mathematical logic in
various practical problems (through discussions and collaborations with Leon Livovschi and
others, it was the period of application development in the field of automation and computers),
reaching the Algebraic Theory of Automated Mechanisms - for which IEEE Computer Society was
awarded the "Pioneer Computer". With this theory he promoted the construction of the first
Romanian computers and the use of electronic computers to solve the problems of the people's
practical activities.
Fig. 1 The paper presented in the competition for the Engineer Award H. Capriel by Gr. C.
Moisil, 3rd year of Mathematics and 2nd year of the Polytechnic School, 1926
We must mention Victor Toma's account of the organization of the International Mathematics
Congress, held in Bucharest in 1956: "During the same period, numerous scientific events, both
national and international, took place in the country. A special manifestation of the Romanian
mathematical school consisted of the International Mathematics Congress, held in Bucharest in
the autumn of 1956, attended by many famous mathematicians from abroad. In his capacity as
President of the Romanian Mathematical Society, Professor Moisil played an important
organizational role. Among other things, he organized information visits for congress participants
at the electronic computer Lab at Institute of Atomic Physics (I.F.A.) Magurele. The CIFA-1
computer was already built and would be operational some months later in April 1957. For many
mathematicians whose preoccupations were purely theoretical, this was a new field and they first
saw an electronic computer."
Fig. 2 Professor Gr. C. Moisil at the home office
Today in international and national projects, participation in mixed teams – mathematicians,

computer scientists, engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, pedagogues,
economists, etc. can lead to useful and necessary results for society as a result of solving various
problems , involving methods, theories, algorithms, including the use of performance computing
systems, these being implemented through project collaboration. Probably – in 1962, these
desiderata led Gr. C. Moisil to the necessity of setting up the Computer Center of the University of
Bucharest (CCUB). The vision, belief and spirit of Gr. C. Moisil influenced the thinking of those
who followed his ideas in the years when computers appeared in Romania and were used to solve
the problems of society, as Moisil predicted.
In 2013, with the 110th birth of Gr. C. Moisil, Prof. Dr. Cristian Calude concludes: "Moisil
was a remarkable researcher who excelled in introducing new ideas, methods and research
directions, a an unconventional teacher who inspired, motivated and encouraged a large number
of young people who became valuable mathematicians, the creator of Romanian mathematics
schools, especially in solid mechanics, mathematical logic and computer science, supporter of
mathematical applications in other fields, the promoter of the privileged relationship between
mathematics and computer science and, as a natural consequence, the one who contributed the
most to the introduction of informatics in Romania (Professor Marcus's view, Moisil's
computational literacy campaign was analogous to the literacy of Spiru Haret)".
2. Grigore C. Moisil, 1959-1971 the founding of the Romanian Informatics

"The Informatics/Computer Science restores not only the unity between the pure and the
applied mathematical sciences, the concrete technique and the abstract mathematics, but also that
between the natural sciences, the human being and the society. It restores the concepts of the
abstract and the formal and makes peace between arts and science not only in the scientist'
conscience, but in their philosophy as well." Grigore C. Moisil
 In 1959 Gr. C. Moisil founded the specialization/section "Computing Machines" (later the
Department of Informatics) at the Faculty of Mathematics at University of Bucharest
 In 1962 Gr. C. Moisil founded the Computing Center of the University of Bucharest
(CCUB) at the Faculty of Mathematics.
 In 1968 CCUB, with Moisil's major efforts acquired an American computing system IBM
360/30 and was used to train many generations of computer scientists, contributing to the
IT program in Romania.
 During 1970/1971, Computer science (Informatics) specialization/section (mathematical
profile), Computer and automation specialization (engineering profile) and Economic
informatics (economics) sections were set up in Bucharest, Cluj, Iaşi and Timişoara.
Fig. 3 Acad. Grigore C. Moisil together with the students of "Computing Machines" at a
demonstration in front of the CCUB analog computer from 1965 (explanations prof. N. Popoviciu,
Source: prof. A. Atanasiu, http://fmi.unibuc.ro/revistadelogica/articole/No1Art73.pdf)
Fig. 4 Grigore C. Moisil in the IBM 360/30 computer room (in front of the computer) at CCUB
(TVR archive)
Fig. 5 Grigore C. Moisil together with

collaborators in the IBM 360
computer room in the building on
Ştefan Furtună str., where is the
Computer Center of the University of
Bucharest). From left to right: Maria
Lovin, Constantin Popovici, Popoviciu
Nicolae, Petre Preoteasa, Stelian
Niculescu, acad. Grigore C. Moisil
Fig. 6 Grigore C. Moisil in the IBM 360/30

computer room (in front of the magnetic
drive) at CCUB
Fig. 7 Year 1998, Postcard,

Gr. C Moisil (1906-1973). The
algebraic theory of automatic
mechanisms (1959). Algebraic
structure of polyvalent logic –
COMPUTER PIONEER
"In every field he worked. Gr.C. Moisil has linked his name to an idea, a fact, a method. He
intrigued the importance of logic with more value, at a time when they seemed just a bizarre, then
to find tech-savvy applications. Moisil's point of view is related to that of Lotfi Zadeh (the creator
of the theory of fuzzy sets), in that the idea of a fuzzy set can be regarded as an extension of a
predicate in logic with an infinite value, logical to which logic with a finite number of values are
just some approximations. In fact, this view had already been outlined by Moisil in some previous
articles. The originality of this point of view, which retains from the structure of vague concepts,
not only the aspect of imprecision, but also that of nuance, was recognized by specialists, as is
also apparent from the preface of A. Kaufmann's recent book devoted to his theory Zadeh and her
applications." Solomon Marcus.
"The greatest regret of my life is

to haven't had any" Grigore C.
Moisil
Grigore C. Moisil was born in
Tulcea, Romania, in 1906 and died in
1973. His life dedicated to mathematics
and computer sciences, consecrated him
as an outstanding scientist and
professor. He created a school of
thought with students and colleagues
who continued his work, developing
computer science and technology in
Romania.
Fig 8 Grigore C. Moisil and Solomon Marcus He was a member of the
Romanian Academy, of the Academy of
Bologna, and of the International
Institute of Philosophy. Moisil was a professor of mathematical logic and computer science at the
University of Bucharest, and taught in various universities in Europe and America. His early
contributions were in mathematics and later he devoted his scientific activity to mathematical logic
and computer science. He pioneered the application of mathematical logic to computer science.
In the 1950s, Prof. Moisil developed a new structural theory of finite automata and proposed
what he called "the trivalent Lukaszewiczian algebra applied to the logic of switching circuits", an
important contribution to the development of computer science in those early years. Some of his
books were translated in several languages. At a time when cybernetics was thought of as
"reactionary bourgeois science directed against working class" Prof. Moisil used his scientific
authority to personally encourage the Romanian scientists to build the first computer, that
appeared in 1957.
In 1941, a position of professor at the University of Bucharest opened up, and Moisil applied
for it. However, Gheorghe Vrânceanu, Dan Barbilian, and Miron Nicolescu also applied for the
position, and Vrânceanu got it. Moisil approached the Ministry of Education, arguing that it would
be a great opportunity for mathematics in Romania if all four could be appointed.
As a result of his appeal, all four mathematicians were hired. Moisil moved to Bucharest,
where he became a Professor in the School of Mathematics (later the School of Mathematics and
Computer Science) at the University of Bucharest, on 30 December 1941. From 1946 to 1948,
Moisil took a leave of absence, being named plenipotentiary envoy to Ankara. While in Turkey, he
gave several series of mathematics lectures at Istanbul University and Istanbul Technical
University.
In 1959 Gr. C. Moisil founded the specialization/section "Computing Machines" (later the
Department of Informatics) at the Faculty of Mathematics at University of Bucharest, and in 1962
founded the Computing Center of the University of Bucharest (CCUB) at the Faculty of
Mathematics.
Main Work by Grigore C. Moisil

In 1929 he defended his Ph.D. thesis, La mécanique analytique des systemes continus
(Analytical mechanics of continuous systems), before a commission led by Gheorghe Ţiţeica, with
Dimitrie Pompeiu and Anton Davidoglu as members. The thesis was published the same year by
the Gauthier-Villars publishing house in Paris, and received favourable comments from Vito
Volterra, Tullio Levi-Civita, and Paul Lévy.
Professor Moisil published papers on mechanics, mathematical analysis, geometry, algebra and
mathematical logic. He developed a multi-dimensional extension of Pompeiu's areolar derivative,
and studied monogenic functions of one hypercomplex variable with applications to mechanics.
Moisil also introduced some many-valued algebras, which he called Łukasiewicz algebras
(now also named Łukasiewicz–Moisil algebras), and used them in logic and the study of automata
theory. He created new methods to analyze finite automata, and had many contributions to the
field of automata theory in algebra.
Moisil had important contributions in the creation of the first Romanian computers. He played
a fundamental role in the development of computer science in Romania, and in raising the first
generations of Romanian computer scientists. In 1996, he was awarded by exception
posthumously the Computer Pioneer Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers Computer Society.
Main publications
 Logique modale, Disquisit. Math. Phys. 2 (1942), 3–98. MR0020524
 Introducere in algebră. I. Inele şi ideale [Introduction to algebra. I. Rings and ideals],
Editura Academiei Republicii Popular Române, Bucharest, 1954. MR0069136
 Teoria algebrică a mecanismelor automate [Algebraic theory of automatic machines],
Academia Republicii Populare Romane, Editura Tehnică, Bucharest, 1959. MR0120120
 Circuite cu tranzistori [Transistor Circuits], Editura Academiei Republicii Populare
Romane, Bucharest, 1961–62. OCLC 15371418
 Théorie structurelle des automates finis, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1967. OCLC 9049760
 The algebraic theory of switching circuits, Pergamon Press, Oxford, New York, 1969.
ISBN 0-08-010148-8
Professor Moisil- famous quotations:
1. "The most powerful explosive is not the toluene, neither the atomic bomb, but the human
idea."
2. "Science takes its revenge like a woman, not when you attack it, but when you neglect it."
3. "Unlike the wine, science shouldn't be let to age."
4. "What's a pessimist? An optimist well informed."
5. "Nobody should be afraid of abstract things and very abstract things, especially in
mathematics; mathematics, precisely because it's mathematics, is abstract. More abstract a
thing is, it includes larger fields and so it is aplicable on more concrete situations."
6. "I don't have a good opinion about children who follow only their parents advice. To have
his own personality, the child - and this is valid for student and teacher, too - should part
company with his parents and he should act as he wants."
7. "I believe that one can have professional success only if he is a modest man with daring
ideas. We mustn't be misled when we notice that "people who meddle" have success. This
apparent success is the one which will bring after a while failure."
8. "But of course that you need to have in your ideas a great daring and perseverance for the
achievement of the purposes for which you aspire through work."
9. "Mediocrity doesn't forgive the intelligent people for being superficial in appearance and
profound in reality."
10. "The double historical role of foolishness: the foolishness turns the revolution into
evolution; the foolishness allows the communications between two intelligence."
Books and articles on Moisil (Selection)

1. M. Abad, L. Monteiro, On three-valued Moisil
algebras, Logique et Analyse, 27, 1984, 407-414
2. L. Beznea, q -valued Moisil algebras and dual
categories (Romanian), Master Thesis, University of
Bucarest, 1981
3. Jonathan S. Golan, Gr. C. Moisil, Activitatea Centrului
de Calcul al Universității din București, AMC 13-14
(1970), 9-20, în J. S. Golan, Semirings and their
Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1999
4. J. J O' Connor, E. F Robertson, MacTutor History of
Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and
Statistics - University of St Andrews, Scotland,
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/
Moisil.html
5. Mihai Drăgănescu, Realizarea de calculatoare și rețele
de calculatoare în România (1953-1985),
http://www.atic.org.ro/ktml2/files/uploads/Draganescu.
pdf, 2001
6. A .Iorgulescu, S. Marcus, S. Rudeanu, D. Vaida (coordonatori/eds.), Grigore C. Moisil şi
continuatorii săi în domeniul Informaticii Teoretice/Grigore C. Moisil and his Followers în the
Field of Theoretical Computer Science, Ed. Academiei, 2007
7. Ioan Dzitac, Florin Gheorghe Filip, Misu-Jan Manolescu, Fuzzy Logic Is Not Fuzzy: World-
renowned Computer Scientist Lotfi A. Zadeh, In International Journal of Computers
Communications & Control, vol. 12 no 6 (2017), http://univagora.ro/jour/index.php/
ijccc/article/view/3111
8. Oana Lucia N. DIMITRIU, "Academicianul Grigore C. Moisil, intemeietorul şcolii de
matematicieni informaticieni din Romania", Biblioteca Academiei Române, Studii și
comunicări, Comitetul Român pentru Istoria si Filosofia Stiintei si Tehnicii, Volumul VII /
2014, http://studii.crifst.ro/doc/2014/2014_4_06.pdf (pdf)
9. George Georgescu, Afrodita Iorgulescu, Sergiu Rudeanu, Grigore C. Moisil (1906 - 1973) and
his School in Algebraic Logic, In International Journal of Computers Communications &
Control, vol. 1 no 1 (2016), http://univagora.ro/jour/index.php/ijccc/article/view/2276
10. G. Georgescu, I. Leuștean, Probabilities on Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras, International Journal
of Approximate Reasoning, 1998, 18, No.3-4, 201-215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0888-
613X(98)00006-1
A. Iorgulescu, Functors between categories of three-valued Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras, Discrete
Math., 49, 1984, 121-131., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(84)90109-2
11. Solomon Marcus, "Grigore C. Moisil și începuturile informaticii romanesti", Lucrările Sesiunii
Știinţifice a Centrului de Calcul al Universităţii din București (1987), 20-21 februarie 1987, pp.
23-26
12. Solomon Marcus, Grigore C. Moisil: A Life Becoming a Myth, In International Journal of
Computers Communications & Control, vol. 1 no 1 (2016), http://univagora.ro/
jour/index.php/ijccc/article/view/2275
13. Grigore C. Moisil, "Activitatea Centrului de Calcul al Universității din București", în volumul
"Grigore C. Moisil și continuatorii săi" (2007), Ed. Academiei Române, pp. 133-155
14. Viorica Moisil, "Once upon a time... Grigore Moisil" (A fost odată... Grigore Moisil),
Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2002. ISBN 973-8356-09-1
15. Ioana Moisil, The wonderful adventures of the mathematician in logic-land: From
Lukasiewicz-Moisil logic to computers, Computers Communications and Control (ICCCC)
(2016), 2016 6th International Conference on, 1-9, DOI: 10.1109/ICCCC.2016.7496730,
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCC.2016.7496730
16. Gheorghe Păun, Moisil -110, In revista Curtea de la Arges, anul VII, Nr. 3 (64), martie 2016,
http://www.curteadelaarges.ro/arhiva/VII_3_64/VII_3_64.pdf
17. Sergiu Rudeanu, On Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras of fuzzy sets, Studia Logica, 52, 1993, 95-
111, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01053066
18. Sergiu Rudeanu, Afrodita Iorgulescu, George Georgescu and Cătălin Ioniţă, "G. C. Moisil
memorial issue", Multiple-Valued Logic 6 (2001), no. 1-2. Gordon and Breach, Yverdon,
2001. MR1817431
19. E. Radu, L'oeuvre de Gr. C. Moisil en logique mathématique, I., II., Rev. Roumaine Math.
Pures Appl., 23, 1978, 463-477, 605-610
20. W. Suchon, On defining Moisil's functors in n-valued Łukasiewicz propositional logic, Polish
Acad. Sci. Inst. Philos. Sociol. Bull. Sect. Logic, 2, 1973, 195-196.
21. Teodorescu H.-N.L. (2011); On the meaning of approximate reasoning: An unassuming
subsidiary to Lotfi Zadeh's paper dedicated to the memory of Grigore Moisil, International
Journal of Computers Communications & Control, 6(3), 577-580, 2011,
https://doi.org/10.15837/ijccc.2011.3.2136
22. Dragoș Vaida, Informatica în România - primii ani, REVISTA DE POLITICA ŞTIINŢEI ŞI
SCIENTOMETRIE – SERIE NOUĂ, Vol.4, Nr. 1/2015, pag. 29-33, http://rpss.inoe.ro/
articles/informatica-in-romania-primii-ani
23. Dragoș Vaida, Gr. C. Moisil, un mod de a privi matematica și cultura, În revista Curtea de la
Argeș, anul VIII, nr. 10(83), oct. 2017, http://www.curteadelaarges.ro/ arhiva/VIII_10_83/
VIII_10_83.pdf
24. Ion Văduva, "Douăzeci și cinci de ani de activitate a Centrului de Calcul al Universității din
București", Lucrările Sesiunii Știinţifice a Centrului de Calcul al Universităţii din Bucurșţti
(1987), 20-21 februarie 1987, pp.6-14
25. Ion Văduva, "Centrul de Calcul al Universității din București, creație a lui Grigore C. Moisil",
în volumul postum "Grigore C. Moisil și continuatorii săi, Ed. Academiei Române” (2007), pp.
515-519
26. Ion Văduva, Centrul de Calcul al Universităţii din Bucureşti (CCUB), pionierat în Informatica
din România, CNIV România, 29 SEPTEMBRIE 2014 - http://www.c3.cniv.ro/?q=2014/
vaduva-ccub
27. Ion Văduva, Computing Center of the University of Bucharest, an Important Step in the
History of Computer Science in Romania(2014), In Proceedings of International Conference
on Virtual Learning, ICVL 2014, https://www.scribd.com/doc/243333879/Proceedings-of-

ICVL-2014-ISSN-1844-...
28. Ion Văduva, History of Computer Science in Romania by Prof. Ion Văduva, In Proceedings of
International Conference on Virtual Learning, ICVL 2014, http://www.c3.icvl.eu/2014/vaduva-
ccub
29. Marin Vlada, Adrian Adăscăliţei, History of Informatics. From recursivity to the Turing
universal machine and Horn clauses (2017), In Proceedings of International Conference on
Virtual Learning, ICVL 2017, http://c3.icvl.eu/papers2017/icvl/documente/pdf/
section1/section1_paper1...
30. Marin Vlada, Adrian Adăscăliţei, ROMANIAN EXPERIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF
COURSES. SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT: VISION ON LEARNING - GRIGORE C. MOISIL,
110 YEARS AFTER BIRTH, In the 12th International Scientific Conference on eLearning and
Software for Education (eLSE) Location: Bucharest, ROMANIA Date: APR 21-22, 2016,
ELEARNING VISION 2020!, VOL III Book Series: eLearning and Software for Education
Pages: 578-585, Bucharest, Advanced Distributed Learning Department, "Carol I" National
Defense University, (ISSN: 2066 - 026X print 2066 - 8821 online), pp. 360-367, 2016,
www.elseconference.eu , http://adl.unap.ro
31. Marin Vlada, Grigore C. Moisil – restituiri (2016), http://mvlada.blogspot.ro/2016/01/grigore-
c-moisil-restituiri.html
32. Marin Vlada, 110 ani de la nașterea acad. Grigore C. Moisil, întemeietorul Informaticii din
România – Restituiri (2016), http://c3.cniv.ro/?q=2016/moisil-110ani
33. Marin Vlada, Discipolii acad. Grigore C. Moisil și pionieri ai informaticii românești (2016),
CNIV 2016, http://c3.icvl.eu/papers2016/cniv/documente/pdf/sectiuneaA/sectiuneaA_lu...
34. Marin Vlada, Discipolii acad. Gr. C. Moisil și pionieri ai informaticii românești (2016),
http://mvlada.blogspot.ro/2016/10/discipolii-acad-gr-c-moisil-si-pionier...
35. Marin Vlada, 60 de ani de la apariția Informaticii la Universitatea din Bucureşti (2015),
http://mvlada.blogspot.ro/2015/04/60-de-ani-de-la-aparitia-informaticii....
36. Marin Vlada, Informatica la Universitatea din Bucureşti: 1960-1974-2004-2014 , (2014),
http://c3.cniv.ro/?q=2014/info-ub, http://mvlada.blogspot.ro/2014/04/informatica-la-
universitatea-din.html
37. M. Vlada, Grigore C. Moisil, Computer Pioneer Award and the father of Romanian Computer
Science, http://c3.icvl.eu/2018/gr-c-moisil, 2018
38. Lotfi A. Zadeh, Fuzzy Sets, Inform. And Control, 8, 1965, 338-353,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(65)90241-X
39. Lotfi A. Zadeh (1975), Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (In Memory of Grigore
Moisil), Synthese, 30, 407-428, 1975, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485052
RECENT ARTICLES:
Ioana Moisil, The Wonderful Adventures of the Mathematician in Logic-Land: From
Lukasiewicz-Moisil Logic to Computers, ICCCC 2016, http://dzitac.ro/files/icccc/
PreprintProcICCCC2016.pdf
From Łukasiewicz-Moisil Logic to Computers by Ioana Moisil
Ref.: Ioan Dzitac, Florin Gheorghe Filip, Misu-Jan Manolescu, Fuzzy Logic Is Not Fuzzy:
World-renowned Computer Scientist Lotfi A. Zadeh, In International Journal of Computers
Communications & Control, vol. 12 no 6 (2017), http://univagora.ro/jour/index.php/ijccc/
article/view/3111
“In 1965 Lotfi A. Zadeh published "Fuzzy Sets", his pioneering and controversial paper, that
now reaches almost 100,000 citations. All Zadeh’s papers were cited over 185,000 times. Starting
from the ideas presented in that paper, Zadeh founded later the Fuzzy Logic theory, that proved to
have useful applications, from consumer to industrial intelligent products. We are presenting
general aspects of Zadeh’s contributions to the development of Soft Computing(SC) and Artificial
Intelligence(AI), and also his important and early influence in the world and in Romania. Several
early contributions in fuzzy sets theory were published by Romanian scientists, such as: Grigore
C. Moisil (1968), Constantin V. Negoita & Dan A. Ralescu (1974), Dan Butnariu (1978). In this
review we refer the papers published in "From Natural Language to Soft Computing: New
Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence" (2008, Eds.: L.A. Zadeh, D. Tufis, F.G. Filip, I. Dzitac), and
also from the two special issues (SI) of the International Journal of Computers Communications &
Control (IJCCC, founded in 2006 by I. Dzitac, F.G. Filip & M.J. Manolescu; L.A. Zadeh joined in
2008 to editorial board). In these two SI, dedicated to the 90th birthday of Lotfi A. Zadeh (2011),
and to the 50th anniversary of "Fuzzy Sets" (2015), were published some papers authored by
scientists from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Hungary, Greece, Germany, Japan,
Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain, Taiwan, UK and USA.”
References
1. Oana Lucia N. DIMITRIU, "Academicianul Grigore C. Moisil, intemeietorul şcolii de matematicieni
informaticieni din Romania", Biblioteca Academiei Române, Studii și comunicări, Comitetul Român
pentru Istoria si Filosofia Stiintei si Tehnicii, Volumul VII / 2014,
http://studii.crifst.ro/doc/2014/2014_4_06.pdf (pdf)
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http://www.curteadelaarges.ro/arhiva/VII_3_64/VII_3_64.pdf
3. Solomon Marcus, Grigore C. Moisil: A Life Becoming a Myth, In International Journal of Computers
Communications & Control, vol. 1 no 1 (2016),
http://univagora.ro/jour/index.php/ijccc/article/view/2275
4. Ion Văduva, "Centrul de Calcul al Universității din București, creație a lui Grigore C. Moisil", în
volumul postum "Grigore C. Moisil și continuatorii săi, Ed. Academiei Române” (2007), pp. 515-519
5. Ion Văduva, Centrul de Calcul al Universităţii din Bucureşti (CCUB), pionierat în Informatica din
România, CNIV România, 29 SEPTEMBRIE 2014 - http://www.c3.cniv.ro/?q=2014/vaduva-ccub
6. Ion Văduva, Computing Center of the University of Bucharest, an Important Step in the History of
Computer Science in Romania(2014), In Proceedings of International Conference on Virtual Learning,
ICVL 2014, https://www.scribd.com/doc/243333879/Proceedings-of-ICVL-2014-ISSN-1844-...
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International Conference on Virtual Learning, ICVL 2014, http://www.c3.icvl.eu/2014/vaduva-ccub
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COURSES. SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT: VISION ON LEARNING - GRIGORE C. MOISIL, 110
YEARS AFTER BIRTH, In the 12th International Scientific Conference on eLearning and Software for
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Restituiri (2016), http://c3.cniv.ro/?q=2016/moisil-110ani
Digital Encyclopedia
“Romania 1918. People, moments and images”
Radu Jugureanu1, Magda Stan2, Daniela Mironov Bănuță1,

Bogdan Gornea1
(1) Siveco Romania, Victoria Park, Sos. Bucureşti-Ploieşti 73-81, cod 013685,
Bucureşti, Romania, e-mail: radu.jugureanu[at]siveco.ro
(2) Liceul Teoretic "Nicolae Iorga" București, Bdv. Ion Mihalache nr. 126, București,
e-mail: stanmagda[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The article describes in Premiere: The first project of the SIVECO Foundation, a free
software product. „Romania 1918. People, moments and images” is a digital product created
by SIVECO Romania, in partnership with prestigious cultural institutions and personalities of
Romanian society. It is our gift to Romania. The digital encyclopedia is accessible on App
Store, Google Play, Windows Store and online. The Encyclopedia is offered to Romanians
everywhere, as a reminder of the most important national project: the national union.
Chapters: I. The historical context (The Great War, The War in numbers and images), II.
Romania under arms (From neutrality to belligerence, From noblemen to peasants: people
and deeds), III. Homefront (The family, Everyday life). The digital encyclopedia is dedicated
to the thousands of Romanians and Romanians who sacrificed themselves for Romania to be
the whole of today, an epic work, built by volunteering and generosity, which will be offered
free to the Romanian school. It is our gift to Romania. We propose that you be contemporary
with those real, authentic models that, through generosity, tolerance, sacrificeand simplicity
offered us, today a beautiful Romania. And stand in front of them by teaching them the story.
The people you will find in this Encyclopedia do not appear in the textbooks, but they are
much more precious in their character than many who have notoriety. Project Coordinator:
Prof. Radu Jugureanu; Instructional Designer and Author: Prof. Magda Stan; Digital
Creation, Coordinator: Bogdan Gornea.
Keywords: Encyclopedia, Great War, national project, Romania 1918
1 Introduction and Objectives
Dedication: “Romania 1918. People, moments and images” is dedicated to the thousands of
Romanians, women, men and children, teachers and priests, lawyers and inventors, peasants and
princesses, soldiers and generals, simple people or erudite inventors who sacrificed themselves for
Romania to be the united nation of today. Built by volunteering and generosity, the Encyclopedia
is offered to Romanian school and society, as a constant reminder of those who created
contemporary Romania.” – Prof. Radu Jugureanu, Project Manager.
“Romania 1918. People, moments and images” is a digital encyclopaedia created by a complex
team of experts (in history, IT, cinematography, art) in partnership with prestigious cultural
institutions and personalities of the Romanian society. The state-of-the-art application covers
European and particularly Romanian historical landmarks and figures from 1914 to 1920 and it is
offered to Romanians everywhere, as a reminder of the most important national project: the
victory of Romania in World War I and the National Union of 1918.
The encyclopaedia is tailored to any type of device and can be accessed on any device (PC,
laptop, tablet, or smartphone). There are extensive photo galleries, with over 370 rare photographs,
from private collections and museums, from which, 12 are animated. There are also 8 very
precious filmed testimonies from the First World War, courtesy of the National Film Archive.
3D objects help the user explore monuments and artefacts (including weapons) of World War I
and the Great Union. 24 interactive maps help track the progress of events and actors in the theatre
of war and after the peace treaties.
The most attractive features for young students are the 3D games simulating real, historical
battles, with tanks and planes of the era.
A large team of volunteers have contributed to the creation and development of the application,
from historians, researchers, private collectors, university professors, museographers, writers,
bloggers, and weapons specialists, to developers, graphic designers, testers, web designers, and
marketing specialists – and even the first Romanian cosmonaut in space, Dorin-Dumitru Prunariu.
You can find more and download the free application from www.romania1918.eu, from iOS
Store, Google Play, Windows Store, MAC OS.The Encyclopedia is offered to Romanians
everywhere, as a reminder of the most important national project: the national union. The digital
Encyclopedia “Romania 1918. People, moments and images” is dedicated to the thousands of
Romanians, women, men and children, teachers and priests, lawyers and inventors, peasants and
princesses, soldiers and generals, simple people or erudite inventors who sacrificed themselves for
Romania to be the united nation of today. Built by volunteering and generosity, the Encyclopedia
is offered to Romanian school and society, as a constant reminder of those who created
contemporary Romania.
It is a reminder for all the people, all over the Europe and beyond, sacrificed them self for their
believe. At the end of the WWI we had a Romania in which everything had to be rebuilt, but who
fully understood their national aspirations. I tried to bring this faith into the pages of the
Encyclopedia.
Over 300 rare photographs, from private collections or museums (12 were animated in order
„to give lifes to the people we knew their story”), +300 rare documents, 8 short filmed 100 years
ago testimonies, 12 3D objects, symbolic monuments of World War I and the Great Union, which
can be explored from all angles, 24 contextual interactive 3D maps to track the progress of events
and actors in the theater of war, two 3D game simulating the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and
Somme.
The digital Encyclopedia Romania 1918. People, moments and images is a SIVECO Romania
production, developed in partnership with prestigious cultural institutions and personalities of
Romanian society. We thank those who contributed to this Encyclopedia
Official Website: http://romania1918.eu/index.html
 Windows (store) :https://www.microsoft.com/ro-ro/store/p/romania-1918/9p1k974p6mpk
 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ro.siveco.romania
 iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/ro/app/rom%C3%A2nia-1918/id1370328857?mt=8
 HTML: http://romania1918.eu/Romania1918/index.html
For the HTML version the content has been trimmed to be accessible using browsers that
support WEBGL. Such browsers are: Microsoft Edge, Opera, Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari.
2. The structure of the Encyclopedia
The structure of the Encyclopedia is made of 5 chapters: The historical context, Romania under
arms, Home front, Romania united, Memory Places. The Encyclopedia is offered to Romanians
everywhere, as a reminder of the most important national project:the national union. Chapters: I.
The historical context (The Great War, The War in numbers and images), II. Romania under arms
(From neutrality to belligerence, From noblemen to peasants: people and deeds), III. Homefront
(The family, Everyday life).
Each one of the 5 chapters hosts several type of resources, rare, neverseen photo galleries and
videos.
In total, the application presents more than 700 photos, 16 videos and Animated images, over
15 3D objects, 300+ old documents, over 35 3D interactive maps, each animated according to the
perior described.
The application was developed to be addaptable and lightweight. Even if it hosts more than
1000 different resource types it’s able to run on low end touch devices. The user can interact with
a variety of types of interactive multimedia applications such as:
Photo Gallery, a collection of rare, neverseen before images taken from private collections;
Movies, old footages takened with very old cameras and digitized;
 3D Objects, to allows users to see and interact with old weapons, planes, tanks, canons
etc;
 Live images: Old images, restored and animated by graphic artists to share more of the
atmosphere to the users.
 Old document: represented in 3D format, for the users to read and understand.
 2 3D Games: Games representing key battles. The battles are on air (with planes) and on
land (with tanks).
 35+ 3D Interactive multi-layer Maps. The maps are aniated and the users are shown the
troops migrations, attacks, troops placements and also maps that show border migrations
and monuments.
After accessing a page, extra content will be made available to the user. Each page has it’s own
unique story and it’s own set of resources.
Features: Language versions (The Encyclopedia is available in three languages: Romanian,
English and (very soon) French); Images (Over 300 rare photographs, from private collections or
museums (12 were animated)); Video (8 short filmed testimonies 3D, 12 3D objects, symbolic
monuments of World War I and the Great Union, which can be explored from all angles);
Interactive maps (24 interactive maps to track the progress of events and actors in the theater of
war); Visibility (The font can be enlarged or reduced); Accessibility (The Encyclopedia is tailored
to any type of device and can be viewed on your PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone); 3D Game (3D
game simulating the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux).
Creators: Project Coordinator: Prof. Radu Jugureanu ; Instructional Designer and Author: Prof.
Magda Stan
The Scientific Council:
Gen. Prof. PhD. Mihail E. Ionescu,
Prof. PhD. Corneliu Mihail
Lungu, Historian Neculai Moghior,
Prof. PhD. Ioan Opriș, Lt-Gen. (ret.)
PhD. Dumitru Dorin Prunariu, Prof.
PhD. Gheorghe Sbârnă, Prof. PhD.
Ioan Scurtu, PhD Simona Tănăsescu.
The Scientific Pedagogical Council:
PhD. Doru Dumitrescu,
PhD. Prof. Gabriel Leahu,
Prof. Simona Tănase.
Contributing authors:
Muzeul Național de Istorie a României, ”România în Marele Război” (catalog expoziție), 2016
Prof. Alin Ciupală, PhD – „Their battle. The Romanian women during the First World War”,
Polirom Publishing House
Researcher Prof. Adrian-Silvan Ionescu, PhD - „The Army's Photographic Service and its
Contribution to the Great War iconography„ the National Museum, nr. XXV, 2013
Prof. Corneliu Mihail Lungu, PhD - Scientific content Chap. IV
Hist. Neculai Moghior - Scientific content Chap. II
Prof. Adrian Mihai Olaru - Scientific content Chap. IV, V
Prof. Dr. Ioan Opriș, PhD - Scientific content Chap. IV
Researcher Claudiu Porumbăcean, PhD - Scientific content Chap. IV
Prof. Gheorghe Sbârnă, PhD - Scientific content Chap. IV
Prof. Ioan Scurtu, PhD - Scientific content Chap. IV
Prof. Corneliu Stoica - Scientific content Chap. V
Researcher Horia Șerbănescu, PhD - Scientific content Chap. II
Contributing collectors: PhD Prof. A. Atanasiu, PhD Prof. Carol Căpiță, Alexandra
Crăciunoiu (Cristian Crăciunoiu collection), Mihaela Kloos-Ilea, blog author of Povestiri Săsești,
Alin Dimăncescu, blog author of Frații Alin Dimăncescu , Prof. Adrian Mihai Olaru, Prof.
Corneliu Stoica , PhD Simona Tănăsescu.
Soundtrack: Adrian Naidin
Digital Creation: Coordinator: Bogdan Gornea , Developers: Marius Curcă, Adrian Dragomir,
Daniel Gherghiceanu, Alexandru Indreaș, Octavian Miu, Andrei Nedelciu , Graphics, design,
animation, movie: Silviu Artene, Sigrid Iuhas, Bogdan Jugureanu, Marian Negrișan, Cristiana
Stermin, Web design: Ancuța Creiță, Testing: Cătălin Petrea (coordinator),, Alexandru Binig,
Dragoș Crăciun, Florin Ilia, Radu Ilia, Prof. Dorina Jugureanu, Ștefan Morcov , Legal
Counseling: Răzvan Codreanu, Adelina Predescu , Marketing and communication: Daniela
Mironov Bănuță, Cătălin Parascan , Translation: Dr. Alexandra Jugureanu , Partners
Coordinator: Prof. Emil Dragomirescu
Partners: National Film Archive, The Digital Library of Bucharest, The National Council of
Cinematography, Cetatea de scaun Publishing House, Polirom Publishing House, Stefadina
Publishing House, Litera Publishing House, History Museum of Satu Mare, Ialomita County
Museum, Matthias Mausoleum, Campulung Municipal Museum, The National History Museum of
Romania, National Museum of Alba Iulia Union, The National Office for Heroes' Cult, Romanian
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Academy of Scientists from Romania, Castelul Peleş
Museum
References
http://romania1918.eu/index.html
Ozias Adler (1928-2001),
The Romanian Digital Printing Pioneer
Alexandru Adler1, Radu Jugureanu2

(1) eGain Corporation London, United Kingdom, adler60000[at]yahoo.com
(2) Siveco Romania, Victoria Park, Sos. Bucureşti-Ploieşti 73-81, cod 013685, Bucureşti,
Romania, e-mail: radu.jugureanu[at]siveco.ro
Abstract
The ‘70s and the 80’s were very important for the Romanian printing industry. On a
background of remarkable developments in the Romanian electronics industry and the
emergence of the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microprocessors and of the first personal
computers, the Romanian printing industry started and successfully completed the transition
from the lead-based alloys, manual and mechanical text editing and page formatting
processes to digital printing. The engines of this transition in Romania were the software
variants written by Ozias Adler from the Polygraphic Research Center located in Filaret,
Bucharest in a building near the Stamps Factory. This new Romanian digital printing
software created by Ozias Adler bridged all these gaps and allowed not just setting the
typefaces (fonts) and their sizes, single-line and within paragraphs inter-lines’ alignment and
same line equal dispersion of characters, various formatting instructions such as number of
columns and their sizes, different char sets such as Greek for mathematical formulas etc. The
entire text editing and formatting process was shifted from the typographic factory to the
editors’ teams.
Keywords: Ozias Adler, computer, Romanian software, digital printing
1 Introduction and informations
Preamble by Professor Math Radu Jugureanu.

I was lucky to meet Ozias Adler in 1975 when I was studying at the Dimitrie Cantemir College
in Bucharest, Romania. I persuaded Alex, my best friend and former colleague to write an article
about his father’s remarkable achievements in digital printing in Romania. Beyond his
overwhelming, all-round knowledge in mathematics, physics, foreign languages, literature,
philosophy and music Ozias Adler had a direct as well as a subtle at the same time sense of
humour, something that most likely made him unpopular with the party politruks leading Romania
at that time.
I believe that this “no-bows” attitude kept him in the shadow of his own achievements that I
am writing about. He fully understood the society that he was part of but never felt any impulse to
obey or even fake obedience. It must be said that he had the full support of his spouse, Roza Adler
(nee Katz), a much-respected lead editor at the Department for Philosophy and Law of the
Romania’s Academy Publishing House.
In 1971 Ozias Adler published in the printing industry conference book for that year an article
about raising the quality of printing in the offset-printing-procedures. That article was followed by
many others. Few people know that Ozias Adler approached the dawn of the digital printing
mathematically, describing the problems, the plans and the solutions just with a pencil and a paper
notebook. Initially he didn’t have the software to draw his algorithm’s data flows or any other
software with the functionality required to capture his notes and the underlying mathematical logic
of his programs, various signs and characters, pictures etc.
Fig. 1 Ozias Adler-Draw design tables with mathematical formulas

in Romanian photoprinting brochure -1984
In 1987 he published an instructions manual for the entire system that he designed, wrote the
software. Romania’s first complete digital printing system was implemented in production in
1981-1982. Romania’s popular science monthly magazine “Știință și Tehnică” was the first in the
Eastern Communist bloc that benefited from this new, revolutionary system. Ioan Albescu, its
chief-editor took the risk implementing this system and let the world know about it. The political
risk taken was significant as the system was a personal endeavour of a researcher not endorsed by
the regime. In 1989 the magazine’s issue no. 6 announced the implementation as a “National
Premiere” but timidly placed the article at page 47. No word about Ozias Adler, the designer,
software developer and integrator of the first Romanian digital printing system, before software
such as Ventura or Microsoft Word (that I am using now to write this article) were developed. For
the reasons above I insisted that Ozias Adler cannot be missing when proudly reviewing the past
century of Romanian achievements since the 2018 Grand Union.
Fig. 2 Adler Ozias, Romanian photo-printing system-1987
Fig. 3 - 1989, July, “Știință si Tehnică”anouncing digital printing

2. Ozias Adler, memoriam

The ‘70s and the 80’s were very important for the Romanian printing industry. On a
background of remarkable developments in the Romanian electronics industry and the emergence
of the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microprocessors and of the first personal computers, the Romanian
printing industry started and successfully completed the transition from the lead-based alloys,
manual and mechanical text editing and page formatting processes to digital printing. The engines
of this transition in Romania were the software variants written by Ozias Adler from the
Polygraphic Research Center located in Filaret, Bucharest in a building near the Stamps Factory.
The software was running on modified DAF 2010 video terminals (consoles) with customized
technical specifications. The consoles were manufactured at the Peripheral Equipment Factory in
Bucharest (FEPER) and had perforated tape readers and punchers, 8-inch and then 5-inch floppy
disks as the technology developed over those years.
The new digital printing systems were implemented at Printing Houses from Bucharest
(including Casa Scanteii), Cluj and Iasi.
The software variants were written in Intel 8080 and Z80 assembler languages and generated
codes for the British manufactured Harris as well as Soviet manufactured FA printing machines.
Some historical technological context is necessary for understanding the uniqueness of this
revolutionary change. It was the time when text editing used software such as the Ed line-editor,
the Word master editor for unformatted text and Wordstar editor for minimally formatted text and
operating systems such as CP/M that preceded Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows operating
systems. There were no graphical UI systems (GUI) in use.
It was the time when characters were represented in the 8-bit ASCII standard codes that
included the Continental Europe languages’ diacritics, not just the original 7-bit ASCII
(English/Latin character set). The inclusion of thefive Romanian specific diacritics (ă, â, î, ș, ț) as
well as the other European diacritics in texts was a very serious hurdle at that time. Tables and
mathematical formulas editing, hyphenation were challenges that seemed almost insurmountable.
This new Romanian digital printing software created by Ozias Adler bridged all these gaps and
allowed not just setting the typefaces (fonts) and their sizes, single-line and within paragraphs
inter-lines’ alignment and same line equal dispersion of characters, various formatting instructions
such as number of columns and their sizes, different charsets such as Greek for mathematical
formulas etc. The entire text editing and formatting process was shifted from the typographic
factory to the editors’ teams.
3. The life of Ozias Adler

Ozias Adler (born 29.02.1928 in Podu Turcului, Bacau County, Romania – deceased
30.11.2001 in Rehovot, Israel) was a classic example of a self-taught erudite. He was fluent in
French, German, Russian, English, Hebrew and Yiddish and was a technical German and Russian
translator. He loved listening classical music, equally interested in science and literature, culture
and politics, constructive debating ideas and progress. He detested violence and imposture.
He was friendly and always joking and he was appreciated by everybody at work regardless of
rank. He was called “Mr. Adler”, rather than “comrade Adler”, by everybody except for the party
politruks. He was a good chess player and as a young man succeeded a draw in a simultaneous
chess game with the Romanian champion Elisabeta Polihroniade. His mathematical skills helped
him learning microprocessors and assembler as well as high level (Pascal and C) programming
languages. He was a master of binary and hexadecimal numbering systems arithmetic operations,
skills that even today some of the programmers would be struggling with. He could read, follow
and understand code and data by reading directly from the perforated paper tape or from the object
code on the video terminal, skills that are required today for computer forensic investigations.
His physics skills helped him become one of the polygraphic industry specialists for deep and
high offset printing and quality statistics before he “reinvented himself” as a programmer. The
high-quality Romanian stamps were exported in countries such as Bahrain, Manama and Sharjah
Emirates and much appreciated by stamp collectors worldwide. Sometimes he was insanely
courageous. As a young man he contradicted on a technical matter in a meeting Iosif Chișinevsky,
the disgraced then but still powerful former leading ideologue of the Romanian Communist Party.
After emigrating to Israel in 1991, he continued to be emotionally attached to Romania and
instantly “devoured“ articles, books and news about it. With the risk of being controversial I
would like to add my own comments and conclude in my father’s “style”.
I’ve had the privilege of being witness and participant in the extraordinary technological
revolutions and at the same time convergence of ideas and technologies over the past three
decades, some of them disruptive for the society that we live in, such as human-machine
interactions, Internet and Artificial Intelligence. This what I call the progress from transhumance
to trans-humanism.
Fig.4 - Ozias Adler-modifications and additions instructions photocalling listing -1981
Conclusions
The change, unique at that time in the Romanian polygraphic industry, was part of a more
general trend of openness to the broader world, a trend that no totalitarian ideology and regime
could stop. Romania at the geographical and cultural junction of several European and non-
European civilizations was and is part of Europe and a world in which Eugen Lovinescu's
synchronism theory is still relevant, perhaps more than ever for Romania’s 1918 Grand Union
Centenary context, with integration into Europe and the world on one hand and maintaining
national specificity on the other hand. And I would add an administrative decentralization at the
same time. A sort of an extended synchronism fit for today’s world.
An OWL Prototype Educational Ontology for Functional
Programming
Mihaela Oprea1
(1) Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Department of Automatic Control, Computers
and Electronics
Bdul Bucuresti, No 39, Ploiesti, 100680, ROMANIA
E-mail: mihaela[at]upg-ploiesti.ro
Abstract
The efficiency of the computer-based academic educational systems can be improved by
the use of educational ontologies that conceptualize the knowledge from a specific
educational domain or a certain discipline. In the curriculum of the undergraduate Computer
Science program of study, different types of computer programming paradigms are taught to
students, imperative programming, object-oriented programming, logic programming,
functional programming etc. Each paradigm has several particularities and requires a good
understanding of its basic and advanced concepts in order to be correctly applied to real
world problems solving. The paper presents an OWL prototype educational ontology for the
course of Functional Programming taught to the Computer Science specialization at
undergraduate level. The main steps of the methodology applied to the ontology development
are also discussed.
Keywords: Educational ontology, Computer-based academic education, Computer

programming, Functional programming
1 Introduction
The development of efficient computer-based academic educational systems (such as web-

based educational systems, e-learning systems, intelligent tutoring systems etc) can be facilitated
by the use of educational ontologies that conceptualize the knowledge from a specific course
domain. A variety of applications were reported in the literature highlighting the benefits of
educational ontologies inclusion in computer-based education. Some examples are given in (Boyce
and Pahl, 2007) – which tackles course content domain ontologies engineering; (Panagiotopoulos
et al, 2012) – which describes an ontological approach applied in e-learning systems; and (Oprea,
2016) – which focuses on collaborative ontology development for higher education.
The educational ontologies engineering can follow general or specific methodologies and
frameworks described in the literature (as e.g those given in (Mizoguchi, 2004; Pinto et al, 2004;
Kotis and Vouros, 2006; Panagiotopoulos et al, 2012; Suárez-Figueroa et al, 2012; Oprea, 2013;
Oprea, 2016)). In the case of a specific curriculum, an educational ontology can be developed for
each course taking into account that some courses are interrelated (i.e. certain courses from the
first years of study are prerequisite courses for others, taught in the final years of study) and thus,
they share some concepts or sub-ontologies. In the curriculum of the undergraduate Computer
Science program of study, different types of computer programming paradigms are taught to
students, as for example, imperative programming, object-oriented programming, logic
programming, functional programming etc. Each paradigm has several particularities and requires
a good understanding of its basic and advanced concepts in order to be correctly applied to real
world problems solving. However, all paradigms share certain fundamental concepts, as e.g.
variable, function and data type. Based on our previous work described in (Oprea, 2017), which
presented an educational ontology for logic programming, we have continued our research work
by developing a prototype educational ontology for functional programming, which is another type
of declarative programming as is logic programming.
The paper presents an OWL prototype educational ontology for the course of Functional
Programming taught to the Computer Science specialization at undergraduate level.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the methodology that was applied for
Functional Programming educational ontology development. An OWL prototype functional
programming ontology implemented in Protégé is presented in section 3. The final section
concludes the paper and highlights some future work.
2 The Methodology for Functional Programming Ontology Development

The main steps of the methodology that was applied for the Functional programming course
educational ontology development are given below.
Methodology
Input: Functional Programming course specification and course resources
Output: the educational ontology for Functional Programming, FunctionProg-Onto
Step 1. Identify and define the fundamental concepts of computer programming used in functional
programming;
Step 2. Generate an ontology with the concepts identified in step 1 (FP-Onto-1);
Step 3. Identify and define the basic concepts of functional programming;
Step 5. Identify and define the advanced concepts of functional programming;
Step 7. Generate by merging or other technique the Functional programming ontology
(FunctionProg-Onto) from the ontologies FP-Onto-1, FP-Onto-2 and FP-Onto-3.
The course specification includes course title and level, pre-requisite courses, year of study,
number of hours/week for course teaching and laboratory work. The main course resources are
textbooks, lecture notes (as e.g PowerPoint slides) and software tools (e.g. functional
programming language).
The output of the proposed methodology is the educational ontology for the Functional
Programming course, FunctionProg-Onto, defined by (1).
(1) FunctionProg-Onto = OntologyUnification{FP-Onto-1, FP-Onto-2, FP-Onto-3}
Figure 1 shows the modular structure of the
FunctionProg-Onto ontology.
Fig. 1. The structure of the FunctionProg-Onto

ontology
3 A Prototype Ontology for the Functional Programming Course

The course of Functional programming is usually taught to students of the Computer Science
specialization, at undergraduate level. The course is included in the computer programming
domain, which contains some basic programming courses such as imperative programming and
object-oriented programming, and some more specialized courses such as logic programming,
functional programming and event-oriented programming.
We have designed a prototype educational ontology for the Functional Programming course
taught at Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti by following the steps of the methodology
described in the previous section, and we have implemented the resulted ontology in Protégé (a
Java-based ontology development tool) as an OWL ontology.
The course specification and main resources of the Functional programming course are:
Course specification:
 Course title: Functional programming;
 Course level: undergraduate;
 Year of study: third year, second semester;
 Prerequisite courses: Computer programming; Data structure and algorithms;
 Number of hours/week for course teaching and laboratory work: 2 hours/week -
course teaching and 2 hours/week - laboratory work.
Course main resources:
Textbooks:
 (Bird, 1998) for basic concepts and introduction to Haskell functional programming
language;
 (Giumale, 1997) for basic knowledge of Functional Programming and its relation to
other computer programming paradigms;
 (Hutton, 2016) for basic and advanced concepts of functional programming in Haskell
programming language;
Optional textbook and other course source:
 (Henderson, 1980) for basic knowledge on Functional Programming - optional
textbook;
Course lecture notes:
 PowerPoint slides for 2017-2018 academic year;
Software tool:
 Haskell programming language (e.g. HUGS).
Two courses were considered as prerequisite of the Functional programming course: Computer
programming and Data structures and algorithms. Examples of fundamental concepts from these
courses are:
 Concepts from the Computer programming course: computer program, statement,
control statement, sequence, decision, iteration, variable, variable domain, constant,
data, data structure, input, output, data type, simple data type, compound data type,
array, structure, file, list, tree, graph, function, function parameter, parameter transfer,
recursion, programming language, procedural programming, declarative programming;
 Concepts from the Data structure and algorithms course: algorithm, backtracking,
sort algorithm, quick sort, binary sort, search algorithm, binary search, data structure,
list, stack, queue, tree, binary tree, graph.
The ontology implementation was performed in Protégé 4.3 under the OWL format. Each
identified concept of the prototype FunctionProg-Onto ontology was defined as a class in Protégé.
Figure 2 shows a screenshot with some basic concepts of functional programming that were
included in the ontology, under OWL Viz view.
Fig. 2. Screenshot with some basic concepts of the FunctionProg-Onto prototype ontology
(in OWL Viz)
Examples of basic concepts are: Function, Expression, DataType, LambdaCalculus,
LambdaExpression, FunctionalProgram.
Figure 3 shows a screenshot with some advanced concepts of functional programming that
were included in the ontology, under OWL Viz view. Examples of advanced concepts are:
StrictEvaluation, LazyEvaluation, EagerEvaluation, Monads.
Fig. 3. Screenshot with some advanced concepts of the FunctionProg-Onto prototype ontology (in
OWL Viz)
The concepts related to the functional programming language (Haskell/HUGS) were included
also as advanced concepts. Examples are standard functions for Haskell/HUGS lists (as e.g. map,
filter, zip, foldl, foldr) and Haskell data types (as e.g. HaskellList, Rational, Integer, Float).
Moreover, some concepts from object-oriented programming were also included as advanced
concepts (e.g. Class, Object and Polymorphism).
Figure 4 shows a screenshot with a part of FunctionProg-Onto class hierarchy that includes
some advanced concepts related to the Haskell programming language.
Fig. 4. Screenshot with a part of FunctionProg-Onto OWL ontology that includes some advanced
concepts related to Haskell (in Protégé 4.3)
We have defined the relationships between concepts as object properties and some data
properties. Our ontology uses apart from the implicit relations between classes (i.e. taxonomic
relations of type is_a and has) provided by Protégé, some explicit relations (i.e. object properties)
such as basedOn and hasComputationModel. These relations allow a more complex
interconnection between classes through the inferences performed by the Protégé 4.3 Reasoner
(FaCT++). Examples of data properties that were defined are functionName (of string type) and
functionArity (of int type).
In its present form, the FunctionProg-Onto prototype ontology in the OWL format can be used
for the course of Functional programming as a vocabulary of terms.
Conclusion and Future Work

The paper presented a prototype educational ontology, FunctionProg-Onto, in the OWL
format, for the course of Functional Programming taught to undergraduate students of the
Computer Science specialization. The ontology was developed by following the guidelines of a
methodology that was described in section 2. The prototype ontology was implemented in Protégé 4.3.
As a future work we intend to extend the developed ontology with more concepts and to
provide a preliminary form of a declarative programming ontology by unifying the two prototype
OWL ontologies: FunctionProg-Onto and LogicProgrammingTeaching-Onto, i.e. a functional
programming ontology and a logic programming ontology.
References
Bird, R. (1998): Introduction to functional programming using Haskell. Prentice Hall.
Giumale, C. (1997): Functional programming – A pragmatic perspective (in Romanian). Technical
Publishing House, Bucharest.
Henderson, P. (1980): Functional programming: application and implementation, Prentice Hall International.
Hutton, G. (2016): Programming in Haskell. Cambridge University Press.
Mizoguchi, R. (2004): Ontology engineering environments. In S. Staab and R. Studer (Eds): Handbook on
Ontologies. Springer.
Suárez-Figueroa, M.C., Gómez-Pérez, A., Fernández-López, M. (2012): The NeOn methodology for
ontology engineering. In M.C. Suárez-Figueroa et al. (Eds): Ontology Engineering in a Networked World.
Springer-Verlag.
Boyce, S. and Pahl, C. (2007): Developing domain ontologies for course content. Data & Knowledge
Engineering 93, 1-18.
Kotis, K. and Vouros, G. (2006): Human-Centered Ontology Engineering: the HCOME Methodology.
International Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems 10, 109-131.
Oprea, M. (2016): A case study of collaborative ontology development for higher education. International
Journal of Artificial Intelligence 14, 2, 70-97.
Oprea, M. (2013): A general framework for educational ontologies development. International Journal of
Computer Science Research and Application 3, 2, 12-22.
Oprea, M. (2017): On the development of an educational ontology for logic programming, Proceedings of
ICVL 2017, 63-69.
Panagiotopoulos, I., Kalou, A., Pierrakeas, C., Kameas, A. (2012): An ontological approach for domain
knowledge modeling and management in e-learning systems. In Proceedings of AIAI 2012 International
Workshop AI in Education: Innovations and Applications, Halkidiki, Greece, 95-104.
Pinto, H.S., Staab, S., Tempich, C. (2004): DILIGENT: Towards a fine-grained methodology for Distributed,
Loosely-controlled and evolvInG Engineering of oNTologies. In Proceedings of ECAI 2004, 393-397.
Protégé: http://protégé.stanford.edu.
A Model for Teaching University Courses by Integrating Modern
Technologies and its Application
to the Artificial Intelligence Course
Mihaela Oprea1, Silviu Teodor Groza1, George Bogdan Bucur1
(1) Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Department of Automatic Control,

Computers and Electronics
Bdul Bucuresti, No 39, Ploiesti, 100680, ROMANIA
E-mail: mihaela[at]upg-ploiesti.ro
Abstract
Several modern technologies are or can be applied in academic computer-based
education. For example, virtual reality use in the teaching activity or laboratory work. Also,
course domain specific technologies such as educational robotics can be integrated in the
educational systems in order to provide examples of applications from real world scenarios
and a testbed for the taught algorithms. The paper introduces a model for teaching university
courses by integrating some software and hardware technologies and presents an example of
its application to the course of Artificial Intelligence, by using an e-learning platform,
LEARNING-ONE, which integrates a virtual reality module and an educational prototype
multifunctional mobile robot, PROMM, based on Arduino UNO R3.
Keywords: Computer-based education system, E-learning platform, Virtual reality,

Educational mobile robots, Artificial intelligence
1 Introduction
Computer-based education in universities is or can be based in the near future on several

modern software and hardware technologies such as ontologies, intelligent agents, cloud
computing, virtual reality, IoT, educational robots, networks of intelligent sensors,
smart/intelligent devices/machines etc. These technologies has the potential to improve the higher
education system quality in both directions, theory and practice. In the last years, various
educational systems were developed as intelligent e-learning platforms, intelligent web-based
educational systems and intelligent tutoring systems, being based on specific artificial intelligence
technologies (e.g. intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, ontologies), some of them being
accessed also from mobile devices.
Among the main types of computer-based education, blended learning and e-learning models
proved to be efficient. These models were implemented on different platforms, such as Moodle
(see e.g. the case study described in (Adăscăliței et al., 2014)) and ECOLE, an ontology-based
open online course platform for linked education, introduced in (Vasiliev et al., 2016). The
fundamental concepts and practice of computer-based education were defined in different
textbooks (see e.g. (Adăscăliței, 2007) - an excellent textbook in Romanian language, for basic
computer-assisted education, (Bersin, 2004) - for blended learning, (Holmes at el., 2006) - for e-
learning). Moreover, the importance of using the ontological approach for the development of
computer-based education systems has been highlighted in numerous publications (e.g. (Boyce
and Pahl, 2007; Panagiotopoulos et al, 2012; Oprea, 2016)), ontologies being valuable educational
resources. On the other hand, experimental demonstrations of the application of different

algorithms, methods and systems to problem solving, either in simulation or in real world
environments are very important for a good understanding of the theory and practice of a
university course. Starting from these remarks, we have designed a model for teaching university
courses by integrating some modern technologies (educational ontologies, e-learning, virtual
reality, educational mobile robots). An example of its application to the course of Artificial
Intelligence is described.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the university course teaching model.
Next section shows the application of the model to the course of Artificial intelligence, by using an
e-learning platform, LEARNING-ONE, which integrates a virtual reality module and an
educational prototype multifunctional mobile robot, PROMM, based on Arduino UNO R3. The
last section concludes the paper.
2 The Model for Teaching University Courses

Usually, university courses are structured in two main parts: fundamentals and advanced theory
and practice. These two parts presents different concepts, methods, techniques, and so on, with
examples and problems solving demonstrations. The utility of a course is perceived by students
through applications and experimental demonstrations, in simulated or real world scenarios. Based
on these observations, we have designed a teaching model for university courses. The structure of
the model is given in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. The structure of the teaching model for university courses
The model is composed of the following eight components:

1) the course text of Part I - Fundamentals (includes the definitions and descriptions of the
basic concepts, simple methods/techniques etc);
2) the educational ontologies for Part I - Fundamentals (including the educational ontologies of
the pre-requisite courses);
3) examples and simple problems solving demonstrations for Part I - Fundamentals (including
various examples related to the course fundamentals as well as simple problems solving
with their solutions and demonstrations);
4) simple experimental demonstrations in simulated and real world environments (including
different software/hardware technologies such as intelligent agents, virtual reality,
educational robots etc);
5) the course text of Part II - Advanced Theory (includes the definitions and description of
advanced concepts, complex methods/techniques etc);
6) the educational ontologies for Part II - Advanced Theory (including the educational
ontologies of the pre-requisite courses);
7) examples and simple problems solving demonstrations for Part II - Advanced Theory
(including various examples related to the course advanced theory as well as complex
problems solving with their solutions and demonstrations);
8) complex experimental demonstrations in simulated and real world environments (including
different software/hardware technologies such as intelligent agents, multi-agent systems,
virtual reality, simulators, cloud computing, networks of sensors, intelligent
devices/machines, educational robots, IoT etc);
The model can be implemented either on a simple e-learning platform or on an ontology based
e-learning system, having already incorporated the ontological layer (i.e. the components 2 and 6).
The inclusion of the components 4 and 8 in the model provides one of its main benefits, that of
a very useful practice of the course by presentation of simulated and real world experimental
demonstrations that are built on fundamental and/or advanced theory of the university course.
Another important benefit of the model is knowledge sharing through educational ontologies. This
is very good for a unified/common view in the curriculum of a certain program of study and
between different curricula (as e.g. in the case of student mobility). An efficient engineering of the
university educational ontologies can follow the guidelines presented in (Mizoguchi, 2004).
Different modern technologies can be used by the components of the model: intelligent agents
and multi-agent systems (e.g. in simulations - by components 3, 4, 7, 8), virtual reality (e.g. by
components 7, 8), intelligent devices/machines and educational robots (e.g. in real world
experiments by components 7, 8), cloud computing and IoT (e.g. by components 3, 4, 7, 8).
The model is general enough so that it can be tailored to the particular requirements of a certain
university course. In the next section it is presented an application of the model to the course of
Artificial intelligence taught to the Computer Science specialization.
3 An Application of the Teaching Model to the Artificial Intelligence Course

We have applied the teaching model to the Artificial Intelligence university course taught to
the students of Computer Science study program at undergraduate level (in the last year of study)
by using (Russel and Norvig, 2016) as main textbook educational resource. In the case study that
is described in this section, the following components were implemented for certain sub-modules
of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) course: an OWL educational ontology for basic concepts of
artificial intelligence and some advanced concepts related to search informed algorithms
(BestFirst, A*, AO, AO*) - components 2 and 6, an e-learning platform that can be used for
components 1 and 5, some simple real world experimental demonstrations for intelligent robotics
with an educational robot based on Arduino development platform (component 4) and a complex
experimental demonstration in a simulated environment (with a virtual reality module) for the
application of the A* algorithm and an optimized version of it to the shortest path search between
two locations (component 8).
The educational ontology was implemented in Protégé 4.3 in the OWL format and includes
some concepts taught in the introductory course of AI and some advanced concepts from the
informed search strategies AI course module. Figure 2 shows a part of the class hierarchy of the
OWL ontology.
The e-learning system used for the implementation of the

components 1 and 5 (i.e. the course text for the
fundamentals and advanced AI theory) is LEARNING-ONE
(Groza, 2018). In our case study, the e-learning platform
included the AI course text for the introductory chapter and
for the A* informed search strategy. The details for the
design and implementation of LEARNING-ONE are in
given in (Groza, 2018). LEARNING-ONE includes a
complex experimental demonstration in a simulated
environment (with a virtual reality module) for the
application of the A* algorithm as well as of an optimized
version of A* (minimizing the running time) to the problem
of mobile robots navigation in a maze (i.e. the problem of
finding the shortest path between two locations). The
implementation of LEARNING-ONE system was
performed with the following software tools: Unity (for the
development of the e-learning platform and the virtual
reality module), Blender (for 3D object modelling) and
Fig. 2. The class hierarchy of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (for A* and optimized A*
AI course educational ontology application programming in C#). Figure 3 shows the main
(selection) user interface of LEARNING-ONE and the login user
interface. The user interface of LEARNING-ONE for the AI
course modules is shown in Figure 4 (a) - introduction and A* application demonstration and
Figure 4 (b) - introductory course text. Figure 5 shows a screenshot with the A*/optimized A*
strategy application demonstration (which integrates a virtual reality module for the navigating
robots).
(a) (b)
Fig. 3. The main user interface of LEARNING-ONE (a) and the login user interface
(a) (b)
Fig. 4. The user interface of LEARNING-ONE for the AI course modules (introduction and A*
demonstration – (a); and introductory course text (b))
Finally, we have included in our

educational system some simple real
world experimental demonstrations for
intelligent robotics with an educational
multifunctional mobile robot, PROMM
(Bucur, 2018), that was implemented on
the Arduino UNO R3 development
platform. The details of the design and
implementation of PROMM are
presented in (Bucur, 2018). Figure 6
shows the basic movements commands
(forward, backward, left, right) for Fig. 5. The screenshot of the A* and optimized A*
PROMM mobile robot, with joystick strategy application demonstration
control. Another type of control allowed
by our educational robot is haptic control. An example of gripper control demonstration for
PROMM mobile robot is given in Figure 7.
Figure 6. PROMM mobile robot

basic movements commands
with joystick control
Conclusion
The paper presented a model
for teaching university courses
that integrates modern technologies
(software and hardware) such as
ontologies, intelligent agents, multi-
agent systems, virtual reality,
smart/intelligent devices/
machines, and educational robots
etc. Depending on the course
topics certain technologies are
more proper to be used.
We have presented an
application of the teaching model
to the course of Artificial
Figure 7. Gripper control demonstration for PROMM Intelligence. In our case study we
mobile robot have used an e-learning platform,
LEARNING-ONE, which integrates a virtual reality module, an OWL educational ontology for
some modules of the AI course, and an educational prototype multifunctional mobile robot,
PROMM, based on Arduino UNO R3. LEARNING-ONE system and PROMM educational robot
were successfully designed and implemented by students from the Computer Science program of
study at Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, under the framework of their diploma project. The
application proved that one of the main benefits of the teaching model is the improvement of
theory understanding by students when using simulated and real world experimental
demonstrations that are built on fundamental and/or advanced theory of the university course.
References
Adăscăliței, A. (2007): Computer assisted education (in Romanian), Polirom Publishing House, Iași.
Bersin, J. (2004): The blended learning book, John Wiley, San Francisco.
Russel, S. and Norvig, P. (2016): Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach. Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
Mizoguchi, R. (2004): Ontology engineering environments. In S. Staab and R. Studer (Eds): Handbook
on Ontologies. Springer.
Vasiliev, V., Kozlov, F., Mouromtsev, D., Stafeev, S., Parkhimovich, O. (2016): ECOLE: An ontology-based
open online course platform. In D. Mouromtsev and M. d’Aquin (Eds.): Open data for education,
Springer, LNCS 9500, 41-66.
Boyce, S. and Pahl, C. (2007): Developing domain ontologies for course content. Data & Knowledge
Engineering 93, 1-18.
Holmes, B., Gardner, J., Gamble, M. (2006): E-learning: Concepts and practice, Journal of Pedagogic
Development.
Oprea, M. (2016): A case study of collaborative ontology development for higher education. International
Journal of Artificial Intelligence 14, 2, 70-97.
Adăscăliței, A., Cucoș, C., Rusu, I., Nica, I. (2014): Developing blended learning university environments
using Moodle – a case study, Proceedings of ICVL 2014, 258-266.
Panagiotopoulos, I., Kalou, A., Pierrakeas, C., Kameas, A. (2012): An ontological approach for domain
knowledge modeling and management in e-learning systems. In Proceedings of AIAI 2012 International
Workshop AI in Education: Innovations and Applications, Halkidiki, Greece, 95-104.
Bucur, G.B. (2018): Design and implementation of a multifunctional mobile robot system (in Romanian),
Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Diploma Project, Computer Science specialization, July 2018.
Groza, S.T. (2018): Design and implementation of an e-learning system integrated in a virtual world (in
Romanian), Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Diploma Project, Computer Science specialization,
July 2018.
Protégé: http://protégé.stanford.edu.
Blended Learning Methodologies and ePedagogical Approaches
Used in an Electrical and Computer Engineering Education
Program Leading to International Accreditation
Ashraf Salah El-Din Zein El-Din1, Adrian Adăscăliței2,

Marinel Temneanu2, Sebastian Arădoaiei2
(1)
Faculty of Engineering, Menoufia University
Gamal Abd El Nasr St. - Shebin ElKoum - Menofia, EGYPT
E-mail: ashrafzeineldin[at]sh-eng.menofia.edu.eg
(2)
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technical University ”Gh. Asachi”, Iași, ROMÂNIA
E-mail: adrian.adascalitei[at]gmail.com; arsete[at]ee.tuiasi.ro; mtemnean[at]ee.tuiasi.ro
Abstract
This review paper describes Blended Learning methodologies and pedagogical
approaches which use ITC in the field of electrical and computer engineering education
program leading to international accreditation. In this paper, we review also recent ASEE
(American Society for Engineering Education), IEEE (Institution of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers), SEFI (European Society for Engineering Education), and IGIP
(International Society for Engineering Education) papers to identify which pedagogical
aspects of the instructional process have been published in the focus of this research area.
Paper also reflects the experience of Technical University ”Gh. Asachi” from Iasi, Romania,
and Menoufia University, Egypt, with this approach applied to Project ECEP (Development
and Improvement of Curricula in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering Program
Leading to International Accreditation).
Keywords: ePedagogy, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Practices, Teacher Education,

Electrical and Computer Engineering Education
1 Introduction
This review paper describes Blended Learning methodologies and pedagogical approaches
which use ITC in the field of electrical and computer engineering education program leading to
international accreditation. In this paper, we review also recent ASEE (American Society for
Engineering Education), IEEE (Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), SEFI and IGIP
papers to identify which pedagogical aspects of the instructional process have been published in
the focus of this research area. Paper also reflects the experience of the Technical University ”Gh.
Asachi” from Iasi, Romania, and the Menoufia University, Egypt, with this approach.
1.1 Project Review
Project: Development and Improvement of Curricula in the field of Electrical and
Computer Engineering Program (ECEP) Leading to International Accreditation
Wider objectives of the project:
•To improve the quality and relevance of ECEP at Egyptian higher education institutions and
to enable easier inclusion of partner country institutions into European Higher Education Area.
Specific objectives of the project:
•To improve, develop and implement accreditation standards, guidelines and procedures for
quality assurance of ECEP education study programs according to EU (European Union) practices
at national level in Egypt beneficiary country;
•Strengthening the international outlook and collaborations of EU with national universities in
the field of electrical and computer engineering;
•Participation as peer reviewing curricula to exchange experience between EU and national
universities;
•They will achieve the overall objectives to educate experts in the field of electrical and
computer engineering which provides new insights into an integrated consideration of electrical,
and computer engineering. Future educated experts will be able to manage complex projects for
international institutions and companies operating in Arabic region.
After completion of the full time program participants will:
•Exhibit academic and practical expertise in their specific field of work, intercultural and
management competencies, and regional as well as language skills for becoming experts for
working in projects in relation to development policy;
•Contribute to their respective working environment more efficiency, using specialist-technical
knowledge linked up with overarching competencies such as communication skills and a holistic
approach to solving problems;
•Be able to contribute to their working environment in a practice and demand oriented way,
however, based on solid academic knowledge.
The training of engineer teachers in the project will meet the requirements promoted by SEFI,
IGIP, EU, ASEE, and IEEE in the areas of:
•Learning and teaching methodologies and pedagogical approaches;
•Advanced training in e-learning techniques. (eLearning is interactive learning in which the
learning content is available online and provides automatic feedback);
•Design website and e-learning platform; new teaching materials, adaptation / translation of
existing teaching materials[41].
2 International Accreditation of Engineering Education

Globalization and new technologies have opened up a global market for education pressuring
many institutions to be internationalized [31].
Internationalisation in higher education usually refers to exchange programmes and student
mobility. Its increasing importance is the consequence of multiple changes in the environment for
higher education which includes the growth of the global information, knowledge-based economy
and opening of the international labour market. Since internationalization of higher education can
be seen as a proactive response to the catalyst globalisation, emergence of an international market
for higher education poses challenges on both global and national level.
Using Blended Learning classes and Virtual and Remote labs for international engineering
education is one of the main objectives of the project.
UNESCO Four Pillars of Learning are fundamental principles for reshaping engineering
education:
 Learning to know: to provide the cognitive tools required to better comprehend the world
and its complexities, and to provide an appropriate and adequate foundation for future
learning.
 Learning to do: to provide the skills that would enable individuals to effectively participate
in the global economy and society.
 Learning to be: to provide self analytical and social skills to enable individuals to develop to
their fullest potential psycho-socially, affectively as well as physically, for an all-round
‘complete person.
 Learning to live together: to expose individuals to the values implicit within human rights,
democratic principles, intercultural understanding and respect and peace at all levels of
society and human relationships to enable individuals and societies to live in peace and
harmony.
2.1 Accreditation System for Engineering Education (EE) in EU.
European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) [30]. SEFI’s position on Accreditation in EE:
One of the main goals of the accreditation of Engineering Education (EE) programs is to
ensure transparency and hence build TRUST, favouring mobility of students and engineers;
A European accreditation system for EE should respect the rich cultural diversity of European
HE (Higher Education) Institutions;
SEFI fully supports the development of the EUR-ACE System, since it is fully compatible with
the requirement mentioned in the previous point, being based on cooperation and mutual
recognition between existing National accreditation bodies, and being based on LO (Learning
Outcomes) for its implementation;
SEFI also appreciates the fact that the EUR-ACE System has acquired global visibility through
contacts with the Washington Accord, the Sydney Accord, and the whole International
Engineering Alliance (IEA);
SEFI encourages all its HE institutional members to apply for EUR-ACE labels for their
programs;
SEFI encourages HE institutional members in countries that have not yet an established EE
accreditation procedure to solicit the relevant authorities in this direction, and in the meantime to
take advantage of the possibility to let one of the EUR-ACE-authorized agencies accredit (some
of) their EE programs;
SEFI wishes to ensure its strong support and involvement regarding ENAEE (European
Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education) activities, and in particular supports the idea
of submitting to the EC (European Community, European Union) a new application to further
advance the European system for accreditation of EE, in which SEFI intends to play an active role.
EUR-ACE (European Accredited Engineer) [29] is a system for accreditation of EE programs,
first defined in 2006, that follows the main recommendations of the 2001 SEFI’s position paper. In
particular, EUR-ACE respects the rich cultural diversity in EE among European HE Institutions.
EUR-ACE has been developed with the support of a sequence of EC-DG EAC (Directorate-
General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, of the European Commission) projects from
2004 to 2010. SEFI strongly supports the further development of the EUR-ACE System, as it
constitutes the first and a successful example of pan-European accreditation system in EE. It must
be remembered that the learning objectives of EUR-ACE, defined in the EUR-ACE Framework
Standards, are fully compatible with the European Qualification Frameworks, apply to first and
second level degrees, as well as “integrated (long) degree” programs, and can be used also by
institutions in countries that have not yet established a National engineering accreditation agency.
Criteria to be satisfied by ECEE programmes to be accredited include the following:
 The teaching and learning environment is appropriate to the programme objectives,
programme structure, preparedness of the students at intake, and the stated outcomes, for
example, as evidenced by: a progressive learning experience, development of independent
learning, effective programme co-ordination, and monitoring student progress;
 Students have access to sufficient literature and computer resources to support their learning.
3 ECEE (Electrical and Computer Engineering Education) Curriculum

3.1 Engineering Education
Engineering education is the activity of teaching knowledge and principles to the professional
practice of engineering.
The aims of the International Society for Engineering Education - IGIP are:
 To improve teaching methods in technical subjects
 To develop practice-oriented curricula that correspond to the needs of students and employers
 To encourage the use of new media in technical teaching
 To integrating languages and the humanities in engineering education
 To foster management training for engineers
 To promote environmental awareness
 To support the development of engineering education in developing countries
3.2 SEFI and IGIP Curriculum Engineering Education Model
The following didactical and organisational principles were formulated as guiding principles
for Curriculum Engineering Education Model:
1. A steady workload is better than ‘binge learning’ for tests;
2. Frequent and adequate feedback helps students adjust learning;
3. A variety in teaching methods keeps students engaged;
4. Community helps students help each other;
5. Ambitions must be clear and high, yet realistic; and
6. Teachers work best in teams, with minimal regulation.
3.3 Electrical Engineering Education
The teaching in undergraduate courses in the STEM disciplines has increasingly started
adopting the more learner-centred teaching, such as problem based learning [16]. This shift is
fuelled by the need for future engineers to demonstrate the use of higher order thinking, problem
solving, and more interpersonal aspects of a career, such as communication, social, and team-work
skills (National Academy of Engineers, NAE, 2005). Specifically, the engineering field is seeing
shifts in the types of engineers needed to emerge from college who are ready to participate as
active and effective members of a global society. The National Academy of Engineers (NAE,
2004) developed a set of attributes future engineers will have to possess to be a competitive force
within the field. Hence, it is important for engineering education to re-examine the use of typical
lecture-based teaching methodology and consider incorporating learner-centred teaching. One such
approach, problem-based learning (PBL) has the potential to help students to cope with the
demands of complexities of the field and problems they will face in their future careers.
PBL develops the following skills of students: Teamwork; Project management and
leadership; Oral and written communication; Emotional intelligence; Tolerance for uncertainty;
Critical thinking and analysis; Application of content knowledge; Research; Decision making;
Problem solving across disciplines.
3.4 Computer Engineering Education, BL Course Components and Activities
Instructional model [7] with a blended-learning approach provides more individualized
instruction than traditional face-to-face tuition. It enables learners to accommodate the space/time
demands of other interests, as students can carry on other everyday activities without having to
adapt to strict space/time constraints. Students can work cooperatively. Cooperative activities help
to promote information exchange flows among students, build up cognitive knowledge
construction processes, and strengthen motivational and informal affective bonds of mutual
support and friendship.
This blended learning process as a possible working scenario consists of a 15-week course
executed as follows:
1) The course kicks off with a one-day face-to-face session where the learners have the chance
to meet each other and the instructor. The instructor presents the learning objectives, discusses the
most significant knowledge and tasks to be learned, and describes computer-mediated interaction
(e-mail, chats, and forums).
2) Every week, there is a 2-h face-to-face session where students ask the instructor questions
about the contents they have studied over the last week and discuss problems that they have
encountered and possible solutions. The instructor presents the most important contents to be
studied over the following week, stressing the concepts that are most important or harder to learn.
3) One-hour interactions between learners and the instructor are held every week via chat
and/or forums to consolidate and acquire knowledge. These sessions are held informally, and their
development is not structured. These sessions are especially important for students that were
unable to attend the face-to-face session.
4) There is permanent e-mail support, and queries should be answered within 24 h.
5) Face-to-face support is available to students 6 h a week. Learners can meet the instructor
either individually or in groups to clarify contents and receive support on how to solve the good
problems.
6) An online assessment is held every week, where the students have to complete a five-
question questionnaire.
7) A final face-to-face assessment is held immediately after the course has finished. Students
have to sit a 10-question examination, where they will be expected to complete short exercises on
a common problem similar to the ones used in the good problems. The examination typically lasts
2.5 h. Learner evaluation takes into account the scores achieved in this test, the solution of the
weekly questionnaires, the solutions given to the good problems set throughout the course, and the
learner’s participation in live e-learning sessions.
4 e-Learning, Blended Learning,

Designing blended engineering courses using CDIO (Conceive--Design--Implement—
Operate) Approach [7]
Course design should be based on a well-constructed curriculum and properly formulated
intended learning outcomes.
The core of course design is selecting Teaching and Learning Activity (TLA). That requires an
open mind on how students learn and considering the use of each available type of TLA. [5]
Laurillard synthesised a list of TLAs from theories of learning:
 Acquisition: reading, watching, listening.
 Inquiry: using resources to develop an evidence-based output.
 Discussion: debating, questioning, answering, negotiating ideas.
 Practice: acting, in the light of feedback, to achieve a goal or output.
 Collaboration: working with others to achieve a joint output.
 Production: making something for others to evaluate against agreed criteria.
Most Learning Management Systems (LMS) were developed to support the TLAs (acquiring,
inquiring, producing and practicing) and sometimes they extend to discussing and collaborating.
Fig. 1. TLAs and supported processes (from van Puffelen[14], based on Laurillard[3])
There are limits in replacing on-campus TLAs by online versions. It seems that students need a
minimum amount of on-campus teacher-student contact and higher level engineering ILOs require
rich on-campus collaboration work that cannot be completely offered online; (ILO, intended
learning outcomes).
Trends and Predictions Related to Blended Learning
1. Mobile blended learning. Increasing use of mobile and handheld devices will create rich and
exciting new avenues for blended learning
2. Greater visualization, individualization, and hands-on learning. Blended learning
environments will increasingly become individualized, in particular, emphasizing visual and
hands-on activities.
3. Self-determined blended learning. Blended learning will foster greater student responsibility
for learning. Decisions about the type and format of blended learning will be made by students
instead of instructors or instructional designers. Learners will be designing their own programs and
degrees.
4. Increased connectedness, community, and collaboration. Blended learning will open new
avenues for collaboration, community building, and global connectedness. It will be used as a tool
for global understanding and appreciation.
5. Increased authenticity and on-demand learning. Blended learning will focus on authenticity
and real world experiences to supplement, extend, enhance, and replace formal learning. As this
occurs, blended learning will fuel advancements in the creation and use of online case learning,
scenarios, simulations and role play, and problem-based learning.
6. Linking work and learning. As blended learning proliferates, the lines between workplace
learning and formal learning will increasingly blur. Higher education degrees will have credits
from the workplace and even credit for work performed.
7. Changed calendaring. The calendar system or time scheduling of learning will be less
appropriate and predefinable.
8. Blended learning course designations. Courses and programs will be increasingly designated
as blended learning paths or options.
9. Changed instructor roles. The role of an instructor or trainer in a blended environment will
shift to one of mentor, coach, and counsellor.
10. The emergence of blended learning specialists. There will emerge specialist teaching
certificates, degree programs, and resources or portals related to blended learning courses and
programs.
Table 1. Typical Blended Learning Engineering Course components

Blended Learning Engineering Course
Online (e-Learning) Components Face-to-Face (F2F) Components
Educational Materials & Assessments: Educational Materials & Assessments:
▪Lecture Notes ▪Lab Sessions
▪Lecture Presentations ▪Supplemental Tutorial Sessions (if needed)
▪Additional Reading Materials ▪Project implementations
▪Virtual Laboratories (Labs) ▪Semester-end Examinations
▪Assignments ▪Workshop Component of a Course (if any)
▪Online Quizzes & Tests
▪Video & Audio Clips of material
▪Video Conference material
▪Webcasted Lecture
Educational Support: Educational Support:

▪Announcements of course-related matters ▪Manual payment of fees
▪E-mail ▪Physical meeting with advisers
▪Discussions Groups
▪Student faculty interaction
Course Management:
▪Course registration
▪Course Add/Drop
▪Course Withdrawal
▪Online fees payment
4.1 ITC for Engineering Education. Virtual Learning. Virtual Campus. Virtual Lab.
Virtual Learning Environments.
MOODLE (moodle.org; moodle.com) is a tool which enables you to create a website
environment for your class with online activities such as forums and quizzes.
Virtual Learning Environments, such as Moodle, are easy, free, and relatively safe to use:
 The Moodle website can be set up to allow only your students to enter it and explore it.
 It is a controlled environment for your students to use the internet.
 Because it’s free, many educational institutions use it.
 This can allow you to share content and ideas with other teachers easily.
4.2 Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other
digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was originated in 2008 within the Open Educational
Resources (OER) movement. MOOCs are open online courses that are more structured formal and
aiming at large-scale interactive participation. Only a few percent of the tens of thousands of
students who may sign up complete the course.
Typically they do not offer academic credit or charge tuition fees but in some cases they offer
the possibility of earning academic credit or certificates based on supervised examinations.
Subsequently, several providers by elite universities have emerged such as edX, which was
founded by MIT and Harvard University.
4.3 Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) for Engineering Education

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is often used as a synonym for e-learning but can also be
used to refer to technology enhanced classrooms and learning with technology, rather than just
through technology.
Implementing TEL for Engineering Education focuses in particular on pedagogical and
learning support issues raised by the fusion of e-learning environment systems with digital
libraries and resources. Taking the position that access to digital content is not synonymous with e-
learning but is an essential element of it, Allison Littlejohn illustrates the role of information
access, sharing and use within the context of a constructivist model for e-learning design. With
reference to three practical scenarios in e-learning design and delivery, she highlights potential
directions for the learning support contribution of the librarian, with impact on both educational
development and student learning.
5 e-Pedagogy for Online-Learning, e-Learning, Blended Learning. Teaching and

Learning Practices and Teacher Education in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Programs
Key learning theories and models, their characteristics, and how they might be realised in the
context of e-learning are presented in Table 2 [11].
Table 2. Summary of key learning theories and models, their characteristics, and how they might
be realised in the context of e-learning
Theories / Potential e-learning
Main characteristics
•Literature applications
Behaviourism •Focuses on behaviour modification •Much of current e-learning
/ •Skinner; via stimulus-response pairs development represents little
•Tennant •Trial and error learning more than transfer of didactic
•Learning through association and approaches online, the ‘web page
reinforcement turning mentality’ linked directly
•Pedagogical focus is on control and to assessment and feedback
adaptive response
•Focus on observable outcomes
Cognitive / •Focus on internal cognitive •Salomon’s notion of
•Anderson; structures; views learning as distributed cognition (Salomon,
•Wenger; transformations in these cognitive 1993) could lead to a more shared
•Hutchins; structures knowledge structure between
•Piaget •Focus on human development individual and surrounding
•Pedagogical focus is on the information rich environment of
processing and transmission of resources and contacts
information through communication, •Development of intelligent
explanation, recombination, contrast, and learning systems, and the
inference and problem solving notion of developmental
•Useful for designing sequences of personalised agents
conceptual material which build on
existing information structures
Constructivist •Focus on the processes by •The concept of toolkits and
/ •Papert; which learners build their own mental other support systems which
•Duffy & structures when guide and inform users through a
Jonassen interacting with an environment process of activities could be used
•Pedagogical focus is task-orientated to good effect to embed and
•Favour hands-on, self-directed enable constructivist principles
activities orientated towards design and •Access to resources and
discovery expertise offers the potential to
•Useful for structured learning develop more engaging and
environments, such as simulated worlds; student-centred, active and
construction of conceptual structures authentic learning environments
through engagement in self-directed tasks •Microworlds and simulations
Activity- •Focus on the structures of activities •In the last decade there has
based/ as historically constituted entities been a shift from a focus on the
•Vygotsky, ’34; •Action through mediating information (and in particular
•Wertsch, 85; artefacts within a framework of content) aspects of ICT to an
•Engestrom, activity within a wider socio-cultural emphasis on communication,
’87 context of rules and community collaboration and understanding

•Pedagogical focus is on bridging the the factors which underpin the
gap between historical state of an activity development of communities
and the developmental stage of a person •In particular there has been a
with respect to that activity e.g. current realisation that the development
state of language use and child’s ability to of content alone does not lead to
speak a language more effective learning, and that
•The Zone of Proximal Development– there is a need to structure and
the idea that assessing current ability foster learning environments to
gives limited insight into an individual’s enable communities to develop
potential for development, which is better •Networking capabilities of
studied through examining their work the web enable more diverse
alongside a more able peer access to different forms of
expertise and the potential for the
development of different types of
communities
Socially •Take social interactions into account •Multiple forms asynchronous
situated and learning as social participation and synchronous communication
learning / •Emphasis on interpersonal offer the potential for more
•Mercer; relationships involving imitation and diverse and richer forms of
•Vygotsky; modelling dialogue and interaction between
•Laurillard; •Language as a tool for learning and students and tutors and amongst
•Lave; the joint construction of knowledge peers, as well as the use of
•Wenger •Language has two functions: archive materials and resource for
1. a communicative or cultural tool, vicarious forms of learning
used for sharing and jointly developing •Different online
knowledge communication tools and learning
2. a psychological tool for organising environments and social for a
our individual thoughts, for reasoning, offer the potential for new forms
planning, and reviewing our actions of communities of practice or
•Dialogue between tutor and student facilities to support and enhance
can be articulated into 12 levels of existing communities
engagement–both external and internal
•Knowledge is a matter of
competences with respect to valued
enterprise. Participating in the pursuit of
this, i.e. active engagement
•Meaning our ability to experience the
world and our engagement with it as
meaningful–is ultimately what learning is
to produce
Experiential / •Experience as foundation for learning •Asynchronous
•Dewey; •Learning as the transformation of communication offers new forms
•Kolb; experience into knowledge, skill, of discourse which is not time-
•Jarvis attitudes, values emotions bound and hence offers increased
•Reflection as a means of opportunity for reflection
transforming Experience •Archive and multiple forms
•Problem base learning a focus: of representation of different

-Experience: Problem situation, communications and experiences
identification and definition offer opportunities for reflection
-Gather and reflecting on information
-Theory formation and test in
practice
-Experience through Primary and
Secondary
-Reasoning and Reflection
-Evaluation (Dewey, 1916)
Systems •Focus on organisational learning, or •New forms of distribution
theory / on modelling the development of learners and storage, archiving and
•Senge; in response to feedback retrieval offer the potential for
•Laurillard development of shared knowledge
banks across organisations and
forms of organisational
distributed cognition
•Models of learning account
adaptation in response to both
discursive and active feedback
Pedagogical Techniques for Blended Learning in Engineering Education are summarized in Table 3.
Table 3. Pedagogical Techniques for Blended Learning in Engineering Education

Most Widely Used Pedagogical Techniques Future Pedagogical Techniques
1. Group problem-solving and collaborative 1. Authentic cases and scenario learning
tasks 2. Simulations or gaming
2. Problem-based learning 3. Virtual team collaboration
3. Discussion 4. Problem-based learning
4. Case-based strategies 5. Coaching or mentoring
5. Simulations or role play 6. Guided learning
6. Student-generated content 7. Self-paced learning
7. Coaching or mentoring 8. Exploration or discovery
8. Guided learning 9. Modelling of the solution process
9. Exploratory or discovery 10. Discussion
10. Lecturing or teacher-directed activities 11. Debates and role play
11. Modelling of the solution process 12. Lecturing or instructor-directed activities
13. Socratic questioning
6 Engineering Teacher Education

6.1 Technical Teacher Training. Pedagogy and e-Pedagogy for Engineering Education[4].
The engineering educational competences are to be summarized as follows:
• Pedagogical, social, psychological and normative ethical competences;
• Didactic skills and subject expertise;
• Evaluative competences;
• Organizational (Management-) competences;
• Communication and social competences;
• Self-reflexive and development competences.
Development of the new International Engineering Educator ING.PAED.IGIP

Curriculum into an Umbrella for Modularised National and Regional Engineering
Education Curricula [21]
Those university graduates who want to become certified engineering educators (and thus also
receive the ING-PAED IGIP award) must attend the following courses in each of the four
modules:
1. Introduction to teaching (organisation of institution, planning of lessons, administration,
legal information), basics of engineering pedagogy;
2. Social competence (professional, vocational, pedagogical information), teaching styles,
types, forms of teaching (problem-based, project-based, blended learning), learning and teaching
psychology and communication;
3. Engineering education / pedagogy (vocational) work with curricula, extract information and
plan a year’s teaching, structuring and dividing of content, formulation of competences;
4. Teaching practice and analysis, self- and external evaluation, reflexion, quality management
and control (plan, act, check, do).
In the proven IGIP engineering educational curriculum there are the following compulsory
subjects:
Fundamental principles of Engineering Pedagogy (2 European Credit Transfer System─ECTS
credits): the core module is the backbone of the curriculum – the base and integrating part of the
engineering education science "Technical Teacher Training." The starting point is practically
oriented technical teaching. This is understood as a process which, like any other, is subject to
specific regularities and is determined by a series of components throughout its course – teaching
goals (G), teaching materials (T), teaching media (M), psychological structure (P), social structure
(S) and teaching methods (TM) have a complex interdependent relationship. The subject is dealing
with the definition of the overall and precise objectives of a lecture, the selection and structuring of
information, the different influences of technical subject matters on teaching methods – definition
of terms, derivation of laws, inductive and deductive methods, programmed instruction, etc.
Engineering Pedagogy practice (3 ECTS credits): The participants are supposed to practice the
design and performance of instructional units using concrete technical subject matters. Their actual
performance is recorded on videotape and discussed by the group. Due to their shared experience
the transfer of the learnt into real situations is achieved.
Fundamental principles of educational technology, ICT, media and e-learning (3 ECTS
credit): Technical devices, equipment and systems used to support instruction. The operation of
these media and e-learning, their sensible use and integration into the instructional process are the
main problems dealt with in this unit.
Laboratory didactics (2 ECTS credits): Concentrates on psycho-motor aspects of technical
classes, namely experimental technical work and research. Amongst others, the structure of
controlled experiments should be brought across, i.e. “stating the problem, setting up hypotheses,
carrying out the actual experiment, results and conclusions”, as well as the various possibilities for
teaching work in the laboratory, i.e. “strictly predefined experiments – selecting one experiment
from many – individual topics selected by students – semester work in the laboratory”, etc.
Scientific writing (1 ECTS credit): students should fulfil the requirements of research work.
Scientific work at the Bachelor level is usually the first research work of the author, the topic is
therefore generally rather narrow which facilitates achieving the desired insight.
Presentation and communication skills (2 ECTS credits): students will acquire basic historical
and theoretical-pragmatic knowledge and skills from the field of history of rhetoric, speech
technique, and vocal hygiene; by practicing they will develop aesthetic criteria for assessing verbal
communication.
Rhetoric (2 ECTS credit): rhetoric should encourage awareness of the effects of speeches and
lectures and at least touch on the basic problems of voice training and correct articulation, starting
with the fundamentals of clarity to the fascinating persuasiveness of speech. It should be
considered in the context of the communication and discussion training and should also be applied
to this purpose.
Engineering Ethics (1 ECTS credit) as a study course, Engineering Ethics is closely related to
Philosophy. The goal is to offer general information on European thinking advancement in the
cultural-historical framework from the beginning of continental philosophy to the present.
Theories of the human and problems of morality are considered.
Working with projects (1 ECTS credit) - one of the objectives of the teacher project is to have a
clear relationship to a teaching experience. If a student chooses to process a textbook, it must
include a didactic analysis of existing textbooks (rationale for creating a new text) and
pedagogical-psychological parameters required from the textbook. If the author decided on
research survey on selected issue, it is usually on a small scale investigation. Its implementation
and interpretation, however, must meet all the requirements for such surveys.
Intercultural competencies (1 ECTS credit): the goal of the course is provides students with
knowledge of sociopedagogical issues, focusing on the so-called multicultural education, whose
mission is to eliminate barriers, prejudice and xenophobia resulting from ignorance of foreign
cultures, nations and ethnic groups.
Fundamental principles of psychology (2 ECTS credits): Conditions of human learning, the
process of learning, results of memory research, motivation, talent and educability (technical
knowledge, comprehension and intelligence), etc.
Fundamental principles of sociology (1 ECTS credit): Functioning and dependence of social
groups (classroom community as a social group, groups within school classes), the role concept of
the teacher in his professional situation, teacher behaviour, student behaviour, etc.
Additionally the following elective subjects are taught: Portfolio Assessment; Coaching and
Mentoring in Engineering Education; Creative and Critical Thinking; Teamwork and PBL;
Standards and Quality in Engineering Education; etc.
Conclusions
In conclusion we mention the IGIP position sustained by Professor Michael E. Auer, President
of IGIP, (2013) at American Society for Engineering Education summarizing the tendencies for
the future of learning [33]:
- The conceptualization and implementation of a new learning model; the 21st century
competencies and expertise are: critical thinking, complex problem solving, interactive
collaboration, etc.
- A balanced approach between E-Learning and Face-to-Face Learning; between Formal and
Informal Learning. A modern approach of teaching and learning is a blended one. We have to
better exploit synergies from traditional and non-traditional education.
- The future of learning will revolve more around context than content. Our age is the
Information Age. We live in the Knowledge Society where data, information, knowledge are easy
to access 24/7. We need a radical change from teaching facts and knowledge to convey skills and
creativity (to find necessary data, facts, and knowledge) in a global context. Therefore, learning is
presently undergoing great transitions.
- The Future of Learning will be a global one, characterized by open content, open knowledge,
open technology for all. Global education is the next distance-learning leap. Especially from this
the necessity of a new business model in education arises.
- The future of learning is characterized by serious changes in the social position of learning.
According to some estimates, more than 80% of all learning occurs on the job rather than in
tertiary and post-tertiary education. Learning in the future has to be an integrated part of the job!
People of all ages have to renew their knowledge in decreasing cycles. This is what we understand
as "Life Long Learning".
The program presented here is the result of ”Gh. Asachi” Technical University of Iași,
Romania, and Menoufia University, Egypt, blended learning project to innovate pedagogical
practices using ITC technology. As a starting point, we advocated to a tertiary education learners’
needs analysis with the hope to create a pedagogical model to more efficiently meet those needs.
We then engaged in the selection of ICT resources for Blended Elearning Theoretical
Fundamentals, in syllabus and courseware materials design and development, in teacher training
envisioning ways to creatively put theoretical principles into practice, in devising and developing
balanced tests to objectively and coherently assess the communicative goals set. At the same time,
we designed, created and judgmentally evaluated the pedagogical materials, supervised technical
implementation, and managed the utilization of the system of our end users. The project provided
student teachers the opportunity to assume new roles: to become CAL (Computer-Aided-
Learning) material designer and developer, script writer, manager and producer of media
resources, work flow manager, online tutor, manager of the language learning environment, and
mediator to open communication channels with a multidisciplinary team.
The blended-learning pedagogical model implemented combines: (a) Learners’ independent
work with CAL tasks for developing language skills in a network-based interactive multimedia
environment, (b) online tutoring in web portfolios, (c) online interaction with global/local
community, (d) online and face-to-face tutoring by CAL teacher-tutors, (e) face-to-face classes
with CAL teacher-tutors.
Acknowledgement
We wish to address our thanks to all authors and institutions for the value of their ideas,
concepts and information that we used in our project design. All sources are cited in the
bibliography.
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[29]The EUR-ACE® (EURopean ACcredited Engineer) Standards and Guidelines for Accreditation of
Engineering Programmes (EAFSG), ENAEE (European Network for Accreditation of Engineering
Education), http://www.enaee.eu/accredited-engineering-courses-html/engineering-schools/accredited-
engineering-programs/
[30]SEFI Position Paper on Accreditation of Engineering Education in Europe,
https://www.sefi.be/publication/position-paper-on-accreditation-of-engineering-education/
[31]Requirements for accreditation of engineering education programmes, Engineering New Zealand,

https://www.engineeringnz.org/resources/accredited-engineering-qualifications/
[32]IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT), Special Issue On The Many Facets Of Remote
Laboratories In Online Engineering Education,
https://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/lt/2009/04/index.html
[33]Michael E. Auer. (2013). Present and Future Challenges in Engineering Education and the Strategies of
IGIP. ASEE International Forum. American Society for Engineering Education.
https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/27/papers/8381/view
[34]Egypt - Engineering and Technical Education Project (English).
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/154291468237321259/Egypt-Engineering-and-Technical-
Education-Project
[35]Tempus - e-Laboratories for Physics and Engineering Education.
https://www.elab.edu.eg/local/static/pages/files/SurveyReportELab.pdf
[36]e-Learning Competence Center. http://www.mcit.gov.eg/Training/Affiliate/13
[37]Falconer, I., Conole, G., Jeffery, A., & Douglas, P. (2006). Learning activity reference model–pedagogy.
LADiE pedagogy guide, LADIE project.
http://www.academia.edu/download/3458696/LARM_Pedagogy30-03-06.doc
[38]Methodologies, Tools and New Developments for E-Learning,
https://www.intechopen.com/books/methodologies-tools-and-new-developments-for-e-learning/
[39]IntechOpen, Open Access books, Computer and Information Science,
https://www.intechopen.com/books/subject/computer-and-information-science
[40]IntechOpen, Open Access books, Engineering, https://www.intechopen.com/books/subject/engineering
[41]EU Report New modes of learning and teaching in higher education.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/library/reports/modernisation_en.pdf
Blended Learning Approach Applied to
Electrical Engineering Courses
Arădoaei Sebastian Teodor 1, Adăscăliței Adrian1
(1) "Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iași,

55 Prof. D. Mangeron Blvd. Iași, 700050, ROMANIA
E-mail: asteor[at]yahoo.com; adrian.adascalitei[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The review paper is about how to Using Blended Learning Resources in Electrical and
Computer Engineering Programs on the Moodle Platform of “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical
University of Iași. Virtual environments for training and learning process based on Blended
Learning methodology are highlighted. This paper presents elearning instruction materials
for electrical engineering undergraduates developed on the Virtual Learning Environment
http://moodle.ee.tuiasi.ro.
Keywords: Blended Learning, Engineering Education, e-Pedagogy, Moodle
1 Introduction
Traditional models of teaching (one-to-many communication supported with one-to-few
encounters) do not sustain the quality of learning and teaching. e-Learning used creatively and
effectively can offer support, maintain and enhance learning process. For training and learning
process improvement dedicated to engineering students as one of the components in the
foundation technological program has been a challenging task to engineering lecturers.
The article presents the concept of using current pedagogical methods based on the analysis of
the advantages of teaching model in the network environment (Christiansen and Weber, 2017).
The instructor’s role in a networked learning environment changes: From lecturer to consultant,
guide, and resource provider; Teachers become expert questioners, rather than providers of
answers; Instructors become designers of student learning experiences rather than just providers of
content; Instructors provide only the initial structure to student work, encouraging increasing self-
direction; Instructors present multiple perspectives on topics, emphasizing the salient points; From
a solitary instructor to a member of a learning team(reduces isolation sometimes experienced by
instructors); From instructors having total autonomy to activities that can be broadly assessed;
From total control of the teaching environment to sharing with the student as fellow learner; More
emphasis on sensitivity to student learning styles. Also, the student’s role in a networked learning
environment changes: From passive receptacles for hand-me-down knowledge to constructors of
their own knowledge; Students become complex problem-solvers rather than just memorizing of
facts; Students see topics from multiple perspectives; Students refine their own questions and
search for their own answers; Students work as group members on more collaborative/cooperative
assignments; group interaction significantly increased; Increased multi-cultural awareness;
Students work toward fluency with the same tools as professionals in their field; More emphasis
on students as autonomous, independent, self-motivated managers of their own time and learning
process; Discussion of students’ own work in the classroom; Emphasis on knowledge use rather
than only observation of the instructor’s expert performance or just learning to “pass the test”;
Emphasis on acquiring learning strategies (both individually and collaboratively); Access to

resources is significantly expanded
As in all courses, the quality of the instructional planning maximizes the learning for all
students. In the Web environment, the components of a course website, which enhance teaching
and learning and save time by being posted for students to access online, are especially valuable.
At the most basic level, instructors can post content and announcements at a course website.
However, course planning usually begins with a course map – an outline of topics, weeks,
objectives, activities, assignments, and assessments to show alignment of course components with
each other in a weekly calendar format. Planning also includes the purposeful design of activities
to create a student learning community – supportive student groups in a course that develop with
the students’ active access, pursuit, generation, and evaluation of information and learning in their
discussion, chats, and e-mail communications.
2 Blended-Learning Concept for Basic Lectures in Electrical Engineering

From a didactical perspective lectures with such large number of participants have particular
shortcomings: differences in prior knowledge, in types of learning or in speeds of comprehension
cannot be accounted for. Only minimal or at least no interaction related to the subject matter is
taking place during each session in the lecture hall and students are driven into a consuming
attitude. Usually no timely feedback to individual problems in comprehension or learning
performance is available to the students. (Winterstein, T.,et. al. , 2012). So, to achieve a good
learning performance and learning outcomes, students had to be highly intrinsically motivated.
Yet, in this case, the contrary is the truth for the majority of lecture attendees, since students are
coming from other disciplines than electrical engineering and attending the lecture mostly for the
single reason that it is prescribed by their study plans.
These problems were addressed by four main aspects for the new concept.
1) All-time accessible material that follows the curriculum and can be autonomously as well as
repeatedly used allows self-study according to the individual skills and
background knowledge
2) Elements with direct feedback shall allow control of the personal learning progress on a
regular basis.
3) New and different learning elements shall create an incentive to continuously stick to the
lecture and lower the inhibition threshold to electrical engineering.
4) The material has to be transparently organized, but administration effort needs to be kept
low enough for one person to manage the lecture.
To increase the flexibility of learning time and place, provide individual learning opportunities
and thus support more self regulated learning on the one hand, and to address typical difficulties in
comprehension, raise motivation and improve the learning experience on the other hand, e-
Learning elements were chosen to complement the traditional lecture.
Amendatory material was added to give background knowledge and motivation, addressing
incentive aspects as well as direct feedback. The educational material as well as organizational
aspects of the lecture is administrated in on central online platform.
3 Planning the Components of a Website

As in all courses, the quality of the instructional planning maximizes the learning for all
students. In the Web environment, the components of a course website, which enhance teaching
and learning and save time by being posted for students to access online, are especially valuable
(Jiménez-Castañeda et al., 2018).
Course planning usually begins with a course map – an outline of topics, weeks, objectives,
activities, assignments, and assessments to show alignment of course components with each other
in a weekly calendar format, Figure 1.
Website Organization
Course News
Content
Schedule
Module 1 Module 2 • • • Module N
2 2 2
Status
Lesson 1 Lesson 1 Lesson 1
Interaction 1 1 Lesson Learning Center 1
Lesson 2 Lesson 2 Lesson 2
1 1 1
Search Overview
Overvie Applications
Application
• • •
• • •
Syllabus • •Example
Examples Classroo •
Classroom
• • •
Course Info • • •
Simulations
Simulation Individual
Individua
Requirements
Lesson
P O Lesson
P P • • • Lesson
P Q
Fig. 1. Web site organization diagram
Planning also includes the purposeful design of activities to create a student learning
community – supportive student groups in a course that develop with the students’ active access,
pursuit, generation, and evaluation of information and learning in their discussion, chats, and
e-mail communications.
Course content is aligned with curriculum standards, objectives, assignments, assessments
(Adascalitei, A. A., 2006).
• Course Syllabus. The course contains a syllabus and supporting documents. The course
includes items such as: course title; correct course semester; course description; course contact and
credit hours; course prerequisites; course objectives; course assignment; course test schedule;
required course materials; grading criteria; testing information; library resources; any on-campus
requirements; work ethics information.
• Staff Information. The course contains staff information: instructor name; appropriate picture
(optional); e-mail address; telephone and fax numbers; office hours
• Student Information. The course contains a student orientation and explains: how to get
started; technical equipment requirements; technology competency requirements; browser
recommendations; drop deadlines; format for assignments; requirements for chat room and/or
e-mail; instructor response time; troubleshooting advice.
• Course Calendar – Due dates for readings, activities, assignments, quizzes, and exams
• Assignments and Activities, including directions and due dates. Course assignments are
designed: to be interactive and requires students to interact with: each other and their instructor via
e-mail, chat room, and/or discussion board; and to address a variety of learning styles through:
written assignments; reading activities; discussions; simulations; case studies; and give students
the opportunity to engage in critical and abstract thinking.
• Course Documents – Additional documents for reference or study or answers to frequently
asked questions. Course document section includes a variety of learning media. Includes course
content delivered through media such as: PowerPoint presentations; Short lectures in audio or
video format; links to resources on websites; CD-ROM materials.
• Lectures – Notes and audio to highlight key concepts of course content Caution: For face-to-
face classes with web-enhancement, faculty may wish to include required assignments, even if
minor, for extra points to be turned in at the scheduled class times or other incentives to maintain
class attendance.
• Communication Tools – Areas for sending and receiving e-mail, participating in group or
class discussions about particular issues, keeping electronic journals, completing “dry or simulated
lab” exercises to prepare for “wet or real lab” experiences, or engaging in chat sessions.
• Student Tools – Areas for using a digital drop box to send and receive completed papers,
homepages, or personal profiles of students, and access to grades.
• Assessment Tools– Areas for quizzes, exams, and surveys; online grade books; and
assessment statistics. Course assignments are designed to be interactive and require students to
interact with: each other and their instructor via e-mail, chat room, and/or discussion board.
4 Using the Moodle Platform in Class

Moodle is a tool which enables instructors to create a website environment for your class with
online activities such as forums and quizzes. “Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS),
also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
It is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.”
(http://moodle.org/)
The web application was designed for a course entitled ”Fundamental of electrical circuits
(FEC)” which was a core module offered to engineering students. The front webpage provides the
overall course content of the FEC module with the names of the chapters, followed by the
activities in a drop-down list for each chapter. The activities involved in each chapter include:
course materials, additional materials, quizzes, open forum/chat and latest news message/calendar
(Zhang and Sun, 2017).
Teaching electrical engineering laboratory procedures by means of a virtual laboratory on a
personal computer will be much welcome by educational institutions for whom maintaining a
hands-on electric engineering lab is not viable due to various reasons. Instructional laboratory
simulations can be incorporated in the virtual laboratory resources where students are free to make
the decisions they would confront in an actual laboratory setting (Aradoaei et al., 2005; Beetham
and Sharpe, 2013).
There are a total of four chapters in FET with different topics. Each of these chapters has
plenty of information and activities related to the topic. This includes the course materials in the
form of PowerPoint slides and Acrobat PDF documents, which are the duplicates of hand-outs that
the students received in class. It is important to provide a softcopy to the students, as it is coloured
compared to their hardcopy and helps better in comprehending complex figures or diagrams.
Nowadays students are very much visual learners (Ng et al., 2017). The majority of the
students expressed the strongest preference to visual learning style compared to other learning
style dimensions. This implies that engineering students are strongly depending on visual learning
environment. Video is clearly a valuable additional learning activity that provides a sensory
experience that allows concepts and ideas to actually become alive and connected. It has the option
to rewind and review a particular section of the video to ensure students understand the key
concept. Thus, free educational video sharing websites that explained the FET theories were
uploaded in the webpage. In addition to this were video links from YouTube.
Apart from this, problems and solutions as well as simplified diagrams explaining complex
concepts, taken from textbooks or take-home questions which were not discussed in class, were
made available online for students. In each of these adapted materials, references were stated
clearly in order to allow students to seek the original sources if the need arises, apart from
avoiding copyright infringement (Svoboda, Špaldonová, and Guzan, 2006).
4.1 Learning Process

Before Attending Class:
• Explore the Overviews & Theory, Examples, Applications, and Simulations sections for
the Lessons to be covered in the Classroom Activities, Figure 1. (See Schedule).
• Complete Language Quizzes for Lessons to be discussed in class.
Classroom Activities:
• Attend class!
• Be prepared to contribute!
• Active learning environment with team-based problems solving.
• Web ready solutions from each team are due by the end of the week (Friday at 5 pm.)
After Attending Class:
• Complete team-based analysis and design problems assigned in the classroom activities.
• Optional analysis and design problems are available on the website.
• Complete the Integration Quizzes for Lessons covered in class.
Quizzes were incorporated in each chapter for students who were keen to self-test their
knowledge and learning after the revision of a chapter. Short quizzes in the form of true/false,
multiple choice, short answers or numerical questions were assigned, depending on the chapter
content. The majority of the questions were of problem solving type that involved calculation with
pre-determined specific units and significant figures of the numerical answers. Positive responses
were provided if the students were successful in answering the questions. However, there was no
time limit to answer each question as the students were given sufficient time to read and
understand the questions, and to answer calmly at their own pace.
INSTRUCTIONAL PROCESS IN
ACTIVE CLASSROOM
Overviews
& Theory
Applications
Lesson Individual
Activities Activities
Examples
Language Integration
Quiz Quiz
Simulations
After
Before Class Classroom Class
( ~ 1 hour) ( ~ 2 hour)
Fig. 2. Instructional process in Blended Learning Environment.

Since the quizzes were not part of the students’ assessment, it was considered as an
independent study at the students’ own will. Hence, the quizzes were designed with a due date of
two weeks, in order to encourage the students to have a constant revision and to avoid last-minute
cramming before examination.
Open forum serves the purpose of allowing a student to post his/her questions or doubts and
can be viewed by their fellow peers. This allows the lecturer to disseminate the answered questions
to the whole class without repeating in the classroom. Hence, each of the chapters was constructed
with their very own Open Forum. Students were also encouraged to use the chat function that
facilitated live discussion and interaction with their instructors and peers.
Another interesting feature of Moodle is the function on the right of the webpage which allows
the lecturers to post any new messages. It also comes with the list of recent activities so that
students can keep-track with any updates. General announcements such as due date of
assignments, examination dates and venues, replacement classes etc. were posted at this section
and these were linked to the students’ email accounts, so that they were notified of every update
studies.
4.2 Learning scenario for Course “Fundamental of Electrical Circuits, FEC”

The course was organized in blended mode with support of e-learning environment Moodle.
The scenario for course “FEC”, Table 1 are stressed on the use of SCORM compatible interactive
and simulation learning objects combined with practical problem solving in “face to face” mode
and development of assignments in online mode.
Table 1. Learning scenario schema of the course “E-Learning technologies”

Face to face activities Online activities and resources
Workshop – Topic 1 (2 hours) Home work (1)
 Demonstrations by the tutor  Preparing home work – solving tasks in
 Solving Tasks with resources prepared in their own Learning Project
advance and published in the online  Using of SCORM compatible simulations.
course (all task are implemented in the e-  Discussion
learning environment)
 Discussions about home work from  Preparing home work – solving tasks in
previous session their Learning
 Demonstrations by the tutor  Using of SCORM compatible simulations.
 Solving Tasks with resources prepared in  Discussion
advance and published in the online
course (all task are implemented in the e-
learning environment)
 Discussions about home work from  Preparing home work – solving tasks in
previous session their own course
 Demonstrations by the tutor  Using of SCORM compatible simulations.
 Solving Tasks with resources prepared in  Discussion
advance and published in the online
course (all task are implemented in the
Moodle platform)
Assessment: 1. Developed individual assignments; 2. Performance of the assignments in front
of all students
The course was organized in blended mode with support of e-learning environment Moodle.
The students had 14 hours lectures and 7 hours exercises in “face to face” mode and around 30
hours for development of own e-learning course in Moodle. During the lectures they learned
mentioned above topics of the course. During the face to face exercises the students mastered basic
techniques for solving problems and performing virtual experiments. They worked under
supervising of the tutor with resource files, prepared in advance by lecturer and used on-line
simulations and demonstrations. To master basic skills for development of e-learning course all
students followed common tasks.
The tasks were related to: 1. Using learning resources - web page, link to file or external web
resource, label; 2. Using and management of learning activities –assignment, lesson, test, forum,
blog, wiki; 3. Questionnaire etc.; 4. Management of students – grouping, assigning students to
activities and resources.
The students were grouped approximately 5 students per group. Each group was assigned to
one common e-learning course activity. During the face to face exercises students used resource
materials offered by the teacher to learn basic techniques and functionalities of the e-learning
electrical engineering environment. Also they had a possibility to use SCORM based e learning
demonstrations and simulations. Each student in role of “teacher” could assign another student in
her/his course like “a student”. In this way another students have a possibility to be enrolled in the
course with student rights and could observe work of their colleagues.
5 Effectiveness of e-learning within Universities

This paper describes a methodological framework consisting of factors necessary for assessing
the effectiveness of e-learning within Universities.
An e-learning framework comprises eight dimensions namely: pedagogical, technological,
interface design, evaluation, management, institutional, resource support, and ethical.
Effectiveness of blended e-learning can be determined by evaluating four main dimensions,
namely: E-learning Readiness, E-learning Course Delivery Strategies, Quality E-learning Systems
and Effects of Blended E-learning.
E-learning Readiness (in terms of costing and budgeting, policies, support, cultural awareness,
and infrastructure) have an influence on the quality of elearning systems and e-learning course
delivery strategies, which in turn have an impact on the effectiveness of blended e-learning.
To ensure effective blended elearning, that review paper propose a framework that focuses on
having a well balanced mix of effective pedagogy in elearning course design and delivery, relevant
institutional readiness for e-learning and use of quality e-learning systems to meet institutional and
student learning goals.
Conclusions
This paper presents e-learning instruction materials to develop on the Virtual Learning
Environment http://moodle.ee.tuiasi.ro/. Processes of: design, development and implementation of
interactive educational modules are presented, for the topic of electrical engineering.
The modulus is divided into a number of teaching and learning units which can be studied
autonomously (or independent). Fundamental of Electrical Circuits (FEC) discipline model is a
new approach to learning electrical technology-one that presents concepts in the customary
logically developed order but illustrates them with exemplars that reflect the applications students
are interested in (http://www.walter-fendt.de/ph14ro, accesed 2018; http://electronics.wisc-
online.com/, accesed 2018). eLearning modules are using visualization of electrical engineering
concepts. These principles focus on a few specific pedagogical pointers: 1) providing multiple
representations and descriptions; 2) making linked referential connections visible; 3) presenting
the dynamic and interactive nature of electrical engineering; 4) promoting the transformation
between 2D and 3D; and 5) reducing cognitive load by making information explicit and
integrating information for students (https://www.wisc-online.com/learn/technical, accesed 2018).
This paper is a synthesis that presents how use Moodle Virtual Learning Environment for the
development courses which mainly contains materials in order to educate the Engineering
Students. There exists a greater acceptance of the online mode of instruction as an adjunct to
learning. Their positive attitude was observed towards the model of blended learning approach,
and Moodle platform did create a positive impact on students’ learning experiences in terms of the
accessibility of learning materials and the support of online assessment activities.
Although the students agreed that the hybrid learning provided them with the needed
assistance, one of the drawbacks observed was that this method of delivery was prone to become a
one-way communication. Communication tools such as forum discussion and online chat room
have the features that create interaction with instructors and among the peers. However, most
students are likely to participate in the learning practices only if the activities are considered as
part of the evaluation of their academic performance. It is therefore necessary to assign grading
procedure in e-learning activities to increase students’ participation. With the improvements at
these loose ends, Moodle application in Electrical Engineering will be an invaluable and
imperative tool for the instructors as well as for the students (http://phet.colorado.edu/en/
simulations/translated/en, accesed 2018; http://moodle.ee.tuiasi.ro, accesed 2018).
The development of courseware materials for student engineers in Romania will have an
increasing impact on the national scene of Engineering Education, and the development of online
materials devoted to the development of human resources and human potential will accelerate the
process of transfer of up-to-date technology.
Acknowledgment
We wish to address our thanks to all authors and institutions for the value of their ideas,
concepts and information that we used in our project design. All sources are cited in the
bibliography.
References
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teaching laboratory, In Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Management of
Technological Changes, Chania, Greece, 179-182.
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Electronics, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on (Vol. 4, pp. 3210-3213).
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effectiveness of blended e-learning within universities. Information Society (i-Society), 2014 International
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Beetham H., Sharpe R., (2013): Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: Designing for 21st century learning.
Routledge; 2nd edition.
Christiansen M. A., Weber J. M., (2017): Teaching and the internet: The application of web apps,
networking, and online tech for chemistry education Chapter 10, American Chemical Society, pp 171–
186.
Jiménez-Castañeda R., Cipri K., Clavijo-Blanco J. A., Moreno-Ruiz J., (2018): The support of European
programmes in the Internalization process of engineering courses: DIEGO project — Development of
high quality courses on renewable technologies and energy efficiency, IEEE Global Engineering
Education Conference (EDUCON), 196 - 201.
Ng R. Y. K., Lam R. Y. S., Ng K. K., Lai I. K. W., (2017): A study of vocational and professional education
and training (VPET) students and teachers’ preferred support for technology based blended learning in
educational technology, International Symposium on Educational Technology (ISET), 268-271.
Svoboda J.A., The Electronic Teaching Assistant: the Circuit Design Lab, Interactive Illustrations and
Electric Circuit Study Applets. http://people.clarkson.edu/~jsvoboda/eta/
Zhang W., Sun Y., (2017): The Study on the Support of Online Learning Resource in Blended Learning
Based on Learning Process, International Conference of Educational Innovation through Technology
(EITT), 242-243.
Winterstein, T., Greiner, F., Schlaak, H. F., & Pullich, L. (2012, July). A blended-learning concept for basic
lectures in electrical engineering: A practical report. In Education and e-Learning Innovations (ICEELI),
2012 International Conference on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
http://www.walter-fendt.de/ph14ro, accesed 2018, JAVA Applets for Electrodynamics,

http://electronics.wisc-online.com/;
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/translated/en
http://moodle.ee.tuiasi.ro/ Moodle elearning, Electrical Engineering Faculty, Technical University “Gh.
Asachi” Iași, România
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universities_en.pdf, Report to The European Commission on: New modes of learning and teaching in higher
education, October 2014
Teacher’s feedback using Moodleand blend learning
Dineva Snejana
Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara

Zagora, “Graf Ignatiev” str. 38, Yambol 8600, BULGARIA
E-mail: sbdineva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
This report based on our experience and collected data explain the useful
teacher’sfeedback,which arereceive from implementingblend learningthrough creating on
line e-training course, multimedia e-books, self-assessment tests and etc., on Moodleonline
learning management system. The sites of e-learningof Microbiology, Chemistry, Ecology and
Biochemistry were among the first developed and used for full and part time study in blend
learning. The obtained feedback that has been registered is proper and entire information
about student process of learning; higher quality of acquire knowledges; better and low cost
support for student training; adequate students assessment and efficacy in applying e-test for
exam.
Keywords:web learning resources, Moodle, blend learning, student assessment, teachers
feedback
1. Introduction
The blend learning is extensively applied nowadaysas perhaps the most prominent delivery
mechanism in higher education, business, government, and military setting(Bonk & Graham,
2006),and it isdescribed as implementation of an ICTenvironment that expands classroom to the
virtual ICT reality (Pardo-Gonzalez, 2013).
Pure distance learning losessocial group partof study and that have negative impact on student
motivation toward acquisition of new information and that cannot beaninstitutionaim (Krake,
2013).The blend learningsupport, reinforce andenhance learning potential of students (Pardo-
Gonzalez, 2013); it is the opportunity to integrate the innovative and technological advantages
offered by online learning with the best oftraditional learning (Thorne, 2003). Moreover, inblend
learninglearners create betterorganize information through more and richerconnections between
the new and old information that they already knew (Douglas & Paton, 2013). Therefore blend
learning allows the learner toretain more of what is learned (Bonk & Graham, 2006).
2. Blend learning in Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University –

Stara Zagora
The e-learning using Moodle in Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol,Trakia
University –Stara Zagora starts at 2005 with the project “Distance learning in Bulgaria.
Opportunities for treatment at the Technical College - Yambol.” Many other projects after that
developed reach data base with supporting e-learning materials (“Creating and piloting a
methodology for e-learning at the Technical College-Yambol”;“Intellectual systems and
technologies in e-learning”; “Improving the quality of teaching using multimedia products and
systems”; “Multimedia training course in Microbiology and opportunities for transition to e-
learning”; etc.).
Among the firstdeveloped e-courses were Ecology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Microbiology,

Informatics and etc. (http://tk.uni-sz.bg/edutk/). The influence of them on the quality of study had
been previously reported (Slavova et al., 2009; Dineva&Nedeva, 2009; Dineva&Stoikova 2011;
Dineva&Ducheva, 2011). Today after implementation of blended learning as a regular method for
teaching there exists large data baseorganize as Thracian e-University (fig.1), with e-coursesthat
covered almost all disciplines in the curriculums,using Moodle learning platform (http://edu.uni-
sz.bg/).
Fig. 1Thracian e-University
With the a new e-data base students have the opportunity to use free of charge multimedia e-
books overlying different subjects (fig.2), e-virtual library, e-presentations, e-quizzes and on-line
assessment of their knowledges, academic schedule, chats and forums, and site for an accurate and
useful student information.
Fig. 2Multimedia e-book of Biochemistry created with EU-project – in Thracian e-University
In Trakia University the students and teachers have the opportunity to be registered online
atthe existing data base, www.trakia-uni.bg,and to have access to a personal e-mail and Integrated
Management and Information System (Nedeva&Karabaliev, 2017).
3. Teacher’s feedbackusing Moodle and blend learning

According to Klompmaker, (2016), online learning programs as Moodle allow teachers to set
up calendars, quizzes and assignments, track student logins and work progress, make
announcements, make blog posts and much more. All in all, the feedback for teachers as well as
for learners from blend learning is positive (Krake, 2013).
Theprocess of blend allowedbeingreceived feedback in face of correcting and improving the

learning contentin the cycles of its implementation (fig.3, Pardo-Gonzalez, 2013).We also
registered the enhancement of students’ motivation to study and willingness to help in improving
learning content and correcting eventual technical errors.
Fig. 3. Stages of the incorporation process of the blend(Pardo-Gonzalez, 2013)
Using e-quizzeson Moodle permit teachers to tracker studentattempts and success in the
process of learning (fig.4), that alsogivesprecise and reliable information about the stage of
understanding and assimilation of supporting study e-materials, as well as the possibilityto
improve learning data info.According to Lee-Post (2009),the success of e-learning depends on
systems design- evaluated by quality ofinformation,system, and service;on delivery -evaluated
along one success factor: use; and outcome analysis -evaluated on user satisfaction, and net
benefits. It is proved that e-learning better enabled students to manage where and when to learn,
and spent less time for study (Lee-Post, 2009). The teachers’ feedback is to have powerful tool to
monitoring and improved the weakness points of students’ knowledges.
Fig. 4. Numbers of Atempts in self-examining test

Absolutely all mentors using remote technologies in process of teaching have assessed that
method of training as perspective and efficient to provide sufficient knowledges to the users
(Kuznetsov, 2017). On fig.5 is given the results of students’ achievements as grate report, after
using e-materials for study and training.
Fig. 5. Students achievement grade report – Moodle statistics
Usually after one semester of Moodle usage, students are feeling very comfortable with the
system (Hölbl&Welzer, 2010). Consequently, there isnomore negative impacts on student e-
assessment that can be causing from lack of enough knowledge and training of computer and other
ICT use. Shivacheva-Pineda (2017) also confirmed the efficacy in applying e-test for exam
control, based on monitoring the results in period of 2013 to 2016 and comparing the results of
various different forms of assessment.
Conclusion
The proved feedback of teachers using Moodle and its possibilities are proper and entire
information about student learning process; better acquired knowledges with higher quality; low
cost support of student training; adequate, fast and powerful students’ assessment; efficacy
andefficiency in applying e-test for student assessment.
References
Bonk, C., Graham, C. (2006): The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs. San
Francisco: Pfeiffer., P. 32.
London: Kogan Page. 161 p.
Thorne, K. (2003):Blended Learning: How to Integrate Online and Traditional Learning.
Douglas J., C. Paton (2013): The Cambridge CELTA course online. In Brian Tomlinson and Claire
Whittaker (Eds): Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation,
ISBN 978-0-86355-706-4, British Council 2013. p. 111- 123.
Krake A. (2013): Lessons in blended learning:Implementing an onlinelearning platform in theadult education
sector. In Brian Tomlinson and Claire Whittaker (Eds): Blended Learning in English Language
Teaching: Course Design and Implementation, ISBN 978-0-86355-706-4, British Council 2013 Brand
and Design/D057, p. 213-219.
Pardo-Gonzalez J. (2013): Incorporating blended learningin an undergraduate Englishcourse in Colombia. In

Brian Tomlinson and Claire Whittaker (Eds): Blended Learning in EnglishLanguage Teaching:
CourseDesign and Implementation, ISBN 978-0-86355-706-4, British Council 2013 Brand and
Design/D057, p. 51-60.
Hölbl M., T. Welzer (2010): Students’ Feedback and Communication Habits using Moodle. Social Science
Computing Review 10, 2, 453-469.
Lee-Post, A. (2009): “e-Learning Success Model: an Information Systems Perspective.” Electronic Journal of
e-Learning Volume 7 Issue 1 2009, (pp61 - 70), available online at www.ejel.org
Dineva S., Nedeva V. (2009): Development interactive courses of education in Microbiology based on e-
learning system applying in technical college of Yambol. The 4th International Conference on Virtual
Learning ICVL 2009.p. 231–238.
Dineva S., Ducheva Z. (2011): Positiveness of Web-based site for General and Inorganic Chemistry in
Blended Learning. The 6th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2011. 211-217.
Dineva S., Stoikova V.(2011): Application of Interactive Devices and Virtual lab in Chemistry Learning. The
6th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2011. 261-267.
Kuznetsov M. (2017): Methodical aspects of remote trainings for unemployed people. In Proceedings of The
12th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2017, 126-130.
Nedeva V., Karabaliev M. (2017): The Benefits of G Suite for Education on the Experience of Trakia
University – Stara Zagora. Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL
2017.151-157.
Shivacheva-PinedaI. N.(2017): Options for e-evaluation of the theoretical training of students of pedagogical
disciplines. Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2017.165-169.
Slavova V., S. Dineva, M. Pehlivanova, Z. Ducheva (2009): Improving the quality of education based on
implementation of e-learning courses and quizzes. Guide International Workshop 2010, New challenges
for e-learning in cultural, scientific and socio-economic development, Università degli Studi “Guglielmo
Marconi” 18-19 March 2010, Rome – Italy.
Klompmaker Matt(2016):E-Learning, Blended Learning, and Moodle. https://sites.google.com/site/
mklomp17/blog/e-learningblendedlearningandmoodle
Importance of the Positive Atmosphere in the Blended Learning
for Active Learning of the Students
Ducheva Zlatoeli, Pehlivanova Margarita
Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara Zagora,

Bulgaria, zl.ducheva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
A positive atmosphere in the classroom can be achieved if the lecturer and the students are
active subjects involved in a collaborative activity in which exist an active exchanging of
information and a subjective sense of comfort, significance, and satisfaction. In the report, we
emphasize on the positive atmosphere, because in the process of pedagogical communication,
a barrier can be not only the psychological peculiarities of the students, but also the relations
established between lecturers and students, students - group, etc. The emphasis is put on the
influence of the positive climate and its impact on the emotional sphere of the students. On
some of the components of the emotional atmosphere a comparative analysis of the results of
our previous study was made. The formulated conclusions are focused on the use of the
possibilities of the reteal and axial communication processes depending on the purpose and
the essence of the communication; in the virtual environment the lecturers should be guided
by the personally oriented approach and the implementation of the individual feedback;
stimulation of the professors to develop e-courses, to improve their digital competences.
Keywords:positive atmosphere, atmosphere in the classroom, learners’ motivation
1. Introduction
The problem of the climate impact in the classroom has been a subject of researchies in a
various aspects since the middle of the last century.This problem has become particularly
prevalent in recent years, as its impact on learners motivation, their involvement as an active
subjects in the learning process, their personal development and positive behavior models.
2. Brief theoretical analysis of the problem

Studies of the various aspects and problems for the learning environment and the climate in the
classroom by different scientists all over the world confirm its relevance and significance.From the
meanings of "environment" in the Synonymous dictionary in the context of the study we can point
out: society, environment, surroundings, atmosphere, climate, a circle of people.One of the
meanings of the term "climate" is an atmosphere in human relations, in politics, in the family ie a
good, healthy creative climate. (Interpretation Dictionary, rechnik.info)
In the Bulgarian-English dictionary the meanings of the terms that are of interest to our
research are:environment; surroundings; social environment; milieu; society.
If refer to the Glossary of Education Reform, the definition of the learning environment refers
to "the diverse physical locations, contexts, andculturesin which students learn. Since students may
learn in a wide variety of settings, such as outside-of-school locations and outdoor environments,
the term is often used as a more accurate or preferred alternative toclassroom, which has more
limited and traditional connotations - a room with rows of desks and a chalkboard, for example.”
Since to the students could be offered many and varied learning opportunities in different
institutions outside the school in the external environment, the term is also used as the preferred
and more accurate alternative to the classroom, i.e. with a more limited and traditionally subjective
definition of an object by evaluators based on experience, culture, etc. The physical environments
include illumination of the room, furnishings, equipment, decorations, etc., which are not of
interest to the study. Another element that is closer to the social and psychological characteristics
of the learning environment is class and school culture. (Evans I., Harvey Sh., Buckley L., Yan
El., 2009)
A literature review shows that in the late sixties of the twentieth century Walberg and his
colleagues use the term “classroom climate” (Walberg & Anderson 1968), and the first researcher
who popularise the concept of a classroom climate is Moos (1973), whoo goes beyond her direct
observations and interests as a psychiatrist and develops a climate measure in the classroom - A
nature of the classroom environments.In fact the term is adopted from an environmental paradigm
and it includes components of the physical environment. Adelman & Taylor (2002) lists over 12
key climate-related concepts in the classroom, including an organization of the social system, staff
morality, power and control structures, instructional methods, preliminary expectations for the
communication, competition, safety and compatibility of the learner with the requirements in the
classroom, emphasizing on the importance of the lecturer's behavior.
In determining of "learning environment" and its main features, many factors (school policies,
governance structures, etc.) are listed in the definition, but doesn't be analyzed in the report.Based
on a literature review and analysis, we can summarize that the term "learning environment" is
wider and includes in itself "climate/atmosphere in a class."The requirements and the expectations
of the society towards the education and the training in the modern conditions are related to the
preparation of the young people - active, independent, with the possibility of critical thinking,
problem solving and to be creative in their activities.For our research, it is important the emphasis
on the interaction between teachers and students as well as between students, the relationships and
the actions in the learning process.Of particular importance is the role of the lecturer to manage
and organize the environment to support and facilitate students’ learning, to develop their sense of
their own significance and achieve success, which produces positive emotions and activity
satisfaction.In this context, the positive atmosphere ("positive learning environment"/climate)
reflects the emotional and social dimensions during classes.For the research, psychological and
social interest is the characteristics of relationships and interactions between students and
professors that are related to the interest of students' creativity, encouraging the activity of the
trainees through feedback on individual achievements and recommendations for development, the
influence of the lecturers on the emotional sphere of the trainees.Particularly important in the
process of student education is to pay attention not only to the discipline or to the order, to
teaching and perception of information, but to provide full pedagogical communication, which
conveys ideas, moods, states, positions.A positive atmosphere in the classroom can be achieved if
the professor and the students are active subjects involved in a collaborative activity in which they
have an active exchange of information, a subjective sense of comfort, significance, and
satisfaction.In the complicated process of pedagogical communication, the lecturer not only seeks
to awaken the interest of the students, but also to convinces them about the significance of the
studied learning content, how it affects the community and thus the understanding of the
information that leads to change and in the behavior model.
Essential to the communication in the learning process is the need for students to acclimatise to
grasp and understand the situation of communication.This is necessary because in their future
professional realization they will work in different organizational environments, where they will
have to be able to understand the meaning of communication in the context of general activity and
the specific situations.The ability to communicate is especially important for those students who
acquire additional professional qualifications as "teacher" and "instructor for preparation of Motor
vehicles drivers" as they will work with learners of different age groups (17-18 to 25-40 years)
with a different level of education, training and motivation, different perception and interpretation
of information, different attitudes, relations, and worldview.In our work we emphasize on the
positive atmosphere, because in the process of pedagogical communication barrier can be not only
the psychological characteristics of the students, but also the relations established between
lecturers and students and students - group.
In the process of interaction, students experience positive emotions and assume that the
atmosphere is positive because in the blended learning ecturers can use different ways of
communication ("eyes in the eye" or mediated by technical resources), different options for
feedback, but also by using the two basic options of the communicative process:axial
communicative process (lat. Axis) when the signal is addressed to a single receiver of the
information, ie the individual;retealnetworkcommunication process (also called a network, lat. rete
- network), where the signals are addressed to many possible addressees/recipients.
In various studies on the climate issues in the classroom as the main problem is put the
behavior and leadership of the lecturer.Of interest is the study of Wubbels and colleagues from the
Netherlands, which have developed Questionnaire for the teacher interaction(QTI), which has
been translated into more than 15 languages (Wubbels et al. 1991).QTI measures the teacher's
behavior related to two orthogonal personal constructs: Influence (Dominance vs. Transmission)
and Proximity (Cooperation vs. Opposition).
3. DESIGN OF THE STUDY

The study was conducted with first-, second- and third-year students, full-time and part-time
study, and representatives of all Bachelor's degree courses in the 2016/2017 school year.The
studied persons are representatives of the different digital generations who have completed various
general and vocational high schools from all over the country. The number of respondents is 88
people.From the questionnaire we have analyzed the results of some of the answers to the
questions related to the support that professors provide for the training and learning of students.To
rank the responses we used four-level scale. The focus is on the influence of the positive climate
and the impact on the emotional sphere of the students. A comparative analysis on some of the
components of the emotional atmosphere with the results of our previous study was made.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Despite the development and deployment of a communication and information technologies in
the education, and the recommendations and preferences of some professors and researchers for
the implementation of the reteal communication process, the analysis of the data from our study
shows that 89.66% of the respondents prefer to provide an axial communication process for
individual feedback in order to communikate the achievements of the students, that is important to
support the motivation of a student's learning.Regardless of the policy of the faculty to stimulate
and develop e-learning and blended learning, comparative analysis of research data in 2015 and
current research shows a difference in the perception of a positive atmosphere in the e-
environment.
Although overall positive responses are close as value, there is a difference in satisfaction and
positive climate assessment.Our expectations for the results of the second study that the majority
of students will be fully satisfied were not confirmed.These results are similar to summaries of
Rayneri and colleagues (Rayneri et al., 2006) that each learner has a complex and unique set of
climate expectations in the classroom based on previous training.In our case this is particularly
true as students have been trained and completed secondary education for 12 years in different
schools, they have observed different styles of interaction, have accumulated their own personal,
social and life experience and they come to the faculty with certain and individual expectations
and ideas about the way of interaction and relationship with the lecturers.
Figure 1. Creating a positive atmosphere Figure 2. Creating a positive atmosphere

2017 2015
From the psychological point of view, the feeling of a positive atmosphere is also related to the
feeling of satisfaction that students experience when they are satisfied with the achieved results
and the positive objective assessment and attitude of the lecturer.The data from our study confirms
Andrews’s statement (2008) that learners should also contribute to the development of a positive
environment, and this participation will enable them to become a stakeholder in the learning
process and promote an atmosphere of shared vision.
Figure 3.Students satisfaction of the blended Learning
Interesting are the results according to the affiliation of respondents to different generations,
the highest is the percentage of representatives of the Z-generation who agree that e- and blended
learning in particular brings them satisfaction, followed by the representatives of the Y-generation.
At the same time, the representatives of the same groups of respondents also have the highest
percentage on the same question and answer "disagree". This fact can be explained by subjective
perception and feeling, interaction with different professors, previous experience at high school
and the level of preparation for work in e-environment.Representatives of all generations have
agreed that learning and training in the e-environment increases their interest to the activity, ie
positively affect their emotional sphere.
Fig.4. Increasing the interest to the learning in e-environment
Representatives of the X-generation responded only positively, while the representatives of the
other two groups have expressed and disagreement that blended courses raised their interest.Close
to the previous are the results from the answers to the question whether in the e-environment they
experience joy of learning, again the representatives of the X- generation have given only positive
responses.
Figure 5.A sense of joy in learning in the e-environment
An essential component that contributes to the feeling of a positive atmosphere is the timely
feedback for the individual achievements of the students.The analysis confirms that the majority of
the respondents prefer the individual feedback on their own achievements, which is an expression
of their willingness and expectation to be recognizable by the professor, to be accepted as active
partners in the cooperative process and their individual contributions and achievements to be
visible and estimated by the lecturers.Our understanding of the creation of a specific climate in a
cooperative activity and environment is close to that of Ashkanasy (2003) that the concept from a
psychological point of view refers rather to the feelings and emotional state of participants and
reporting and satisfaction with the achieved results.(Sharma U., Roodenburg J., Rayner St., 2015)
Figure 6.Making a feedback on ididvidual achievements
In our research, we have included issues that reflect the students' sense of climate during
training related to the positive atmosphere and the components that support this feeling (activity
supporting, intellectual skills and creativity developing, feedback on individual achievements,
timely feedback and recommendations to improve performance, stimulate different views,
etc.).Such elements are contained in the Moos questionnaire and in the Study program on the
"Emotional Environment" of the school classroom, although the second study refers to pupils of
primary school age in New Zealand(Harvey & Evans 2003).In our previous study on e-and
blended learning issues and the role of the lecturers to create a positive climate during the classes
(2015), we have included issues that reflect the active and independent participation of
students.The data analysis shows that the majority of surveyed students believe that thr professors
in their activities seek to manage and organize interactions with them, giving them the opportunity
to show initiative and activity, ie. opportunity for expression.Almost identical are the values of the
students who responded and accept that lecturers stimulate their autonomy and the expression of
critical thinking as encourage the expression of their own, different opinion.These data suggest
that professors have created a positive, friendly atmosphere where students are not afraid to
express their own position and feel like equal partners and participants in the learning process.The
percentage of students who accept that educators support and stimulate creativity, that is
particularly important for the overall development of the personality but also increases their ability
to adjust to the requirements of the labor market after their graduation, is relatively high.
The results and efforts of our long-standing research aim to change the pedagogical aspect and
technology where the students are encouraged to take the initiative and responsibility for their own
actions and behavior and learning outcomes. This can be achieved by using the opportunities of
the virtual learning environment to achieve higher academic and research results, by enabling and
requiring students to solve problems, create products, make autonomous decisions.
CONCLUSIONS
In the development of e- and blended courses to be used the possibilities of retial and axial
communication processes depending on the purpose and nature of communication.
When working in a virtual learning environment, teachers should be guided by a personally
oriented approach and individual feedback as the students are a heterogeneous community such as
age, prior learning experience, expectations about the nature of communication in learning,
different motivation to learn and participate in the activity.
Efforts should be directed to encouraging teachers to develop e-courses, improve their digital
competences to work with new platforms, products and software applications to meet the new
requirements and needs of digital generations.
References
Adelman, H. S. & Taylor, L. Classroom climate. In S. W. Lee, P. A. Lowe, & E Robinson (Eds.),
Encyclopedia of School Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage., http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/
publications/46%20classroom%20climate.pdf
Andrew, T. (2008). Create a learning environment that promotes respect., https://www.pearsonhighered.com/
assets/samplechapter/0/1/3/2/0132272350.pdf
Harvey, S., & Evans, I. M. (2003).Understanding the emotional environment of the classroom. In D. Fraser
&R. Openshaw (Eds.), Informing our practice (pp. 182-195). Palmerston North, NZ: Kanuka Grove Press.
Sharma U., Roodenburg J., Rayner St., (2015) A Guide to Promoting a Positive Classroom Environment,
ISBN: 978-94-6300-343-8 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers
Evans I., Harvey Sh., Buckley L., Yan El.( 2009) Differentiating classroom climate concepts: academic,
management, and emotional environments, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online,
2009, Vol. 4: 131–146 1177–083X/09/0402–131, The Royal Society of New Zealand
Walberg H.J., Anderson, G.J. (1968) Classroom Climate and Individual Learning. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 59, 414-419. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0026490
Moos, R. H. (1973), Conceptualizations of human environments, American Psychologist, 28(8), 652-665.,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0035722
Wubbels, Th., Brekelmans, M., & Hooymayers, H. (1991).Interpersonal teacher behavior in the classroom.
Harvey, S., Evans, I. M., Hill R., Henricksen An., Bimler D., (2016) Warming the Emotional Climate of the
Classroom: Can Teachers’ Social-Emotional Skills Change?, The International School of Emotional
Education, Special Issue Vol. 8, N 2, Nov. 2016 pp 70-87, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1121234.pdf
Understanding and Supporting student’s collaboration and
communication in blended learning
Nedeva Veselina1, Dineva Snejana1
(1) Trakia University - Stara Zagora; Faculty of Techniques and Technology;

Yambol 8602, "Gr. Ignatiev" str. №38, Bulgaria http://tk.uni-sz.bg
E-mail: veselina.nedeva[at]gmail.com , sbdineva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
The report discusses the subject of student’s collaboration, communication and blended
learning. The purpose of the report is to describe the extent of skills that students need to
acquire in the field of collaboration and communication in blended learning and the use of
Moodle virtual learning environment. For this purpose, the following questions are presented
and analysed in Materials and Methods: Communication and collaboration as part of Digital
communication; Benefits of Collaboration Software; What is mean to be Collaborative. In the
Discussion and Results section are analysed Moodle activities for the development of
Communication and collaboration skills in blended learning and Moodle's Plugins to create
an environment for communication and cooperation. Conclusions are drawn on the
application of the various blended learning tools and the learning outcomes that can be
achieved.
Keywords:Collaboration and communication, blended learning, Moodle, Moodle plugins.
1. Introduction
The theme of Collaboration and communication is really significant for the 21st century when
Internet and Information Technology have entered into all public ranges and in education
particularly. It becomes even more challenging totrain and educateyoung people, mainly students,
with the adoption of the Digital Competence Framework of EU (Dig Comp 2.1). That obliges us to
consider our training to provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills in the five areas
covered by Dig Comp: Information and data literacy; Communication and collaboration; Digital
content creation; Safety; Problem solving.
The report analysed the opportunities that are offered to the students of Techniques and
Technology Faculties -Yambol, in the area of Communication and collaboration in Blended
learning.
The article aim is to describe the extent of skills that students need to acquire in the field of
collaboration and communication in blended learning and the use of Moodle virtual learning
environment.
2. Materials and methods

In order to achieve the goals set, the scientific report provides an overview of literary sources
that address and analyse the topic. The sources used are both publications and reports of EU. They
are analysed on the basis of the existing theoretical perceptions and concepts. At the same time are
presented and analysed the experience of working with the resources and activities of the Moodle
virtual learning environment and the third-party plug-ins. Based on that analysis, conclusions are
drawn on the benefits of collaboration and communication in blended learning.
2.1.Communication and collaboration as part of Digital communication

The Digital communication and collaborationskills are indispensable and very important part
of student’s competences studying in different university.They are critical to the development of
modern society because engineering specialties are those who create the infrastructure and
technologies that enable the creation and development of knowledge, enhance communication and
collaboration in the 21st century.Therefore, the EC has adopted the Digital Competence
Framework (EU DigComp 2.1), that is already successfully integrated into development strategies,
curricula and programmes for student learners. The EU DigComp 2.1 is the set of knowledge,
skills, abilities and strategies that are required when are using ICT and digital media (Ferrari,
2012; fig.1).
The definitionof Digital Competence can be broken into: learning domains; tools;
competence areas; modes; purposes (Fig. 1; Ferrari, 2012).
Figure 1. Blocks of Digital Competence definition
The skillsfor communication and collaboration as a part of EU DigComp 2.1 framework

(Carretero at all, 2017) are:
 Interacting through digital technologies - interact through a range of digital technologies
and to understand appropriate digital communication means for a given context;
 Sharing through digital technologies - share data, information and digital content with
others through appropriate digital technologies;
 Engaging in citizenship through digital technologies - participate in society through the
use of public and private digital services;
 Collaborating through digital technologies - using digital tools and technologies for
collaborative processes, and for co-construction and co-creation of resources and
knowledge;
 Netiquette - aware of behavioural norms and know-how while using digital technologies
and interacting in digital environments. To adapt communication strategies to the specific
audience and to be aware of cultural and generational diversity in digital environments;
 Managing digital identity - create and manage one or multiple digital identities, to be able
to protect one's own reputation, to deal with the data that one produces through several
digital tools, environments and services.
2.2. Benefits ofCollaboration Software

The researchers believed that team work and collaboration is better than competition in
education (Ibrahim, 2014; Sackstein, 2017), and some elements of friendly competition are indeed
collaboration (Sackstein, 2017). In team environment learners grow;aseach one offers its
experience and knowledge with a deficit that can be lessened by collaboration (Sackstein,
2017).The collaboration increase productivityfosters creativity and empathy or other perspectives
good for product development andorganizational health. Collaborationhelps to build teams that are
better-rounded,saves time and supports better productivity. Additionally, when you give teams a
freedom to act independently, you’re also building trust, creating more loyalty and retaining
talent(Frary, 2017).
The collaboration is a process of teams, and the collaboration tools are meant to facilitate those
communication processes, using: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, Scoop It, Google Apps for Education
(GAFE) that offered opportunities to share and collaborate on a global scale (Coutts, 2015). There
are many different forms and types of collaboration software, from video conferencing platforms
to chat apps and project management tools to shared online document storage and workspaces.
The different collaboration formsthat help teams to collaborate together are:Chats &
Discussions; Commenting; Sharing; Video Conferencing; Shared Tasks; Online File Storage;
Working in the same document or space together; Alerts to keep team up-to-date at the same time;
Mobile apps and others (Ray, 2017).
The most common tools using for collaboration are shown on fig. 2.
Figure 2. Most common tools using for collaboration (Frary, 2017)
The ways of developing environments that prize people working together over ones that
promote a winner are (Sackstein, 2017):
 Get rid of grades –it is better tomake learning about learning and NOT about being better
than our classmates or colleague;
 Worktogether as a group - allow natural problem solving to happen and teachers need
these opportunities;
 Build relationships - give students multiple opportunities to get to know each other and
trusting relationship to be build; there are much more effective collaborations when we
know and trust each other.
 Teach how to collaborate –showing the outcomes of collaborative efforts versus
individual ones;
 Be transparent - lean on each other for help, switch roles, share responsibility and
because all of that takes practice always build time for practice.
2.3. The mean of being Collaborative

Being collaborative in practice isto share information, insights, strategies and resources across
projects, organizations and sectors, leading to increased efficiency and impact that brings all the
others together in practice. No single initiative or organization can make it happen alone through
collaboration, working in digital development and beyond can pool theresources and expertise not
only to benefit each initiative, but also to strengthen the global community. The collaboration
requires time, planning and dedicating resources to look for and develop opportunities
(digitalprinciples.org, 2017).
Core Tenets of collaboration are:
 Understand how your work fits into the global development landscape - identify others
working on the same problem in other geographies, and determine if there is a community
of practice. Find the technical leaders in global and regional organizations (such as World
Bank, World Health Organization, etc.) who can help you disseminate your work to other
teams, regions and countries;
 Engage diverse experts - across disciplines, countries and industries throughout the
project lifecycle. Create an engagement plan to apply this expertise at all phases, and
incorporate insights through feedback loops. Look for tools and approaches from other
sectors, and publish your findings so they are available to other groups and countries;
 Plan to collaborate from the beginning - build collaborative activities into proposals,
work plans, budgets and job descriptions. Identify indicators for measuring collaboration
in your monitoring and evaluation plan;
 Document work, results, processes and best practices - Share your code with the open
source community, publish documents under a Creative Commons license, and participate
in digital development conferences and other forums to share lessons you have learned
and to learn from other practitioners;
 Define how your project will contribute locally - collaboration is the first step in
interoperability; define how your work can connect with local systems and
whichstandards you need to adopt to make these connections. Engage with organizations
that support these standards, and participate in local technical strategy groups and
roundtables to ensure that you are a part of the larger whole.
3. Discussion and results

3.1. Moodle activities for development of Communication and collaboration skills in
blended learning
The developments of Communication and collaboration soft skills are crucial for the new
engineers and their employers, and for stakeholder perceptions of the value and relevance of
engineering education (Daniels at all, 2010).The activities that can be used to develop that skills
and implement them in the learning process in Moodle VLE are:
 Chat - allows a synchronous discussion in real time. This is a useful way to understand
the different point of view of each participant in the discussion. The way of using a chat
room is quite different from the asynchronous forums, which also have their place. Chat
features include a number of chat management and review features.Any teacher can add a
Chat to your course; Give a chat name to show what the goal is; to introduce a description
of this chat and instructions for participants in the course; Schedule future chat sessions
(there are four options for this: chat without any time - at any time, chat only for a certain
event, at the same time each day, at the same time every week); Save for past chat
sessions options to access past chat sessions.The administration of sessions allows

choosing from several existing methods in Moodle - Ajax, Normal method, Chat server
daemon.
 Forum - tools for asynchronous communication for teaching (sharing content or for
student interaction (creating content), useful for communication and successfully
creationof online communication environment. Forums are well suited for students to
communicate with each other as well as to co-create content. Students can write together,
participate in discussions, share files and collaborate (UMass Amherst Information
Technology, 2018).The forums can be different types: Standard forumfor general use;
Single, simple discussion; Question and Answer forum. These forums allow the groups to
get around certain issues that are being discussed, to create general content, to publish
files or to answer questions posed in the forum.Depending on the goals set by the creation
of the forum, many structured activities supported by Moodle settings can be created such
as: Forum Type; Group Mode; Assign to grouping.
 Wiki - a collection of web pages that anyone can add to or edit. A wiki is a collection of
collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki page is a web page that
everyone from one class can create together, right in the browser, without needing to
know HTML. A wiki starts with one front page. Each author can add other pages to the
wiki by simply creating a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. For students to collaborate
in this case, students need to use the “Collaborative wiki”, where students work together
on a single wiki but not an individual wiki. There are several wiki formats: HTML editing
using the normal text editor such as Atto; Creole - a popular wiki editing language,
NWiki - a wiki editing language similar to Mediawiki.
 Workshop - enables peer assessment of students. Students can evaluate other participants
who upload their materials using a multi-criteria assessment form.According to the
settings that are being maintained, the teacher can decide whether to show or hide the
identities of the students to each other when assessing.
3.2. Moodle's plug-ins to create an environment for communication and collaboration

Plugins (total 1510 to 02.08.2018) that can be integrated into MOODLE have different
application areas:Administration; Assessment; Collaboration; Communication; Content;
Interface.Collaboration plug-ins mainly refer to student group work: Group self-selection; Group
choice. Creating groups and configuring them creates the conditions for shaping them in different
ways in order to achieve the goal of collaboration.
The plugins that can be used for Communication are significantly more
(MoodlePluginsatMoodle.org, 2018):
 Message My Teacher - allows to configure the role of "Teachers" on a course. The blog
that is created shows a list of everyone with this role in exceptionof current user, if they
are a teacher and with a link to message each one;
 Congrea - facilitate real time Interaction between users. Build of Education, it is designed
primerly for teachers to Interact with Students. “Congrea” lets collaboration in real time
through Screen, Audio, Webcam, whiteboard, documents and media with students during
online delivery of classes and training sessions;
 Resource notification -allows a teacher to notify course students by internal messaging
when a new resource/activity is created or modified into a course;
 Purpose - a new action appears in a new entry on the end of the Edit drop-down menu,
available for each resource or activity, on the course page. The teacher can control who to
send the message to. The notification meets the restrictions on access to the resources of
the individual courses.
 Facetoface -A useful plug-in for blended learning environments through which the
administrators are looking for a way to manage events if pre-enrollment is required. Face-
to-face activities are used to keep track of classroom trainings. Each activity is available
in one or more identical sessions. A reminders message is sent to the users of their
managers a few days before the session is scheduled to start. Confirmation messages are
sent when users sign-up for a session or cancel.
 MoodleMobile&MoodleMobileTextMessages - The plug-in allows you to send a message
to any of your existing contact groups, allowing a large number of people to connect at
the same time.Without current monthly costs and only with a small setup fee to activate
via Janet txt profile, MoodleMobile is a great way to integrate text messages into the
university.
 Reservation -The main objectives of this module are scheduling laboratory sessions and
exams, but any events can be plan. The teacher can determine the number of seats
available for the event, the date of the event, the start and end dates of the reservation.
Students can book and unbook a seat and add a note for this reservation. Reservations
may be linked to another event so that students can only book one of these. It is allowed
to make a reservation via a CSV file from managers and administrators.
 CourseContactsBlock - shows a list of course users, different methods of communicating
with them, and their current activity status. By default, the block will show teachers on
the course, but this can be changed as desired; the block can provide quick links to an
email, message or phone to each user.
 BigBlueButtonBN - open source web conferencing system for online learning.The aim of
the project is to enable instructors to conduct online classes,virtualofficehours,
andgroupcollaborationwithremotestudents.BigBlueButton supports real-time sharing of
slides (including whiteboard), audio, video, chat, emoticons, windows, and screen.It also
records all content for later playback. There are a number of settings that make the plug-
in convenient for students and teachers.
4. Conclusions
Moodle supports student collaboration throughall collective forms of communication and
collaboration applied in different variants:
 changing the roles of "teacher" - "student" depending on the goals we want to achieve;
 the teacher assesses the participation of the participants in the course and their
participation in the collective forms of work;
 Moodle offered various formats for collective activities that allow innovative approaches
to their implementation;
 the plug-ins are valuable for enhancing the effectiveness of communications, which in
most cases are a prerequisite for blended learning collaboration;
 Moodle resources and activities allow the integration of other external software products
that can expand communication and collaboration capabilities.
5. References
Carretero St., R. Vuorikari, Y. Punie, (2017):DigComp 2.1 The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens,
Joint Research Center of The European Commission, http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
repository/bitstream/JRC106281/web-digcomp2.1pdf_(online).pdf Accessed 01/08/2018
Coutts N., (2015): Education: Competition vs Collaboration. http://thelearnersway.net/ideas/
2015/10/11/education-competition-vs-collaboration.
Daniels M., A. Cajander, A. Pears, T. Clear, (2010):Engineering education research in practice: Evolving use
of open ended group projects as a pedagogical strategy for developing skills in global collaboration", Int.
J. Eng. Educ., vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 1-12.
Documents of Moodle, (2018a):https://docs.moodle.org/35/en/Activities,Accessed 01/08/2018

Documents of Moodle, (2018b):https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Chat_settingsAccessed 01/08/2018
Ferrari Anusca, (2012):Technical report: Digital Competence in Practice: An Analysis of Frameworks, Joint
Research Center of The European Commission, http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/
w/file/fetch/55823162/FinalCSReport_PDFPARAWEB.pdf, Accessed 01/08/2018
Frary M., (2017): How collaboration powers productivity. https://www.raconteur.net/business-
innovation/how-collaboration-powers-productivity
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mats_Daniels/publication/, Accessed 01/08/2018
Ibrahim L.E., (2014): Competition vs. Collaboration: A Study on Promoting Children’s, Parental and
Teachers’ Collaborative Roles in Twenty First Century Digital and Media Literacy Education.
Medij.istraž. (god. 20, br. 2) 2014. p. 69-84.
Internet sources
Moodle Plugins at moodle.org, (2018):https://moodle.org/plugins/ Accessed 01/08/2018
Principal to Digital developments, (2017):https://digitalprinciples.org/principle/be-collaborative/, Accessed
01/08/2018
Published on UMass Amherst Information Technology, (2018):https://www.umass.edu/it/support/
moodle/group-communication-collaboration-spaces-moodle, Accessed 01/08/2018
Ray Stephanie, (2017):Top 10 Online Collaboration Tools for Increased Productivity,https://www.
projectmanager.com/blog/project-management-software/online-collaboration-tools, Accessed 01/08/2018
Sackstein S., (2017): Motivation for Learning: Competition vs. Collaboration. https://blogs.edweek.org/
teachers/work_in_progress/2017/02/grades_competition_and_collabo.html
Improving the quality of study assessment
Dineva Snejana, Nedeva Veselina, Zlatoeli Ducheva
Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara

E-mail: sbdineva[at]abv.bg, veselina.nedeva[at]gmail.com, zl.ducheva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
Thisarticle concern the problem with accurateevaluation of students and the possibility to
improve the quality of assessment tests and learning process itself. The assessment is a part of
study and many researchers agree that well-designed and inventive assessment can boost the
active learning process.
There are enough evidences that motivation of students tostudy is toughly affected by
assessment so improving the quality of assessment tests in virtual learning environment is an
urgent and important task nowadays.
Keywords:student assessment, formative, summative and diagnostic assessment, quality of

assessment
1. Introduction
Assessment and its associated feedback are essential not only for student learning, but researchers think
that it influence onthe rest of students’ lives (Race et al., 2005).
Students’ academic achievement is ordinarily measured withgrade point averages. However, course
marks do not reveal qualitative learning results due to the nature of the assessment (Asikainen et al, 2003;
Minbashian et al, 2004).The most important factors in studying are self-regulation and motivation and that
might prevent the negative effect of inappropriate assessment (Asikainen et al, 2003). Nevertheless,the
deepapproach to learning has been found to be positively related toquality of exam responses (Minbashian et
al, 2004). Moreover, students who applied a deep approach in theirstudying aimed at understanding the
subject matter for themselvesdespite of the nature of the assessment(Asikainen et al, 2003).
When developing the course in an e-learning environment, assessment takes a significant role. Various
activities as solving tests or problems, developing collaborative or individual projects, participating in
discussions, etc. aims to evaluate not only students' knowledge but also the learning process itself (IDS,
2002).
In developing the FTT courses and in particular the assessment modules, the teachers' aim is that the
assessment area to cover not only knowledge but also skills and competences. We accept the
Mödritscherunderstanding for competence as assimilation of knowledges and competences at a level that is
sufficient for their application to a particular job(Mödritscher et al., 2004).
2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Assessment as a part of study
Assessment is all about information for students of their progress to let them to actionsthat will improve
their performance (Cheryl, 2005). The assessment is an unbreakable part of study and engine of learning.
Moreover, well-designed assessment can boost active learning especially when the assessment delivery is
innovative and engaging (Cowan, 2005).
According to Cheryl,(2005), learning does not happen incidentally, so teachers carefully need to plan
the process of learning:
 decide what is going to be learnt in a particular session;
 define the learning goals;
 how it fits into the curriculum;

 communicate the learning goals to the learners;
 compile questions and design tasks to check learner understandingof the learning goals;
 explain to the learners the criteria which will be used to assess their work;
 decide how feedback is going to be provided;
 define how learners will take an active part in the assessment process;
 plan opportunities for learners to use the feedback provided on the assessment decision to further
progress.
Assessment is all about delivering correct information to learners of their progress,which empower the
necessary actions that improve their performance.The stages of implementing the process of assessment are
as following (Cheryl, 2005):
 explain the learning objectives and feedback opportunities;
 check learner understanding of learning objectives;
 brief learners on what they have to do and what they have to hand in;
 introduce the assessment criteria to learners and check their understanding;
 provide learners with opportunities to apply the assessment criteria to examples of work produced,
possibly by a previous cohort, to illustrate standards required and the application of the assessment
criteria;
 provide the necessary guidance and support to learners on an individual bases and provide oral
feedback;
 provide peer assessment opportunities;
 provide self-assessment opportunities;
 undertake the teacher-led assessment of learners’ work;
 provide written feedback to learners;
 create opportunities for learners to undertake remedial action as consolidation activities.
Based on the evidence that assessment drives learning,institutions, program directors or educators try to
adjust assessment with the newlearning environments (Segers& Dochy, 2006). The proper and accurate
evaluation is very important part of education, because there are enough evidences that learning motivation of
students is affected by assessment (Harlen & Crick, 2003; Dochy, 2005). Therefore, improving the quality of
assessment test in e-learning environment is an important task nowadays.
2.2. Educational paradigm and study assessment
In the traditional educational paradigm, when are determining the learning objectives and the assessment
methodsthen are determined and the competences that must be learned by the students, how they to be
developed and how to be measured the learning outcome.
In order the assessment not only to be a snapshot of the students' training, teachers can use all three
types of assessment - diagnostic, formative and summative.Thus, they assess not only the incoming and
outgoing level of the students' preparation, but also their development with the help of formative assessment.
In order to accomplish its purpose, different strategies can be used in the assessment, depending on
teachergoals aiming for and how to help students learn. In the higher education summative evaluation is
needed, because the training in each discipline ends with an assessment of student preparationachieved level.
However, if only summative assessment is used the teachers can determine the level of learning curriculum
by the students, but only when training is over and can not make the necessary adjustments during the process
of learning.
It can be said that formative assessment is often a successful strategy as the emphasis is placed not only
on the knowledge acquired by trainees but also on the learning path and students' omissions in the
discipline.According to Panadero et al, (2018) the periodic assessments during learning, known as formative
assessments (FA), are connected to self-regulated learning (SRL) and influence on the quality of learning.
Exactly the formative assessment enhances the efficiency of student learning through to timely feedback and
the teachers improve their e-learning teaching by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the materials
offered during the course.We can emphasize, however, that formative assessment focuses the attention of
teachers and students on what still needs to be learned instead of what has already been learned.Thus,
students have enough opportunities and their interest in the information needed to fill the gaps in their
knowledge during their studies increases. It is too much to say that only the use of formative assessment is a
win-win strategy, as various types of assessment can be used at different stages of training. Unfortunately, in
most disciplines, not enough attention is paid to diagnostic assessment.
3. Discussion and Results

E-assessment covers activities that use digital technologies to design, measure, store, transfer and analyse
data related to learner knowledge. The e-evaluation not only improves the validity and credibility of the
assessment system but also encourages student learning. Through a well-organized formative assessment with
appropriate requiringresources, not only reproductive knowledge, but also demonstration of understanding
and reasoning, with timelyfeedback the student learning can be stimulate and thus to increase the
effectiveness of learning process.By e-assessmentthe personalization of learning enhances as it enables
learners to check their knowledge of particular parts of the curriculum, to identify their gaps, and to build an
individual educational path.In addition, the different combination of evaluation methods also contributes to
the development of a better, objective self-assessment.
The approaches to use different assessment methods in e-environment, type and formulation of
questions and tasks are determined by the lecturer, taking into account the objectives set, the specificity of the
module or course, the reliability and objectivity of the assessment, the competencies to be assessed and the
level of their learning, etc.
The report discusses the application of e-evaluation at Trakia e-University based on Moodle
(http://edu.uni-sz.bg),on the subjects of Program Languages and Systems in Automation (with C ++
programming), Object Oriented Programming in Java and Multimedia for web based e-learning systems.
Final assessment of the students is done according to the following point system - maximum number of points
100, of which 50 are obtained in the following way:
 a total of 10 for items 1, 2, 3 and 4;
 course assignment - 15;
 semester test at least 50% - from the test at least 10 points (i.e.Average 3);
 the exam task at least 15 points (i.e.Average 3).
Table 1: Study Assessment scores

Participation on the lectures, exercises and task implementation Scores
1. Lectures participation 10
2. Exercises participation 10
3. Assignment 1 during the semester – one task with computer program with teaching
6
assessment
4. Assignment 2 during the semester - one task with computer program with teaching
9
assessment
5. Assignment 3 – three tasks with computer programs with pier assessment 15
6. Final quiz 20
7. Final task on the exam 30
The final score for the semester grade is obtained by the following scale:
 from 50 to 62 points - Average (3);
 from 63 to 75 points - Good (4);
 from 76 to 88 points - Very good (5);
 over 88 - Excellent (6).
In the Faculty of Technique and Technology of Thracian University different forms of assessment can
be applied, which can be divided into several groups:
 for collaborative work - Assignment, Workshop, Glossary;
 for individual work - Quiz and formfor Feedback.
The first 5 refer to Formative assessment, and the followingto the Summative assessment.
Assignment – the evaluation of this activity is given by the lecturer. During the semester the students
receive an individual assignment with three programming tasks (different for each student) that cover
alltopics of the learning programme. By the end of semester, they must submit 6 files to a specified maximum
volume: the code of each task and a screenshot with the result after the compilation.The teacher grades their
work and returns a written commentary on the performance each studenttask, paying particular attention to
the deficiencies and what needs to be done.
Removal of defects must take place within a certain timeframe. The teacher can use Feedback
comments in which make assessment in score points (50 to 100 depending on the degree of achievement or in
marks from 3.00 to 6.00).If a plug-in is used, annotate PDF can be created and saved.Upon expiry of
deadline, students present to the lecturer or to the students their programs with which they have completed
their tasks and demonstrate the results of their performance.In this way, each student expands his/her
knowledge on the already solved tasks of his colleagues and has the opportunity to comment on the presented
solution and to offer a more efficient algorithm or method. This enables students to analyse the work of their
colleagues“peers' work”, to apply peer assessment, to offer and protect alternatives, to develop critical
thinking and skills for assessment and self-assessment.
Workshop- Students learning Multimedia for web based e-learning systems get an individual job that is
different for each one. They work in a web-based environment and create multimedia applications. Everyone
has the opportunity to learn about the work of their colleague.There is an opportunity for students to see or
not see the job they are going to review.For a greater objectivity and appreciation, it is preferable for students
not to know whose work they are analysing and evaluating.During the assessment, the works are presented,
questions are asked by students and lecturers, and each student evaluates their colleagues from the group with
marks. When the final assessment of assignmentare establishing, the teacher takes into account his/her mark-
based on the degree of accomplished requirements; the total average grade of the students; as well as answers
to questions during the defence, and also presentation skills of the students. This achieves a double effect - it
develops and evaluates not only the programming competencies, but also the social competences to raise and
defend themes and their back with arguments.
Glossary - a collaborative activity. Students are required to prepare in the glossary the concepts
assigned by lecturers, as well as those related to their course and are missing in the glossary.Each student can
make comments in the glossary; teacher has to approve final version,however all students that have takena
part will be evaluate. The collective studentswork on dictionarycreation is a prerequisite, forboth enriching
the knowledge and for acquiring new concepts, as well as for increasing the activity and improving the
quality of their assessment and their active participation in the educational activity. This activity is applied in
all disciplines according to developed standards for creation and validation of e-courses in Thracian e-
University.
Quiz - this is one of the most used evaluation activities. When creating the tests, the questions are
grouped into categories that correspond to the subjects in the curriculum of the discipline. When setting the
test, a random number of questions from each category are casually selected. Particular attention is paid to the
statistical analysis after the test. The goal is to analyse the results after the first run.
Thereport Quiz structure analysis contains the following information in tabular form (fig.1, the way of
their calculation is known and described in the Moodle documentation).
Figure 1. Quiz structure analysis

Q#– shows the question number, question type icon, preview and edit icons;
Question name–a link to the detailed analysis of this question;
Attempts– shows how many students attempted this question;
Facility Index– the percentage of students that answered the question correctly;
Standard Deviation–information about how much variation there was in the scores for this question;
Random guess score–the score thatstudent would get by guessing randomly;
Intended/Effective weight– intended weight is simply what you set up when editing the quiz. If
question 1 is worth 3 points out of a total of 10 for the quiz, the intended weight is 30%. The effective weight
is an attempt to estimate, from the results, how much of the actual variation was due to this question. So,
ideally the effective weights should be close to the intended weights;
Discrimination index– this is the correlation between the score for this question and the score for the
whole quiz. That is, for a good question, you hope that the students who score highly on this question are the
same students who score highly on the whole quiz. Higher numbers are better;
Discriminative efficiency– another measure that is similar to Discrimination index;
 random questions are used, there is one row in the table for the random question, followed by
further rows, one for each real question that was selected in place of this random question;
 quiz questions are randomized for each quiz, the quiz module determines a default position.
Moodle's structural analysis - for test questions necessarily analyses those who have a Discrimination
index and Discriminative efficiency less than 15%. The approach in this case is as follows:
1. the material dealing with these questions is discussed with the students and given additional
information on the topics if necessary;
2.the students are offered opportunities to formulate two or more questions on this material to replace
existing ones.
The next test run is reassessed to verify the effect of the changes. The goal is always to increase the
quality of the assessment of the learning process and the end result of this learning course that students have
studied.
Feedback - in the end of each course with summative assessment students have to give written feedback
also.
Conclusion
Enhance the quality of student assessment is an essential task nowadays.In the course of the students'
training it is necessary to make preliminary analysis and development of the e-environment assessment
system based on the educational paradigm, the pre-set learning objectives and the strategies for their
achievement. The positive experience of the e-assessment system has shown that it is effective and
stimulating for the students to apply the forms for evaluation of collective work and peer evaluation. To
achieve evaluation quality, it is advisable to use the three types of assessment - diagnostic, formative and
summative. Formative assessment increases the effectiveness of student learning by identifying strengths and
weaknesses during the course.
In the future, it is envisaged to develop and improve the e-assessment system, complemented by a
diagnostic evaluation at the start and completion of each of the courses. The statistical reports of the tests and
courses will be further analysed in order to enhance their quality and comprehensiveness not only in terms of
knowledge but also of students' competencies.
References
Cheryl A. J., (2005): Assessment for learning. Learning and Skills Development Agency. ISBN 1 84572 064
4. p.49.
RaceP., Brown S., Smith B. (2005): 500 Tips on assessment: 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
Asikainen H., A. Parpala, V.Virtanen, S. Lindblom-Ylanne (2003): The relationship between student learning
process, study success and the nature of assessment: A qualitative studyStudies in educational Evaluation
39 (2013) 211–217.
Harlen, W., R.D. Crick, (2003): Testing and motivation for learning. Assessment in Education,10. 2, 169-207.
Minbashian A., G. F. Huon, K. D. Bird, (2004): Approaches to studying and academic performance in short-
essay exams. Higher Education, 47(2), 161–176.
Panadero, E., Andrade, H., & Brookhart, S. (2018): Fusing self-regulated learning and formative assessment:
a roadmap of where we are, how we got here, and where we are going. The Australian Educational
Researcher, 45(1), 13-31.
Segers M., E Dochy (2006): Enhancing student learning through assessment:Alignment between levels of
assessment and different effects on learning. Studies in Educational Evaluation 32 (2006) 171-179.
Dineva S., V. Nedeva (2009): Development interactive courses of education in Microbiology based on e-
learning system applying in technical college of Yambol. The 4th International Conference on Virtual
Learning ICVL 2009.p. 231–238.
Dochy, F. (2005): 'Learning lasting for life' and 'assessment': How far did we progress? Presidential address
EARLI 2005 at the 20 th anniversary of the European Association for Research onLearning and
Instruction, Nicosia, Cyprus, August 23. Retrieved on May 23, 2006.
http://www.earli.org/conferences/previous_conferences/earli 2005/presidential_address
Melia, M., (2012): Statistical Analysis of Moodle Quizzes, Blog, News/5 April, 2012,
https://enovation.ie/statistical-analysis-of-moodle-quizze/
IDS (2002): Instruction at FSU: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Practices. Instructional Development
Services, Florida State University.https://distance.fsu.edu/ instructors/instruction-fsu-guide-teaching-
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Differentiated success rate in e-testing
of students of pedagogical specialties
Ivanka Nikolaeva Shivacheva-Pineda
Faculty of education, TrakiaUniversity- Stara Zagora

6010 Stara Zagora, 9 Armejska Str.,BULGARIA
E-mail: ivanka.shivacheva[at]trakia-uni.bg
Abstract
E-testing is an effective option for monitoring and evaluation of academic preparation.
The article analyses the different achievements in e-testing and assessment of the theoretical
training of students in pedagogical courses. The factors and the regularities are searched
and derived for the found differentiation of results. E-evaluation is realized through the e-
learning platform Moodle. The results of this form of control are presented; comparative
analysis on different indicators is presented too, as well as with traditional forms.
Conclusions are made on the effectiveness and suitability of its application in the control of
the theoretical training in the different stages of the training of the students from the
pedagogical specialties.
Keywords: e-learning, theoretical pedagogical training, test, e-evaluation, differentiated

success
1. Introduction
This article is dedicated to electronic control and assessment as an essential part of the higher
education process. "Control and evaluation have undoubted diagnostic value. Through them we
check the level of knowledge, skills, competencies, availability of personality abilities. The
didactic diagnosis of the intellect is not merely a finding and assessment of content and
peculiarities, but rather a complex set of parameters related to the definition of the sense, the
meaning, the depth of understanding, the ways of interpreting social values."(Teneva, 2012: 204)
In particular, is presented the preparation of students from the specialtiesof the Faculty of
Educationof the Trakia University - Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. E-learning in pedagogical subjectsat
the faculty is used as an assistive technology.This complements and enriches the traditional forms.
(Shivacheva, 2016) The analysis of electronic control and evaluation shows both its undisputed
advantages in the training of pedagogical specialists and certain limitations. (Dommeyer et al,
2004; Monev and Dikov, 2009; Teneva, 2011; Ivanov, 2014; Shivacheva, 2017; Keremedchievand
Peneva и др.)
This study aims to study the effectiveness of e-evaluation at different stages of student's
training compared to traditional forms.Electronic control and assessment is an element through
which the semester mark is formed. It takes place at the end of the course. Besides it, the final
mark is formed and by other elements, resulting from traditional and interactive forms of control.
2. Methodology of the research
2.1. Object and subject of the research

The object of research is the process of monitoring and evaluation of students' theoretical
knowledge.
The subject of the research is the relation of the effectiveness of the e-evaluation of the
knowledge of the students in the pedagogical subjects and the stage of their education at the higher
school.
2.2. Aim of the research

The aim of the research is to establish the regularities between the conditions in conducting the
e-control and the success rate of the students in the pedagogical subjects.
2.3. Methods and tools of the research

The study was carried out through the following methods:
 Electronic didactic tests in the subjects "Theory of Education" and "Andragogy" as final
control. E-evaluation is realized through the e-learning platform Moodle. The test for each
courseis generated individually for each student by a bank with questions on certain categories.
The categories correspond and cover the course content. Tests on both subjects have equal degree
of difficulty and evaluation criteria.All students have the opportunity to do two attempts to solve
the test under the same conditions.The test success is formed from the higher score.
 Comparative analysis of the results of the e-test on the basis of comparison with:
o the results from the evaluation with the classic forms of examinations - oral and paper-
based testing with predominantly open answers;
o the stage of training.
 Statistical methods for establishing correlation between the studied magnitudes.The nature
of empirical data implies the use of the t-criterion for comparing the arithmetic mean of
independent groups.
2.4. Contingent
The contingent of the study is 139 students of 1st year, 1st semester of full-time studies of all
specialtiesof the Faculty of Education of Thrakia University - Stara Zagora, Bulgaria (Preschool
and Primary School Education, Primary School Educationwith a Foreign Language, Social
Pedagogy, Special Pedagogy, Pedagogy of Information Technology Education) and 45 students
(20 students in 2018 and 25 students in 2017) of the 3rdyear, 6st semester of full-time training in
specialtySocial Pedagogy, Bachelor’s Degree Programme.In the framework of the present
research, their knowledge and competences in the educational courses "Theory of Education" and
"Andragogy" were checked and evaluated by e-testing. All students included in the study, were
deciding e-test for the first time. This ensures comparability of results on this indicator. Besides
the above mentioned main contingent, the comparative analysis uses the results and from the
evaluation through different forms in the given subjects of the previous years.
2.5. Criteria and indicators

The main criteria of the study are success in e-testing of students and their attitude towards this
form of control and evaluation.
Student successrate in the present study is measured with rating as a result of the answers to
the questions in the individually generated test. The score is measured on a six-tier scale, but given
the way it is formed, it is expressed by a two-digit number after the decimal point. The success rate
depends on many factors. They can be summarized in two main groups:
 Individual factors.This group includes a variety of personal characteristics of the students -
development of the cognitive sphere (sensory knowledge, thinking, memory, imagination),
attention and volition, interests and motivation for learning, mastery of learning activity and
technology of learning, quality of preparation, influence of the environment (family, professional)
and many others.All these factors in its numerous combinations are of exceptional importance, but
they are not the subject of this research.Their influence is expressed through the individual marks.
Overall success trends are tracked by its arithmetic mean, given the scope of the groups and the
inclusion of all students in the study. Thus, the individual specifics by the formed assessment are
included as data, but the generalized are the leading.
 General factors for all students. In this group can also list a number of factors -
organization and management of the learning process, complexity and volume of learning content,
presence of various forms of current control, etc. The influence of the organization of the learning
process on students' success in e-testing is topical for this study. The organization of training is
also a system of factors and conditions. It can be assumed that the complexity and volume of
learning content, the presence of various forms of current control, teaching style and other similar
factors are similar or equivalent for different groups of students. A contribution in this direction is
also the fact that the leading lecturer is the same. Important for the study is the stage of education
of the students, when they are conducting the electronic control and evaluation.
Indicators for the criterion Successrate are the results in the subjects "Theory of Education"
(beginning - 1st semester) and "Andragogy" (late stage - 6th semester), studied at different stages of
the students' education.
Student's attitude towards e-control and e-evaluation is an additional criterion that explains
their success in the respective course. Indicators for this criterion are:
 preference of e-control and e-evaluation;
 insistence on solving the e-test;
 satisfaction with the result.
2.6. Hypotheses of the research

The following working hypotheses can be formulated:
H1 - The difference between the students' success rate with electronic and traditional forms of
control and evaluation (written and oral tests, tests with open answers) is greater at the beginning
of their studies (1st semester) than in the later stages (6th semester).
H2 - It can be expected that at the beginning education, the students' success by the e-
evaluation through test with the given answers will be higher compared to solving the paper-based
test with open questions.
H3 – No statistical difference in student success rates is expected in the later stages of the
training, regardless of the form of control.
3. Results of the survey
3.1. Success rate

The subject"Theory of Education" is taught in 1styear, 1st semester of all students. This is a
basic course in their pedagogical preparation, with specific, new and not light matter. Students are
now adapting to the academic environment and activity, are touching on the terminology and
content of the pedagogical sciences. The course has as result the orientation in the scientific issues
and concepts in the field of Pedagogy and Education. However, it cannot be expected that within
one semester students to form skills freely and competently to use the language of Pedagogy. This
fact suggests and explains the markedly lower success rate in the subject"Theory of education"
from the traditional forms of testing and evaluation (oral and written, open answer tests) compared
to e-testing whereby students must not to reproduce self-formulation of responses, but recognition
and choice of ready-made and suggested answers. In this way, electronic testing facilitates
students who, by logic or based on meaningful and memorized content, are more easily orientated
and choose the right answers. As lecturers and examiners, we would like on the end of course
students not only to orientate themselves in the content, but to master it in depth and to express
themselves in the language of pedagogy. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the
objective realities, to overcome the maximal expectations and to assess fairly the possible
achievements of the students with a view to their upgrading within the next educational courses
and forms of study.
The subject"Andragogy" is taught in the 3rd year, 6th semester of full-time education by
students in specialtySocial Pedagogy.This is a later stage of student education. The subjectis from
the system of pedagogical sciences. It has as object the education of adults. So it builds up the
knowledge of didactics and other pedagogical sciences. At this stage of their studies the students
expand, consolidate and wield in considerable extent the pedagogical terminology and problems
throughout the study of several of pedagogical courses. They are able to formulate and express the
knowledge and positions with the pedagogical science dictionary.From this point of view, it is
expected and is established proximity and a small difference in the results of the examination and
evaluation of their theoretical knowledge through the classical forms (oral and written exam, tests
with open answers) and by e-test.The marks are the result of the quality of the overall pedagogical
preparation up to now and already formed competencies.
Figure 1 presents the comparative analysis of the results obtained fromthe e-test of the students
in the two courses - Theory of Education (1st semester) and Andragogy (6th semester).
Theory of Education (1st semester) Andragogy (6th semester)

Figure 1. Number of students who achieved the given assessment intervals in the courses and
stages in the learning process
The results obtained are satisfactory and correspond to the quality of work and participation of
the surveyed students, evaluated also by other methods.
Table 1 summarizes the average scores for the two courses, studied at different stages of
student education (semester), formed on the basis of decision on the electronic and paper test.
Table 1. Comparative analysis of success rate through different forms of control and
evaluation at different stages of the education (average scores)
Theory of Education (1st semester) Andragogy (6th semester)

Е-test Paper test Е-test Paper test
4,22 3,08 4,00 3,89
(2018) (2016–2017) (2017–2018) (2015–2016)
The summarized average scores rate in the course Theory of Educationencompasses the
success rate of students in all specialties. The results outline marked difference between success
rates in Theory of education from various forms of control. The success from e-testing is visibly
higher.It can be assumed that this fact is due to:
 the new specific academic environment and activity, scientific issues and pedagogical
terminology;
 lack of formed pedagogical competencies and skills to operate with the vocabulary of
Pedagogy.
The verification of this working hypothesis by the t-criterion for comparing the arithmetic
means of independent groups confirms the preliminary assumption. The statistical analysis shows
a very significant difference in the success rates from the two forms of control in the course Theory
ofEducation:
[1] t = 12,3ttable=2,60with guaranteed probability99% (Р(t) = 99%)
The statistical results support the expectation that the success rate of the students at the
beginning of the education correlates not only with the quality of their preparation for the exam
but also with the forms of control. E-evaluation through a test with formulated answer assists
students in demonstrating their knowledge and certifies their efforts to master the theoretical
learning content. They meet difficulty themselves to formulate with the scientific language and
logic of Pedagogy. However, this essential component of pedagogical competence will be
gradually developed and built up in the course of their training through a variety of interactive,
creative and practical forms and methods.
The aggregate median scores for the course Andragogy include the success rate of the students
in specialtySocial pedagogy. The analysis of the results does not show much difference between
the successes from the different variants. This fact leads us to the assumption that at the given
stage of their education (6th semester) the students have a profound knowledge of the conceptual
vocabulary of the pedagogical sciences, they have understood their sense and meaning, they have
formed the skills to use it - to express themselves and to understand it, have formed certain
pedagogical competencies.As a consequence, it can be assumed that the result form the test is not
so much influenced by the control form (e-test with answers or paper with open answers requiring
competence for expression with the pedagogy dictionary), but from the depth of the preparation,
needed for both forms of verification. This working hypothesis is checked by the t-criterion for
comparing mean arithmetic values in independent groups. The statistical analysis shows a non-
essential difference in the success rate from the two forms of control in the course Andragogy:
[2] t=0,005 <ttable= 2,62 with guaranteed probability 99% (Р(t) = 99%)
The latest results highlight the expectation of achieving the desired level of academism and
professionalism of students in the later stages of education.
3.2. Student attitude towards e-control and e-evaluation

The attitude of students towards this version of e-control and e-evaluation is an additional
criterion, which explains their success in the respective course. The following data were found on
the indicators under this criterion:
 studentsof 1st year categorically prefer to complete the e-test as the verification of their
knowledge in the subjectTheory of education. This way of checking for them is associated with
greater security for success in given the commented situation in their educational development.
Students from the 3rd year did not claim preference for the form of control of their theoretical
knowledge of the subjectAndragogy.This fact once again supports the thesis that they feel equally
comfortable in both situations - to recognize and in situations to formulate their answers. The
reason is found in the already formed basic pedagogical competence.
 the commented facts of the previous indicator are supplemented by the underlined
insistence of the students of the 1st year to decide the e-test.As the course Theory of education is
studied at the beginning of the university education, some of the students had unresolved problems
related to their registration and access to the e-learning system of the Thrakia University.
Impressed the ambition and the determination within half a day (on the day of the exam) to do
their best to gain access (which they did not arrange throughout the whole semester) to have the
opportunity to solve the e-test.
 the satisfaction with the outcome of e-evaluation can be measured by analysing the use of
the opportunity for students to repeat the e-test solution to increase the mark.The fact that over
25% of students in the 1st course did not make a second attempt is an indicator of relative
satisfaction by the evaluation.
Conclusions
On the basis of the obtained results, the research hypotheses are confirmed:
H1 - The difference between the students' success rate in electronic and traditional forms of
control and evaluation (written and oral tests, tests with open answers) is greater at the
beginning of their education (1st semester) than in the later stages (6th semester).
H2 - At the beginning of the students' education, the success rate from e-evaluation through
test with predefined answers is higher compared to solving a paper test with open
questions.
H3 – Not found statistical difference in students' success rate in the later stages of the
education, independently of the form of control.
It can be summarized that e-testing in checking the theoretical knowledge of students in
pedagogical subjectsensures the efficiency of the procedure. It has its significant advantages and
grounds for applicability at all stages of education. E-control through test with predefined answers
provides the conditions for a gradual immersion in scientific pedagogical issues and terminology
at the beginning of their training. It has cognitive, motivating and stimulating functions for the
educational, scientific and professional development of the students of the pedagogical
specialtiesat the University.
5. References
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Keremedchiev, D., J. Peneva. Comparing results of traditional and e-testing.[Керемедчиев, Д., Ю.
Пенева.Сравнение на резултатите от традиционно и електронно проведено изпитване],
http://eprints.nbu.bg/3038/1/Doklad-Botevgrad.pdf, accessed2017
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learners' knowledge and skills. Dialogue, 5, 46-62.[Монев, В., В. Диков. (2009): Сравнително
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обучаемите. Диалог, 5, 46-62]
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Shivacheva, I. (2016): E-learning as supporting technology in the pedagogical preparation. Innovation and
entrepreneurship,4 (2), 3-16.
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pedagogical disciplines. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning
VIRTUAL LEARNING - VIRTUAL REALITY. Bucharest University Press,Bucharest, 165-169.
Education influence of artistic elements and principles
on the street network
Vaska Sandeva1, Katerina Despot1, Zlatin Zlatev2
(1) University of Goce Delchev - Stip,

Department of Architecture and Design, Macedonia,
e-mail: vaska.sandeva[at]ugd.edu.mk, katerina.despot[at]ugd.edu.mk,
(2) Trakia University, Faculty of Technics and Technologies,
38 Graf Ignatiev str., 8602, Yambol, Bulgaria,
e-mail: zlatin.zlatev[at]trakia-uni.bg
Abstract
The street network as an element of urban and spatial planning of settlements forms the
skeleton of the settlement and creates conditions for orientation in the general landscape.
Roads should be traced not only as convenient roads but also for economical construction. In
comparison to this important functional significance there is aesthetic visual quality of the
roads. In the theory of park art, term composition means - arrangement of individual plants or
combined with dead materials so as to form a harmonious whole subordinate to the artistic
idea. The main theoretical works in park art are closely related to the principles of the
general theory of composition.
Keywords: Park, Design, Street, Principles, Art
1 Introduction
The green system is an important spatial structural and functional part of the settlement and the
upland territories, which solve a number of tasks for improving the environment.
"Designing a street according to its likely use is a reasonable but unusual practice," says Plato
in 1917. We strongly believe that streets, squares and public spaces are a vital element in every
region and city, a component that contributes to the revival of the city. The street network as an
element of urban and spatial planning of settlements forms the skeleton of the settlement and
creates conditions for orientation in the general landscape. The organization of places for extra-
urban recreation is unthinkable without good transport links at these places in urban areas, i.e.
branched rational network of roads (Boubekri et al., 2014).
The formation of principles and the prediction of the effect of green systems planning are
closely related to the definition of the nature and content of the concept of "green system". In the
present work the definition of Prof. arch. Atanas Kovachev, which is formulated on the basis of
the existing urban and park development theory and practice:
"The green system of the cities and other settlements is a set of functionally planned and
spatially connected park - urban units (public and service green areas) within the range of the
settlement and the peripheral territory, corresponding to quantitative parameters and qualitative
indicators. The green system, under the specific natural and anthropogenic conditions, provides the
biologically active part of the living environment of man and his society through the connection
between the individual elements and the development zones of the urban organism with the natural
environment and provides an ecological and aesthetic environment for the development of the
different human functions.".
Street landscaping is part of the green areas for wide public use (SPS) and it is an element of
the town's general urban plan (Gordon, 2015; Despot et al., 2017). We defined this as a park
arrangement of the streets in the settlements, which means that besides the plantations in the
streets there are also green strips (areas) - middle, dividing, front gardens, which give great
opportunities for a park arrangement recreation, playgrounds, architectural elements, cafes and
kiosks, etc.).
2 Composition and skill principles

The composition is one of the most important concepts in all arts originating from the Latin
composition, which means the presence and connection of elements or parts of a work of art in a
single system. The term & quot; composition & quot; means composition, bonding, association
(Nedeva et al., 2013; Stoykova, 2014).
In the theory of park art, term composition means - arrangement of individual plants or
combined with dead materials so as to form a harmonious whole subordinate to the artistic idea. It
can be static, dynamic, closed, open and free.
The main theoretical works in park art are closely related to the principles of the general theory
of composition.
The combination of vegetation in landscape design is also subject to the principles of unity,
expediency, proportion, balance, and so on.
Knowledge of the elements is of great importance for the formation of the road composition
(line, offset and shape, vale, paint, direction, size) from which artistic principles are established
(expedience, color, scale, proportionality, equilibrium, symmetry and asymmetry, contrast, shade,
equality, diversity, repetition (rhythm), categorical contrast), and they are the regulators of any
project work that defines the interrelation of the elements in it.
3 The influence of artistic elements and principles on the street network

The artistic principles and elements are a guide for designers in organizing elements for a
visually satisfying landscape. Knowledge of design elements and principles is essential for
designing an open surface (landscape) and working in the road design process.
The elements of the compilation are the visual qualities that people see and react when they
look at the space in our case this is the road (Despot et al., 2014). Visual effects can forbid many
different emotions and feelings and the more positive these feelings are, the more likely people are
to enjoy and use space.
Perhaps the most common element in the composition is the line. The line creates all shapes
and patterns and can be used in different ways in building the landscape.
The landscape line is created between the edges of two materials, the contour or the shape
silhouette or a large linear function. Lines are a powerful tool of the designer because they can be
used to create infinitely many shapes and to control the movement of the eye and the body.
Landscape designers use lines to create patterns, create spaces, create forms, control movement,
establish dominance, and create a cohesive theme in the landscape.
Line properties determine how people respond to the landscape, emotionally and physically.
The right lines are structural and compelled; they create a formal character, usually associated with
a symmetrical design, and direct the eye directly to the focal point. The diagonal lines make the
lines in a deliberate direction. Curved lines create an informal, natural and calm character that is
more intimate with nature and asymmetric balance. Curved lines slowly move the eye and add a
mystery to work by creating hidden views.
The appearance is created by the contour of the enclosed space, and the shape is the three-
dimensional mass of appearance. The shape of the structure, the plants and the garden elements
also determine the general theme of the space. Formal geometric shapes include circles, squares
and polygons.
Form is the most durable quality of plants. Ordinary plant forms are well established and
standardized, and the shape is the most conventional and recognizable plant features.
The shape is very powerful because people often recognize and identify an element depicted on a
contour or silhouette.
The texture refers to how rough or fines the surface of the plant feels and / or looks. The
texture is used to provide variety, interest and contrast.
The greens, flowers, bark, and the whole structure of the branch have a texture. The shape and
size of leaves often determine the perception of the structure of the plant. A plant can be described
as rough, medium or fine texture.
Acute textures are dominant and tendencies dominate in color and shape, and the fine texture is
finer for other textures and tends to unite the composition.
Paint is the most visible element in the landscape and is often the focal point of most of the
Demure fans; however, it is also the most temporary of an element that often lasts only a few
weeks a year in individual plants.
The use of colors is determined by the theory of colors (using a color wheel) to create color
schemes. The simple description of the color wheel includes the three basic colors - red, blue and
yellow; the three secondary colors (when mixing two basic colors) green, orange and violet and
the six third colors (when mixing one primary in the adjacent and one secondary color) as red-
orange.
The color theory explains the relationships of the colors to one another and how they should be
used in the composition. The main color schemes are monochrome, analog and complementary.
Color is an important element for creating interest and diversity in the landscape. Color has
properties that can affect emotions, spatial perception, light quality, balance, and accent. A color
property is described by the relative temperature - the colors look warm or cold and can affect
emotions and feelings.
Visual weight is a concept that combines certain features that are more important in
composition based on their mass and contrast. Some areas of the composition are more noticeable
and more sensitive, while others are lost in the background. This does not mean that the
background features are not important; they create a cohesive appearance by linking the high-
visibility features and providing a place for resting the eye.
Compositions where all the features have a high visual weight often seem chaotic because the
eye tends to jump between the characters. High visibility usually comes from a group of plants
with one or more of the following characteristics: vertical and unusual shapes, large domains,
bright colors, thick textures and diagonal lines. Low visibility is found in horizontal lines, broken
or low shapes, fine texture and muted or dotted colors.
The harmonic composition can be achieved through the principles of proportions, order,
repetition, and singularity. All principles are linked and their use helps to achieve another.
Physical and psychological comforts are two important principles that have been achieved
through the use of these principles. People feel more psychic comfort in a landscape that has order
and repetition.
 Proportions. The relative share is the size of an object relative to another object. The
absolute proportion is the scale or size of an object. An important absolute percentage is
the human scale (the size of the body), since the size of the other objects is considered to
be relative to man. Vegetable materials, garden items and ornaments should be related to
human scale. Other important relative proportions include the size of the house, the yard
and the area where it is to be planted.
 The human dimension is also important for the psychological comfort of empty and open
spaces. People feel safer in small open spaces, such as patios and terraces. An important
conception of spacious comfort is the enclosure. Most people feel light with some
overhead protection that points to the ceiling. Overloading must not be solid; in fact, an
unintended breeding, such as tree branches, provides a good psychological enclosure that
allows the light to pass through to the sky.
Red. The order generally refers to spatial layout and organization of design and most often
works through balance. Balance is a concept of equal visual attraction and weight, usually around
a real or represented center axis. The shape, color, size and texture also affect the balance. The
balance can be symmetrical, asymmetrical and perspective. Order can also be achieved by massive
elements or elements in different groups, located around a central point (Sandeva et al., 2015).
 Symmetric balance. Systematic equilibrium is achieved when the same objects (mirror)
are placed on both sides of the axis. This kind of balance is used in formal design and one
of the oldest and most used concepts of spatial organization. This is because the brain
divides the space on an imaginary central axis and then requires an even distribution of
objects or mass (visual weight). Many historic gardens are organized using this concept.
 Asymmetric balance. Asymmetric balance with the same visual weight of uneven forms,
colors and textures on both sides of the axis. This equilibrium is informal and is usually
achieved by masses of plants that seem to have the same visual weight over the total
mass.
Mass can be achieved by combining plants, structures and garden ornaments. In order to create
a balance, the features of large sizes, thick shapes, bright colors and coarse textures look heavy
and should be used moderately, while small sizes, rare shapes, gray or protruding colors and fine
textures look easier and need to be used in larger quantities.
 Prospective balance. The perspective balance is responsible for the balance of the front,
middle and background. When we look at a composition, the objects in front are usually
high in visual weight because they are closest to the viewer. This can be balanced if you
want, with large objects, lighter colors or heavy textures in the background. In most
cases, the front or background should dominate.
 Repeat. Repeat is done by reusing elements or features to create patterns or sequences in
the landscape. The repetition of lines, shapes, colors and textures creates waves in the
landscape. Repetition should be used with caution, too much repetition can create
monotony and too little can create confusion. Simply repeating is the use of the same
objects in a single line or grouping of geometric shapes such as a square in an organized
branch (Sandeva et al., 2017).
Grading, which is a gradual change in some functional features, is another way to make the
repetition more interesting. An example may be a square shape that gradually becomes smaller or
larger.
 Unity. Unity is achieved by linking elements and features to create a limited character in
the composition. Unity is sometimes called harmony, a concept of general fit. For
comparison, scattered piles of plants and unrelated garden elements are opposed to unity.
Unity is accomplished through domination, inner bonding, unity in three (described
below), and the simplicity of outlining colors, textures and shapes. Although paper and
plants can be delayed by merging similar features, some variety is important for interest
creation. The easiest way to create unity is by using a design theme or design style.
Design themes and styles have a well-defined set of features that have retained their
popularity over time as many of them are visually satisfying.
Characteristics that are grouped in three or other groups of odd numbers as a group of five or
seven feel more balanced to the eye and give a strong sense of unity. Odd numbers indicate
different variations in height, such as small, medium and large, giving more interest. Odd numbers
are often viewed or perceived as a group and are not easily divisible and visually separated like
steam, worms.
 Application of Design Principles and Elements. Although it is useful to know the
elements and principles of design, it is sometimes difficult to understand how to apply
them. Each country presents challenges and opportunities for individual projects and
expressions and requires a unique implementation of elements and principles.
The research as elements and principles have been applied in an existing design that is attractive to
you is a good place to start. The best way to create a good design is to get ideas from projects that
are attractive to you and adapt to our specific conditions.
Conclusion
The main concept of landscape design is to solve problems by using gardening, artistic
composition and spatial organization to create attractive and functional "rooms" with different
applications. Elements (visual qualities) Line, shape, texture, color and visual weight and
principles (instructions) The proportion, order, repetition, and uniqueness of design are used to
create space, connect and visually mesh.
References
Boubekri, M., Cheung, I., Reid, K., Wang C., Zee P. (2014) Impact of windows and daylight exposure on
overall health and sleep quality of office workers: a case-control pilot study. Journal of clinical sleep
medicine 10, 6, 603-611.
Despot, K. Sandeva, V. (2017) Characteristics of ancient furniture correlated with Scandinavian modernism.
Innovation and entrepreneurship 5, 3, 162-174.
Despot, K., Sandeva, V. (2014) Art decorative appearance of children park. Applied Researches in Technics,
Technologies and Education 2, 4, 393-400.
Gordon, G. (2015): Interior lighting for designers 4th edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey,
USA.
Nedeva, V., Dineva, S., (2013): Design and development of efficient e-learning courses, ICVL 2013,
Romania, 108-115
Sandeva, V., Despot, K. (2015) Impact of water in designing landscape. Applied Researches in Technics,
Technologies and Education 3, 3, 275-281
Sandeva, V., Despot, K. (2017) Creativity development concept in industrial design. Innovation and
entrepreneurship 5, 3, 152-161
Stoykova,V. (2014) Evaluation of the application of interactive presentation systems in higher education.
Applied Researches in Technics, Technologies and Education 2, 3, 286-300
Application of optical device in methodology for teaching
analysisof essential oils
Zlatin Zlatev1, Stanka Baycheva1
(1) Trakia University -Stara Zagora, Faculty of Engineering and Technology38 Graf
Ignatiev Str., 8600 Yambol, BULGARIA
E-mail:zlatin.zlatev[at]trakia-uni.bg
Abstract
Technical tools for rapid and non-destructive analysis of essential oils, perfumery and
cosmetic products are mainly available in specialized laboratories.The training of students,
technicians to work with these devices requires the use of available technical tools.Such a
tool is the document-camera used in two VIS and NIR ranges of the spectrum, which can be a
tool for acquiring skills and habits for working with optical characteristics of essential oils.A
methodology is described which includes the steps of obtaining, processing and analyzing
spectral characteristics of essential oils.The effectiveness of this methodology for the analysis
of spectral characteristics of essential oils is demonstrated by the results of the study.
Keywords: Document-camera, Essential oils, Spectral characteristics
1 Introduction
Bulgaria has traditions in the cultivation of medicinal and aromatic crops and the production of
essential oils. The increasing use of essential oils in cosmetic, medical, food and aromatherapy
increases the demand for oil in the world. The global market for essential oils is expected to grow
at an average annual rate of accumulation of 8-11% in the period up to 2025, according to various
analysts (Dobreva, 2005; InteliAgro, 2017).
The quality of essential oils is a key indicator that determines its price and demand.
Laboratory methods for analyzing this quality are related to destructive and time-consuming
methods, as well as the need for trained personnel to perform this analysis.
In recent years, there has been interest in rapid and non-destructive methods of analysis based
on optical techniques, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging. These methods are suitable for
expressly detecting deviations from the qualitative performance of the product to be submitted to a
laboratory for in-depth analysis. In this regard, a growing need for training in working with
specialized devices for rapid analysis (Nedeva et al., 2013). Such technical devices are available
mainly in specialized scientific laboratories.The training of students, technicians to work with
these devices requires the use of available technical tools.An accessible technical tool in this
training is the document-camera (Stoykova, 2014), which can be used to acquire skills and habits
for working with optical characteristics of essential oils.
The purpose of the report is to apply a methodology for training on the processing of optical
characteristics of essential oils using a document camera.
2 Material and methods

30g of the fresh plant, dry leaves and inflorescences ofwhite oregano
(OriganumHeracleoticumL.) were distilled by hydrodistillation for a period of about 1h using
Clevenger-type apparatus. The oil was dried over anhydrous sodium sulphate to remove traces of
moisture and stored in a vial inside a refrigerator at 4oC until use.
The optical characteristics of the essential oil were obtained with a document-camera device,
developed at the Faculty of Technics and technology – Yambol, Bulgaria. The device consists of
two video-cameras capturing images in the visible and near infrared spectrum.
For the students' training on the operation of an optical device, obtaining, processing and
analysis of spectral data, the methodology proposed in (Damyanov, 2006; Mladenov et al., 2015)
is used. This methodology is presented in summary form in Table 1.
Table 1. Stages in conducting training to work with methods for reducing data from spectral
characteristics and classification
Stage Content Description
The spectral characteristics are obtained with an
A Spectral characteristics obtaining optical device operating in the VIS and NIR
spectral range
At least 4 methods are used - PCA, LV, AUC,
B Reducing the amount of data
PCA variants
Classification by reference
C As a reference is used a naïve Bayesian classifier
classifier
Selection of methods for reducing Methods are selected with the lowest error in the
D
the amount of data reference classifier
The methods selected and the data obtained by
Classification with linear and
E them are classified with at least four linear and
nonlinear classifiers
non-linear classifiers
A comparative analysis of the obtained results is
made and a method for reducing the amount of
F A comparative analysis of results
data and the classifier with the lowest error in the
use of the reduced spectral data
Conversion of values from XYZ and LMS models into reflectance spectra in the VIS and NIR
ranges in the spectral bands 390-730nm and 800-1000nm is conducted by mathematical
dependencies, with the transformation possible in both directions of the equations(Glassner, 1989).
The matrixes used to convert color components to spectrum are available in (Mather, 2010) for
the VIS range and in (Vilaseca et al., 2004) for NIR.
To reduce the amount of data of the spectral characteristics, latent variables (LV), obtained by
PLS (partial least squares) method, principal components – simple (PCA) and polynomial kernel
(kPCA), area under curve (AUC) are used. The naïve Bayes classifier (NB), Discriminant analysis
(DA) and Support vector machines (SVM) are used for classification. The assessment of the
performance of the classifiers used and made by a general classification error (e,%) (Mladenov et
al., 2015).
3 Results and discussion

An analysis was made of the possibility of applying the presented methodology in the
preparation and processing of spectral characteristics of essential oils of white oregano
(OriganumHeracleoticumL.).
Spectral characteristics were obtained for essential oil extracted from inflorescence (200
characteristics), whole fresh plant(200 characteristics) and dry leaves (200 characteristics) of the
plant.
Figure 1 shows the average spectral characteristics of the three types of essential oil in the
visible and near infrared spectrum.With the spectral characteristics in the VIS range, the three
types of essential oils are clearly distinguishable from the spectral characteristics obtained, while
in the NIR range, overlapping of the inflorescence and fresh plant characteristics is seen.
a) VIS b) NIR
Fig. 1. Spectral characteristics of white oregano essential oils
Data from the spectral characteristics obtained were reduced by four PCA, kPCA, LV and
AUC methods.Since there is overlapping of the spectral characteristics, especially in the NIR
spectral range, a suitable classification tool is the Bayesian classifier (Mladenov et al., 2015).
Figure 2 shows examples of classification with Naïve Bayesian classifier.When using the
principal components obtained with the PCA method, there is a strong overlap of the data for the
two classes of inflorescence and dry leaves.When using latent variables, the distinctiveness is
clearly better.
a) Inflorescence-Dry leaves VIS, PCA, b) Fresh plant-Dry leaves NIR, LVs,

e=15% e=1%
Fig. 2. Classification Naïve Bayes examples
The graphical results are also confirmed by the full analysis of the possibility of classification
with a Bayesian classifier on reduced spectral characteristics of essential oils of white oregano.
The results of this analysis are presented in Table 2.The principal components obtained by the
PCA method and the AUC are not suitable for use as the baseline spectral analysis of white
oregano because the common error of classification obtained in their use is e=48%.Appropriate for
classification are the principal components obtained by the kPCA method and the latent variables
obtained by the PLS method, because when using them, the common classification error with the
Bayes classifier is 0-1%.
Table 2. Classification results with NaïveBayes classifier

I-FP I-DrL FP-DrL
Method for data
VIS NIR VIS NIR VIS NIR
reduction
e, % e, % e, % e, % e, % e, %
PCA 31 48 15 45 3 4
kPCA 0 0 0 0 0 0
LV 0 0 0 1 0 1
AUC 0 41 0 0 0 0
I-inflorescence; FP-fresh plant; DrL-dry leaves; PCA-principal component analysis; kPCA-
kernel PCA; LV-latent variables; AUC-area under curve
A classification with DA and a method of SVM was made. Principal components obtained by
the kPCA method and latent variables obtained using the PLS method were used.
Figure 3 presents examples of this classification.Using latent variables and discriminant
analysis, a partial overlap between the classes and a common classification error of e=1% is
observed.When using the SVM method and the main components there is a clear resolution
between the two classes, respectively the common classification error is 0%.
a) DA-quadratic, NIR, LVs, Fresh b) SVM-Quadratic, VIS,kPCA, Fresh

plant-Dry leaves, e=1% plant-Dry leaves, e=0%
Fig. 3. Classification with DA and SVM
The results of this analysis are presented in Table 3.Variations of DA and SVM classifiers were
used using linear and non-linear separating functions.When using the principal components, a
common classification error of e=0% was obtained regardless of the classifier used and the
separation function.
Table 3. Classification results with DA and SVM

Method for
data kPCA LV
reduction
I-FP I-DrL FP-DrL I-FP I-DrL FP-DrL
Method for VIS NIR VIS NIR VIS NIR VIS NIR VIS NIR VIS NIR
classification e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e, e,
% % % % % % % % % % % %
DA-L 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
DA-DL 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
DA-Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
DA-DQ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
DA-M 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
SVM-L 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
SVM-Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
SVM-P 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
SVM-RBF 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
I-inflorescence; FP-fresh plant; DrL-dry leaves; kPCA-kernel PCA; LV-latent variables; DA-
discriminant analysis; SVM-support vector machines; L-linear; DL-diagLinear; Q-quadratic;
DQ-diagQuagratic; M-Mahalanobis; P-polynomial; RBF-radial basis function
When using the latent variables, the division of the fresh plant and dry leaves classes has a
common classification error of e=1% using reduced spectral data in the NIR region.The obtained
results prove the statement of (Aenugu et al, 2011) that NIR spectra have a high penetration rate
and are difficult to use in highly absorbent objects.Latent variables are strongly dependent and
directly correspond to spectral characteristics (Haenlein, 2004).Therefore, when classifying them,
larger errors are made compared to kernel PCA, where a more complex procedure for calculating
principal components is used.
Conclusion
The report presents a document-camera application in the implementation of a training
methodology for obtaining, processing and analyzing spectral characteristics.The results show that
the data obtained with a document-camera can be successfully applied in the implementation of a
training methodology for using instruments for expressing essential oils according to their optical
characteristics.
The results obtained represent a key feature in the use of classifiers - their effectiveness
depends mainly on the product being studied and the methods used to reduce the amount of the
spectral characteristics data.
The research can be continued by conducting a survey among learners to assess the
effectiveness of using this methodology and document-camera with which each learner can work
individually.
Acknowledgements
The work on this report is related to scientific project 5.FTT/30.05.2016 "Technological
research to obtain flavors from spices".
References
Aenugu, H., Kumar, D., Harson, S., Parthiban, N., Ghosh, S., Banji, D. (2011): Near Infra Red Spectroscopy-
An Overview. International Journal of ChemTech Research, 3, 2, 825-836.
Damyanov, Ch. (2006): Non-destructive quality evaluation in automatic sorting systems of food products.
UFT Plovdiv Publishing House – Bulgaria, ISBN 954-24-0079-9 (in Bulgarian).
Dobreva, K. (2005): Nutritional and Medicinal Properties of Spices. Trakia Journal of Sciences, 3, 3, 198-200
(in Bulgarian).
Glassner, A. (1989): How to derive a spectrum from an RGB triplet. IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications, 9, 4, 95-99.
Haenlein, М. (2004): A Beginner’s Guide to Partial Least Squares Analysis. Understanding Statistics, 3, 4,
283-297.
InteliAgro (2017): Essential oils market in Bulgaria. October 13 th 2017. http://www.inteliagro.bg/
article/220/Eterichni-masla-Bulgaria-2017, accesed 2018
Mather, J. (2010): Spectral and XYZ Color Functions, https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/
fileexchange/7021-spectral-and-xyz-color-functions?focused=5172027&tab=function, accessed 2018
Mladenov, M., Penchev, S., Deyanov, M. (2015): Complex assessment of food products quality using
analysis of visual images, spectrophotometric and hyperspectral characteristics. International Journal of
Engineering and Innovative Technology (IJEIT), 4, 12, 23-32.
Nedeva, V., Dineva, S., (2013): Design and development of efficient e-learning courses, ICVL 2013,
Romania, 108-115.
Stoykova, V. (2014): Evaluation of the application of interactive presentation systems in higher education.
ARTTE, Applied Researches in Technics, Technologies and Education, Journal of the Faculty of Technics
and Technologies, Trakia University, 2, 3, ISSN 1314-8796, 286-300.
Vilaseca, M., Pujol, J., Arjona, M., Martínez-Verdú, F. (2004): Color visualization system for near-infrared
multispectral images. Proceedings of The Second European Conference on Colour Graphics, Imaging
and Vision CGIV, 431-436.
How student collaboration influence on student success
Faculty of Technique and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara

E-mail: veselina.nedeva[at]gmail.com, sbdineva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
This report regarded student success in higher education that is with high importance and
one of the main concern for all institutes. It reviews how student success can be enhanced
using collaboration tools in VLE and the methods that are used. The base types of
collaboration are described too. The features of effective learning environment that result to
higher student success are discussed.The report analyzes the experience of Faculty of
Technique and Technology - Yambol from Thracian University according to the EU DigComp
2.1 framework and the competences that the students should acquire for communication and
collaboration.
Keywords:students collaboration, student success, effective learning environment
1. Introduction
The most effective educators are those who make their lessons easy to be love and help
students love learning again, and always, and that is the greatest gifts, which teacher can give to
scholars (Lee, 2018a). The methods that can enhance student success, recognized from US
institutions, and that will be in priorityin 2018, according to Zewald (2017), are:
 Closer collaboration between higher institutions;
 Enrollment targets best-fit students;
 Organizational structures evolveto support student success – implementation of new
advising models to enhance student success;
 Increased tech investments - continued increase in tech investment to support student
success, spending on software for academic advising and planning;
 Standard commercial software use - use of standard commercial software rather than custom
development;
 Integrated system approaches - many institutions found that their legacy student information
systems harder adapt to new models, hampering admissions and advancement efforts, which
discourages collaboration and undermines data integrity. A new approach to core systems are
starting to emphasis across the entire student lifecycle;
 Rise of data warehouse and analytics - predictive analytics is an area of analytics that more
schools will utilize to find and retain students;
 Automation focus - automation in core systems to support early alerts and action plans for at-
risk students and toreduce repetitive tasks and keep processes agile that helps academic
institutions to better support students. Academic advisors will be able to use technology that
facilitates automation to identify at-risk students faster. This will help themto provide a clear
action plan for improving overall success;
 Mobile and self-service student experiences- more focus on student portals, self-service and
mobile app development;
 Increased use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - focused on strategies thatbuild

strong employer branding partnerships a vital factor in a student’s decision to apply to a
university as its reputation;
 Growing artificial intelligence (AI) awareness - post-secondary educational institutions to
use AI-enabled tools to drive student success. For example, to register for classes and to
apply for financial aid using a chatbot;
 Core SIS replacement trend - to report student success outcomes.
The purpose of article is to review how can use the collaboration tools in VLE and
differenttypesof collaboration that enhance a student success. The main characteristics of effective
learning environment that result to higher student success are discussed too.
2. Thracian e-University
In Trakia University the students and teachers have the opportunity to be registered online at
the existing data base, www.trakia-uni.bg, and to have access to a personal e-mail and Integrated
Management and Information System (Nedeva&Karabaliev, 2017).
As a result of implementation of blended learning as a regular method for teaching in Trakia
University of Stara Zagora, Thracian e-University has been createdwith e-courses coverednearly
all disciplines in curriculumson Moodle learning platform (http://edu.uni-sz.bg/). With a new e-
data base, students have the opportunity to use free of charge e-virtual library, multimedia e-
books, presentations, quizzes, on-line knowledge assessment, academic schedule, chats, forums,
and site for useful student information that support student collaboration and success.
The skills for communication and collaboration as part of EU DigComp 2.1 framework
(Carretero at all, 2017) are:
 Interacting through digital technologies - to interact through a variety of digital
technologies and to understand appropriate digital communication means for a given
context;
 Sharing through digital technologies - to share data, information and digital content with
others through appropriate digital technologies; to act as an intermediary, to know about
referencing and attribution practices;
 Engaging in citizenship through digital technologies - to participate in society through
the use of public and private digital services; to seek opportunities for self-empowerment
and for participatory citizenship through appropriate digital technologies;
 Collaborating through digital technologies-to use digital tools and technologies for
collaborative processes, and for co-construction and co-creation of resources and
knowledge;
 Netiquette- to be aware of behavioral norms and know-how while using digital
technologies and interacting in digital environments. To adapt communication strategies
to the specific audience and to be aware of cultural and generational diversity in digital
environments.
 Managing digital identity-to create and manage one or multiple digital identities, to be
able to protect one's own reputation, to deal with the data that one produces through
several digital tools, environments and services.
In the Thracian e-University, various forms of work and cooperation of students have been
created and used in applied faculty courses and disciplines. The most used ones are Workshop,
Chat, Forum and Wiki. They develop skills and learning experiences in digital collaboration,
digital sharing, digital engagement, and digital collaboration.
To acquire and apply skills for communication and collaboration, along with the above
mentioned forms, we offer training for ECDL (European Computer Driving License) certificates
in the e-learning environment of the Thracian e-University. The ECDL Foundation defines Quality
Assurance Standards, which all national operators must adhere to in the implementation and
promotion of our certification programs (ECDL Foundation, 2018). National operator for Bulgaria
is ECDL - Bulgaria (ECDL Bulgaria, 2018). The Faculty of Techniques and Technologies -
Yambol at Thracian University has a certified and authorized training and testing center.The
materials are organized in e-course "ECDL" in Thracian e-University. Training sessions are
unified for all 24,000 test centers in 148 countries around the world. They are designed, validated
and approved by academic and industry experts from around the world. Knowledge and practical
training for collaboration and communication are covered in Base, Intermediate and Advanced
Modules. Specific training in this direction is provided by the students in Intermediate modules -
IT security, Online Collaboration and Project Planning. In addition to the competences they
acquire through the assignments in the training courses, Netiquette and managing digital identity
are covered in these courses.
3. Enhancing student success in higher education

Key priorities for learning and teaching in higher education are focused on enhancing student
success and included thematic areas of strategic importance to any institution: assessment;
employability; student engagement; access, retention, attainment and progression; flexible
learning, and internationalization (fig. 1, HEA 2016).
Theframeworks (fig. 1) havean impact upon student success by influencing on:
 HE curricula - content, design, delivery and documenting of the formal and/or informal
curricula;
 Learningenvironments - design and provision of formal and/or informal learning spaces
and resources;
 Learningcommunities - widening and engaging staff and students in professional,
academic anddiscipline communities;
 Teachingquality - quality of design, delivery or evaluation of teaching as core to the
enhancement of any themeor discipline.
Figure 1. Student Success Framework (HEA, 2016 )

4. Collaboration and student success

The collaboration is a driving force to improve student success (Burns et al., 2015).Success
means differentthings to different students (HEA, 2016).There are five types of students’ study
profiles that differ in their learning success (Asikainen et al, 2003):
 deep approach to learning;
 deep approach to learning, but poor time management;
 fact-based learning and repetition before understanding;
 change from understanding to memorization in the course;
 surface approach to learning.
Nevertheless, there are many evidences that the collaboration of students in the process of
study leads to better understanding, achieving higher levels of learning and retaining more new
information working in a group rather than individually (Gokhale, 1995; Johnson & Johnson,
1986; Davis, 2012). Students are capable of performing at higher intellectual levels when asked to
work in collaborative situations (Vygotsky, 1978). It was registered that a collaborative study has
helped students to achieve greater academic success (Davis M., 2012; Burns et al., 2015), and
enhances students’ interest to study (Queenie et al, 2015). Collaboration spurs innovation bringing
together different ideas, approaches, experiences, and creating a productive environment for
generating new concepts and methods (Burns et al., 2015). Collaborative learning is a very
important in achieving a critical thinking (Gokhale, 1995). Moreover, working in a team is an
important mechanism for dealing with changing business environment; team learning is an attempt
to prepare students to real‐world experiences (Yazici, 2005).
The collaboration in learning has three things in common:shared knowledge,shared knowing
andshared responsibility(Tinto, 2003). The results of investigations showed that a higher student
success was achieved when alearning management system was combined with advanced
collaborative tools during the teaching in a Web-based environment (Nadir et al, 2007).In a highly
effective learning environment (fig.2), the learning is a collaborative and harmonious process, and
teachers and students are happy and focused (Lee, 2018b). The things considered as an essential
for creatingan ideal learning environment is shown in fig.2 (Lee, 2018b).
Figure 2. The 10 Characteristics of a Highly Effective Learning Environment (Lee, 2018b)

The students are collaborated in education by asking questions, by development of

application and reporting of assessment as much as possible (Lee, 2018b).
The core attributes of successful learning teams are (Varlas, 2010):
 shared values and goals;
 collective responsibility;
 authentic assessment;
 self-directed reflection;
 stable settings;
 strong leadership support.
Through collaboration a unique opportunity of helping each other to learn are created (Dreon,
2013). In order to be successful in a collaborative environment, the students must learn to
communicate freely and directly, supporting and value each participant's contribution. The
collaborative groups must be heterogeneous and to contain:different genders; different ethnicities;
participants that prefer different subjects; that do not know each other very well; have different
“intelligences”; have varying levels of academic and technology proficiency (Bias& Kolk, 2018).
Collaboration interinstitutional and interindividual is a powerful tool to promote learning and
professional growth, it is an important way to innovate and adapt the education in a time of rapid
and continuous change (Baldwin & Chang, 2007). In order the collaboration to be successful the
following activities are needed:
 choosing thepartners carefully -a successful collaboration increase when potential
partners get to know each other, possess common interests, and identify similar purposes
and goals;
 never underestimate the importance of socialization - conditions that promote
conversation are important;
 monitor progress and assess outcomes - collaborations are dynamic entities, collaborators
should periodically take stock of how things are going, identify challenges, and work to
resolve conflicts;
 be flexible - partners should be flexible,when a collaboration does not work as planned.
Learning is a major incentive for collaborating. The key elements of successful collaborations
aretrust, communication, a sense of shared interests and goals, and defined and clear expectations
and roles.The organizations are seeking to learn about the newest or “best” practices and to apply
to their own situations. The collaboration opportunities included: Comentoring projects; Scholarly
consultation grants; Support for collaborative research; Research/student assistants;
Field/interest-based conferences and workshops; Support for intellectual community; and
Leadership development(Baldwin & Chang, 2007).
Conclusion
The policy of being transparent, sharing knowledges,“best” practices and circumstances,
working in partnership on projects and in different areas in education are applied intensively
nowadays. The collaboration increases the prosperity of any institution and enhances the student
success.
The Faculty of Techniques and Technologies assesses the role of the virtual environment and
the new technologies in order to create better conditions in which the knowledge and skills for
communication and collaboration are learned. They are an important prerequisite for enhancing
student achievement through collaborative assignments, mutual evaluation, and teacher support in
the virtual learning environment.
References
Vygotsky, L. (1978):Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Asikainen H., A. Parpala, V.Virtanen, S. Lindblom-Ylanne (2003): The relationship between student learning
process, study success and the nature of assessment: A qualitative study.Studies in educational Evaluation
39 (2013) 211–217.
Gokhale, A.A. (1995):“Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking,” Journal of Technology
Education, 7 (1). 22-30.
Johnson , R. T., & Johnson, D. W. (1986): Action research: Cooperative learning in the science classroom.
Science and Children , 24, 31-32.
Nadire C., Huseyin U., I. Dogan (2007): Assessing the Success Rate of Students Using a Learning
Management System Together with a Collaborative Tool in Web-Based Teaching of Programming
Languages. V.: 36, issue: 3, p. 301-321.
Queenie Pui Sze Law, Joanne Wai Yee Chung, Chi Cheung Leung, Thomas Kwok Shing Wong. (2015):
Enhancement of Self-efficacy and Interest in Learning English of Undergraduate Students with Low
English Proficiency through a Collaborative Learning Programme. American Journal of Educational
Research. 2015; 3(10):1284-1290. https://doi: 10.12691/education-3-10-12.
Yazici H. J., (2005):"A study of collaborative learning style and team learning performance", Education +
Training, Vol. 47 Issue: 3, pp.216-229, https://doi.org/10.1108/00400910510592257.
Nedeva V., Karabaliev M. (2017): The Benefits of G Suite for Education on the Experience of Trakia
University – Stara Zagora. Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL
2017. 151-157.
Carretero St., R. Vuorikari and Y. Punie, (2017), DigComp 2.1 The Digital Competence Framework for
Citizens, Joint Research Center of The European Commision, http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
repository/bitstream/JRC106281/web-digcomp2.1pdf_(online).pdf Accessed 01/08/2018
Baldwin R. G., D. A. Chang (2007): Collaborating to Learn, Learning to Collaborate. Vol. 9, No.
4,https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/collaborating-learn-learning-collaborate.
Bias G., Kolk M., (2018): Enhance Learning with Collaboration. https://creativeeducator.
tech4learning.com/v03/articles/Collaboration.
Burns B., Crow M., Becker M., (2015): Innovating Together: Collaboration as a Driving Force to Improve
Student Success.https://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/3/innovating-together-collaboration-as-a-driving-
force-to-improve-student-success.
Davis M., (2012): How Collaborative Learning Leads to Student Success. https://www.edutopia.org/stw-
collaborative-learning-college-prep.
Dreon O. (2013): Promoting Student Success Through Collaboration. https://www.facultyfocus.com/
articles/teaching-and-learning/promoting-student-success-through-collaboration/.
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downloads/higher_education_academy_-_white_paper_-_student_success_-_210416.pdf.
Heick T. (2018): The Characteristics of a Highly Effective Learning Environment.
https://www.teachthought.com/learning/10-characteristics-of-a-highly-effective-learning-environment/
Lee Watanabe-Crockett (2018a): The Most Effective Ways of Helping Students Love Learning.
https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/effective-ways-to-help-students-love-learning
Lee Watanabe-Crockett (2018b):The 10 Things You’ll Always Find in Ideal Learning
Environments.https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/10-things-ideal-learning-environments
Tinto Vincent (2003): Learning Better Together: The Impact of Learning Communities on Student Success.
Higher Education Monograph Series, 2003-1, Higher Education http://www.nhcuc.org/
pdfs/Learning_Better_Together.pdf.
Varlas L., (2010): Six Traits of Successful Learning Teams. http://inservice.ascd.org/team-learning/.
Zewald O., (2017): 12 higher education trends to empower student success in 2018.
https://government.diginomica.com/2017/11/28/12-higher-education-trends-to-empower-student-success-
in-2018/.
Educational Situation as a Tool for Communication Activity
Motivation in the Virtual Learning Environment
Iryna Vereitina1, Yurii Baidak1, Oksana Popel1
(1) Odessa National Academy of Food Technologies

1/3, Dvoryanskaya str, Odessa, 65082, UKRAINE
E-mail: kozak_admin[at]ukr.net
Abstract
Situated learning as an instructional approach, when teaching English for special
purposes in a virtual educational environment involves the creation of so-called educational
speech situations. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the main issues to be taken into
consideration while creating educational situations for university students in the conditions of
instruction in virtual educational environment. The educational situation in a virtual
educational environment is a universal form of the professionally oriented or academic
communication process functioning that exists as an integrative dynamic system of role and
activity relations between the subject of learning and artificial intelligence. From the
methodological point of view, the task of unprepared dialogue with computer organization is
rather complicated, since any talk has the property to correspond to some vital or
professionally oriented situation, while providing unprepared communication in specific
situation. The subject of research is identification of the main ways of development situations
that on the one hand are authentic, but on the other hand are adapted and personalized, have
specialized reason and aim. The main methods of direct and indirect control of students'
speech activity are given, among them the fulfillment of problem-search tasks, the method and
implementation of which are unknown in advance. Thus, communicative and cognitive
activity of students is increased - from executive-reproductive to independent and creative.
Keywords: Situated learning, Virtual educational environment, Educational situation,

Students' speech activity
1 Introduction
Proceeding from the up-to-date foreign languages teaching didactics requirements, it is
sociocultural or professionally oriented contextual situation that is the foundation stone of training
process. Educational situations used in special courses, provided their association with common
scenario based on a single theme that combines lexical and grammatical material, will create a
series based course. Training contextual educational situation (E-situation) in case of its
embedding to virtual learning environment as electronic educational situation (EE-situation) will
become a stimulus to the student communicative activity.
The aim of the paper is to identify the ways and methods of contextual EE-situations creation
in the form of “real-cases” exercises in the conditions of the virtual learning environment intended
for the learning of the “English for Special Purposes” discipline at the university level.
2 Materials and Methods

At the beginning of the last century, in 1933, the well-known British methodologist Michael P.
West pointed out that “the art of teacher is an adaptation of real-life situations to linguistic needs”
(West, 1933). Contextual learning in the frame of contextual approach is a training system, in
which academic content is interwoven with real life context in the frames of e-situation, linking
students’ previous experience with the newest knowledge (Davtyan, 2014) and information
(Powers and Guanm, 2000). To create e-situation, the following ways are usually identified:
1. creation of a game situation in the class in the frames of role-play (gamification of the
process);
2. creation of e-situation with the help of a visual basis – stationary visual material (pictures,
images, illustrations, tables, graphs) or dynamic visual material (presentation); 3. creation of e-
situation with the help of real-time audio (teacher's speech, interactive lecture) or pre-recorded
training situation (ibooks);
4. creation of e- situation with the help of audiovisual basis (animated images, avatars, videos,
training films, etc.)
Today the task of creation e-situations is still relevant for every lecturer but from the point of
view of digital age educational realities – appearance of computer-integrated technologies and
necessity of their utilization in the learning process, web-oriented classes and the need for
continuous observation of classroom dynamics, “cloud” data storage and inevitability of virtual
and augmented learning environments creation and implementation to the training process, etc.
The educational situation in a virtual educational environment is a universal form of the
professionally oriented or academic communication process functioning that exists as an
integrative dynamic system of role and activity relations between the subject of learning and
artificial intelligence. Thus, it is necessary to create EE-situation, the learning context of which
will show students that it is bound with real (professionally oriented or academic) situations and
can help them to master skills they need in a fast-changing future life.
As for e-learning resources for such situations, they should
• be authentic and expose learners to actual contemporary language use;
• support curriculum outcomes;
• be developed by competent authors and meet highest quality standards;
• be appropriate for the subject area, ability level, learning styles, and social development of
the students;
• have aesthetic, literary, and scientific value;
• have appropriate, suitable for their intended use interface;
• be one of a variety of media presentation modes (Aleven and Koedinger, 2000);
• the keys to e-conversation should not determine its progress step by step, but must be the
guide in the course of e-situation.
For specialists who are faced with the need to create e-courses for learning English (sometimes
English for Special Purposes) in a virtual learning environment, there is a need to create EE-
situations that meet such requirements as: variability (to display the actual reality and changes in
it) (Vermetten et.al., 1999); informativity (availability of new information and resources for its
search and storage; e-dialogue should encourage students to look for information); scenario
subject unity (subject-semantic relationship of e-tasks); foreign speech motivation (the student's
willingness to respond to the appeal, to take part in the e-dialogue or conversation, to express
his/her point of view on new information) (Ochoa et al, 2016); situationality (creating, with the
help of the learning environment, prerequisites that require compulsory communication – with
educational purposes or natural).
Any foreign language e-learning course has an integrated collection of structured learning
exercises (Wu et. al., 2006) and usually includes a set of exercises or tasks which are known as
grammar, semi-communicative or non-communicative and communicative tasks. These tasks are
intended for formation skills in vocabulary, grammar, reading and listening. Under the term
"exercise or task" we will understand one-or multiple-time implementation of a series of
operations or actions of speech, specially organized in the training conditions. It is assumed that
the system of exercises and its successful performing will lead to the formation of competences in
various types of speech activities in their interaction and will ensure high level of foreign language
mastering.
The main methodological principles of constructing an exercise system for virtual learning
environment are the following:
1) adequacy of the main types of exercises to the linguistic-psychological characteristics of the
speech activity type and, accordingly, the type of communication skills;
2) interaction in the training process of such activity types as listening – reading –speaking,
reading – writing–speaking, listening – writing – reading, speaking – writing, listening – writing –
speaking.
3 Results
Usually there are no difficulties (because of widespread experience in the area) with creation of
grammar, semi-communicative or non-communicative tasks with EE-situations for the basic
learning levels of any virtual educational environment (there can be only one answer, the keys to
the exercises are exact and with a verbatim text of the correct answer). Here are some examples of
such tasks.
3.1 EE Situations for Grammar or Non-Communicative Tasks (Drect Control)

1. Task (Grammar): Listen the whole text and try to understand the main idea. Write and then
say about the concept of energy. Determine the tense for all sentences.
All activities in the universe require energy. Nothing moves, changes, grows, or decays without
the expenditure of energy. Energy flows downhill from high-potential sources like the stars at
millions of degrees temperatures to the cosmic cold of outer space at a few degrees above absolute
zero. The planet Earth takes some of this energy from the Sun, transforms and stores some of it.
Energy is necessary for all natural and human-developed systems on the Earth. [#Present Simple
tense] [Past Simple tense] [Future Simple tense]
2. Task (Grammar): Fill in the necessary form of the verb "to be". Remember that the verb “to
be” is irregular (to be; was, were; been). Remember also that "am, is, are" are the forms of the
verb "to be" in the present tenses, "was, were" are the forms of the verb "to be" in the past tenses
and "will be" is the form of the verb "to be" in the future tenses.
|Energy [am][#is][are] essential to all life.| It [#was][were][are] my book. |It [are][#will be
my][were] place.| Complex ecosystems of millions of organisms [am][is][#are] developing on our
planet.| I [#am][is][are] composing music.| He [am][#is][are] requiring help.| Sulfur [am][#is][are]
released to the atmosphere as sulfur dioxide.| The Earth [are][#was][were] formed 5 billion years
ago.| I [#was][were][are] to make a report about the ecosystem of our region.| Power [am][#is][are]
energy expended per unit of time.|
These reactions [am][is][#are] essential.|
3. Task (Semi-communicative): Listening strategies:
When you listen to the text for the first time, don’t panic! You will not understand everything –
just try to get the general idea. Listen again for the specific information you need or pay attention
to some minor details. Listen and decide whether the sentences below are true (T) or false (F).
{Text for listening} |Organisms at or near the surface of the earth are immersed in a radiation
environment consisting not only of direct downward-flowing solar rays, but also long-wave heat
(thermal) radiation from nearby surfaces. Both components contribute to temperature and other
conditions of existence. Thermal radiation comes not only from soil, water, and vegetation, but
also from clouds, which radiate a substantial amount of heat energy downward into ecosystem.
You may have observed that a temperature of a winter night remains higher when it is cloudy than
when it is clear; it’s the reradiated heat from clouds that makes the difference. |
1. Organisms at or near the surface of the water are immersed in a radiation
environment.[true][#false]
2. Thermal radiation comes not only from soil, water, and vegetation, but also from
clouds.[#true][false]
3. A temperature of a winter night remains lower when it is cloudy than when it is
clear.[true][#false]
4. Task (Semi-communicative): Fill in the gaps with English words
[4#composition][1#essential][3#stores][6#released][2#changes][7#decay][5#require][8#activit
y];|Energy is [1] to all life| Nothing moves, [2], grows, or decays without energy|
The planet Earth transforms and [3] energy from the high-potential source| Changes in the
atmospheric [4] of our planet are now constant| Developing ecosystems [5] energy balance of the
natural system| Gases [6] into the atmosphere change the climate and weather| Industrial wastes [7]
the energy balance| Products of human [8] poison the environment|
3.2 Programming of Real-Communicative Exercises for Virtual Learning Environment
(Indirect Control)
The problem will appear on the higher learning level (Snider, 2008; Van Acker, 2000), i.e.
with “real” conversation in the frames of EE-situation. The puzzle of the possibility to program e-
dialogue at a first glance seems rather controversial and unreal. Of course, everyone knows about
the existence of artificial intelligence and its capabilities (McArthur et al., 2005; Aleven and
Koedinger, 2002; Damacharla, et al. 2018), but in this case we have a talk about the “free” for
students but controlled by teachers foreign language conversation, that although is free, but should
be a some kind of direct, determinate speech of educational character and which will be conducted
not by native speakers but by ordinary university students. It is also necessary to keep in mind that
all these dialogues despite of their ‘free’ character have educational purpose.
So, how can be organized feedback when programming real-communicative exercises in
virtual educational environment? In spite of the single correct answer (key) to the exercise, the so-
called "hidden key" can be used. Here are some examples of different models with “hidden key”
using in the frames of different activity types. The Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine should
be used and Microsoft Agent will interact with students through defined phrases.
1. Activity type: listening – reading –speaking.
Model 1: Stimulus – hidden key in the form of question – reaction (inclusion of the phrase,
which should sound as a student's response, into the avatar (teacher) question).
Situation 1
{stimulus (for listening)} Fundamental to our understanding of energy was discovering of the
laws of motion.
{hidden key in the form of question (for reading)} What do you know about Galileo and
Newton discoveries more that three centuries ago?
{reaction (for speaking)} [#More that three centuries ago, Galileo discovered experimentally
the laws of motion, but it was Sir Isaac Newton who put them into useful form].
2. Activity type: listening – writing – reading.
Model 2: Stimulus –question - hidden key in the form of answer (inclusion of the phrase,
which should sound as a student's question, into the avatar (teacher) answer).
Situation 2
{stimulus (for listening)} Fundamental to our understanding of energy was discovering of the
laws of motion.
{question (for writing) } [#What do you know about Galileo and Newton discoveries?]
{hidden key in the form of answer (for reading)} More that three centuries ago, Galileo
discovered experimentally the laws of motion, but it was Sir Isaac Newton who put them into
useful form.
Partial key for forming a conversation is another tool which is used in the process of real-
communicative exercises programming. In the conditions of virtual learning environment training
such keys will guide the conversation into the right direction. The key can be given in the verbal
(for reading), audiovisual (for listening and watching) or symbolic (to guess) form because all
these facilities are available in any virtual learning environment.
Model 3: Stimulus – partial key in the form of words for reaction (appearance of the words
which should be used in the student's response on the screen. Also Microsoft Agent can be used as
additional resource).
Situation 3
Research and explain the difference between manmade and natural ecosystems. Use
information given in the lecture and additional materials (http://www.answers.com/
topic/ecosystems-1).
{Stimulus} Manmade Ecosystems are the artificial ecosystems which rely on the human efforts
to sustain. They do not possess a self regulating mechanism. What else do they have?
{Partial key in the form of words on the screen} no diversity; simple food webs
[#They have almost no diversity and have simple food webs.]
Model 4: Stimulus – partial key in the audiovisual form (images or video) for reaction
(appearance of the images, moving pictures, animated cartoon, or simply icon with file for
listening/watching that should be used in the student's response on the screen. Also Microsoft
Agent can be used as additional resource).
Situation 4
information given in the lecture and additional materials (http://www.answers.com/topic/
ecosystems-1).
{Stimulus} The cycling of nutrients is negligible. The inputs are provided by the human
efforts. What do they include?
{Partial key in the audiovisual form (images or video) on the screen} villages, towns, cities,
rivers, orchids, dams, gardens, lakes and agriculture
[#They include the villages, towns, cities, rivers, orchids, dams, gardens, lakes and
agriculture.]
Model 5: Stimulus – two partial keys in the verbal (words) or audiovisual form (images or
video) for reaction (appearance of the images, moving pictures, animated cartoon, or simply icon
with file for listening/watching that should be used in the student's response on the screen. Also
Microsoft Agent can be used as additional resource). The student can choose one from two
answers. The communication will be continued in the chosen format.
Situation 5
information given in the lecture and additional materials (http://www.answers.com/topic/
ecosystems-1).
{Stimulus} The agriculture consists of the animal husbandry and the production of crops. It is
the first manmade ecosystem which occurred with the increase in human population.
There is a difficulty in procuring food. How do people procure food?
{Partial key1 in the verbal/audiovisual form (images or video) on the screen} fire, forest, to
cultivate, crop, agro ecosystem
[#As the human beings discovered fire they cut down the forests. The land was cultivated for
some years and was then left out. The areas where they raised crops are known as the agro
ecosystem.]
{Partial key 2 in the verbal/audiovisual form (images or video) on the screen}
domestic animals, pasture land
[#The feeding of domestic animals occurs on the pasture land. The pasture land is also known
as the pastoral land.]
Model 5 can also be used when programming the dialogue with the answers of Yes – No type
(common questions).
3.3 Independent Solution of Problem-Search Tasks
The main methods of direct and indirect control of students' speech activity given above may
be considered as a preparation stage to the fulfillment of problem-search tasks, the method and
implementation of which are unknown in advance. To prepare such tasks in a virtual learning
environment, it is necessary to develop set of rules or algorithm. Such algorithm as a sequence of
operations (Vereitina et al, 2017) will show all possible ways for solving the problem.
Conclusion
In the conditions of the global computerization of the educational process and the need for
lifelong learning, such means of instruction as virtual learning environments acquire special
significance for the study of both foreign languages and other academic disciplines. The proposed
methods of creating EE-situations provided that they are included into the training modules of
virtual learning environment will contribute to better assimilation of learning objects and increase
the communicative activity of students. This includes both quantitative (speed of speech and
reaction, absence of pauses, the size of sentences) and qualitative characteristics (structural
diversity, adequate use of speech units, etc.). Such approach will facilitate the development of
skills for independent solution of problems and tasks in future real communication in the process
of business activity.
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Advantages, Disadvantages and Limitations of Using Google
Forms for Online Tests (A Case Study of a Russian University)
Natalia Sazonova1, Svetlana Ivanova1, Anastasia Lavrova1
(1) Ural Federal University

19, Mira Str. Yekaterinburg, 620002, RUSSIA
E-mail: natalia.sazonova[at]urfu.ru
Abstract
IT tools and services in the 21st century penetrated all spheres of human life, educational
training being no exception. For a decade Google Docs app has been gaining popularity
among academicians, instructors for collaborative work due to its accessibility, compatibility,
functionality. In this paper the authors embarked on discovering the functionality of the
Google Suite tools, namely Google Forms, for online tests both in class and outside it. In
order to present a rational way of assessing students’ knowledge using the wonder of Google
Forms we experimented with syntax and managed to create a number of potentially useful
patterns. In this paper we wish to share our experience and current result of experimenting
the innovation with a number of groups of English as a foreign language (EFL) students in
Ural Federal university in Russia. To this end an algorithm of creating a rational
manageable effective formative test is presented. The analysis of two focus groups surveys let
us identify advantages such as multiple use, automatic assessment and self-assessment, less
paper-and-pencil materials, option to shuffle the questions, easy sharing, etc. Along with pros
there are cons experienced by both teachers and students such as the dependence of
successful score on device and internet/Wi-Fi stability. The limitations of Google Forms such
as case and additional spaces sensitivity can be eliminated only in collaboration with
affiliated company programmers. The paper outlines recommendations on how to get round
these limitations to make an online Google test helpful and formative.
Keywords: Google Form (GF), Online Test, Formative Assessment, Test Design, English as
a Foreign Language (EFL).
1. Introduction and Literature Review

The popularization of the term Web 2.0 in contrast to Web 1.0 in the late 2004 meant a paradigm
shift from passive viewing of website content by users to interactive collaboration with each other
in social media. Due to increase in availability of tools and services that become easily accessed
from everywhere, internet users were encouraged to create user-generated content in a virtual
community. Among the benefits of this process Mansor (2012) mentions the “creation of online
learning communities that organize and facilitate learning for their members”. Mobile devices and
mobile data contributed to this shift. The reality faced in university classrooms is that students in
the 21st century are always connected, in an uninterrupted way, with the stimuli coming from
social networks (Carabal-Montagud, 2018). The instructor’s task is to not ignore the possibilities
provided by technological advances. Many students feel that some Web 2.0 applications can be
effective at increasing satisfaction with learning, improving their performance and their writing
ability, and increasing peer-to-peer student-to-faculty interaction (Harshone et al., 2009).
So far, several tools, platforms and systems have been proposed to support various classroom
and out-of-class collaboration activities. Some of them are brand-new and stand-alone programs
(Lin, 2012). While our students use these technologies in an almost innate way, many teachers
have not been born in the digital age. This means that users might have to spend additional time
and efforts to familiarize themselves with the manipulation of the tools or systems. Lin and Jou
(2012) emphasize the “users may need to install additional programs on their own devices or
create a new account for these programs”. In this regard the choice of Google Docs for online
learning is clear and straightforward. Google positions its Google Suite as free, always accessible,
user-friendly, mobile available, most OS-compatible, MS Office-compatible and MS Office-
convertible apps.
The functionality of Google Forms (GF) for tests became the topic of current research.
According to Mansor (2012) and Djenno et al. (2015) Forms can easily be created and allow for a
variety of question types. The tool is very dynamic and simple, it allows user to customize the task
flow. You can develop standard questions (for example multiple choice, true-false, fill-in short
answers) and ask questions with interactive format (checkboxes, drag-and-drop, etc.). Also in
Forms with a high number of questions, it allows to work by sections and section breaks. The form
can be easily published on the Web through special URL generated by Google and can be
embedded in blogs, websites, social networks, etc.
The online GF could be used both as an active-learning technique and as a formative
assessment instrument. Kato implemented Web exercises by using GF as the place for “self-
learning and continual reflections”. They converted students’ attitude from passive learning to
active learning, by creating “an environment that enables active learning without instructor
intervention” (Kato et al., 2016).
Toki and Caukill (2013) defined online assessment “as self-marking assessment tools,
simulation-based assessment tools, collaborative and feedback-oriented tools”. Online testing is
“purported to reduce testing time, gives instantaneous results, increases test security, and can be
more easily scheduled and administered than paper-and-pencil tests” (Toki and Caukill, 2013). It
is fundamentally “most useful within autonomous learning, because it is simple, immediate,
attractive and intuitive, and due to this you can get immediate conclusions, through quantitative
and qualitative results” (Carabal-Montagud et al, 2018). But the results of the test can then be used
in class for further collaborative discussion, correction, transformation, etc.
Nevertheless, it is essential to realize that without instructor’s intervention technological
applications and tools themselves do not assure developing a useful testing environment that leads
to good educational outcomes. Teachers must understand how students perceive, react and actually
use this tool. The successful use of technology requires a particular test taker motivation model.
To increase students’ motivation to take a test an instructor has to consider the task types, test
layout, test time, assessment criteria, grades, etc. These are test design aspects to consider.
Besides, when a course is virtual, technical problems will occur, and sometimes at the most
inconvenient times. This is a truth that many students reported experiencing (Kay, 2018). The
limitations of GF tests are not widely covered and reported in current literature.
2. Method
GF tools are reviewed in the paper to explore how they can be used by EFL teachers in assessing
students’ knowledge on different EFL grammar topics, vocabulary lists, limited skills as well as
shared among EFL teachers. To explore the use of tools, the following methods were used: (1)
reviewing literature of how the tools are currently used by teachers and academicians in other
disciplines for varied purposes; (2) reviewing internet guides and manuals on GF provided by
affiliated and non-affiliated companies; (3) implementing and experimenting with the use of GF,
both in class and from home; (4) designing a GF survey for EFL students and analyzing its results;
(5) designing a GF survey for EFL teachers and analyzing its results. We chose to design a
questionnaire and collect the data by using a separate focus group of interviews with students and
with EFL teachers, which allowed independent identification of issues from both points of views
of participants of educational process. The design of the questionnaire survey included two main
sections: (1) questions relating to general information about the participants, and possible previous
experience of using Google products and GF in particular; (2) statements regarding real experience
and feedback of using GF in English classes. The participants for this study were 282 1st and 2nd
year university students from required English courses at Ural Federal University (Russia),
ranging from near absolute beginners to advanced language users, and 27 EFL teachers from
different departments of the University.
Mainly two research questions were put forward: what are the possible advantages, and what
are the possible limitations of the application. In practice we came up with a list of
recommendations for EFL teachers concerning the topics, duration, periodicity, layout, etc. of the
online test created in GF.
3. Results and Discussion

3.1 Algorithm of Creating a Google Test
The algorithm of creating a GF test is not difficult. As long as one has a Google account, one logs
in Google Drive. Then click Create and select GF from drop-down menu. The form is entitled
NEW FORM which can be changed as you wish. Choose Settings. One can see three tabs General,
Presentation and Test.
Choose Test tab and shift the button to Test Mode. The Test mode means that formative
assessment is enabled. A teacher inputs correct answers and assigns points for correct answers.
The more correct answers the teacher inputs, the more accurate assessment will be. Here one can
choose to automatically check and assess the forms, but the teachers may prefer to check the
results manually for a number of reasons outlined further. Figure 1 shows the final version of a
task as a teacher sees it.
Figure 1. An example of a test task in Google Form. The task is to use the verb in brackets in the
correct form to test First conditionals. There are 6 input possible correct answers including those
capitalized. The point for correct answer is equal to 1
There are three options for a student to get feedback: 1) correct answers only; 2) incorrect
answers only; 3) points for answers only. Our own experiment showed that depending on the
purpose of the test and post-test activities there is no universal solution or preference. Personal
experience is that if students see correct answers only, they become curious and start discussing
the incorrect ones. Tab Presentation provides a teacher with a very useful option to shuffle the
questions. This function doesn’t work well with all task types. And the possibility to follow the
student’s progressing with the test didn’t prove very helpful.
When the test is ready the teacher shares its URL through e-mail or social net. Everyone who
has a link can do the test, submit the results. Tab General has such an option as collecting students’
emails for individual feedback after manual checks.
The teacher has access to Answers tab. He gets the statistics in various ways. First, responses
submitted through GF are automatically gathered in a web-based spreadsheet that can be viewed
online or exported to Microsoft Excel, allowing for easy data analysis. Second, the teacher gets a
summary of frequently input incorrect answers. It can be further clarified and improved. If the test
is limited in time, it is here that the teacher can manage every student’s progress and submission
time and close the form when time expires. Third, the teacher gets every student’s individual
score.
We designed a number of tests in this way, presented them to students, experimented with
different settings and link sharing nets. As a result, we compiled the success stories and problems,
decided to quantitatively prove our observations and filed two questionnaires for EFL teachers and
students.
3.2 EFL Teachers Focus Group Findings

In this part we present the results of EFL teacher survey and detail the various responses gained in
it. The survey was conducted among university teachers whose working experience ranged
predominantly from 1 to 5 (18,5%), and from 6 to 10 years (51,9%). These respondent teachers do
not belong to strictly “digital natives”, but grew up with IT in mind and supposedly feel
comfortable with them. Nevertheless, more than a half (55,6%) do not use them at all, three people
(11,1%) have no idea about GF. Other uses of GF ranked from surveys for scientific purposes
(29,6%), GF for creating tests (22,2%) and online registration (14,8%).
Such a small percentage of respondents creating GF tests might be connected with some
reliability of using these tests in class and the main of them is that students have an opportunity to
cheat or find correct answers through the Internet.
Special attention was paid to the length and frequency of GF testing. Those teachers who do
use GF tests do it on a regular basis (once a month (33,3%) or even once a week (22,2%)). The
average length of the test is 15-20 minutes, though sometimes tests might be shorter up to 5-10
minutes.
Teachers were also asked to choose the main advantages and disadvantages of GF tests. We
present top five benefits identified by teachers. There is no need to check each student’s work
which leads to saving time. This benefit (88,9%) ranks number one. Even if the teacher chooses to
re-check the answers manually one avoids deciphering handwritten at times illegible materials.
The second advantage (77,8%) is multiple use of tests. Next, 66,7% of teachers appreciated the
idea of freeing themselves from piles of paper-based tests. Over a half of the surveyed (55,6%)
preferred to share a test URL as home task or used as in a flipped classroom to be done remotely.
Notice that it doesn’t work well for formative assessment. It proves helpful for self-study and self-
correction. The last main advantage (44,4%) is that the order of questions in the test can be
randomized, so the test appears differently to every student. This option reduces the chance of
students cheating.
The main disadvantages and limitations include the following features identified by teachers
and summarized in Figure 2.
Figure 2. A bar chart presenting limitations and disadvantages as observed by teachers and
reported by students
First, technical limitations include mainly the use of capital letters and extra spaces when
typing the answer. To make it clear, most mobile and computer devices have default settings to
start a new line with a capital letter. The answers with capital letters and extra spaces are
automatically regarded as the wrong ones and lead to the loss of points for the test. GF app doesn’t
have the rule to set to ignore the case. It means that so far, a teacher has to input all possible
combinations of correct answers and the same answers beginning with capitals which as a result
doubles the number of input key answers. Second, with complicated tasks it seems difficult to
predict all possible correct responses. Thus, in most cases for objectivity the teacher has to
personally check all the answers. Third, in teachers’ opinion test development and inputting the
answers are time-consuming. A good point is that one can use, edit, share and copy the test more
than once. Finally, the screen size of a mobile device makes the tasks look cumbersome. This fact
puts additional responsibility on the teacher to thoroughly design test layout.
With these problems in mind teachers were asked about the idea of having GF test bank, which
was appreciated by 77,8%. Though the idea is strongly supported, only 33,3% of our teachers
implement it for educational purposes.
3.3 Student Focus Group Findings

Many students are accustomed to using digital technology to access information, share files and
create content in their personal lives. As the survey showed most of the students (90,8%) used
various Google products on their own or in different classes and 61% of them happened to use
some apps in English classes. Consequently, that leaves us with only 9,2% of students unfamiliar
with Google's features such as Forms or Docs, but we assume that this number can be even less,
regarding that some students might have misunderstood the question or were unwilling to answer
honestly.
Considering possible benefits and drawbacks of online testing for students, and to improve the
learning process, we asked students about their personal attitude towards the use of online testing
during English classes based on their own experience. Throughout the academic year teachers
experimented with online test design in GF approved by students. The survey was administered at
the end of the academic year.
For the question “what form of testing you would prefer”, 49,4% of respondents chose to go
through online form of testing, 29,7% noted that the format does not matter, while 20,9% would
still prefer paper-and-pencil tests.
These numbers indicate that at the moment we are not ready to completely switch from paper-
and-pencil tests to online ones. Nevertheless, we tend to assume that some of the students, who are
against tests on GF, have encountered a number of problems when testing. Thus, according to the
survey, among students preferring a paper test, 59% faced various kinds of problems, such as
instability of the internet connection and the unreliability of mobile devices, which may lead to the
loss of typed-in answers, and the need to follow clear-cut rules for inputting the answer, i.e. to
control the case (especially at the beginning of a sentence) and spaces while typing.
From there, students who experienced problems and, in that way, received low scores for tests
could negatively respond about such form of testing, supposedly being disappointed and expecting
getting a higher score for paper-and-pencil test instead which would not be inherent with these
negative features.
Overall, among all students who had such a form of knowledge assessment as GF testing in
English classes 41,3% encountered one or several problems when taking tests. Top problems result
from dependence of successful results in the test on the reliability of mobile devices and the
internet connection. 34,9% reported that the page reloaded, 18,6% had problems with their mobile
devices which either went down or ran out of charge, 11,6% lost the internet connection during
testing, 5,2% couldn’t send the replies because the Submit button was inactive. In all these cases,
the problem would lead to the total loss of all replies and getting null score for the test. We also
absolutely agree with this limitation of GF indicated by students, which entails the need to
consider and write a huge number of options for possible answers and in some cases, leads to
manual checking. 8,1% of students mentioned they didn’t have either a smartphone or a laptop,
which led to the impossibility of passing the test at all.
Despite the negative aspects of GF, some students supported the idea of being tested in this
way. Some of the feedbacks we received included the comments about the convenience of online
tests in comparison to paper-and-pencil tests in all senses either for test taking or checking.
Most popular advantages of tests in GF, mentioned by students, appeared to be the opportunity
to take the test remotely – 76,7%, and the absence of necessity of writing everything by hand as in
a paper-and-pencil testing – 73,3%. Automatic spelling correction on some smartphones or
computers and the ability to find an answer on the Internet were marked as benefits by 33,7% and
26,2% of students, respectively.
Thus, if the first two options can be viewed from a positive point, not only for students, but for
EFL teachers as well, the last two diminish the reliability of online form for assessing knowledge,
especially with regard to spell checking. We hope that setting the time limit for the test can stop
students from searching outside resources.
In our survey, we asked students to choose the optimal test duration and frequency. 40,7% of
students noted the possibility of having an online test once a month, 30,8% considered it possible
to be tested once a week, 12,8% and 7,6% admitted to administer a test each class and once a
semester, respectively. 8,1% of respondents opposed this form of knowledge assessment in
English classes. The optimal duration of a test according to 66,8% of respondents is 10-20
minutes.
4. Recommendations and Conclusion

Because GF are free OS-compatible easy-to-use MS Office-convertible applications, they gain
popularity for educational purposes. As an alternative to a paper-and-pencil test, without any better
available IT or software alternatives, the use of tests in GF can be one of the options for organizing
classroom activities and students’ knowledge assessment provided that there is a stable Internet
connection and that all students have reliable mobile devices. Just in case there should be some
copies of printed tests which are easily converted and filed from GF into Excel and Word
documents.
Students and teachers unanimously agreed that the optimal duration of the test is up to 20
minutes with the periodicity of once or twice a month.
For the convenience of passing on mobile devices, tests with multiple-choice/true-false (where
true and false are options) and open-ended tests with only one correct answer work perfectly well.
These cover such language aspects as verb forms, word formation, vocabulary lists (definitions;
English-Russian, Russian-English translations including spell checking under control, etc.). One
can also design a test to assess reading and listening test because the functionality of the Google
application allows for uploading audio files, images and text. But it is the teachers’ responsibility
to make the test look manageable and convenient especially on mobile devices with the prevalence
of multiple-choice questions.
It is necessary to make the responses case-insensitive so that, for example, the auto correction
on the phone (by default, the word begins with a capital letter) does not affect the final score. For
the time being Google guidebooks don’t provide any rules for eliminating the problem. One
recommendation is to state and write clear instructions to the test not to use capital letters if not
necessary. Another recommendation is to input capitalized correct answers. And still one more bit
of advice is to recheck the answers manually.
Compared to typical paper-based tests the majority of teachers prefer to spend a certain amount
of time on creating a computer-based test with the help of GF, notwithstanding that it is time-
consuming, but free themselves from endless check of students’ works. There are some
recommendations that the teachers would like to find when creating GF tests: 1) the possibility to
set a time limit on a test. Though this can create some anxiety for students, but knowing the
material well is definitely going to help them on any time limit test; 2) the possibility of not taking
the use of capital letters and extra spaces into account; 3) the possibility of automatic conversion
of questions and answers from MS Office documents (.doc, .xls); 4) the possibility to introduce a
formula to convert the points into grades.
Since teachers welcome the idea of sharing Google tests, a good idea is to organize workshops
locally and globally to attract more educational staff to test design.
Next step, we find it important to report the problems and continue experimenting with GF test
design in collaboration with affiliated GF programmers to enhance its functionality and promote
attractiveness for educational experts.
References
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pedagogical strategy. Proceedings of INTED2018 Conference 5th-7th March 2018. Valencia, Spain,
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tests. In Journal of Computing in Higher Education 21, 183–198.
Kato, T. et al. (2016): Practice for Self-Regulatory Learning using Google Forms: Report and Perspectives
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Annual NACCQ. Palmerston North, New Zealand, 435–438.
Distance education as a condition of elderly’s social activity
Olga Volkova1, Polina Ananchenkova2, Oksana Besschetnova3
(1) Belgorod State National Research University, Belgorod, Russia

E-mail: volkovaoa[at]rambler.ru
(2) Academy of Labour and Social Relations, Lobachevskyst, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: ananchenkova[at]yandex.ru
(3) Balashov Institute of Saratov State University named after N.G.Chernishevsky,
Balashov, Russia
E-mail: oksanabesschetnova[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
The article substantiates the necessity of organizing and holding of computer literacy
courses and distance education programs for elderly due to their more intense integration
into social life, the manifestations of activity in the fields of labor, education, and recreation.
The article presents the results of the study of the specifics and motives of older people’s
learning in computer literacy courses, conducted in 2014 − 2017. The study was provided by
social services for elderly with the support of faculty and students from local universities,
located in Russian regions. The methods of the research included the questionnaire survey of
elderly, joining computer literacy courses (n=350); structured interviews of teachers (n = 15)
and volunteers (n=52), helping to organize and implement these courses; content-analysis of
websites containing the information about distance learning programs. The results of the
study show that the development of computer literacy skills: (1) depends on motivation, socio-
psychological qualities of elderly and the emotional atmosphere during the training; (2) it is a
starting point for more active self-learning; (3) it contributes to the intensity of the
communicating process with relatives and children, living far away, and helps to establish
privacy; 4) it expands the range of activities, increases the elderly’s awareness in various
spheres of public life; (5) it allows to diversify everyday life (literature, cooking, crafts), to
master the techniques of search information and be involved in virtual groups; (6) it is an
opportunity to search for new possibilities of employment, including domestic work or self-
employment.
Keywrds: distance education, elderly people, social activity
1 Introduction
Modern digital technologies provide new opportunities for elderly to increase their social
activities. They allow carrying out social interactions of older people more intensively, including
the communication with relatives and friends living far away; making new friends; getting
information about upcoming events as well as improving professional qualifications.
Using modern gadgets such as computer, laptop, reader, etc. can help to minimize the feel of
loneliness which was increasing among older people in recent years. In these regards, distance
education plays a very important role and helps elderly to organize their time independently, to
extend the period of their professional employment as well as to fill their leisure time. It leads to
the increasing of social activity and the well-being of elderly. The aim of the work is to analyze
the possibilities of e-learning as a tool for regional educational space virtualization.
2 Theoretical background and literature review

At present, it is especially urgent to consider the integration of older people in the educational
space of modern society. Until now, there is a stereotyped image in society about the limited
ability of older people to perceive new information and the difficulty in learning. However, studies
show that differences in learning abilities between young people and elderly are minor and most
people aged 70-75 can retain a good level of efficiency, competence, and intellectual potential.
Some difficulties in learning are related to their health (for example, the weakness of sight,
hearing, poor coordination, etc.).
Y. Lee claims, that in response to the impact of population ageing and low fertility rates,
numerous elementary schools, junior high schools, and universities have allocated resources and
space to establish learning centers and learning camps for senior citizens, providing them with the
opportunity to learn. Older adult education extends beyond the classroom and into society,
forming a new public pedagogy in Taiwan. Its important elements include:
- the changes in population structure and the rising number of older adults;
- the government’s formulation of older adult education policies based on learning
enhancement;
- the joint promotion of older adult education activities by numerous academic institutions;
- the theoretical bases of program design to help senior citizens achieve active ageing and
popularize older adult education in communities.
Future challenges to older adult learning becoming the new public pedagogy include:
- the public’s skepticism concerning the necessity of older adult education and its efficiency;
- the need to establish diverse sources of funding to ensure the sustainable development of
older adult education;
- the necessity to develop various program designs to satisfy senior citizens’ needs due to the
heterogeneity of senior citizens;
- the urgent necessity for research to confirm the effectiveness of older adult education [Lee,
2015].
M. Inaba provides a overview of the situation of the elderly and their caregivers in Japan,
including demographic changes in the country, development and changes in long-term care policy
that have targeted the poorly integrated community care system. The potential of empowerment-
oriented community development intervention strategies to decrease the gap between available
institutional and formal community-based services and the needs of the elderly and their families
in their efforts to meet late life challenges is described. The need for an increased role of distance
education in community development interventions is explored and new strategies are suggested
[Inaba, 2016].
B. Debska и A. Kubacka claim, that education by means of the e-learning method is becoming
more and more popular nowadays and a rapid development of information technologies makes
traditional, static websites used for online education being replaced by interactive, intelligent
portals. In spite of the rapid advances in informatics, there is still no software which would meet
the needs of all learners, and older people in particular. B. Dębska и A. Kubacka present the
structure of the portal and also describe how to use it for the personalized online education system
[Debska, Kubacka, 2016].
S. Park и H. Yun examines the relationships between students’ academic levels, the use of
motivational regulation strategies, and cognitive learning strategies. A total of 141 undergraduate
and graduate students enrolled in online distance courses participated in the study. The findings
show that students use different motivational regulation strategies and cognitive learning strategies
depending on their academic levels. Additionally, hierarchical regression analyses using two
dependent variables (i.e., surface level learning strategy and deep processing level learning
strategy) indicate that a surface level learning strategy (i.e., rehearsal) and deep processing level
strategies (i.e., elaboration, organization, and critical thinking) are predicted by different sets of
motivational regulation strategies after controlling for academic level and age. The results provide
distance educators and instructional designers with practical suggestions on how to support
motivational needs пожилых людей and further promote their use of cognitive learning strategies
in online distance education programs [Park, Yun, 2017].
T. Kahan, T. Soffer and R. Nachmias analyze a proliferation of massive open online
courses (MOOCs), which provide unprecedented opportunities for lifelong learning.
Characterizing the different types of participation in MOOCs is fundamental in order to be able to
better evaluate the phenomenon and to support MOOCs developers and instructors in devising
courses which are adapted for different learners' needs [Kennedy, 2012].
J. Kennedy explores characteristics associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Three key characteristics are revealed: varied definitions of openness, barriers to persistence, and a
distinct structure that takes the form as one of two pedagogical approaches. The concept of
openness shifts among different MOOCs, models, researchers, and facilitators. The high dropout
rates show that the barriers to learning are a significant challenge. Research has focused on
engagement, motivation, and presence to mitigate risks of learner isolation. The pedagogical
structure of the connectivist MOOC model (cMOOC) incorporates a social, distributed, networked
approach and significant learner autonomy that is geared towards adult lifelong learners interested
in personal or professional development [Kennedy, 2012].
O. Volkova, O. Beschetnova and P. Ananchenkova state that the remote training is conducted
solely by posting information on the web-site of the organization, the use of tutorials, videos and
audio materials. The most effective distance education methods are videos, themed movies,
cartoons, and short stories [Volkova, Beschetnova, Ananchenkova, 2017].
The main purpose of elderly’s education is to develop skills for active and effective integration
in social life. The participation in the learning process allows older people to be independent, self-
sufficient, confident and capable persons.
3 WEB-resources which contain the information about distance learning programs

Currently in Russia, there are a number of international, federal, regional distance learning
programs for elderly which are primarily implemented on the basis of large educational
organizations such as universities or academies in partnership with commercial companies that are
able to finance similar initiatives in the framework of corporate social responsibility programs.
Some of them are the following:
1. The national social program “Grandmother and Grandfather online”
(www.babushka-on-line.ru) was established in 2008 by the Interregional Public Organization
“Association of Veterans, Disabled People and Pensioners” with the support of Rostelecom
(national telephone company). The purpose of the project is to teach elderly the basic skills of
information and communication technologies (ICT) as well as how to use e-government services.
More than 25 000 older people have been educated during the seven year period.
2. The federal social and educational project “All ages are submissive to the network”
(www.svvp.ru) is designed to get practical skills of using the Internet in order to solve everyday
problems, to popularize modern information and communication technologies and useful online
services for older people.
3. Charitable project “Status: Online” (статусонлайн.рф) is computer literacy courses for
elderly and adult people with disabilities. The goal of the program is to create conditions that
prevent social and informational isolation these social groups and improve the quality of life.
4. The international program “Computer Literacy”, developed by Microsoft, is designed to
acquaint people with the digital world and to learn basic concepts and skills of working with a
computer. The program is translated into more than three dozen languages. The main integrated
multimedia resources are video lectures, simulators, and test programs. In the Russian Federation,
the program is implemented as part of the project “Your Course” (www.ycdl.ph-int.org/study).
Computer courses have been attended by 145 000 people.
5. The international project “E-Citizen” (www.ecdl.su), created with the support of the
International Foundation ECDL, is aimed at the development and implementation of unified
standards of ICT. The program focuses on the Internet resources which provide interaction with
social services and government structures. The project is designed for a wide audience, but a
significant part of the listeners are elderly.
The dissemination of educational programs entails the development of basics computer literacy
skills for people of the third age. The most famous of them are the textbook “The ABC of the
Internet”, developed by the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation in conjunction with
“Rostelecom” (www.azbukainterneta.ru); “Clear Internet” (www.Zaprosto-internet.ru), created
together with created together with the government of Nizhny Novgorod region and Google and
others.
In addition, a variety of distance learning lessons created by individuals and organizations and
devoted to different topics can be found in the Internet. Among them: Sergey Avdevnin's website
“Virtual computer academy for pensioners” (www.pc-pensioneru.ru), I.A. Kostromina’s website
“Computer literacy” (www.computer-study.narod.ru), Nadezhda Shirobokova’s website
“Computer Literacy with Nadezhda” (www.compgramotnost.ru), the website “We are not in
trouble” (www.godanebeda.ru), Online University of the Third Age of the St. Petersburg National
Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (www.u3a.ifmo.ru).
Unfortunately, it is quite rare to find the improving of professional qualification programs. The
exception is the program for pedagogical workers “The methodology of teaching computer literacy
of socially unprotected layers of the population”.
4 Distance education and social activity of elderly

4.1 Data and methodology
The authors of this article were carried out the research in 2014 – 2017 in order to study the
necessity of organizing and holding of computer literacy courses and distance education programs
for elderly due to their more intense integration into social life, the manifestations of activity in the
fields of labor, education, and recreation; its results are presented here.
The article substantiates the results of the study of the specifics and motives of older people’s
learning in computer literacy courses. The study was provided by social services for elderly with
the support of faculty and students from local universities, located in Belgorod and Saratov
regions. The methods of the research included the questionnaire survey of elderly, joining
computer literacy courses (n = 350); structured interviews of teachers (n = 15) and volunteers
(n = 52), helping to organize and implement these courses; content-analysis of websites containing
the information about distance learning programs
4.2 Results
- The attitude of elderly to computer literacy courses/
The results of the survey are presented in the Table 1.
Table 1. The results of the survey of elderly regarding computer literacy skills
№ Factors influencing the development of elderly’s computer literacy skills Percent
1 Motivation, personal and individual characteristics, emotional climate during the 88.6 %
learning process
2 Degree of independence of mastering educational programs 37.1 %
3 Degree of intensity of the communication with relatives, children, friends, etc.
living far away 56.1 %
4 Level of awareness of older people in various spheres of public life 47.6 %
5 Hobby (literature, cooking, crafts, needlework), participation in virtual groups 95.3 %
6 Employment, searching for job 15.2 %
According to the empirical data, the success of elderly’s computer literacy skills depends on
motivation, personal characteristics, hobby, teacher’s personality, as well as the emotional climate
during the training.
- Excerpts from structured interviews with teachers conducting computer literacy courses for
elderly.
“The main advantage of computer communications is the ability to transmit information of any
kind (visual and sound, static and dynamic, textual and graphic) to any distance” (Teacher of
computer literacy courses for elderly, man, 39 years).
“The most promising are the following activities: the development of educational programs for
the elderly; the creation of educational and methodical manuals; organizing and conducting free
group sessions or providing resources for individual education; training of teachers, holding
conferences, providing opportunities for self-study” (Teacher of computer literacy courses for the
elderly, husband, 58 years).
“In my opinion, the effectiveness of training older people depends on four components: first of
all, the effective organization; secondly, the quality of the educational materials, manuals; thirdly,
pedagogical leadership; and fourthly, the mastery of the teacher” (Teacher of computer literacy
courses for the elderly, women, 38 years).
“It is important to use several teaching tools at the same time, because learning would be more
effective if we combine, for example, audio lectures and video materials” (teacher of computer
literacy for older people, man, 58 years).
Analyzing the materials of the interview, we can draw some conclusions. Education of the
elderly is a mutual process. On the one hand, teachers acquire gerontological knowledge of
working with older people; experience in training older people in distance education field; interact
with other specialists. On the other hand, the elderly get the opportunity to get and improve their
computer skills; get access to various Internet sources of information, which allow older people to
broaden their horizons, circle of contacts, and overcome the problem of loneliness.
The effectiveness of training depends on four components: the quality of interaction between
the teacher and the older person; the use of a complex of pedagogical technologies; the feedback
and the quality of materials used in education program which take into account the peculiarities of
the mental processes of the elderly.
- Excerpts from structured interviews with volunteers, helping elderly to develop computer
literacy skills.
“I am a volunteer. I help elderly to get acquainted with computer technologies. This knowledge
can help them in their everyday life, for example, they can pay their bills via Internet, get some
new information regarding their interests and hobbies and it makes them a little happy. For
example, I’ve get acquainted with a woman, she is fond of gardening. So she is searching the
information about her home plants all the time!” (Volunteer, women, 20 years).
“I come here regularly. I like to feel I can help older people. Some of them feel extremely
lonely, because their children have grown up and left home. So we try to teach them how to use
email, skype or search information in the Internet. Even being far from their children and other
relatives they can stay in touch to each other” (Volunteer, women, 20 years old).
“To the end of the training of the elderly, I saw that our project is effective. Most of our
“pupils” have become advanced users of the Internet resources; they have expanded their social
ties. These basic computer skills are the start for the active self-education, and participation in
other educational programs” (Volunteer, women, 22 years).
Based on the analysis of interviews with volunteers, we can state that the improvement of the
quality of education and the learning process takes place through the provision of two-way
communication between elderly and young people; intergenerational interaction, contributing to
the development of tolerance of different generations to each other.
Conclusion
The use of distance technologies in adult education is determined by the following factors: it
gives the opportunity to choose one’s own pace of studying; to increase the availability of
information in various fields such as health care, social protection services, etc.; to widen the range
of their social contacts; to be social active.
The results of the study show that the development of computer literacy skills: (1) depends on
motivation, socio-psychological qualities of elderly and the emotional atmosphere during the
training; (2) it is a starting point for more active self-learning; (3) it contributes to the intensity of
the communicating process with relatives and children, living far away, and helps to establish
privacy; 4) it expands the range of activities, increases the elderly's awareness in various spheres
of public life; (5) it allows to diversify everyday life (literature, cooking, crafts), to master the
techniques of search information and be involved in virtual groups; (6) it is an opportunity to
search for new possibilities of employment, including domestic work or self-employment.
References
Debska B., Kubacka A. (2016): Classification algorithms in the personalisation of educational portals.
Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning. 26 (1), URL:
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Inaba M.(2016): Aging and Elder Care in Japan: A Call for Empowerment-Oriented Community
Development. Journal of Gerontological Social Work. 59 (7-8). URL:
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Kennedy J. (2012). Characteristics of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): A Research Review, 2009-
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09.01.2018
Lee Y. (2015): Older adult education: new public pedagogy in 21st Century Taiwan. Australian Journal of
Adult Learning. 55 (3). URL: https://www.ajal.net.au/older-adult-education-new-public-pedagogy-in-
21st-century-taiwan. Date Views 09.01.2018.
Park S., Yun H. (2017). Relationships between motivational strategies and cognitive learning in distance
education courses. Distance Education. 09(10). URL:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01587919.2017.1369007. Date Views 10.01.2018.
Volkova O., Beschetnova O., Ananchenkova P. (2017). The use of e-Learning technologies in orphans
training programs. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning – virtual
reality, October 28, 2017. University of Bucharest. URL: http://c3.icvl.eu/2017/about-icvl-project. Date
Views 09.01.2018
Using of distance learning technologies in the educational process
of orphans and children left without parental care
Olga Volkova1, Polina Ananchenkova2, Oksana Besschetnova3
(1) Belgorod State National Research University, Belgorod, Russia

E-mail: volkovaoa[at]rambler.ru
(2) Academy of Labour and Social Relations, Lobachevskyst, Moscow, Russia
(3) Balashov Institute of Saratov State University named after N.G.Chernishevsky,
Balashov, Russia
E-mail: oksanabesschetnova[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
The article presents the results of in-depth interviews with children left without parental
care aged 10-17 years (N=100) who are studying at secondary schools as well as teachers,
using information computer technologies (ICT) in educational and extracurricular work
(n=35). The territory of the research covered three regions: Belgorod, Saratov regions and
the Trans-Baikal Territory (Russia). The results show that the most effective distance
education technology is Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment –
“Moodle”, which allows creating on-line courses; inserting tables, charts, graphics, video,
flash, etc.; carrying out the mutual exchange of knowledge, increasing collaboration between
participants during the educational tasks execution; applying new methods of distance
learning (encyclopedias, tests, glossaries, questionnaires, etc.). According to children and
teachers’ opinions, the leading positions are occupied by the programs Skype, Team Viewer,
MS PowerPoint, Word, Excel as well as electronic games-classes; playing exercises;
handouts for children; manuals for teachers. According to the research, the most popular
forms of distance education are different kinds of lectures (with elements of control, video and
audio); study of resources (Internet, text, animation, illustrations, video, audio files);
independent work under the scenario (search, research, creative); holding a conference in
chat or forum; individual or collective project work; performance of training exercises;
conducting trainings; control of students’ knowledge (test, answers the questions);
counseling.
Keywords: Orphans, Educational process, Distance learning technologies
1 Introduction. Topical issues of application of remote technologies in the educational

processes higher educational institutions
Information technology is a huge growing field of activity that can be successfully applied in
the education of children and adults with various educational needs, contributing to its
effectiveness “(Sutherland, 2017)”. Some modern researchers consider new information
technologies as a specific kind of symbolic reality, which is created on the basis of the interaction
of computer technology and society “(Ayimaletdinov and Lyubimova, 2012; Kasza, 2017)”. A
distinctive feature of these technologies is the ability of a person observing, experiencing as well
as actively acting in it.
The use of information computer technologies has the following advantages: the access to a
variety of information sources; the intensive independent work of the trainee, who can study at a
convenient place and time, based on an individual schedule; the opportunity of students’
communication with a teacher at any time; the possibility of mediated counseling and education;
the high quality and visibility of the stimulating material “(Volkova and Besschetnova, et al,
2017)”.
Due to the interactive style of distance education, it is possible to individualize and
differentiate the learning process, which is especially important for orphans, because it can help
them to realize their potential to a greater extent, to lead an active social life, as well as to expand
their social ties “(Volkova and Besschetnova, et al, 2018)”.
2 Material and Methods

The article presents the results of in-depth interviews with children left without parental care
aged 10-17 years (n=100) who are studying at secondary schools as well as teachers, using
information computer technologies (ICT) in educational and extracurricular work (n=35). The
territory of the research covered three regions: Belgorod, Saratov regions and the Trans-Baikal
Territory (Russia). The research is supported by the Russian Foundation for the Basic Research
(project no. 16-03-00057).
3 Methodology
The purpose of the research was to study the opinions of school teachers of information
technologies about the possibilities of improving the educational environment, contributing to the
physical and mental health of children, living outside their biological families by using e-Learning
technologies in school curriculum.
In all selected classes, along with children, living with their biological parents, there were
children who were living outside their biological family, many of whom demonstrated significant
gaps in knowledge of the school curriculum, decreased cognitive functions, low self-esteem, and
signs of adaptation disorder, high level of anxiety, aggression, and negativism. This led to the lack
of friends among classmates, low personal status in peer group, and the emergence of deviant
behavior. The solution can be found through the inclusion of orphans and children left without
parental care in distance school and out-of-school activities through information technologies and
through Moodle in particular.
The organization of the study included several stages. At the first stage, classes were identified
and children, living outside their biological family at the time of the study, were selected (some of
them lived in kinship care, foster care, social institutions, etc.). The sample consisted of pupils of
grades 5-11 who was studying at general education schools (n=100) located in Belgorod, Saratov
regions and the Trans-Baikal Territory. The sample was approximately the same in all three
regions.
In the second stage, we received a permission from the school administration and the children
themselves to conduct the survey. The main method of the research was in-depth interviews of
children, regarding the relationships with teachers and classmates in school; difficulties associated
with training; presence/absence of friends; the computer skills of using Internet for educational or
developmental purposes. At the beginning of the study, children were closed, hesitant, and weakly
motivated to participate at the survey. The previous work had been done to make them feel
comfortable and calm as well as to overcome the difficulties of communication with researchers.
Gradually, in the process of communication, children began to show their interest in activities, to
respond and ask questions; to exchange contacts in social networks with peers.
In the third stage, in-depth interviews with school teachers of information technologies (n=35)
who had an experience of working with children, living outside their biological families were
conducted to study their opinion about the possibilities of distance education through Internet to
overcome children’s social adaptation disorder in the school community. The sample of teachers
was formed from the regional databases of educational institutions. It included almost all teachers
with the exception of those who were not available at the time of the research or refused to
participate in the survey. Interviewing teachers was conducted in their workplace.
4 Discussion
Teachers were encouraged to use Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning
Environment) with children, living outside their biological families as a free and open-source
modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment system which was widely used in more
than 100 countries.
The main structural elements of Moodle are different kinds of Internet resources, including
text, video and audio files, illustrations, animation, etc. which can help a person to create his/her
individual educational environment; work independently under the scenario (search, research,
creative, etc.); be included in a chat or a forum; create an individual project work; do exercises,
using special training systems.
Moodle is focused on collaborative training technologies; it enables to design, create and
further manage resources; it allows to organize training in the process of joint solving of
educational tasks; to carry out mutual exchange of knowledge; to create and apply new ways of
distance education, such as electronic abstracts, encyclopedias, tests, glossaries, questionnaires,
virtual laboratories and a set of other communication tools. It includes forum (general or private),
chat, and blogging, e-mail, the possibility of attachments’ exchange between students and the
teacher.
The system can help to combine different methods of teaching to increase the effectiveness of
the learning process, taking into account the age and computer skills of children, the degree of
their activity and independence, the specifics of the subject they learn. In our research the mostly
used main tools in the teacher’s work were the Internet browser, Skype and TeamViewer.
Web browser is software that allows performing tasks directly on the course, to search for the
necessary information and work with it.
Skype is free, closed-source software that provides encrypted voice and video over the Internet
between computers (VoIP), as well as paid services for mobile and fixed phone calls. The program
also allows to make conference calls (up to 25 voice subscribers, including initiators), video calls
(including videoconferences up to 10 subscribers), and provides text messaging (chat) and file
transfer.
TeamViewer is a software package for remote control of computers, file exchange between
control and managed machines.
When preparing and conducting classes in Moodle, teachers of information technologies used a
glossary, resource, task, forum, wiki, lesson, test, etc.; combinations of various elements of the
course in accordance with the goals and objectives of the subject.
The glossary allows organizing work with terms. The vocabulary articles can be created not
only by teachers, but also by students themselves. As a resource, any material for self-study,
research, discussion: text, illustration, web page, audio and video file, etc. can act as resources.
Executing a task is a type of student activity, the purpose of it is usually the creation and
uploading to the server of a file of any format or the creation of a text directly in Moodle, using the
built-in visual editor. The teacher can quickly check students’ files, comment on them and, if
necessary, suggest finalizing in some ways.
Forum is a convenient tool for discussion of educational issues, consultations, downloading
files, etc. It gives students the opportunity to evaluate each other's work as well. During the
education the student can create forum of any types: a regular forum with a discussion of one
topic, an accessible common forum or a forum with one discussion line for each user. In addition
to that Moodle supports a very useful function of collective text editing (“Wiki”).
Element of the course “Lesson” is useful for organizing a step-by-step study of the teaching
material, breaking the training material into didactic units, putting questions for repeating
materials. Also it provides different forms of control, including automatic control of students’
knowledge based on pre-set evaluation parameters.
According to school teachers’ opinion, the use of information technologies in general and
Moodle in particular, makes it possible to correct such characteristics of children as the absence of
motivation to education or participation in out-of-school activities, as well as to overcome the lack
of ability to maintain their physical health through sports.
At the end of the research teachers as well as children were asked to evaluate the effectiveness
of using Moodle as an educational resource. All respondents from both groups highly appreciated
their experience. As a result children began to perform much better in school; their behavior and
mental health became more stable.
Conclusion
The information technologies have its influence of on all spheres of the society such as
education, employment, management, health, culture and leisure. The development of information
technology is determined by the needs and tasks of social development.
Of course, the use of information technologies in educational and extracurricular activities to
enhance the social adaptation of children living in out-of-home care should not be viewed as the
only form of interaction between the teacher and the student. Nevertheless, the research shows that
information technologies significantly improve the effectiveness of education and allow children
to overcome knowledge gaps due to frequent moving, changing schools, and the lack of family
control of their attendance and performance. It provides additional opportunities for children and
teachers to identify areas of improvement, as well as to connect caretakers and schools, delivering
educational recourses and additional services through student information systems, e-mail, instant
messaging, and blogs “(Empowering Parents Through Technology, 2010)”. Also in many cases
using information technologies helps children, living in care to finish school, enter the college and
get the professional education and skills.
References
Ayimaletdinov, T.A., Lyubimova, L.I. (2012) Innovative opportunities of Internet technologies in social
adaptation of disabled people. Sociology of Medicine 1, 20, 51-55.
Empowering Parents Through Technology To Improve the Odds for Children. Digital Opportunity for Youth
Issue Brief, 2010 http://www.childrenspartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Empowering-Parents-
Through-Technology%E2%80%94To-Improve-the-Odds-for-Children_October-2010.pdf, accesed 2018.
Kasza, J. (2017) Post Modern Identity: “In Between” Real And Virtual. World Scientific News, 78, 41-57.
Sutherland, A. (2017) Caring activism: a 21st century concept of care. A proposal for citizens to join together
to support vulnerable children, teenagers, adults and elderly people. Disability & Society, 32, 4, 608-610.
Volkova O., Besschetnova O., Ananchenkova P. (2017) The use of e-Learning technologies in orphans
training programs. In Proceedings of The 12th International Conference on Virtual Learning – Virtual
reality, Bucharest, Bucharest University Press, 136-140.
Volkova, O., Besschetnova, O., Ananchenkova, P. (2018) Distance social-psychological support for care-
leavers. In Proceedings of eLearning & Software for Education, Bucharest, 274-279.
Distance learning technologies as a tool in managing corporate
knowledge system
Polina Ananchenkova1
(1) Academy of Labour and Social Relations, Ozernaya st., 34-3-8, 119361, Moscow,
Russia, E-mail: ananchenkova[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
Making efficient and adequate organizational management decisions requires building a
knowledge management system. An organization’s information and intellectual assets are
distributed between databases and knowledge bases, document storage facilities, email
messages, reports and of course personnel. The main objective of the knowledge management
system is to provide fast access to this data and knowledge.
Corporate knowledge system (CKS) management creates a unified information space
within a company, organizes joint activities of the employees for acquiring, presenting and
sharing knowledge, provides access to the common knowledge base and creates the
environment for more efficient usage of staff knowledge for the common good. This system
organizes management actions on the basis of all information resources in an organization
that are accessible remotely. Using these resources requires a set of specialized products,
tools and platforms.
What are the advantages of using remote knowledge management systems?
1. Internal benchmarking, which allows all employees to learn from other’s mistakes and
use each other’s achievements. Through this process, both new employees and veterans of the
organization acquire the professional knowledge they need faster, reducing the time needed
for personnel training and improving the quality of their work.
2. CKS management allow employees and departments to work more efficiently, avoiding
“reinventing the wheel” with regards to the processes already developed by other employees
or company units and reducing duplicate activities.
3. CKS management facilitates innovative development by providing each employee an
opportunity to initiate innovations, upgrade existing processes and track critical comments.
Keywords: remote technologies, corporate knowledge system, training
1 Introduction
Making efficient and adequate organizational management decisions requires building a
knowledge management system. An organization’s information and intellectual assets are
distributed between databases and knowledge bases, document storage facilities, email messages,
reports and of course personnel. The main objective of the knowledge management system is to
provide fast access to this data and knowledge.
Corporate knowledge system (CKS) management creates a unified information space within a
company, organizes joint activities of the employees for acquiring, presenting and sharing
knowledge, provides access to the common knowledge base and creates the environment for more
efficient usage of staff knowledge for the common good. This system organizes management
actions on the basis of all information resources in an organization that are accessible remotely.
Using these resources requires a set of specialized products, tools and platforms.
2 Development of the knowledge-based organization theory

In the middle of the 20th century, while the production concentration, globalization and fierce
competition were developing, a new resource-based organization theory appeared in the
economics. One of the most prominent representatives of this school, E. Penrose, focused on the
research of the economic growth processes treating a firm as an administrative organization,
functioning due to the use of production resources: human, tangible and intangible resources,
acquired in the market or created inside the firm. According to E. Penrose, the resources
themselves never participate in the production process, they have to be transformed into services,
that, in their turn, depend on the knowledge and experience accumulated by a firm and determine
its profile. Thus, the firm represents a knowledge vault. E. Penrose pointed at the presence of a
very close link between various types of resources available to a company, and at the necessity to
perfect the ideas, experience and knowledge of managers and entrepreneurs on a permanent basis
[Penrose, 1995]. According to the authors, it is the resource-based view that emphasizes the
corporate nature of the knowledge in possession of a business unit.
Later, in the 1980s, the evolutionary organizational theory evolved, that also considered a
company to be a knowledge vault. Authors of this theory, R. Nelson and S. Winter, claimed that
the main item in business organizations is the knowledge of "how to do something". Each single
company at a specific point of time is a vault of rather specific production knowledge uniting
sometimes completely contravening knowledge that does not repeat even in similar companies
working in one and the same sphere [Nelson, Richard, Winter, Sidney, 2002].
The corporate knowledge management theory, as the modern management concept, originated
in economically advanced countries at the end of the 20th century. P. Drucker, an American
scientist, laid the origin foundation of this theory. According to P. Drucker, (“Landmarks of
Tomorrow”, 1959), "a knowledge worker is a person who has education received in an educational
institution and abilities to acquire and apply theoretic and analytical knowledge. At that, his way
of thinking is focused on ongoing development of available knowledge and, respectively, on the
essentially new approach to the performed functions. This is a person, who "carries all his work
tools along" [Drucker, 2008].
Later, the research of the organizational knowledge management aspect was continued by the
Swedish scientist K. Sveiby. Beginning from the 1980s, he has published a large amount of works
dedicated to this topic, including the first ever monograph "Knowledge Company"; in 1994, he
defended the first ever doctorate dissertation on knowledge management titled "Towards a
Knowledge Perspective on Organisation" [Sveiby].
All the scientists working on this issue, are unanimous, that there four main processes in the
corporate knowledge management system: creation, storage, transfer and usage of knowledge,
while the corporate knowledge management itself is needed in order to create value via complex
education of an organization workers, to define the opportunities for a repeated usage of
knowledge, as well as to manage the processes of knowledge generation and transfer. That is why,
learning and training takes up one of the most important positions in the corporate knowledge
management system. The corporate education system was prominently discussed in the concept of
learning companies of P. Senge, who first introduced the term "learning company" in his work
"Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” (1990) [Senge, 2009].
It is necessary to point out, that the implementation of the corporate knowledge management
system implies establishment of the relevant organizational model, describing the complex of
resources and how they are used in order to reach organizational goals.
3 Organization of the knowledge system based on remote technologies

IT infrastructure of many companies is rather often a mixture of various information systems
functioning autonomously. On the one hand, this may by due to the desire and operational need of
employees from various departments to work in specialized software. Creation of a single

informational space of a company is one of the most acute tasks, which, if resolved, allows not
only to align activities of different departments and employees but also to increase the speed of the
decision-making process. Today business faces challenges, the resolution of which requires well-
coordinated efforts across all information systems. In order to do that, it is necessary to use one of
the systems as a basis and connect all the others to it. Technically, this problem may be tackled via
a number of methods.
One of them is to integrate the systems, used in the company, on the basis of the corporate
distance learning system (CDLS) - a corporate portal accumulating the following: corporate
knowledge units (knowledge, skills, technologies, manuals, regulations, etc.) integrated in such a
way as to allow formation of individual content upon order of a user in accordance with the set
parameters; technical conditions and opportunities of access to knowledge units, their usage and
replication (including downloading); technical capabilities to update and renew knowledge units;
procedures to assess the course of mastering of knowledge and technical capabilities to do the
assessment remotely.
CDLS may serve both as a single point of entry into other systems and as a convenient
environment to work with these systems. Initially, the corporate portal only performed functions of
the internal corporate website. By accumulating important internal information and simplifying its
search, by adding new services for communication between employees, CDLS is now able to
address the following crucial corporate issues: human resources; communication between the
human resources; corporate culture - its establishment and development.
Behind each of these issues, there are important corporate internal processes and, at the end of
the day, people.
What are the advantages of using remote knowledge management systems?
1. Internal benchmarking, which allows all employees to learn from others’ mistakes and use
each other’s achievements. Through this process, both new employees and veterans of the
organization acquire the professional knowledge they need faster, reducing the time needed for
personnel training and improving the quality of their work.
2. CKS management allow employees and departments to work more efficiently, avoiding
“reinventing the wheel” with regards to the processes already developed by other employees or
company units and reducing duplicate activities.
3. CKS management facilitates innovative development by providing each employee an
opportunity to initiate innovations, upgrade existing processes and track critical comments.
4 Integrability
Since the most important task when implementing any systems is to create necessary working
conditions for employees, to structure and systematize business processes, CDLS makes it
possible, among other functions, to make calls both inside the organization and outside calls, at
that this can be done directly from the browser and the calls will be recorded and stored in the
system. Thus, all communication may be stored by the relevant customer cards or by projects.
For companies that already have and use a corporate portal, it may serve as the stem in order to
align the IT systems, where all other systems are "impaled" on this stem as in case of a toy
pyramid (see picture 1).
An efficient CDLS allows various departments to work with their IT systems, while it is
possible to swiftly replenish and update the corporate portal. Thus, if it is necessary to transfer
some knowledge (information, problem, document or instruction) from one division of the
company to another, this information may be transferred through the company corporate portal.
Outlook
SharePoint
AD
Exchange
Electronic document flow systems
Accounting systems
Human resources management systems
CRM
Personal account integrated into the company website
Outlook
Picture.1 CDLS as the platform for integration of information systems
Integration scope may vary depending on what solutions are relevant for a specific company.
Integration "tailored" specifically to satisfy the needs of the company allows to unite isolated
information systems within a single information space and to systematize the total of
organizational knowledge by enhancing efficiency of business processes and, as a result,
performance of divisions and employees.
On the other hand, implementation of software products in companies often happens gradually,
depending on the tasks the company has to tackle. In the result, a certain amount of "interlacing"
systems accumulates, covering the same activities, using the same data (counterparties, employees,
etc.), and these data have to be input into various systems separately.
The key challenges to CKS development are as follows: weak infrastructure, complex
navigation and gaps between CKS elements, duplicated elements, fragmentation of the content
related to the same thematic area in CKS, lack of commitment among the personnel to developing,
maintaining and updating the corporate knowledge content
Conclusion
Thus, for high school students in the preparation of online courses need to develop a brief
guide to the study of discipline and proper time management, a reference to the use of knowledge
in practice, communication with professionals in the field.
For college students is necessary to provide control tasks for the study of each topic with the
ability to obtain and use-rated chat rooms, wikis.
References
Drucker P. (2008): Classic of management. Alpina Business Books, Moscow.
Nelson P., Richard P., Winter, Sidney G. (2002): An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Delo,
Moscow.
Penrose E. (1995): The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Senge Peter M. (2009): Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Olymp-
Business, Moscow.
Sveiby Karl. KM-lessons. http://www.sveiby.com/KM-lessons.doc.
The motives of a choice of e-learning system of training by
students of colledge and higher education institution
Polina Ananchenkova 1, Dilbar Amonova 2
(2) Russian-Tajik (Slavic) University, M. Tursunzade St. 30, 734025, Dushanbe,
Republic of Tajikistan, dilbar_amonova[at]mail.ru
Abstract
Systems of electronic training - e-Learning-are instilled everywhere in the higher and
secondary educational institutions. The advantages of using this system are obvious - the
acceptable price, availability, possibility of boundless expansibility, a high covering,
simplicity in operation, multimedia representation of a training material. In Russia
introduction of e-Learning becomes a mean of survival and a factor of competitiveness of
educational institution. Electronic training and development of distant systems need to be
considered taking into account characteristics of target audience. Results of students’ poll
consumers of systems of electronic training are presented in article. The research objective is
to study motives of a choice of online training in the system of secondary and higher
education. The reasons, for which students of higher education institution choose online
training, are more connected with their educational and social readiness. Students of higher
education institution are interested in convenience in procedures of receipt and training,
possibility of continuous interaction with the teacher, a free access to training materials, and
profitability of training. Students of college choose online training, first of all, because of
possibility to combine work and study, desire of financial independence, but they show less
educational readiness for this form of training.
Keywords: motivation, student, choice, factors, distance learning
1 Introduction.
Systems of electronic training - e-Learning-are instilled everywhere in the higher and
secondary educational institutions. The advantages of using this system are obvious - the
acceptable price, availability, possibility of boundless expansibility, a high covering, simplicity in
operation, multimedia representation of a training material. In Russia introduction of e-Learning
becomes a mean of survival and a factor of competitiveness of educational institution. Currently,
there are extensive studies [Conole et.al., 2007], [Velea, Simona, 2011], which present the factors
affecting the efficiency and motives of choice e-learning students.
2 The factors of the choice of e-learning

Researchers identify the following factors affecting the choice and effectiveness of e-learning:
1. Psychological and pedagogical factors.
Conole [Conole et.al, 2007] indicates that the motivation of students is based on the model of
John Keller's ARCS. ARCS stands for Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction, i.e
Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction. The model tells us that we constantly have to
call and keep the attention of the listener. There can be used sensory stimuli provocative questions
and diversity training events. Attention and motivation of students cannot be formed if the listener
does not believe that the material is useful for him.
In e-learning, you need immediately to show how long it takes to pass a course or module, as
well as the need to show progress on a regular basis - how much passed, how much is left.
Listeners need to get some satisfaction from teaching - reward good understanding, certificate and
so on. The model is very simple and versatile and is based on the basic principles of motivation to
action for an adult.
Another study [Istrate,Velea, Simona, 2011] focuses on the needs and expectations of students
in online training, based on communication, receiving feedback, the desire to interact and feel to
belong to a group. Motivation for learning in an online environment can be reduced if there is no
system of interaction between students through chats.
2. Social and cultural factors.
The success of the training depends on the socio-cultural factors, interaction and
communication. Cultural differences in e -Learning considered in four categories:
- attitude to authority,
- individualism-collectivism,
- uncertainty avoidance,
- masculinity-femininity.
In individualistic cultures, the emphasis is on individual rights and efficiency, which plays an
important role in personal autonomy and privacy. In collective cultures, group performance is of
great value and makes it easier to identify with the goals of the team.
In democratic culture encourages personal freedom of self-realization. In authoritarian cultures,
highlights the inequality of status, which limits the space for personal fulfillment.
In authoritarian cultures, teachers and students are guided by strict rules and standards, barely
avoiding any changes. Tolerant teachers offer students to be involved in the interaction through
discussions, wikis and chat rooms.
Students in the online training solve formal problems, but not interact with each other,
although in real learning situation they have to interact in solving specific real professional tasks.
In the opinion of Arestova, it’s possible to allocate the following motivational levels of online
learning:
Business motivation.
Typical for 91% of respondents. This motif - a component of professional activities aimed at
achieving a certain goal: the search for specific information, contacts and interaction with the
individual, organization, etc.
Cognitive motivation (81%).
It is associated with the production of new knowledge. Subject knowledge at the same time can
be a new service capabilities, hypertext information, people, ideas, concepts, visual and auditory
images.
Motivation cooperation or corporate motif (59%).
Most human activities are social in nature, both in content and structure. This means that the
activities involve the distribution of functions between people working together, sharing the
results, joint problem solving.
Motivation cooperation, which manifests itself as a desire to help others, often a means of
increasing their own authority, achieving recognition of their competence and skill. This confirms
the combination of motives, resulting in a sense of belonging to the intellectual and media elite of
modern society. In this category of respondents is also a motive of self-affirmation. We can
assume that the motivation of cooperation linked with this last form of motive.
Self motivation and personal development (52%).
Users see online learning as a means to display and develop their intellectual and creative
abilities, indicate the presence in their work motives, self-affirmation and communicative motive.
You can talk about a complex social motives, which is composed of motifs associated with
various aspects of the business and interpersonal communication. Among them - the theme of
cooperation, self-realization, self-affirmation and communicative.
Respondents with the motif of self believe that online learning is an element of play and
improvisation, moreover, it contributes to the development of personality and success in life,
accompanied by a sense of inclusion in the global information space.
The motivation of self (29%).
As online learning provides new communicative and cognitive capabilities, it can be assumed
that the investigated type of self is associated with various phenomena of communication (search
for the reference group, identifying with its values and the ability to express themselves in it).
Respondents in this group are particularly interested in teleconferencing for free discussion.
they are inherent also self-realization, cooperation, educational and recreational reasons.
3. Technical factors.
On the effectiveness of the training and motivation of students directly affected by the
technical support. From technical factors depends not only on the speed of delivery and quality of
educational information.
3 The motives of the choice of e0learning in secondary and higher education

The aim of our research - to examine the motives of the choice of on-line learning in secondary
and higher education. Method of research is a survey. The survey involved 190 students of
secondary and higher vocational education Academy of marketing and socially-information
technologies.
For all disciplines taught at the academy developed electronic modules. Most students (97%)
of college and high school daily use electronic modules in training activities.
High school students indicate the following benefits on line learning: the availability of a
convenient time (76%) and the ability to focus on the training topic and problem (65%).
The disadvantages of online education high school students is associated with ill-prepared to
work independently (86%), property management time (75%).
This group of students focused on the practical use of the knowledge gained. Students of
higher education demonstrate educational and social willingness to work online.
The choice of online learning is associated with facilities in the procedures of attending, and
the possibility of permanent interaction with the teacher, free access to educational materials, cost-
effective training.
For college students are characterized by different motives selection of electronic courses.
They select online education in the first place, because of the possibility of combining work
and study, the desire of financial independence and self-reliance, to a less extent; they demonstrate
a willingness to study this form of training.
Advantages of online training for college students: the duration of the lessons, the ability to
control the intensity of the training, the opportunity to repeat the material covered as many times
as you need, the availability of teaching materials.
Cons of online learning: depending on the quality and stability of the Internet, the lack of
opportunity to compare their achievements with the achievements of other people (as in the
training group), lost one of the main motives for learning - rivalry.
Conclusion
Thus, for high school students in the preparation of online courses need to develop a brief
guide to the study of discipline and proper time management, a reference to the use of knowledge
in practice, communication with professionals in the field.
For college students is necessary to provide control tasks for the study of each topic with the
ability to obtain and use-rated chat rooms, wikis.
References
Conole, J. et.al., (2007): Collaboration. In: Grainne, C. etalii. (eds). Contemporary Perspectives in
E-learning Research. Routledge, New York.
Collier, G. (1983): The Management of peer - Group Learning, Society For Research Into Higher Education.
Surrey.
Istrate, O. (2011): Education Staff Working in Elearning Environments: Skills and Competences. In:
Roceanu, I. (Ed.) In Proceedings of The 7th International Scientific Conference eLearning and Software
for Education. Bucharest: Editura Universitara.
Iucu, R. (2006): Managementul clasei de elevi. Editura Polirom, Iai.
Istrate, O.,Velea, Simona. 2011: Professionalism in the Education System Today. In: Vlada, Marin (ed.)
ICVL. In Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Virtual Learning. Bucharest: University of
Bucharest Publishing House.
Velea, Simona, (2011): ICT in education: responsible use or a fashionable practice. The impact of eTwinning
action on the education process. In: Vlada, Marin (ed.) ICVL. In Proceedings of The 6th International
Conference on Virtual Learning. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Publishing House.
Features of distance learning of personnel in the sphere of
philanthropy and social entrepreneurship
Petrova Mariya 1,Petrova Alla2
(1) Academy of Labour and Social Relations, Moscow, Russia

E-mail: maria871805[at]yandex.ru
(2) Director of the orphanage, Moscow, Russia
Abstract
Social activities that are focused on the sphere of charity, philanthropy and social
entrepreneurship is an actual trend and it inevitablies necessitate the search for professionals
who are able to carry out the organization and management of charitable and social activities
at a high professional level. Many educational organizations of the Russia have developed
educational training programs for charity and social entrepreneurship. These programs are
implemented to the greatest extent in those universities where the training of managers and
specialists in the field of social work is implemented. This is due to the fact that charitable
activities, on the one hand, is considered as a project and needs effective management, and on
the other hand-as a social activity that requires appropriate knowledge in the field of social
work, social services, etc.The authors of this article conducted a comprehensive study, the
purpose of which is to analyze the features and effectiveness of the development of
professional competencies in the organization of charitable activities and social
entrepreneurship in the process of distance learning in the relevant disciplines. The study was
conducted among students of the 3rd and 4th years of undergraduate studies in the areas of
"Management" (Management in the social sphere) (N=186 p.) and "Social work"
(Organization of social services) (N= 172 p.). The results of the study show the strengths and
weaknesses of distance learning, what are the difficulties of implementing distance learning
programs, as well as their popularity among students and prospects for further development.
Keywords: Distance learning, charity, social entrepreneurship, comparative analysis
1 Introduction
Features of the distance learning to work in the sphere of philanthropy and "learning of social
entrepreneurs" usually manifest themselves in the development of certain specialized diploma and
additional professional education development programs to improved qualification, with an
audience of predominantly made up from the listeners who are already engaged in social
entrepreneurship or plan to start appropriate projects. Listeners of such programs have a basic
education in the field of psychology, pedagogy, sociology, medicine, etc., but don't have
knowledge, skills and abilities of doing business. In addition, they are often frightened by the
inevitable use of sophisticated marketing and financial analysis tools. In addition, throughout the
world, there is an active interest in social entrepreneurship on the part of non-profit organizations
(NPOs) searching additional ways of generating income in the social sphere and trying at least
partially to go on self-sufficiency [Byrne, 2010]. Accordingly, managers of NPOs operating on
grants, subsidies and other borrowed irrevocable funds, as a rule, have both low competence in
development of a sustainable profitable business and hard ideological installation, traditionally
opposing their "high-moral" activities to the "unmoral" business.
"Teaching social entrepreneurship" might encompass all levels of business education. It

involves getting acquainted with the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, its capabilities, role
in the socio - economic system, as well as peculiarities of the social entrepreneurship business
models. At that "teaching social entrepreneurship" largely repeats the "mainstreaming" logic of
training in the field of corporate social responsibility, passing the path from optional and elective
disciplines to basic courses and eventually - to introduce ideology of corporate social
responsibility and sustainable development in the whole system of basic courses defining the
integrity of training plans [Blagov, 2010].
In the Higher school of Economics the program to support projects in the sphere of social
entrepreneurship is based on Business-incubator NIU HSE. Themes of the projects: children's
education, the urban environment, conditions for disabled people and ecology.
The expert accelerator group is ready to help future and already starting social entrepreneurs at
three stages. The free stage "Generator" is created for those who have time and energy, but without
a specific idea and the team to run the own project. As soon as there is the idea and supporters
appeared, you can identify yourself to the next level - "Sandbox" and try to launch free the own
project in the test mode.
The most serious and main direction of support from HSE {good} is actually "Incubation" for
teams with the prototype, who want to build sales, find the optimum business-model and resources
for growth. The program includes practice-oriented classes on all business topics: business-model,
financial plan, sales, marketing, and public relations. In addition, each team has a mentor,
providing continuous support.
The course is ended with presentation of the project to potential investors and media
representatives. For 10 years HSE {good} has managed to assemble a team of experts from
different industries: venture investors and philanthropists, IT-"evangelists" and farmers. Duration:
Incubation lasts until it brings benefit to the team. Most companies run for 3-4 months or closed.
2 Programs of the funds and private initiatives

The Federal program "Social innovations" for social entrepreneurs is implemented in 4
Russian cities: Moscow, Odintsovo, Perm and Rostov-on-Don. The program, in addition to
standard training activities also includes the so-called tracking-measurer of the project
development results, and also as a separate phase of the project realization, an information
campaign for target groups. There is to be involvement of regional and municipal resources.
According to certain courses of the program, further on it plans to collaborate with a number of
universities for development of social projects and training of specialists in terms of required
practical demands and factors.
For that the program participants can run their own crowd-funding project on Planeta.ru
supported by experts of the platform, and also present the project to investors after successful
completion of the program, also for the development involving the students trained in these
occupations.
Training is based on modules. Each module includes lectures, which reveal the theme related
to all stages in creation of the social enterprises, opportunities and tools available to beginning
social entrepreneurs to build more sustainable business with a clear social mission, as well as
practical exercises where participants of the Schools practice the acquired knowledge and skills in
their own social enterprise project.
Business plan is developed on the basis of a financial model offered by the Laboratory SP. To
date, there is the fully developed and tested distance industrial course "Open your kindergarten!"
(Tab. 1). Industry courses in homes for the elderly, disabled tourism, medicine, employment of
people with disabilities, agriculture and ecology are being created. During their training, trainees
can get the existing cases and successful experience in a particular industry.
For those who, for one reason or another, cannot take part in onsite programs, the "Laboratory
of social entrepreneurship" offers convenient distance learning formats. There are both paid and
free courses: from short time video seminars to the semi-annual "Online-school of social
entrepreneurship". Among authors and trainers - there are practicing social entrepreneurs, business
coaches and experts in various aspects of doing business.
Table 1. Program of the distance course "Open your kindergarten!" (24 hours, 12 lectures).
Theme Duration
1. Sanitary - hygienic requirements to establishment of the pre-school 2 hours
educational organization in present conditions (main federal laws)
2. Variants of the legal form to organize the pre-school organization 1 hour
3. First steps of functioning the private kindergarten 1 hour
4. Sanitary - hygienic requirements to establishment of the Pre-school 2 hours
educational organization in present conditions (choice of premises,
equipment, differences of pre-school and nursery groups in residential areas;
requirements to maintenance of pre-school premises; personal staff hygiene,
medical examinations for employees)
5. Plan of the medical work in the pre-school educational organization 2 hours
6. Organization of food for children in pre-school educational organizations 2 hours
7. Answers to questions on the Sanitary - hygienic requirements to 1 hour
organization of pre-school activities
8. Smoking forbiddance in the pre-school territory 1 hour
9. Licensing the activities, granting subsidies 1 hour
10. Documentation of labor relation in pre-school organization 1 hour
11. Pedagogic documents in pre-school educational organization (methods 2 hours
to develop the basic educational program)
12. Pedagogic documents in pre-school educational organization (methods 2 hours
to develop the annual program)
13. Pedagogic documents in pre-school educational organization (calendar 1 hour
planning of teachers and schedule of educational activities)
14. Answer to the question "Pedagogic documents" 1 hour
15. Secrets of good discipline 2 hours
16. Teacher and family: organization of interaction 1 hour
Employees of the "Laboratory" work over the cases and social franchises in various directions
of social business, including in the areas of charity. Recently the "Laboratory" has entered into a
preliminary agreement with a number of universities on cooperation in development of the
distance education in the field of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship.
Impact Hub Moscow (platform for communication and exchange of experience for Russian
entrepreneurs in the social business and charity) offers several educational programs for
entrepreneurs at different stages of the project development. For those who want to try in the
social business, but don't know where to begin in 2017 there is again the opening of the largest
European program on development of social entrepreneurship Social Impact Awards, aimed at
supporting social business among young people. This year it will be held simultaneously in 20
countries of Europe, including Russia. the selection is on a competitive basis. The winners will
receive prize money and expertise for implementation of the social project. The program includes
workshops on design and develop ideas, business-models and other important aspects of social
business. Who teaches: practitioners, leaders and active members of existing businesses. Training
form: the program is distance or in co-workings of Moscow and partner-cities.
For those who already have a business plan and who wants it "run", Impact Hub offers the
program of 90 Days Challenge. For those who already have a working business and who need to
take it to the next level, Impact Hub offers a special direction - Grow. Social entrepreneurs with
projects over 6 months are invited for participation. The program consists of practical trainings on
various business aspects, mentor's support. Each of Grow stages is aimed at stage-by-stage
planning and further tracking of the project [Expert, 2014].
Here is an example of the activities realized by the Moscow school of professional
philanthropy - a new project of the fund "Friends" developing the systematic charity in Russia.
The school cooperates with a number of universities under their own programs.
The school - is a long-term strategic project of the fund. In two years it is planned to introduce
a new specialty in the register of educational occupation classifiers. Then - there is the creation of
a full-fledged master's program. The final step of the first development phase in the Moscow
School of professional philanthropy will be establishment of the first Russian department of
philanthropy and full-fledged research centre dedicated to problems of the non-profit sector. At the
beginning of the year the school traditionally presents an up-to-date list of such programs, which
will help navigate and choose the optimal direction to develop yourself and your project. Next we
are to disclose one of the main programs in this school.
It should be noted that when training for charity and social enterprise an important aspect is the
practical training component when listeners directly in practice embody their projects. The
program was created in terms of basic directions in both the practical activities in the industry,
and taking into account the programs of universities, training in areas of the social work (Tab.2).
Table 2. The main program of the course "Development of the charity system in Russia"
Module 1 Module 2 Module 3 Module 4
Charity market Program strategy Communications Fundraising
Charity history and From mission and Marketing, PR and Practice of sales and
ethics strategy to target advertising negotiations
Global trends in the indicators Digital marketing New channels to
charity sphere Formation of the Work with the attract funds
Definition of the fund "product" Government, GR Involvement of
organization mission New IT solutions, grants and subsidies
Determination of the formed especially
Social Impact for charity sphere
Module 5 Module 6 Module 7 Module 8
Project management Financial - legal System HR Leadership and
and business support personal brand
processes
Introduction in Budgeting Team formation Personal leadership
project management Management and Work with Practice of public
Management of auditing account volunteers speaking
processes Legal sphere in NPO Motivation and Project presentation
Management in work management
modern organization
Every year there are more and more educational programs in the field of philanthropy and
social business: paid and free classes of varying durations allow beginners to understand the theme
specifics acquire competence needed to run the own project. However with accelerators, one-day
seminars and online courses they help to develop entrepreneurial skills in the social sphere and get
valuable advice from recognized experts in business.
3 Study of the distance learning features and staff training for the sphere of social
entrepreneurship: analysis methods, methodology, processes research
The applied research was aimed at studying the views of students in the 3 and 4 years of the
bachelor program trained in "Management" (profile - "Management in the social sphere") and
"Social work" (profile - "Organization of social services") about features of the distance learning
training the staff in philanthropy and social entrepreneurship.
To conduct the applied research, we have chosen the method of deep interview as the most
appropriate as there is the need to get more detailed, comprehensive and structural specific
information from each respondents and by using a comparative analysis to draw conclusions in
this study.
The respondents were the students of 3 and 4 years of the bachelor program trained in
"Management" (profile - "Management in the social sphere") and "Social work" (profile -
"Organization of social services) (the total number of respondents - 186 persons) (the total number
of respondents - 172)
As the general totally there was the total number of students from the selected directions and
profiles of the higher institution participating in the survey - he Academy of Labor and social
relations included in the regional data banks of educational organizations. The used type of
sampling: all- over
The students were questioned about the social entrepreneurship features and entrepreneurship
in the charity sphere, as well as the distance education peculiarities in this sphere of the social
business.
In the made research there are some aspects demonstrating the interesting results during the
study. The research results show the strengths and weaknesses of the distance learning and
difficulties to realize the distance programs, as well as their popularity among students and
prospects of further development.
4 Empirical results
As it is demonstrated by the comparative study on compliance of the competencies developed
by educational institutions (knowledge, skills and abilities) to expectations of existing social
entrepreneurs, between their supply and demand there is a considerable gap (Tab. 3). It is
significant that the match was just noted on three competencies: ability to solve managerial
problems, ability to manage finances, as well as innovation and creativity. At that educational
programs do not imply the development of seven from 10 top-competence viewed by the existing
social entrepreneurs as "success factors", including - the critical business competence of "an ability
to sales and marketing", as well as competences, traditionally classified as the corporate social
responsibility, - "the ability to interact with customers, suppliers and other interested persons" and
"an ability to ethical evaluation". In turn, "the ability to manage strategic development" formed by
educational programs, and even "the ability to build, assess the feasibility and implement a
business plan" did not find the corresponding demand. It should be noted that the opinion of
students in the 3 and 4 years of study is based only on short-term practice in such institutions, and
they have not themselves develop and implement a charity or social project. As the demand the
students noted those qualities which are sounded by employers in practice and the findings that
students have made themselves. As the proposal there are competencies included in the course
programs and fixed as the training objective in these occupations.
Table 3.Competences of social entrepreneurs: supply and demand

Top 10: Top 10:
waiting for supply of
Competence
social educational
entrepreneurs programs
Ability to solve managerial problems + +
Skills to form effective teams + —
Ability to manage finances + +
Ability to interact with customers, suppliers and other + —
stakeholders
Personal communication skills + —
Ability for sales and marketing + —
Ability to manage strategic development — +
Ability to assess the activity performance — +
Ability to develop cooperation — +
Ability of ethical evaluation/moral imperative + —
Innovation and creativity + +
Ability to build, assess the feasibility and implement a — +
business plan
Ability to identify, assess and exploit the opportunities — +
Social skills + —
Desire and ability to achieve significant social effect — +
Ability to think innovatively + —
Ability to identify social problems — +
The methodology of teaching social entrepreneurs (and, accordingly, social entrepreneurship

and competent activities of charity organizations) involves the integrated use of traditional
approaches for management and social disciplines, to be exact - scrupulous building of
interdisciplinary methodology.
Among interviewed students 23% believe that the most important areas of learning are
practical skills and self-development of the project and the work in a particular charity fund or
social project. 28% interviewed respondents believe that when receiving their education in the
social sphere, there is no practical implementation of ideas, but 18% students agree that the
additional education for the main training in the sphere of social initiatives will help them faster to
become professional.
The practice of online courses and introduction of distance learning programs both
supplementary and as a basic educational course for training social entrepreneurs showed that the
distance learning effectively cope with the task to transfer to listeners the specific practical tools,
and the format of individual online consultations provides the detailed elaboration of projects and
its individual characteristics in the sphere of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
In the work based on the interview of respondents and their comparative analysis and analysis
of scientific articles on this topic, comparable data analysis which are obtained at various research
stages, revealed main features of the distance training for philanthropy and social
entrepreneurship.
Based on the performed research and its analysis, the complexity of required competencies is
determined and their relation to the structure of practical skills and knowledge required in the field
of social entrepreneurship, which are most often represented in responses of students.
Thus, an analysis of the practice in teaching social entrepreneurship in the researched
educational institution and introduction of the distance learning system keeps all peculiarities of
the educational process organization and makes it possible to solve the following problems:
- To create conditions for the successful implementation and use of the social identity and
self-efficacy theories for "the students to develop identity with social entrepreneurs and instill
confidence in the ability to bring positive public changes";
- To create and use "a conceptual model to form and implement educational programs in
the field of social entrepreneurship" by linking to those characteristic of teaching management for
non-profit organizations with "parallel" themes to learn entrepreneurship activities;
- To use "formation of the socially oriented business-plan", widely applying "already
existing knowledge, interests and ambitions of the students" as the main structural element of
learning social entrepreneurship and charity.
- To improve the quality of education, including the available numerous information
resources and various forms of the distance education, and in parallel with that communication
with highly -qualified teaching staff and practicing businessmen in the sphere of charity and social
entrepreneurship to acquire the lacking skills and knowledge in the selected type of activities;
- To acquire new experience in the work over social and charitable projects;
- Continuous involvement in the educational process for the students trained in
management of the social sphere and social work, actual distance learning forms: case studies,
online courses, programs of entrepreneurial initiatives, programs of charitable projects will allow
students getting closer in their practice to the future professional activities.
References
Blagov Y. E. Arai Y.N. (2010): Social entrepreneurship: problems of typology (preface to section). Bulletin
of the Saint-Petersburg university. Edition 3. P. 109-114.
Expert (2014): Special issue. Entrepreneurship. June.
Byrne J. (2010): Social Entrepreneurship: The Best Schools and Programs. URL: http://poetsandquants.
com/2010/08/13/social-entrepreneurship-the-best-schools-programs/ (reference date 17.07.2014).
Distance learning for social service: case-study of the
Department of Church charity and social service
of the Russian Orthodox Church
Petrova Alla1
(1) Director of the orphanage, Moscow, Russia

Abstract
Responding to the requests of the clergy of the Moscow and Moscow region parishes, and
then remote parishes since 2017, the Department for Church charity and social service of the
Russian Orthodox Church together with St. Tikhon's Orthodox humanitarian University
(PSU) developed and implement a course of distance learning of Church social work "Social
service in the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church: organization, management,
communication". The course is designed for social workers of temples and socially-oriented
non-profit organizations (NPO). Participants receive the necessary minimum professional
knowledge, learn to identify target groups in need and analyze their needs, to attract
volunteers. In addition, an important emphasis is placed on the passage of each student
individual in-depth courses on the organization of social work directly in their chosen areas,
depending on the needs of the parish (students can choose one or more areas): Organization
of volunteer activities; Assistance to disabled persons (including disabled children) and their
families; Pre-abortion counselling and maternity protection;Help pregnant and young
mothers in difficult life situations; Assistance in family placement of orphans and children left
without parental care; Organization of social work in villages, etc. Training is conducted
remotely - using the technology "webinar" via the Internet. An important component of the
training program are tasks that are carried out by students directly at their parishes, followed
by the analysis of difficulties with the participation of specialists of the Department in the
framework of group online discussions and forums.
Keywords: distance learning, Church charity, parish, social project
1 Introduction
Due to methodological and organizational support of the Synod department on church charity
and social services each year in Russian there are more than 100 new church social projects (in
2013 there were 179 of them and in 2016 - 289).
The Russian Orthodox Church is constantly performing the wide-scale and versatile work in
direction of the social service [Zubanova, 2015]. Such work needs special competences of the
clergy, which often can't be achieved by full-time educational programs (owning to remoteness of
parishes and inability of the clergy to go training to Moscow or other cities, etc). In these
circumstances, the distance learning is the mostly optimal providing the vast coverage of the
regional Orthodox parishes and priests serving in them.
2. Educational programs of the Russian Orthodox Church

Charity and social wellbeing are at the forefront in the daily service of the Russian Orthodox
Church. As modern communications are special by development of internet - communities and
different forms of remote communication with the audience, the Church isn't left behind in using
computer technologies for popularizing the ideas of moral church orientation, charity, sensitivity
and non-indifference to social problems.
From October 2013 till April 2014 the Department on church charity and social service jointly
with the St.-Tikhon's Orthodox humanitarian university arranged the first free course of the
distance training in social services with the possible practice in Moscow. The training was
organized completely through internet providing the direct involvement of participants in the
process and opportunities to ask questions and discuss problems without time and other costs on
organization of visits and full-time meetings. Then the course was repeated.
The success and efficiency of this course was provided by development of educational
activities in the social services, and the distance learning form turned to be rather demanded by
clerics.
Responding to the requests of the clergy of the Moscow and Moscow region parishes, and then
remote parishes since 2017, the Department for Church charity and social service of the Russian
Orthodox Church together with St. Tikhon's Orthodox humanitarian University (PSU) developed
and implement a course of distance learning of Church social work "Social service in the parishes
of the Russian Orthodox Church: organization, management, communication".
The course is designed for social workers of temples and socially-oriented non-profit
organizations (NPO). Participants receive the necessary minimum professional knowledge, learn
to identify target groups in need and analyze their needs, to attract volunteers. In addition, an
important emphasis is placed on the passage of each student individual in-depth courses on the
organization of social work directly in their chosen areas, depending on the needs of the parish
(students can choose one or more areas):
- Organization of volunteer activities;
- Assistance to disabled persons (including disabled children) and their families;
- Pre-abortion counselling and maternity protection;
- Help pregnant and young mothers in difficult life situations;
- Assistance in family placement of orphans and children left without parental care;
- Assistance to dependent people and their families;
- Assistance to large, poor and single-parent families;
- Help to homeless;
- Patronage help and care;
- Organization of social work in villages, etc.
Such thematic of educational programs realized in the distance form is not limited. Positive
reviews of listeners by results of the training made possible to develop the system of distance
course in the sphere of social service and charity oriented to various target audiences (NPO,
charity funds, hospices, palliative care center, SOS-centers, etc.).
Thus, for instance, jointly with the Orthodox care service "Miloserdie" the educational online
resource "Miloserdie. DCP" was developed to improve qualification of the staff in Russian NPO,
engaged in address collections on cerebral palsy, training parents of the children with cerebral
palsy and also development of address requests on care of cerebral palsy on the portal
Miloserdie.ru. In 2018 this portal launched the cycle of online-materials consisting of 3 blocks:
1) organization of webinars with online translation and record;
2) writing articles on actual topics on cerebral palsy;
3) organization of address collections for children with cerebral palsy on the website
Miloserdie.ru.
Online lectures (in webinar formats) by invitation of "Miloserdie" service are conducted by
professionals of the medical sphere, doctors, occupational therapists, and also the staff of portal
Miloserdie.ru and other professionals of the charity sector.
In addition it is planned to conduct webinars on such special themes as:
 care for patients with severe spinal injuries,

 speech rehabilitation and restoration of functions after brain insults,
 routing of the long-term oncologic treatment,
 transplantation of organs and bone marrow,
 rehabilitation and habilitation of children with the autism spectrum disorder,
 care for palliative patients.
These educational programs are characterized by their realization not one-time, by order of the
specific audience, but they are combined into the distance educational system which keeps
recorded archives of webinars, presentations and other materials of speakers, references to
additional materials promoting a deeper immersion into the topic.
3. Practical aspects to realize the distance educational programs of the Russian Orthodox
Church
According to practice of realizing the distance educational programs developed by the Synod
department of the Russian Orthodox Church, the interest of listeners is significantly differentiated
depending o the thematic direction of the distance learning course. In particular, Table 1 gives the
data reflecting the share of listeners taking for learning these or those programs.
Training is conducted remotely - using the technology "webinar" via the Internet. An important
component of the training program are tasks that are carried out by students directly at their
parishes, followed by the analysis of difficulties with the participation of specialists of the
Department in the framework of group online discussions and forums.
Table 1.Main thematic directions of the distance learning which are mostly demanded by
listeners under the social projects of the Russian Orthodox Church
Thematic direction Share
Address care for people with disabilities and members of their families 23%
Address care and work with oncologic patients and their families 21%
Work and address care for people with drug- and alcohol - addiction and 18%
members of their families
Address care for people with disabilities 15%
Address care for pregnant women, women with children and women under the 11%
crisis situation
Raising funds for the social activity and social design 9%
Other themes 3%
By the course results the participants launched social projects on the basis of 306 parishes and
social - oriented NPO in territory of 109 eparchies (from them - 11 foreign), more than 1950
volunteers were involved (from them more than a half - young people). During the course the
number of supervisees assisted by participants of the training have increased for more than 15000
people.
Among participants of the half-year course in 2016-2017 there were representatives of 11
foreign eparchies.
In addition in November 2017 there was the start of a new half-year distance learning course
for parish social workers. In April 2018 it was completed. 255 people from 95 eparchies
successfully ended the training. Among participants of the course there were representatives of 11
foreign eparchies.
Also to perform the order of the Supreme Church Council in the last year there was a 2-month
distance learning course for managers and personnel of social departments in eparchies. The
course was successfully completed by 82 representatives of 52 eparchies.
Also in 2017 there was the online-course dedicated to organization of family arrangement
centers and work with orphan-children. 249 people from 71 eparchies participated in this course.
Since March 2011 the Department on church charity and social services has been conducting
free educational internet-seminars on social service problems. The training is organized through
internet as "webinar".
Totally from 2011 till February 2016 there have been 801 internet - seminars, with publication
of records and materials in the archive (Fig.1)
Realization of the distance learning programs in the sphere of theology, church service, charity
and related spheres is likely to have specific features. As it is noted in the interview of the "Church
Orthodox newspaper" by the dean of the extended education department in the Orthodox St.-
Tikhon humanitarian university the priest Gennady Egorov, "Individual advantages are revealed
by this training form, surely, in learning adults, who usually have rather a strong motivation. To
implement it, so to say, in the common education for students of 17-19 years old is more difficult,
as it goes here about people who are not sufficiently stable, with an unformed purpose in the life.
For example, it is known to me by experience of some higher schools, that students spend time not
to answer the test questions, but to "crack" this test and see what answers are in it (it doesn't refer
to the theological education).
Figure 1.The number of Eparchies and Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church participating in
major online programs realized in the social service direction in 2016-2018.
Theological education - is a poorly thought and studied area. Among Orthodox educational
institutions there are yet no one known to me that is serious engaged in problems of methods,
psychology of the theological education. Therefore the talk about advantages and disadvantages of
this or that education form in relation to the theological education will be idle. We study this
problem rather careful, write articles, reports for ourselves; we are constantly optimizing our
programs. But still it's too early to make any serious conclusions, for instance, how principal is the
contract with a teacher. It is surely to be principal, but how its principle importance is manifesting?
We know a great number of students having spent a long time in the audience before many
remarkable teachers, but left untaught in anything - neither intellectually nor morally. If it is so,
not all in this life is determined by the personal contact. But what is exactly - this question is now
difficult to be answered. Among main disadvantages I should name rather a lack of the common
pray. It is difficult to be compensated by something". [Priest Gennady Egorov, 2017].
Conclusion
Thus, integration of modern technologies in the system of social service and fundamental
charity based on the case-study developed on practical examples of the church-educational
activities and implemented in eparchies and church parishes contributes to development of the
social service, social work, emergence of volunteers in local parishes and eparchies. The distance
learning form proved its efficiency in its using for training the staff in the sphere of church service
which means further development of the distance training in this sphere.
References
Priest Gennady Egorov (2017): "The man aspiring to comprehend the church tradition not only by
intelligence, but transforming itself, brings "many results". URL: http://arhiv.orthodoxy.org.ua/
node/8403
Zubanova S.G. (2015): Research of the social service to the Russian Orthodox Church: history of the issue.
Young scientist. URL:https://moluch.ru/archive/100/22679/ (reference date: 09.09.2018).
Using the method of case-study in distance learning system at
training young entrepreneurs
Martirosyan Oksana1
(1) Federal state educational institution of higher professional education "Belgorod state
University named after V. G. Shukhov», Belgorod, Russia
Abstract
The latest data from the public opinion Foundation show that Russian business is rapidly
growing younger. The average age of an entrepreneur is 36 years, 26% of all businessmen in
Russia are young people under 30 years. At the same time, this part is the most optimistic.
Young people are more prone to legal business, prestigious public activities. Polls also show
that 30% of young people under 23 years of age would like to do business. Currently, in the
Russian educational space there is a huge variety of educational products that provide the
formation of knowledge and skills necessary for the implementation of entrepreneurial
initiatives by young businessmen, whose ambitions are often not supported by the appropriate
educational baggage. The purpose of the article is to show the possibility of using the case
study method in the process of training young entrepreneurs taking into account the use of
distance learning technologies.
Using the methods of aggregation, deduction and logical synthesis, the author developed
the principles of distance learning of economic disciplines on the basis of case-study
methodology. On concrete examples personal types of cases are demonstrated: illustrating
processes and concepts; simulating template processes; describing original situations in real
business and having solutions already implemented in practice; cases with an uncertain
answer to a given problem question. The choice of a particular type of case studies is
determined by the learning objectives and the required level of discipline. Cases complement
each other in the formation of the evaluation Fund.
Keywords: distance learning, entrepreneurship, youth business, case-study
1. Introduction.
The latest data from the public opinion Foundation show that Russian business is rapidly
growing younger. The average age of an entrepreneur is 36 years, 26% of all businessmen in
Russia are young people under 30 years. At the same time, this part is the most optimistic. Young
people are more prone to legal business, prestigious public activities. Polls also show that 30% of
young people under 23 years of age would like to do business.
Currently, in the Russian educational space there is a huge variety of educational products that
provide the formation of knowledge and skills necessary for the implementation of entrepreneurial
initiatives by young businessmen, whose ambitions are often not supported by the appropriate
educational baggage.
Currently the most popular training method oriented to formation of practical skills in trainees
and required competences in young entrepreneurs is the method of case-study. Many teachers
believe that it can be used only when studying full-time, but implementation of this method into
the distance learning programs also proved its efficiency.
2.Definition of the case-study concept and its use features in the educational process
In the Russian educational practice these methods were widely spread in 1991–1997 due to
training programs for managers (for instance, under MBA programs), though the first attempts of
use were in the USSR (“methods to analyze business situations” [Guryanova, 2010]).
The case-study tasks are consistent with the basic principle of a practice-oriented approach:
development of abilities to analyze in short terms a large volume of irregular information and
make decisions under stress conditions. In this matter the case-study method efficiently
complements with the classical university educational system, which forms the basic, fundamental
knowledge. Its use becomes more efficient jointly with other methods oriented to practical
activities: training action, trainings, master-classes and simulations.
The case-study method – is the process of negotiation, discussion.Its use tradition rests on the
premise: “Movement to the truth is more important than the truth”. The experience of using the
case-study method when teaching young entrepreneurs shows that the main stages of this method
are the following:
 Training in the written form as the case from business practice;
 Individual study of the case by trainees;
 Joint discussion of the case in the audience under the teacher’s guidance according to the
principle of “the discussion process is more important than the decision itself” [Fortmüller, 2009].
Considering the diversity of cases, we are to highlight the most common, but essential features
of the learning situation.
1. It should be specially prepared. It can be said to be “prepared” by the author of a situation
from business practice.
The task of this difficult methodic work is to form a creative and simultaneously targeted,
controlled atmosphere which is to be the basis of discussion.
2. The case must contribute to development of specific competences.
It generates certain professional skills in context of the scientific worldview.
3. The work with different types of cases teaches trainees to analyze information, view the
cause-effect relationships, and identify key problems and/or tendencies.
Any case should meet the following requirements:
 It is an entertaining story of a particular business or real episode from the business history;
 It must contain the internal intrigue, puzzle that needs solutions;
 The case task – is to stimulate the trainee for search of additional information or isolate the main;
 The case contains an actual problem which can be developed in future;
 The task solution base -“theory of the task” which coincides with the learning subject.
Cases can be divided into the following types: illustrative, analytical and related to making
specific decisions. Specifics of the case study presupposes that one and the same situation can
have several decisions, and their search should be encouraged during discussion, organized usually
as the group work under uncertainty conditions.
The most actively and widely cases are used in teaching economic disciplines, under which the
“business-case” concept appeared. In the Western tradition any business-case is accompanied with
the financial reporting, copies of photos and publications, representing the company products,
description of its production, commercial infrastructure, etc. These applications make the business-
case legend which is in the “story-telling” format discloses the company internal and external
environment, reveals the list of problems actual for business. The detailed description of the
legend submerges the trainee into the theme, creates the atmosphere motivating it to study the
matter.
3.Use practice of the case-study method in teaching young entrepreneurs based on the
distance educational programs
Within the project of teaching young entrepreneurs realized under the Novorossiysk branch of
the Belgorod state technological university the educational program “Fundamentals of
Entrepreneurship” was developed. Professors from NNSU got the task on preparing classes which
can be organized in the distance form with setting specific demands on formulation and selection
of the content in business-cases, as the task are made in the electronic medium wherein there is no
direct communication between the trainee and the teacher.
The standard set of materials to work with the study case includes the following elements:
1) the case (text with questions for discussion);
2) applications with selection of the different information communicating the general case
content (for instance, copies of the financial statements, publications, photos, etc);
3) opinion on the case (possible solution of the problem with the following events);
4) note for the teacher with outlining the author’s approach to the case consideration.
We are to consider the ways to transform business-cases on entrepreneurs at their transfer into
the electronic environment and the ways to process results of the decision. As an example we are
to take the training discipline “Financial calculations”, including into the educational program
“Fundamentals of entrepreneurship”.
Currently this program is published on the electronic training platform of the Novorossiysk
branch, which provides additional opportunities of the practice-based learning [Chepyuk,
Shaliminov, 2014].
In the electronic medium we have the ability to post three types of cases:
1) Cases requiring participation of the teacher in verifying the student’s answer, as the
answer to the question is open and ambiguous. The task – is to arouse the student’s interest in the
topic, make him talking, include critical thinking;
2) Cases with the decisionto be automated; as an answer to the question is unambiguous.
The task – is to learn working with information by selecting it useful and discarding excess;
3) Cases – simulators with the decision to affect input parameters of the following cases.
They make it possible to trace the company history on the complex of decisions, rather than one.
In the module training business-cases perform different functions: illustrative, explanatory and
analytical. The main task of a business-case is submersion into the managerial problem with the
decision depending on how fluently the student knows the terminology, what skills and knowledge
he has acquired in the process of learning.
To master the fundamentals of entrepreneurship four types of business-cases were identified.
1. Business-cases illustrating processes and concepts, adding the volume to the viewed topic.
These can be examples from practice, demonstrating various aspects of the theoretical concept, its
functions, which are disclosed in context of the story (story-telling).
2. Business-cases describing original situations in the real business and having solutions
already realized in practice. Their task – is to provide the trainee with information pushing him to
the correct answer.
3. Business-cases imitating sample processes of the real business. The task – is to provide the
trainee with an example of the step-by-step solution which requires a particular skill (for instance,
balance registration of the property as contribution in the stock capital by founders).
4. Business-cases with uncertain answer to the asked problem question. They are usually
filled with different additional information (sometimes deliberately excessive) and they require the
skill to choose not only between different solution variants, but methods / tools of the managerial
analysis.
We are to demonstrate how each of these cases is realized in the distance learning and helps to
master the key competences in the sphere of entrepreneurship.
At the first stage the trainee is offered to learn an end-to-end case legend. It is a list of events
and circumstances preceding the current economic and financial condition of the viewed
enterprise. It is just the story-telling to capture the listener.
As an example we will take the following end-to-end legend: “The entrepreneur jointly with
the partner has acquired the hotel property. The main hotel indicators proved that for the last three
years in the hotel there is a stable decrease in the number of guests. Recently capital funds were
invested in the hotel: there were investments in SPA-center built in the hotel. But the center isn’t
yet commissioned: only areas are repaired. Firstly after acquiring the hotel, the new owner has
decided to meet the management company of the hotel to discuss business prospects”.
The first task of the case was to solve the problem related to management of the hotel
economy: the current hotel director offered the entrepreneur to invest in business development to
enlarge the sales volume of existing services. As to his words, the business needs additional funds
on advertising in sum of 15 000 000 rubles. The Director said that currently the employees were
working out the marketing plan. He promises the entrepreneur in 2018 the company net profit
growth of 30%, and the income increase for 15% 15%. Question for discussion: “Will you as
satisfy its demand to allocate for the development program 15 000 000 rubles? Why?”
As an application (the second case element) the listeners are offered to review the company
financial reports for the last three years, including the balance, statement of cash flows, profit and
loss statement. The case may be placed in the electronic medium in any of three formats: open
question, automated answer or simulator.
Requirements to the input knowledge of listeners include: orientation in the discipline basic
concepts (“revenue”, “net income”), the ability to analyze financial reporting of the company. But
in text of the task there is no specific information on the ways to search an answer.
Open questions may have the following variants:
1) Whether forecasts of the hired director are justified: will investments in advertising result in
the growth of revenue for 15% at the competitive market?
2) Whether the offer is economically reasoned: can it be that the profit increases for 30%, if
the revenue grows only for 15% and is there the need of investments for 15 million rubles?
3) Whether 15 million rubles are redeemed, if the company net profit is increased for 30%?
All variants of the questions require the analysis of financial statements, at that it doesn’t
matter what way it will be done. In this case it goes about the fourth case variant – work with
uncertainty.
In the electronic (distance) form it is difficult to check such cases, as listeners are not
motivated for the long-term and independent reasoning, therefore it is recommended to direct the
trainee to the decision by offering him several variants of the answer in the form of a test task.
Another business-case representing an exemplary imitation of the situation from business-
practice: “After meeting the director the entrepreneur decided to analyze the annual report to the
owners. In the report the hotel director stated that all economic and financial indicators are normal
without demonstration of the negative dynamics for the last years”. The task is formulated as
follows: “Indicate those groups of indicators in relation to which the director was dishonest”.
Analysis of the financial statements is one of basic skills for the manager of the current
business. To solve the business-case here the listener is to make the traditional ratio analysis using
the attached financial statements in the program format MS EXCEL.
Original cases unlike simulating cases or cases with uncertainty, describe a specific situation of
the company. Such cases – are living examples from the business practice. Often they are related
to the marketing, advertising and promotion, wherein the skill to develop own receipts of
entrepreneurial activities is the key to success. At the same time any successful experience should
be viewed in terms of its possible repetition and approbation in other conditions.
When choosing the illustrative cases it is needed to consider the following:
1) Whether case decision is universal for using in other business branches in similar
situations;
2) Whether the successful realization of the solution is theoretically based, or it is resulted
from the sudden market situation;
3) Whether the case is related to the theory that is if the case illustrates it and develops its use
opportunities.
An example of the illustrative situation under the set legend is the case describing the
successful experience in promotion of the hotel services in social networks. The listener shall
choose between the type of SMM-methods and social networks with reliance on the similar
statistics of their use by various audiences. This case is a perfect illustration to the theme of
segmenting clients or internet-promotion. The trainee needs both compare the data on distribution
of clients in social networks, and to account the structure of the hotel basic audience and what
SMM-methods are suitable for work. The case task can be developed, offering the listener to
demonstrate analytical skills: for instance, you can evaluate the decision efficiency in terms of the
expected revenue growth from the selected segment and costs on promotion.
Conclusion
Thus, when transferring the case into the electronic medium it is needed to pay attention to
formulation of the question in the practical task, supply the case with samples and solution tips and
also make accents in theory. It will allow using this method more efficiently in the distance
learning.
All four types of described cases complement each other when forming the fund of evaluation
tools for the discipline “Financial settlements”. The choice of this or that task is conditioned by
educational objectives.
References
Guryanova S.Y. (2010): Innovative learning technologies-the basis of the quality of education.
Quality.Innovation.Education.№ 2. p. 12–18.
Chepyuk O.R, Shaliminov E.U. (2014): Practice-oriented training on the basis of web-technologies of
distance education (on the example of web-platform of entrepreneurship education in UNN iGeneration.
Open education. № 4. p. 80–83.
Fortmüller R. (2009): Learning through business games acquiring competenceswithin virtual
realities.Simulation&Gaming. Vol. 40. № 1. P. 68–83.
Social Network Analysis in E-Education
Branka Lasković, Zorica Bogdanović, Tamara Naumović,

Marijana Despotović-Zrakić, Božidar Radenković
Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade

Jove Ilića 154, 11000 Belgrade, SERBIA
E-mail: brankaa92[at]gmail.com, zorica[at]elab.rs,
tamara[at]elab.rs, maja[at]elab.rs, boza[at]elab.rs
Abstract
In this paper the authors study the application of social network analysis in e-education.
The main goal is to apply social network analysis concepts and tools to analyze data from e-
education contexts. The expected results are twofold. First, the research gives information on
students’ profiles, in terms of their interests, attitudes and problems, which can be used for
improving the e-education process. Second, the research provides an example of usage of
social network data that can be used to improve the social network marketing of educational
institutions. The experiment has been conducted within Faculty of organizational sciences,
University of Belgrade.
Keywords: Social network analysis, E-Education, Social media
1 Introduction
Given the fact that the Internet and social networks have a direct impact on daily life, it is
necessary to take advantage of the possible benefits they bring to education. As most young people
spend a lot of time browsing various social networks on their electronic devices, it is necessary to
devise a way to use their time on social networks to provide some sort of education, be it formal
and informal (Dijck, 2013)(Tiryakioglu & Erzurum, 2011). One way of doing this is establishing
various Facebook pages that belong to schools, educational institutions and teachers. In addition,
students can "flip through" Facebook and stumble across interesting content that can be both
informative and educational. The question is whether this influence can change and improve
education? This study aims to provide an insight into causal connections between social networks
and e-education and give a possible answer to the question "how to use a social network for the
purpose of education?" The main idea is to show how it is possible to analyze data from social
networks and how to use the data obtained from social networks to improve the activities of
educational institutions on the social networks.
2 Related work
Social networks have attracted much attention and educational institutions, even apart from the
informal, began to use them in formal contexts. A study conducted at the Institute for teacher
training in Singapore in 2008 was done on a sample where the majority of students (85%)
belonged to the group of 20-25 years (Santos et al. 2009). Many (92%) had significant experience
with using computers, and the same percentage said that they spent on average more than three
hours a day using the Internet both at home and at school. Another study was conducted in Brazil,
with similar results. The results showed that students from both universities mainly use social
networks to keep in touch with their friends. The primary activities are the publication of photos
and social network messaging. Students from Singapore had different opinions on whether they
should use social networks as a platform for discussion on activities related to the study. Results
with Brazilian universities were quite different. Even 60% of students exchanged information,
ideas and resources related to their studies through social networks, and 43% said they have
benefited from it. Less than half of respondents (29%) said that their discussions on social
networks helped to better understand the course and also get ideas for solving problems. Most of
the students have agreed that social networks can be very useful for educational purposes and it
was certainly desirable to develop a platform for this kind of communication. One explanation for
the results researchers found is that the college where the study was conducted is in southern
Brazil, where not all students have access to libraries and traditional resources for studying. The
other explanation is that many of the students are not used to face to face communication, so they
tend to embrace the social networks potentials. Also, the research has shown that messages are
exchanged mainly at the level of sharing different links and pages in order to provide access to a
variety of topics necessary for studies. On the other hand, Singaporean students had continuous
access to learning resources, and they did not need the additional search for the same.
These results may be indicative for other research context as well. In a developing country,
such as Serbia, students are used to face to face communication, but they are also accustomed to
blending social network services for educational information exchange (Despotović-Zrakić et al.
2009). More advanced examples include implementations of social networks to support
crowdvoting among students (Bogdanović el al. 2015). The crowdvoting experiment has been
done using Facebook to publish students' projects, and then ask other students to vote for the best
ones. Although the crowdvoting on social networks has proved to be effective for educational
context, no evaluation has been done to evaluate its social network aspect.
3 The methodological framework of the research

This study should provide insight into the causal connections between social networks and e-
education and provide the best practices for using social networks in education. A Facebook page
that is in this article taken as a research context is the official page of Department of e-business,
Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade (in further text: Elab). The aim is to
examine the behaviour and interaction of a user with the Facebook page. Another raised question
is whether the social network content, in some way, influences the work of students? Which posts
are most frequently published and what are students' attitudes toward it? To reach these
conclusions, it was necessary to access the data from the above-mentioned Facebook page, collect
it and then analyze them using social network analysis tools. Social network analysis has already
been used in a variety of different contexts (Milovanović et al. 2018). Specifically, the study
should answer some of the following key issues:
1. Are there any usage patterns, for example are students are more active during
examinations terms?
2. Which post types cause the most reactions (video, photos, links, status)?
3. How is the page itself active and updated in publishing posts?
4. Does this page interact with other similar pages?
5. How can we improve the activity on this page by using the results obtained?
A prerequisite for such analysis is data collection; therefore it was necessary to collect the data
that will be imported into one of social network analysis tools. In this study data was collected
through Facebook application Netvizz. Netvizz is a tool for data collection and extraction from
different sections of Facebook which provides relevant data in standard formats suitable for
analysis.
For purposes of this study we used a "data page" module in Netwizz that exports the posts on
the page for a given period or number of posts. This module generates several files:
- Tabular file (TSV), which lists a number of metrics for each post.
- Bipartite graphic file (GDF), which shows the posts, users (anonymous) and the
connections between them. The user is connected to the post if it is commented or
responded to it.
- Tabular file (TSV) which sets out basic daily statistics for the period covered by posts.
- Tabular file (TSV), which shows the page numbers by country (for a total of 45
countries). This file allows us to see the number of users who liked the page by country.
In this way it is possible to have an overview of students interested in the content of this
Facebook page by country, and plan future actions accordingly.
- Tabular file (TSV) containing user text comments (anonymous users). From this file it is
possible to extract the text comments and see how the students usually comment on posts,
if there are any negative comments, questions and suggestions.
4 Analysis of results
The analysis of results was done using Gephi tool for social network analysis (Gephi 2018).
The first applied tool in is the comment count filter that counts comments on posts. For this file,
which contains posts and users for a period of one year, the post with minimum comments has
value 0, while the post with the highest amount of comments has value 12. The comment count
here refers to both comments on posts and comments on comments. For example if a user writes
"Bravo" and another user responds only to that comment with "Thank you" it would be counted as
2 comments. In this case, we have only one node has 12 comments. This was for a video post that
contained students' video on the topic "Children are the ornament of the world". The mentioned
post had 12 comments, 37 shares and 390 likes.
Applying a like count filter to posts, Gephi returns a graphical representation of nodes with
number of likes. For a period of one year the post with highest number of likes has 735 likes and it
is represented as a node with that value. This post is actually a students' video titled "160 years
from the birth of Nikola Tesla". The mentioned post has 13 shares and 747 reactions. Even though
the previous post has three times the number of shares than this post, it did not receive the higher
amount of likes and shares. Therefore we cannot conclude that the larger number of shares leads to
higher number of likes and responses.
Another filter which is used is reactions count which shows the maximum number of 747. This
number represents the sum of "likes" and "responses". This post has 735 likes, which means that
the response (a new feature introduced by Facebook) was 12. As can be seen from the above, re-
post "160 years from the birth of Nikola Tesla" is in the first place. In addition to having the
highest number of likes this post has caused the most reactions.
Filter shares count shows a node with maximum value of 37. It is a node that is already in the
first place by the number of reviews "Children are the ornament of the world". At this point we can
conclude that the post will take at least two leading positions in any criteria (e.g. number of likes,
shares, comments and reactions).
The bipartite graph generated from GDF file has 1406 nodes and 1817 links between them.
Total of 49 nodes represents the posts and 1357 nodes represent users. This means that for a period
of one year page posted 49 posts, which is on average four per month, i.e. once a week.
By filtering the graph by post type we can discover three different types of posts: videos, photo
and link status. Video posts obtained scores of 13 nodes. It is important to notice is that the posts
in the form of video posts are those with the most comments, likes, shares and reactions. It can be
concluded that the for the Elab's Facebook followers, the most appealing type of posts is video.
However the largest number of posts are images, counting 36 nodes. Regardless of being
published more frequently than videos, photos have not increased user interactions with the page.
Other types of posts - links and statuses have rather weak placement with 10 likes being their
maximum. Number of these posts is 9 and 7 respectively.
The next dataset we took into consideration was tsv file generated by Netvizz. The file contains
data about users who follow the page and countries from which they come from. Since the Faculty
of Organizational Sciences is located in Belgrade, it was logical that the largest number of page
followers come from Serbia.
Another tsv file downloaded from Netvizz is a table showing the content of user reviews. Most
comments were given to the video "Children are the ornament of the world" and the comments
were mainly positive with text such as "This is the best video" and "Fantastic" followed by various
stickers and smilies. Posts on the topic of Nikola Tesla also caused a number of positive comments
such as "Excellent animation", "Congratulations" and the like. From these results it can be
concluded that the comments are about praising colleagues for their work, and that the work
students do at faculty is what they were most interested in.
The next file we explored a table that lists the basic statistics per day for the specified period.
This statistic shows when the Elab page was most active (in which months). Here we want to
discover whether page activity is higher during the periods of exams, colloquia and holidays or
there is no association between activity and period of year. Figure 1 shows the graph where each
node represents one day. In addition, different colouring is used for days with different numbers of
posts. White colour indicates the days with 0 posts, purple when with published 1 post, red 2 and
blue 13 posts.
Figure 1 - Each node represents one day - White color 0 posts; purple 1 post; red subject 2;
Blue 13 posts
What could be read from the Gephi using the option Data Laboratory is how posts are
published on certain dates. Most posts in a day (13) were published on 24 January. These posts are
the already mentioned works of students and during this period there is a contest and voting for the
best work. Statistics show is that these posts have brought the most likes, shares and reactions. In
addition, the page was inactive during some periods. The page had minimum activity in the period
from May to October, and that in the period from March to May it was also inactive. This leads to
the conclusion that the page is most active during the winter semester when the lectures are held,
while in the second semester is fairly inactive.
Another imported GDF file is the file "Page like networks," which is taken from Netvizz. This
module starts with the selected page and takes all of the pages that the selected page "likes".
Choosing a depth of 1, Gephi displays a graph of 25 nodes, where each node represents a
Facebook page to which the Elab is related. This graph is "mixed", in sense that it shows the
connections where Elab likes a page and where other pages like Elab. Figure 2 shows the pages
Elab "likes" but has no "returning likes", indicating it is mostly a follower.
However the next parameter, "fan count" (number of followers) gives an interesting insight.
Elab has 2,214 likes which is less than the leaders but more than other pages of university
departments.
Figure 2 - Page like networks - interaction with other sites
5 Discussion and conclusion

From the above results, it can be concluded that there is interest among students for the Elab
page, but this interest can be increased. The fact is that students regularly monitor the Elab
Facebook page, which is best illustrated by an example that there is a wide range of reactions to
the posts related to the organized contest. In the future, we should increase the number of such
publications in order to motivate students to participate and to gather around Elab content. In
addition, students should not lose interest in the page during the summer semester. In order to
achieve better results in the future, it would be advisable to apply the following suggestions:
- More frequent publication (at least four times a week)
- More posts in the form of pictures and clips
- More posts that will cause comments (ask students for their opinion, proposal, etc.).
- More releases where students will vote and evaluate a post
- More post regarding particular courses
- Stimulating students to posting
- More posts which will directly affect a particular course (the extra points, etc.)
- Relationship with similar pages of other faculties
- Publication of the contents which is not directly associated with the university / studies
When we look at all the results and how colleges "invest" in social media activity, it can be
concluded that social media have a potential to be fully blended into e-learning (Littlejohn &
Pegler, 2007)]. However, in our country social networks have not yet become an integral part of e-
education activities. An increasing number of groups on the social networks and the creation of
new networks intended only for education show that this trend is growing and that in the future it
is likely to become an integral part of education.
References
Dijck J. (2013): A critical history of social media. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970773.001.0001, 3-18,

Oxford Scholarship Online
Tiryakioglu F., Erzurum F., (2011): Use of Social Networks as an Education Tool. Contemporary Educational
Technology, 2(2), 135-150
Santos I.M., Hammond M., Durli Z., Chou SY. (2009) Is There a Role for Social Networking Sites in
Education?. In: Tatnall A., Jones A. (eds) Education and Technology for a Better World. WCCE 2009.
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 302. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Despotović-Zrakić M., Labus, A., Milić A. (2011) Fostering Enginering E-learning Courses with Social
Network Services, 19th Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR), Beograd, Proceedings on CD, November
2011, pp. 122-125, ISBN: 978-1-4577-1498-6, IEEE Catalog Number: CFP1198P-CDR
Bogdanović Z., Labus A., Simić K., Ratković-Živanović V., Milinović S. (2015) Harnessing Crowdvoting To
Support Students' Creativity, EDULEARN15 Proceedings, 7th International Conference on Education and
New Learning Technologies, 6-8 July 2015, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 4318-4326, ISBN: 978-84-606-8243-1
Milovanović S., Bogdanović Z., Labus A., Barać D., Despotović-Zrakić M. (2018) Using Social Network
Analysis to Identify User Preferences for Cultural Events. In: Rocha Á., Adeli H., Reis L.P., Costanzo S.
(eds) Trends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST'18 2018. Advances in
Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 745. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77703-0_64 Springer,
Cham, ISBN: 978-3-319-77703-0
Gephi, https://gephi.org/, accesed 2018.
Littlejohn A., Pegler C., (2007): Preparing for Blended E-learning, New York: Routledge.
Nowadays education and long-life learning
Dineva Snejana
Faculty of Techniques and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara

Zagora, “Graf Ignatiev” str. 38, Yambol 8600, BULGARIA, E-mail:
sbdineva[at]abv.bg
Abstract
The article reviews the importance of long-life learning nowadays and the new semantic
e-learning environment creatingduring last years to support the requirements of that
conditions. The education in 21th century is a long-life learning education with commitment
of formal, non-formal and informal learningsupportedbyNew Learning Environments.The e-
Academia frameworkhas been adopted and created with real and virtual members of
organizations, applications for communication and collaboration, e-Learningand directory
services.The aim of article is to describe the changes of education system in the last decades
forced by the innovations of technology and their implementation in the life. The
characteristics of the New Learning Environments are analyzed and the concept of long-life
learning.
Keywords:long-life learning,new learning environments, intelligent network
1. Introduction
The new paradigms accepted in nowadays education, both in higher educationalinstitutions and
“in general”, in the entire educational system is ‘lifelong learning’ with the philosophy “education
from cradle to grave” (Demirel, 2009). Education is vital for both society and individuals and it
must be supported from the cooperation of family, school, environment and mass media (Gulen
M., 2015). Today, more than ever, the society and economy rely on highly educated and
competent people, and that is a reasonfor education and training systems to beamended to
thisreality (EC, 2017). In order to meet the challenges of 21th century, learning became not limited
to formal education, but integrated with non-formal and informal learning (http://lllplatform.eu/
who-we-are/about-us/).The e-Learningbecame with a wider meaning than before embracing
allresources of e-Learningcommunication and collaborationthat are base of creating intelligent
communication network orNew Learning Environmentswhich maintenance long-life learning of
individuals.
The aim of article is to describe the changes of education system in the last decades forced by
the innovations of technology and their implementation in the life. The characteristics of the New
Learning Environments are analyzed and the concept of long-life learning.
2. Education nowadays
In the context of rapid socio-economic, cultural and technological changes of the world, it is
widelyacknowledged that individuals should possess unique skills that would allow them to
compete in the increasingly globalized world (Mwaikokesya et al., 2014). The concept of
education took changesfrom 20th to 21th century, table 1, as lifelong learning style of learning has
been assumed (Longworth 2003).
Table 1. Differences of the concepts of education between 20th and 21th century
(Longworth, 2003)
The concept of 20th century 21th century
education -differences
Education sets of narrow academic objectives and the concept of lifelong learning accepted,
objectives targets, works to achieve these in works to achieve not only present targets,
the present but also to impart future long term values
and attitudes to learning
Relationship with short term business plan usually full written organizational strategy
industry around academic matters, little available to all, and proactive information
effort is made to keep every strategies to bring all stakeholders on-side
stakeholder informed and on-side
In-service training of some teachers go on educational every person in the school has a
teachers courses according to their needs or continuous improvement plan for academic
desires and there are occasional and personal skill embedded into the
seminars in schools only for management system and as a part they are
teachers related to the school development plan
Role of the teacher teachers are the only human objected to add human resource by tapping
resource for curriculum delivery into skills, talents and knowledge of
and other resources are supplied governors, parents and everyone in the
from local government and school community by exploring funding
events
Curriculum based on discrete subjects and they based on skills and knowledge, the
are assessed on memorizations of enhancement of self- esteem and the
facts with fail-pass philosophy acceptance of lifelong values
Support services teachers are overworked and sparse guidance, support and counselling systems
support service is given to identify are available for all learners and their
and solve individual learning and families
social problems
Evaluation based on examination success outward to the world and it learns by
contributing to the community in which it
exists. A strong social curriculum is
created to promote a sense of tolerance and
understanding of different races, creed and
cultures
Instruction methods and teacher has a role of passer of teacher has a role of developer of learning
techniques information through didactic skills using motivational power of the
teaching methods using chalk, talk individualized learning programmes like
and paper exercises ICT, multimedia and Networks
Relationshipwithparents parents are invited to school to it is objected to involve the family in to
discuss the child’s progress once a the life of the school through increased
term and there are occasional home-school cooperation and to develop
public information meetings their awareness about active participation
in school events
Schoolactivities only one show or play once a year a wide range of extra-curricular activities,
and the actives out of school are led impressive programme of school societies,
by only enthusiastic teachers. out of school activities, cultures, events
Sometimes there are Annual School should be established and involve the
Fair and Presentation Days community where is appropriate
Vision of school high academic achievers in order to concentrated on academic and personal
enhance attractiveness to parents success of all pupils as a means of
through position in league tables enhancing the school’s reputation and
satisfying society’s needs. The school
should create its own league table of all
round achievement
Longworth (2003) also summarizes the barriersthat should be overcome to be applied the
lifelong learning:
 mental barriers - poor family culture of learning, low aspiration, low self-esteem, bad
childhood experience of learning;
 financial barriers - lack of finance to participate, and lack of study facilities at home;
 access barriers - distance to educational provision for a large number of students;
 learning design barriers - learning provision which not geared to the needs and
characteristics of lifelong learners and does not sufficiently take into account the
individual differences and circumstances of learners during life.
 information barriers - learning providers who supply information which is inadequate in
attracting people to learning and fail to ensure that people have access to good-quality
advice about learning opportunities throughout their lives.
The barriers can be overcome by the use of new networked learning technologies, providing
more and better access to distance education,applying new information and communication
technologies (Koper&Tattersall, 2004). Implementing the newest technology affects how we live,
work, play, and most notably learn (Mareco, 2017).
The benefits of applying mobile technology in the classroomare described from Mareco
(2017):
 mobile devices and their applications prepare students for the future careers;
 effective way to connect with students of all learning styles;
 enhance the interaction with classmates and instructors by encouraging collaboration;
 opportunity to develop student's digital citizenship skills;
 helps students stay engaged;
 combining virtual reality with traditional classroom instruction is a way to enhance the
learning experience and create new opportunities;
 students are able to access the most up-to-date information quicker and easier;
 traditional passive learning model is broken; theteacher becomes the encourager, adviser,
and coach;
 technology helps students be more responsible;
 transformed the learning experience,empower students to be more creative and
connected.
3. The New Learning Environments (NLEs) and long-life learning

3.1. Building the future of education – e-Academia framework
The New Learning Environments (fig.1, NLEs) that respond to the current requirements of
education start its developmentwithin last 3-4 years with the intensive integration and
collaboration of the universities that made e-science community (fig.2), and network, with the help
of many projects (Pierre-Yves Burgi, 2012):
 IT-Service- integrationdesigning a future academic environment and combining the virtual
and «physical» components, which include studying, teaching, research and administrative
aspects. The IT-enhanced environment should be supportive of a variety of teaching scenarii
and of Life-Long Learning (LLL).
 ScienceWISE- is a Web-based Interactive Semantic Environment for e-Science in physics,
mathematics, biophysics, environmental and computer science. The main goal is to provide a
platform for virtual organizations of scientists working together.
 Système E-Learning INductif (SELIN)- is a project aiming at developing early on at
university active learning, teaching of science of observation, and providing teachers and
students with multiple opportunities for interaction and empirical investigation. This project
is based on pedagogical and epistemological concepts with the use of multimedia tools,
targeted exercises, and a high degree of interactivity to enhance students’ learning to develop
the following abilities:topay attention to the obvious, which is core to a strict scientific
method; understand a given situation through audio-visual content;compare and contrast
different scales of analysis, frameworks of analysis (individual, group, institutional) and
methods of data acquisition (simple observation, interaction, interviews, data manipulation).
 Lifelong Learning Transfer (LLL-Transfer) - the project reviewexisting LLL strategies and
organizations and related services and proposed guidelines and checklists for the
implementation of LLL.
 Personal Learning Environment (PLE) ande-Porfolio - the objective is to put together
institutional and non-institutional tools, to support formal and informal learning.
Aninstitutional PLE enabler (iPLEe) to bridge personal, institutional and worldwide
resources to enable collaborations between co-learners and sharing of resources; providet
students with a set of learning tools, both formal and informal, linking together institutional
tools (eg. Moodle, Chamilo, Mediaserver, etc.) and non-institutional tools (eg. Youtube,
twitter, Googledocs, etc.).
Figure 1. Tree Representation of the NLEs.
Figure 2. e-Academia framework

The e-Academia framework contains (fig.2): members of real and virtual organizations;
applications: for communication, collaboration, e-Learning and other areas; middleware:
authentication, security, directory services (one middleware component, mentioned as AAI);
infrastructure: an intelligent and transparent network between components.
3.2. Lifelong Learning - the most important competencies that people must possess
Lifelong learning is now recognized by educators, governing bodies,
accreditationorganizations, certification boards, employers, third-party payers, and the general
public asone of the most important competencies that people must possess (Dam, 2018).The
competences learned in formal education need to be developed in order to be adequate during
entire life, and keep the competences up to date, to obtain new ones in response to changing needs,
and that is a reason to become an autodidact, which is a lifelong process. The concept of lifelong
learning has been adopted with the necessity to adjust to the requirements of the knowledge
society in the 21st century and to cope with the rapid changes in science and technology (Demirel,
2009). If you want to keep your attitude or to become the best, you can to adopt a mindset of
lifelong learning (Brett & McKay, 2018).
The high-quality of education and inclusive lifelong learning is at the heart of the solution of
nowadays growing populism, xenophobia, spreading of fake news, high youth unemployment
(David Lopez, LLL platform - activity report 2017). The first principle of European Pillar of
Social Rightsstates that everyone has the right to quality and inclusive education, training and
lifelong learning to maintain and acquire skills that allow full participation in society and
successful transitions in the labour market (EC, 2018).
3.3.Free resources supporting long-life learning

Nowadays the new job skills can be learned inexpensively online, the interactive learning
communities are already built by online education companies that transformed education (Pearce,
2017). There are huge available free onlinecourses,which supports long-life learning (Brett &
McKay 2018; Cobb, 2017; Jane, 2018; Pearce, 2017):
 Blinkist– free data base for non-fiction books - business, philosophy, history, and more;
 Coursera- the largest course platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with
over 25 million students around the world. It works with top universities from around the
world and offer the best online courses for free;
 edX- non-profit source and a leading provider of free courses and training from Harvard
University and MIT;
 Udacity- similar to edX and Coursera with the focus on STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. Founded by Sebastian Thrun, the creator of
Google’s self-driving cars. College level classes taught online for free.
 MIT Open Courseware – an ambitious project, all of MIT’s courses are available on the
web for free;
 OpenStudy - a social learning network that connect individuals with the same learning
goals;
 Khan Academy - videos covering almost all academic topics for free.
 Duolingo – free website to learn foreign languages,offers online courses for over 30
languages;
 Code Academy - learn to code for free with interactive exercises;
 Wolfram MathWorld – extensive math resource from all over the world, include
information about algebra, geometry, calculus, applied mathematics, discrete
mathematics, number theory, statistics, and other math topics;
 Open Course Ware (OCW) Consortium –a collaboration of more than 200 higher
education institutions, an excellent place to find free courses and course materials from
some of the world’s best colleges and universities;
 Lecturefox –an online directory of free audio, video, and text-based lectures from
universities like MIT and Yale;
 LearnOutLoud – contains more than 20 000 free educational materials, including books,
videos, audio lectures, and podcasts;
 CreativeLive- the live stream of courses for free, but if you want to view the course later
and at your own pace you have to pay for it. The courses focus on more creative and
business subjects like videography and online marketing.
 TED–offers lectures by professors and interesting people on different subjects. TED also
has several related channels on YouTube, one of which is TED-Ed that offers online
lessons on various subjects including history, science, philology and many more, and can
be interesting for children as well;
 Saylor– the Saylor Foundation is a non-profit that provides a free University education.
 iTunes U - free podcast lectures by the best professors from around the world;
 Project Gutenberg - offers over 5000 free eBooks, from the classics of literature to the
textbooks on specific subjects with impeccable quality;
 The Online Books Page – the University of Pennsylvania’s Online Books Page is one of
the best places to find free unabridged books online;
 The Free Library – Farlex’s Free Library contains more than five million books and
articles that can be viewed online for free;
 YouTube EDU–contain thousands of videos that cover a variety of topics.
Conclusion
Building the new learning environments and implementation of newest technology in
education is a main trend of education nowadays, which requires a long-life learning to be
accepted and developed. Long-life learning is the main key that can keep the person on the attitude
to the position and degree that hold, and that is ruled bythe fast changes of socio-economics, which
became a digital economics.
References
Brett & Kate McKay, (2018): How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner. A Man's Life, Personal
Development.https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-and-why-to-become-a-lifelong-learner/
Burgi Pierre-Yves, (2012):New learning environments. https://ciel.unige.ch/2012/03/new-learning-
environments/
Bushati J., E. Lezha, E. Hasmujaj, G. Tuxhari (2017): About digital culture and education.
https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/271706
Cobb J., (2017): 25 Free Online Resources and Web Apps for Lifelong Learners. https://www.mission
tolearn.com/lifelong-learner-free-resources/
Dam, (2018): http://www.tesol.org/docs/default-source/new-resource-library/symposium-on-student-
empowerment-8.pdf?sfvrsn=0
Demirel M., (2009): Lifelong learning and schools in the twenty-first century. Procedia Social and Behavioral
Sciences 1 (2009) 1709–1716.
EC (2018): COUNCIL RECOMMENDATION on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, https://
ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/recommendation-key-competences-lifelong-learning.pdf
European Commission (2017): White Paper on the Future of Europe, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/ white-
paper-future-europereflections-and-scenarios-eu27_en
Gulen M., (2015): The main duty and purpose of human life is to seek understanding. Education from cradle
to grave. https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1319253/education-cradle-grave
Jane K. (2018): 7 Online Tools for Lifelong Learning. https://blog.peopleperhour.com/blogroll/ lifelong-

learning-tools/
Koper R., C. Tattersall, (2004): New directions for lifelong learning using network technologies. British
Journal of Educational Technology, Vol 35 No 6 2004, 689-700.
Longworth N (2003): Lifelong Learning in Action: Transforming Education in the 21th Century Kogan
Page,London.
Lopez D., LLLplatform - activity report 2017.
Mareco Danny (2017): 10 Reasons Today’s Students NEED Technology in the Classroom.
https://www.securedgenetworks.com/blog/10-reasons-today-s-students-need-technology-in-the-classroom
Mwaikokesya M. J.D., Osborne M., Houston M. (2014): Mapping lifelong learning attributes in the context
of higher education institutions. DOI: 10.7227/JACE.20.2.3 https://www.researchgate.net/
publication/276681843_Mapping_lifelong_learning_attributes_in_the_context_of_higher_education_insti
tutions
Pearce K., (2017): 100+ self-education resources for lifelong learning online. https://www.diygenius.
com/100-self-education-resources-for-lifelong-learners/
Simmons Michael, (2018): The secret to lifelong success is lifelong learning. https://www.weforum.
org/agenda/2018/01/the-secret-to-lifelong-success-is-lifelong-learning.
Creating online evaluation system using new technologies
Doru Anastasiu Popescu, Camelia Ioana Toma
University of Piteşti, Romania, Departament of

Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Romania
E-mail: dopopan[at]gmail.com, toma.camelia26[at]gmail.com
Abstract
The primary objectives that the application fulfills highlight the development of the
information system from the very beginning. Efficiency of the time spent correcting works is
one of the most important goals. Through the application, each student can see at the end of
the test the mistakes they made. This can bring great advantages because for the final exam
you can prepare intensely for the chapter where you do not master the matter so well. It is
intended for all students and teachers. The application displays useful information about the
students that a teacher has under their coordination and their contact details. With the
functionality and simplicity of use, the web application gives every user the ability to access
the information they are looking for in a very short time without having much IT knowledge.
An important benefit of this is the availability of information that every individual wants to
access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Keywords: system, evaluation, test, learning
1 Introduction
Nowadays, the informational development and the means of accessing data are important
factors in the learning process. The modalities of presenting information and selecting it in order
for them to reach their purpose are very important. Making an evaluation app is essential because
it brings many benefits. The purpose of the evaluation system is to establish the objectives of each
teacher when it comes to his / her students.
Through this system, the teacher can not only visualize the students he has at a certain course,
but also their evolution, reports according to the knowledge they accumulate during the semester.
The desire to streamline the time invested in the correction of the works and also the automatic
answer given to the student represent the main reasons for choosing the theme. With the help of
this computer system, I propose that all students will be aware of the answers provided during the
evaluation test through an email notification. The student for the final examination can prepare and
observe which chapter is not mastered, what exactly he / she has to prepare for the final.
Based on responses provided by the student, the teacher can also see what chapter was not
understood in a particular group in order to make a small recovery, before the final exam. The
primary objective of the web application is highlighted by the fact that any student / student in a
faculty / school can easily access the information provided because the application does not
require a lot of IT knowledge.
The paper consists of four chapters, each chapter being fundamental to the design of the
application.
Chapter 2 called "Systems Evaluation" is designed to highlight the need for a good
organization. At the same time, the advantages and disadvantages are presented for any
implemented information system.
Chapter 3 aims to highlight the main tools and languages used to implement the application.
Thus, the characteristics and advantages of each technology used in the information system are
presented.
Chapter 4 deals with designing and analyzing the web application, mentioning the functionality
and application modules. Also, UML diagrams are presented to highlight the most important
modules and design the database, the relationships between entity-defining tables.
Chapter 5 highlights the way the web application is used, where all the features provided to the
user are specified. Accessing the app is different due to each role a user has. This role influences
permission on certain actions.
The paper ends with the conclusions and proposals section, thus building the demonstration
elements and proposals resulting from this study.
2 System evaluation
In everyday life, we are conditioned by the information provided for good functioning. The
most valuable source of information is the internet because we get the references in a very short
time. In order to catalog problems in an institution, people are required to receive all real-time
notifications. This goal is achieved with the help of information systems.
Information System "is a set of components, acting on a causal basis, in order to collect and
process the data and information needed at the decisional and information level."
The good functioning of the informational model is strongly influenced by the above structure
because any institution aims to achieve its performance. Reported data are concise and processed
using logical and easy-to-use operations.
The mandatory requirements that an information system has to meet are the following:
 the system must be achieved through efficiency criteria;
 the participation of the company's management is mandatory;
 the workstation must be easy to use so that any person, regardless of the computer skills
they have, can use the system without any difficulties;
 compliance with the features stated above.
The advantage of an IT system is that it can be used many times without damaging it, unless
the implementation has been well done. At the same time, it can be improved according to user
requirements. The disadvantage of the system is influenced by the Internet connection. The life
cycle of the IT system is strongly influenced by the abandonment or replacement decision with
another project.
In order to achieve a profitable system, it is necessary for the developer to understand the
primary needs and evaluate them. Implementation must also be implemented in a very short time.
It builds on the design specifications and guarantees the program's final, executable execution.
The steps to achieve the proposed goal are: writing the necessary code in the preferred language,
bringing it to the level of compilation without errors and testing the methods separately.
There are such evaluation systems on the market. These are modular programs using a
common database. It does not send the answers of each student to review later which is a
disadvantage.
3 Used instruments and interfaces

Java is an object-oriented programming language created in 1995. The language adopts much
of the C / C ++ syntax that has a simpler object model. A Java program can be deployed on any
platform that contains a virtual machine installed. The term of virtual machine is abbreviated as
JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
A server is a“program that connects network users to a centralized source”. This application is
on the computer and waits for customer connections. The server occupies a fundamental place in
information technology.
The server is behind the World Wide Web.
The Apache server has a precompiled version for use on any platform and provides support for
the user when they want to authenticate.
AngularJS (commonly referred to as "Angular.js" or "AngularJS 1.X") is a JavaScript-based
open-source front-end web application framework mainly maintained by Google and by a
community of individuals and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in
developing single-page applications. More information can be found in [1].
MySql is a relational database management system and is the most popular at the moment. The
Mysql server controls access to data to connect multiple people who can work with it
simultaneously. Thus, MySql is a multi-user and multi-thread server (multiple threads, according
to [2] and [4]). It uses SQL as the standard query language across the world. MySql is accessible,
and can be installed without any major problems.
Maven was built by Apache Software Foundation and the initial release had been in 13 July
2004 (13 years ago). It is a build automation toll used for Java projects. More information can be
found in [3] and [10].
Maven addresses two aspects of software building:
1. how the software is build
2. describes all the inserted dependencies
The build of the software project is described by an XML file and comes with its detailed
dependencies on other external modules and components, the build order, directories and plugins.
It has predefined objectives for performing well-defined tasks, such as compiling the code and its
packaging.
Jersey developed by Oracle Corporation was release in 8 September 2017. It is an open source
RESTful Web Services framework available in Java 6 or higher. It provides support for JAX-RS
API and serves as a JAX-RS. More information can be found in [5].
REST (Representational State Transfer) was initially described by Roy Fielding in 2000. It is
an architectural style defined by a set of constraints and HTTP protocol.
CSS language (Cascading Style Sheets), which is referred to as cascading style sheets, is one of
the languages used for stylization that allows formatting elements of a document made in a
preferred language, generally HTML. The implemented code is used to place content on the WEB
page, and display details (backgrounds, colors, margins, fonts, etc.) are made by CSS elements.
Definition of MVC
MVC is an architectural design that separates an application into three logical components:
model, view, and controller. Each of these components is built to handle the aspects of a
developed application. MVC is a platform that the developer must follow to create scalable and
extensible projects. Architecture is recognized for a web development environment.
MVC Components
Model: The model component matches all the data the user views in the application. Each
model is represented by an object containing the attributes of a class. Classes could be seen in the
previously detailed class diagram. For example, the user will retrieve information from the
database, and they are stored in the model, and then displayed with the other components.
View: The view component is used for the entire logic of the application. For example, it will
include all the components the user sees and interacts with (buttons, text, images).
Controller: The controller component uses the declared programmer's model for the web
application to work. It works by taking information from the other components to process all the
logic and requests received, manipulating data using the model component, and interact with view
to display the desired user result.
The components can be understood after checking
the figure 3.1
In the above figure we can see the fact that the user
calls the controller to return the desired information. It
further manipulates the selected model, retrieves useful
information to retrieve the component view.
4 Application analysis and design

The information system has an easy-to-use interface
because all the variables are declared intuitive. This can
be used by any student who has an account created by
the class teacher. The system contains only English
language in order to be used by foreign students,
relocated with Erasmus project or exchange of experience.
The user is helped by the application when
Figure 3.1 MVC way of operation completing the appropriate fields, such as "Username" or
"Password". We also notice that the system validation is
highlighting the importance of completing the fields. (“This is required”).
If the username and the password is not correct, it means that the student or the teacher doesn’t
have access to the application and a certain specified warning message is displayed in the
interface. The access for the application is provided by the admin.
The main purpose of the system application is the overview of the entire classes that a teacher
is responsible. One of the most important is to ease the time spent on correcting control topics. The
application does this automatically, also notifying the student of the score he has received, and all
the answers to the questions are sent automatically by email. So each student can self-correct and
prepare for the final exam. It is possible to analyze each answer given by the student, thus viewing
the score for each question.
The functional requirements considered in the application development will be identified and
modeled through usage case diagrams. These charts illustrate how the system will be used by
representing stakeholders through so-called actors and actions to be taken through use cases.
The detailed usage case diagram shows all the features the computerized system has to contain
(Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2). The user, depending on the role they receive, can perform different
actions. There are 2 roles in this application. Those are the simple user and the administrator that
includes all the permissions.
Figure 4.1 Detailed use case diagram – Admin

Figure 4.2 Detailed use case diagram – User
Computer system data

The data of a computer system is output and input data.
The information entered by the user when he wants to use the application, log in with a
username and a unique password is the input data, and those displayed by the application via the
graphical interface are the output data.
In order to protect input data and change it into output data, we used SQL programming
languages, and the command-line local server built an application development environment.
Detailed Class Diagram
The detailed class diagram is used to highlight the classes used by the application, along with
the attributes, methods, and relationships it contains with another class. Detailed class
representation helps build the program step by step because it provides information about field
visibility, list of parameters in a method, and parameter type.
At this stage, based on the results of the system requirements analysis, data requirements are
modeled using a high-level model. Conceptual design involves building a pattern of information to
be used by the application so that this model does not take physical resources into account. The
entities identified following the analysis of the functional requirements of the application are the
following:
 questions
 role
 scores
 user
 user_answers
The application database relationships can be seen in the Figure 4.3
Figure 4.3. Database relationships

At the same time, it establishes how entities interact with each other and is modeled by
associations based on the natural relationships existing in the real world (in the domain they come
from). Once identified a connection between two entities, relevant to the needs of the system,
cardinality (one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many) and relationship options are established.
Each relationship and its option (marked by discontinuous arcs).
Through the logical schema of the database we can see that our system contains 5 tables that
manage several relationships:
The USER table manages data for all people who have access to the information system. The
primary key is the ID that is also related to the ROLE and USER_ANSWERS tables. The fields
that make up this user table must be filled in because the employee cannot access all of the
application's functionality without it.
The ROLE table helps to differentiate between users. They may be students or administrators.
The relationship with the USER table is one to one.
The SCORES table keeps records of all the assessments completed by each student. These data
are further used to generate the report of all students. Through this peer-to-peer report, the teacher
can analyze the level of school students and, above all, can figure out whether the difficulty level
of the questions is tough or not, and then after that analysis will change the questions.
The USER_ANSWERS table serves to provide useful information about each user's response.
These responses are then sent through a mail to the student in order to benefit from his answers,
the percentage of each question, and also to prepare for the final exam.
The QUESTIONS table stores all the detailed questions by the teacher (administrator).
Application purpose
Making an evaluation app is essential because it brings many benefits. The purpose of the
evaluation system is to establish the objectives of each teacher when it comes to his / her students.
Through this system, the teacher can not only visualize the students he has at a certain course,
but also their evolution, reports according to the knowledge they accumulate during the semester.
The desire to streamline the time invested in the correction of the works and also the automatic
answer given to the student represent the main reasons for choosing the theme. With the help of
this computer system, I propose that all students be aware of the answers provided during the
evaluation test through an email notification. The student for the final examination can prepare and
observe which chapter does not master, what exactly he / she has to repeat to prepare for the final.
Based on responses provided by the student, the teacher can also see what chapter was not
understood in a particular group in order to make a small recovery, before the final exam. The
primary objective of the web application is highlighted by the fact that any student / student in a
faculty / school can easily access the information provided because the application does not
require a lot of IT knowledge.
The main menu of the application - Admin

Once the teacher logs in with the correct username and password, the menu will show those
actions that an administrator can do. If the user is not logged a warning message is displayed. All
the admin or student actions are hidden.
Only the admin / teacher can see this menu and also only him has access to sign up a student. If
the role is not defined the default role is user.
After the labels are completed, an email notification will be sent at the completed address to
announce the student that she / he has access to the evaluation system application.
The first thing the student has to do is to change their password, because the algorithm that the
application uses to generate the password is similar for all students.
A list of students is also provided for the teacher in order to check the personal data of his
students.
The teacher has the possibility to delete the student if he / she will no longer be part of the
teacher's group. The data for each student can be also viewed or updated.
The main advantage that the application is offering is that the student can re-take the test only
if the teacher is giving the permission. If we check the above page the student “Camelia Toma”
has already completed the test and can no longer use the application again in order to complete the
evaluation.
The questions can be added using the “Add a question” interface.
All the labels must be completed. As we can observe the teacher has to check the correct
answer, only one because all questions have one correct answer. The score has to be also
completed and the total score must not exceed 100; otherwise a warning message will be displayed
for the teacher.
There are cases when the teacher can’t add a new question to the evaluation test, because the
total sum of the questions must be 100. The score for each question can be changed in the “List of
questions” page. The page can be accessed from the Menu.
The main actions for the questions can be viewed in the below image. A question can be
deleted, viewed or updated Due to display the student results, the application can provide a
detailed report. For example we can verify that the number of students with the score between 70-
90 points is 6.
In this case the teacher can also check the difficulty of the questions that he has created and
also can create an overview of the students' knowledge he has in the classroom.
After the student received the email notification regarding the access for the evaluation system
application he / she is obliged to change his / her password because the application is using the
same password algorithm and the password can be guested for other colleagues.
If we check the student menu the action in order to change the password can be done only by
clicking “Change profile” link.
The available time that the student has at his disposal is 30 minutes to complete all the
questions. The application won’t let the student to select multiple answers and also a warning
message is displayed for the student “Please note that each question has a unique answer”. The
questions are not displayed the same for each user. The order of the questions and also the order of
the answers are randomly displayed. This action was made due to not cheat.
There have been cases when a user, when completing a test, would forget to answer some
questions.
In this system application a warning message will be displayed so the student can return to the
question. If the user is not pressing the submit button on time, the evaluation test is finished and
the questions he did not answer will not be scored. After the test is completed, an email
notification will be sent to the student address and also the test result will be automatically
displayed. The email will contain all the questions the test provided, the student's answer and the
question’s score. More information can be found in [6].
Conclusions
Objectives fulfilled
The primary objective that the application fulfills highlights the development of the
information system from the very beginning. Efficiency of the time spent correcting works is one
of the most important goals.
Through the application, each student can see at the end of the test the mistakes they made.
This can bring great advantages because for the final exam you can prepare intensely for the
chapter where you do not master the matter so well.
The importance of the application in real life

It is intended for all students and teachers. The application displays useful information about
the students that a teacher has under their coordination and their contact details.
With the functionality and simplicity of use, the web application gives every user the ability to
access the information they are looking for in a very short time without having much IT
knowledge.
An important benefit of this is the availability of information that every individual wants to
access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
From my point of view, the implementation of this information system determines the efficacy
of the time for both the professor and the student because the student at the end of the test
automatically receives the answer.
References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS, accesed 2018
[2] https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL, accesed 2018
[3] https://maven.apache.org/what-is-maven.html, accesed 2018
[4] http://db-engines.com/en/system/MySQL%3BPostgreSQL%3BSQLite, accesed 2018
[5] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html, accesed 2018
[6] http://lucrarededisertatieerp.blogspot.ro/, accesed 2018
[7] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-javascript/all/all, accesed 2018
[8] Ioan Radu, MinodoraUrsăcescu, Dorian Vlădeanu, Mihai Cioc, Sorin Burlacu, „Informatică și
Management”, Ed. Universitară, 2005
[9] „Sistemul informaţional-managerial al organizaţiei”, Ed. Economică, Bucureşti, 2001
[10] http://randomposts.in/redirecting-root-url-to-a-subfolder-in-apache-web-server/, accesed 2018
Learning model using predefined blocks
Doru Anastasiu Popescu1, Ovidiu Domșa2
(1) University of Pitești, Departament of Mathematics and Computer Science, Pitești,

Romania, E-mail: dopopan[at]yahoo.com
(2) “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia, The Faculty of Exact Sciences and
Engineering, Romania, E-mail: domsaddd[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
Step-by-step learning is an extremely efficient method of developing analytical skills for
a student. Thus, finding a solution to any type of problem by sequentially following an
algorithm can be helpful in var-ious real-life situations, where you have several alternatives
to each step during the process of problem solving. So, given a desired prob-lem to be solved,
in this paper we aim to build a type of this learning puzzle by automatically selecting blocks
of learning from a set of predefined blocks. We will describe the model built using units or
blocks of learning, which can be applied for algorithmic learning, learning by discovery and
so on.As an example, solving the problem described and proposed in this paper can be
modeled and then opti-mally solved using the proposed method..
Keywords: learning, algorithm, step, block, sequential
1 Introduction
Solving problems is a key skill in every situation, either in school or in real life. This type of
learning consists in an educational base that must be included in eve-ry aspect of planning a well-
structured education, mainly because it develops the analytical component of human mind.
Intuitively, we all have used algorithms to face problems appeared either in school or in real
life. While applicable to a wide range of situations, in the educa-tional environment the method of
step-by-step solving problems is widely-used in exact sciences such as Mathematics, Programming
or Robotics. As previous re-search, the model can be successfully applied to generating test items
which are linked between them, described in papers (Baron, 2014), (Nijloveanu, 2015) and
(Popescu, Bold, Nijloveanu, 2016). Also, learning is start-ing more and more to be structured with
the help of information technology (open learning environments (Holotescu, 2015) or long-term
education (Gaytan, 2007), (E. Popescu, 2010) and (Defta, 2014).
In this paper we intend to describe a model based on sequential learning blocks andto show the
utility of this model for solving problems within the educational process. These blocks are formed
of three main components, as we will see in the next sections. Section 2 will contain the actual
mathematical description of the model, while section 3 will present a possibility of implementation
of the model in education. Conclusions regarding the described model will be presented in sec-tion 4.
2 Model description
The model is purposed to be used by teachers to form learning paths or to pro-pose exercises. In
other words, within a course, a teacher can form a sequence (learning path) of steps (blocks) that
can optimize the student learning by maxim-izing the learning efficiency based on connections
between concepts. In this way, the students learn different concepts based on other concepts
learned at previous steps.
Other usage of the model can be the solving problem component, especially the sequence-
based ones, in areas recommended but not limited to mathematics or programming. In this way,
the students can learn to solve problems using prede-fined blocks.
The model will be described in the paper by its component elements, the require-ments and the
method used to add interaction between elements. Before we start presenting these elements, we
can say that solving problems using this model can be compared with solving a linear puzzle,
where the connection between two blocks is made using dependency relations between these two
blocks.
2.1 Component elements

One of the main elements of the model is the problem that must be solved. Its subject can vary
from Mathematics to Programming, but they are not limited to science domains. The singular
requirement is that the problem should have definite input and output data, which applies to almost
all types of problems.
The basic component element of the model is the interactive learning block or simply stated in
the paper as the block. In a short natural definition, the block is the unit of learning that can be
considered a step in the solving algorithm. As an example, a block can be the calculation of the
number of divisors in the process of determining whether a number is prime or not.
A block is considered to be formed of three major components: input (I), transformation (T),
which is formed of several requirements and which can change states of variables, and output (O).
Basically, a block Bi can be considered a 3-tuple in the form shown in form [1].
[1] B_i=〈I,T,O〉/〈〖NBI〗_i,T,〖NBO〗_i 〉,i=¯(1,NrB)
NrB is considered the total number of available blocks, a pool of blocks that is generated or
created before the actual formation of the solution puzzle. In order to understand better the concept
of block, a graphical instance of it is represented in Fig. 1.
Usually, blocks are predefined and make basic operations as transformation.
NBI and NBO are represented by arrays or data
structures called generally sockets. From a
mathematically point of view, these structures can
also be considered n-tuples, where n is the number
of input (nrsi) or output (nrso) sockets. These data
structures are helpful at matching the output of a
block with the input of the next block, similar to
the way of matching two sequential pieces of
puzzle.
This leads us to the next key component of the
model, which is the relation between blocks, made
using sockets. A more schematic way in which this
relation is made is shown in figure 2.
A relation between two blocks Bi and Bj can be
made if the output component of Bi matches with
the input component of Bj. In other words, the first
Fig. 1. Representation of a language block block must provide the data needed for the next
block, so that a local solution is obtained. The
matching consist in the comparison between the types of output sockets of the block i (NBOi) and
the types of input sockets of the block j (NBIj).
[2]
In order to create relations between blocks,

these must be created. It is formed in this way
a set of blocks (SB).From these elements of
the set SB there are chosen NrB elements
(blocks) which form the set B which will
contain the blocks included in the solution (B
\subset SB).
2.2 General principle of method

Now that we have presented the main
components of the model, we will show the
modality of learning through solving problems
using the model presented in the previous
subsection. Figure 3 presents a scheme of the
principle of functioning of the model of
learning. Fig. 2. Creation of the relationship between two
blocks Bi and Bj
Fig. 3. Principle of functioning of the model
In a short explanation, the steps of the method are:

Step 1. The first step of the method is the building of the set of blocks SB.
Step 2. The statement of the problem is translated into mathematical language and the input
and output values are established.
Step 3. The first block whose NBI1 are matching input values of the general input (I)is
selected.
Step 4. Based on the resulted output of the first block, the second block is selected.
Steps 3 and 4 are repeated until the general output (O) is reached. The best solution is the one
covering the lowest number of the blocks included in it.
3 Implementation and discussions

The model has a large applicability in practice. Similar models are used in learning programming
(MIT Scratch, 2018, Blockly, 2018, Alice, 2018 and Touch Develop, 2018) or robotics (Lego
Mindstorms, 2018). In this section, we will present practical usage of a learning sequence for
creating movements for a robot using the Lego Mindstorms software.
The sentence of the problem can be enunciated in this way: given a path with n dots of various
colors, it is required to be found the total number of blue dots alongside the path. Given this
statement, the input is given by the path with the total number of dots and the output is the number
of blue dots.
The software has several initial blocks (|SB| = 37) that are offered to construct the learning
path. Some of the most important blocks are shown in figure 4.
Fig. 4. Some of the SB set elements
The implicit initial and final blocks are the start and stop blocks. The second block is the block
that initializes the count variable with 0. The robot follows the path and stops at each dot. After the
scan, the dot color is read, and the variable is incremented if the dot color is blue. In the final, the
variable value is shown. Figure 5 presents the path described in the previous rows.
Fig. 5. Blocks path for the given problem
In the given example, there were used seven blocks. This is a case when the cardinals of the
NBI and NBO sets are equal to 1, so that there is one input and one output socket for each block.
The first block stands for the beginning of the path. At the second block, a counter is initialized,
and passes to the next one when the variable is equal to 0. Then, an iterative block makes the
verification at each dot. Within the iterative block, there exist a block for stopping the robot, one
for reading the dot color and one of incrementing the counter if the conditions are met. When all
the dots are crossed, the iterative block stops its action and the counter is displayed on the robot.
Conclusions
The learning using blocks develops an important skill for students and this learning style is
extremely useful in the real life. The most important fact is that the model can be applied to
several problems solving in various domains or disciplines within the educational process. The
model of learning using interactive blocks can be developed in the direction of adding
functionalities to the blocks. Also, the method of generating the initial set SB of blocks can be
improved or based on other principles.
References
C. Baron, A. Şerb, N.M. Iacob, C.L. Defta, IT Infrastructure Model Used for Implementing an E-learning
Platform Based on Distributed Databases, Quali-ty-Access to Success Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 140, pp.
195-201, 2014
C. Holotescu, A conceptual model for Open Learning Environments, Interna-tional Conference on Virtual
Learning – ICVL, pp. 54- 61, 2015
J. Gaytan, C. McEwen-Beryl, Effective online instructional and assessment strategies, American Journal of
Distance Education, Volume 21, Issue 3, pp. 117-132, 2007.
D. Nijloveanu, N. Bold, A. C. Bold, A hierarchical model of test generation within a battery of tests,
International Conference on Virtual Learning, pp. 147-153, 2015
E. Popescu, Adaptation Provisioning with respect to Learning Styles in a Web-Based Educational System: An
Experimental Study, Journal of Computer As-sisted Learning, Vol. 26(4), Wiley, pp. 243-257, 2010
D. A. Popescu, N. Bold and D. Nijloveanu, A method based on genetic algo-rithms for generating assessment
tests used for learning, International Confer-ence on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational
Linguistics, LNCS, Conference Proceedings, April 3–9, Konya, Turkey, 2016
D. A. Popescu, Nicolae Bold, O. Domsa: A generator of sequences of hierar-chical tests which contain
specified keywords. SACI 2016: 255-260
C.L Defta, A. Şerb, N.M. Iacob, C. Baron, Threats analysis for E-learning platforms, Vol. 6 / Nr. 1, pp.
132–135, 2014
Internet Sources:
Alice - innovative 3D programming environment, http://www.alice.org/index.php, accesed 2018
Blockly-Games - series of educational games that teach programming, https://blockly-games.appspot.com/,
accesed 2018
Lego - https://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms, accesed 2018
Massachusetts Institute of Technology educational resources, https://scratch.mit.edu/
Microsoft Touch Develop, https://www.touchdevelop.com/, accesed 2018
Characteristics of the Items Administered in the
NationalEvaluation Science Testing 6th grade
Gabriela Deliu1,2, Cristina Miron1, Cristian Opariuc-Dan3
(1) Faculty of Physics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest-Măgurele, Romania

(2) “Emil Racoviță” Highschool, Brașov, Romania
(3) “Ovidius” University, Constanța, Romania
Email: gabinan_bv[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The Item Response Theory is a solid theory, which provides the test constructor with tools
enabling us to estimate, with a high degree of accuracy, both the characteristics of the items
and the abilities of the examinees to whom a test is administered. Based on unidimensional
IRT models, the present paper presents the results of the calibration of the items administered
in 2017 within the National Evaluation Tests in Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 6th
grade, in our endeavour to determine the extent to which these tests are in line with the
purpose of their creation and administration.
Key words: item difficulty, item discrimination, item information function, test
information function, physics education.
1. Introduction
In Romania, as of 2014, the 6th-grade students are administered, at the national level, two tests
of transdisciplinary evaluation: “Mathematics and Natural Sciences” and “Language and
Communication”. The “Mathematics and Natural Sciences” test assesses the level of development
for a set of abilities common to the school disciplines mathematics, physics and biology. The
results of these evaluations are subsequently used to elaborate individualized curricula and for pre-
guidance in selecting a certain type of high school (LEN, 2011). This is the reason why the level of
the students’ abilities must be assessed as accurately as possible. But in order to achieve a rigorous
estimation, the administered tests must meet a certain level of validity and fidelity.
The present article brings forward the results obtained from the evaluation of the characteristics
of the items and of the National Evaluation Tests administered in 2017 (Subjects for National
Examinations, 2017). The determination was made within the paradigm of the Item Response
Theory, with the help of unidimensional IRT models.
2. Methodology
Applying IRT with a view to calibrating the items involves first checking the assumptions
regarding the unidimensionality (Hambleton et al, 1991; Hambleton et al, 1997) and the local
independence of the items (Liu et al, 2012). Along this stage, we realized that the items of the two
tests measure the scientific logical reasoning construct, oriented on three axes: A. conceptual and
procedural knowledge (Items 1, 2, 3, 8); B. intuitive and deductive scientific logical reasoning,
applied in order to relate the elements of the surrounding world (Items 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15);
C. inductive scientific logical reasoning, used in order to relate some abstract elements, to relate
concepts (Items 4, 7, 14).
The items display significant loadings in the measured construct, the internal consistency of the
items being good (α = 0.75 for both tests). Furthermore, all the item pairs were checked regarding
local independence, by using Yen’s Q3. No pair of residual correlations was higher than 0.20 (in
absolute value), the limit value suggested by Yen, so local independence does not seem to be a
problem (Yen, 2016). The items were calibrated with the 2PL model (Baker, 2001; Ding, 2009),
available in one of the IRT packages of the R program (Opariuc, 2017; R Open, 2017), and the
estimation was achieved by the Maximum Marginal Likelihood (MML) method.
3. Evaluation instrument
The tests under analysis, called Test 1 and Test 2, were administered in 2017, within the
National Evaluation Testing, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 6 th grade. About half the students
took Test 1, and the other half Test 2. The tasks were structured in 15 monodisciplinary items,
covering the fields of physics, mathematics and biology (5 items for each discipline). The items
were framed in a story, which gives the tests a pluridisciplinary rather than transdisciplinary
character. Out of the 15 items, 5 are multiple-choice and 10 are open answer items (Subjects for
National Examinations, 2017). In the present analysis, all items were treated as dichotomous
items, allotting score 0 for an incorrect or incomplete answer and score 1 for a correct and
complete answer.
4. Research lot
The data processed in the present analysis were collected by ourselves directly from a
significant number of secondary schools, which resulted in a data set made up of the responses
given by 1104 subjects who took Test 1 in 2017, and by 1053 subjects who took Test 2 in 2017.
All subjects are 12-13 in age and are 6th-grade students. 1038 of them are girls (48.1%) and 1119
are boys (51.9%).
5. Data analysis and interpretation

A first observation is related to the fact that the estimated parameters validate the placement of
the items in the three categories mentioned in Section 2. The items of group A have low values of
the difficulty parameter. The same parameter has average values for the group B items, while for
the group C items the parameter reaches high or very high values.
Using the Categorical Principal Components Analysis (CATPCA) (Opariuc, 2012), we
encountered in our research a problematic item in Test 1, that is Item 5, whose retaining in the
present study would have led to the appearance of great errors in estimation, so that we decided to
eliminate it.
When checking the values of the parameters, we found that the values of the item difficulty
parameter in the two tests are distributed approximately evenly on the scale of abilities θ (see
Figures 1 and 2). This comes as no surprise, considering the necessity of fitting the instrument
meant for the measurement of a string with a wide variation of θvalues (DeMars, 2010).
We can also observe the clear difference between Item 7 and the rest of the items (see Figures 5
and 6). Its difficulty parameter is so high, that its value was estimated with a great degree of
inaccuracy (SE = 0.37 in Test 1 and SE = 0.45 in Test 2). Nevertheless, the model used fits the
data well: Q = 4.38 for df = 7 and p = 0.735 (for Item 7 of Test 1), and Q = 3.08 for df = 7 and
p = 0.877 (for Item 7 of Test 2), in all likelihood because brings information about an extremely
small number of students, those who give correct answers and whose level of ability is very high,
θ> 3, whereas the students with average or low values of their level of ability θ fail to answer
(see Figures 3 and 4). According to the 2017 report of the NationalCenter for Assessment and
Examination (CNEE), at the national level only 3% of the students answer this item (CNEE,
2017).
Figure 1. Distribution of item difficulty Figure 2. Distribution of item difficulty

Test 1 – 2017 Test 2 – 2017
Diametrically opposed to Item 7 are Items 1, 2, 3, and 8, whose difficulty parameter is
extremely low. They are highly discriminatory, but bring information about a very small number
of students, those with very low values of their level of ability θ (see Figure 5). These items fail to
say anything about the majority of students, with values of their level of ability within the interval
θ  (–1, +1) (see Figure 6).
The evaluator can only infer that the level of these students is higher than the difficulty level of
the items. According to the CNEE statistics, at the national level approximately 80% of the
students give a correct answer to these items (CNEE, 2017).
Figure 3. Characteristic curve for Item 7 Figure 4. Characteristic curve for Item 7
Test 1 – 2017 Test 2 – 2017
Figure 5. Characteristic curve for Item 1 Figure 6. Information curve for Item 1
Test 2 – 2017 Test 2 – 2017
Another observation refers to Items 9 and 13. The CATPCA technique applied to our data
shows that the students have a different perception forItems 9 and 13 of Test 2 compared to the
same items of Test 1. At first sight, this may be surprising, as the two items seem to have the same
structure in the two tests. Nevertheless, after a careful analysis of the test statements, we find that
the task of Item 9 from Test 2 is much less intuitive than that of Item 9 from Test 1. The same
could also be said about Item 13.
The estimated values of the difficulty parameters associated to these items validate statistically
the above observations. In Test 1, Item 9 has a difficulty parameter b = –1.72, which places it in
the area of low-difficulty items. In Test 2, Item 9 is a difficult one, with b = 1.50 (see Figure 7). If
we check with the CNEE report of 2017, we see that, at the national level, 65% of the students
give correct answers to Item 9 from Test 1, whereas Item 9 from Test 2 gets only 29% correct
answers (CNEE, 2017).
Figure 7. Characteristic curve for Item 9: Test 1 – 2017 (left), Test 2 – 2017 (right)
Figure 8. Information curve for Item 9: Test 1 – 2017 (left), Test 2 – 2017 (right)
The slope of the characteristic curve for Item 9 has a low value, because its discrimination is
low (a = 0.63 in Test 1, a = 0.65 in Test 2), the item failing to differentiateadequately the students
with different levels of abilityθ. Therefore, the information with which the item contributes to the
general information of Test 1 is extremely low, I = 0.10 on the intervalθ  (–3.0) and insignificant
on the intervalθ  (0.3) (see Figure 8, left). In Test 2, the situation is similar, with the only
difference that the information of the item is insignificant for θ  (–3.0)and I = 0.10 forθ (0.3)
(see Figure 8, right).
Regarding Item 13, in Test 1 it has a value of the difficulty parameterb = 0.73 and brings
information about the students from the average area of the scale of abilityθ, whereas in Test 2 the
item has a difficulty parameterb = 1.97, providing information about the high-ability students (see
Figures 9 and 10). The item discriminationin the two tests has approximately even values (a = 1.00
in Test 1,a = 1.03 in Test 2).
We assume that these characteristics of the biology items, so dissimilar in the two tests, had an
adverse effect on the equivalence of the administered tests. The physics and mathematics items,
unlike the biology ones, have a much higher stability, with comparable characteristics in the two
tests. For instance, Item 12 (physics) has in Test 1 a value of the difficulty parameter estimated at
b = –0.37, and in Test 2 b = –0.24, which places it in the area of average-difficulty items (see
Figure 11). Having a moderate discrimination a = 1.08 in Test 1 and a = 0.94 in Test 2, the item
differentiates adequately the average-ability students and has a moderate information value I =
0.30 (see Figure 12).
Focusing on the tests at large, we find that the small number of items and the fact that 6 out of
the 15 items of each test target the areas of extreme values of the scale of abilityθ (5 items in the
area of very low values and one item in that of very high values on the scale) result in a low
estimation of ability in the average area (SE ≈ 0.50). This aspect is problematic if we bear in mind
that the average-ability students are the majority, and the tests are administered with the object of
estimating the level of ability with a high degree of accuracy (CNEE, 2017). This assertion is
corroborated by the graphs below, which present the level of errorin estimating the level of
abilityθ, as well as the graphs for information functions of the two tests.
Figure 13.Error in estimating abilitiesand graphs of information functions of tests.
The errors in estimating ability are big and uneven along the scale. The biggest appear in the
extreme areas: θ < –2, and θ > 2 respectively. In Test 1, in the interval θ  (–1.0), the standard
error (SE)is 0.5. The smallest errors are registered in the interval θ  (0.5, 1.5). For Test 2, in the
interval θ  (–1.0) the standard error is0.5, the smallest values being registered within the same
interval θ  (0.5, 1.5). The minimum of the function appears slightly to the right compared to Test
1. Therefore, the two tests best estimate the students’ abilities in the interval θ  (0.5, 1.5).
Correlating the error in estimating abilities with graphs of information functions, we find that the
tests provide a larger amount of information on the abilities of the students from the area of the
maximum of this function, namely in the interval θ  (0.5, 1.5), in which I ≈ 7 in Test 1 and I ≈
5.5 in Test 2 (see Figure 13). However, this value of the function is quite small, explicable by the
small number of test items and by the number of low-difficulty items. In the intervalθ  (–1.0), the
test information reaches even lower values: I ≈ 3.5 in Test 1 and I ≈ 3 in Test 2. In the extreme
areas of the ability scale, forθ < –2, and θ > 2 respectively, the values of test information are
insignificant.
The shape of the information curve for such tests should be similar to a bell with a flat top for
an interval of θvalues as wide as possible and the maximum of the information function should
have a value as high as possible (DeMars, 2010). None of these requirements has been met in the
case under analysis.
Conclusions and suggestions

The analysis shows that the two tests administered in 2017 within the National Evaluation, 6th
grade, are, in certain respects, problematic.
The items of the two tests have values of the difficulty parameter relatively evenly distributed,
on a wide interval, which is only to be expected considering the aim in administering the tests. The
real issue is that, out of the small number of items, 5 are allotted to investigating a very low
number of students, very weak or very good respectively. We refer to Items 1, 2, 3 and 8, with
values of the difficulty parameter of b < –2, and Item 7, with b > 2. These items should be either
reworded or replaced with items whose difficulty parameter falls within the interval (–1, +1), in
order to raise the accuracy in finding the level of ability of the subjects whose θ  (–1, +1), who
are in the majority. Another item that needs rewording is Item 5 of Test 1. As we have mentioned,
it was discarded, as it was flagged as problematic by both CATCA and the parameter estimations.
The biology Items 9 and 13 should be reworded as well, and their tasks brought to a common
denominator, otherwise the big differences in their level of difficulty unbalance the parallelism of
the two tests.
Last but not least, we consider that it is necessary to give more items to the National Evaluation
Tests. Specialty literature requires at least 20 items in order to obtain accurate information on the
level of ability of the subjects to whom a test is administered (Osterlind, 1998). Each of the tests
we discussed here has 15 items. CNEE, the test constructor, admits that there should be more
items, but “the piloting preceding the administration of the national test showed that an increase in
the number of items would have involved an increase in the time allotted to the testing” (CNEE,
2017), and the option for this number of items is based on “the wish to reduce to a minimum the
costs of printing the tests, as well as the effort of the students and of the evaluators” (CNEE, 2017).
Despite all these arguments of CNEE, we can say, on the basis of our analysis, that the tests we
discussed have problematic aspects, which need to be addressed, otherwise, a test incompatible
with the aim of the evaluation will generate costs, without providing the information that it was
conceived to provide.
References
Baker, F. (2001): The Basics of Item Response Theory, ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation.
CNEE, (2017): Raport Național EN VI 2017 Matematică și Științe – Analiza rezultatelor Evaluării Naționale
la finalul clasei a VI-a.
DeMars, C. (2010): Item Response Theory: Understanding Statistical Measurement, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Ding, L. and Beichmer, R. (2009): Approaches to Data Analysis of Multiple-Choice Questions, in Physical
Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research 5, 2, 020103.
Hambleton, R.K., Swaminathan, H. and Rogers, H.J. (1991): Fundamentals of Item Response Theory, Sage
Publication Inc, London.
Hambleton, R.K. and Linden, W.H. (1997): Handbook of Modern Item Response Theory, Springer, New
York.
Low of National Education nr. 1 (2011), art.74 (4)
Liu, Y. and Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2012): Local Dependence Diagnostics in IRT Modeling of Binary Data, in
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 73, 254-274
Microsoft R Open, USA (2017): [R for Windows, version 3.4.0]
Opariuc-Dan, C. (2017): Introducere în limbajul R, Manual pentru atelierul de lucru WS 5, Conferința
ICAPES
Opariuc-Dan, C. (2012): Analiza Componentelor Principale pentru Date Categoriale, in Psihologia
Resurselor Umane, 10(2), 103
Osterlind, J.S. (1998): Constructing Test Items: Multiple-Choice, Constructed-Response, Performance, and
Other Formats, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston
Subjects for National Examinations 2017, http//: www.subiecte.edu.ro
Yen, W. (2016): Critical Values for Yen’s Q3: Identification of Local Dependence in the Rasch Model Using
Residual Correlations, University of Leeds
Exploratory Analysis of the Equivalence of Tests,
applied to National Evaluation Tests –
Mathematics and Natural Sciences - 6th grade
Gabriela Deliu1,2, Cristina Miron1, Cristian Opariuc-Dan3
(1)Faculty of Physics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest-Măgurele, Romania

(2)“Emil Racoviță” Highschool, Brașov, Romania
(3)“Ovidius” University, Constanța, Romania
Email: gabinan_bv[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The Categorical Principal Components Analysis is a technique of nonparametric
analysis, which can be used as exploratory analysis to identify not only similarities, but also
differences that may arise between the items of simultaneous tests administered in schools.
The paper illustrates the way in which the technique is applied to the National Evaluation
Tests, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 6th grade, administered in 2016 and 2017.
Key words:Categorical Principal Components Analysis, vectors related to items,

equivalence of tests, validity of evaluation, physicseducation
1. Introduction
Most large-scale evaluation tests, such as the national evaluation ones, are based on test
equivalence, either as horizontally or vertically. Parallel tests, administered simultaneously to
different groups of students, but with the same characteristics of age and schooling, must be
equivalent horizontally. Tests administered in different years to students of a certain level of
schooling, should use the same scale of cognitive acquisitions, from year to year, if the aim is to
maintain a certain level of performance, evaluated by its being material to some well-known and
generally accepted standards (Ryan and Brockmann, 2011). These tests should be equivalent
vertically. In any case, the equivalence of administered tests is an important factor in the validity
of an evaluating process. If the tests considered parallel do not measure the same competences (the
term is used here with its simplest meaning, namely what the students are expected to know and
are able to do with their knowledge), then any comparison, any interpretation of the results thus
obtained is completely irrelevant (Osterlind, 1998).
This paper presents the way in which the Categorical Principal Components Analysis may be
used as exploratory analysis in identifying some differences between the items of the tests
administered simultaneously or in different years, which are susceptible to influence the
equivalence of the tests. The analysis was carried out using the National Evaluation Tests for
Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 6th grade, in the years 2016 and 2017.
2. Methodology
The object of this study is to show that we can find similarities and differences between the
supposedly equivalent tests, by using statistical models. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
may be used as an exploratory technique, which allows for the graphical representation of
variables, here of items. The technical details of the way in which PCA works (Jolliffe, 2002) are
not within the scope of this paper. We will only say that this data analysis method allows for the
representation of each test item by a vector associated to it in the area of the main components,
also called dimensions (Ding and Beichmer, 2009). The angle distance between the two vectors
associated to the items signifies the level of correlation between the two items. The smaller the
angle is, the greater the correlation between the items and the higher their similarity. The bigger
the angle, the lower their correlation and similarity (Sava, 2011). Undoubtedly, these angle
distances are not to be generalized, as they are only relative values. What we can notice, based on
these graphical representations, is just a stronger or a weaker correlation between the items. On the
other hand, the graphical representations allow us to compare the ensemble of the vectors
associated to the items from two or several parallel tests and to note whether the items display
significant differences from one test to another, which may jeopardize the equivalence of the tests.
Since the collected data have a nominal level, the answers to the items of the analysed tests
being scored dichotomously, we made use of a special type of analysis of the main components for
nonparametric data, called the Categorical Principal Components Analysis (CATPCA) (George
andMallery, 2009; Opariuc, 2012).
3. Evaluation instrument
The paper deals with the evaluation tests administered in 2016 and 2017, for Mathematics and
Natural Sciences (Subjects for National Examinations, 2016; 2017). Nationwide, almost half the
6th-grade students took Test 1, and the other half took Test 2. The two tests, supposedly equivalent
both horizontally, for the tests administered in the same year, and vertically, for the tests
administered in different years, are made up of 15 items from the disciplines physics, mathematics
and biology. Part of these items have an open answer structure, but within the present analysis the
subjects’ answers were treated dichotomously, allotting score 1 to a correct and complete answer
and score 0 to an incorrect and/or incomplete answer.
4. Research lot
The processed data are constituted of the pattern of answers given by a significant number of
subjects, as follows: 1104 subjects who took Test 1 in 2017, 1053 subjects who took Test 2 in
2017, 883 subjects for Test 1 of 2016, and 853 subjects for Test 2 of 2016. The subjects are 6th-
grade students and are aged 12-13.
5. Analysis and interpretation of data

As we mentioned in Section 2 of this paper, the comparative study of the ensembles of the
vectors associated the items from the two supposedly equivalent tests serves at identifying the
items that present differences with a possible impact on test equivalence. In building an item, the
constructor has to pay heed to a wide range of conditions, some of which relate to the set of
cognitive abilities involved in its solving, and others to its wording (Osterlind, 1998). Even if all
these conditions are rigorously met, speciality literature and teaching practice show that, when
administered, an item may act differently from the intention with which it was conceived. More
often than not, the differences that arise between the items administered in parallel tests are caused
by supposedly equivalent wording, which may be, however, in practice, perceived by the subjects
differently from the intention of the item constructor. The analysis below presents a few situations
of this kind, encountered in the National Evaluation Tests.
Studying the ensemble of the vectors associated to the items of Tests 1 and 2 of 2017,
generated by CATPCA (see Figure 1) (IBM SPSS Statistics, 2015), we find that the vector
associated to Item 3 is positioned spatially in Test 1 in a different way from Test 2.
Figure 1. The ensemble of the vectors associated to the items

Test 1 – 2017 (left), Test 2 – 2017 (right)
When reading the statements of Item 3 in the two tests (Subjects for National Examinations,
2017), we find that the item was meant for the students of very low cognitive abilities. The task
requires the identification of the measurement unit for average altitude and that for the length of a
route, respectively, by merely reading a cell from a table. Actually, the students must establish a
correlation between the symbol of the measurement unit for length and the measurement unit, given
as one of the answer variants in the statement. The structure of the items is obviously identical and
the cognitive ability behind the correct answer is the same. Nevertheless, the spatial orientation of the
vectors associated to the item is different in the two tests. The explanation may come from the fact
that Test 1 uses the metre as the unit of measurement, while Test 2 the hectometre, a unit of
measurement for length rarely present in school exercises and in daily practice.
If we are to make a comparison vertically, we find a marked change in the spatial orientation of
the vector associated to Item 3 of Test 2 2016 over Test 2 2017 (see Figure 2). The comparison of
the statements shows that in 2017 the item is connected to Items 1 and 2 by a stimulus text, which
does not happen in the 2016 tests, where Item 3 has, besides, a different task. It requires the
identification of the measurement instrument used in order to measure the distance between two
points, out of a number of answer variants (Subjects for National Examinations, 2016; 2017).
We find that, even though Item 3 has a similar structure in all the tests, being a multiple-choice
item that requires the identification of a measurement unit for length, respectively the
identification of the measurement instrument for length, however, from the reasons we have stated,
the item generates a different perception for the students who took the tests in different years.
Another relevant example that substantiates our analysis is Item 8. As Figure 1 shows, the
spatial orientation of the vectors associated to the items is comparatively the same in the two tests.
The statements are very similar, and the ensemble of the vectors does not highlight any difference
of Item 8 of Test 1 2017 and the same item of Test 2 2017 (Subjects for National Examinations,
2017). For that matter, according to the statistics published by the National Centre for Assessment
and Examination (CNEE), nationwide, 68% of the students give correct answers to the Test 1 item,
and 70% to the Test 2 item (CNEE, 2017). Nevertheless, things are not the same if we make a
vertical comparison, between different years. In Test 2 of 2016, the vector associated to this item
has a different positioning from 2017 (see Figure 3).


Analysing the statements from the two tests, we find two differences. In 2016 the task of the
item is to determine the “temperature variation” between two moments of the day, while in 2017
the students are required to determine “by how much the temperature is lower” at a certain
moment of the day than at another moment (Subjects for National Examinations, 2016; 2017).
Although the wording is equivalent in the two tests, the concept of variation may be less clear to
some of the 6th-grade students than the wording, frequently used in calculations, “by how much a
quantity is bigger/smaller than another”. Furthermore, in 2016 the reading of temperature values
from the graph accompanying the statement is achieved by interpolation, while in 2017 the reading
of the values is achieved directly from the temperature axis. The statistical data published in the
CNEE reports of 2016 and 2017 corroborate our assumptions. In 2016, nationwide, only 43% of
the students gave correct answers to Item 8 of Test 2, while 70% of the students gave correct
answers in Test 2 of 2017 (CNEE, 2016; 2017).
But the same National Evaluation Tests also provide us with examples of very stable items,
both in the parallel tests administered in the same year and in successive years. This is the case of
Items 4 and 14 (physics). The items are similar both regarding their statements and the cognitive
abilities involved in the elaboration of the answer: conceptual knowledge (of speed in Item 4 and
of density in Item 14, respectively), abilities regarding the transformation from one measurement
unit into another, abilities of mathematical calculation such as the determination of a term from a
ratio (see Figures 4 and 5) (Subjects for National Examinations, 2016; 2017). These similarities
generate a very small angle distance between the vectors associated to the respective items (see
Figure 1). The fact that they do not evince significant differences from one test to another is also
evidenced by the stable positioning of the associated vectors (see Figure 6).
The method of achieving test equivalence by keeping intact, from one year to another, the item
statements, changing only the data, might be regarded as infallible. However, pedagogically speaking,
we consider it a mistake. These items can generate mechanical learning of a solving algorithm, thus
gravely endangering validity of the tests specially conceived to evaluate certain abilities.
Figure 4. Data and tasks of Item 4 Figure 5. Data and tasks of Item 14

Conclusions
The analysis we have carried out proves that the nonparametric CATPCA technique can be a
useful instrument in the exploratory research into the differences that may arise between the items
of tests conceived as equivalent.
The analysis, based on the Mathematics and Natural Sciences test as part of the National
Evaluation Examinations, in 2016 and 2017, shows that the administered tests are susceptible to
not being equivalent. Both horizontal and vertical equivalence seem to be affected by items that
display significant differences from one test to another. The present paper deals only with the
physics items but a compared analysis of the biology items, which display a greater diversity in
their wording, could result in the identification of even greater differences. This aspect was not
within the scope of this paper.
We feel bound to reassert that this analysis is essentially exploratory, as the equivalence of the
tests can be confirmed or invalidated only by a series of specific confirmatory analyses (Ryan and
Brockmann, 2011).
References
Ding, L. and Beichmer, R. (2009): Approaches to Data Analysis of Multiple-Choice Questions, Physical
Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research 5, 2, 020103.
George, D. and Mallery, P. (2009): SPSS for Windows Step by Step: A Simple Guide and Reference, Pearson
Education, Boston.
IBM SPSS, USA (2015): [SPSS for Windows, version 20]
Jolliffe, I.T. (2002): Principal Component Analysis, Springer-Verlag, New York Inc.
Opariuc-Dan, C. (2012): AnalizaComponentelorPrincipalepentru Date Categoriale, Psihologia Resurselor
Umane, 10(2), 103.
Osterlind, J.S. (1998): Constructing Test Items: Multiple-Choice, Constructed-Response, Performance, and
Other Formats, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.
Sava, F.A. (2011): Analizadatelorîncercetareapsihologică, Editura ASCR, Cluj-Napoca.
Ryan, J. and Brockmann, F. (2011): A Practitioner’s Introduction to Equating with Primers on Classical Test
Theory and Item Response Theory, Council of Chief State School Officers, Washington.
Subjects for National Examinations2016, http//: www.subiecte.edu.ro
Subjects for National Examinations2017, http//: www.subiecte.edu.ro
The internet - Information resources for students in the study of
children's literature
Oana Stoican1, Cornelia Ștefănescu1, Valeriu Ștefănescu1
(1) Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest, Romania,

E-mail: oana.stoican[at]yahoo.com,cornelia.stefanescu[at]yahoo.com,
stefanescuvaleriu[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Learning resources for students are currently multiple and varied, ranging from classical
printed, audio and video documents to electronic ones, accessible on CDs or the Internet.
Resource webpages have integrated the computer revolution into contemporary society, with
students having easy access to content from multiple sources via the Internet. They can
choose the source of information appropriate to their learning needs, having multiple
solutions at hand.And the study of children's literature can be supported by accessing
specialized, Romanian or international websites that sum up consecrated literary texts or
suggestions for pedagogical exposition. From this perspective, students who are future
teachers in primary and preschool education have the opportunity to go through both
classical children's works and the latest adventures in the field, overcoming any obstacle of
time, place, and financial nature.This study aims to illustrate the way in which the Internet
can contribute to the preparation of students for the Children's Literature discipline. This
research attempts to highlight the importance of accessing the various resources available in
the online environment for informing and documenting students about accessible literature to
the young.
Keywords: Children’s literature, Internet, Primary and preschool education, University

studies
1 The context of research

The school's report with literature and, in particular, children's literature has undergone, over
time, some transformations due to social, psychological, axiological, and, above all, technological
changes. By spreading computer among the masses and to generalize the use of the Internet,
literature was conceived as a form of entertainment and learning resources accessible in the home
or in the library, which form the reader in many directions: comprehension, memory fragments,
moral education (Ștefănescu et al., 2013).With the emergence and spread of virtual reality,
literature has occupied an increasingly significant place in the online space, reflecting the great
mobility of information and resources, specific to the present times.
These changes, which also touch on the school reality, have produced innovative effects, new
pedagogical practices, and teachers are in a position to adapt to these challenges. The Internet has
therefore become a living, ever-changing image to respond to information and documentation
needs (Ezzahri et al., 2002). In this context, in the didactic process of primary and preschool
education, children's literature is a flexible and fluid domain, varying according to the culture,
beliefs, interest and values of the teaching staff(Vuillemin, 2000). Circulation of information in the
virtual environment offers the opportunity to borrow good practices, to search for unexplored
sources, to innovate.
In the initial training of future teachers, learning resources are now many and varied, from
classical printed documents, sound and video, to the electronically available on CD or online.
Resource WebPages have integrated the computer revolution into contemporary society, with
students having easy access to content from multiple sources via the Internet. They can choose the
source of information appropriate to their learning needs, with varied solutions(Neacșu, 2006).
And the study of children's literature can benefit from the online resources available to all,
although we find a weaker representation of the Romanian specialized sites compared to the
international ones, in English or French.
These useful resources sum up well-known or less-known literary texts, as well as suggestions
for their pedagogical expedition. From this perspective, students who are future teachers in
primary and preschool education have the opportunity to go through both classical children's
works and the latest adventures in the field, overcoming any obstacle of time, place, and financial
nature. For future teachers, the Internet offers the opportunity to inform, in complementarity with
the education obtained in college, after completing their studies, by contributing to their
continuous training, by discovering new information and deepening the knowledge already known.
Interaction with literature in school has changed over time, depending on the objectives of
international evaluations (PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS), and the following issues are discussed and
practiced:
- understanding the literary text;
- interpretative debates;
- reading on the network by connecting two or more texts;
- identifying the specifics of a specific author's writing;
- the living and active presence of the book's illustrator;
- characteristics of the object book;
- creative writing about the literary text.
All these pedagogical approaches have been complemented by the expansion of the literature
space beyond the established, classical texts, the school promoting children's literature not only as
a support for written and oral communication, but also as an aesthetic object, addressed in all its
aspects: historical, social, axiological and literary(Mercier and Tourron-Bertrand, 2013).
In the formation of English or French speaking students, the Internet becomes a true partner,
universities adapting their educational offer to the virtual environment. There is a wealth of pages
with free children's literature available but also with pedagogical resources such as: reviews,
teaching materials or teaching strategies for literary text use in the classroom. Universities also
offer alternative online training options(Daniel, 2012), MOOC (Massive Open Online Course),
OER (Open Educational Resources), Learning Management System (LMS) for Distance Learning.
As far as the virtual reality of Romanian is concerned, we find a relatively low presence of
websites that promote the literature for children. Examining the current offer, we find three types
of WebPages: those specialized in children's literature, which provide all readers with literary
creations larger or smaller http://www.literaturacopii.ro,www.povesti-pentru-copii.com,
http://www.povesti-de-copii.ro,https://www.cutiutafermecata.ro, http://www.revistatus.ro), web
pages dedicated to activities and games for children,including a literary section
(https://www.gokid.ro/c/activitati-copii/povesti-audio, http://www.adventurekids.ro/3-7-
ani/Povesti-de-spus-seara-la-culcare,http://www.mybuni.com,https://www.roli.ro/povesti), parents'
websites, with various information about the child's life, containing texts for children
(https://www.mamicamea.ro, https://www.parinti.com, https://www.copilul.ro,
https://www.qbebe.ro,http://www.scoalaparintilor.ro,http://www.anidescoala.ro).
2 Objectives and methodology of research
2.1 Objectives of the study

The purpose of this investigative approach is to identify the role of the Internet in the initial
training of students in the children's literature.
This goal is subordinated to several objectives that are concretized as follows:
 Revealing students' opinions on the importance of online resources for information on
children's literature;
 Capturing the ways in which the Internet supports the individual study of children's
literature;
 Highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using online resources by referring to
classical resources.
2.2 Research hypothesis

The use of online resources in addition to the classical ones in the study of children's literature
provides diversified information to students who are preparing for primary and preschool
education to cover their documentation needs.
2.3 Methodology of research

This study was conducted by survey method using questionnaire as a tool, a method which
involved gathering data from students in the study program Pedagogy of Primary and Preschool.
Thus, 140 questionnaires have been applied and have been fully validated.
3 Structure of the sample

The investigated population, consisting of 140 students, of all three years of study, has shown
interest in how it perceives and uses the Internet in the study of children's literature. Thus, subjects
are differentiated according to: age, level of studies, university experience, integration into a
profession. Thus, some already have university experience, being graduates of a faculty; others are
older than colleagues coming directly from high school banks, thus gaining a special social status.
We identify students who are partially or totally integrated into a profession in the labour market,
education or other fields.
3.1 Distribution by age
Figure 1. Age Distribution of Subjects
In terms of age, the highest percentage is the category of people aged 19 to 25, the percentage
being 57%. The second age range is between 26 and 35 years, representing 26% of the sample. In
the next age category, 11% are students aged 36 to 45. The fewest are students aged over 45 years
at the rate of 6%.
The analysis of the above data reveals that the sample of subjects is made up of students
belonging to different age categories, a relevant aspect of Internet access, knowing that young
people use new technologies more often in everyday life and in the profession.
3.2 Distribution by level of education
34, 24% high school

graduates
5, 4%
post-
101, 72% secondary
Figure 2. Level of studies
Of the 140 students surveyed, 101 are high school graduates, 5 post-secondary graduates in
education, and 34 graduate students, studies that allowed them to form and use independent study
skills.
3.3 The existence of a computer and Internet connection

94% of respondents have a personal computer (135 subjects), and 91% of them (131) have an
Internet connection, which gives them the chance to diversify their sources of information.
4 Analysis and interpretation of data

The first item highlights the frequency of internet use for informative purposes for the
children's literature course in the faculty by the 140 subjects. Half of them (70) use the computer
very often, 45 of them often, 17 rare and 8 occasionally. These data lead to the conclusion that the
Internet is an important source of information in the course of the study, demonstrating its
usefulness.
Figure 3.The frequency of internet use for informative purposes for the children's literature course
Questioned about the types of online resources accessed in the study of children's literature, 75
of the subjects claim to access web pages containing the literary texts under study at the seminar,
54 access scanned books, university courses, studies and articles on the subject, 41 of the students
access materials posted by teachers on specialized sites, 14 - discussion forums and blogs of
current or future teachers for primary and preschool education.
14 41
54
75
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
discussion forums and blogs materials posted by teachers

sacking materials web pages
Figure 4.The types of online resources accessed in the study of children's literature
In the opinion of the questioned students, the purposes for which online resources are accessed
in the study of children's literature are: preparing the papers, posters or PowerPoint materials
presented at the seminar (113), reading the recommended bibliography (101), preparing for the
seminar topics (54), searching for new information in completing the course (44), reading the
biography of lesser known authors (31), others (12).
others
reading the biography of lesser known authors
31
44
54
101
113 searching for new information in completing the course
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
reading the recommended bibliography
preparing thereading the recommended bibliography papers, posters or

PowerPoint materials presented at the seminar
Figure 5.The purposes for which online resources are accessed in the study of children's literature
It can be noticed that in the preparation for the tasks imposed by the course, the Internet is
considered useful especially for the preparation of personal contributions, but also for the
individual study.
Asked about the benefits of using the internet in preparing for the children's literature course,
respondents considered that the online environment offers the following opportunities:
- involves low costs;
- facilitates learning through the concreteness, clarity and support it provides (video, audio,
animation);
- information that can be easily accessed anywhere, anytime, on any device, even on your
mobile phone;
- Increases the motivation of students through the possibilities of interaction offered (blogs and
forums), where they can post comments or personal contributions, and they can exchange
ideas and opinions with others in similar situations;
- fosters autonomy in learning, the Internet putting the learner in a position to act, to actively
participate in his / her own learning;
- develops and forms the critical spirit by reference to the wealth of accessible information on
children's literature;
- allows consultation with as many different resources as possible, always updated.
As disadvantages of using the Internet in studying children's literature, students identified the
following:
- there is a need for discernment in the proper choice of credible, valuable resources;
- it is necessary for the teacher who teaches the children's literature course to guide students to
search for, select and apply information, as this information is constantly changing;
- great time spent in identifying information relevant to the course;
- the possibility to retrieve information with errors.
Conclusions
The results presented by our research have revealed that the Internet is a permanent presence in
the preparation of students for the children's literature discipline, effectively relying on the virtues
of this didactic means. Analyzing the points of view of the subjects, we have come to the
conclusion that they use to a significant extent their own resources in online training, but also that
they need guidance in exploiting the pedagogical and methodological potential of the Internet. In
order to practice authentic learning, students need to correlate their own searches and discoveries
with the basic information provided by the teacher, learning how and what to learn, and
discovering the relevant data for their own training. The Teacher of Children's Literature has the
task of helping students to become aware of the fact that they need to become responsive to their
own learning and to use properly all of their cognitive, classical or online resources available to
them.
References
Neacşu, I. (2006):Învăţarea academică independentă. Ghid metodologic. Editura Universității din București.
Journal Articles:
Mercier, A.M. and Tourron-Bertrand, I (2013) Formation des maîtres et littérature de jeunesse. Bulletin des
bibliothèques de France (BBF), 2, 16-19. http://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-2013-02-0016-003>.
ISSN 1292-8399.
Daniel, J., (2012). Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility.Journal of
Interactive Media in Education, 3, 18. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/2012-18
Șefănescu, V., Roșu-Stoican, O., Ștefănescu, C. (2013):Contribution of new technologies to
students'individual study in Quality and efficiency in eLearning. Proceedings of the 9th International
Scientific Conference «eLerning and Software for Education», april 25-26, vol.I, 149-156
Ezzahri, S., Talbi,M., Erradi,M., Bennamara,A., Khaldi,M. and Belmohktar, S. (2002) Usages de l'internet
dans les activités d'apprentissage des élèves, Faculté des sciences BenMsik - Casablanca – Maroc
https://www.epi.asso.fr/revue/articles/a0211a.htm
Vuillemin, A. (2000) Littérature et informatique La revue de l'epi, n. 97, 45-56,
https://www.epi.asso.fr/fic_pdf/b97p045.pdf
Educational software –
Learning resource for pupils in primary education
Cornelia Ştefănescu1, Oana Stoican1 ,Valeriu Ștefănescu1
(1) Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest, Romania

E-mail: cornelia.stefanescu[at]yahoo.com, oana.stoican[at]yahoo.com,
stefanescuvaleriu[at]gmail.com
Abstract
The use of educational software to complement traditional learning resources in primary
education disciplines brings a qualitative plus to the instructive-educational process. Some
studies to date have sustain the idea that the use of educational software has beneficial effects
because it provides a large amount of information, provides a rapid feed-back, stimulates the
student's active involvement in learning. There are also specialists who have reserved
opinions about using the computer in the didactic process, as this would mean spending time
on preparing and installing the technical equipment, as well as lowering the active listening,
oral, reading, reading ability. This study reveals the perception of primary school teachers
about the usefulness of developing effective educational strategies for the exploitation of
educational software in lessons.
Keywords: Educational software, Primary education, Learning resources, Teaching

strategies
1. The context of research

Today's pupils are a category of digital natives (Prensky, 2001), born and raised in the age of
virtual technology, with whom they were familiar early and who use it intensively. The
educational preferences and skills of this new generation seem to be different from those of
previous generations. Some studies in the field (Prensky, 2005; Junco and Mastrodicasa, 2007)
reveal that the main characteristics of the digital natives are: low reading tolerance, active
approach to work and tasks, frequent use of computer technologies and search for information,
ability to develop professional and social interactions through new technologies. Other studies
disagree with the different preferences of learners in digital technology and link the ease of use of
information technology to the development of digital competences (Thompson, 2013; Janssen and
al., 2013).
Technological and computer changes have meant redefining educational reality, updating the
roles of educational actors and teaching strategies; so there are numerous studies that have
demonstrated over the past decades that the use of computer and educational software at all levels
of education has changed the way of conceiving and implementing the educational act, also
revealing the positive effects on pupils and learning.
The school reality, captured in our previous research (Ştefănescu and Stoican, 2017), revealed
a number of issues that cause difficulties in the implementation of new technologies in the school
environment such as: the development of technological skills to allow frequent access to software
education; the need to allocate a budget for the acquisition of educational software; the acquisition
of high-performance computer equipment and the creation of laboratories in which other lessons in
the curriculum can take place than in computer science.
This study reveals the perception of primary school teachers about the usefulness of developing
effective didactic strategies to exploit educational software in lessons. The focus will be on:
- the frequency of computer use in classroom activity;
- the utility of using software according to the educational discipline;
- types of software used in primary education;
-the advantages and disadvantages of using educational software in the teaching process.
2. Objectives, hypothesis and methodology of research
2.1 Objectives of the study

The purpose of this investigative approach is to find out to what extent the design and
implementation of didactic strategies that integrate different types of educational software and
their use, teaching the disciplines of the first years of schooling has a relevant contribution, in
order to make the didactic efficiency more efficient, in facilitating student learning.
This goal is subordinated to several objectives that are concretized as follows:
 Recognizing teachers' opinion on the use of educational software in didactic activity;
 Understanding how different types of educational software contribute to the teaching of
primary education disciplines;
 Highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of integrating educational software within
the didactic strategies.
2.2The research hypothesis

The use of various types of educational software within the didactic process of primary
education facilitates the transmission of information, stimulating effective learning.
2.3Methodology of research
The study was conducted by the method of investigation questionnaire, which was applied to
collect data from teachers working in primary education. Thus, 97 questionnaires were appliedand
fully validated.
3. The sample structure

The investigated population, made up of 97 teachers in primary education, is a heterogeneous
structure sample, which can be differentiated from the perspective of our research theme according to:
age, age in didactic activity, level of continuous training, the environment in which find out the
institution in which it operates, which has enabled the collection of relevant data for the proposed topic.
Figure 1.Age Distribution of Subjects Figure 2.Old age in didactic activity

40
urban
57
rural
Figure 3. Level of studies Figure 4.The environment in which school is located
The investigated subjects belong to different age categories, an important aspect in terms of
computer interaction, given that younger people use the new technologies more frequently in both
work and life. The population in the sample is differentiated from the perspective of the teaching
experience, which influences the way of thinking and putting into practice of various didactic
strategies, in which the educational software contributes to the achievement of the established
objectives. Also, the level of teacher education is an indicator that reflects the level of training for
the teaching profession, but also to what extent they have the digital skills needed to work with
new technologies. “Thus, their area may be different from general knowledge and functional skills
(teachers know the basic terminology about digital devices and can use them for elementary
purposes), using these devices day by day (teachers are able to integrate these devices into
everyday life) to specialized and advanced work and creative skills (teachers are able to use ICT
to express their creativity and improve their performance in activity)” (Janssen and al., 2013). The
level of competence of each subject is determined to a large extent by the level of graduate
education, given that in the university, the formation and development of digital competences is an
important objective. The environment in which teachers are active is an important criterion for
analysis because the urban education institutions benefit from a better endowment of internet
connection, which is a favorable prerequisite for the implementation of educational software in the
process didactic compared to rural institutions that may be deficient from this perspective.
4 Data analysis and interpretation

The first item highlights the frequency of computer use in didactic work conducted with small
school pupils by the 97 questioned subjects.
2
8
20
37
30
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
never occasional rare frequently very often (daily)
Figure 5. Frequency of computer use in didactic activity

Many of the subjects (30) use the computer very often (daily), 37 of them often (2-3 times a
week), 20 rarely (weekly), 8 occasional, and 2 never. The computer is constantly used in the
lesson, the didactic strategies developed by the primary school teachers encompassing the
computer as a useful didactic means for conducting a qualitative instructional-educational process.
Users are found in all age categories identified, which emphasizes the existence of digital
competences at a certain level at any age.
37
54
78
79
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
educational software audio-visual materials

written documents power-point presentations
Figure 6.Types of computer materials used in didactic activity
The use of new technologies in the teaching process involves the use of many different types of
computer materials. The questioned subjects use power-point presentations in a large number (79),
as these materials can be easily made and used by all teachers who have general knowledge and
functional skills, benefiting from the combination of image, sound and animation. Recorded and
audio-video documents are also among the materials frequently used by teachers (78 - written
documents, 54 - audio-visual materials) in the study of primary education subjects. Educational
software is used at a lower frequency, only 37 of those surveyed develop educational strategies
based on educational software, requiring specialized and advanced skills and creative working
skills in the digital domain. Their sporadic use is also dictated by financial reasons, own resources
or schools can be directed to purchase such software, which involves a sustained effort from a
material point of view. Also, for the extensive use of software, it is necessary to have a computer,
video projector and screen, permanently in the classroom, which is impossible in some situations.
From the teachers questioned point of view, the school objects in the primary education who
benefit from the software contribution in the educational process are distributed unequally, as
follows:
Figure 7. School objects that benefit from software
It can be noticed that in the educational process conducted at the primary education disciplines,
the didactic strategies in which educational software is used are mainly used in the fields of
Science, Geography and Mathematics / Mathematics and Environmental Exploration, as these
products can represent and reproduce phenomena of nature, relief forms, geometric shapes,
difficult to replicate with traditional didactic means. The educational software is also useful in the
lessons of the socio-human disciplines: History, Civic Education and Communication in Romanian
/ Romanian Language and Literature. The Music and Motion discipline doesn’t have the same
representation of the software as it also benefits from other teaching tools that make the teaching
process more efficient.
Figure 7.Types of software used in primary education
When questioning the different types of software (Adăscăliței, 2007; Ceobanu, 2016;
Ștefănescu, 2016) used in primary education, subjects have indicated that the practice software is
most frequently used (32), because the practice with the help of the learners helps the learner to fix
his or her knowledge and to develop skills specific to a discipline. These software prove their
efficiency by helping to transfer new knowledge into long-lasting memory, because through the
exercise, cognitive automatisms are created. Simulation software (31) and training games (29) are
also found among the software used in primary education. The educational potential of simulation
software is very high, they can be used in complementarity with traditional methods, increasing
their value. By simulation, phenomena or processes that can not be represented in another way can
be rendered. Most simulation software is found in the Science field, but there are simulation
software for other disciplines, such as letter writing software. Educational games have an
unquestionable educational potential, the curiosity of learners, especially young school children, is
an element that supports their use in classroom activities, to capture the students' attention as a
reward for a well-done activity, and also an instructive value itself. Primary teachers have
indicated that they also use tutorial software (15) and investigation software (10) and, to a lesser
extent, test / evaluation software (7)
Asked about the advantages of using educational software in didactic work with small pupils,
the opinion of the majority is that, in the didactic process, they:
- allow a good organization and systematization of the taught content;
- develops a student's investigation, search behavior that is a more advanced form of
instructional interaction;
- provide immediate feedback, preventing the acquisition of incorrect knowledge and skills;
- support concrete theoretical content with concrete elements;
- determines the increase of students' interest in the information taught
- allow the acceleration, slowing down or resumption of information;
- facilitates access to inaccessible facts, realities and events;
- provides the opportunity to observe complex phenomena that can be broken down into
component parts.
As disadvantages of the use of educational software in the teaching process, primary education
teachers have identified the following aspects:
- reduced capacity in assimilation of theoretical content;
- reflects a certain type of pedagogical approach, which belongs to the one that created the
software, hindering creativity;
- the inability to adapt to the classroom's learning needs;
- poor infrastructure: lack of equipment or non-performing equipment, problems with
compatibility of software and programs;
- the need for teachers' digital competences;
- relatively high costs of purchasing them through their own financial effort.
Conclusions
By correlating the data gathered through research, we found that educational software is an
important component of didactic strategies that is insufficiently exploited in the current Romanian
school. Through these, the teacher has the advantage of creating moments in which he can change
his role as a facilitator of information, directing the student into discovering, selecting, practicing
and consolidating knowledge. On the other hand, the teacher has the opportunity to present
students with facts and phenomena in a concrete and convincing manner.
However, school reality has demonstrated that this resource with a real educational potential
implies significant costs, improving the material basis of the classroom, respectively of the school
institution, benefiting the extension of the use of these modern means of training.
References
Adăscăliței, A. (2007): Instruireasistată de calculator. Didacticăinformatică.Polirom, Iași.
Ceobanu, C. (2016): Învățareaînmediul virtual. Ghid de utilizare a calculatoruluiîneducație. Polirom,Iași.
Ștefănescu, V. (2016): Instruireaasistată de calculator șisofturileeducaționale. Sitech, Craiova.
Ștefănescu, C. andStoican, O. (2017): Computer implementation in primary school teachingIn Proceedings of

ICVL 2017 (ISSN 1844-8933, ISI Proceedings) – the 12th International Conference on Virtual learning,
coord. Marin Vlada, october 28, 2017, p. 264-268.
Thompson, P. (2013): The digital natives as learners: Technology use patterns and approaches to learning.
Computers & Education, 65, 12-33.
Janssen J., Stoyanov, S., Ferrari, A., Punie, Y., Pannekeet, K. and Sloep, P. (2013), Experts’ views on digital
competence: commonalities and differences. Computers & Education, 68, 473–481.
doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2013.06.008, disponibil la:
http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/4986/1/Experts%E2%80%99%20Views%20on%20Digital%20Compet
encePreprint.pdf, accesed 2018.
Junco, R. and Mastrodicasa, J.(2007): Connecting to the Net. Generation: What Higher Education
Professionals Need to Know About Today’s Students. NASPA, disponibil la:
http://blog.reyjunco.com/pdf/NetGenerationProof.pdf, accesed 2018.
Prensky, M. (2005): Listen to the Natives. Learning in the Digital Age, 63(4), disponibil
la:http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el200512_prensky.pdf, accesed 2018.
Prensky, M. (2001): Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5),
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%
20-%20Part1.pdf, accesed 2018.
Online Learning Readiness Level of High School Teachers
Ersun İscioglu
Eastern Mediterranean University, Faculty of Education, Department of Computer and

Instructional Technology Teacher Education, Famagusta N.Cyprus via Mersin10 Turkey,
e-mail: ersun.iscioglu]at]emu.edu.tr
Abstract
The main aim of this study is to investigate the online learning readiness level of high
school teachers’ according to gender and age. This study designed as a quantitative survey
method. Data gathered from 136high school teachers whose areworking in 4 different schools
located Famagusta, N. Cyprus. Online Learning Readiness Scale (OLRS) and personal
information form will be used to data collection tools. OLRS developed by Hung, Chou, Chen,
and Own (2010) and adapted to Turkish by Yurdugül and Sırakaya (2013).The data collection
tools was applied to all high school teachers in the 2016-2017 terms. Data gathered as a
result of the study was analyzed with descriptive analysis, t-test and Anova. According to the
findings, discussions and suggestions are provided at the end of the study.
Keywords: Readiness, Online Learning Readiness, High School Teachers
1. Introduction
Learning environments have started to change with the innovations brought by technology in
recent years. These changes have accelerated adoption of technological innovations into the
education life with regard to solution of challenges faced in face to face education or supporting
the face to face learning process. In other words, developments have made online environments a
part of our life as well as the education life. Without a doubt, in order to anlearnng environment to
be successful, the readiness of attendees to the respective environment should be high. According
to Topses (2003), readiness is the physiological and psychological equipment necessary for an
individual to demonstrate a certain level of competence. Senemoğlu (2009) defines readiness as
having preliminary information and prerequisite skills required in learning.
Online learning environments have become increasingly popular in recent years. Many
organizations and institutions put an effort to offer learners rich contents through these means. It is
clear that the learner’s demand has increased towards these vehicle (environment). However, it
emerges as a research area how ready teachers on active duty are for these highly demanded
learning environments. Because, it would be very hard to serve learners with a learning
environment that teachers are not ready for. Online learning readiness can be defined as the user’s
mental and physical preparation to acquire certain learning experience or actions (Borotis and
Poulymenakou, 2004). According to Rowe (2000), readiness and self competency also
demonstrate how voluntary teachers are about implementing reforms. Furthermore, online learning
environments offer highly significant opportunities for teachers in the system to develop
themselves within the scope of lifelong learning and become learning individuals. Therefore, it is
of utmost importance to study readiness of teachers for these environments.
There are many scales developed to measure online learning readiness in the literature. In this
study, the Online Learning Readiness scale, developed by Hung, Chou, Chen and Own (2010) and
adapted to Turkish by Yurdugül and Sırakaya (2013) was used. It was decided to use the
respective scale based on the fact that the teaching language of respective teachers is Turkish, the
subdimensions of the scale (Computer/Internet Self-Efficacy (CSE), Self-Directed Learning
(SDL), Learner Control (LC), Motivation for Learning (ML), Online Communication Self-
Efficacy (OCSE) are comprehensive and are used (acknowledged) heavily in the literature.
The literature review revealed limited number of studies on teachers in this field. No such
study has ever been conducted on teachers engaged in the teaching profession in Northern Cyprus.
It was considered necessary to conduct this research as it was necessary to study how ready
teachers are for online learning.
Purpose
The main purpose of the study is to investigate the level of readiness of high school teachers
for online learning. Moreover, studying readiness of teachers by gender and age is also among the
purposes of the study. To reach this general target, the following questions were tried to be
answered:
1. How ready are teachers for online learning?
2. Does readiness of teachers for online learning vary by gender and age?
2. Methodology
The study was conducted using the general survey model. Survey models are approaches to
research which aim for describing a condition which occurred in the past or occurs in the present
as it is (Karasar, 2006). The study population is comprised of the teachers serving in high schools
in Mağusa district in Northern Cyprus in 2016-2017. A sample group was not created in the study
which tried to reach the entire population. The study group of the research is provided in Table 1.
Table 1: Personal Information about Teachers in the Study

N %
Female 90 66.2
Gender Male 46 33.8
22-29 39 28.7
Age 30-37 50 36.8
38 + 47 34.6
1-9 40 29.4
Experience 10-19 59
(Years) 43.4
20+ 37 27.2
As can be seen from Table 1 above, 66.2% of the participant teachers in the study are female
and 33.8% are male. In other words, the number of female teachers is almost twice the men.
Again, as can be seen from Table 1, 28.7% of the teachers are aged between 22-29, 36.8% are
between 39-37 and 34.6% are 38 and older. Moreover, as can be seen from Table 1, 29.4% of the
teachers in the study have an experience of 1-9 years, a large majority, 43.4% 10-19 years and
27.% 20 years and more.
In this study, the Online Learning Readiness Scale (OLRS), developed by Hung, Chou, Chen
and Own (2010) and adapted to Turkish by Yurdugül and Sırakaya (2013) was used. According to
the OLRS grading scale, the 5 point Likert scale was used (1= Strongly Disagree (SD), 2=Disagree
(D), 3= Natural (N), 4 = Agree (A), 5 = Strongly Agree (SA)). The scale is comprised of 18 items
in total in 5 different dimensions. Scale Dimensions are: Computer/Internet Self Efficacy (CSE) (3
items), Self Directed Learning (SDL) (5 items), Learner Control (LC) (3 items), Motivation for
Learning (ML) (4 items), Online Communication Self Efficacy (OCSE) (3 items). The
Cronbach’s Alpha value of the scale was 0.98. Data obtained with the study was analyzed in SPSS
22.0 package software. Descriptive statistics, t-test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
and Scheffe test were used for data analysis.
3.Findings and Discussion
Statistical analyses on the scores obtained in the scale and comments on these analyses are
provided under this section.
Online Learning Readiness Level of Teachers
The teachers’ answers to the online learning readiness scale are provided in Table 2 below.
Table 2:Online Learning Readiness Levels of Teachers

N Min Max Mean SD
Online Learning Readiness of
136 37 86 66.29 17.17
Teachers
As can be seen from Table 2 above, the arithmetic mean of the answers of the teachers to the
scale was 66.29 (> 54). According to this result, it can be concluded that the teachers’ readiness for
online learning is good. It is evaluated in subdimensions in Table 3 below.
Table 3: Teachers' Online Learning Readiness Evaluation by Subdimensions

N Min Max Mean SD
Computer/internet self-efficacy 136 6 14 10.75 2.84
(CIE)
Self-directedlearning (SDL) 136 14 24 20.69 3.40
Learnercontrol (LC) 136 4 15 9.85 4.17
Motivationfor Learning (ML) 136 8 18 14.08 3.50
Online communication self- 136 5 15 10.91 3.45
efficacy (OCSE)
As can be seen from Table 3 above, for the teachers, the CIE mean was 10.75 (3 items), SDL
mean was 20.69 (5 items), LC mean was 9.85 (3 items), ML mean was 14.08 (4 items) and OCSE
mean was 10.91 (3 items). According to these results, it was concluded that the teachers scored
higher than the average also in the subdimensions of online learning readiness. For the teachers in the
study, the Learner Control (9.85) dimension was the weakest. Moreover, their best dimension was
self directed learning (20.69). It was observed that teachers believed they were distracted in directing
their own learning in the online environment and also during online classes (Learner Control). It is
also considered to be useful to study this kind of challenges experienced by teachers. The results are
similar to the findings of the study of Kırmızı (2015). However, they vary from those of Sırakaya and
Yurdugül (2016). In the study of Sırakaya and Yurdugül (2016), the students at the Faculty of
Education (candidate teachers) scored the highest in Learner Control and lowest in Online Learning
Communication Self Efficacy. The reason for variances between the results of this study and those of
the study of Sırakaya and Yurdugül (2016) might be the different sample studied.
Findings on Gender, Age and Experience

T-test was conducted to study if the teachers’ online learning readiness varied by gender.
According to analysis results, the teachers’ online learning readiness did not show significant
difference by gender. Therefore, it can be suggested that the teachers’ online learning readiness
does not vary by gender. This result is similar to the results of the study of Hung, Chou, Chen and
Own (2010). However, it varies from those of Sırakaya and Yurdugül (2016). Also the study of
Çakır and Horzum (2015) on candidate teachers obtained a significant difference in candidate
teachers' self directed learning by their gender (higher in females), while it did not conclude any
significant difference in computer/internet self efficacy, control, motivation for learning and online
communication self efficacy dimensions. It can be suggested the results of this study do not vary
from the studies in the literate. Relative different results were obtained by gender also in the study
of Sırakaya and Yurdugül (2016) on candidate teachers. As a result of the respective study, female
candidate teachers scored higher than males in computer/internet self-efficacy and self-directed
learning. There was no difference between male and female candidate teachers in learner control,
motivation for learning and online communication self-efficacy.The results of the study of
Sırakaya and Yurdugül (2016) vary to a certain extent from the results of this study. The reason for
such difference might be working with teachers who got into the profession.
One way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Scheffe post-hoc test were applied to
evaluate if the teachers’ online learning readiness varied by age. According to analysis results, the
teachers’ online learning readiness did not show significant difference by age. Therefore, it can be
suggested that the teachers’ online learning readiness does not vary by age. Çakır and Horzum
(2015) found no significant difference in the online learning readiness subdimensions by age
among the candidate teachers. In conclusion, this finding obtained from the study is also in line
with the findings in the literature.
Conclusion
At the end of the study, it was determined that the online learning readiness levels of the high
school teachers were good. Considering the subdimensions evaluated in the study, the teachers
scored the highest in Self-Directed Learning (SDL), Motivation (ML), Online Communication
Self-Efficacy (OCSE), Computer/Internet Self-Efficacy (CIE) and the lowest in Learner Control.
Generally, however, it was concluded that the teachers scored higher than the average also in the
subdimensions of online learning readiness. Additionally, in the study, the teachers’ online
learning readiness did not show significant difference by gender or age.
It is considered to be useful to make the study in different areas with a larger sample and
compare results accordingly. Moreover, it is believed evaluating how well the preliminary
preparation of the group in student status is while preparing online learning environments would
directly affect the success of the application. Thus, it would be useful for those who arrange or
implement the online learning environment to measure readiness levels of the learner group in
their studies.
References
Borotis, S. A.,& Poulymenakou, A. (2004). E-Learning readiness components: Key issues to consider before
adopting e-learning interventions. Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate,
Government, Healthcare, andHigherEducation, Washington, USA.
Çakır, Ö andHorzum, M. B. (2015). TheExamination of the Readiness Levels of TeacherCandidatesfor
Online Learning in Terms of VariousVariables. Journal of TheoryandPractice in Education. 11(1), 1-15.
Hung, M., Chou, C., Chen, C., and Own, Z. (2010). Learnerreadinessforonlinelearning:
Scaledevelopmentandstudentperceptions, Computers&Education, 55, 1080–1090.
Karasar, N.(2006). Bilimsel Araştırma Yöntemi. Ankara: Nobel Yayın Dağıtım.
Kırmızı, Ö. (2015). TheInfluence of Learner Readiness on StudentSatisfactionandAcademicAchievement in
an Online Program at HigherEducation. TOJET: TheTurkish Online Journal of EducationalTechnology.
14(1). 133-142.
Rowe, B.W. (2000). Theinfluence of teacherefficacyandreadinessfor self-directedlearning on
theimplementation of a growthorientedteacherperformanceappraisalprocess. Paperpresented at theAnnual
Meeting of theAmericanEducationalResearchAssociation, New Orleans, LA.
Senemoğlu, N. (2009). Gelişim, öğrenme ve öğretim kuramdan uygulamaya. Ankara: PegemA Yayıncılık.
Sırakaya, D. A. andYurdugül, H (2016). Öğretmen Adaylarının Çevrimiçi Öğrenme Hazır Bulunuşluluk
Düzeylerinin İncelenmesi: Ahi Evran Üniversitesi Örneği. Ahi Evran Üniversitesi Kırşehir Eğitim
Fakültesi Dergisi (KEFAD). 17(1). 185-200.
Topses, G. (2003). Gelişim ve öğrenme psikolojisi. Ankara: Nobel Yayın Dağıtım.
Yurdugül, H. andSırakaya, D. A. (2013). Çevrimiçi öğrenme hazırbulunuşlulukölçeği: Geçerlik ve güvenirlik
çalışması. Eğitim ve Bilim, 38(169), 391-406.
Impact of Online Learning on the Environmental Awareness: An
Opinions of Secondary School Teachers
Ersun İscioglu*, Deniz Iscioglu**
* Eastern Mediterranean University, Faculty of Education, Department of Computer and

Instructional Technology Teacher Education, Famagusta N.Cyprus via Mersin10 Turkey,
e-mail: ersun.iscioglu[at]emu.edu.tr
**Eastern Mediterranean University, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of
Business Administration, Public Administration Program, Famagusta N.Cyprus via
Mersin10 Turkey
Abstract
The aim of this study is to inquire the effect of online learning on secondary school
teachers’ on the environmental awareness. Within this scope, the effect of online learning on
teachers’ environmental awareness and the effectiveness of the environment were assessed
within the framework of teacher opinions. The study was designed as a qualitative research.
The data were collected by means of the focus group interview method conducted as a result
of the study. The working group of the study is composed of a total 42 secondary school
teachers working in two different secondary schools located at Famagusta, N.Cyprus. Data
gathered as a result of the study was analysed with descriptive analysis. According to the
findings, discussions and suggestions are provided at the end of the study.
Keywords: Online Learning Environment, Environmental Awareness, Secondary School

Teachers
1. Introduction
Today, environmental problems affect all of humanity. Together, with globalization,
environmental problems are now not only a problem of the society we live in, but a common issue
that affects the entire world. Increasing the awareness of individuals of the society towards
environmental problems is considered to be one of the most important steps to take in the solving
of environmental problems. It is particularly essential to increase the environmental awareness of
the youth of the society. Therefore, the most important duty is undertaken by the teachers who
educate them.
According to Gifford, Hay and Boros (1983), the attitude towards the environment and
environmental friendly behaviors are affected by the past experiences of the individual and
therefore, start to be shaped at very early ages. Daily lives of children outside school also
contribute to creating approaches towards the environment. However, as kids spend most of their
time in school, school and in-school learning are also very important for the environmental
consciousness. At this point, a huge responsibility awaits teachers. According to Eames and Barker
(2011), in environment education, teachers are expected to ensure their students gain experiences
about the environment and sustainability, offer them opportunities of fulfilling their capacities and
of creating their own knowledge, help them create a vision for a sustainable future and generate
efficient solutions to environmental problems.
This is also closely related to the environment policies of countries. Individuals’ consciousness
about the environment and their use of environmental resources are parallel to each other.
Awareness about sparse resources and efficient use of resources positively affect sustainable
environment policies. For this reason, education for the environment should become a state policy.
Human is one of the fundamental components of the environment. Human and environment
interaction cannot be ignored. The increase in environmental problems with globalization is again
explained by human activities. Under these conditions, educating human beings is considered a big
step in preventing future environmental problems.
Teachers, therefore, should take the role of the main actor in establishing environmental
awareness. Yet, teachers to take this fundamental role are also required to have high environmental
awareness. Recent studies demonstrate teachers have training in various topics through online
learning. The literature review revealed very limited number of studies on increasing
environmental awareness of students in the online learning environment. Similarly, in the
literature, there is no study for evaluating environmental awareness of the teachers in Northern
Cyprus with contents prepared in the online environment. Therefore, it was decided to make a
study on the impact of the online learning environment on teachers’ environmental awareness.
2. Purpose of the Study

The aim of this study is to inquire the effect of online learning on secondary school teachers’
on the environmental awareness. Within this scope, the effect of online learning on teachers’
environmental awareness and the effectiveness of the environment were assessed within the
framework of teacher opinions.
To reach this general target, the following questions were tried to be answered:
1. What are the teachers’ opinions on the impact of the online environment on
environmental awareness?
2. What are the teachers’ opinions on the online learning environment?
3. Method
This study was designed as qualitative research. As known, in qualitative studies, qualitative
data collection methods such as observation, discussion and document analysis are used and
perceptions and incidents are tried to be manifested in a realistic and holistic manner (Yıldırım and
Şimşek, 2005). Data was collected through the focus group discussions method in the study.
“Focus groups provide a rich and detailed set of data about perceptions, thoughts, feelings and
impressions of group members in their own words” (Stewart and Shamdasani, 1990, p. 140).
Focus group discussions allow us to comprehend the common perceptions in daily life and the
ways individuals are affected by others in the group (Kuş, 2003).
Focus group discussions were held with the semi structured interview form. The literature was
researched and then the opinions of field experts were taken while preparing the interview
questions. The interview questions were presented to field experts from education faculties of
universities, necessary corrections were made upon expert opinions and the interview form was
finalized. Teachers attended the focus group discussions voluntarily and discussions were held
outside school hours. Within the scope of the study, the teachers were given training on the
environmental awareness for 3 weeks (a total of 9 hours) in an online learning environment.
Moodle LMS was used in the online learning environment.The working group of the study is
composed of a total 42 secondary school teachers working in two different secondary schools
located at Famagusta, N.Cyprus.
The study group of the study is comprised of 42 teachers in secondary schools (2 different
schools) in Mağusa district of Northern Cyprus in 2016-2017. Data was collected by making focus
group interviews at the end of the 9 hour class with the teachers who attended the classes
organized in the online environment based on the voluntary principle. A voice recording device
was used while collecting data. Thus, the entire data collected was backed up. Personal
information about the teachers in the study is given in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Personal Information about Teachers

n %
Gender Female 24 57,1
Male 18 42,9
Experience 0–8 11 26,2
9 – 15 21 50,0
16 + 10 23,8
As can be seen from Table 1 above, 24 (57.1%) of the participant teachers in the study are
female and 18 (42.9%) are male. Again, as can be seen from Table 1, half of the participants
(50%) had 9-15 years of teaching experience.
Data collected with the study (interview records) was transferred to the computer environment.
Data transferred to the computer environment was analyzed with the descriptive analysis method.
Data obtained with the descriptive analysis was summarized and interpreted according to pre-
determined themes (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2005).
Findings
In this section, findings from the study are presented in parallel to the research questions.
Teachers’ Opinions on the Impact of The Online Environment on Environmental
Awareness
From the analysis of the responses of the teachers, it was determined that a large majority of
them were satisfied with the education they received in the online environment and thought it
created a positive impact. Some of the statements from discussions are:
“…The online environment proved to be very useful in terms

ofboth presentation of materials and flexibility it offered….”
“…It was very enjoyable to take lessons in the online

environment.. Its flexibility helped us following the lesson. Videos
about the classes motivated us in a positive way..."
“…It was very fun, we had a chat with our friends whenever we
wanted, we watched videos over and over as we wished, it was very
enjoyable….”
“…Especially its flexible structure allowed us to move more

freely. We we able to plan ourselves without exhaustion outside
school hours. Therefore, it was more efficient for us...”
From the statements above, it can be concluded that the teachers were satisfied with the
online environment because of presentation of online materials, flexibility offered by the
environment, online communication, being able to making their own learning plans and having
fun. The quality of the materials presented and the teaching period not being long might have had
an impact on these results. There are some, albeit a few, teachers who expressed negative opinions
in this respect. Some of these opinions are as follows:
“…I am not very efficient in using computers. Sometimes,

it was hard for me to follow some topics…”
“…The internet infrastructure is not very strong in our

country, connecting from the school was very challenging... “
“…Sometimes, I was disconnected while watching the

videos…”
Based on the foregoing statements, the teachers were rather negatively affected by
conditions with the infrastructure than the online environment. Connection problems emphasized
by the teachers are very important problems, which might have impaired their interest in the class.
The teachers evaluated the impact of the online environment on environmental awareness high.
“…The online environment was very useful for developing my

environmental awareness. Thanks to it, I was able to distinguish
environmental problems I was not aware of before…”
“… The online class I took certainly affected my environmental

awareness in a positive way. From now on, I will share what I saw in
the class with my students…”
“…I will share the materials in the class I took with my students.
The materials were very interesting, of high visibility...”
As can be understood from the foregoing statements, the teachers believe the materials
presented in the online environment made a positive impact on their environmental awareness. It
can be concluded that especially interesting online materials with high visibility impacted the
teachers. No teacher expressed any negative statements in this respect. From this point of view, it
can be suggested that all of the teachers believe online learning positively affected their
environmental awareness.
Moreover, another point that almost all of the teachers agreed upon was that they were
willing to take further classes based on such practice. Some of their statements are as follows:
“… I was very impressed with the practice for both the

environment's flexibility and its interesting structure. I
would like to attend such session again…”
“…I wish there are applications like this in other topics.

I would be able to have classes whenever and wherever I
desire…”
“…I have to learn something new on a continuous basis

because of my field (ICT). It would be better to have this
type of practices in other topics. Therefore, I will be able to
reach information whenever I want...”
As can be understood from the foregoing statements, the teachers think of having classes
again in the online environment. This shows they were positively affected by the environment.
Teachers’ Opinionson the Online Learning Environment
A large majority of the teachers expressed positive opinions about the online learning
environment. Some of their views are as follows:
“… The (online) environment was very well designed.

At least, it had all contents to fulfill our needs, especially
the class contents were presented highly orderly…”
“… I can say it sufficed generally. We especially used

the forum and chat options…”
“… It was an easy to use environment. We were able

to reach information we wanted...”
“… Especially the presentation of videos and

interactive materials was very good. Videos we watched
in the system prepared us much better. We were able to
reach all videos as we pleased…”
“… The system was designed in a structure which

could be used at all times and tried to keep us in the topic
with constant messages. Therefore, I can the design was
pretty suitable…”
As can be understood from the foregoing statements, it can be concluded that the teachers
were satisfied with LMS (Moodle). The teachers especially found highly sufficient presenting
class contents in an order, availability of forum and chat options, flexible structure of LMS, easy
presentation of videos and materials in the system.
There are some teachers who expressed negative opinions on the system. However, they
are in a limited number. Below are the statements of the teachers who had a negative view:
“…My connection was very slow. I didn’t understand if

my connection was very slow or the system worked very
slow. I had problems every time I logged in…”
“…The systems screen design was very plain. It was

very simple.
“…A better screen design and colours might be

necessary. I can say what I saw was behind today’s
systems...”
“…Especially the chat platform was not visually

sufficient, it might have a more updated structure…”
As can be seen from the foregoing statements, the negative views of the teachers on the
online learning environment focus on connection and design problems. It is required to eliminate
current infrastructure problems to eliminate these problems. Moreover, it is considered very
important to further develop the visual design of LMS to meet the expectations of users.
Conclusion
This study evaluated the impact of the online learning environment on environmental
awareness of secondary school teachers. It was concluded that the teachers were satisfied with the
online environment because of presentation of online materials, flexibility offered by the
environment, online communication, being able to making their own learning plans and having
fun. Moreover, it was determined the teachers thought the materials presented in the online
environment had a positive impact on their environmental awareness. It was found out the
problems of the teachers were caused by internet connection problems. Additionally, the teachers
were satisfied with LMS (Moodle). The teachers especially found highly sufficient presenting
class contents in an order, availability of forum and chat options, flexible structure of LMS, easy
presentation of videos and materials in the system.
In conclusion, it is clear environment education offered using today's technologies offers
benefits for not only our own era but also future generations. More importance should be paid to
education for the environment to create a sustainable environment.
References
Eames, C. and Barker, M. (2011). Understanding student learning in environmental education in Aotearoa
New Zealand. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 27(1), 186-191.
Gifford, R., Hay, R., andB oros, K. (1983). Individual Differences in Environmental Attitudes, Journal of
Education, 14(2), 19- 23.
Kuş, E. (2003). Nicel-Nitel Araştırma Teknikleri (Quantitative-Qualitative Research Methods). Ankara: Anı
Yayıncılık.
Stewart D. And Shamdasani P.N. (1990) Focus Groups: Theory and Practice. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, USA.
Yıldırım, A. And Şimşek, H. (2005). SosyalBilimlerde Nitel AraştırmaYöntemleri (Qualitative Research
Method on Social Sciences) (Genişletilmiş 5.Baskı). Ankara: SeçkinYayınları.
Perceived intensity and causes of criticism within romantic
relationships. Findings from a Romanian sample
Andreea Ursu1
(1) Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, 700704, Romania

E-mail: ursu.anndreea[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Research suggests that criticism has destructive effects on dyadic satisfaction and its
outcomes. Although, effects of criticism on relational dynamic have been examined, individual
beliefs about which kind of situations made them feeling criticized within their romantic
relationships have not been explored. The current study extends existing research by
investigating the perceived causes of criticism in two contextual conditions: victim and
perpetrator. More precisely, the aims of study are: (a) assessing the criticism level
experienced within their romantic relationships in the last 2 weeks, (b) underlying the
dimensions which characterizing persons explanations about criticism experienced within
their romantic relationships, and (c) presenting similarities and differences of perceived
causes of criticism for the two contextual conditions. We have used an online approach for
both, reaching the participants and collecting the data, taking into account the development
of technology in research field. Results suggest nine factors characterizing the perceived
causes of criticism experienced within romantic relationships. Implications for couples
therapy and research on romantic relationships are discussed.
Keywords: Criticism, Romantic relationships, Causes, Intensity
1. Introduction
Criticism is attracting considerable interest in the areas of romantic relationship and substance
abuse because of its effects on predicting divorce and relapse. Initially, in the area of substance
abuse, criticism was studied as perceived criticism from one spouse, while in the area of romantic
relationships it was studied as actual criticism (established by independent observators).
Recent research have compared the perceptions of criticism in marriage - perceived and actual
(established by independent observers and by the criticizing spouses themselves) with the purpose
to extend the existing knowledge of criticism. Even, the concept of criticism and its effects on
romantic relationships dynamics have received much attention in the last 2 decades, there is still a
need for studying the causes of criticism experienced within romantic relationships.
2. Criticism – affective pattern

2.1. Definition
Criticism is an affective pattern, which together with defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling
describe the listener’s withdrawal and disengagement (emotional or physical) from the interaction
(Gottman, 1993). It is defined as a complaining with added blaming, characterized by negative
global assessment of a person’s abilities or value as a human being. During a typical interaction
characterized by criticism, one of the partners attributes a motive, behavior or feeling to the other
one, which suggest that the partner’s personality is defective. Moreover, criticism is a complaining
accompanied by “you never” or “you always” statements (Gottman & Levenson, 1999; Coan &
Gottman, 2007). Thus, criticism is the generalization of a certain partners behavior to their entire
personality, which is taken as an assault.
2.2. Associated emotions and relationships with other concepts

Criticism can be seen as a negative spousal feedback which may be associated with the
reduction of feelings of intimacy between partners and with a high level of negative emotions.
Moreover, Gruen et al., (1994) suggest that female’s criticism level leads to negative moods, as
anxiety, lack of confidence and security, for their male partners. In addition, Gottman (1993)
suggest that partners’ conflict conversations characterized by criticism are accompanied by a
negative voice tone or a facial expression which indicates a judgmental attitude.
There is a considerable amount of literature on criticism and its effects. In the last 3 decades,
Gottman and his team have investigated the factors which predict the dissolution of one marriage.
They concluded that criticism accompanied by defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling are
predicting the divorce with a 94% accuracy (Gottman, 1993; Gottman & Silver, 2004).
Furthermore, many attempts have been made in order to clarify the relationship between
perceived criticism and marital outcomes. For example, perceived criticism from partner is
negatively correlated with emotional support from spouse; positively correlated with dependence
on spouse and significantly correlated with negative interactions with spouse (Kwon et al., 2006);
and it is related to depresive symptoms (Smith & Peterson, 2008). Thus, it seems that the more one
partner is perceived as being critical, the more likely is that the other partner will report general
relationship distress.
2.3. Coan and Gottman’s indicators for criticism

The following indicators are presented in the new version of Specific Affect Coding System
(SPAFF) (Coan & Gottman, 2007). The purpose of SPAFF is to systematically observe the
affective behavior in the context of marital conflict. One of the affective patterns analyzed is
criticism. They suggested that criticism “functions as an attack on someone’s character or
personality in a way that is not obviously insulting” (p.274).
In their vision, criticism is characterized by 5 indicators: (a) blaming, (b) character attacks, (c)
kitchen sinking, (d) betrayal statements, and (e) negative mind reading.
To start with, blaming is an affectative pattern in which persons assigan fault to their partners,
along with personal attack or global accusation. Character attacks are defined as “you never/you
always” generalizations, atributed to partner’s personality or abilities in very general ways.
Kitchen sinking is a list of complaints which illustrate the incompetence or personality’s defects of
their partner. Betrayal statements are related specifically to lack of trust or commitment; the
partner is perceived as not committed untrustworthy or both. And, finally, negative mind reading
is related to the mindreading statements attributions about their partners feelings, behaviors or
motives.
The principal aim of the present study was to extend current knowledge on the concept of
criticism by investigating the causes which people associate with the feeling of being criticized
experienced within their romantic relationship. More precisely, the focus was on (a) assessing the
criticism level experienced within their romantic relationships in the last 2 weeks, (b) underlying
the dimensions which characterizing persons explanations about criticism experienced within their
romantic relationships, and (c) presenting similarities and differences of perceived causes of
criticism for the two contextual conditions.
3. Method
3.1. Participants
The target population was young-adults, involved in one romantic relationship aged between
18-30 years, living in Romania. The sample comprised a total of 81 persons (84% females), with
an average of relationship length 35.32 months (SD = 26.97) and with an average age of 23.46
(SD = 3.26).
For a more detailed description of the sample characteristics, see Table 1.
Table 1 – Sample characteristic
Variables
Sex
M 13 (16%)
F 68 (84%)
Age years 23.46 (18-30)
Mean (range)
Education
High school 26 (32.1%)
Bachelor 32 (39.5%)
Master 21 (25.9%)
PhD 2 (2.5%)
Length (months) 35.32 (2-122)
(mean+range)
Marital status
Involved in a 57 (70.4%)
committed rel
Engaged 19 (23.5%)
Married 5 (6.2%)
3.2. Procedure
Participants were recruited through Facebook to complete a survey about behaviors in romantic
relationships, in their mother tongue. The recruitment procedure it was organized as following:
asking for permission to join all the groups we have found on Facebook with the name of cities
from Romania and with the universities names. When we received the permission we have posted
the announcement for our study with the link where the questionnaire could be filled out. After 2-3
weeks we have posted the same message again. We have collected the data using the platform
Web-survey which offer the possibility to assure that participants will fill out the open-ended
questions with a number of characters decided before.
3.3. Measurement
The online survey was structured as following: providing the informed consent, measure of
criticism intensity level experienced within their relationship in their last 2 weeks, 2 open-ended
questions: one for presenting a situation in which they have felt being criticized by their partner
(victim condition) and the second one for presenting a situation in which their partner have been
feeling criticized by participant (perpetrator condition). The last part of questionnaire was related
to demographic questions (gender, age, education, length of relationship and marital status)
4. Results
Coding strategy
Deductive and inductive analysis (Bulmer, 1979) and thematic approach were used to analyze
the content of participants’ responses. For objectivity, two native Romanian coders read all of the
responses and independently categorized participants’ content.
Moreover, one of two coders has prepared a list of categories based on participants’ responses,
but, also, taking into account the criticism’ indicators proposed by Coan and Gottman (2007). The
definition for each category was developed by the first coder and the second coder was provided
with them. The coding schema that emerged from this process then was employed by each of the
two coders to independently categorize the data. Disagreements related to categories or definitions
were discussed and consensus was found.
The aims of the current study are three-fold:1) examining criticism intensity experienced in
the last 2 week in their romantic relationship; 2) presenting the perceived causes of criticism
experienced in the two conditions: victim and perpetrator, and (3) presenting the similarities and
differences of perceived causes of criticism for the two contextual conditions. The results part it
divided in three parts, one for each aim.
4.1. Criticism intensity

For assessing the criticism intensity experienced in their relationship, in the last 2 weeks, a set
of descriptive statistics was computed. Thus, 27,2% felt not at all criticized by their partner, while
almost 5% felt a very high level of criticism. Moreover, the mean of criticism experienced in the
last 2 weeks is 2.31 (S.D.=1.15).
4.2. Perceived causes of criticism experienced in romantic relationships, in the social

condition victim.
The situations presented in the open-data items, concerning the criticism, experienced in their
romantic relationships because of their partner ,were codded by using the procedure detailed
above. Over 80% of data could be codded in one of the six categories presented in Table 2. The last
20% was codded in either “Never, not the case” category (15%) or “not categorized” category (5%).
Table 2. Categories, definitions, examples of perceived causes and relative percent for criticism,
in victim social context.
Category Definition Example %
Blaming: Accuses, making someone
“Cand m-a invinovatit de lipsa de comunicare dintre noi”/
feeling guilty about something, 21 (17)
“Reprosuri pe chestii marunte”/
reproaches, faulting.
Expectations not met: Expectations 10 (8)
of one partner are not met (not doing
something which is supposed to do it “Cand nu imi ia partenerul apararea”
because of the type of relationship
they have).
Disapproval: Expression of an “Cand incerc sa-i explic si un alt tip de viziune asupra
unfavorable opinion; differences unui lucru”/ 21 (17)
between life’s perspectives “Cand nu e cum vrea el”
4 (3)
Judgment: Having an judgmental “Cand m-am simtit judecata dupca ce i-am povestit istoria
attitude about partner’s past, way of mea amoroasa”/
being; “pentru lucrurile pe car imi place sa le fac”
Disdain: Expressions of “Indiferent ce faceam nu era bine”/
7 (6)
unworthiness; lack of consideration “De fiecare data cand crede ca lucrurile facute de mine,
toward the partner nu sunt la fel de bune ca cele facute de el”.
“Atunci cand partenerul a insistat asupra schimbarii
Pressure to change: Demanding for
fizice”/
changing issues related to the partner
“Mereu imi spunea ca nu sunt la nivel si ce trebuie sa 11 (9)
(physical appearance, behavior) or
schimb”/
related to the relationship
“Nu sunt exact cum vrea sa fiu”
Daily house/car activities: Unequal “Stii doar sa faci dezordine in masina si nu ma ajuti
sharing of housekeeping or car niciodata sa fac curat”/
5 (4)
cleaning activities; little interest for “Desfasurarea activitatilor practice”/
cooking “De ce nu ai dus gunoiul astazi?”
*numbers between parenthesis are the absolute frequencies
4.3. Perceived causes of criticism experienced in romantic relationships, in the social

condition perpetrator
To examine distinctions in peoples perceived causes of criticism in which the criticized their
partner, we have used the same categories and we have created new categories for the situations
which could not have been codded in none of the preestablished list of categories. In the social
context perpetrator, participants had to describe a situation in which they were the perpetrator and
their partner was the victim. More precisely, they had to describe a situation in which they
criticized their partner.
Comparing with the social context victim, for social context perpetrator there are 3 new
principal categories (teasing, conflict and grammar). Because of participants answers, we have
decided to create a new category for the answers as “I don’t know”, “I don’t remember”. Over
85% of participants responses were coddable into one the 9 categories. The last 15 % was distributed as
following: “Never, not the case” (5%), “Not categorized” (4%), “I don’t know” (6%).
Table 3. Categories, definitions, exemples of situations and relative frequencies for criticism, in
perpetrator social condition.
Category Definition Example %
Blaming: Accuses, making „Cand ii arunc in fata greselile din trecut”/
someone feeling guilty about „Cand ii reprosez ca petrece prea putin timp cu familia”/ 20 (16)
something, reproaches, faulting. „Cand ii reprosez diverse chestiuni de comportament”
Expectations not met: Expectations
6 (5)
of one partner are not met (not doing
something which is supposed to do “Cand incerc sa ii explic ce ar trebui sa faca in relatie”
it because of the type of relationship
they have).
Disapproval: Expression of an „Cand nu facea ce voiam eu”/
unfavorable opinion; differences „Cand incerc sa ii explic ceea ce nu-mi place”/ 14 (11)
between life’s perspectives
1 (1)
Judgment: Having an judgmental
attitude about partner’s past, way of “Cand faceam comparatii cu alte personae si el”
being;
Pressure to change: Demanding for
“Cand ii spun ca e prea fixist”/
changing issues related to the
“Cand incerc sa ii spun c ear trebui sa schimbe ca lucrurile
partner (physical appearance, 22 (18)
sa mearga mai bine”/
behavior) or related to the
“Cand ii spun ca ar trebui sa slabeasca”
relationship
Daily house/car activities: Unequal
“La greselile efectuate in activitatile casnice”/
sharing of housekeeping or car
“Momentul in care i-am spus ca nu ma ajuta cu nimic in 12 (10)
cleaning activities; little interest for
casa’
cooking
Teasing: partner teasing, nagging “Cand il cicalesc” 1 (1)
Conflict: fighting interactions “La fiecare cearta” 5 (4)
Grammar: one partner is correcting
“Corectarea greselilor gramaticale’ 4 (3)
grammatical errors of the other ones
Conclusions
Research suggest that criticism is an affective pattern which acts as an attack on someone’s
character or personality. For having a more holistic view of the concept of criticism, we have been
assessed it by using a social contextual approach: victim and perpetrator. Thus, firstly, the
participants are victims and are presenting a situation in which they have felt being criticized by
their partners, while secondly, the participants are the perpetrators presenting a situation in which
their partners have felt critized by them.
Criticism is a generalization of someone’s defective personality (Coan & Gottman, 2007).
Indeed, many of the causes presented by participants are in the area of inadecuacy of their abilities
and value as human being (in the victim social context) or of an inadecuacy of partner’s abilities
(in the perpretator social condition).
For instance, two of the most frequently noted categories were blaming and disapproval.
Both of these perceived causes involved circumstancies in which people are not feeling that they
are acceptated how their are. Explanations involving jugdment and pressure to change reflect an
undermining of self-concept of the victim. The victims are feeling alienated or far away from their
partners. These behaviors may decrease the self-confidence, by making them to doubt their
competence or self-worth, and it may affect the emotional bond between partners.
Unexpectedly, there is the conflict category which it is specific for perpetrator social
context. One posible explination for this, it might be the high number of female participants. Due
the fact that, in our study have participated just heterosexual romantic relationships, it is probably,
that male are feeling more critized during a conflict than female. Men tend to avoid the conflict,
while women tend to start most of the marital conflict discussions (Gottman & Levenson, 1999).
Moreover, it appears another category – grammar which might suggests men feelings of
inferiority in this area.
In the following we will present the similarities and differences related to the perceived
causes of criticism, in the two social contexts: victim and perpetrator. Open-ended data from the
victim social context has been codded into 6 categories, while the open-ended data from
perpetrator has been codded into 9 categories. Thus, there are 6 commune categories (blaming,
expectations not met, disapproval, judgment, pressure to change and daily house/car activities) and
3 (teasing, conflict, grammar) which are specific for perpetrator context. In addition, it should be
mentioned that for perpretator context, another category has been created for covering answers as
”I don’t know”. These differences might be explained by the sample gender composition.
To sum up, the results of the present study represent an intend to extind the growing body of
literature related to criticism by presenting the perceived causes of criticism and the differences
and similarities for the perceived causes in two social contexts.
Although, considerable progress has been made made with regard of how individual feel and
the way people situate themselves in social and relational context, the present study clearly has
some limitations. Firstly, given the sample size and its composition, caution must be taken when
interpreting the results. Secondly, the auto-selection of participants. Due the fact that we have
invited people to participate using social media tools, we do not know if there are differences
between the persons which have participated at the study and persons which have seen the link,
but they did not participated.
This work revealed that the perceived causes of criticism experienced within romantic
relationships are related to the inadequacy of partner’s personality. The results allow the
practitioners from psychological and psychotherapeutic practice to develop and use new methods
and interventions that may reduce the negative effects of criticism and teaching the partners to ask
for metting the needs in a “softer”.
These findings suggest the need for future systematic research on affective patterns during
conflict conducted in order to provide knowledge on affective pattern as criticism and must
consider different age cohort, different marital status, different cultural groups (European samples)
and a more equivalent group on demagraphic variables as gender.
References
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J.J.B, Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (pp. 106-123). New York: NY: Oxford
University Press.
Fals-Stewart, W., O'Farrell, T. J., & Hooley, J. M. (2001): Relapse among married or cohabitating substance-
abusing patients: the role of perceived criticism. Behavior Therapy 32, 787-801.
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A Longitudinal View of Five Types of Couples. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 61, 1(6-
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Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1999): Dysfunctional marital conflict. Journal of Divorce and
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in unipolar depression - Findings from a Korean Sample. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 13,
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A Comparative Approach to the Impact of 2D Animations and
3D Computer Animated Movies in Students’ Cognitive
Process of Comprehension
Stanca-Maria Iurean
Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Psychology and Science of

Education, 7, Sindicatelor Street, 400029, Cluj-Napoca, Cluj County, Romania
E-mail: stanca.maria.iurean[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Nowadays, Romanian children at least, are interested in animated movies, mostly 3D
computer animated movies. The current paper presents a comparative approach to the impact
of 2D animations and 3D computer animated movies in students’ cognitive process of
comprehension. The study took place in two preparatory classes in a public educational
institution from Cluj county and it presents data collected from teachers’ observation sheets
and students’ tests during the implementation of curricular activities based on 2D animations
and 3D computer animated movies. Teachers’ observation sheets and students’ tests were
filled during a debriefing process of the watched movies. Therefore, the data collected from
the two preparatory classes indicate the way these animated movie-based activities facilitate
students’ process of comprehension. The main purpose of the study was the investigation of
the way preparatory school students comprehend similar contents presented through 2D
animated movies and through 3D computer animated movies.
Keywords: 2D animations, 3D computer animated movies, debriefing, comprehension
1. Introduction
Media is an alternative resource of information. Stories, myths and fairy tales are used as a role
model by children to help them understand themselves and their surrounding.
Modern animated movies for children offer information about nature, science, Universe and
many other useful areas. Their stories also have an impact on personal development.
Most preparatory classes children can’t read, due to the fact that they are 5-6 years old.
Therefore, the best way for them to obtain information is through images or audio-video means,
including animations.
There are many types of animation. The ones considered in the current paper are 2D
animations and 3D computer animated movies.
2. Theoretical framework
2.1. 2D and 3D animations
Animation is a dynamic medium in which images or objects are manipulated to appear as
moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on
transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film.
Traditional animation (also called cel animation or hand-drawn animation) was the process
used for most animated films of the 20th century (White, 2006). The individual frames of a
traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, first drawn on paper (Beckerman,
2003). To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it.
The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets called cels
(Thomas and Johnston, 1998), which are filled in with paints in assigned colors or tones on the
side opposite the line drawings (Laybourne, 1998). The completed character cels are photographed
one-by-one against a painted background by a rostrum camera onto motion picture film (White,
2006).
The traditional cel animation process became obsolete by the beginning of the 21st century.
Today, animators' drawings and the backgrounds are either scanned into or drawn directly into a
computer system (White, 2006; Buchan, 2013). Various software programs are used to color the
drawings and simulate camera movement and effects (Culhane, 1990). The final animated piece is
output to one of several delivery media, including traditional 35 mm film and newer media
with digital video (Laybourne,1998; Buchan, 2013). The "look" of traditional cel animation is still
preserved, and the character animators' work has remained essentially the same over the past 70
years (Wiliams, 2001). Some animation producers have used the term "tradigital" (a play on the
words "traditional" and "digital") to describe cel animation that uses significant computer
technology.
Examples of traditionally animated feature films include Pinocchio - United States, 1940
(Solomon, 1989), Animal Farm - United Kingdom, 1954, Lucky and Zorba - Italy, 1998, The
Lorax – US, 1972 and The Illusionist - British-French, 2010. Traditionally animated films
produced with the aid of computer technology include The Lion King - US, 1994, The Prince of
Egypt - US, 1998, Akira - Japan, 1988 (Beckerman, 2003), Spirited Away - Japan, 2001, The
Triplets of Belleville - France, 2003, and The Secret of Kells Irish-French-Belgian, 2009.
Computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the unifying factor being that the
animation is created digitally on a computer (Culhane, 1990; Serenko, 2007). 2D animation
techniques tend to focus on image manipulation while 3D techniques usually build virtual worlds
in which characters and objects move and interact (Masson, 2007). 3D animation can create
images that seem real to the viewer (Serenko, 2007).
2D animation figures are created or edited on the computer using 2D bitmap graphics and
2D vector graphics (Masson, 2007). This includes automated computerized versions of traditional
animation techniques, interpolated morphing (Sito, 2013), onion skinning (Priebe, 2006) and
interpolated rotoscoping.
2D animation has many applications, including analog computer animation, Flash animation,
and PowerPoint animation. Cinemagraphs are still photographs in the form of an animated GIF file
of which part is animated (White, 2006).
Final line advection animation is a technique used in 2D animation (Lowe and Schnotz,
2008), to give artists and animators more influence and control over the final product as everything
is done within the same department (Masson, 2007). Speaking about using this approach
in Paperman, John Kahrs said that "Our animators can change things, actually erase away the
computer-generated underlayer if they want, and change the profile of the arm" (Beck, 2012).
3D animation is digitally modeled and manipulated by an animator. The animator usually starts
by creating a 3D polygon mesh to manipulate (Masson, 2007). A mesh typically includes many
vertices that are connected by edges and faces, which give the visual appearance of form to a 3D
object or 3D environment (Masson, 2007). Sometimes, the mesh is given an internal digital
skeletal structure called an armature that can be used to control the mesh by weighting the vertices
(Masson, 2007; Sito, 2013). This process is called rigging and can be used in conjunction with
keyframes to create movement (Sito, 2013).
Other techniques can be applied, mathematical functions (e.g., gravity, particle simulations),
simulated fur or hair, and effects, fire and water simulations (Masson, 2007). These techniques fall
under the category of 3D dynamics (Lowe and Schnotz, 2008).
3D terms
 Cel-shaded animation is used to mimic traditional animation using computer software.
Shading looks stark, with less blending of colors. Examples include Skyland - 2007,
France, The Iron Giant - 1999, United States), Futurama Fox, 1999, Appleseed Ex
Machina - 2007, Japan, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - 2002, Japan, The Legend
of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 2017, Japan
 Machinima – Films created by screen capturing in video games and virtual worlds. The
term originated from the software introduction in the 1980s demoscene, as well as the
1990s recordings of the first-person shooter video game Quake.
 Motion capture is used when live-action actors wear special suits that allow computers to
copy their movements into computer-generated characters (Masson, 2007; Sito,
2013). Examples include Polar Express - 2004, US, Beowulf -2007, US, A Christmas
Carol - 2009, US, The Adventures of Tintin - 2011, US, Kochadiiyan - 2014, India
 Photo-realistic animation is used primarily for animation that attempts to resemble real
life, using advanced rendering that mimics in detail skin, plants, water, fire, clouds, etc.
(Parent, 2007). Examples include: Up - 2009, US, How to Train Your Dragon -2010, US,
The Lorax – 2012, US, and many other recent movies.
2.2. Comprehension based on debriefing

According to English Oxford Living Dictionary, comprehension is the ability to understand
something.
In our case, it involves understanding and interpretation of the watched animation movies. One
big part of comprehension is having a sufficient vocabulary or knowing the meanings of enough
words. Viewers who have strong comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they
read – what is important, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, which characters are
funny. Thus comprehension involves combining watching the movie with thinking and reasoning.
To accurately understand the watched material, children need to be able to:
- decode what they read;
- make connections between what they read and what they already know;
- think deeply about what they have seen.
An important aspect in processing the given information from the watched animations is
debriefing. Debriefing is a process of:
1. receiving an explanation,
2. receiving information and situation-based reminders of context,
3. reporting of measures of performance, and/or opportunities to further investigate the
results of a study, investigation, or assessment of performance after participation in an
immersive activity is complete.
Debriefing is a short interview that takes place between researchers and research participants
immediately following their participation in an experiment.
3. The impact of 2D animations and 3D computer animated movies in Students’ Cognitive

Process of Comprehension – comparative study
The current study presents a comparative approach to the impact of 2D animations and 3D
computer animated movies in students’ cognitive process of comprehension.
3.1. Methodology
The study took place in two preparatory classes in a public educational institution from Cluj
county.
It presents data collected from teachers’ observation sheets and students’ tests during the
implementation of curricular activities based on 2D animations and 3D computer animated
movies. Teachers’ observation sheets and students’ tests were filled during a debriefing process of
the watched movies.
Therefore, the data collected from the two preparatory classes indicate the way these animated
movie-based activities facilitate students’ process of comprehension.
The main purpose of the study was the investigation of the way preparatory school students
comprehend similar contents presented through 2D animated movies and through 3D computer
animated movies.
3.2. Implementation and results

More specifically, two preparatory classes (preparatory A, composed of 29 children and
preparatory B, composed of 27 children) watched separately two different animation movies based
on the same book – The Lorax, written in 1971 by the American children’s author Dr. Seuss.
Pupils from preparatory A class watched 1972 2D animation based on the book The Lorax and
preparatory B class watched 2012 3D computer animated movie based on the same book by Dr. Seuss.
In both productions, the action is centered on environmentalism and anti-consumerism. The
differences between them are mainly given by the used animation techniques (2D and 3D) and
minor plot differences, but the information provided and the message are the same.
After watching the movies teachers from both classes, used debriefing questions and initiate
short conversations in order to observe the comprehension level reached by the children after
watching the movies. The discussions and observation sheets were based on the level of
comprehension concerning:
- the message of the movie;
- the importance of main characters;
- favorite parts of the movies, with arguments.
In the observation sheets, 3 indicators (good, medium, bad) were used to measure the
comprehension level. The table below presents a comparative situation between the two
preparatory classes:
Comprehension level (%)
Good Medium Bad
Preparatory A class 52% 21% 27%
Preparatory B class 67% 26% 7%
Table 1. Comparative comprehension level – observation sheets
Figure 1. Comparative comprehension level – observation sheets

Data collected from the observation sheets indicate that the level of comprehension is superior
in preparatory B class. The teacher from preparatory B class noticed that the impact of the movie
children watched was powerful: “Children loved the characters, they were impressed by the way
people can destroy nature. Through this movie, they realized what could happen in the future if we
don’t take care of the nature.”
The tests applied included 4 questions about the action, characters, theme and message in the
watched movies. Because the tests were applied at preparatory classes, children’s tasks for each
item were to circle/underline the images showing correct answers. Each right answer equals 1
point, so a pupil could get from 0 to 4 points maximum. Test results are shown in the following
table and figure:
Test results (%)

4 points 3 points 2 points 1 points 0 points
Preparatory A class 45% 21% 17% 14% 3%
Preparatory B class 59% 27% 7% 7% 0%
Table 2. Comparative comprehension level – pupils’ test results
Figure 2. Comparative comprehension level – pupils’ test results
The test results indicate again that the level of comprehension is better in preparatory B class.
4. A brief conclusion
After data being triangulated, the results of the current study indicate that children tend to
better comprehend the action, the plot, the theme and even the characters behavior from a modern
3D animation movie than the ones from a 2D animation.
One of the reasons could be that 3D actual graphics give characters and background a very
realistic form, that helps children identify with them.
Another reason may be that the plot is much better detailed in these 3D animations, so that
children clearly understand why and where the action begins.
Also, songs and musical themes used in 3D computer animated movies make children sing,
easily memorize and like them.
There are some important aspects that must be taken into consideration, too.
First of all, it is teacher’s major responsibility to analyze and extract violence and sexuality
scenes from the featured movies. Although those media productions mainly address to children,
those aspects must be verified.
Secondly, watching this kind of animated movies takes at least one hour, so time management
could become a problem, if class activities are not very well organized.
In conclusion, 3D computer animated movies can become a useful resource, a comprehensive
one, for many activities in preparatory classes, if teacher’s creativity and a good time management
are involved.
References
Beck, J. (2012). A Little More About Disney's "Paperman". Cartoon Brew.
Beckerman, H. (2003): Animation: The Whole Story. Allworth Press. ISBN 1-58115-301-5.
Buchan, S. (2013): Pervasive Animation. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-80723-4.
Culhane, S. (1990): Animation: Script to Screen. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-05052-6.
Laybourne, K. (1998): The Animation Book: A Complete Guide to Animated Filmmaking– from Flip-books to
Sound Cartoons to 3-D Animation. New York: Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0-517-88602-2.
Lowe, R. and Schnotz, W. (2008): Learning with Animation. Research implications for design. New York:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85189-3.
Masson, T. (2007): Unique and personal histories of early computer animation production, plus a
comprehensive foundation of the industry for all reading levels. CG101: A Computer Graphics Industry
Reference. Williamstown, Massachusetts: Digital Fauxtography. ISBN 978-0-9778710-0-1.
Parent, R. (2007). Computer Animation: Algorithms & Techniques. Ohio State University: Morgan
Kaufmann. ISBN 978-0-12-532000-9.
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Serenko, A. (2007): The development of an instrument to measure the degree of animation predisposition of
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0-262-01909-5.
Solomon, C. (1989): Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Random House,
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233-2.
Williams, R. (2001): The Animator's Survival Kit. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-20228-7.
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Park: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-240-80670-9.
A curriculum of all the talents-problem solving case
Tripon Cristina1
(1) Teacher Training and Social Sciences Department,

Politehnica University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania,
e-mail:cristinatimpau89[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Formal education is increasingly focused on the development of formal examination or
testing options for students. The idea of knowledge testing has deep roots in the history of
education, but the obsession of the education system for testing is becoming more and more
accentuated, becoming a real deal for those in the field. Academic progress has become
primordial, forgetting emotional or social issues or leaving them in the care of pupils or
parents to be developed for children. In demagogic discourse we often find the issue of
changing the curriculum, but what is the optimal solution that could be adapted to the skills
of talented natives?
The paper aims to provide opportunities for organizing students' activity based on
modules specifically designed to develop problem-solving skills, concrete problems that can
be internalized to be developed to solve problems that students will face in real life. It is also
very important that, as a result of academic efforts, enough time is spent on their practical
development, especially within micro groups, for easy adaptation to macro groups-society,
the labor market. The research undertaken summarizes the assumed objectives and
assumptions, describing their possible solutions.
Keywords: testing, academic progress, problem-solving skills, modular activities.
1 Introduction
Unfortunately, in recent years of educational reforms, it has become increasingly less
important what you can do with what you know that what you know. The interest and ability to
create new knowledge to solve problems are the most important skills that students should face in
the long run. It is imperative that students filter information and apply them in new contexts,
ultimately it is the purpose of education. The problems of today are simply too complex to be
solved with the academic instruments specific to a single discipline.
There is a gap that is constantly widening the skills that schools cultivate and the needs of the
economy. The irony is that in many countries there are job offers in full, but despite investment in
education, too many people do not have the skills needed for those jobs. Although the whole
rhetoric of the school's purpose to spin around employability, the emphasis was not placed on
courses to prepare them directly for work, but on capitalizing on standards in academic programs.
2 Problem statement
Washor and Mojkowski(2013) are of the opinion that traditional instructional processes and
assessments cannot bring all students to the level of being competent, much less in craft or
craftsmanship. To keep pupils involved in school as productive pupils until graduation, schools
have to offer many experiences where all pupils go through part of their learning outside of school
as well. To do this, schools have to break down the walls that separate the learning process that
students are going through and could go to school outside the school. Learning from both contexts
and contexts needs to be integrated. Most of the young people see a system in the school with
difficult rules to follow. Indeed, many young people consider the school to be a negative learning
environment. Not only do schools fail to help students acquire important skills for life, they even
present a distorted image of learning as something that happens only in schools, isolated from the
real world, organized according to disciplines and bells and evaluated by paper pen and multiple
choice questions. Schools have a multitude of written and unwritten rules that strangle the native
desire of young people to learn and limits their choices to the issues they would like to excel, when
to practice, from whom to learn and learn. No wonder that so many creative youngsters and
entrepreneurs distance themselves from the productive learning process. They recognize that when
we are at school, we offer them forms of abandonment to the real world.
Several types of problems have been proposed in the literature, but so far they have never been
tested on different categories to see a separate performance. The studies of Wirth and Klieme
(2003) and those of Scherer and Tiemann (2014) presented the first evidence for a
multidimensional analysis of the problem-solving structure.
Research in the field (Carpenter & Shell, 1990; Mayer, 2011) says that it is almost obvious that
logical reasoning (eg inductive reasoning and deductive fact-based reasoning) is the starting point
for problem-solving and involves evaluating this competence (Greiff & Fischer, 2013a;
Wüstenberg et al., 2012). In addition, this type of reasoning also implies a large amount of already
crystallized abilities such as "knowledge and the dominant language of culture" (Horn &
Masunaga, 2006) Specifically, “experimental interactions with the environment "(Raven, 2000)
and largely depends on the procedural and declarative knowledge base, on knowledge of how and
when different search strategies for problem-solving.
2.1 Organization of modular didactic activity

Numerous education systems opted for an integrated curriculum approach, one of the most
common forms of integration being the organization of disciplines on curricular areas, starting
from the premise that there are a series of general competencies common to a group of disciplines.
In addition to the classical disciplines, some countries, especially the Nordic countries, have
moved on to introduce cross-cutting themes, to project activity, to the intersection of new
dimensions of education in the curriculum. As an expression of this integration, cross-curricular
themes are studied units that allow us to explore some significant issues of what we can call the
"real world."(Potolea, Toma,2012). Of course, an inter-or transdisciplinary design will not lead to
"dismantling" the disciplines, but the beneficial consequences for school curriculum are multiple:
focusing on integrated projects such as projects; relationships between concepts, phenomena,
processes from different domains; the correlation of learning outcomes with everyday life
situations.
We consider that a modular organization would emphasize the flexibility of the content
according to the interests and abilities of the pupils, their psychic peculiarities. Modular sizing
content is for a group of subjects (this does not mean that the modules overlap objects classical
education, but is unusual synthesis prospects epistemic new integrated knowledge cumulus etc.)
aimed differences even professional orientation.
Modules can be different in terms of difficulty, level, and pace of work. Thus, recovery
modules can be structured for students with difficulties or additional explanation modules for good
or very good student categories. The student chooses or suggests following a module that he/she
goes through with the teacher, then evaluating the results, in case of failure, a modular or
complementary module is recommended, modular learning cannot be fully extended.
It is extremely important that teenagers become aware of the importance of health from a
holistic perspective and how it affects society in general. In order for this to be feasible, it is
necessary to adapt the way of activating the teenagers in the classroom. We are talking, therefore,
about a particularisation of learning, according to the needs and interests of the students. This can
be accomplished by modularly modifying the content by adapting the appropriate methods to the
teacher's workgroup by using small working groups/working teams that can handle the same issue
from diverse perspectives. Thus, not only the need to treat each student's capacities differently but
also their need to harness their social skills or to develop them. At the same time, because we are
discussing from the perspective of solving concrete problems addressed in the group of students,
we analyze and discuss real problems with which students meet each day. It is extremely important
that the pace of work is a natural one that suits the pace of work of the students, that is why we use
the learning modules.
The particular module we are talking about is about health. as goals to be followed at the
end of the module we can:analysis of the multidimensional nature of health and public
health;recognizing the importance of a general and positive health vision towards a sustainable
future;assessing the impact of HIV / AIDS infection on the social and economic development and
the role of the teacher in this regard; comparing traditional approaches to health education with
others project (Findland model, Spain model, France model) approaches; develop cross-cutting
skills.
Below we select some examples of tasks included in the program of activities within the
health module.
Q1.Identify the differences between traditional health vision and the wider perspective of new
public health.
Q2.Debate: Importance of medical or socio-ecological health?
Q3. Investigate the health and living conditions of the farm (study case given).
Name five of the farm's social and environmental problems.
Identify how these issues could affect the health of Mao, Joe and their children.
It recommends action that could be taken to prevent or remedy each of these health problems
(social and environmental problems identified on the farm, family health problems, prevention
actions).
Q4.Investigate these new public health projects and evaluate their impact on the farm in the
example given.
3 Research Questions
Based on the gaps identified at the level of real-world problem-solving development (previous
research), we can address the following research questions:
What is the level of use of problem-solving problems among students?
Can modular delivery be a viable solution for developing these skills?
Can modular delivery be a solution for customizing the "talents" of each student?
Can problem-solving be developed through diverse content?
4 Purpose of the Study

The aim of the study is to demonstrate that teenagers need to be challenged for long-term
learning by experimenting with problem-solving, through ground-breaking case studies, to develop
skills to solve problems by using an active digital platform with differentiated tasks that can be
used at any time, at the students' own pace. Therefore, the assumptions made refer to:
1. Subjects in the experimental Group 1 who will follow the activities of the module will have
significantly higher statistically results in the Problem-Solving inventory (PSI) -Heppner and
Peterson questionnaire than in the control group.
2. Subjects from the experimental Group 1 who will follow the Transforming minds program
activities will have statistically significantly higher results in the Problem-Solving inventory (PSI)
-Heppner and Peterson questionnaire than at pretest
5 Research Methods and target group

Heppner and Peterson developed the Problem Solving Inventory (PSI) which assesses
perceived problem-solving competence, including behaviors and attitudes associated with problem
solving styles .
The P.S.I. is an instrument with 35 items directed to measure the way in which individuals
generally react to every day personal problems. The term ‘problem’ refers to personal aspects such
as choosing a career path, feelings or the decision of separating from someone important in life.
The instructions require the respondents to appreciate what they believe it is true in the case of
every item. In the next stage the respondents are required to self-assess themselves on a Likert
scale (between 1 as strongly agreeing and 6 as strongly disagreeing) and to choose the value that
corresponds to the degree in which they agree or disagree. The P.S.I. and its scales are anchored in
such a way that the lowest scores should reflect the highest perception of their ability to solve the
problems.
The main working group volume comprised 56 students, 28 students from an economical high
school-experimental group and 28 pupils-control group, all enrolled in high school, grade XI. Also
benefited from the curriculum activities as well as the students of a vocational high school - a class
of 29 pupils, but their results were compared with the initial level of the development of
transversal competences as it was not possible to replace the control group (a class of same profile
within the same high school). As such piloting of the experimental modules was carried out in two
high school classes with different specializations, but benefiting from similar activities.
The Economic Experimental Group participated in 8 activities, all belonging to the
experimental module, and the pedagogical group went through the module, along 5 meetings. All
three groups of students (economic experimental group, pedagogical group, economic control
group) were tested before and after the experimental stage, describing the results obtained by
referring to the related chapter.
In our study, we included a number of 85 teenagers from high schools All were tested before
and after the experimental stage, describing the results obtained by referring to the related chapter.
It was not possible to compare the results of the research with the gender variable as the subjects
of the research were, in a first stage, tempted to declare in the questionnaire and in the focus
groups distorted statements, given that, on questionnaires, it was necessary to state the genre of the
subject. To eliminate this risk and to obtain data as close as possible to school reality, it was
decided to fill in the questionnaires in anonymity way.
6 Findings
In order to find that is a normal distribution of data, we have presented the Kolmogorov-
Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk test results. For the variable to be normally distributed in the
population, they must be statistically insignificant. The result of the first test, Kolmogorov
Smirnov, for the experimental group, pretest, is 0.132, p = 0.200 and the result for Shapiro
Wilk = 0.958, p = 0.310. For the same group, after the intervention, the results obtained in the first
test were 0.133, with p = 0.200, Shapiro Wilk = 0.955, p = 0.262. For the control group, the pretest
time has the K-S = 0.106, p = 0.200, S-W = 0.955, p = 0.265 and for the posttest test result
K-S = 0.132, p = 0.200, S-W = 0.958, p = 0.310. For the pedagogical group, the result for the KS =
0.140 test, p = 0.172, SW = 0.943, p = 0.134 and for the post-intervention the results obtained in
the test KS = 0.155, p = 0.083 and in the test SW = 0.948, 0180. As all the results obtained for
each group, both in the pre-intervention and post-intervention phase, both in the Kolmogorov-
Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests are statistically insignificant, it follows that the variables are
normally distributed.
The contrasting results table shows the results of the contrast tests, these being significant
between pretest and posttest for the experimental group (F = 650.699, p = 0.000) and the control
group (F = 359.670, p = 0.000). Of course there are other differences between the other moments
between groups, but the selection is made according to the degree of interest of some data shown
in the research). Hence, the assumptions are confirmed.
Source Type III df Mean Square F Sig.

Sum of
Squares
practic. Sphericity 6912.079 5 1382.416 306.80 .000
proble Assumed 1
m.solvi
ng Greenhouse- 6912.079 3.334 2073.058 306.80 .000
Geisser 1
Huynh-Feldt 6912.079 3.860 1790.518 306.80 .000
1
Lower-bound 6912.079 1.000 6912.079 306.80 .000
1
Error(p Sphericity 608.296 135 4.506
ractic.p Assumed
roblem. Greenhouse- 608.296 90.025 6.757
solving Geisser
) Huynh-Feldt 608.296 104.230 5.836
Lower-bound 608.296 27.000 22.529
Table 1 Constrast Testes
The results of Bonferonni post hoc tests are presented in the following. We notice that there
are significant differences between pretest and posttest experimental group Bonferonni t = 25.51,
p = 0.000, between pretest experimental group and pretest test group Bonferonni t = 0.0520,
p = 0.000, between experiment group pretest and post test group pediatric Bonferonni t = 26.495,
p = 0.000, between posttest test experiment group and pretest test group Bonferonni t = 26.674,
p = 0.000, between posttest test group experiment and posttest test group Bonferonnit = 25.51,
p = experimental group and pedestrian pretest group Bonferonnit = 11.73, p = 0.000, between
posttest experimental group and pedestrian pedestrian test group Bonferonnit = 8.32, p = 0.000,
between condition pretest control group and post test experimental group Bonferonnit = 24.67,
p = pretest control group and posttest test pediatric group Bonferonnit = 27.24, p = 0.000, between
posttest test group posttest and posttest group ex Perfect Bonferonnit = 25.51, p = 0.000, between
pretest group pretest and post test experimental group Bonferonnit = 11.73, p = 0.000, between
pedestal pretest group and posttest test pedagogical group Bonferonnit = 18.958, p = Experimental
group Bonferonnit = 26.495, p = 0.000, between the pedestrian posttest group and posttest
experimental group Bonferonnit = 8.325, p = 0.000 between posttest pedagogical group and pretest
test group Bonferonnit = 27.274, p = 0.000, between posttest group and posttest group control
Bonferonni t = 26.495, p = 0.000, between posttest pedagogical group and pretest test group
Bonferonni t = 18.958, p = 0.000. There are no significant differences between the control group
prestest condition and the posttest test group Bonferonnit = 1.04, p = 1000.
In order to verify the effect of the activities carried out according to the module on the
development of problem-solving skills we applied the ANOVA method with repeated
measurements. The results indicate that the passage of such a module had a strong effect on the
development of practical problem-solving skills in the case of the experimental group, F =
650.699, p <0.001, the effect size r = 0.96, in the pedagogical group, F = 1359.670, p <0.001, the
magnitude of the effect r = 0.93, but not a significant development of these skills in the control
group (pretest and posttest). If we compare with the results of the pretest and posttest test group
F = 1.094, p = 0.305, then we realize that the experimental module scroll has had strong effects on
the development of practical problem-solving skills for the participants.
Conclusion
Transversal competencies like problem solving case do not develop in isolation. They are
activated in interaction with each other. It may be useful for pedagogical practice to target one or
some of the transversal competencies according to their relative importance in a given learning
situation or according to the pedagogical intention of the teacher regarding the pupil or
group/class. However, requiring cross-curricular competence in a deliberate manner often results
in the casual request of many others, which is extremely beneficial to pupils.
Under the conditions of today's society, especially the one we are in, it is imperative that we do
not lose any student talent. We have a duty to cultivate it, to develop it in the direction of our own
interests and the pleasure of learning. It is very easy to say that students do not learn, have no
motivation, but is it not important and how they learn, what resources are used, what are the
approaches to the class, how students are organized when working in class, if they are offered
pupils of equal opportunities to develop, according to their interests. Thus, through this pilot
research, it has been demonstrated that the use of problematic methods in a pupil environment
(digitalized) and social (through working groups), in the context of modular content, can have
beneficial effects in terms of concerns the development of competence to solve concrete problems.
References
Carpenter, P.A., Just, M.A. & Shell, P. (1990). What one intelligence test measures: A theoretical account of
the processing in the Raven Progressive Matrices Test. Psychological Review, 97(3), 404-431.
Horn, J., & Masunaga, H. (2006). A merging theory of expertise and intelligence. In K. A. Ericsson, N.
Charness, P. Feltovich, & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert
performance (pp. 587–611). Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.
Greiff, S. and A. Fischer (2013), “Der Nutzen einer komplexen Problemlösekompetenz: Theoretische
Überlegungen und Empirische Befunde” (On the usefulness of complex problem solving competency:
Theoretical considerations and empirical results), Zeitschrift für Pädagogische, Psychologie, Vol. 27/1,
pp. 27-39.
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handbook of intelligence (pp. 738-747). New York, NJ: Cambridge University Press.
Raven, J. (2000). Psychometrics, cognitive ability, and occupational performance. Review of Psychology, 7,
51–74
Scherer R. , Jenny Meßinger-Koppelt J.M, R Tiemann R.(2014)., Developing a computer-based assessment
of complex problem solving in Chemistry, International Journal of STEM Education,8, 17-30.
Potolea D., Toma S. (2012).Coordonate ale unui nou cadru de referinta al curriculumului national,București:
Editura Didactica si Pedagogica, R.A.
Washor, E., Mojkowski C(2013).”Leaving to learn: how out-of-school learning increases student engagement
and reduces dropout rates”, Portsmouth: Heineman
Wüstenberg, S., S. Greiff and J. Funke (2012), “Complex problem solving. More than reasoning?”,
Intelligence, Vol. 40/, pp. 1-14
Wirth, J., & Klieme, E. (2003). Computer-based assessment of problem solving competence. Assessment in
Education: Principles, Policy & Practice
Aspirations for tomorrows-education plan for active citizens
Cristina Tripon
(1) Teacher Training and Social Sciences Department, Politehnica University of

Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania, cristinatimpau89[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Education is the investment in a better future. It is well known that major education
systems on the world market provide sufficient financial needs for education and represent
the country's large-scale projects. The Romanian education system still has steps to be taken,
but the real reform is needed from the inside, starting with the training of teachers in cross-
cutting fields. Lately, country-run projects on a political level describe educational issues, but
without being carried out with a generous substrate to meet the needs of the future labor
market. So what is the need for the labor market in the near future and what competencies
should a high school graduate have?
The paper aims to describe the research undertaken within an economical high school,
over the course of 2 months, on the development of 21st-century competencies with the help of
the field of democratic citizenship. The tools used in the research and the results obtained are
described in the following, from the perspective of future education, as possible solutions for
the development of high school students' skills. Conclusions provide insight and action
prospects in the near future.
Keywords: 21st century competencies, active citizens, teacher training.
1 Introduction
For various reasons, education institutions are deeply conservative, especially in the case of
formal education. The education system behaves as the main task of preserving and transferring
the capital of knowledge to the next generation, as if they were traditions that we rely on infinitely,
ED. Hirsch (1988) inventing a term that defines them as "cultural training".
One of these urgent challenges for Romanian society is to address pupils' poor performance in
reading, maths, and sciences as well as improving education in general, taking into account
national test results. Recognizing the importance of transversal competencies, basic skills for
employment, social inclusion and further learning, the Council of Europe has adopted an EU-wide
reference to reducing the proportion of 15-year-old students' poor performance in these areas to
less than 15% by 2020.
Supporting the development of transversal skills is a complex process. This involves
introducing or adopting policies to improve the quality of education and to ensure that learning
and teaching continue to reflect the needs of individuals and society.
The process takes place on several levels and involves a number of different bodies. In many
countries, an important element is the introduction of a strategic and coherent approach to
improving pupils' knowledge, attitudes, and skills in the form of a national strategy, action plan or
similar policy. While such an approach is not a precondition for reform, its adoption may indicate
to the educational community that a particular issue is considered a government priority.
A strategy or a national plan can also bring together a series of actions such as curricular
reform, teacher training, and professional development or support for those with poor outcomes
and can address a variety of educational issues in a comprehensive way. In addition, a national
strategy can provide a direction and guide efforts at local and school level, while taking into
account developments such as increasing decentralization and school autonomy. The absence of a
national strategy could indicate that central authorities believe that local authorities are best placed
to lead activities or may simply indicate that a national strategy is underway or is still in the
development phase. In Romania, we still do not know the cause of all these problems, but we think
that they are being solved by addressing examples of good practice, it is just, but we are in the
process.
We live in a century of unlimited speed, technology and excessive information that overwhelm
us all the time. Technology is progressing, trades are changing, and today's students need to be
able to cope with progress, but above all market demands. Learning is a complex cognitive process
and an intro- and interpersonal social activity; the teacher is no longer the magician who conveys
information and shapes brains, forms skills, and characters.
1.1 Problem statement

In the third millennium, learners form transferable skills, assume roles in a team, develop
prosocial behavior, develop the competence to learn to learn, develop conceptual charts, develop
critical and creative thinking. By transdisciplinarity, students move from deep, useful conceptual
learning to learning through challenging, meaningful problems, adapted to their cognitive level,
being able to apply knowledge, develop new and complex situations to foster transfer, and
generate new knowledge.
The most important change to the curriculum, which is, in fact, the central pillar of our
education reform, is the shift from a knowledge-based education, predominantly informative, to a
training centered on competencies, predominantly formative.
Learning was centered on knowledge, it was the teacher who had this knowledge, the students
had to reproduce them. This guideline suggests that sometimes the subject can be studied in
observable and measurable behavioral terms. Operations rule is important but applies to a limited
range of skills. That's why complex deprivations and most of the skills remain out of the
curriculum or are only mentioned in the passage.
Therefore, an alternative to the notional curriculum seems to be a competency-based
curriculum. In Perrenoud's view (1998), competence is defined by reference to its structure: a
competence of a certain complexity puts into operation several schemes of perception, thought,
evaluation and action, which support in inference predictions, analog transpositions,
generalizations, probability estimates, establishing a diagnosis based on a set of indices,
researching relevant information, making a decision. So we can conclude that in the structure of
competence we will meet: knowledge, abilities, and attitudes.
Of course, not all competencies can be described at such a complex level, but what needs to be
emphasized is that they can not be reduced only to action patterns and behavioral patterns.
Because constructivist pedagogy emphasizes the role of contexts in learning, it seems that
teachers can only provide contexts during classes. And this is an extremely important duty. Here is
a new role that involves a new competence to organize and maximize the learning contexts.
"The role of the instructors tends towards the counselors (...) they turn into moderators of
group learning (...). Learning through concrete projects focuses more and more on the ground (...)
A moderator's task is to encourage the mentoring phenomenon within the group or by attracting
mentors from outside ", says Siebert H.(2001).
The term critical thinking, considered to be a very general one, has been described in various
variants: either "critical reasoning" ("critique"), referring to the development of reasons for certain
beliefs, the evaluation of actions through common logical means(Thompon, 2002) or "critical
argumentation" (engl) - "critical argumentation" (ro) what presupposes the identification and
evaluation of arguments in everyday life, thinks Walton(2006).
"Critical thinking is the type of thinking that is structured on the basis of a careful evaluation
of the evidence and the premise and which makes the most objective conclusions taking into
account all relevant factors and using all the logical processes”, thinks Carter (1973).
"The benefits of practicing and developing logical abilities (critical thinking skills) are
localized in at least three areas: persuasion, knowledge, and co-operation. The logical abilities to
accept a belief based on solid arguments or constraining evidence can protect human individuals
from the collateral effects of persuasion (commercial commercials, media manipulation, political
promises, etc.). The practice of logical abilities can also lead to the expansion of knowledge
through reasoning: in the sense of inferring new information (conclusions) from their previous
knowledge (premises) and not in the sense of dependence on vague generalizations or slogans,
habits and stereotypes of thought. "
This perspective, which includes logic, approved by Petre Bieltz (2012, human thinking is
indispensable with deductive and inductive reasoning, and these arguments are" good "or" less
good ", depending on full respect or partial logical reasoning requirements (...) an effective tool for
accurately analyzing human theoretical activity in any field in which it would be involved. "
Katzenbach et al.(993) define the team as a small number of people with complementary
abilities that pursue a goal, goals and a common approach that they consider to be mutually
responsible.
The role of the team is defined by Meredith Belbin (2003) as the specific tendency of a person
to behave, contribute and interact with others.
Delarue(2003) supports the team as "the group of employees who have at least some collective
tasks and where team members are authorized to regulate each other's performance of these
collective tasks."
Teamwork is defined as "working in collaboration with others to achieve the objectives of the
group, composed"( Core Competency on Teamwork, 2006).
Cooperative learning involves teamwork, in small groups, to achieve common goals. In this
type of learning, students find that the success of the group depends on the contribution of each
member. Students work together to achieve common goals.
Today, it is recognized that school must change so that cooperative learning is promoted rather
than competition learning and student hierarchy.
To deal with life's problems, students need to be educated for each other and not against each
other. West (2005) says that, in life,cooperation helps people more than individualism because it
determines: a higher productivity, materialized in achievements, superior performance; mutual
support and mutual support in problem-solving; a better psychological health.
Competition and cooperation within the group influence students' learning and performance.
The performances recorded in a task are more stimulated by cooperation than by competition.
Cooperation does not mean, however, the total cancellation of competition because there may be
cognitive-functional confrontations between its members within the group. Cooperation does not
imply uniformity of conduct but the creation of a socio-educational environment in which its
members establish a positive functional interdependence based on cognitive conflicts necessary to
solve the problems.
Cooperation can be a way to study with greater efficiency a theoretical complex theoretical or
group or team practice, combining intelligence and individual effort with group intelligence and
efforts. This method is based on the consideration that man is a social being, that his existence and
development is achieved by combining individual efforts with the efforts of the members of the
group to which they belong, through cooperation (West, 2005).
This can increase the individual learning efforts as a result of combining them with the efforts
and intelligence of the group. under the contemporary conditions, interdisciplinary relationships,
relationships between people, between collectives gain a growing weight and importance. That is
why group learning through co-operation is not only a method of lifting the burdens of learning
but also of socializing, of forming a spirit of co-operation and reciprocal mutual assistance, of
manifesting and developing democratic relationships and practices, loyal competition, to ensure
the socially useful, efficient and effective training of graduates. Cooperation is a method of inter-
and multidisciplinary cooperation in research.
2 Active Citizen Module for a Sustainable Society

In a world characterized and manipulated more and more, it is the duty of the school to prepare
young people capable of critical judgment, objectively interpreting the events they live, and
courageous proposals for the problems of society. Through Active Citizen Mode for a Sustainable
Society, it is intended to develop transversal critical thinking skills and teamwork in the context of
content related to the area of democratic citizenship. Thus, accentuation is put on problematic
learning tasks within the micro group of students.
3 Research methodology
The target group consists of high school students, 11th grade, 2 classes (56 students), one will
be used as a control group in experimental research and the other experimental group, the one with
which the activities of the module were carried out within 2 Monday, 2 hours a week. There was
no randomization of the subjects, as this was impossible due to the lack of a large number of
participants. In other words, the participation in the module activities was voluntary, based on a
list of enrollments and without gaining benefits. This was desirable because we know that
motivation is an important predictor of any human development and not to distort the results. The
experimental group did not know the existence of the control group, just to keep the ethics of the
research.
The research hypotheses are outlined below.
Hypothesis 1.1 Subjects in the experimental group 1, who will follow the activities in the
framework of the mode, will have post-test statistically significantly higher results in the Watson-
Glaser Critical Thinking test than the posttest subjects.
Hypothesis 4.1 Subjects from the experimental group 1 who will follow the activities in the
framework of the mode will have post-test results statistically significantly higher in the team
competency questionnaire than the subjects in the control group.
Data research and interpretation tools were selected to match the subject of the research and the
target group.
A questionnaire for assessing the development of team work competence is developed around
four sections, further analyzed. It is also important to note that the instrument has been protested
and has been adapted to meet the conditions of experimental use. The fist section is about
participates actively in teamwork (with evaluation criterias), then communicate with teammates
(also with evaluation criterias), the third section is about think critically and creatively and the last
behaviours in group.
The most common type of critical thinking test is the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking
Appraisal (W-GCTA), which is published by TalentLens. With over 85 years of development,
critical judgment of thinking through the Watson-Glaser test is the most popular tool for
measuring critical thinking ability.
W-GCTA was originally developed by Goodwin Watson and Edward Glaser in the 1940s,
revised in 1980, is the reference point for other instruments (Facione & Facione, 1994). W-GCTA
measures the critical skills required for presentation in a clear, structured, well-thought-out way, a
certain point of view, and persuading others of your argument. Test questions relate to the person's
ability to:
1. Makes correct inferences

2. Recognize assumptions
3. Make deductions
4. Identify conclusions
5. Interpret and evaluate arguments
The critical thinking test evaluates the ability to reasonably analyze assumptions, arguments,
deductions, inferences, and interpretation information. A passage of information that may contain
a mixture of verbal and numerical data and statements requiring critical evaluation of the candidate
as to the extent to which the statements are based on the passages previously given.
For the interpretation of the data, the SPSS 2.0 software was used, applying the tests needed to
confirm / refute the stated hypotheses.
4 Findings
The results obtained for the first hypothesis are described below. Therefore, in the Mann-
Whitney U, Wilcoxon W tests, and in the transformation of the U-value in the z-score and the
associated significance threshold we obtained Z = -6.010, p = 0.0001, therefore there are
significant differences between the two groups in terms of results obtained from the Watson-
Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test.
The results from the posttest test posttest test experimental group-Ranks group shows that the
subjects in the experimental group had a higher ranking than those in the control group (41.59 vs.
15.41), it results that the students in the experimental group, better Watson-Glaser Critical
Thinking test results compared to control group students who did not go through the experimental
module.
Calculating the magnitude of r (magnitude of the effect) using the formula (Labar, 2008), was
0.645,which according to Cohen's criteria (1988), it results that the effect of the experimental
module on the students in the experimental group had strong effects on their Watson-Glaser
Critical Thinking performance.
In presenting the results, we will calculate and present the median, this being more appropriate
for nonparametric tests.
In order to check whether the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking test results are influenced by
the experimental module, we applied the Mann-Whitney U test. The results show statistically
significant differences between groups (U = 25.50, Z = -6.010, p = 0, 0001), the students in the
experimental group achieving significantly higher results (Mdn 144.00) compared to the students
in the control group (95,000). The effect shown by the data above shows r = 0.645, which,
according to Cohen's criteria, experimental module by students is a powerful one on their
performance in the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking test, which means they have developed
critical thinking skills by participating in module activities.
The results obtained for the second hypothesis are described below. Therefore, it is necessary
to check the situation of the variables distributed in the population. The results obtained in the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests must be statistically insignificant in order for the
variable to be distributed normally in the population. The results obtained in the KS test for the
pretest group = 0.124, p = 0.200 and the test result SW = 0.943, p = 0.135, indicating the normal
distribution of the variables, the results being statistically insignificant. The same procedure is also
performed for the posttest test group: test KS = 0.207, p = 0.053 and test SW = 0.959, p = 0.336,
for the pretest test group: KS = 0.132, p = 0.200 and SW = p = 0.325, in the posttest test group: KS
= 0.165, p = 0.059 and SW = 0.944, p = 0.139. According to these results, all variables are
normally distributed.
The results for general F tests will be presented below. The condition of sphericity is satisfied,
so we will follow the value of F on the first line: F (139774.548) = 1284.611, p = 0.000. Since the
results of the general F test are significant, there are significant differences between the
experimental conditions for the development of team competence.
To find out which of the 4 conditions are significant differences will apply either contrast tests
or post hoc tests. From the results of the contrast tests shown in the table, we note that there are
significant differences between the pretest and the post-intervention stage in some situations. This
is for experimental.pretest group vs. group.experimental.posttest F = 6733.205, p = 0.000 for
group.experim.posttest vs. group.control.pretest F = 8321.263, p = 0.000. There are no significant
differences for group.control.pretest vs. group.control.posttest, F = 3.207, p = 0.085. Therefore,
from the hypotheses stated, it is confirmed that the subjects in the experimental group who
followed the activities in the frame of the post had statistically significantly higher results in the
questionnaire for the evaluation of the team competencies than in the pretest.
The results of the Bonferroni post hoc tests are shown to confirm the results described above.
We notice that there are significant differences between the experiment. pretest vs.
group.experim.posttest Bonferroni t = 82.03, p = 0.000, the actual value of the test being
calculated by dividing the mean difference to the standard error (77.929 / 0.950). We will do the
same with the other pairs, the results of the Bonferroni test for the posttest test group and the
Bonferonni test group pretest t = 91.269, p = 0.000, for posttest test group and Bonferonni control
group test t = 39.03, p = 0.000. There are no significant differences between pretest test group
pretest and Bonferonni control group t = 2,721, p = 0,168, pretest pretest test group and
Bonferonni control group test t = 3, 11, p = 0,065 for pretest test group condition posttest test
group Bonferonni t = 1.79, p = 1.000. The results confirm the data obtained above and reject the
null hypothesis.
In order to verify the effect of the activities carried out according to the module on the
development of team competencies, we applied the ANOVA test with repeated measurements. The
results indicate that the passage of such a module had a strong effect on the development of team
competencies in the experimental group, F = 6733.205, p <0.001, the effect size r = 0.99, in the
pedagogical group, F = 1738.381, p <0.001, the magnitude of the effect r = 0.98, but not a
significant development of these skills in the control group. If we compare the results obtained by
the control group in the pretest and posttest, F = 3.207, p = 0.085, then we realize that the
experimental way has had strong effects on the development of the team competencies for the
participating subjects.
Conclusions
As you can see, by introducing a great deal of attention to these competencies, easy to
approach in the classroom, within any content, you can create premises for the development of
21st-century competencies in students. We emphasize that it is particularly important that these
competencies be developed mainly among teachers, through initial or continuing training
programs.
Given the new educational research results and the development of technology and needs
identified in the labor market, it is imperative to give considerable weight to the development of
cross-curricular competencies for students. Of course, this would not be possible without taking a
number of considerable measures at school level:
- reducing the burden of curricula and european compatibility with curricula;
- the conversion of education from a predominantly reproductive education into a creative one
and the re-engineering of scientific research at the base of university studies;
- improving infrastructure and generalizing electronic communications;
- creating a partnership and, in general, a new interaction between schools and universities, on
the one hand, and the economic, administrative and cultural environment, on the other;
- student-oriented management and their real needs;
-analysis of marginal, interculturally and decentralized cultures; overturning the myth of power
and knowledge about the teacher-student relationship (canceling the unique source of information)
and promoting the continuous interaction between the actors of the educational process
-realizing reflections by addressing different perspectives by reinterpreting, reconsidering
theories, deconstructing to reveal the different facets of the same issue/themes and identifying the
contradictions/assumptions from which a change/ mitigation/adaptation can be made in accordance
with the identified needs and needs
-the usefulness of acquiring knowledge relevant to the life of the individual in the context of
the role of the future employee as well as their integration into personal development
- tolerance towards diversity in all perspectives (ideas, concept, own interpretation), advancing
negotiation, mediation, active involvement
-promotion of collaborative learning, use of group interactive methods. By activating
imagination, creativity, portfolios, project development, emphasis on analysis and improvement,
and less on punishment and control, we increase the personal responsibility of pupils in the
learning process, becoming more motivated and developing collaborative relationships with
teamwork, and socialization capacity.
References
Bieltz, P.(2012). Bazele gândirii critice, Editura Academiei Române, Bucureşti.
Carter, C. V. (1973). Dictionary of education. New York: McGraw Hill.
Delarue, A., Stijn, G. and Van Hootegem, G.(2003). Productivity outcomes of teamwork as an effect of team
structure , Working paper, Steunpunt OOI, Catholic University of Leuven.
Hirsch, E.D. (1988). Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York: Vintage Books.
p. xiv–xv.
Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance
organization. Boston: Harvard Business School
Perrenoud, Ph. (1998).Construire des compétences dès l’école, ESF, Paris
Memorandum on Lifelong Learning. (2000). European Commission, Brussels.
Siebert H.(2001). Învăţarea autodirijată şi consilierea pentru învăţare, Editura.Institutul Europen,Iasi.
Thompson, A.(2002). Critical Reasoning: A Concise Guide, Routledge, London, New York.
Walton, D.(2006). Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation, Cambridge University Press, New York.
West, M. (2005).Lucrul în echipă. Lecţii practice. Editura Polirom, Iași.
Usefulness of Web Sources in Geography Bibliographical
Research and Learning
Oana-Ramona Ilovan1, Sorin-Alin Kosinszki2, Maria Eliza Dulamă2,

Marian Marin1
(1) “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Faculty of Geography,

3-5 Clinicilor St., Cluj-Napoca, RO-400006, ROMANIA
E-mail: ilovanoana[at]yahoo.com, marinmarian197[at]gmail.com
(2) “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education,
7 Sindicatelor St., Cluj-Napoca, RO-400029, ROMANIA
E-mail: kosinszki.sorin[at]gmail.com, dulama[at]upcmail.ro
Abstract
Teachers use web sources to do bibliographical research when writing their theses to
obtain the 1st didactic degree in the Romanian education system. This study is the result of
our analysis of the web sources used in bibliographical research to write about the landforms
of the Hășdate settlement, Cluj County, and the way the author used these web sources in
comparison to the field research and the printed ones. We analysed the texts, the photos and
the available sources for this topic on Wordcat, Researchgate, Wikipedia, Facebook, from
other 1st didactic degree and from Ph.D. theses and from available printed materials at the
university library of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. All these were put
down in the final reference list of the respective 1st didactic degree thesis, as well as the
official cartographic material and the one realised in GIS for this. In our comparative study,
we analysed how useful were the web sources to represent the landform features, to clarify
concepts, and to present scientifically correct information. We concluded that the used web
sources were very valuable in realising the study when the researcher had a high competence
level of assessing correctly the information quality.
Keywords: Assessment, Competence level, Field research, Geomorphology, Map,

Photograph
1. Introduction
Either using web-based materials or e-learning applications, e-learning is increasingly applied
both in school and for life-long learning. Therefore, e-learning is being rendered as “a modern,
flexible and economic way” (Guelch et al., 2012, p. 1) of education, turning many educational
researchers to assessing and developing e-learning tools and methods. In this context, research
explored online reading and the relationship with the occurrence of more or less productive
learning (Cho et al., 2018), underlining that “reading electronically has altered the cognitive and
metacognitive processes readers use to approach science texts” (Yen et al., 2018, p. 797). Other
researchers proved the importance of knowledge sharing among web users using information from
heterogeneous web sources in order to make decisions (Sathick and Venkat, 2015). In addition,
writing assignments were improved when students use the Internet. For instance, researchers
showed how students could improve their standard written assignments using a Wikipedia
assignment based on students contributing short entries to Wikipedia (Freire and Li, 2016).
Recent research analysed students’ “natural science literacy of research and comprehension
competence” as “an essential part of science literacy - as a competence to find, evaluate and use science
knowledge stored on the Internet (as a part of extended memory) to solve a problem in a science class
and to construct students’ own science knowledge” (Abersek et al., 2015, p. 460). Thus, the Internet is
viewed “as a storage and as a source of knowledge for teaching/learning process in the science class”
and therefore changes in teaching practice are underway, these leading to the necessity of curricular
changes (Abersek et al., 2015, p. 460). While curriculum and research design is affected by the use of
the web, web-mediated knowledge synthesis and creative and generative web use have been shown to
improve students’ learning experience (DeSchryver, 2017).
Teachers from Romania use the web sources in the documentation for writing the methodical-
scientific papers to obtain the 1st didactic degree in pre-university education. There are many free
web sources available on the Internet that can be used for this purpose. Teachers have some
difficulties during the documentation and the writing of the methodical-scientific paper. They
study many sources and often find gaps, contradictions and mistakes in the written information or
in the cartographic materials.
In this study, we analysed the web sources used in the documentation for a landform study in
Hăşdate locality, Cluj County, the way these sources were used, compared to the information obtained
in the field research and those identified in the printed sources. We have also analysed the issues faced
by the teacher in documenting and using web sources to determine how to solve them.
2. Material and Method

2.2. Data Collecting, Procedure and Research Material
The research material was represented by the research process carried out in the field by the
author of the methodical-scientific paper and by her scientific coordinator, the documentation
carried out on the Internet, and the use of the printed sources. We collected the data through the
observation method, including self-observation, interviewing and visual methods, and we
interpreted the results through the content analysis method.
2.1. Participants
The research involved a primary school teacher who participated in the admission colloquium for
obtaining the 1st didactic degree in January 2017 and submitted the methodical-scientific paper to
the Department of Teacher Training in August 2018. The research involved the scientific
coordinator who participated in the entire field research and guided the process of completing the
study.
3. Results and Discussions

a. Analysis of the obtaining and using of photographs. The first series of 89 photographs was
taken with the phone camera and with a photo camera during the first field research on September
10, 2017. At this stage, special attention was paid to the geological structure and lithology.
In the 9 photographs included in the paper, some specific aspects of the place were found: a
folded structure in sandstone flysch, an outcrop with terra rossa, limestone with Nummulites
perforates, an outcrop with porphyry, a dacite carved slope, a temporary water course formed in
red Eocene clays (Figures 1-5), etc. Taking pictures under maximum sunshine conditions caused
an overexposure that generated a colour blur. The intensity of light diminished the chance of
obtaining overall images of the local landforms.
The second series of 114 photographs was taken on October 22, 2017, during the unfolding of
the learning activities with the students who were the subject of Psychological and Pedagogical
research. 23 photographs out of these were included in the chapter in which the didactic
experiment was presented.
Fig. 1. Folded structure. Fig. 2. Terra rossa Fig. 3. Temporary

Flysch situated north of the (Crucii Hill) (Crișan, 2018) watercourses in red Eocene
Hășdate River (Upper clays (Crucii Hill) (Crișan,
Cretaceous) (Crișan, 2018) 2017)
Fig. 4. Limestone with Nummulites Fig. 5. Porphyry on the left slope of the
perforates (Crucii Hill) (Crișan, 2018) Hășdate Valley (Popii Hill) (Crișan, 2018)
Several photographs of the slopes and interfluves of the hills were identified in the monograph
of Hăşdate locality (Bodea et al., 2009), but their use in the paper requires scanning. Currently, the
easiest strategy to get photographs about a place in Romania is searching the Internet. By
searching with key words Hăşdate Cluj, a mix of photos associated with the Hăşdate River
(flowing through the researched locality) was delivered, from Hăşdate settlement belonging to the
municipality of Gherla, Cluj County, and from Hăşdate settlement, Săvădisla Commune, which we
are interested in. Neither adding the word settlement offers a correct selection of photographs, so it
is important for the researcher to know the places well.
The seventh photograph displayed indicates the origin https://www.facebook.com/Hasdate/. On
this page, there were 371 photographs in the chronology, 16 being published by others. 92
photographs were posted from mobile phones. In most photos, rural landscapes of Hăşdate Village
and of neighbouring agricultural landscapes are rendered, people being rarely represented. Out of
the high quality photographs selected from this page, 32 were included in the paper. For the ethics
of research, the name of the author of the photographs was sought, but it was not identified either
in the field investigation or after writing of messages, which is why only the link was mentioned as
a source.
The fact that none of the photographs have a title explicitly mentioning the place they
represent, requires the researcher to recognise the place and know its name. As a positive thing, we
have noticed that the Google Chrome search engine currently identifies images posted on
Facebook, which was not possible in a few years ago and this makes it easier to access a valuable
resource.
b. Analysis of the obtaining and using of cartographic material. In the first stage in the field,
two cartographic sources were used: Geological map of Iara-Hăşdate Depression. Source:
Geological map of R.S.R. 1: 200,000, Cluj and Turda sheets (Moldovan, 2014) and G.U.P.
(General Urban Plan) Săvădisla village - 2006. Hăşdate village (1: 5000). The geological map,
included in a Ph.D. thesis, was an excellent source for understanding the lithology and landforms.
However, because of the scale and the absence of names, it was difficult to establish a
correspondence between the map and the field reality only according to the layout of the
hydrographic network, this being poorly represented on the map as well.
In order to get more scientific information we accessed Google Academic
(https://scholar.google.com/). With regard to Hăşdate settlement, there were delivered/identified
research papers from scientific journals of Geology, posted by researchers on the Researchgate
social network, which provides free access to researchers from any scientific field to a public file
server for web.2.0 applications and it allows semantic search for articles, file sharing
(https://www.researchgate.net) and on the Academia.edu website, an American social network for
the academic field, a platform used to share documents, monitor their impact, and track research in
a certain field (https://www.academia.edu/; https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu). From the
analysis of the faults represented on the maps included in two papers (Bucur et al., 2004; Săsăran
et al., 2004), we could explain the presence of magmatic rocks, the direction of flow for the
Hăşdate River, the settlement of sedimentary deposits, and other categories of rocks in connection
with this one.
On the G.U.P., the 5 m equidistance between the contour lines and also the marking of the
heights should have helped understand the general characteristics of the landforms. However, by
overlapping on these the limits of land lots with different uses this process was prevented. In order
to analyse and interpret the landforms, the Topographic Map (1: 25000) was used and copies of
these maps were made in order to draw sketches with landform terraces, slope exposition, slope
inclination, current geomorphological processes, and landform types. As a paper in the Sciences of
Education, not in Geography, those sketches were enough for landforms study.
The presentation of the landforms in Hăşdate settlement was hampered by the fact that on the
two maps there were very few names of places (e.g. hill peaks) and permanent or temporary water
streams, a situation similar to that of the photographs. To complete the names, in the third field
research, we approached a 90-year-old citizen (Farcaș Ilie, born in 1928), who also contributed to
the making of the G.U.P. (2009). During the discussion with the map in front of us, names of
valleys, interfluves, peaks and slopes were added. Names of peaks and tree species from the
forests (which are influenced by the altitude of the landforms) were also corrected. At this stage, in
the discussion with the first author of the monograph (Bodea et al., 2009), it was explained how
exactly they used the plough to develop agricultural terraces, which were specific to the slopes of
the locality and were represented on the G.U.P. (2009).
We tried to clarify certain issues related to the landforms nearby the road by using the Google
Street View tool, but there was no information available for Hășdate settlement from Săvădisla
Commune. We found useful the images provided by the http://satellites.pro/Hasdate application,
where we could get a view on the entire landforms ensemble, certain details about the river route,
and the degree of vegetation coverage. We recommend that people are cautious when using maps
realised in GIS, having diverse authors, because these can have mistakes (the way of writing the
heights, establishing the limits of the studied area, using non-standard colours for the geological
map, using inappropriate colours in relation to the landform height, etc.).
c. Analysis of the obtaining and using of block charts and drawings. In order to understand
the layout of the sedimentary layers in the monoclynal structure and the cuesta mentioned in
various sources (Moldovan, 2014; Roman, 2017), the teacher searched images on the Internet with
Google Chrome, using the key words monoclynal structure. She identified block charts from the
Tectonic-Structural Geomorphology (Ene, 2012), which are included in the paper for
exemplification. During the learning activities, students drew sketches similar to the cross-
sectional profiles through the Hăşdate Valley (the minor riverbed and the main riverbed) and
sketches of the slopes to represent their inclination. The sketches were photographed and included
in the paper in order to understand the students’ representations of some landform elements.
d. Analysis of the valorisation of text information. Romanian sources about Hășdate have
been searched on WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org) (Online Computer Library Center), the
catalogue which contains collections from 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Web
sources have been identified (Bucur et al., 2004; Săsăran et al., 2004) and printed sources, already
quoted (Bodea et al., 2009; Moldovan, 2014), which showed little interest in the landform from
this area. From other printed sources about Cluj County (Pop, 2007) or about the Vlaha-Săvădisla
Depression (Roman, 2017), information that corresponds to the landform from Hăşdate locality
was taken through a difficult selection and transfer process.
In the first stage of field research, red clays, porphyry, dacite, organogenic limestone and
sandstone flysch were identified in the outcrop. For understanding their genesis and for confirming
the hypotheses, these terms have been clarified by means of Internet search. Most of the
information in Romanian language has been identified in the Wikipedia free encyclopaedia
(https://ro.wikipedia.org). The fact that anyone can develop the contents of this encyclopaedia
induces the disadvantage of posting also empirical information. Evaluating the information in this
encyclopaedia and using it in various papers is strongly influenced by the reader’s competence and
by the way of valorisation (place, purpose). To complete and verify information, a printed source
was used (i.e. Pârvu, 1983).
Conclusions
We concluded that web sources were very useful in realising the methodic-scientific thesis for
obtaining the 1st degree in the Romanian education system. These sources were used in order to:
identify printed published materials on the topic (Google.ro; Wordcat), to clarify certain concepts
about landforms both through the printed published materials (Wikipedia) and through using the
posted online maps and block charts (Researchgate), to present places through photos (Google.ro;
Facebook) and in cartographic materials (Researchgate), to have a view of the whole landforms
and of certain details (http://satellites.pro). During the presented research, we also noticed some
minuses: not all available books and papers in Romanian libraries were included in Wordcat, many
photos had no title and author, and some pieces of information were incomplete or wrong. We
consider that web sources were very valuable in realising the presented research, provided that the
researcher had a high competence level so that she was able to assess correctly information
quality.
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Visual Materials from Web Sources in Studying Regional
Geography Topics
Ioana Cristina Magdaș1, Oana-Ramona Ilovan2, Maria Eliza Dulamă1,

Cosmina-Daniela Ursu2
(1) “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, 7

Sindicatelor St., Cluj-Napoca, RO-400029, ROMANIA
E-mail: magdas_ioana[at]yahoo.com, dulama[at]upcmail.ro
(2) “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Faculty of Geography,
3-5 Clinicilor St., Cluj-Napoca, RO-400006, ROMANIA
E-mail: ilovanoana[at]yahoo.com, ursucosmina[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
Geography teachers use cartographic materials, drawings including charts, and
photographs to enable students’ understanding and learning of Geography contents. They
present these materials in a digital format and project them using appropriate devices. In this
paper, we analysed the use of certain devices in e-learning at Geography, for teaching,
learning, and assessment. We analysed the PowerPoint presentations realised by the
university students who attend the courses for becoming Geography teachers. These
presentations were associated to lesson plans with Regional Geography topics. We analysed
the following: the ways materials were selected in order to underline the characteristic
features of the studied areas (i.e. continents, countries, regions); quality of materials;
presentation way and form, combining materials; representativeness for the respective area;
the proposed learning activities starting from these. We concluded that technology progress
and its cost diminishing enables students and teachers to use digital materials in e-learning
Geography, that there was an abundance of web sources that could be used, and also that
university students had difficulties in choosing the most appropriate materials for certain
topics because of their low competence level in Geography.
Keywords: Assessment, Competence level, Assessment tool, University education
1. Introduction
In Geography classes and in other educational contexts, teachers use visual materials (maps,
drawings, charts, photographs, animations, documentaries, etc.) to enable students’ understanding
and learning of contents. At present, the Internet offers an abundance of free web sources that can
be used for this purpose. In Romania, diminishing device costs and easy access to Internet create
optimal premises for the use of visual materials in e-learning.
Competence-based education has been the recent trend worldwide and in Romania too (Dulamă,
2010), both in the pre-university and university education systems. Researchers focusing on
improving the quality of students’ geographical training brought forward topics such as the role of
feedforward in increasing learning efficiency (Dulamă and Ilovan, 2016), analysis of the previous
educational model (Dulamă and Ilovan, 2017), and the impact of teachers’ perceptions on education
(Dulamă et al., 2017). In this context, special focus was granted to improving university Geography
teacher training students’ skills (Bagoly-Simó et al., 2016), while the online environment and that of
digital technologies was assessed in connection to Geography students’ learning (Dulamă et al.,
2015; Ilovan et al., 2016a, 2016b; Osaci-Costache et al., 2015).
In the study of Regional Geography topics, students’ competence level is assessed while taking
into account their capacity to identify the specificity features of places and their role in
development (Ilovan et al., 2016c; Nicula et al., 2017). Therefore, it is crucial that students learn
how to use the online information helping them to find those territorial specificity features.
Images represent a very important part of the resources that students can access to learn about
places (Rose, 2012) and the use of images and digital tools has been investigated for education and
research in general, with “requirements of today's geospatial users expecting online, on-demand
access to image processing” (Bahr and Okubo, 2013, p. 243), as tools for geo-scientific and
technologic disciplines (Maman et al., 2016), for digital literacy (Mills and Unsworth, 2018), for
digital learning technologies, including images and the user experience during digital learning
experience (Gratch and Warren, 2018), and for education and research in Geography: on GIS, in
order to provide solutions and resources by being “taught to know geographic meaning, collect
spatial data and then use ArcGIS software to analyze spatial data” (Chou et al., 2011, p. 51), for
researching landscape changes through systematic repeat photography (Sanseverino et al., 2016),
on the study of landscapes in relation to nation-building (Tyner et al., 2015), etc.
However, in the usual didactic activity, we found that students who were preparing to become
Geography teachers had difficulties in the effective use of these materials. The purpose of this
study is to establish the Geography students’ competence level in designing the way of using
digital visual materials in e-learning at Geography and in developing PowerPoint presentations
(PPPs) for e-learning at Regional Geography.
2. Material and Method

2.1. Participants
50 students from the Faculty of Geography in Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
Romania, from various specialisations, were involved: Geography (G), Geography of Tourism
(GT), Cartography (C), Territorial Planning (TP), Hydrology-Meteorology (HM). These students
attended optionally Level 1 of the Psycho-Pedagogical Studies Program (Monospecialisation) to
become Geography teachers.
2.2. Data Collecting, Procedure and Research Material

In order to achieve the research objectives, we analysed the use of visual materials in the lesson
plans using an assessment tool (Table 1). We assessed two aspects: their choice of visual materials
and the use of visual materials in learning activities. We evaluated PPPs using the assessment tool
in Table 2. We evaluated four aspects: contents, visual materials used, proposed learning activities
based on visual materials, and general aspects of the presentation. For the first tool, we made the
evaluation using 12 criteria, and for the second one, on the basis of 20 criteria. For each criterion,
we associated scores from 1 to 5. The maximum score that can be obtained in the first case is 60
points and a minimum of 12 points, and in the second case, the maximum score is 100 points and
the minimum was 20 points. The competence level was established by calculating the mean (a
value of 1 to 5) by dividing the total score to the number of criteria. We ranked the result for each
criterion in one of the three categories of competence: inferior competence if the mean was less or
equal to 2, average level of competence if the mean was higher than 2 but and lower or equal to
4.5, and higher competence level if the mean was higher than 4.5. The research material was
represented by the learning activities based on the visual material that we had extracted from
students’ lesson plans and PPPs associated with those plans.
3. Results and Discussions

a. Analysis of the devices used in e-learning Geography. In this paper we only refer to the use
of mobile phones in e-learning, taking into account that Geography students permanently have
these devices and their tendency for frequent use. In pre-university education in Romania, during
certain periods, the use of mobile phones was forbidden during classes, because these were a
powerful distractor in receiving and learning contents. Starting with the 2017-2018 school year, it
was allowed to use phones in lessons for educational purposes only (MENCS, 2016, p. 10). In
universities, professors have diverse opinions and attitudes about the use of mobile phones during
courses, seminars, and practical activities, and therefore they impose different rules. In our
opinion, mobile phones are today devices that most teachers and students have in both university
and pre-university education. These private devices tend to exist in each class alongside the
traditional blackboard and chalk. The trend to expand the range of applications available on these
devices, the extension of the mobile telephone network and signal across the country, and
reasonable access to the Internet represent an opportunity that should be exploited as much as
possible for educational purposes.
A way to use the mobile phone in e-learning Geography is to search for the meaning of
unknown geographic terms. For example, for deep knowledge of mangroves, students sought ad-
hoc definition, description, location and photos, the searching process was followed by viewing,
sharing and clarifying information (including visual material). When students have the task of
asking questions about a major relief unit from Romania, based on a map, they immediately
searched for the physical map and solved the task without needing mural maps or atlases. GPS is
used by students to walk in the city, to a certain unknown destination, and to learn the
geographical location (latitude, longitude, altitude). In her Bachelor’s thesis, a student described
the way in which the UGP (Urbanistic General Plan) plan was loaded, the use of the GPS and an
external battery to collect information on the height, character, or buildings function (Ursu, 2018).
In the context of evaluations (presenting papers), the mobile phone is used to retrieve documents
stored in the mailbox, especially in software incompatibility situations, or even as a screen (for
PPPs, lesson plans, etc.).
b. Analysis of the competence to design the use of digital visual materials in e-learning
Geography. In Table 1, we present the results obtained by the students.
Choosing visual materials
C1. Optimal number of visual materials. This quantitative indicator cannot be correlated with a
certain number of visual materials that should be used in a Geography lesson. Still, it is
recommended that their number is not too large (Dulamă, 2010). Most students include in the
lesson plans fewer visual materials than would be required to present and understand the subject.
C2. Correctness of the visual materials. In plans and in PPPs, visual materials used were
created by other people, not by these students. We noticed that it was difficult for them to select
cartographic materials, charts and drawings that did not contain mistakes. They included in the
plans some maps with no legend or no title, incomplete, with non-standard colours, without
mentioning the year from which the data from the map was represented / used. Some drawings
were incomplete. For example, on the Richter scale, it was not specified that the magnitude was
expressed in degrees. Some students used edited pictures that did not reflect geographic reality and
led to misconceptions. For example, to exemplify the seismic waves, a photo was used in which
the wave was twice as high as a ten floors building.
C3. Clarity of visual materials. Most of the visual materials chosen by students had the
necessary clarity to make others understand what they represented.
C4. Relevance of visual materials (regional characteristics and country / territory specificity).
Most maps and charts included in the plans were relevant to the topic of the lesson; however,
students had difficulty in choosing photos to illustrate local or regional specificities, or put certain
objectives in wrong positions (e.g. they included a photo of coniferous woods for representing the
Plateau of Transylvania; they included the photo of Vidraru Lake at the lesson about the Getic
Plateau). We noted in many plans a weak highlight on urban features in the presentation of large
agglomerations in photos, on showing regional characteristics and the specificity of the territory,
determined by a superficial knowledge and an incomplete documentation.
C5. Specification of the source for visual materials. In the lesson plans, most students included
the link from where they took the visual material. In some cases, a site or portal was specified
under the image (e.g. http:/profudegeogra.wordpress.com; www.imagazin.ro), which prevented
the correct identification of the source.
Using visual materials in learning activities. In the literature regarding the organisation of
learning activities based on visual materials, it was pointed out that their simple presentation was
not sufficient to ensure long-lasting understanding, memorization, and learning (Dulamă, 2010).
C6. Systematic analysis of the content of visual materials (components, attributes and
relationships) based on questions and C7. Interpretation of the content of visual materials based on
questions. At the course of Didactics of Geography, students were trained to phrase questions through
which the analysis and the interpretation of the content of the visual materials were targeted (Dulamă,
2010). Students were asked to design learning activities in which questions were directed to
identifying components, attributes and relationships between components, and to explaining those
characteristics and relationships. Students associated a series of questions for that purpose, but the
resulting analysis and interpretation was incomplete and less systematised, indicating the need to raise
the level in Geography and, in particular, to understand Regional Geography.
C8. Solving tasks by using visual materials. Students provided some tasks where visual
materials were required. It was proposed to analyse climograms, the age pyramid, population
density based on a cartogram, etc. We also identified situations where the task associated with a
map was specified, but the map was missing and also situations where the task could not be solved
on the basis of the presented map.
Table 1. Competence level in designing digital visual materials use in e-learning Geography
Assessed aspect Assessment criteria Score (1-5)
Choosing of C1. Optimal number of visual materials 3.8
visual materials C2. Correctness of visual materials 3.4
C3. Clarity of visual materials 4.7
C4. Relevance of visual materials (regional characteristics and 3.8
country / territory specificity)
C5. Specification of the source for visual materials 4.0
Using visual C6. Systematic analysis of the content of visual materials 4.1
materials in (components, attributes and relationships) based on questions
learning C7. Interpretation of the content of visual materials based on 3.0
activities questions
C8. Solving tasks by using visual materials 3.2
C9. Analysis depth and interpretation of content 2.8
C10. Fairness of analysis and interpretation of content 3.1
C11. Consistency of analysis and interpretation of content 2.9
C12. Value of studied aspects (essentiality, novelty) 2.9
Mean 3.475
C9. Analysis depth and interpretation of content. Students’ questions, answers, and explanatory
texts indicated less profound analysis and interpretation of the visual material content, this being
explained by the competence level in Regional Geography, by paying less attention to valorising
materials and by the limited time resources.
C10. Fairness of analysis and interpretation of content. In general, we appreciate that students
analysed and interpreted the content of visual materials correctly, but without analysis and
interpretation being complete. We identified some wrong questions: “What plants do you see?” In
this case, in the photos there were grain seeds, not plants. In another case, on the slogan of the
“Extractive Industry”, there were also photos of the feeding of the gas pump, the construction of a
brick wall, and gold ingots.
C11. Consistency of analysis and interpretation of content. Because few questions were asked
about visual materials, it cannot be said that a coherent analysis and interpretation was made.
C12. Value of studied aspects (essentiality, novelty). In the case of maps and charts, we
consider their use to be valuable, but in the case of photos, many of them were only “colour spots”
because they did not exemplify a relevant aspect of the topic. We noted this problem in particular
when presenting cities in different countries, with students not interested in or not fully capturing
the specifics of the place.
c. Analysis of the competence to develop PPP for e-learning in Regional Geography
The content of the presentations was analysed on the basis of several criteria. Table 2 shows that
students obtained scores ranging from minimum of 2.2 (depth / coverage of details, showing links
between environmental components) and maximum of 3.8 (information correctness). From the
evaluation based on all criteria (including systematisation / organisation / consistency of
information, coverage of the whole topic, synthesis, highlighting regional characteristics and
country / territory specificity, information relevance), students had an average competence level.
Table 2. Competence level to develop PPPs for e-learning Regional Geography
Assessed aspect Assessment Criteria Score (1-5)
Content C1. Coverage of the whole topic 2.5
C2. Profoundness 2.2
C3. Systematisation / organisation / consistency of information 2.3
C4. Information correctness 3.8
C5. Information relevance 3.0
C6. Showing links between environmental components 2.2
C7. Synthesis 2.6
Visual materials C8. Optimal number of visual materials 3.5
C9. Diversity 4.0
C10. Quality 3.8
C11. Relevance 2.7
C12. Mentioning titles 2.2
C13. Mentioning sources/ authors 2.2
Learning activities C14 Conducting analysis of visual materials 2.6
based on visual C15. Conducting interpretation of visual materials 2.3
materials C16. Predominance of student-centred activities 2.2
General aspects C17. Place of text and visual materials on slides 3.5
C18. Contrast between background and writing 4.2
C19. Font 4.3
C20. Optimal number of slides 3.6
Mean 2.985
Visual materials used in the presentation. As a general observation, we emphasize that for
most of the visual materials used in PPPs, students omitted titles and quoting sources / authors,
which it was why a mean of 2.2 was obtained. Students used various visual materials (maps,
charts, photos, drawings) in PPPs (mean 4.0) to an acceptable quality level for clarity and accuracy
(mean 3.8) and a reasonable number (mean of 3.5). The lowest result was obtained for relevance
(mean of 2.7), because better documentation is required in plan implementation and PPPs for
future lessons.
Learning activities organised on the basis of visual materials. Even if in the lesson plans
students provided a number of questions related to the visual materials, many of them were not
included in the presentation, probably because the students did not want to be too text-loaded
slides or considered it more appropriate to address them orally. The scores were quite good at all
three criteria: conducting visual material analysis (mean of 2.6), conducting visual material
interpretation (mean of 2.3), and predominance of student-centred activities (mean of 2.2).
General aspect of the presentation. For the overall layout of the presentation we awarded
higher scores, these results being justified by the fact that students had experience in making such
presentations. The smallest score was obtained for the sizing of text and visual materials in slides
(spacing, density of writing and materials) (mean of 3.5). The number of slides we appreciate as
optimal for most presentations (mean of 3.6). They provided great contrast between background
and writing (mean of 4.2), which we considered positive. Although they obtained an amazing
score for font use (colour, size, legibility) (mean of 4.3), we noticed some presentations made on
dark blue or black background and white writing, which reduces readability. As a negative aspect
we also noticed the use of more colours in writing on slides.
4. Conclusions
Most of the students used the visual materials in their lesson plans by observing the requests
and they planned learning activities taking them into account. We noticed the following problems
in their lesson plans: using a smaller number of visual materials than it was necessary and little
relevant for presenting and understanding the topic, for illustrating the local and regional
specificity; using maps without legend or title, or with an incomplete title, with non-standard
colours, without mentioning the year for the data used to realise the map; using edited photos that
did not render reality correctly. Analysing the PPPs, we noticed that students were experienced in
realising them, but there were also several problems: incomplete planning of the learning activities,
using irrelevant materials for underlining the regional specificity, omitting titles and omitting to
quote the sources/authors of the visual materials. We recommend better bibliographical research
for realising lesson plans to enable correct, in-depth, and coherent analysis and interpretation of the
visual materials contents.
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Can microlearning be an alternative in training for textile
industry staff?
Liliana Buhu1, Adrian Buhu1
(1)”Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Faculty of Textile, Leather and

Industrial Management
E-mail: lbuhu[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
Nowadays, the training of working personnel in different areas must keep pace with
rapidly changing technology. For this reason, companies must ensure, as far as possible,
lifelong learning opportunities for their own staff. Business staff needs to adapt to this
constantly changing work environment and downward continuously. The ability to learn and
the speed of learning thereby become an elementary factor for individual quality of life. From
this point of view, the lifelong education and training is a feature of the Information Society.
The online learning is widely used by different organizations like schools, universities and
also companies and recently the Millennials have entered the job market. The online courses
seem to imitate traditional ones, thus not bringing the desired outcomes. Because the learning
never ceases and the employees should be familiarized with new information, the knowledge
gaps, as well as the retention of learning materials, should be dealt with. Micro-learning can
fill these gaps as it arrives just in time and it is compliant with the specific needs the learners
have. This article presents the possibility of using Moodle cloud to create micro-learning
content. This is done in two steps: initially are trained trainers who in turn will train
specialized personnel from different departments.
Keywords: Micro-learning, Training, Textile, Moodle, Cloud
1 Introduction
One of the most important requirements for successful learning experiences is learning activity
on a regular basis.
The world is subject to rapid change, which also affects work and private life. For this reason,
people have to adapt to this continuous change to the environment that is happening at decreasing
intervals. The ability to learn and the speed of learning thereby become an elementary factor for
individual quality of life. Thus education and advanced training occupy a part of our lifetime that
must not be underrated.
In business, an additional cost factor is a non-productive time for employees participating in
different training. As a rule, advanced training cannot be organized during the work process, and
therefore costs are generated from people's participation in training, and they are also temporarily
withdrawn from work. Observations of everyday life show a very high starting motivation to gain
knowledge and abilities amongst all social classes. Despite this basically positive climate many
learners fail to reach their aims. Dropout rates of 50% in adult education are no rarity. In the
respective e-learning segment even 85% of course terminations are reported (Fritsch, H., 2003).
The e-learning is based on the use of electronic media for a variety of learning purposes that
range from add-on functions in conventional classrooms to full substitution for the face-to-face
meetings by online encounters (Guri-Rosenblit, S., 2005).
The learning management systems currently in use (different platforms, MOOC, etc.) have the
advantage of allowing learners to access the required information whenever and wherever they are,
provided there is an Internet connection. The advantages of accessing these LMSs are given by
being available to the student. For elderly people, who are less dependent on the different devices
with which the Internet can go, there may be a number of adaptation problems.
Learners often get stuck while using today’s e-learning systems, because they can’t motivate
themselves to use these systems for learning. In contrast, the same learners make use of their
computers, their cell phones and similar tools without such effort (Gassler, G., et. al., 2004).
A challenge of adults’ engaging with eLearning has to do with the time requirements of a
course, which are sometimes longer than expected (Bakar, et al, 2015). In addition to the difficulty
of finding the time needed for learning, fatigue can also affect the physical and mental adulthood,
and ultimately impede the learning process (access to LMS, the study of materials, etc.). A course
in the e-learning system can take a long time if the subject is very complex, which is quite unlikely
in continuing education. Therefore, lengthening the duration of an eLearning course will act as a
deterrent to student participation as well as traditional online courses that are "offered in the
academic semester, without taking into account the pace preferred and students' expertise." (Goyal,
et al., 2012).
Taking into account the difficulties outlined above, a company's management and staff will
prefer training as cheaply as possible, and as far as possible the information will be available when
it is needed. In this context, a possible solution is the use of microlearning.
The definition of microlearning has been easy to guess using just its name or the common
adjective used to describe it: providing "bite-size" information. But microlearning means more
than just small. Microlearning is not only compact—it’s also focused, offering just the right
amount of information necessary to help a learner achieve a specific, actionable objective. This
makes microlearning in business contexts especially valuable. The microlearning is a relevant and
essential learning method and consists of: short, task-based video demonstrations, packaged
simulation, brief "gamified" activities, instructive animations, visually rich job-aids.
2 Moodle cloud training and microlearning

Lately, the textile industry faces a shortage of qualified staff at all levels. This shortage
requires management to employ low-skilled or unskilled workers in the textile field. The training
of such persons is done at the workplace with the help of a qualified person. The disadvantage is to
block a specialized person for a certain amount of time. Such people are considered as trainers.
They will teach firm-specific knowledge, and in order to be able to do so, they must be prepared to
teach and use the means provided by the LMS.
This article is an example of progress made on the Moodle platform cloud to prepare trainers in
the textile companies.
2.1 Using Moodle cloud for training quality personnel in textile companies
Moodle Cloud is offering a cloud-hosting solution for teachers, trainers or anyone to
effortlessly deploy Moodle as a learning environment, with zero installation or hosting charges.
Moodle Cloud site administrators have the ability to manage multiple courses, add content, enrol
users and use Moodle’s famous range of interesting and unique collaborative learning activities
within their Moodle learning environment. With automatic updates to the latest Moodle release,
Moodle Cloud hosting seamlessly gives educators the choice to adopt the open source learning
platform for their teaching and training objectives without the need to install, maintain and
upgrade software and servers themselves.
The article presents the "Modern Quality Training Systems" course. This course is addressed to
the staff of the quality department of textile factories. The course is structured so that the trainees
can get the necessary information and then apply them, figure 1.
Figure 1. Moodle cloud course for training in the quality of textile
The structure of the course respects the elements needed to create a course on an LMS
platform: selecting the scenario (1), starting the resources (2), establishing the learning activities
(3), choosing the communication modalities (4) and registering the users (5). The last module
refers to knowledge verification tests.
2.2 Developing microlearning based on Moodle cloud

It is easy to see how microlearning could be applied in Moodle using the standard activities
and sections. The challenges to implement microlearning in Moodle are related to the practice
more than the technology, figure 2.
Figure 2. Microlearning based on Moodle cloud facilities

The development of microlearning requires a series of stages of practical evolution: "Bite-size":

For a learning intervention to be considered "micro", short 2-minute games, short videos, or
written text with large fonts are required to be read without scrolling. Compact: microlearning
must make the most of a student's time by eliminating the usual elements (long introductions).
Focused: if organizations have large archives of short knowledge, concision is very important for
organizing and accessing them. Relevant context: due to the fact that demands for microlearning
content increases, organizations will design this content to be as close to reality as applicability is
immediate. Immediate reward: gamification become the best means of microlearning of quickly
capturing students' attention and highlighting the small efforts they make in acquiring skills.
Technology can help in the development of microlearning content, as it involves turning a
content module into several easy-to-understand sections, and any way to automate the creation and
upload of content and activities is welcome. Although teachers sometimes communication ability
is poor, they will be forced to be concise.
This course for quality managers in textile firms is structured in modules that involve solving a
problem. For example: Adding a resource allows you to choose the resource type, then explaining
in one screen the steps you need to add that resource. There is a test to solve the appropriate steps.
After completing this test, each student enters their own course. This course allows the students to
practice their accumulated knowledge, the student being a teacher, in figure 3.
Figure 3. Microlearning based on Moodle cloud facilities
Conclusions
The microlearning is a relevant and essential learning method and consists of: short, task-based
video demonstrations, packaged simulation, brief "gamified" activities, instructive animations,
visually rich job-aids.
Microlearning can be used to develop useful content with immediate applicability by
fragmenting existing materials.
Content management systems such as Moodle can be used to create content. The resources
provided by such platforms are sufficient to create content that can be used by companies wishing
to train their staff.
References
Conference Proceedings:
Bakar, A. B. A., Wook, T. S. M. T., & Ashaari, N. S. (2015): An investigation of user engagement factors in
ELearning for working adult learners. In Electrical Engineering and Informatics (ICEEI), 2015
International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCOINS), IEEE, 633-637. Retrieved
from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7352576
Journal Articles:
Goyal, M., Yadav, D., & Choubey, A. (2012). ELearning: current state of art and future prospects.
International Journal of Computer Science, 9(3). 490-499. Retrieved from
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/38584112/25_ELearning_Current_State_of_Art_and
_Future_Prospects.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1515353657&Sig
nature=E%2BL3vNoS96%2FH5qCt2Wvcj2e9ez0%3D&response-content-
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49(4), 467-493. doi: 10.1007/s10734-004-0040-0
Newspapers Or Magazines:
Gassler, G. Hug, T., & Glahn, C. (2004): Integrated Micro Learning – An outline of the basic method and
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Internet Sources:
Fritsch, H.( 2003): Contrasting distance learning education drop out experience, http://www. fernuni-
agen.de/ZIFF/contrast.htm, accessed 2018.
https://www.moodlenews.com/2017/trim-down-your-moodle-teaching-getting-started-with-microlearning/,
accessed 2018.
Virtual solutions for industrial automation education
Robert Beloiu1
(1) University of Pitesti

1, Targu din Vale, RO-110040, ROMANIA
E-mail: robertbeloiu[at]gmail.com
Abstract
This article presents a possible solution for the industrial automation professional
formation: both in universities as well as in other types of educational environments. Most of
the technical universities have included in their syllabus the topic of industrial automation.
The reason of this inclusion is the very high demand from the industry for specialists with
competences in this field.
The organization of such an educational topic requires several “must have”
infrastructure: software and hardware. Even though the hardware for learning could be less
complicated, is, nevertheless, expensive and many times out of the possibilities offered by
university laboratories. One way to overcome this impediment is to use software simulators
that include industrial installations. There are some companies that produce some simulation
software, but this is very expensive, and it requires a lot of knowledge. Nevertheless, there is a
solution that could help solution this situation. This is going to be presented in this article.
A different required infrastructure is the software for industrial automation. There are
some solutions in the market. There are several commercial solutions as well as free ones.
The companies are now more aware that if they want to sell their product, there has to be a
way that the academic community has access to programming resources. Therefore, some of
them create time limited software, restricted capacity as well as free available programs.
Some of them will be covered in this article.
The conclusion in the article is a presentation of a possible solution for the laboratories'
activities for industrial automation courses.
Keywords: engineering education, industrial automation, simulators, PLC
1. Introduction
Education faces many challenges everywhere in the world. Technology advances at a very high
pace and there are times when the educational system is not capable to follow it. As the
accessibility to computers rises, their prices lower. At the same time, as the capabilities of
computers rises, their prices rise too. The same is true with technological equipment (Korus,
2017). Even though for industry the cost of an arm robot, for instance, might be acceptable
because it can be an investment cost, for an educational institution it’s price is very high (Valera et
al., 2014). The same is true about most of other technological equipment.
At the same time, industry promotes the use of simulation software in almost any field of
activity. All major multinational industrial companies promote the use of “virtual commissioning”
to reduce costs.
The educational community is also adapting to this trend on one hand due of the high cost of
equipment acquisition and on the other hand due to the demand of the companies for competencies
of new employers. If some years ago, the use of software use was a request for new employees,
now is a standard and it is supposed that everyone has knowledge of basic use of it. This situation
is the same in other field of activity: industry, automation, medicine, forensic investigation,
construction, economy, etc.
Lego Mindstorms in combination with Arduino, Raspbeery Pi and BeagleBoard is a relatively
lower cost for robotic applications (Valera et al., 2014). This combination allows the users to
create several applications in the field of mobile robots. This approach has the advantage of being
possible to be used with teenagers in pre-university and young university students. In fact, the
advances of low cost and easy access to “Arduino-type” board, produced an explosion of
competitions around the world.
Nowadays there are many students that work while study. Therefore, a solution should be
found for every day larger group of people looking to acquire higher competences (Kozák,
2016)(Celik, 2016)(Chen and Gao, 2012). These students need to upgrade their practical skills
with theoretical ones. They either are involved in dual educational systems or just attend regular
courses after work. Sometimes, the solution for them is to have access to educational resources at
different periods of week, when the job pressure lowers.
At the same time as students, the educators should be interested in upgrading their technical
competences as the technology evolves (García-Jiménez, 2016). There are situations when
teachers are reluctant to keep the rhythm of technology evolution in their activities due to various
factors (Watty et al., 2016). Nevertheless, in many cases there is a general trend of adopting new
technologies and methodologies in classrooms around the world (Márquez et al., 2016).
2. Actual situation
Industrial automation is a course that is given at the University of Pitesti at electric and
electronic engineering programs in the last year and last semester of studies. Before this course,
the students have acquired competences in mechanics, electronics, electric drives, control systems,
electric installations.
The University of Pitesi has similar problems as other educational institutions in Romania and
in other countries. This is a constant long term lack of funds that affects the infrastructure,
especially for laboratories(“Education and Training Monitor 2017 Romania,” n.d.)(Aedo, 2017).
In this context there were some preoccupations for finding alternative means for teaching
especially laboratory classes using alternative means (Beloiu et al., 2014)(Beloiu, 2015) or through
European projects (Bostan et al., 2015).
The Industrial Automation course is focused on teaching PLC installation and programming.
These competences are required by the work market in the local, regional, national and
international environment. As the tendency for automation is every day more evident, the
employers are looking for people that have competencies in this field.
The solutions applied so far (Beloiu, 2015)(Beloiu et al., 2014)were an alternative to the
technological installations. The purpose is to replace a complicate industrial installation with its
equivalence of an electronic simulator of the implementation of its transfer function as indicated in
Figure 1.
3. Solutions
Many companies that produce PLCs offer built-in simulator programs. Simulating an
automation program before it is launched into production facilities helps detect possible errors and
save costs. Nevertheless, some simulators’ interfaces are not very friendly despite of their utility in
software testing as indicated in Figure 2.
In Figure 3 are indicated images of simulators for Siemens and CodeSys programs. The interest
for Siemens products is due to its requirements in the automation in Europe, while for CodeSys is
due to the fact that it is freely distributed and can be used on a large variety of PLCs.
A simple application that contains 5 input variables, 4 output variables and 1 timer, as indicated
in Figure 3. This application implies two vertical movements, two horizontal movements and one
timer operation.
Scope1
1
s2 +2s+4
Step Transfer Fcn
Scope
Scope2
1 1
s s
Integrator Integrator1
Subtract
Gain
4
Gain1
Block representation Electronic implementation

Figure 1. Representation of a 2nd degree system
PLCSIM – Siemens simulator Visualization – CodeSYS simulator

Figure 2. Example of PLC software built-in simulators
M1 - motor urcare si coborarea carlig
M2 - motor avans si retragere carlig
M2
F7 F4
F3
M1
S2 buton de pornire
F2
Figure 3. Test application
PLCSIM – Siemens simulator Visualization – CodeSYS simulator

Figure 4. Simulator configuration for Figure 3. Test application
The problem of software simulation is that the user has to be very careful in validation of the
input variables order. If this is not very carefully observed, the program might have unexpected
evolution.
It is true and known that automation companies are developing and implementing the “Industry
4.0” and “Virtual Commissioning” tools in order to be able to simulate complex processes before
to be implemented in real life installations. Nevertheless, these solutions are very expensive and
for their implementation it is required many resources from the implementation PC that increase
costs even more.
A different approach comes from the gaming industry (“3D FACTORY SIMULATION,”
2018). It is well known that young generation is very accustomed with computer games.
This solution simulates industrial installations that can be linked to different PLCs. The major
advantage of “Factory I/O” solution is that it has already defined several sensors, buttons,
actuators, robots, etc. Therefore, there is no need for the programmer to concentrate on the events’
order in the simulated situation. The simulation software communicates with the PLC just as it
would do a real installation.
In figure 5 is illustrates the simulation of an industrial transportation system that contains two
actuators: entry and buffer conveyor. The system contains three sensors: item ready (the
manipulated object enters on the entry conveyor), at entry (the manipulated object enters on the
buffer conveyor) and at exit (the manipulated object leaves the buffer conveyor).
The process consists in the following operations:
 One object is ready at the entry conveyor
 The entry conveyor starts
 When the object arrives at entry, it starts
the buffer conveyor
 When there are three objects on the buffer
conveyor, the entry conveyor stops
 When the three objects leave the buffer
conveyor, it starts again the entry
conveyor and the process repeats Figure 5. Factory I/O conveyor
The implementation of the control program is
done using the LAD and SCL (Beloiu, 2017) Siemens S7.
Figure 6. Non-structured control program

In Figure 6 is displayed the non-structured version of the program. This means that the main
function program OB1 contains all the instructions. This programming is not the best and could be
used by beginner programmers.
The program initializes the variables that will contain the counters for the processed objects,
MW0 and MW10 in Network 1 (1st program line).
Then as the objects appear on the 1st conveyor one variable is added 1. Once the objects enter
the 2nd conveyor, the second variable is increased by 1. These operations are done in Network 2
and 4. The variables are compared with the stored values in Networks 3 and 5 and decisions are
made as the comparing operations in Networks 5 and 6. The cycle is repeated by activating the
start variable stored in M0.0.
Main program SCL function

Figure 7. Structured program
LAD function
Figure 8. Structured program. LAD function
Figure 7 displays a different programming approach. The main program contains the calling of
two functions that do the same operation. They are aimed to work in turns, but never at the same
time. The function FB400 is called when the memory bit M200.1 is activated. This function is
developed in SCL format.
SCL function is very similar to high level programming language like Pascal. At the beginning
of the function, there is the declaration of input, output and local variables. The functions S_CU
and S_CD implement the count up and count down operations, counting the objects according to
the specifications.
The IF functions make the same tests as the non-structured program did: counting the objects
that enter on the buffer conveyor and when the conditions are fulfilled stopping and starting the
entry conveyor.
Figure 8 displays the same operations written in LAD format. There is a difference in this
function and the non-structured program in the sense of using dedicated counting functions C1:
S_CU and C2:S_CD.
In both functions FB1:”prog LAD” and FB400:”prog SCL” in variable declaration are used
formal variables. In the main program, where they are called, they are applied actual variables
whose values are linked to the controlled system.
Using the Factory I/O simulation program, the user does not need to focus on the difficult job
to make a very determined variation in the input variables. As this program simulates the actual
installation, the signals from the simulated inputs: sensors, buttons, etc. and simulated outputs:
conveyor commands are directly passed to the programming environment. Thus, learning PLC
programming could be very efficient and more attractive way for students that learn Industrial
Automation course.
Conclusions
In this article it is presented a new way of implementing Industrial Automation courses.
The companies are moving toward adopting “Virtual Commissioning” solutions that implies
using software simulation before the actual implementation of automation solutions.
The gaming industry developed an environment that coupled with the programming packages
helps learning PLC programming. Using this tool helps the user focus on the programming instead
of being concentrated on the input validation according the desired logic.
A different advantage of using gaming solutions makes easier the Industry Automation
laboratories. Using a software tool, including considering the license cost, proves much easier
laboratory development. Also, if needed, some applications in the software could be physically
implemented as graduation projects.
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Romania, p. 5. https://doi.org/10.1109/ATEE.2015.7133751
Beloiu, R., Bostan, I., Iorgulescu, M., 2014. Dynamic electronic model for a DC motor - Simulation and
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and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). Presented at the 2014 6th International Conference on Electronics,
Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), IEEE, Bucharest, Romania, pp. 7–12.
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Laboratory Activities. Procedia - Soc. Behav. Sci. 180, 1014–1021.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.02.195
Celik, F., 2016. Comparing distance education versus traditional education in Engineering Management
Masters Program: Sakarya University Sample. IFAC-Pap. 49, 305–309.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.11.084
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Kozák, Š., 2016. Multidisciplinary Approach and Dual Education in Control Engineering for
Mechatronics. IFAC-Pap. 49, 52–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.07.152
Márquez, R., Tolosa, L., Gómez, R., Izaguirre, C., Rennola, L., Bullón, J., Sandia, B., 2016.
Reproducción de un ambiente de innovaciónen el salón de clase. Unaestrategia para promover la
creatividaden la educaciónenIngenieríaQuímica. Educ. Quím. 27, 249–256.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eq.2016.07.001
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TrabajosPrácticos de Mecatrónica y Robótica. Rev. Iberoam. Automática E Informática Ind. RIAI 11, 363–
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2016.03.003
Section
TECHNOLOGIES &
VIRTUAL LABORATORY
Technologies (TECH):
 Innovative Web-based Teaching and Learning
Technologies, Virtual Laboratory
 Web, Virtual Reality/AR and mixed technologies
 Web-based Education (WBE), Web-based Training (WBT)
 Educational Technology, Web-Lecturing Technology
 Mobile E-Learning, Communication Technology
Applications
Augmented Virtuality as an Instrument
for a Better Learning of History
Dragoș Gheorghiu1, Livia Ștefan2
(1) Doctoral School, National University of Arts, 19 Budişteanu, Bucharest, ROMANIA

(2) Vauban IT Services, 2 Oteteleșanu, Bucharest, ROMANIA
E-mail: livia.stefan[at]ahoo.com
Abstract
In this paper the authors present a research investigating methods for achieving a more
efficient immersion of the visitors in a set of historical reconstructions performed in online
Virtual Reality (VR) using Unity3D. The approach was centred on augmenting the virtuality
by means of „reality inserts”, to enhance the veridicity of the overall 3D scenes and support
an immersive setting for informal history learning. The current paper will describe a case
study involving two Roman-Greek reconstructions in Mangalia and Albeşti, within the Time
Maps (PN II IDEI) project.
Keywords: Augmented Virtuality, Historic Characters, Videos, Experimental Archaeology,

Unity3D
1 Introduction
Virtual reconstructions in 3D are currently a well established visualization method both in
architecture and archaeology (Barceló 2001; Earl 2009; Saleeb and Dafoulas, 2011; Abbott 2012;
Shanks and Webmoor 2013; Gheorghiu, 2018), representing a form of Virtual Reality (VR) which
is currently more accessible to a broader public. The evolution of the 3D modelling and rendering
technologies has led to the creation of 3D reconstructions of high photographic accuracy (Shanks
and Webmoor 2013; Earl 2009), in which, paradoxically, the user once immersed can no longer
maintain a connection to the real world.
Augmented Virtuality (AV) represents a method by which a virtual environment can be
enriched with information from the real world, with the purpose of connecting the virtual to the
real, and thus offering a broader cognitive context. AV was conceptualized by Milgram et al.
(1994) and together with Augmented Reality (AR), defines the spectrum of a mixed reality (MR)
within a reality–virtuality continuum. While AR has been experimented with in several cultural
heritage and e-learning projects (Radu, 2012; Kyriakou and Hermon, 2016; Gheorghiu and Ştefan,
2012; Gheorghiu and Ştefan, 2015), AV as a mixed reality medium is less studied as a technology
per se.
In AV different augmentations can be applied for the exploration of historical sites. In more
complex settings, the 3D reconstructions and scenes are populated with different human
characters, also reconstructed in 3D, with the purpose of reproducing a more realistic image of the
past architectural spaces.
In this paper the authors present a research whose purpose was the application of methods and
techniques for achieving a more efficient immersion and cognitive impact of a set of online
historical reconstructions. The approach was centred on augmenting the virtuality by means of
„reality inserts”, thus enhancing the veracity and complexity of the overall 3D scenes. The
research goal was to create an improved immersive setting to support a better informal e-learning
of history.
Two forms of augmented virtuality were tested. One was represented by videos shot within
architectural fragments reconstructed in reality (as experimental archaeology) and introduced
within the virtual architectural reconstructions. This method provides the visitor the opportunity to
switch from a virtual to a real environment, back and forth. The second method consisted in 3D
scenes populated with virtual human characters, created by 3D-scanning of real characters dressed
in epoch costumes.
These methods were employed in later years within the Time Maps (PN II IDEI) project (Time
Maps, 2018) of the National University of Arts (NUA) in Bucharest with excellent results in
immersive and experiential e-learning (Ştefan and Gheorghiu, 2014; Gheorghiu and Ştefan, 2018).
The current paper will describe a case study using AV as an instrument of learning in two
Roman-Greek reconstructions in Mangalia and Albeşti within the mentioned research project.
2 Literature Review
Virtuality has become a research instrument both in science and education (Goodwin et al.,
2015). In the scientific literature, AV it is implemented as a form of MR. The Horizon Report
(2018) defines MR as “the intersection of virtual and physical Realities” and still an “emerging
environment” to be fully adopted in four or five years.
In archaeology Mixed Reality is present in recent research works (Tan and Lim., 2017). In
these works, AV is not yet employed as a learning instrument but rather as a new museum
practice.
In current implementations, the educational potential of the MR technology is obvious. From a
user’ cognitive and engagement impact, the MR environments have proven effective but still
difficult to adopt in educational practice due to the need for equipment that would mix the virtual
with the real (Costanza et al., 2009; Callaghan et al., 2010; Dede et al., 2017).
3 The AV Technological Methodology

Unity3D (Unity, 2018), a very popular gaming engine among game developers and
researchers, was the technology selected, due to its high performance both in online environments
and mobile devices. It is for this reason that Unity3D is currently a platform of choice for both
virtual reality and augmented reality (Gheorghiu and Ștefan, 2015; Kyriakou and Hermon, 2016),
along with the Unreal engine (Unreal, 2018). The capability of creating very interactive 3D virtual
scenes, also makes Unity3D a good platform for AV.
The 3D reconstructions were integrated as a single user application into the project’s
educational website (Time Maps, 2018), using the Unity web plugin. The “first-person” mode, in
which the user views the 3D scene through his/her own eyes, was employed. Thus, a complete
immersion was obtained.
3.1 3D Scenes
In the Unity application, various 3D hyper realistic reconstructions of the Hellenistic
architectural spaces were integrated, designed with high archaeological accuracy and focused on
the details. The reconstructions were copied from existing archaeological remains or were the
result of the experimental archaeological research (Gheorghiu, 2014) carried out by the first
author. The built-up spaces and usual objects that furnished these spaces were reconstructed taking
into account the textures and colours of each material and the diurnal and nocturnal illumination of
the built space (Gheorghiu, 2018).
The illumination (Gheorghiu, 2018) took account of a specific moment of the day, thus trying
to provide a more accurate (realistic) image of the site. In other experiments at the sites of
Mangalia and Albești, the forms and textures of the ancient objects were scanned for a hyper-
realistic representation.
3.2 3D Characters
Photogrammetry is a technique used to generate 3D models from sequences of successive
photos. It is used in cultural heritage projects, to obtain models of artefacts or historic buildings
(Bazzurri and Picardello, 2018), and it is a more convenient method, in terms of post-processing
effort, than laser scanning. Sketchfab is an online platform that can be used to create galleries of
3D models.
In the Time Maps project, photogrammetry was used to scan young volunteer actors dressed in
historical costumes as a method to create a gallery of 3D characters (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Real Characters During Photogrammetry Sessions And The Resulted 3D Models In
Sketchfab Online Gallery
3.3 AV in Unity3D
To design an AV application the capabilities of Unity3D to embed hotspots linked to video
films were explored. Hotspots are small regions in the 3D scene where users can interact with it by
clicking on it. In Unity3D the hotspots could be seen as “game objects”. These hotspots have been
inserted in the reconstructed contexts in the exact place where different technologies would have
taken place in the historical time (Figure 2).
The scanned 3D characters have been post-processed and optimized in a number of polygons, due
to the fact that a huge file size resulted
from the generation of the 3D model,
and after several iterations they were
integrated in the Unity 3D scene.
Even with a loss of accuracy of the
resulted images, the presence of the
human characters brought an
important augmentation, explicating
the overall historical scene and
bringing to it an extra touch of “that
reality”. When the 3D scenes were
completed with 3D characters, the
illumination effects were implemented
contributing to the augmentation of
the “reality” of the Past.
3.4 VR/AV as a Virtual Tour

From the Unity3D project a fully
Figure 2. Video Hotspots Places As AV In Unity3D
featured AV application using the
Unity3D web plugin was generated.

To maintain compatibility with all the versions of browsers, a virtual tour in the first-person
mode was offered as a limited VR variant of the Unity3D application. There are 2 possibilities to
create a virtual tour, either using an external screen capture software, such as Fraps (2018), or
using a Unity3D camera animated to make a directed tour through the 3D reconstruction. The
Time Maps project employed the second method.
3.5 Discussion and Limitations

The online environment is still limited regarding the VR interactive support. This is also the
case for AV. Things are also complicated by users with different browsers, different versions of
the same browser, or computers with different capabilities.
Since 2016, modern browsers no longer support plugins, except for a special version of Mozilla
Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR 52.8.0) as well as Google Chrome 67.0.339699, which
provides backward compatibility with web plugins.
That is why, within the Time Maps project, we had to envisage solutions that would
accommodate all the possible situations, such as guided virtual tours through 3D reconstructions.
These videos are also compatible with mobile devices, which when detected, are redirected to the
page containing the VR videos instead of the Unity3D application.
Users able to install the special version of Chrome and the Unity web plug-in received a link to
the Unity VR application.
4 Pedagogical Methodologies in AV Settings

Learning “affordances” is a term introduced by the perceptual psychologist Gibson (1977),
which extended the description of the graphical environments from objects and space, to specific
actions performed on the objects of that environment. AV can be considered an affordance of a
virtual learning setting, and can be employed as a complex instrument to study spaces and objects
of the Past.
 Video - In the video AV method, the student does not interact with the virtual
environment. The video tour of a historical reconstruction is based on the teacher's
instructions that guide the student to visualize essential information in order to understand
the cultural phenomenon behind the 3D historical contexts such as architectural
structures, historical characters, character relationships, relationship between characters
and architecture, technologies, and finally daily scenes.
 Unity - In AV developed as a Unity3D application, the student explores the 3D historical
contexts to study, and discovers other data and meaningful relationships between
characters and between characters and context that do not appear in videos and which will
also generate a series of questions, thus enhancing the learning outcome and the volume
of knowledge.
 Case Study - In these case studies we will detail the AV made with 3D inserts, real-virtual
conversion and virtual insertion. Hellenistic sites on the Black Sea coast, Mangalia
(Mangalia, 2018) and Albeşti (Albeşti, 2018) were selected, where various home and
funerary architectural spaces were built, and populated with characters inspired by
ceramics and the stone sculptures of that era.
 Mangalia - Characters dressed in costumes inspired from Tanagra ceramic statues were
scanned and inserted in representative locations in 3D reconstructions of Hellenistic
houses and of a funerary tumulus. An attempt was made to capture some daily life
fragments, studying the living quarters of patio houses. A funerary scene inspired from a
Greek bas-relief was also recomposed (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Reconstructions Of Mangalia Hellenistic Site
 Albeşti - For the Albeşti settlement a fortified farm dating from 4th-2nd centuries BC was
reconstructed in 3D. The settlement was part of the Greek town of Mangalia (Gr.
Kallatis) chora, and recalls the rural farms or pyrgoi of the Hellenistic world. The
imported materials discovered constitute an index of the commercial relationships of
Kallatis with the Black Sea-Aegean worlds and infer the main function of the settlement
(Figure 4).
The 3D reconstruction of the pyrgoi-farm was populated with barbarians, Greek soldiers, iron-
smiths and peasant women.
Figure 4. Reconstructions Of Albeşti Hellenistic Site
5 Conclusions and future work

The paper presents the results of an original research, consisting in the implementation of two
methods of AV, applied to facilitate the understanding and study of local history in 2 locations,
from the Hellenistic epoch.
These two types of augmentations of the virtual space achieved by adding „real”
representations enhanced the grade of credibility of the virtual reconstructions.
Experiments with students from primary schools showed an advantage of augmenting virtual
representations, compared to simple virtual ones, in order to increase knowledge and efficiency as
time and volume of information transmission. AV allows the achievement of a high degree of
reality of the Past, which helps to understand the cultural complexity of the discussed topics. With
the help of the historical dress, facial expressions, gestures and attitudes, the historical characters
could visually transmit a multitude of information about activities and daily life technologies, in a
living, engaging way for students. The authors consider that the complexity of the Past can be
experimented in an immersive and augmented manner, by inserting the real in the virtual, this AV
allowing a visitor an enhanced experientiality derived from an enhanced veracity of the studied
contexts.
Acknowledgements
The reconstruction of the Albeşti site was coordinated by Dr. Robert Constantinescu and was
drawn by design students. The scanning and the animation from Mangalia and Albeşti were
performed by Marius Hodea and Liviu Ungureanu.
Many thanks to Mr. Bogdan Căpruciu for his help in improving the translation of the present
text.
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and Cultural Heritage VAST (2012). pp. 1-4.
Barceló, J.A. (2001): Virtual reality for archaeological explanation beyond ‘picturesque’ reconstruction.
Archeologia e calcolatori, pp. 221-244.
Bazzurri, F., and Picardello, M. A. (2018). Optimization Techniques for Photogrammetry Applied to Cultural
Heritage and the Action of Transformation Groups. In International Conference on Augmented Reality,
Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics (pp. 332-348). Springer, Cham.
Callaghan, V., Shen, L., Gardner, M., Shen, R., and Wang, M. (2010). A Mixed Reality Approach to Hybrid
Learning in Mixed Culture Environments, In Handbook of Research on Hybrid Learning Models:
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Costanza, E., Kunz, A., and Fjeld M. (2009). Mixed Reality: A Survey. Invited book chapter in Human
machine interaction, LNCS 5440, Pages 47-68, Springer.
Dede C., Grotzer T.A., Kamarainen A., Metcalf S.J. (2017). Virtual Reality as an Immersive Medium for
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Light Intensity Control Using Arduino and LabVIEW
Mihai Bogdan
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department,

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, 550025, Romania,
E-Mail: mihai.bogdan[at]ulbsibiu.ro
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to design and implement a low cost system intended in terms
of hardware and software, to make a light intensity control system.This system will be built
using the Arduino Uno development platform, and programming will be done using the
LabVIEW graphical programming. Hardware resources that will be used in the paper are:
Arduino Uno, a light dependent resistor or a photo resistor (LDR), wich output is used to
control the intensity of the two led, a breadboard, one suitable resistors for the LDR (10KΩ)
and 2 x suitable resistors for to limit the current through LEDs (220 Ohms is fine) and
connecting wires. The results will be displayed through the serial interface on the computer,
in the LabVIEW program.
Keywords: Light intensity, Arduino, LabVIEW, Light Dependent Resistor (LDR), While
loop, Case structure.
1 Introduction
The light intensity of a point source is numerically equal to the luminous flux flux ΔΦ emitted
in the elementary solid angle dΩ.
E= ΔΦ/dΩ
The light intensity measuring unit is the candle [cd], and the luminous flux measurement unit is
the lumen [lm]. A lumen is defined as the luminous flux of light, produced by a light source which
emits 1 cd of light intensity on a solid steradian angle. The luminous flux or the light power is the
measure of the perceived power of light.
For implement this project we will need the following materials: an Arduino UNO, a light
dependent resistor or a photo resistor (LDR), one suitable resistors for the LDR (10KΩ),
breadboard, 2 LEDs, 2x220 ohm resistors and jumpers wires to connect.
Figure 1.The graphic symbols of the LDR
LDR is a photo conductive sensor wich changes its resistance in a proportion to the light
exposed to it. It’s resistance decreases with the intensity of light. LDR consists of a film of
semiconductor material deposited by vacuum evaporation on a metal grill which is fixed to an
insulating plate. The casing is provided with ends with ohmic contacts which are terminals and is
protected by lacquering or encapsulation plastic. The electrical resistance of the photoresistor
decreases as the intensity of the light flux increases.
The main parameters of a photosensor are: Dark resistance, Maximum current, Maximum
power dissipation, Maximum voltage.
The value of the current through the photoresistor at a given U voltage, depends on the level of
illumination according to the current – voltage characteristic (Figure 2).
LDR is used to detect the light, and
Arduino is used to on/off the Light of
the LEDs depending on two thresholds
of brightness. The first threshold was
80 and the other 50.
Thus, if the light intensity drops
below the first threshold lighting (80),
the first LED will light up, and if it
falls below the second threshold
lighting, the second LED will also
illuminate. If the light intensity is
above the threshold of 80, both LEDs
will be off. Figure 2.The current-voltage characteristic of a LDR
Figure 3.The components necessary for the elaboration of the technical project
Figure 4. Circuit diagram of the light intensity controlsystem

2 The virtual instrumentof the light intensity control system

This paper aims to create a virtual instrument for controlling the brightness of an enclosure or a
street (turn on and off based on the thresholds of brightness).
Programs developed in LabVIEW are called virtual instruments or VIs and have the extension
.vi. These programs have the role of receiving data from the user or from the computer interfaces
with the process, processing them and then displaying, storing or transmitting them remotely
(Bogdan 2017).
A VI contains the following three components:
- Front Panel—Serves as the user interface.
- Block Diagram—Contains the graphical source code that defines the functionality of the VI.
- Icon and Connector Pane—Identifies the interface to the VI so that you can use the VI in
another VI. A VI within another VI is called a subVI. A subVI corresponds to a subroutine in text-
based programming languages (http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361H-01/lvconcepts/
intro_to_vis/).
Represented in Figure 5 is the Front Panel of the VI. It contains the following controls and
indicators:
-a control for setting the serial port to which Arduino is connected;
- a boolean Stop control to turn off the virtual instrument;
- a numeric Gauge indicator to display the threshold of light intensity;
- two LEDs indicators, that is turn on or off based on the thresholds of brightness;
- a Error Out cluster indicator to display any errors that might occur.
Figure 5. The Front Panel of the VI
To make the Block Diagram of the VI (Figure 6), we will use the LINX software. LINX
provides easy to use LabVIEW VIs for interacting with common embedded platforms, like
Arduino.
The VI Block Diagram contains the controls and indicators terminals of the Front Panel,
various nodes, constants and wires. The nodes in LabVIEW are different functions, subVIs and
programming structures. We used different LINX functions and two comparison functions (Less
Or Equal?) for comparing light intensity with the two thresholds.
We also used two Case structures. At the Selector terminal of the two Case structures I wired
the outputs of the two comparison functions. In the four subdiagrams of the two Case structures,
we placed two Digital Write functions for controlling the two LEDs in the Front Panel. We created
Local Variables for each LED for write the True or False variable according to the two thresholds.
A Local Variable can read or write to controls or indicators on the front panel of a VI. Useful to
communicate between structures within one VI.
The Bock Diagram of the VI, also contains a While loop. A While Loop, executes the code it
contains, until a condition occurs.
Figure 6. The Block Diagram of the VI
Figure 7. The sub-diagrams of the Case structure corresponding to the 50 threshold lighting
Figure 8. The sub-diagrams of the Case structure corresponding to the 80 threshold lighting
Conclusion
Light intensity control using Arduino and LabVIEW is designed to measure intensity of light
or amount of light. Light dependent resistor is used for detection of light and Arduino is used to
on/off the Light of two LEDs. If instead of LEDs we use 230 volt light bulbs, then relays will need
to be used to provide the required insulation between Arduino and the 230 volt supply.
The light sensor used is a component that senses the level of illumination of the environment.
This sensor is not calibrated (in the sense that you do not directly get a brightness value, but only a
numerical value directly proportional to the level of illumination without a unit of measure).
With the help of applications based on the Arduino microcontroller, interesting lighting
patterns can easily be achieved.
With LabVIEW, you can build any type of application, from simple mathematical operations to
complex communication systems or databases. LabVIEW has a number of libraries that contain
simpler or more complex functions, with which the user can build their own application, even with
a relatively low level of programming knowledge. The trend of program producers is to meet a
wider range of users so they can build an application to satisfy their requirements to the fullest
extent possible.
References
Bogdan M., (2017): „Traffic Light Using Arduino Uno and LabVIEW”, Proceedings of the 12th International
Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2017, ISSN: 1844-8933, p. 286-290, October 28, 2017
https://www.arduino.cc
http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361H-01/lvconcepts/intro_to_vis/
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/ro/nid/212478
http://www.ni.com/getting-started/labview-basics/shift-registers
http://www.ni.com/getting-started/labview-basics/execution-structures
Monitoring and Alarming the Level of Liquid in a Tank
Mihai Bogdan

Abstract
In this paper we are going to use a ultrasonic sensor for monitoring and alarming the
level of liquid in a tank. This is achieved by sending an ultrasound (inaudible to the human
ear for its high frequency) through one of the pair of cylinders that make up the sensor (a
transducer) and waiting for that sound to bounce on an object and return, return captured by
the other cylinder. When the liquid exceeds a maximum level or falls below a minimum level,
it will start a visual and audible alarm. This system will be built using the Arduino Uno
development platform, and programming will be done using the LabVIEW graphical
programming. This alarm system can monitors liquid levels in lift pump chambers, sump
pump basins, holding tanks, sewage, agricultural, and other water applications.
Keywords: Ultrasonic sensor, Arduino, LabVIEW, LINX software, While loop, Case
structure.
1 Introduction
The HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor is one of the most popular and easy to use remote sensors. It is
compatible with Arduino and has several advantages over analogue sensor sensors: it requires only
digital I / O pins, has higher immunity to noise.
This sensor can measure distances between 2cm and 400cm with precision that can reach 3mm.
Each HC-SR04 module includes an ultrasonic transmitter, receiver and command circuit.
Characteristics:
Operating voltage: DC 5V
Operating current: 15mA
Operating angle: 15 °
Distance: 2cm - 4m
It is easy to use and consumes little
energy, the main disadvantage being the
relatively small measuring distance. The
sensor is very easy to use, with only 4 pins:
VCC and GND, which are used for power Figure 1.The HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor
and two digital pins, used for the trigger and
the echo.
Distance measurement is based on the difference between the time at which the trigger was
transmitted and the time at which it is detected back.
Ultrasonic sensors emit short acoustic pulses of high frequency at regular intervals. They
propagate through the air at the speed of sound. If they hit an object, they are reflected back as
echo signals at the sensor, which calculates the distance to the object based on the time interval
between the signal emitting and echo reception.
Since the distance to the subject is

determined by measuring the wave
travel time and not the sound intensity,
the ultrasonic sensors are excellent for
eliminating background interference.
In principle, all materials that
sound reflecting, can be detected
regardless of their color. Even
transparent materials or thin films are
Figure 2.The ultrasonic principle not a problem for an ultrasonic sensor.
The ultrasonic sensor also detects
practically all liquids.
The Gnd and Vcc pins must be connected to the Gnd and 5V pins on the Arduino board, and
the Echo and Trig pins to any of the Arduino I/O digital pins.
The HC-SR04 sends a 40,000 Hz sonic pulse in 8 cycles to the Trig pin, which moves at the
speed of the sound through the air and will be received, after its reflection of an obstacle, at the
Echo pin. Echo Pin will show the time in microseconds that the sound waves made. The pulse
duration obtained at the Echo end is between 150 μs, corresponding to the distance of 2.58 cm, and
25 ms, corresponding to the distance of 4.31 m = 431 cm (https://alselectro.wordpress.com/
tag/ultrasonic-sensors/).
The circuit consists only of the Arduino, an ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04 and a two LEDs, with a
resistance of 220 ohms to limit the current.
The Trigger pin of the sensor is connected to pin 9 of the Arduino, and the pin Echo sensor is
connected to pin 8 of the Arduino. The sensor power is 5 volts. The two LEDs goes on port 5 and
respectively 6 of the Arduino.
Figure 3.The complete monitoring and Figure 4. The circuit diagram of the monitoring and
alarming project alarming project
2 The virtual instrument of the monitoring and alarming project

The virtual instrument accomplished, will monitor the level of liquid in a tank. If the liquid
drops below a certain minimum level set by the user, a red LED will light up and a buzzer will be
activated which will emit a tone of a certain frequency (500Hz) and a certain duration (500ms). If
the fluid rises above a certain maximum level set by the user, a red LED will light up and a buzzer
will be activated which will emit a different frequency (1000Hz) and a different duration (500ms).
Represented in Figure 5 and 6 is the Front Panel of the VI. It contains the following controls
and indicators:
- a control for setting the serial port to which Arduino is connected;
- a boolean Stop control to turn off the virtual instrument;
- a numeric Tank indicator to display the liquid level;
- two LEDs indicators for liquid level monitoring;
- two numeric controls for setting the pins to which the sensor is connected
Figure 5. The Front Panel of the VI with minimum level alert and with maximum level alert
respectively
To make the Block Diagram of the VI

(Figure 7), we will use the LINX software.
LINX provides easy to use LabVIEW VIs
for interacting with common embedded
platforms, like Arduino (Bogdan, 2017).
The VI Block Diagram contains the
controls and indicators terminals of the
Front Panel, the various nodes, constants
and the wires. The nodes in LabVIEW are
different functions, subVIs and
programming structures. We used
different LINX functions and two
comparison functions (Less Or Equal? and
Greater Or Equal?) for comparing the
liquid level with the two thresholds
(Minimum Level and Maximum Level).
We also used two Case structures. At Figure 6. The Front Panel of the VI without warning
the Selector terminal of the two Case
structures I wired the outputs of the two comparison functions. Exceeding the two thresholds
(Minimum and Maximum respectively) will generate the two warning sounds.
The Digital Write.vi function is used to control the two LEDs and the Read.vi function is used
for ultrasonic sensor reading.
contains until a condition occurs.
Figure 7. The Block Diagram of the monitoring and alarming project
Conclusion
The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor offers excellent non-contact range detection with high
accuracy and stable readings in an easy to use package. The HC-SR04 can be used to measure
distances up to 4m with 3mm accuracy (product datasheet data) and identify the presence of
objects or capture motions. This allows us to create alarms, presence sensors, listening systems,
parking sensors, obstacle sensors for use in robots, and many other applications.
The LINX toolkit is a an open source project which allows a LabVIEW developer to easily get
data to and from the ever-popular Arduino microcontroller.
The ultrasonic sensors used as level sensors can be used:
-for direct control of pumps and valves;
-in dangerous areas;
-in cleaning agents, cooling emulsions and lubricants
5 References
Bogdan, M.; Panu, M.,(2015): "LabVIEW modeling and simulation, of the digital filters", 13th International
Conference on Engineering of Modern Electric Systems (EMES), ISBN:978-1-4799-7650-8, 11-12 June,
Oradea, ROMANIA, 2015.
https://www.microsonic.de/en/support/ultrasonic-technology/principle.htm
https://alselectro.wordpress.com/tag/ultrasonic-sensors/
Gas Detector Using Arduino and LabVIEW
Mihai Bogdan

Abstract
The objective of this article is to develop a technical project, to detect smoke and
inflammable gases using an MQ-2 sensor, Arduino and LabVIEW graphical programming.
Will be read the sensor analog output voltage and when the smoke reaches a certain level, it
will make sound a buzzer and a red LED will turn on.
Hardware resources that will be used are: Arduino Uno, MQ-2 Smoke detection sensor, a
breadboard, 5 mm red LED, Buzzer, 2 x suitable resistors for to limit the current through
LED and Buzzer (220 Ohms is fine) and connecting wires. The results will be displayed
through the serial interface on the computer, in the LabVIEW program.
Keywords: MQ gas sensors, Arduino, LabVIEW, LINX software, While loop, Case structure.
1 Introduction
The gas sensors of the MQ series are analog sensors, designed to detect the presence of
different chemical components in the air. We can connect these devices with any microcontroller,
like Arduino. There is a wide variety of MQ sensors. Each model is designed to detect one or more
substances, designed for a specific use, such as flammable gas detection, air quality or detection of
alcohol in breathed air.
The MQ-2 gas sensor, used in my project, are suitable for detecting LPG (Liquefied Petroleum
Gas), propane, methane, alcohol, hydrogen, smoke. It is more sensitive to LPG and propane. Gas
sensors are provided with both analog output and digital output. The analog output is increased the
value of the voltage in proportion to the level of gas that is detected. The digital output can be used
to detect gas leakage and hence trigger an alert system (for example a sound alarm or an sms
activation). The digital output gives only two possible outputs – High and Low.
Due to its high sensitivity and fast response time of the MQ2 gas sensor, measurement can be
taken as soon as possible. The sensitivity of the sensor can be adjusted by potentiometer.
The MQ gas sensors must be calibrated before making an accurate measurement. Even
calibrated, these sensors do not have the
guarantee to be part of a security system.
Despite its limitations, MQ gas sensors are
widely used in various Arduino projects. For
example, we can turn on or off a fan
depending on air quality, we can make a
small breath detector or an alarm to alert
when smoke is detected.
The MQ sensors use small heater inside
with an electro-chemical sensor that changes
resistance in contact with the various
substances. They are sensitive to a range of
gasses and are used indoors at room
temperature. The output is an analog signal Figure 1.The schematic of the MQ gas sensor
and can be read with an analog input of the Arduino (https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/MQGas

Sensors).
Gas sensors are devices with high inertia, their response requires long periods of time to
stabilize after a change in the concentration of the measured gases. This is due to the physical need
of gas to leave sensitive material, which is a slow process.
All MQ models have a heater needed to increase the temperature of the sensor (Figure 1). As
long as the heater does not reach the operating temperature, reading the sensor will not be safe.
The heating time depends on each sensor model. In most models, a few minutes are enough, but
some models require between 12-48 hours until stable measurements are obtained. On the other
hand, each model needs its own voltage
to power the heater. In many models this
voltage is 5V.
2 The Virtual Instrument of the gas

detector
I used the gas sensor by reading the
analog values generated by it. I have
connected the analog output of the sensor
to the Arduino analog input A0. Then I
used Arduino's digital outputs 5 and 8 to
Figure 2.The components necessary for the
control the Buzer and the LED.
elaboration of the technical project
Represented in Figure 5 is the Front
Panel of the VI. It contains the following controls and indicators:
- A control for setting the serial port to which Arduino is connected;
- A boolean Stop control to turn off the virtual instrument;
- A numeric Meter indicator to display
the sensor output voltage;
- 2xLEDs indicators, that is turn on or
off based on the voltage thresholds of the
smoke;
- A control to set the analog pin to which
the sensor is connected;
- Two controls to set the digital pins
to wich the LED and Buzzer is
Figure 3. Circuit diagram of the Gas Detector connected
Figure 4. The Front Panel of the VI

Figure 5. The Block Diagram of the VI
To make the Block Diagram of the VI (Figure 6), I used the LINX software, that is the the new
way of programming Arduino. LINX provides easy to use LabVIEW VIs for interacting with
common embedded platforms, like Arduino. The LINX functions operate in a similar manner like
the LIFA function, but they have different names.
The Block Diagram of VI contains the controls and indicators terminals of the Front Panel, the
various nodes, constants and the wires. The nodes in LabVIEW are different functions, subVIs and
programming structures.
I used different LINX functions for programming Arduino platform:
-The Open Function initiates communication. We can see the COM Port that Arduino is
connected to. Each different program starts with the Open function;
-The Analog Read Function read the value of the specified analog input channel, and return the
sensor output voltage, which is compared with the voltage threshold set by the user;
-The Digital Write Function allows us to select the digital input address that we will use on the
Arduino. The Output Value input is active with the value being connected or sent;
-The Close Function controls the end of the program. We must finish each different program
with Close function;
-With the Loop Frequency Function, we can see the loop rate in Hz.
-The Simple Error Handler Function indicates whether an error occurred. If an error occurred,
this VI returns a description of the error and optionally displays a dialog box.
-The Greater Or Equal? Function returns TRUE if output sensor voltage is greater than or equal
to voltage threshold. Otherwise, this function returns FALSE.
contains until a condition occurs (http://www.ni.com/getting-started/labview-basics/execution-
structures).
Conclusion
The MQ2 gas sensor is used to detect gas leaks in small or large rooms and is a precautionary
method for fires or intoxications.
The sensor has a high sensitivity and the main gases it targets are LPG, isobutane, propane,
methane, alcohol, hydrogen and smoke. The sensor has a comparator so you can read analogue
data in real time or find out if the gas concentration has exceeded a certain limit.
This small gas sensor detects the presence of fuel gas and smoke in concentrations of 300 to
10,000 ppm. It incorporates a simple analog voltage interface that only requires an analog input
pin of the microcontroller.
Despite its limitations, MQ2 gas sensors are widely used in home electronics projects with
Arduino. For example, we can turn a fan on or off depending on the quality of the air, make a
small breathalyzer detector, or an alarm that sounds when smoke is detected.
References
https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/MQGasSensors
https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/Biometric/MQ-7%20Ver1.3%20-%20Manual.pdf
ECOKT Pilot project – Open Knowledge Technologies: Mapping
and validating knowledge
Octavian-Marius Preda1, Mihaela Garabet1,2, Dorothea Caraman1
(1) SIVECO ROMANIA

Victoria Park, Şoseaua Bucureşti-Ploieşti 73-81, Corpul 4, Sector 1, 013685, Bucharest, Romania
(2) National College “Grigore Moisil”, Timisoara, 33, Sector 6, Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: marius.preda[at]siveco.ro, mihaela.garabet[at]siveco.ro,
dorothea.caraman[at]siveco.ro
Abstract
ECOKT Digital up-skilling platform for European young unemployed is a 2-year pilot
project. It started in December 2016 and it will end in November of this year. Backed by the
European Commission, Director of the Data Directorate of the Directorate-General for
Communications Networks, Content and Technology and developed from the European
DigComp framework, Compass is a unique Pan European Digital Upskilling Platform
designed to specifically provide our users with digital skills as well as align their digital
competencies with their chosen career path.
The ECOKT Grant 2015 n° 30-CE-0830391/00-58 co-financed by DG CONNECT (Unit G4
Inclusion, Skills and Youth) is based on the idea to help young unemployed people to acquire
the digital competences needed for a certain type of job. Digital badges will enable the user
to better enter into the job market.
Under the frame’s project we have built a free and interactive learning platform called
Compass: http://www.compassdigitalskills.eu/, aimed to help young Europeans evaluate and
develop their digital competences in line with the current digitalisation of the economy.
The pilot project is available in the four languages of the project: English, French, Italian
and Romanian.
On the platform, we have created a Career Pathway in collaboration with the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Skills and Employability Division. The
user needs to take a digital competences assessment tool and express his/her career goal.
Then Compass recommends him/her a personnalized learning pathway.
The 18 lessons are based on the DigComp Framework https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp/
digital-competence-framework
in collaboration with the DigComp Team of the Joint Research Center of Sevilla.
You can visit the platform on: http://www.compassdigitalskills.eu/
and you can also find a brochure attached.
Keywords: Learning platform, digital competencies, career pathway
1 Introduction
Compass - start a journey to learn new digital skills and plot a course for your career. Compass
is a free and interactive learning platform, co-financed by the European Commission, which is
aimed at helping young Europeans evaluate and develop their digital competences in line with the
current digitalisation of the economy.
A 2-year pilot project, Compass is a unique Pan European Digital Upskilling Platform with
project-based learning content developed from the European DigComp framework.
The Consortium formed by: AGENCE FRANCAISE D'EXPERTISE TECHNIQUE

INTERNATIONALE (Expertise France) (France), DARA DESIGN AND PRINT LIMITED
(DARA CREATIVE) (Ireland), SIVECO Romania (Romania) and LAI-MOMO SOCIETA
COOPERATIVA (Lai-momo) (Italy) proposes a pilot online learning and interactive platform
offering digital up-skilling for European young unemployed. We believe such platform is the best
innovative and modern tool for the target to efficiently up-skill and better insert in the digitalized
labor market.
COMPASS reduces the gap between employers' requirements and the insufficient digital skills
of young European unemployed people, to increase their employability and to help them develop a
clear career structure.
The platform is easy to use. Each lesson develops digital competences in five areas identified
by the European Framework DigComp , including: knowledge of information and data,
communication and collaboration, digital content creation, information security and problem
solving. Lessons focus on real-world examples so that the user develops digital skills that can be
used immediately.
Figure 1. The Compass platform homepage
1.1 Improving young Europeans with new skills

The primary aim behind Compass is to empower young people with a set of digital
competences so as to increase their employability within the career pathway chosen by themselves.
Using Compass as a guide, they will be able to map out their preferred career and identify the
digital competences required for each job title along the career ladder.
The online platform pilot project will target young European graduated or non-graduated
people in search for a job from 15 to 30 years-old:
- the primary age group – aged 20 to 25 years old, who have finished the secondary
education and study in the post-high school education or are unemployed and are looking
for a job;
- the secondary age group between 26 and 30 years old, who are currently either in the
education system, or outside the labor market and those aged between 15-19 years old,
still in the educational system.
The project will focus 4 countries: France, Italy, Ireland and Romania.
This proposal is based on:

● The European Commission Digital Agenda Scoreboard 2015 data showing regular
Internet users with a medium level of digital skills in France (7.78%), low level in Italy
(4.22%) and bottom level in Romania (2.01%) ;
● The latest unemployment statistics from Eurostat statistics data (August 2015) showing
the 4 chosen countries’ youth employment rate is above the European average
employment rate of 20.4%:
○ 40.7% in Italy
○ 24.5% in France
○ 22.3% in Romania
○ 20.7% in Ireland
● The languages of the Consortium members (French, English, Italian and Romanian) and
their respective networks;
● The goal to reach a good geographical balance for the pilot project.
Figure 2. Why Compass
1.2 Modernisation and Innovation

The online platform will contribute to the Opening up Education initiative launched in 2013. It
will be a stimulating online learning project on ICT and digital content. It will include:
● eLearning capability (training and learning)
● Collaborative tools
● Labour market Connections.
Figure 3. Compass Dashboard

1.3 Definition of digital skills applied to the labour market

On the basis of DIGCOMP’s Framework for Developing and Understanding Digital
Competence in Europe report published in 2017, the 5 main Digital Skills already defined will be
further detailed and improved in line with the labour market’s latest requirements.
1.4 Harmonisation of knowledge
Reducing digital skills inequalities among the young people in Europe will allow making the
most of the labour opportunities in increasingly digitized markets.
1.5 Innovative on-line platform with adapted courses
In order to be efficient and adapted to the young unemployed, the learning courses will need to
be adapted, upgradeable and progressive. The innovation will be based on a Project Based
Learning approach (PBL) according to a learner-centered approach.
1.6 Cross-border labour opportunities
Cross-border labour opportunities will definitely be covered by this pilot project. Being an
online platform, the pilot project will highly encourage online collaboration between young
unemployed from different Member States.
2 The lessons
COMPASS lessons are fighting to reduce the gap between the employer's demand and the
skills of young unemployed people.
The project-based learning course content developed from the European DigComp framework ,
identifies key components of digital competence in 5 areas including Information and Data
Literacy, Communication and Collaboration, Digital Content Creation, Safety, and Problem
Solving.
The focus on project-based learning whilst tackling the Foundation Level lessons and
Advanced Level lessons is to allow you to develop digital skills that could be immediately put to
use in a practical and real-life work environment.
Figure 4. The Compass lessons
The learning courses, developed from the DigComp framework, are segregated into
Foundation Level lessons and Advanced Level lessons. In case the user decide to skip the Digital
Competence Assessment or do not have the requisite knowledge, they can only take the Advanced
Level lessons on completion of the Foundation Level lessons.
Figure 5. An example of a lesson
3 Career pathways
At Compass, we focus on clearly defining in the career path each user needs to follow, because
we understand how daunting it is not to know what the next step is to achieve your goal. When a
user creates their profile, after evaluating existing competencies, we recommend selecting the
aspiring position within an industry so that the platform can identify the relevant digital
competences and skills needed for that job. And then the user starts the courses to acquire them.
Building an ePortfolio - as the user completes the lessons and get hands-on experience on real-
life projects, they can collect and showcase all the projects they have worked on in one hub - the
personal ePortfolio. The ePortfolio provides them with an opportunity to showcase the project
work, list of lessons completed, and digital badges collected to potential employers, privately.
Compass was conceptualised to create a free an innovative, project-based learning platform to
bridge the gap between the requirements of employers and the insufficient digital skills of Young
Unemployed in order to increase their employability and help them develop a clear career
structure.
Figure 6. The analitycs
Conclusions
At the end of the pilot project, an analysis will be performed in order to:
● Assess the results of the project;
● Recommend changes for the used methodology;
● Evaluate the employability of the graduates, areas of employment;
● Determine a correlation between acquired digital skills and competences and areas of
employment;
● Recommend changes or adaptation of the core digital skills based on this analysis.
References
Internet Sources:
http://www.compassdigitalskills.eu/, accesed September 2018
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp/digital-competence-framework, accesed September 2018
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/digcomp-action-get-
inspired-make-it-happen-user-guide-european-digital-competence-framework, accesed September 2018
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/digital-competence-
framework-consumers, accesed September 2018
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/digcomp-21-digital-
competence-framework-citizens-eight-proficiency-levels-and-examples-use, accesed September 2018
BEACONING Project
Octavian-Marius Preda1, Mihaela Garabet1,2, Dorothea Caraman1
(1) SIVECO ROMANIA

(2) National College “Grigore Moisil”, Bucharest, Romania
Victoria Park, Şoseaua Bucureşti-Ploieşti 73-81, Corpul 4, Sector 1,013685,
Bd.Timisoara, 33, Sector 6, Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: marius.preda[at]siveco.ro, mihaela.garabet[at]siveco.ro,
dorothea.caraman[at]siveco.ro
Abstract
BEACONING stands for Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive
and Gameful Learning and will focus on ‘anytime anywhere’ learning by exploiting
pervasive, context-aware and gamified techniques and technologies, framed under the
Problem-Based Learning approach. BEACONING is a Horizon 2020 funded project of the
European Union involving 15 partners - Grant Agreement 687676. In conjunction with 15
partners who each bring in their own expertise and technologies, the project seeks to pilot
innovation in a real operational environment, aligning with DMLL’s ethos in disruptive
media and the impact on changing mind-sets and creating new models and practices of
teaching and learning.
The objectives of the project are:
1. Integrate technologies, pedagogical and social perspectives using pervasive, context-
aware and gamified approaches ensuring that the BEACONING platform is innovative while
also extending our scientific understanding and practice-based experiments of engaging a
community of learners including those with disabilities with a more inclusive, connected and
contextualised learning process.
2. Develop, implement and validate the BEACONING platform that:
leverages cutting-edge approaches including the Future Internet technology, mobile,
gamification, pervasive gaming, procedural game content generation, game authoring,
human-computer interfaces, learning analytics and problem-based learning model;
is usable, adaptable, extendable and sustainable.
3. Explore and measure the level of engagement, effectiveness and impact that is enabled
by the BEACONING platform towards incentivising learners and fostering acquisition and
transfer of knowledge and skills, validate this through large scale pilots involving a
community of stakeholders and practitioners in Europe, and provide an exploitation and
business plan for the platform adoption.
Web: https://beaconing.eu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeaconingEU
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beaconing
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BeaconingEuProject
Keywords: Learning platform, gameful learning, Problem-Based Learning
1 Introduction
BEACONING is a teaching and digital learning platform that integrates technologies,
pedagogical and social perspectives, using pervasive, context-aware and gamified approaches.
The lessons created by using the Authoring Tool demonstrate how easily the learning process
turns into a pleasant, interesting and useful activity. The secret lies in using “context-aware”
systems (that adjust to the context in which they are used) and gamification (translating a common
learning context into a situation similar to a game). These methods make Problem-Based Learning
possible.
Implemented within the Horizon 2020 program, the project seeks to pilot innovation in a real
operational environment, while changing mind-sets and creating new models and practices of
teaching and learning.
The project’s consortium is: Coventry University (UK), Heriot-Watt University (UK), BIBA -
Bremer Institut Für Produktion Und Logistik Gmbh (Germany), Inesc Tec (Portugal), Universidad
Complutense De Madrid (Spain), Ort France (France), Succubus Interactive Sarl (France),
Advanced Technology Systems (Romania), Imaginary (Italy), Geomotion Games Sl (Spain),
Ifinity Spolka Z Organiczona Odpowiedzialnoscia (Poland), Playsoft (France), Sebit Egitim Ve
Bilgi Teknolojileri Anonim Sirketi (Turkey), Hands Free Computing Limited (UK) and SIVECO
Romania.
2 Project description
BEACONING sets a forefront in multifaceted education technologies through large-scale
piloting of a digital learning platform that blends physical and digital spaces. As innovation action
strategies, pilots combine opportunities for new ICTs in multiple ways that merge learning
acquired in formal, non-formal and informal means, developing the skills for today’s abled and
disabled learners and workforce.
The BEACONING platform will be a ubiquitous solution that exploits advances in user
experience design, mobile communication, location-based and context aware systems, procedural
content generation, pedagogy-driven gamification, learning analytics and cloud technology
through innovative integration towards a blended learning space.
The BEACONING demonstrator will facilitate, assess and author gamified learning activities,
integrating existing educational tools and services of the participating organizations. Focusing on
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the cross-subject approach
embedded in a Problem-Based Learning model will contextualize learning within real world
problem solving and applications.
The role of learners is amplified in the process of filtering and connecting concepts framed
under practical, investigative and exploratory scenarios. Large-scale pilots will validate and inform
the development of the BEACONING ecosystem that democratizes learning across and among
fully abled and those with mild to moderate physical and mental impairments (age 15 to 24),
undergoing general and vocational training. BEACONING anticipates the benefits of making
cross-subject matter more understandable, fostering the application of subject specialism to other
domains. The pilot substantiates the technical and economic viability and the impact of the
innovative platform to strategize market adoption and replication. By integrating experiences in a
highly engaging, contextualized and personalized manner, learning can go beyond the barriers of
space and time.
Figure 1. Learning with BEACONING

3 The Authoring Tool
After Log in, the teacher will be met by the specific interface from where he can create,
manage and assign his lessons:
Figure 2. The Teacher Interface
The Teacher App will provide teachers with an easy access to the Authoring Tool, where GLP
can be built, edited and deployed.
In case that he want to edit/complete a lesson he will choose Edit option and he will enter in
the Authoring Tool wich is the primary component that enables teachers as learning designers to
author, edit and deploy lesson plans according to their specific needs.
Figure 3. The Lesson Manager
The dashboard of the Authoring Tool was developed to meet the specific needs of
BEACONING including games and mini-games structure and location-based activities.
It enables teachers to create Missions and Quests.
The Gamified Lesson Plans (GLP) constitutes the core of the BEACONING Project and
experience. The GPL embed learning in the daily life of the students, while providing deep
engagement through their Game Plots overlaid over the pedagogical content.
BEACONING GLP (Gamified Lesson Plan) editing is very simple. Just pick a plot for the
main game, observe the challenges that are essential opportunities for performance-based learning,
then configure a selection of serious mini-games to exploit those opportunities for learning.
Figure 4. The Gamified Lesson Plans (GLP)
If the teacher choose a Lesson Path, for example, they will follow a linear path of quiz –like
activities delivered through Mini Games like: - Drag it, Match it, Millionaire Quiz, Swipe and
seek, Solve it, Checkers game, Location-based games, Planet Ninja and another few more.
The learning path can be gamified by associate it to the game plots and challenges.
Each plot has a number of events that can be assigned to specific exercises.
4 The Metagame
The Metagame lets users drag assets into a scene. The elements can be: a background image, a
non-player character, a game item.
Figure 5. The Metagame
The Mini Games are reusable and configurable, provide engaging challenges to test and train
player’s STEM skills. They can be configured inside a lesson path, to be triggered at the end of
another activity.
Figure 6. A Minigame example
Minigames will be integrated with the Learning Analytics and Core Services, enabling both
adapting to student requirements and providing real time feedback.
Minigames are a web based component that will be experienced by the student inside the Game
App, more specifically, the minigames will be triggered by the interactions of the player with the
game characters encountered during the gamified learning plan.
Figure 7. Location based Game
A callback mechanism ensures that the Student App triggers the opening of the specific
minigame session through a query string parameter.
Figure 8. Editing a minigame- Millionaire quiz

5 Students interface
The Student Dashboard is the main web page where students can get an overview of their
progression within the different GLPs, and link with the Community. From this same web page
students, will be able to access and launch LP (or specific activities and Quests) which have been
activated and assigned to them by their teachers.
After log in, the students arrive in the homepage which provides information to help them
decide where else in the application to go next: to the Library, to play the lessons or to connect to
the community. They can create/edit their own profile. They can also consult the objectives set by
teachers and see an overall progress of their activities.
Figure 9. BEACONING students interface
Beaconing also provides an experience not like any other with innovative tools for users with
disabilities, such as a fully interactive toolbar interface called Accessabar, which makes content
accessible to users with different disabilities.
Figure 10. BEACONING Accessabar

On the other hand the students can access their analytics. They can see a list of their missions
and the STEM cathegory of their missions and their status. Students can consult a list of their skills
related to the given missions. They can see their current level, the badges collected so far and a list
of the upcoming achievements.
Figure 11. BEACONING students analytics
References
https://beaconing.eu/wp-content/uploads/deliverables/D1.1.pdf, accesed September 2018
https://beaconing.eu/2018/08/31/final-meta-lam-dashboard-for-teachers/, accesed September 2018
https://beaconing.eu/insights/media/, accesed September 2018
https://beaconing.eu, accesed September 2018
https://www.facebook.com/beaconing, accesed September 2018
https://www.youtube.com/c/BeaconingEuProject, accesed September 2018
https://beaconing.eu/2018/07/09/glp-gamified-lesson-plan-creation-is-a-matter-of-expertise/
http://beaconing.eu/demo/teacherui
Could we objectively evaluate the process of teaching?
A critical overview about teaching, e-teaching and
distance teaching
Andreea C. Buzduga1, Petru-Adrian Istrimschi 1, Ovidiu Stofor1

(1) Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania, adrian.istrimschi@uaic.ro
Abstract
The aim of this article is to provide comparative points of view over the processes of
teaching, e-teaching and distance teaching. We underline the definitions for those three terms
and analyse the specific scientific literature. Previous research has not clarified the
mentioned topic and further research is necessary in order to provide different approaches.
We consider necessary the development of an instrument that measures the teaching process.
Moreover, our aim is to propose some premises of models for e-teaching and distance
teaching starting from teaching model.
Keywords: teaching, e-teaching, distance teaching,
1 Introduction
Definition of concepts
The 21st century society encourage people to learn by themselves. But students? How can they
adapt to this situation? Firstly, they must be taught how to learn and secondly they should be
encouraged to learn on their own (Armitage et al., 2012).
In the pedagogical literature (Ignelzi, 2000; Benson and Brack, 2009; Isman and Dabaj, 2004;
Loughran and Hamilton, 2016; Rekkedal et al., 2003 Littleton, Wood and Staarman, 2010)
teaching and learning are two concepts highly associated that can be very easily confused by
students. Teaching can be based on prospective teachers' own experiences as learner in school, or
at the university (Bullough et al., 1998). In terms of "technology", teaching is defined as a
succession of tasks that guide the teacher to perform according to certain rules. (Richards and
Nunan, 1990). If we take in consideration the main model of teaching, we have two actors: a
teacher and the student (Richards and Nunan, 1990; Isman and Dabaj, 2004). The first one
(teacher) has the role to teach knowledge and the student has to learn (Skinner, 1965). According
to Hallinan (2006) teaching for understanding, forms a link between the dynamic relation of
teaching the social relations in school and a feedback loop between learning and teaching. We
represented Hallinan's idea in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Teaching for Understanding Model (Hallinan, 2006), author’s graph

Professor Nakajima (2013) defined e-teaching as a conceptual framework, a system to support

teachers to use Information Technology (IT) as a system designed to improve the teaching
performance, self-motivation and self-directedness. In sum, the use of online as an information
device to spread the information is called e-teaching (Oliver and Herrington, 2001). E-teaching
can be the supporting technology for the teacher's learning process or it can be included in the
content of curricula in order to be applied in the process of teaching (e-teacher) in an e-learning
system (Bjekic et al., 2010). This kind of teaching using the online environment, is centered on the
teacher, forms a framework for e-learning and it can be a possible innovation in education because
it can motivate the students to learn and increase their performance (Nakajima, 2006).
The last teaching way chosen to be analysed involves the two main actors, teacher and student,
being in different places, not in the same environment. According to the British Collins
Dictionary, distance teaching means teaching by correspondence (mail), using the online, where
teacher and students are not physically present in the same classroom. Distance education
facilitates learning through global technology and interaction between communicators, without
presenting, posing the barriers of time or space (Isman and Dabaj, 2004, Garrison and Kanuka,
2004).
It seems that teaching and e-teaching are the same thing (passing the knowledge) the only
difference is the method used by the teacher to send the information to students (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Traditional vs Modern Education Model
Even distance teaching can be possible using the online or e-teaching, the two concepts are
different in the dialog distance and the student autonomy (Moore, 1991 cited by Rekkedal et al.,
2003). Also, we can divide the three concepts in two categories: teaching as a traditional form of
education, using face to face contact between teacher and student, and using the online
environment on modern education, e-teaching and distance teaching (Figure 3). Even if technology
changes the concepts, the base framework will still apply (Rekkedal et al., 2003).
Figure 3. Teaching and E-teaching Model
2 Teaching Process
The teaching process can be understood as the entire activity of the teacher as presentation and
explanation of the knowledge, preparation of the class for the learning activity, leading and
supporting the students to have acquirements (Moise, 1996). In terms of strategies, the teaching
process can be defined as actions (e.g., control of question patterns and wait-time) made by the
teacher during the instruction of the class (Richards and Nunan, 1990; Frumos, Istrimschi and
Ungureanu, 2017). If the delivery of the course's information involves the use of the Web and of
the associated technologies, it involves minimal changes to the classical teaching process and in
this case we can talk about an e-teaching process (Oliver and Herrington, 2001).
According to the dynamic educational process (Moise, 1996) we have the following steps:
teaching, learning, evaluation of learning that leads to some changes in learning strategies and the
final achievements. Thus, the teaching-learning process is based in fact on the learning level
because the aspected results are compared with the intermediary results. Also, this process is
dependant on the memory and the students' capacity of processing information, and is not related
to the comprehension degree of the teaching material presented by the teacher.
There is need to tackle the major educational challenges, and a call for the revision of the
teaching methods.
Conclusion
The purpose of this study is to highlight the need for an evaluation on teaching that will
empower learning and improve the student's achievements. If we take in consideration the skills
required in this knowledge society, Lightfoot, (2015), identified other teaching/learning methods
as fieldwork, teamwork, project-based learning, work-based learning, internships, special expert
sessions, learning games, peer tutoring, simulations, role-plays, distance learning, exchange
programmes and volunteering. Otherwise, in terms of innovative tools, it can be named the
internet, movies, educational software, e-learning and the social networks.
There is a necessity for further research that will enable us to objectively evaluate teaching
methods. There would also be useful to see how the learning can happen naturally.
References
Armitage, A., Evershed, J. and Hayes, D. (2012). Teaching and training in lifelong learning. McGraw-Hill
Education (UK).
Benson, R., Brack, C. (2009). Developing the scholarship of teaching: What is the role of e-teaching and
learning? Teaching in Higher Education, 14(1), 71-80.
Bjekic, D., Krneta, R. and Milosevic, D. (2010). Teacher education from e-learner to e-teacher: Master
curriculum. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology-TOJET, 9(1), 202-212.
Bullough, R., a Teacher, B. and Biddle, E. B. (1998). International Handbook of Teachers and Teaching.
Garrison, D. R. and Kanuka, H. (2004). Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher
education. The internet and higher education, 7(2), 95-105. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001
Hallinan, M. T. (Ed.). (2006). Handbook of the Sociology of Education. Springer Science & Business
Media.
Ignelzi, M. (2000). Meaning-Making in the Learning and Teaching Process. New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, 2000(82), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.8201
Isman, A. and Dabaj, F. (2004). Roles of the students and teachers in distance education. In Society for
Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 497-502). Association for
the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Krneta, R., Bjekić, D., Milošević, D. (2007). Competencies of e-Teaching in the System of Teachers’
Competence, ETAI 2007, September, Ohrid- Macedonia, Book of Abstract, 29, CD Proceeding,
Available
on http://www1.etf.ukim.edu.mk/SCM_C021A06/conference/E3-2.pdf
Lightfoot, S. (2015). Teaching and Learning the European Union: Traditional and Innovative Methods, edited
by S. Baroncelli, R. Farneti, I. Horga and S. Vanhoonacker (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014, ISBN
9789400770423); JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 53(2), 430-431.
Littleton, K., Wood, C. P. and Staarman, J. K. (2010). International handbook of psychology in education.
Emerald Group Publishing.
Loughran, J. and Hamilton, M. L. (Eds.). (2016). International handbook of teacher education. Springer
Science and Business Media.
Moise, C. (1996), Concepte didactice fundamentale, Ed. Ankarom, Iaşi
Oliver, R. and Herrington, J. (2001). Teaching and learning online: a beginner’s guide to e-learning and e-
teaching in higher education. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University.
Richards, J. C. and Nunan, D. (1990). Second language teacher education. Cambridge University Press.
Rekkedal, T., Qvist-Eriksen, S., Keegan, D., Súilleabháin, G. Ó., Coughlan, R. and Fritsch, H. (2003).
Internet based e-learning, pedagogy and support systems. Norway: NKI Distance Education.
Nakajima, K. (2013). Innovations of E-learning on learner performance and faculty development.
International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies, 4(2), 359-366.
Nakajima, K. (2006): Is “e-Teaching” Web Zero or Potentially Web 2.1?, Retrieved April 2018,
Skinner, B. F. (1965). Review Lecture-The technology of teaching. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, 162(989), 427-443.
Distance learning in support of social entrepreneurship:
the russian experience (case-study)
Petrova Mariya1

Abstract
The Foundation called "Our future" in 2014 created the "Laboratory of social
entrepreneurship", whose activities are aimed at the development and implementation of
distance learning programs focused on the needs of social business. The main educational
program of the Laboratory - "Fundamentals of social entrepreneurship" is implemented in a
remote form, which allows to provide a wide geographical coverage of the audience of
interested students from different regions of the Russia. General characteristics of the
learning process: forms, methods, technologies: Seminars using distance learning technology
video. Self-development of recommended materials by students. Independent work of students
to develop their own project of social enterprise, discussion of the results of independent work
in the online group and with the teacher in the process of group chat. Creation of a regional
database of existing social enterprises by students. In addition to the main distance learning
course, the Laboratory offers a wide range of webinars ("Mom's business: launching an
educational project", "Social business Marketing", "Waste Economics: how to make money
on garbage", etc.). Some online seminars of the Laboratory are held in the form of master
classes of successful social entrepreneurs, who share their experience and answer questions
from the audience. The practice of conducting online courses for social entrepreneurs has
shown that distance learning effectively copes with the task of transferring specific practical
tools to students, and the format of individual online consultations allows for detailed study of
projects and its individual characteristics.
Keywords: social entrepreneurship, educational support, distance learning programs
1 Introduction
Social entrepreneurship - is an effective tool for arranging the most pressing social problems of
the territory and the region. Social entrepreneurs use commercial mechanisms to meet social needs
of the community, allowing them not to depend on external sources of funding. In addition, social
business more effectively provides services to the public. In some cases, the cost of one service
can be 10 times lower than in specialized municipal, regional and federal structures.
2 Theoretical bases to organize the distance learning of social entrepreneurs

The teaching methodology of social entrepreneurs (and, accordingly, social entrepreneurship)
involves the integrated use of traditional approaches for management and social sciences, to be
exact - scrupulous building an interdisciplinary methodology. In particular, the analysis of
teaching practices in social entrepreneurship in leading business schools demonstrates:
1) successful attempts to use the theories of social identity and self-efficacy for "the students to
develop identity with the social entrepreneurs and instill confidence in the ability to bring positive
changes in society" [Smith, Woodworth, 2012]; 2) creating and using "conceptual model for
formation and implementation of educational programs in the field of social entrepreneurship" by
linking to those characteristic of teaching management of non-profit organizations with "parallel"

themes of entrepreneurship activities [Ananchenkova, Kuznetsov, 2017]; 3) using "the socially
oriented business plan", widely applying "already existing knowledge, interests and ambitions of
the students" as the main structural element of learning social entrepreneurship with relative
reducing the role of case-study which is traditional for business education [Kwong, Thompson,
Cheung, 2012]. The most system methodology and popularization of social entrepreneurship in
the world is arranged by Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, where you can further
familiarize yourself with functions and types of the social entrepreneurship.
What important in the distance learning in the direction of social entrepreneurship are chat-
lessons - training classes, carried out using chat technologies. Chat-classes are conducted
synchronously, meaning that all participants have a simultaneous access to the chat. In many
distant learning institutions there is the chat-school wherein using chat-rooms the activities of
distance educators and students are organized.
Cases with practical situations, embedded or introduced social projects also take a big place in
the distance learning of social entrepreneurship. (Bazhenova, 2015). Among all programs and
courses that are studied in context of the social entrepreneurship, the case-study occupies 80% of
the total amount.
Web classes - are distance lessons, conferences, seminars, business games, labs, workshops
and other forms of training classes held by using the means of telecommunication and other
Internet opportunities. This system is based on the teaching method, called the "Natural process of
learning" (Natural Learning Manner).
3 Russian experience in organizing of distance learning of social entrepreneurs.

We are to give the most vivid examples of distance learning in the field of social
entrepreneurship, its approaches, types and forms of education. Thus, to design and implement the
distance training programs oriented to the needs of social business, the Fund "Our future in 2014,
the "Laboratory of social entrepreneurship" was established. For 7 years of operation, the Fund
supported 108 social entrepreneurs to the total sum of $231 million rubles. The main educational
program of the Laboratory - "Basics of social entrepreneurship", realized in the distance form,
allowing a wide geographic coverage of the audiences formed by interested listeners from
different regions of the Russian Federation. The forms and methods of this program are the
following:
 Seminars using the distance video technologies.
 Independent mastering of recommended materials by listeners.
 Independent work of students in development of the own project of a social enterprise,
discussing the results of independent work in the online group and with the teacher during a
group chat.
 Formation of a regional database including the existing audience of social enterprises by
students.
In addition to the basic distance course the Laboratory offers a wide variety of webinars
("Mom's business: launch of the educational project", "Marketing of the social business",
"Technologies of the social business: the Canadian experience", "Wastes economy: how to make
money on debris", etc.). A part of online seminars of the "Laboratory" is in the form of master-
classes of successful social entrepreneurs who share their experiences, answering questions of the
listeners.
Additional professional education training program to improve qualification "Project
management in the field of social entrepreneurship" was developed and implemented in the
institute "Higher school of management" SPbSU for the grant from the Fund Citi. The program is
designed for current and potential social entrepreneurs, as well as managers of the companies,
developing projects in the field of social entrepreneurship.
Thus, in particular, still in the process of distance learning such programs and courses are
included as follows:
1. Programs in universities
1. Higher school of management and innovations MSU in cooperation with the Fund of
regional social programs "Our future" prepared the training program "Management in the sphere
of social entrepreneurship " for social entrepreneurs.
2. In the Russian economic university named after G.V. Plehanov social entrepreneurship is
taught within the master program "Management of entrepreneurial activity" at the management
department.
The subject "Management of social entrepreneurship" is included in the academic program of
future masters and the following disciplines can supplement it by choice, such as "Business-model
of social entrepreneurship", "Business-planning in social entrepreneurship" and "Project activity in
the social entrepreneurship ". The program was developed in cooperation with The Fund of
regional social programs "Our future".
3 . In some educational institutions operating under the charity foundations and foundations of
social initiatives there are schools and courses in various fields of social entrepreneurship.
"According to our estimates, development of the social business based on internet-technologies
will increase the share of social entrepreneurship in Russian GDP up to 1-1, 5% from 0.25% GDP
by the year of 2020, as well as legalize more than 30 million citizens, who are self-employed in the
informal sector of economy. Social entrepreneurship - is an important driver for economic
development, especially in small towns", - said Dmitry Yablonsky - Director of IRI working
group" Internet + social enterprise" in one of his interviews.
4 Review of the forms and methods to research social entrepreneurship: methods, tools,
statistic data
The applied research is aimed at examining the existing systems of distance learning in the
aspect of social entrepreneurship.
To conduct the applied research, we have chosen the method of content analysis and online
survey as the most widely covering the groups of people interested in this type of study and being
reasonable empirically, as our necessary condition is to get relevant information on the distance
learning situation in Russia in context of the social entrepreneurship development.
The following persons were selected as respondents: legal entities (foundations, associations,
schools, involved in the training of social entrepreneurship) and individuals (groups of people
wishing to be engaged in social entrepreneurship or who are already developing their social project
and wishing to deepen their knowledge). Online interview included 312 respondents.
The used type of sampling: all-over
The respondents were asked the questions about necessary, importance, scope, characteristics
and forms of the distance learning in social entrepreneurship. They are mostly participants of
online-learning on portals, online schools, distance education forums in the aspect of social
entrepreneurship. The users were interviewed who were participants of realizing online-programs
of social entrepreneurship based on the platforms and software products, such as "eLearning
Server 3000", "Bathysphere", etc. Below we are to give the main indicators of the performed
study. Questions of the on-line survey concerned the importance of social projects social
entrepreneurial initiatives, importance and timeliness, scope and forms of the distance learning in
social entrepreneurship. The performed study revealed major problems in the current state and
development of the distance education in the direction of social entrepreneurship.
The performed study identified that the modern distance education in the field of social
entrepreneurship is constructed using a series of techniques and methods, both traditional
(electronic lecture - 27% case study - 33%, master-class - 10%, training - 10%, etc.), and specific,
based on the traditional educational approach (practical participation in fund-raising activities for
charity foundations - 8%, creating ideas and practical development of the social project - 6%,
holding desk and field researches in the area of ethical marketing course - 6%, etc.) (fig. 1), in
formation of the information educational space for the distance learning, and basic items such: as
inbound and outbound information flows, forming the basis of the training information array
communicated to the listeners remotely, namely information and communication networks,
communication technologies, methods. We see that the case study occupied the first place in the
distance learning, as the practical aspect is mostly demanded by listeners.
Figure 1. Main forms of the distance learning in social entrepreneurship
Modern computer e-learning technologies make possible to continuouslyimplement, update,

integrate into the educational, social and socio-entrepreneurial projects a number of technological
products: technically accessible and at the affordable cost, unlike financially significant learning
resources. Moreover the distance learning in the field of social entrepreneurship, constantly
developing and being supplemented with new programs, courses and projects is designed to meet
the goals and objectives of education in the field of social entrepreneurship, and in particular cover
those population groups which need support and training in the new job.
Every year there are more and more distance educational programs in the field of social
business: paid and free classes of varying durations allow beginners to understand specifics of the
topic and acquire competences, needed to run the own project. However, accelerator, one-day
Every year there are more and more distance educational programs in the field of social
business: paid and free classes of varying durations allow beginners to understand specifics of the
topic and acquire competences, needed to run the own project. However, accelerator, one-day
We are to give the chart of main thematic areas for the training programs in social
entrepreneurship.
The study proved that introduction of e-learning technologies in social entrepreneurship as
various types of distance learning allows you to expand your business opportunities and, above all,
its small and medium-sized forms, offer the distance learning to population groups that need in
support, create new jobs, implement really important and socially significant projects and
initiatives in the business space of Russia.
At that among statistically significant indicators of the performed survey it is possible to mark
out the following:
1. The main training directions in social entrepreneurship to be mostly interesting are the
following (Fig. 2):
Figure 2. Main directions of study and further design in social entrepreneurship for
2015-2018 in the Russian Federation
2. Among the respondents asking the online survey questions the first place is taken by women
aged 30-45 years old (35%); the second - youth of 20-29 years old (32%); persons with disabilities
(23%); unemployed men (10%) (Fig. 3)
Figure 3. Major groups of students on courses and social entrepreneurship

programs in 2014-2018
3. Through the distance learning it is possible to resolve many social problems and the practice
of online courses for social entrepreneurs showed that distance learning effectively transfers to the
listeners specific practical tools, and the format of individual online consultations allows you to
provide the detailed elaboration of projects and their individual characteristics.
4. Thus, according to participants of the online survey, the distance learning allows to acquire
professional and entrepreneurial skills through education and entrepreneurial spirit and
consultations of the beginning entrepreneurs by experts.
5. Most courses and programs are adapted to the different training environment and their
content to e-learning paradigm have both limitations and an extensive additional educational
potential.
Conclusion
Based on the performed survey and its analyses we have defined the importance, necessity and
consistency in the distance learning of social entrepreneurship, including specific examples
demonstrated different types of case studies: illustrating the processes and concepts, imitating the
sampled processes; describing original situations in the real social business and having solutions
being already implemented in practice; cases with an uncertain response to the given problematic
issue.
Thus, investigating the distance learning of social entrepreneurship, it is important to determine
accurately methods and forms of education that are most suitable for the educational process of
people groups and building of the educational process based on solutions of problem situations,
collective search, development of the entrepreneurial spirit and social responsibility, the possibility
of using case studies in the distance format for individual acquiring knowledge and practical skills.
References
Bazhenova S. (2015): Modern forms of personnel training in human resources management of the company.
Id atiso. Moscow.
Ananchenkova P.I., Kuznetsov M.Y. (2017): The Use of E-Learning Technologies in the Process of Training
of Women on Parental Leave. In Proceedings of The 13th eLearning and Software for Education
Conference - eLSE 2017. Bucharest, 316-321.
Kwong C., Thompson P., Cheung C.(2012): The Effectiveness of Social Business Plan Competitions in
Developing Social and Civic Awareness and Participation // Academy of Management Learning and
Education. Vol. 11.N 3. P. 324–348.
Smith I., Woodworth W. (2012): Developing Social Entrepreneurs and Social Innovators: A Social Identity
and Self-Efficacy Approach // Academy of Management Learning and Education. Vol. 11.N 3. P. 310–
407.
Virtual Image Processing E-Learning System Re-architecture on
Cloud Platform Service
Eugen Zaharescu1, Atena Georgeta Zaharescu1

(1) Ovidius University of Constanta, ROMANIA
E-mail: ezaharescu[at]univ-ovidius.ro
Abstract
Emerging technologies like Deep Learning based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Architectures, Block Chain, Artificial Intelligence, new computer-human interfaces and
interactions based on Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Autonomous Software, etc. are
creating new opportunities to transform classic e-learning systems through innovation. This
paper presents a modern e-learning project intended to re- architecture an Image Processing
e-learning system using Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Service solutions. Face-
recognition applications and computer vision applications such as self-driving vehicles which
rely heavily on Convolutional Neural Networks can be seamlessly and easily build from
scratch, or use a pre-trained model with a very large particular dataset. Cloud Storage
Service proved to be the ultimate solution for this e-learning system re-architecture.
Keywords: Deep Learning, Deep Convolutional Neural Network Architectures, Cloud
Infrastructure, Platform Service, Cloud Storage Service, Image Processing e-Learning System.
1 Introduction
Computational resources for a virtual image processing e-Learning system are an important
factor that can determine redesigning its whole architecture. Training a Deep Learning model, for
example, can take hours, days, or weeks, depending on the size of the data and the amount of
available processing power. Cloud-based computation proved to be the best solution for a
professional transfer of e-Learning activities on a powerful and reliable platform.
1.1 Paper Contributions
This paper presents a new architectural solution based on Cloud Infrastructure and Platform
Service for an Image Processing E-Learning System project.
2 Cloud Infrastructure Architecture

Cloud IaaS solutions for the development of e-LMS (e-Learning Management Systems) enable
Migration, Migration with enhancements, Re-architecture existing e-Learning Apps, or Building
all new cloud e-Learning applications. Also, some Cloud Service providers (e.g. Oracle) support
Replace with SaaS e-Learning Apps which enables to migrate and re-architecture existing
e-Learning applications with all expected performance, availability, and manageability (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Cloud IaaS solutions for the development of e-Learning Management Systems
Fig. 2 Cloud Infrastructure Architecture
Cloud Infrastructure Architecture (Fig. 2) offers an adaptable environment for existing

e-Learning applications, and is flexible enough to support cloud-native applications.
The most important advantages offered by Cloud Infrastructure Architecture:
a. Each region has multiple Availability Domains to give a great foundation for high availability
and disaster protection;
b. High performance Physical Network provides the lowest latency and no resource contention;
c. Layer 3 Virtual Network, helps optimize IO performance and enables unique services like
bare metal servers (single-tenant physical server) on-demand;
d. Integrated compute, storage, database, networking, and platform services ensure to migrate
existing e-Learning applications without change, and build optimal new applications;
e. Connectivity and Edge services (e.g. DNS and email services) allow to connect different
provider regions and on-premise data center, as well as optimize end-user experience;
f. Powerful and simplified abilities ensure segment, secure, and offer resources in complex
organizations.
High performance servers, storage, and database support millions of IOPS (I/O operations and
transactions per second) (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 High Performance Cloud Services: Compute, Storage, Database

Fig. 4 Virtual Cloud Network
Virtual Cloud Network (Fig.4) gives the complete set of network services needed in the cloud
with the same network flexibility as on-premise solutions. The most important advantages are:
 The e-Learning systems users will have high performance and predictable access to e-
Learning applications with network services like provisioned bandwidth load balancing;
 Secure and dedicated connectivity from e-Learning data center to the cloud can be ensured
with multiple providers like Equinix and Megaport;
 An isolated virtual network with granular controls can be built, including subnets and security
lists.
 All networking services are API-driven and programmable for more automated management
and application control.
Cloud service providers offers an extended variety of computer solutions: from small and
virtualized to very large and dedicated, from web servers to high performance application servers,
with either network block storage or local NVMe storage.
 VM’s and Bare Metal compute with predictable IOPS block storage;
 Dense I/O VM’s + local NVMe storage provide high IOPS compute and capacities;
 Bare Metal GPUs with 2 P100 GPUs, 28 cores, and predictable IOPS block storage;
 Bare Metal compute with 52 cores, high memory, and optional local NVMe SSDs
Fig. 5 A large variety of Cloud Computing solutions

3 Deep Learning. Computationally Intensive Image Processing Models
Deep Learning is an extended machine learning model implemented upon Deep Neural
Network architecture with hundreds of layers, capable to learn and to perform classification tasks
directly from images, text, or sound.
TABLE 1. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

Machine Learning Deep Learning
+ Good results with small data sets — Requires very large data sets
+ Quick to train a model — Computationally intensive
—Classification accuracy is limited + Classification accuracy is unlimited
—Needs to try different features and + Learns features and classifiers
classifiers to achieve best results automatically
While the traditional machine learning needs a preliminary extraction of the relevant features
of an image (manually), with Deep Learning this step is eliminated as the whole set of the raw
images are loaded directly into a Deep Neural Network that learns the features automatically.
Deep Learning often requires even millions of images for the best results, it is also
computationally intensive and requires a high-performance GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) or a
Cloud Infrastructure Service.
Deep Neural Network architecture uses a large number of multiple nonlinear processing layers,
made from simple elements operating in parallel:
 Input Layer
 Hidden Layers (a large number in between)
 Output Layer.
The layers are interconnected via nodes, or neurons, and the input of each hidden layer is the
output of the previous layer.
Deep Convolutional Neural

Network (Deep CNN, or Deep
ConvNet) is one of the most used
architecture used for computer
vision based on Deep Learning
paradigm (Fig.7).
This architecture has two
categories of layers:
 Feature Detection Layers
and Fig. 6 Deep Neural Network Architecture
 Classification Layers
Feature Detection Layers perform one of three types of operations on the data:
1. Convolution passes the input images through a set of convolutional filters. Each
convolutional filter activates or reveals certain features from the images.
2. Pooling simplifies the output by performing nonlinear down sampling (Max-Pooling or
Average-Pooling) and reducing the number of parameters that the network needs to learn
about.
3. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) maps negative values to zero and maintains positive values
allowing a faster and more effective training.
These three operations are repeated over hundreds of layers, with each layer learning to detect
different features.
Classification Layers perform the final task of image classification and is made of:
1. Fully Connected Layer (FC) outputs a vector of K dimensions where K is the number of
classes that the network will be able to predict. This vector contains the probabilities for
each class of any image being classified;
2. Softmax Function Layer is the final layer of the Deep CNN architecture and provides the
classification output.
Fig. 7 Deep Convolutional Neural Network Architecture
Fig.8 Object Detection Using Faster R-CNN(Regions with CNN) Deep Learning
4 The Evolution of Convolutional Neural Networks
 LeNet (1990s): The first successful applications of Convolutional Networks were developed by
Yann LeCun in 1990’s. Of these, the best known is the LeNet architecture that was used to read
zip codes, digits, etc. (http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-98.pdf )
 (1990s to 2012): From late 1990s to early 2010s convolutional neural network were in standby
state. After this pause the convolutional neural networks became again more and more
interesting when more and more data and computing power were available.
 AlexNet (2012) – The first work that popularized Convolutional Networks in Computer Vision
was the AlexNet, developed by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoff Hinton. The
AlexNet was a deeper and much wider version of the LeNet and won by a large margin the
ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC) in 2012. It was a significant
breakthrough with respect to the previous approaches and the current widespread application of
CNNs can be attributed to this work. It significantly outperformed the second runner-up (top 5
error of 16% compared to runner-up with 26% error). The AlexNet had a very similar
architecture to LeNet, but was deeper, bigger, and featured Convolutional Layers stacked on top
of each other (previously it was common to only have a single CONV layer always immediately
followed by a POOL layer) (https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4824-imagenet-classification-with-
deep-convolutional-neural-networks.pdf) .
 ZF Net (2013) – The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC 2013)
winner was a Convolutional Network from Matthew Zeiler and Rob Fergus. It became known as
the ZFNet (short for Zeiler & Fergus Net). It was an improvement on AlexNet by tweaking the
architecture hyper parameters, in particular by expanding the size of the middle convolutional
layers and making the stride and filter size on the first layer smaller (https://arxiv.org/
abs/1311.2901 ).
 GoogLeNet (2014) – The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC 2014)
winner was a Convolutional Network from Szegedy et al. from Google. Its main contribution
was the development of an Inception Module that dramatically reduced the number of parameters
in the network (4M, compared to AlexNet with 60M). Additionally, this paper uses Average
Pooling instead of Fully Connected layers at the top of the ConvNet, eliminating a large amount
of parameters that do not seem to matter much. There are also several follow-up versions to the
GoogLeNet, most recently Inception-v4 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4842).
 VGGNet (2014) – The runner-up in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition
(ILSVRC 2014) was the network from Karen Simonyan and Andrew Zisserman that became
known as the VGGNet. Its main contribution was in showing that the depth of the network
(number of layers) is a critical component for good performance. Their final best network
contains 16 CONV/FC layers and, appealingly, features an extremely homogeneous architecture
that only performs 3x3 convolutions and 2x2 pooling from the beginning to the end.
Their pretrained model is available for plug and play use in Caffe. A downside of the VGGNet is
that it is more expensive to evaluate and uses a lot more memory and parameters (140M). Most
of these parameters are in the first fully connected layer, and it was since found that these FC
layers can be removed with no performance downgrade, significantly reducing the number of
necessary parameters. (http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/very_deep/ )
 ResNets (2015) – Residual Network developed by Kaiming He et al. was the winner of ImageNet
Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC 2015). Until 2016 ResNets was by far
state of the art Convolutional Neural Network models and was the default choice for using
ConvNets in practice. It features special skip connections and a heavy use of batch
normalization. The architecture is also missing fully connected layers at the end of the network.
More recent developments of the original architecture are presented in Kaiming He et al. Identity
Mappings in Deep Residual Networks (published March 2016). Some recent experiments
reproduce these networks in Torch (https://github.com/gcr/torch-residual-networks) .
 DenseNet (August 2016) – Recently published by Gao Huang (and others), the Densely
Connected Convolutional Network has each layer directly connected to every other layer in a
feed-forward fashion. The DenseNet has been shown to obtain significant improvements over
previous state-of-the-art architectures on five highly competitive object recognition benchmark
tasks. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06993). See Torch implementation here (https://github.com/
liuzhuang13/DenseNet).
References
Gao Huang, Zhuang Liu, Laurens van der Maaten, Kilian Q. Weinberger (2016 Submitted on 25 Aug 2016
(v1), last revised 28 Jan 2018 (this version, v5). Densely Connected Convolutional Networks. Computer
Vision and Pattern Recognition, 12, 35-46 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06993 )
Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun (2015). Deep Residual Learning for Image
Recognition. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,3, 57-69 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385)
Krizhevsky Alex, Sutskever I., Hinton G.E. (2012). ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural
Networks (https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4824-imagenet-classification-with-deep-convolutional-neural-
networks.pdf ).
Szegedy C., Wei Liu, Yangqing Jia, Sermanet P., Reed S., Anguelov D., Erhan D., Vanhoucke V, Rabinovich
A. (2014). Going Deeper with Convolutions. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,6, 87-99.
(https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4842).
Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, and Patrick Haffner (1998). Gradient-Based Learning Applied to
Document Recognition. Proc. of the IEEE, November 1998. (http://yann.lecun.com/
exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-98.pdf )
Zeiler Matthew D, Fergus Rob (2013). Going Deeper with Convolutions. Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition,9, 77-82. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2901 ).
E-training tutorial for the enhancement of the clothing
designer technical skills
Avadanei Manuela-Lacramioara, Loghin Emil- Constantin,

Ionescu Irina, Ionesi Savin- Dorin, Dulgheriu Ionut
"Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iasi,- Romania, Faculty of Textiles, Leather

and Industrial Management
28, Prof.dr.doc.Dimitrie Mangeron Street, 700050, Iasi- ROMANIA
E-mail: manuela_avadanei[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
Creativity and diversity characterize the apparel industry because fashion trends and
sophisticated consumer requirements determine rapid changes. A business in this field is
competitive if it is capable of launching new models in a short time, if it can maintain or
develop the customer network and if the rate between the price and the quality of the
manufactured products is at an affordable level. In the clothing industry, a typical situation
consists of manufacturing the same model of a garment from a base material with one colour
or with different motifs (freestyle or repetitive). Under these circumstances, the designer has
to know how to select and use various commands and functions from a CAD environment
(clothing industry) to prepare the garment pieces for the process of marker-making. He or she
must know how to take into consideration the characteristics of the material(the shape and
the size of the motif, as well as if it is repetitive or not), and the features of the model (the
position of the motif on the piece surface and if the motif lines or colours continue on the
sewn pieces). This paper presents the preparation of the parts of a fitted garment for the
process of marker- making, meant to obtain a model manufactured from a base material with
motives. This tutorial is suitable for the technicians who are working in the clothing design
field with the aid of CAD functions and commands.
Keywords: fabric motifs, marker, pattern design, restricted pieces.
1 Introduction
In all nowadays industries the goods are produced by using modern and updated equipment in
each stage of the production process, operated by well-trained personnel and qualified workers,
with a logically and efficiently organised structure. In T&C industry, fashion and technology are
combined and used efficiently, because the product (garment) must be well designed, well- sized,
with the best level of quality, diversified in order to satisfy the customers, [3,4].
A model of a garment can be changed into a new one in several manners, [2]:
I. By maintaining its constructive characteristics (silhouette, cut-line):
- modifying the size of the pieces (enlarge or shrink);
- modifying the geometry of different contour lines.
II. By increasing the number of pieces (by cutting the others);
III. By eliminating pieces (sleeves, waistbands, collars, pockets, etc.);
IV. By adding secondary pieces, designed with different shape and size but in correspondence
with the main ones (lapels, pockets, collars, cuffs, waistbands or other decorative
elements).
V. By sewing from:
 Unicolour fabrics;
 Base fabrics with geometric motifs (regular or not): squares, stripes, diamonds, etc.
 Fabrics with irregular motifs placed randomly or with freestyle drawings;

 Combinations of fabrics which can have different colours or motifs;
 With or without a different type of accessories (ribbons, brochures, embroidery,
rhinestones).
By combining the criteria mentioned before, a designer has many possibilities of changing a
model, in order to transform it into a new one according to the fashion trends and to the
requirements of the consumer.
This paper presents the main stages of how to prepare the pieces of a garment for the process of
marker-making when the model is sewn from fabrics with motifs.
2 Work method
The specialized IT programs which are used in technical departments (clothing companies)
have modules/ functions for, [6]:
a) designing the shape of the pieces from the garment structure, grading and checking;
b) patterns matching for further sewing operations;
c) preparing the patterns of fabrics with different motifs;
d) planning the size combinations on the markers and for planning the lays to obtain the
required quantities;
e) making and optimising the markers;
f) calculating the marker efficiency;
g) setting and printing the order report;
h) exporting the markers for the automatic cutting machine;
i) saving and managing data in files in the computer for planning or programming further
processes.
The general steps which must be taken in order to design the garment pieces are, [1,2]:
 The analysis of the features of the model in order to establish how to design the pieces of
the model;
 The designing process of the main parts of the model;
 The designing process of the secondary pieces of the model (in relation with the main ones);
 The preparation of the patterns for the cutting process (seam allowances, grain line axis,
notches, general restrictions, etc.).
These stages are explained for a blouse model (figure 1).
The model presented in figure 1 is a classic blouse, less fitted, with
longitudinal cut- lines and long sleeves. The hemline is below the hip
line (about 15 cm). The front has 3 panels, from the shoulder to the
hemline. The back has also got 3 panels (the cutting line starts from the
same point placed on the shoulder line as for the front ). The sleeves
have 2 pieces: the transversal cutline is above the elbow line by about
2cm. The sleeves are enlarged on the hemline. The blouse has a zipper
on the lateral side.
There are many possibilities for producing different models of this
blouse:
-unicolour fabric;
-by combining 2 or 3 fabrics with different colours, motifs or types
(for example, the use of lace for the inferior parts of the sleeves);
Figure 1. Blouse -from fabrics with geometric motifs (regular or irregular);
model,[7] -from fabrics with one motif which must appear in a specific position
on the blouse.
No matter what type of fabrics are used for sewing the model, the blouse patterns are designed
by changing the shape and size of the front and of the back of a classic dress (table 1).
Table 1- The blouse design stages
-Shorten the front and then -Change the shape and size of -Decrease the adjustment degree on
separate the pieces; the front neckline; the waistline;
-Modify the position of the bust -Change the shape of the -Cut the front pattern in order to
dart. hemline. obtain its panels;
-Symmetrize the central panel and
copy the lateral one.
-Shorten the back and separate -Change the shape and size of -Decrease the adjustment degree on
the pieces; the back neckline; the waistline;
-Modify the position of the -Change the shape of the -Cut the back pattern in order to
scapula dart. hemline. obtain its panels;
-Symmetrize the central panel and
copy the lateral one.
-Transfer the elbow dart to the hemline;
-Erase the dart and divide the sleeve pattern;
-Separate the sleeve pieces;
-Increase the hemline length;
-Design the patterns of the pieces

which finish the front and the back
neckline;
-Add seam allowances;
-Establish the position of the
grainline (for each piece);
-Establish the position of the
notches.
From this point, the blouse patterns are prepared differently for the process of marker- making,
by taking into consideration the characteristics of the fabrics.
a) A model blouse with a motif placed asymmetrically on the front, below the waistline and
over the sewn panels (table 2).
Table 2 Stages of preparing the front model

Import the fabric motif (this motif is an
image file obtained by scanning or by
drawing).
-Establish the position of the reference

marker point on each piece. At this
point, the image of the motif appears on
the selected piece.
-Change the position of the reference

marker point on each piece, until the
motif appears to continue from a piece
to another on the sewing line.
-Save the model.
b) If the blouse is sewn from a fabric with regular motifs and some parts of the motifs must
be placed on the same level on 2 pieces, those pieces must be restricted (table 3).
Table 3- Stages of preparing the patterns
Position the reference mark points on the Restrict the pieces horizontally or vertically
pieces which must be restricted (linked), at the as the model requires. The side panels become
same level and direction. pieces with horizontal restrictions.
Set the characteristics of the marker and of the fabrics and import the motif image
Place the pieces manually or automatically on the
marker.
The reference marker points lay those 2 side panel
at the corresponding points of the squares of the grid.
Obs. The stages explained before can be applied

when the fabric has squares, diamonds, or stripes
(longitudinally and vertically).
c) Most commonly the model is made of unicolour fabrics, by combining 2 or 3 types of

fabrics with different colours or fabrics with small or freestyle motifs. In this case, for the
pieces of the blouse, we will have to declare only the data for the marker- making
process: the position of the grainline axis, the type of the fabric, the degree of contraction,
if the piece is symmetrical or not, the number of pieces in the product, the degree of
freedom, etc.,[1,6]
Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the Gemini Company for the technical support and collaboration
with the Faculty of Textiles, Leather and Industrial Management from Iasi, Romania.
Conclusions
Designers from the clothing industry have to deal with several issues: the level of technological
equipment which is used in the production process, the level of the qualification of the workers/
technicians and the rapid changes in the IT industry. Besides these problems, which are specific to
each company, they need to consider the fashion trends, the requirements of the consumer and the
competition among the garment producers.
On these terms, the designers have to find proper solutions for diversifying garment models in
order to be able to create new collections. The characteristics of the fabrics (composition, draping
properties, dimensional stability, regular or irregular motifs, etc.) determine specific preparation
steps of the garment patterns, but with the help of the IT functions and instruments, and with their
creative skills, they can produce new and original models, by using and highlighting the fabrics
motifs.
Due to its interactive explanations, this tutorial is useful for any person who is starting to work
in the garment design field or for the students who attend master’s degree studies in this area.
References
[1] Irina, Ionescu, (2015) Designul tehnologiilor vestimentare, Ed. Performantica, Iaşi
[2] Emilia, Filipescu, Manuela, Avădanei (2007), -Structura şi proiectarea confecţiilor textile. Îndrumar
laborator, Ed. Performantica, Iaşi, ISBN 978-973-730-412-4
[3] Nicolaiov, P., Florea, A., Loghin, C. (2013), Specific Innovation Approaches in Garment
Manufacturing Companies, Buletinul AGIR, ISSN 1224-7928, nr.1, ian.-martie, pag. 168-172
[4] Mariana URSACHE, Carmen Maria LOGHIN, Manuela AVADANEI, Savin Dorin IONESI, Luminiţa
CIOBANU, Irina IONESCU (2016), Developing new skills for the extroversion specializations of
fashion industry in Europe – Extro skills-, 16th Romanian Textiles and Leather Conference CORTEP
2016, ISSN-L 2285-5378, 27-29 October 2016, Iasi, Romania, pag.508-511
[5] * * * SR 13545/2010 Îmbrăcăminte. Dimensiunile corpului şi mărimi de confecţii pentru femei
[6] https://www.geminicad.com/
[7] https://www.sewessential.co.uk/misses-princess-seam-tunics-vogue-pattern-9270
A simple physics experiment with unexpected results revealed by
using the of augmented reality tool and methods
Sorin Trocaru1,2, István Bartos-Elekes3
(1) University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, P.O.Box MG-11, RO-077125,

Bucharest-Măgurele, Romania
(2) Ministry of National Education, Romania, Department of Upper Secondary Education
and Lifelong Education, Bucharest, Romania
(3) Theoretic Highschool „Ady Endre”, Oradea, Romania
E-mail: sorin.trocaru[at]gmail.com
Abstract
The overall aim of teaching physics is to enable the student to build his own descriptive
model of the reality. For that the experimental activities are essential. The use of augmented
reality tools may reveal unexpected phenomenon covered under the measurements error. The
paper presents the study case of such situation and the didactical advantages of use of
augmented reality in understanding physics phenomenon. The theme of experiment is the
study of free falling body by calculation of the gravitational acceleration. The sets of data are
collected by using the classical setup and using an augmented reality tool and method. The
difference in values analysis reveals the influence of the magnetic field produce by the
metallic ball launcher. Some didactical aspects are presented.
Keywords: augmented reality, physics experiment, free fall, physics education
1 Introduction
This paper focuses on two domains, i.e. physics teaching in secondary and high school physics
instructions and the augmented reality tools. More than in other scientific domains, teaching
physics applies from early ages of computing sciences a wide range of digital tools and develops
its own methodologies and dedicated applications. One of the reasons resides into the basic aim of
learning and teaching of physics, developing different descriptive models of reality, by using the
mathematics language. It is obviously that a model reflects only a part of observed reality. Thus
the physics teacher’s task especially for the youngest students is quite difficult. Furthermore
according (Redish, 1994) even for advanced learners not only the mental model developed by
student is the same that the teacher thinks that was acquired and applied by the student. The role of
the enhanced reality and virtual reality tools in understanding the models in physics become
essential.
According to literature the augmented reality is a part of the concept of virtual reality (Crăciun
and Bunoiu, 2017). Usually the augmented reality is understood as addressed to image / video
tools. In physics the augmented reality addresses not only to visual analyzer. We can consider as a
visual represented of a model build on base of a transducer signals can be considered as an
enhanced/ augmented reality artifact (Liu et al, 2017). The difference between a virtual reality and
augmented reality can be considered as follows: virtual reality is a mathematical model based on
functions which simulates the reality, the augmented realty is a superposed of mathematical
theoretical model over a represented reality signal taken from reality.
2 The proposed study case

One of the most popular experiments in teaching physics is the direct determination of
gravitational acceleration (Giambattista et al, 2010). The classical experimental setup used in
Romania consisted of a metallic ball launched with no initial speed by switching off the electric
current passing through an electromagnet. For different positions of the falling body the passing-
time is recorded/measured using light – gates (see Figure 1).
The experimental setup may be used in

different ways in order to collect the pairs of
data (y, t) where y is the falling distance and t is
the corresponding falling time.
According to the experimental method used
the theoretical formulae are used. We assume
that y  y0 the distance between light gates and
t t is the time measured by the chronometer
commanded by them, v0 is the speed when the
chronometer is triggered on by the first light
gate. The general theoretical formula:
g  t 2
[1] y  y0 =v0  t 
2
The formula can be simplified in order to
Figure 1 Free falling body experimental
allow an appropriate plot by triggering the start
standard setup
of the chronometer together with the launch of
the body, i.e. by using only the second light gate
for stopping the chronometer. Assuming that initial velocity is zero in the start moment and the
origin of time measuring also zero the relationship [1] becomes.
g 2
[2] y t
2
Plotting the y  f (t ) the linear graph in Figure 2 is expected:
2
Figure 2. The plot of data – the values are arbitrary chosen

The value of gravitational acceleration can be obtained finding out the slope of the graph.
Using the least squares method, the value of the coefficient in equation [2] can be found. This is
the half value of gravitational acceleration.
3 Method 1
A method for collecting data for analyzing fast phenomenon is the stroboscopic photos or as an
alternative multiple taken photos with fast shooting options (Curticapean et al, 2014). The overall
result is an accurate recording of different positions of a falling body after quite exact period of
time. The stroboscopic picture can be considered as a tool of augmented reality from the point of
view of the ease of collecting data i.e. make more accurate measurements than the classic way
presented in previous section. Furthermore, it allows in different experimental situations to
emphasize hidden or ignored physical phenomenon hard to be observed in the classical way of
conducting the experiment.
In (Bartos-Elekes, 2010) the experimental determination of gravitational acceleration where
conducted using the general setup sketched in Figure 1. The measurements are done on a
stroboscopic picture:
The picture was done by dr. István Bartos-Elekes

presented in (Bartos-Elekes, 2010)
The data analysis of plotting the function [2]

reveals the two following aspects: the points fits
a linear dependence, as expected, but the fitting
2
line didn’t intercept the t axis.
The value obtained for gravitational
acceleration was:
m
[3] g  9, 75  0, 20
s2
which is an acceptable value for an didactical
experiment.
The way for solving the problem of graph
intercept point was the assumption that
“something happens” during the initial; moments
after the metallic ball is launched, i.e. there is a
magnetic interaction with the electromagnet
who’s magnetic field influences the movement
of the ball.
The theoretical approach according to
(Bartos-Elekes, 2010) was to consider the
following expression in analyzing the data:
g
y   t  tm 
2
[4]
2
where t m is the time of magnetic field
influence.
The plotted data where fitted with the Figure 3. Stroboscopic picture of a falling
following function: metal ball. The time lapse is 30 ms.
[5] y  f (t )
This is according to relation [4].
g g
[6] y t   tm
2 2
According to (Bartos-Elekes, 2010) the values obtained where:
m
[7] g   9,86  0,10  , tm  11, 7 ms
s2
which are far more close to the accepted real value of gravitational acceleration. Further more
the value of t m confirm the initial hypothesis of magnetic interaction.
4 Method 2
In this section we made a secondary analysis of the picture in Figure 3 using an application
accessible on line which allows performing pixel precision measurements. The tool can be freely
access at https://app-1529760352.000webhostapp.com/index.html. According to the indications
from the start page the distance measurements where performed. The series of values of y where
measured from A point B as seen in Figure 3. The distance calibration was performed according to
the description of the experiment. The corresponding time is calculated for each position B taking
into account the frequency of the stroboscope t  30 ms .
The data table:
Table 2 The data measured on stroboscopic picture
y (m)  
y m2
1
t(s)
0,00E+00 0,00E+00 0,00

9,81E-04 3,13E-02 0,03
6,87E-03 8,29E-02 0,06
2,13E-02 1,46E-01 0,09
4,48E-02 2,12E-01 0,12
7,98E-02 2,83E-01 0,15
1,25E-01 3,53E-01 0,18
1,79E-01 4,23E-01 0,21
2,44E-01 4,94E-01 0,24
3,18E-01 5,64E-01 0,27
4,02E-01 6,34E-01 0,3
4,97E-01 7,05E-01 0,33
The function used for plotting the data were the relationships [5], [6].
Figure 4. The data plot
The value of the gravitational acceleration obtained by using the method of picture analysis
was calculated. The Excel Linest Function for the least squares method was used to calculate the
line of best fit through the supplied set of  1
y m 2 and t(s) values. The results according to
relationship [6]:
g 2
[8]  2, 21 mms
2
g
[9]  tm  0, 038 m 2
2
The values for gravitational acceleration and t m are:
[10] g  9,80 sm2 , tm  0, 08 ms
The error calculated for g is about 4%.
The results are quite similar with the ones obtained using the way described by making
measurements.
Conclusions
The paper presented two ways of experimental measurements approaches. The differences
between them are the different methods of doing the measurements. Despite both can be
considered as augmented reality techniques, the second one, presented in section 4 have more
advantages from the point of view of physics didactics. The individual work of the student can be
easily be stimulated by using the digital stroboscopic photos and by the contribution of an
appropriate digital picture analyzing tool. Furthermore the student may be stimulated in order to
make in depth analysis in order to find out answers for unexpected values obtained after picture
analysis, aspect which cannot be only revealed during the class activity.
Use of augmented reality tools in classrooms and laboratories can make physics-science easier
to understand. There are numerous studies which prove that using interdisciplinary (Miron and
Staicu, 2010; Iordache et al, 2016; Skliros et al, 2014; Iofciu et al, 2011; Iofciu et al, 2010),
simulations, virtual experiments and real experiments the understanding of concepts becomes
easier and deeper (Iofciu et al, 2012; Garabet et al, 2012; Stoica et al, 2014; Grigore et al, 2016a;
2016b; 2016c; Grigore et al, 2017).
References
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Conference Proceedings, 1916(1), 50003. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5017456
Curticapean, D., Wozniak, P., Israel, K., Vauderwange, O. & Dressler, P. (2014). Increased knowledge
transfer by using modern high-speed camera (Vol. 9188, p. 91880G-9188-8). Preluat în din
https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2061875
Garabet M., Miron C., Neacsu I, Popescu F.F. (2012). New Educational Perspectives on Spectroscopy in the
Romanian High School, Romanian Reports in Physics, 64(2), 633–651.
Giambattista, A., Tichardson Mc Carthy, B. & Richardson, R. (2010). College Physics: with an integrated
approach to forces and kinematics (3rd editio). Mc Graw-Hill Companies, New-York.
Grigore I., Miron C., Barna E.S. (2016). Didactic tools created with Excel spreadsheets to study motion on an
inclined plane, Romanian Reports in Physics, 68(1), 440-454.
Grigore I., Miron C., Barna E.S. (2016). Exploring the graphic facilities of Excel spreadsheets in the
interactive teaching and learning of damped harmonic oscillations, Romanian Reports in Physics, 68(2),
891–904.
Grigore I., Miron C., Barna E.S. (2016). The study of the transient regime in electric circuits with Excel
spreadsheets, Romanian Reports in Physics, 68(3), 1281–1295.
Grigore I., Miron C., Barna E.S. (2017). Exploring Excel spreadsheets to simulate the projectile motion in the
gravitational field, Romanian Reports in Physics, 69(1), 901.
Iofciu F., Miron C., Antohe S. (2010). Interactive Conceptual Maps Part of Constructivist Environment for
Advanced Physics Teaching, The 5th International Conference on Virtual Learning – Virtual Reality,
(ICVL 2010) October 29-31, Targu Mures, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference On Virtual
Learning, 95-100.
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cognitive map for the study of magnetoresistive materials, Third World Conference on Educational
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Behavioral Sciences, 15, 461-465.
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Physics Concept Approach: Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), Romanian Reports in Physics, 64(3), 841–852.
Iordache S.M., Ciocanea A., Balan A., Stamatin I., Budea S., Ceaus C., Trefilov A.M.I., Voinea S. (2016).
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in High Schools, Romanian Reports in Physics, 62(4), 906 – 917.
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62(9), 796-803.
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atmospheric pressure: the analysis of the volatile organic compounds and SO 2, Romanian Journal of
Physics, 59, 9–10, 1074–1083.
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66(4), 1285–1300.
Blockchain and its Potential in Education
Cristina Turcu1, Cornel Turcu1, Iuliana Chiuchișan1
(1) Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava

13, University Street, Suceava, RO-720229, ROMANIA
E-mail: cristina[at]eed.usv.ro
Abstract
The proposed paper presents a literature review regarding the status of integrating the
dynamic blockchain technology in the educational field. Blockchain is a relatively new
technology and the same is its implementations in education. The emerging need in this area
of research, which still is in its infancy, is justified by the possible use cases; some of these
cases are in piloting phase, while others have already been adopted by educational
institutions. This paper focuses on extending knowledge about blockchain and on identifying
the benefits, risks and the associated challenges regarding the successful implementation of
blockchain-based solutions in the field of education, fully in line with standards and
guidelines for quality assurance.
Keywords: Blockchain, education, security, diplomas, certificates
1 Introduction
The field of education is moving forward into the digital era. In fact, technology and education
are a great combination that gains more popularity in recent years. Thus, education technology is
becoming a global phenomenon, and according to (EdTechXGlobal, 2016), the market is projected
to grow at 17.0% per annum, to $252 billion by 2020.
But we cannot talk about using technology without addressing the subject of security. Failure
to comply with the appropriate security measures can result in the increased consumption of
financial and human resources. Since the early adoption of technology in the field of education,
researchers and practitioners have proposed different guidelines, approaches and policies to
support the decision-making process regarding the security measures to be implemented. One
solution that is gaining ground lately is based on blockchain technology, which offers powerful
security capabilities. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in this concept, justified
by the exponential success of Bitcoin's cryptocurrency, launched by Satoshi Nakamoto
(Nakamoto, S. 2009). Thus, the various possibilities of applying blockchain in different fields have
caught the attention of researchers and practitioners. As the number of projects and applications
based on this technology has increased, it is important that researchers and practitioners have
access to the current state-of-the-art and –practice. In this work, a bibliographical research was
carried out in order to understand the state of the art of applying blockchain technology in
education. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic classification and a synthesized
overview of current practices. We have addressed the following research questions: (1) Is there
evidence of the application of blockchain technology in education aimed at offering solutions to
various issues? and (2) What are the reported outcomes? To achieve the proposed objective and to
answer the research questions, we have performed a literature review study on the application of
blockchain technology in the education field.
Blockchain, also known as Distributed Ledger Technology, revolutionizes the ways in which
data is managed and transacted. In recent years, due to the many advantages, it began to be applied
in various areas, all over the world, such as supply chain, transportation, logistics, public
administration, etc. However, education, with some minor exceptions, is not currently considered a
priority, even in countries with national blockchain initiatives. This is because, among other
things, many stakeholders within education are currently unaware of the benefits and potential of
blockchain technology.
But the adoption of technologies has a growing impact on the way skills are acquired and
developed for the 21st Century workforce. Thus, there is an increasing demand for skills update,
which requires lifelong learning. But, sometimes, checking the authenticity of all diplomas and
certificates that attest someone’s skills and achievements proves difficult and time consuming. A
system that allows an instant verification of the authenticity of these documents issued within the
higher education area or other levels of education is paramount. Blockchain offers, besides high
security, the capability to integrate data from disparate data sources, such as education records
stored in databases of different educational providers.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the background and
reviews the related work. The next section presents some blockchain-based solutions for
education. Some of the benefits of adopting blockchain technology in education are showed in
the Section 2.3. Next section discusses the limitations of blockchain technology in education,
while section 3 states the future work directions. Finally, the conclusions are drawn in section 4.
2 Blockchain technology
2.1 State of the art
Blockchain technology is considered the key to solve scalability, privacy, and reliability
problems in various domains (Malviya, 2016).
In short, a blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that enables the information recording and
sharing by a community in which each member keeps his/her own copy of the information and
must validate collectively any update (Piscini et al., 2016). The blockchain is a “trust-free, tamper-
proof, auditable, and self-regulating system, with no human intervention required to execute
computation” (Atzori, 2017). This encrypted database, that serves as an irreversible and
incorruptible repository of information, “enables, for the first time, unrelated people to reach
consensus on the occurrence of a particular transaction or event without the need for a controlling
authority” (Wright & De Filippi, 2015).
Blockchain-based solutions are now being developed in many areas by big IT corporations
such as IBM, Microsoft (Azure), Intel etc., but also by start-ups that are growing rapidly.
According to (Grech & Camilleri, 2017), “the majority of EU Member States are likely to be
experimenting with blockchain technologies. Some are working on national strategies, while
others are conducting trials of specific application”. Among these countries, there are Estonia,
Netherlands, etc.
In this paper, we focus on the application of blockchain in education.
Blockcerts is an open standard for blockchain educational certificates (MIT Media Lab, 2016;
Schmidt, 2015; Schmidt, 2017). In fact, this standard includes open-source libraries, tools, and
mobile apps enabling a decentralized, standard-based, recipient-centric ecosystem, allowing the
creation, issuing, holding, viewing and trustless verification of blockchain-based official records
(Blockcerts, 2018). Currently, there are already commercial implementations of the blockcerts
standard. An example of blockcerts application is MIT’s Digital Diploma, that enables the issuing
of secure digital diplomas, allowing students to share their verifiable and tamper-proof diploma
digitally, free of charge and without involving an intermediate party (Durant and Trachy, 2017).
Due to the benefits of this technology, different blockchain-based platforms have recently been
launched and their number is increasing. Therefore, we present some of the most popular
platforms, focusing on the most suitable for developing applications in the educational field.
Some of the platforms for developing applications with a high impact lately are the following:
Ethereum (Buterin et al., 2014), Hyperledger (Androulaki et al., 2018). Hyperledger is an open-
source platform, on which various blockchain-based projects have been developed, including, for
example, Hyperledger Fabric. The blockchain framework Hyperledger Fabric provides a
distributed and scalable ledger on which other implementations, some of which commercial, such
as the IBM Blockchain platform or Sony Global Education next-generation credentials platform
(SGE, 2017) are based.
The blockchain is a relatively new technology and the application of blockchain in education is
extremely new. Nevertheless, there already is a large number of blockchain-based proposals to
improve some aspects of education. Some of these are presented in the next section.
2.2 Blockchain-based solutions for education

The blockchain technology is a transformative technology with an enormous potential. The
scientific papers and reports published so far assert that, although education could greatly benefit
from the functionality provided by blockchain, the adoption of block technology in education is in
its infancy. The Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge
service, published a report on Blockchain in Education (Grech & Camilleri, 2017) highlighting the
potential and proposing some scenarios, including issuing certificates, verifying accreditation
pathways, lifelong learning passports, intellectual property management, and data management.
According to (Gräther et al., 2018), blockchain is highly suited for storing fingerprints of
certificates or other educational items, due to the fact that each transaction is permanent recorded
and verified.
Among the first blockchain-based systems, which moved from the prototype stage to
commercial products, some refer to diplomas. These systems can be found, for example, at MIT,
UT Austin, and the University of Nicosia (Cyprus), where digital diplomas are being issued to
students.
In Europe, UK’s Open University Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) is one of the pioneering
universities to employ blockchain. KMI, in partnership with British Telecommunications (BT), has
developed an Ethereum based platform for academic applications, named OpenBlockChain
(Lemoie, 2017). For its experiments, the institute considers Microcredentials (badges) allocated for
courses available on the Open Learn website and MOOCs (UK platform FutureLearn).
Open Badges are “verifiable, portable digital badges with embedded metadata about skills and
achievements” (Mozilla Foundation, 2012) “that happen anytime, anywhere, and anyhow”
(Lemoie, 2017). Badges can be degrees and certifications, but also microcredentials or any other
type of credential.
Due to space limitations, we consider here only one use case related to education that can stand
as proof for the important role blockchain can play in this field.
Usually, academic records of a person, such as degrees, diplomas, are separated data, stored in
the databases of various providers of education and students or graduates do not have the authority
to manage their own information. Moreover, no other unofficial person (e.g. an employer) has
access to modify or even view these official records. This situation is common in most countries
around the world, including Romania. But, in the context of heightened internationalization of
education and work, with the increasing mobility of students and graduates, an easy access to the
personal degree record is paramount. According to various studies, a significant percent of CVs
contains false information regarding the person’s academic track record. Thus, for example, (Risk
Advisory Group, 2018), point out that “eighty percent contained one or more discrepancy - up by
ten percent compared to our data last year. Discrepancies were most frequently related to
educational qualifications and information about employment history”. In the UK, there is a
centralized service, named Higher Education Degree Datacheck (HEDD), that allows the
verification of someone’s degree. In Romania, the Ministry of National Education (Romanian

acronym MEN) controls the management of the (Single) National Student Enrolment Registry
(RMUR in Romanian), that is “a digital database that records all students in Romania from public
and private universities, accredited or with a temporary license”, in accordance with the Romanian
Education Law no. 1/2011, art. 201, for all academic years and for all study cycles (RG, 2018).
Keeping the record of all university diplomas issued in Romania, a strict control of the diplomas is
ensured. But, so far, the access to this information is restricted, and students or graduates cannot
view their own records from this central database. Moreover, a third-party, such as an employer,
cannot access this database in order to verify the authenticity of a candidate’s degrees.
Various studies identified the challenges regarding the recognition of degrees and diplomas
issued by foreign education providers, taking into consideration the perils of degree counterfeiting,
and made some recommendations for safeguarding against fraudulent documents (Trines S.,
2017). One of these recommendations is a comprehensive and trusted system for recording, storing
and retrieving educational information, such as, degrees, diplomas, education and training
credentials, etc. Among other purposes, such a system would contribute to preventing fraud, by
ensuring, for example, the management of both educational data and data access to third-parties
(e.g. other universities, recruiters or employers), even from different countries.
But, “centralized data-storage and management systems are susceptible to hacking, intrusion,
and breaches” (Efanov & Roschin, 2018). Instead, a distributed trust technology, ensuring
scalability, privacy, and reliability, such as blockchain, could be considered. Thus, a blockchain-
based model could be used for managing education data from various education service providers.
This model will allow education providers to efficiently store and manage data, while ensuring
data integrity and security. Also, data access with permission could be enabled. The universities
and governments could be collective caretakers of the blockchain network. But only the
universities should have access to create or update the data related to a student’s degree record.
Instead, the control of sharing this data should belong to the student/graduate, without requiring
the permission of any official entities (universities, governments). This system should also address
the quality assurance requirements.
The main benefits for stakeholders offered by such a system are depicted on the right side of
figure 1.
Figure 1. Romanian current state vs. blockchain-based solution

2. 3 Benefits of blockchain in education

Blockchain technology has limitless possibilities and could become an extensive part of
education systems.
Some benefits of adopting blockchain technology in the field of education are the following
(but are not limited to):
- decentralization: considering a P2P distributed architecture over a centralized one brings
an improvement of the fault tolerance, by eliminating the central points of failures and
bottlenecks (Veena et al., 2015);
- scalability: allows the elimination of situations where one or several entities control the
storage and processing of information of a large number of people;
- reliability: the information can remain unchanged, immutable and distributed over time in
blockchain. Any system participant can verify the authenticity of data and be certain it has
not been tampered with (Reyna et al., 2018);
- security: information and communications can be secure if considered as transactions of
the blockchain (Prisco, 2016), based on cryptographic protocols. Thus, for example,
blockchain offers the potential to make degree records more secure.
- last but not least, the benefits that universities may have through the adoption of
blockchain-based solutions include reducing administrative costs and bureaucracy.
2.4 Limitations
Some researchers and practitioners reported various issues that were encountered in the
implementation of blockchain-based applications for education. Mainly, these revolve around
GDPR compliance, data ownership and authenticity of data sources.
One of the limitations refers to the education providers joining the same blockchain network.
One assumes that the identity of the education provider is verified by the system before joining the
blockchain.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a robust and far-reaching privacy
legislation, was created and adopted to impose the preservation of individual privacy and
autonomy (“right to be forgotten” protections). Therefore, any solution must be GDPR compliant.
But the blockchain removes “the need to trust a centralized authority in order to keep an accurate
record of activity” and “it makes surveillance of activity extremely difficult. The blockchain
represents the opportunity to not only fulfill but go beyond the promise of the European General
Data Protection Regulation” (Smolenski, 2017). There are already some solutions, such as
EvidenZ or BigchainDB, but any blockchain-based platform or application should carefully
consider GDPR implications.
Latency is another limitation of blockchain, because the transaction can take too long.
Some assert that increasing storage capacity due to data redundancy (each node has a copy of
the Blockchain) could also be an issue of blockchain adoption.
Moreover, many publications, including (Lin & Liao, 2017) reveal an important security issue
of the blockchain-based system, the so-called “51% attack”.
Also, we should emphasize the fact that the blockchain adoption in education makes it
necessary to solve various legal issues.
In order to fully adopt blockchain technology in education ways in which these limitations
could be alleviated or avoided altogether should be found.
3 Future work
Various reports and papers reveal the blockchain's potential to solve certain issues related to
education, and also make various recommendations. But in order to fully exploit the blockchain in
education, there are still technical and non-technical challenges that have to be addressed. Some of
them are related to the blockchain technology itself (for example, overcoming current limitations,
offering more powerful features and new capabilities), while others refer to education information
systems. Thus, for example, some researchers consider the blockchain as a way to change in time
the organization of the entire higher education system (McArthur David, 2018), in fact,
revolutionizing higher education in order to create a global network for higher learning (Tapscott
and Tapscott, 2017).
In Romania, considering the records from RMUR, MEN could support the development and
implementation of a pilot project, based on the blockchain. In a first phase, this project could
address PhD diplomas, that currently are all validated at the national level by the National Council
for Titles, Diplomas, and Certificates.
Conclusion
There is an emergent need for solutions to various issues in the education field, proved, among
others, by the number of search engine hits produced by our search strings and the number of
projects already developed or in the developing phase. Many researchers and practitioners
authored technical papers tackling the subject of blockchain in education. The published papers
and the applications implemented so far in the field of education demonstrate that the solutions
provided by blockchain are viable.
In this paper, we examine outputs from the research and practitioner communities to identify
how blockchain technology could be applied in the education field in order to potentially improve it.
Due to the benefits offered by this technology, various blockchain-based platforms have
recently been launched and various applications have been developed in many diverse areas,
including education, some of them being presented in this paper.
An important aspect is gaining access to important student or graduate-related data, which is
often stored in the university database with exclusive access, or in the form of paper documents.
Blockchain technology provides solutions to this issue, while allowing alignment with the
emerging trend known as "open data".
Although the benefits of applying blockchain in the education field are many, this research
topic is still in a preliminary stage and the adoption of standards and regulations is essential to
expand its use. But it is worth noting that there are still other areas that have to be further
investigated in order to fully adopt blockchain technology in education. Therefore the decision to
apply the blockchain to this field must be carefully considered and taken with caution.
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COVEO – an e-learning tool for the induction and continuous
training of IT employees
Sorina Chircu1
(1) Politehnica Institute of Bucharest, Spl. Independentei, Nr.313

Sector 6, Bucuresti, Romania, E-mail: chircusorina[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Labour productivity, a very important indicator for any company that delivers products
and/or services, depends on many factors such as: work organisation, employee training and
technological process. In order to grow workforce productivity, more and more IT companies
use IT products instead of creating everything from scratch, in a common programming
language. Therefore, the tendency of IT companies is to specialise developers on specific
products based on programming languages (one doesn’t need to only learn a programming
language, but a more advanced product/framework that is based on a particular
programming language). On a regular basis, programmers must learn new products or new
version of a product previously used within the same company. Every new product or product
version has its own documentation. Therefore a method to organise all this information is
needed in order to facilitate fast learning both for junior and senior programmers. In IT
companies documentation is scattered across multiple locations: SharePoint, Confluence,
Internal Communities/Forums, JIRA, etc. A innovative tool considered the leader of
Enterprise Search in 2017 and 2018 by qualitative analysis market research companies is
COVEO. The present paper aims to emphasize the benefits of using COVEO as an AI Search
Tool (Enterprise Search using Artificial Intelligence) both for the employee as well as for
employers. As research method we used the survey, which was shared online to a lot of 230 IT
employees from Bucharest, that use COVEO AI Search. The research results confirm the
previously mentioned benefits of using COVEO.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Innovative E-learning tools, Labour Productivity
1 Introduction
In general, productivity is defined as a ratio between the results of an economic activity and the
efforts made for this. Labour productivity growth is the most important factor towards increasing
the production volume, reducing production cost and increasing the financial return and
competitiveness of products [1]. A series of factors contribute to the increase of labour
productivity, most importantly work organization, employee training and technological progress
[2]. For the growth of labour productivity IT companies are increasingly using IT products and
extending those for customers instead of developing things from scratch in a common
programming language. Therefore, the tendency of IT companies is to specialize programmers in
certain IT products based on certain programming languages (therefor one does not only learn a
programming language, but also the product or framework that is used; which itself is based on a
particular programming language).
Examples of products used in IT companies and extended for clients are:
(1) Content Management Systems (CMS) (Ex: WordPress, Sitecore, FirstSpirit, etc) which
allow companies to customise such a platform for customer content publishing & editing needs
without building one from scratch in a particular programming language (Ex: .NET, PHP, Java, etc);
(2) Ecommerce platforms (Ex: Magento, Prestashop, Commerce Cloud, etc) make building an
ecommerce website a lot easier by providing a full ecommerce site out of the box and then
customising it for the client’s needs;
(3) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms that store complete information
about the interactions with each existing or potential customer in order to increase sales &
retention (Ex. Salesforce CRM, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, etc);
(4) Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms which hold all the information flow between
company departments in order to improve efficiency (Ex: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, etc)
(5) IT Tickets management system are used for platforms used for helpdesk support, issue
tracking and project management and are common in companies (Ex: JIRA, Zendesk, etc).
Periodically, programmers need to learn new such products or new versions of an already used
product. Each new product or new production version has a different documentation, which means
a method is needed to organise all the documentations to facilitate fast learning both for junior and
senior developers. In IT companies documentations are scattered throughout many locations (Ex:
SharePoint, Confluence, Community Forum, etc).
A innovative tool considered the leader of Enterprise Search in 2017 and 2018 by qualitative
analysis market research [3] companies is COVEO, which gathers all the information a company
has on a large variety of topics, in one place.
COVEO is a platform that provides intelligent and predictive search to organisations. It has
many plugins for other online corporate tools such as: Salesforce, Sitecore, Google Apps,
Alassian, JIRA, etc which allow organisations to easily have COVEO search all information
within an organisation. COVEO uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to provide the most
relevant search results and it’s also highly customisable by platform admins [4]. Coveo is an
information search engine that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence, meaning it has self-learning
algorithms). COVEO is an information aggregator, a centraliser for all data created and stored by
any and all national and international offices of the company.
COVEO aids with labour organisation, employee training and technological progress. It helps
with labour organisation in the sense that it offers all the existing documentation on a particular the
topic the user is searching, gathering it from multiple information repositories (SharePoint,
Confluence, Community, etc) the company owns, who have been contributed to by employees
from any of the offices (national or international). Also, it offers a Quick View of any information;
with a simple click one can see all the information without going separately to the external
repository page that had that information. Moreover COVEO indexes information certain
employees don’t normally have access to (due to access restrictions) and these are easily available
through the Quick View feature.
The platform also supports employee training, in the sense that it decreases the learning curve,
it allows the optimal integration of juniors into the company by fast assimilation of the complex
information regarding company products & services, which are both extended for customers and
used internally. COVEO is also very useful to e-learning coordinators from the company since
based on what employees search for most frequently, they can see advanced statistics on their
learning needs and content gaps (where certain keywords didn’t return sufficient or any search
results). Thus, the e-learning coordinator can generate new content highly targeted to employees’
learning needs. Also, for senior software developers in the company, the platform provides job
stability by helping them always keep up to date with the new products and new product versions
the company is using to develop final products for customers or for internal use. Every new project
can bring on different technologies that a senior must be familiarised with or updated on and
COVEO efficiently facilitates this learning process.
The platform also helps with technological process by using artificial intelligence algorithms,
in the sense that COVEO learns from the search behaviour of each user, being able to predict their
search intent, context and most relevant result at the right time and place, to the right person.
In this regard, the benefits for the company and employee retention are an important increase in
labour productivity and inherently of the profitability per employee and overall bottom-line.
2 The research methodology

The paper aims to emphasize the benefits of using COVEO as an AI Search platform
(Enterprise search using Artificial Intelligence) with the goal of increasing employee productivity.
We are operating with the following working hypothesis: we expect COVEO to be an
information aggregator that facilitates the learning progress of employees to a larger degree than
other information repositories and aggregators used by IT companies.
For our investigation we have used the survey-based research, which was administered online
and has 5 items (on a Likert scale of 1 to 5) that aim to measure the efficiency of using COVEO
by:
(a) The degree to which COVEO differentiates itself from other information aggregators and
repositories, used so far. Differentiation criteria comprise: website loading time, the usability of
the platform and the relevance of the search results to the used keyword;
(b) The frequency of COVEO usage by employees, compared to other information aggregators.
Sample: 230 employees who work in the IT industry and are based in Bucharest, that use
COVEO, of which 143 are juniors developers in the companies they work for, 4th year students
from Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Automatics & Computer Science Faculty, who have
been employees for 3-6 months and 87 are respondents which are employed on a senior developer
position in their respective company (which an experience of at least 2 years in the field they work
in). The 230 respondents work in 6 different IT companies.
2.1 Research results

Regarding the question which of the information aggregators is used by each of the employees,
we have obtained the following results:
Table 1. The utilisation degree of the information aggregators by employees
Frequency
Module Answer
J S
SharePoint Very large degree 8 0
Large degree 16 4
Moderate degree 34 9
Small degree 81 28
Very small degree 4 46
Total 143 87
Confluence Very large degree 12 5
Large degree 17 37
Small degree 65 10
Frequency
Module Answer
J S
SharePoint Very large degree 8 0
Large degree 16 4
Small degree 81 28
Total 143 87
Community Very large degree 49 60
Large degree 23 16
Small degree 16 0
Total 143 87
COVEO Very large degree 89 7
Large degree 44 13
Small degree 0 0
Total 143 87
N=230; J= junior developers ; S = senior developer
According to the resulted data, juniors use COVEO & Community the most, followed by
Confluence. Seniors on the other hand use Community and Confluence the most and more
moderately COVEO. Seniors are already very specialised and know where to find the basic
information if needed, unlike juniors who feel lost in the vast amount of new information.
SharePoint is considered outdated both by seniors and juniors because the website is slow and its
usability is low.
From the company information aggregators you use, please appreciate their efficiency based on
the following criteria:
Table 2. Comparison between platforms, by variable

SharePoint
M St. d
Variables J S J S
Page Loading Speed 1,8 1,1 0.6 0.1
Usability 1,8 1,3 0.3 0.4
Relevance of search results 2,7 1,4 1.0 1.6
Reduces Learning Curve 1,8 0,5 1.1 0.3

Confluence
Page Loading Speed 2.9 4.0 0.1 0.3
Usability 2.7 4.1 0.1 0.3
Relevance of search results 4.8 4.4 0.4 0.1
Reduces Learning Curve 3.1 4.2 0.8 0.1
Community
Page Loading Speed 3.9 4.0 0,4 0.1
Usability 3.8 4.0 0.1 0,3
Relevance of search results 3.8 4.9 0,4 0,0
Reduces Learning Curve 4.8 4.8 0,1 0,1
COVEO
Page Loading Speed 4.3 4.0 0.2 0.4
Usability 4.3 4.0 0.1 0.3
Relevance of search results 4.8 3.1 0.1 0.6
Reduces Learning Curve 4.9 3.7 0.2 0.8
M= mean; St.d= standard deviation; J= junior developers ; S = senior developer
According to the resulted data, juniors use COVEO & Community more and more, due to the
fact these decrease the learning curve, while Confluence is used for the high relevance and clean
structure of the information. Seniors on the other hand use Community and Confluence the most
due to the very specific information they get from these platforms while the relevance of COVEO
is appreciated to a moderate degree. In the opinion of juniors and seniors, SharePoint is slow and
usability is low.
3 Interpretations, comments
SharePoint is a platform created by Microsoft that offers organisations a powerful way to create
internal websites, also called intranets to hold various types of information. SharePoint also
provides the storage needed, a way to organise and search for information as well as means to
share and spread the information across the organisation. Microsoft office online is also integrated
with SharePoint which means that similar to Google Docs, Office Online allows you organisations
to collaborate online on word, excel and PowerPoint documents. [5]
Confluence is a platform that offers organisations an efficient method of collaboration and
sharing of important information. Confluence allows the creation of pages and blogs that can be
commented on and edit by all members of the team. It also integrates well with JIRA, the task
management platform, so thus it can be used very well for project management as well. [6]
Confluence is very good in structuring information, by organising it on categories, subcategories,
spaces, wikis thus facilitating logical learning.
A Community Forum is an online discussion website that can be used for public (open for
anyone to register) or private (only employees can have accounts). In such forums employees post
messages in the form of threads (whole topics of conversation) by starting such a thread (new
topic) or by replies to that thread (adding new comments to it to continue the conversation).
Forums are also moderated (controlled) by Moderators to avoid duplicate posts, lack of
compliance with the community rules, etc.
COVEO is an insight engine, which is an advanced and complex search engine having a deeper
index than a regular search engine allowing for complex queries and using advanced methods for
calculating relevance by using AI technologies including Natural Language Processing,

Graph-based data structures and Machine Learning (ML). [7]
The working hypothesis: we expect COVEO to be an information aggregator that facilitates
the learning progress of employees to a larger degree than other information repositories and
aggregators used by IT companies, is confirmed only for junior software developers. Based on the
gathered data, juniors use COVEO and then Community the most, which significantly reduce their
learning curve by their high information relevance. Seniors on the other hand use Community the
most because due to the fact they have good past work experience they are assigned to projects
where they need to work with very specific information that they can get from using the
community, this information mostly comes from other colleagues who have solved similar
problems, in the form of peer-to-peer learning. Furthermore, seniors use Confluence frequently
because it allows them to create technical documentation for juniors, as well as update it and use
it. The seniors use COVEO to a moderate degree because they are highly specialised and they
know where to find specific information when they need it, and don’t get lost in the vast amount of
information like juniors do. SharePoint is used very little by seniors and juniors, being considered
a relatively outdated platform.
Conclusions
As any IT platform that risks being quickly outdated, the question is what perspectives
COVEO has for the future. According to Market Research Leaders [7] who have analysed trends
regarding insight search engines (such as COVEO) by 2019, half of the search queries will be
generated automatically, by voice search or by using NLP - natural language processing. COVEO
is highly equipped to handle these future trends. It has been ranked as the most visionary insight
search engine by market research leaders and it already uses auto-generated queries and highly
advanced AI algorithms to process queries. Another important foreseen trend is that by 2022,
information will find employees and not the other way round and thus helping with important
company decisions and actions. Therefore the use of COVEO is an important resource for IT
organizations and employees both now and for years to come.
Acknowledgements
My appreciation should be expressed to Computer Science students from the fourth study year
for making this research possible by answering to the survey and for also forwarding it to senior
developers form the companies they work for.
References
[1] Buşe, L. (2005). Analiza economic-financiara. Bucuresti: Editura Economica.

[2] Anghel, I., Dinu, E. (2000). Strategia şi analiza economico-financiară a firmei. Studii de caz: Vol I.
Bucureşti. Editura ASE
[3]https://www.coveo.com/en/company/news-releases/2017/positioned-upper-rightmost-in-leaders-of-
gartner-magic-quadrant-for-insight-engines-eur
[4]https://onlinehelp.coveo.com/en/ces/7.0/user/what_is_the_coveo_platform.htm
[5]https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-is-sharepoint-97b915e6-651b-43b2-827d-fb25777f446f
[6]https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-what-is-confluence
[7] https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-5724I12&ct=180713&st=sb
Study of a Learning Method based on Energy Optimization of
Electromechanical System
Mariana Iorgulescu
University of Pitesti, Electrical Engineering Departament

E-mail: marianaiorgulescu[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The paper presents a study above learning technology used in electrical engineering
domain. This method is developed in laboratory in order to familiarize the future engineers
with the concept of energy optimization of electromechanical equipment. The teaching method
based on energy optimization of an alternative current motor are chosen take into
consideration that the induction motors are spread in industry. The optimization of electric
motor can be done by frequency convertor supply. For analysis of energy consumption it is
necessary two steps: first, the motor are supplied directly from electric network and secondly,
the motor are supplied by frequency convertor. The induction motor are studied for different
level of torques as an applied load. This learning technology by doing are finalised by
experimental results analysis. Based on this experience the electrical engineering will learn to
present a few measures means to improve the energy efficiency of induction motor and report
on the progress potential economies of electric energy both with feasibility of these methods.
Keywords: learning method, energy optimization, induction motor
1. Introdution
The electric motors converts electricity in mechanical energy inside an electromechanical
system. The most important part of energy consumption in this system are used by electric motor.
Only a small part of the energy are used by the secondary circuits. The electric motors both with
whole systems represents the biggest consumer on global economy. In present, there are
estimation that these systems uses around 46% of total electricity produces in whole world, figure
1. These process returns in nature around 6040 million tone of CO2 emissions.
Standby
3%
Heating
19% []
[]
Electrolysis
3%
Electronic
devices
10%
Electric light
19%
Figure 1. Global demand for electricity for different categories of consumers end
The necessity of carbon emission imposes the decreasing of energy consumption, especially of
electricity given by the electric machines.
The present paper aims it’s learning one technique of using electric drives in which the power
supply and control of the machine are made by changing of the supply frequency, in direct
connection with the increase of the energy efficiency of the machine.(Lena et all,2017)
Three-phase asynchronous motors, especially those with a short-circuit rotor, are the most
common in all industrial sectors, due to their advantages over other motors such as: low price,
safety in service, high efficiency.
The large-scale introduction of automation and robotics, the development of new types of
machine-tool-driven tools have led to the need to use the most rapid and reliable drive systems.
For the use of these motors, it is necessary to know the methods of electric drive, but especially
the methods of adjusting their speed. This is very important because the motor-driven load may
vary, or the applications in which they are involved require the speed variation.
It is known that electric motors have good performance when running at nominal load. If these
machines are under-charged their yield is low. One of the aims of this paper is to learn the technique
of optimizing induction machines in the event of sub-loading them.
The frequency converter is a device that controls the voltage and frequency supplied to a motor
and therefore controls the speed of the motor and the system it manages. A static frequency
converter is able to adjust both the speed and torque of the AC motor. Therefore, the inverter
provides continuous process speed control (compared to discrete speed controllers or multi-speed
motors). (Panasetsky et al,2016)
The overall structure of the paper takes the form of three sections, including the introductory
section. Section II describes the lecture with basic knowledge of electromechanical equipment
from a theoretical point of view. Section III presents the practical activities in motor’s speed
regulation in laboratory work, representing designed of energy efficiency for an induction motor
and handle of experimental equipment. Finally, the conclusion gives a brief summary of the
learning and training in energy efficiency domain.
2. Teoretical Consideration
The electric motor studied in this paper is a three-phase asynchronous with a short-circuit rotor.
Static frequency converters are equipment that are positioned between the power source and the
receiver, they modify the power supply parameters (value, shape, voltage frequency) respecting the
requirements imposed by the asynchronous motor.
The main purpose of the experimental model was the concept of speed control of a three-phase
induction motor with energy saving. To do this, a frequency converter is used to control the speed
of a three-phase induction motor with load attached to the motor. It analyses the energy consumed
by the motor at different frequency values. These frequency converters have been designed to be
used with a 3-phase induction motor. Since these motors are usually only on / off, a converter is
needed if more operating speeds are required. The motor can also be slowly start to rated speed,
eliminating the high starting currents.
Frequency variable drives are becoming more common and more used in applications. They are
able to change the output speed of a motor without the need for mechanical wheels, thus reducing
the number of mechanical components and general maintenance. But the biggest advantage that
such a device has is the ability to save energy and implicitly the costs for it consuming only the
necessary energy.(Gavrila,2018)
A converter is similar to the motor to which it is attached, both transforming power into a usable
form. In the case of an induction motor, the electric power supplied to it is converted to mechanical
power by rotating the motor rotor and the torque it produces by slipping the motor. A frequency
converter, on the other hand, converts the input power, a voltage and a fixed frequency to a variable
voltage and frequency. The same concept is also the basis for motor speed variation without the
need for adjustable wheels or gear changes.
Figure 2 shows the control interface that can control the drive. It can be seen that this frequency
converter is supplying to alternating current and the output to the motor is in the form of PWM.
In the laboratory study the energy
consumption is analysed for the following
nominal data:
Rated power: P=1,5 kW; power factor:
cosφ=0,85; frequency: f=50Hz; shaft rotation:
n=1400rpm.
It is very important that this frequency
converter has a rated power similar to the motor
Figure 2. Diagrame electric motor control on which it operates or greater. It is
recommended to calculate the output current of
the converter. It is usually advisable to use a motor-to-heat relay for additional motor protection.
In the next section, it will be presented how the output currents for the inverter have been
calculated.
Phase voltage of convertor’s :
[1]
Electrical output power of motor’s:
[2]
Output convertor current’s:
[3]
The laboratory model was developed using the values of calculated currents, and the fuse
dimensioning was done with the specific formulas using the same current values. For additional
protection, a thermal relay has been added to protect motor in short-circuit regime.
3. Experimental Results
To simulate energy consumption, an experimental study was conducted on the motor. The
motor was coupled through an elastic coupling to an electromagnetic brake by which the currents,
the voltage and the speed for various electromagnetic torque values were analysed.
3.1 Experimental layout
The main purpose of the experimental model was the concept of speed control of a three-phase
induction motor with energy saving. To do this, a frequency converter is used to control the speed of a
three-phase induction motor with load attached to the motor. It certainly leads to the best performance
and high efficiency of the induction motor. As a result, the implementation of frequency converters
helps to save a large amount of energy by reducing large amounts of current absorbed by the motor at
start-up. An experimental configuration is designed by analysing the operation of the asynchronous
motor without the converter and an experimental configuration designed using the frequency converter
and the results are displayed to demonstrate the concept of energy saving. In the practical application,
various functions of the frequency converter are tested, such as:
• Motor operation at different frequencies;
• Scalar control Pulse Width Modulation (PWM);
• Direct Torque Control (DTC).
These results are obtained using the frequency converter connected to the motor.
The experimental results are shown in the following charts, for which a brake torque of 1.5, 1
and 0.5 Nm was established.
3.2 Experimental results for 1,5 Nm torque

Figure 4 shows that the voltage drops as the
frequency increases. According to the
asynchronous motor characteristics, the current
absorbed by the motor from the converter is
high at the beginning. It is noticed that
afterwards the current drops below nominal
consumption. The rated current consumption of
the motor is 50 Hz and 60 Hz.
It can be noticed that by using these variable
frequency drivers a large scale of motor speeds
can be developed. From motor data it is known
that the nominal speed is 1400 rpm. Figure shows
that using this control system a frequency of 60 Hz
can be used, the motor runs at 1700 rpm. Figure 3. Experimental layout
Figure 4. Voltage, current and

shaft speed with motor’s torque
1,5 Nm
3.3 Experimental results for 1 Nm torque
Figure 5. Voltage, current and shaft speed with motor’s torque 1Nm
Figure 5 shows that with the decrease of the breaking torque the voltage differences are higher.
From the results obtained in figure it is observed that the motor absorbed current is lower if the
motor load is lower.
3.4 Experimental results for 0,5 Nm torque
Figure 6. Voltage, current and shaft speed with motor’s torque 0,5 Nm
Figure 6 shows that with the decrease of the braking torque the voltage increases. At the
maximum value of 60 Hz the voltage is the lowest. It is shown that the current absorbed by the
motor varies depending on the load the motor has. Figure shows that the speed increases at the
same speed of 5 in 50 Hz and is influenced by the load of the motor.
3.5
3
Current [A]
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
1.5 Nm 1.5 Nm 1Nm 1Nm 0.5Nm 0.5Nm
Torque [Nm]
Motor suplied by electric network Motor suplied by frequency convertor
Figure 7. Comparison of currents absorbed by the motor
Figure 7 shows the value of the phase current absorbed by the motor supplied to a 400 V and a
50 Hz frequency, and the yellow phase is the value of the phase current of the motor supplied at
the frequency converter with the 230 V supply voltage and operating at a frequency of 50 Hz. In
both cases, these currents were analysed using a brake torque of 1.5, 1 and 0.5 Nm.
This graph shows a decrease in the motor current consumption with the frequency converter
method. Motor efficiency is the input power in relation to output power.
Assuming an efficiency of 80%, the input power = 1.5kW / (80/100) = 1.87 kW

Unit consumed = Power in kW multiplied by the number of hours of operation = 1.87 x 8 =
14.96 kW
Therefore, motor power in 8 hours will be 14.96kW, if the motor efficiency is 80% and the
motor is fully charged.
For the experimental results, the energy consumption for motor operation was calculated for
8760 hours per year, ie 24 hours a day. From the resulting calculations, the motor will consume
12.89 MWh without the frequency converter.
The motor will consume 5.87 MWh with the frequency converter. The energy saved in one year
is 7.02 MWh.
The cost savings with the frequency converter represents around 1000 euro. So, the cost of the
converter will be depreciated over a period of about half a year and the rest of the cost for the
saved energy will be profitable.
Discussions
 Power factor
The experimental results have shown that the power factor of the motor driven by the inverter
varies depending on the load imposed on the motor. It can range from 0.3 motor to light load up to
0.9 for a large motor at high load. The converter will effectively isolate the motor from the power
supply, thus providing a power factor close to the neutral value of 0.9.
 Torque control
The frequency converter provides the possibility of a torque open loop control for various
applications where a high torque is needed at low speeds, for example: cranes, lifts, mixers,
conveyors, etc.
For the experimental model we varied the torque value by modifying the parameter that gives us
this option.
Conclusions
The learning method it is useful for the students, based on experimental results proving that this
method is efficient and can reduce costs and energy consumption.
It is demonstrated that this mode of operation of the motor is very efficient and the investment
can be recovered in short time.
In all operating conditions, the frequency converter monitors the speed and load imposed on the
motor. A model of these conditions is constantly updated and checked against the limits set by the
rated characteristics of the motor. If these limits are exceeded, the motor is overloaded. If this
overload is not removed, the inverter decides to stop the unit to protect the motor. If this motor
model does not offer the desired protection level, the variation can directly measure the motor’s
temperature by the internal thermistors.
References
Lena Neija, Eva Heiskanenb, Lars Strupeit, The deployment of new energy technologies and the need for local
learning, Energy Policy ,Volume 101, February 2017, Pages 274-283
Panasetsky D., Osak A., Sidorov D., Yong Li,’Simplified variable frequency induction-motor drive model for
power system stability studies and control, IFAC-PapersOnLine, Volume 49, Issue 27, 2016, Pages
451-454
Horia Gavrila, Electrical Machines with Increased Efficiency, by Using Advanced Technical Solutions Based
on the Predetermination of the Magnetic Properties of Sheets, http://cnci.ancs.ro/downloads/03B.pdf.
accesed 2018
Variable frequency drives, Energy Efficiency Reference Guide. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.
gc.ca/files/energy/pdf/energystar/variable-frequency-drives-eng.pdf , accesed 2018
Section
SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS
Software Solutions (SOFT):

 Software and management for education
 Virtual Reality Applications in Web-based Education
 Computer Graphics, Web, VR/AR and mixed-based
applications for education & training, business,
medicine, industry and other sciences
 Software Computing in Virtual Reality and Artificial
Intelligence
 Avatars and Intelligent Agents
E-environment platform for learning the management
of the protected areas
Radu Rădescu1, Alexandru-Cristian Trifan1
(1) University Politehnica of Bucharest, Applied Electronics and Inform. Eng. Dept.,
313, Splaiul Independenţei, Sector 6, RO-060042, ROMANIA
E-mail: radu.radescu[at]upb.ro, trifan.alex.criss[at]gmail.com
Abstract
E-environment is a platform that offers the potential to bring together data about
protected areas around the world to form a unified management system. The e-environment
platform can provide or receive rapid information through the use of information technology,
which can lead to improved citizens' awareness, real-time data updates, increased
involvement of individuals, organizations and governments in saving and preserving
protected areas. Interactions between people and organizations connected to information
platforms could increase the degree of interest and the way citizens see the protected areas in
their neighborhood. The e-environment platform aims to visualize, add and describe
protected areas as well as monuments, cultural areas or risk areas simply by connecting from
a computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Keywords: Environment Systems, Web Application Design, Software Tools, Advanced

Web Technologies, Online Management, Virtual Learning Platform
1 Introduction
Currently, e-environment applications helps users to identify the points of interest that allow
them to observe and take pictures then automatically loaded into a common database conservation
classification and analysis. Such applications improve visitor experience and can make a useful
contribution to the data available to environmentalists. There are cloud-based community
collaboration platforms that allow participants who are subscribed (at no cost) to set up or join
groups, participate in discussions, share ideas, ask questions, provide or search for documents,
videos and pictures of best practice experience “(Rădescu, 2011)”.
The e-environment platforms are available via the Internet, with access possible regardless of
the area. These platforms are easy to configure, and the required software is inexpensive “(What is
eLearning?, 2018)”. However, e-environment platforms require management and an animated
interface to provide the user with an attractive and interactive learning experience “(Rădescu,
2017)”.
E-environment platforms offer major enhancements compared to conventional information
options: mass media, posters or maps.
As for advantages, an e-environment platform:
• has global coverage. The online platform can bring together information about all areas of
interest around the world. There is no need for travel or dedicated material to view any
area around the globe “(Rădescu and Manolache, 2014)”.
• includes all devices. The online platform can be accessed on both desktop and mobile or
portable devices, such as smart phones and tablets, making it easier for users who need it
to access information from an e-environment system, any time.
• allows real-time update. The online platform can be updated at any time with new points
of interest, images or information. Users can instantly find information about the newest
areas “(Rădescu and Tudor, 2014)”.
• increases engagement. With the simplification of access to environmental information,
people and organizations can notify governments about certain areas that need to be saved
or preserved. E-environment provides the opportunity to follow the steps and to detect
possible deviations “(Rădescu and Ismail, 2014)”.
• integrates the facilities of the smart city concept “(Pulsosocial, 2018)”. A smart city is
best described as a city that takes advantage of information and communication
technology, aiming at creating infrastructures and services to ensure sustainable
development, improving the quality of citizens' lives, increased resource efficiency,
proper dissemination of information and active participation of citizens “(Rădescu and
Olaru, 2015)”.
As the world becomes more connected and globalized, more and more people have access to
the Internet and to devices based on advanced technology. By providing the public with
opportunities to interact with the environment through these devices, they can use them to improve
methods and actions for environmental conservation.
In the world, many projects have been implemented following the concept of smart city, which
has been providing services to citizens for some time (see Figure 1). The current objective is to
increase the number of protected areas, to make them known and, with the direct involvement of
citizens, to discover and mark new areas.
Figure 1. The modeling of electronic platforms for e-environment applications
2 Technologies used to develop the e-environment platform

2.1 AngularJS
AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open source web application platform “(AngularJS, 2018)”,
mainly maintained by Google and a community of individuals and corporations, to address many
of the challenges in developing one-page applications.
The JavaScript components are complemented by Apache Cordova, a platform used to develop
multi-platform mobile applications. Its goal is to simplify both the development and testing of
such applications, providing a framework for Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Model-View-
View-Model (MVVM) architectures along with components commonly used in applications for
the internet.
The AngularJS platform works by reading the HTML page, which has built-in additional label
attributes. Angular interprets these attributes as directives to link the input or output parts of a
model page that is represented by the standard JavaScript variables. The values of these JavaScript
variables can be set manually within the code or are taken from static or dynamic JSON resources.
2.2 Spring Framework

Spring Framework is an open source platform application and a reversal of the control
container for the Java platform “(Spring Framework, 2018)”. The main features of the platform are
that they can be used in any Java application, but there are also extensions for building web
applications on the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) platform.
Although the platform does not require a specific programming model, it has become popular
in the Java community as an alternative to replacing or even adding to the JavaBeans Enterprise
(JBE) model. Spring Boot is the "conventional-over-configuration" solution for creating platform-
based applications that can be run. Most applications require a simple platform configuration.
2.3 PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a relational database management system (SGBD-R), available free of charge
under a BSD open source license that builds on a globally distributed community as well as
several developers “(PostgreSQL, 2018)”.
As a database server, its main functions are to store data safely and to return this data in
response to requests from other software applications. It can handle workloads from small
applications with one machine to large applications (or data storage) with many simultaneous
users. On the MacOS server, PostgreSQL is the default database. It is also available for Microsoft
Windows and Linux (provided in most distributions).
PostgreSQL allows the use of procedural languages to execute code blocks directly in the
database server. It can be used to create user-defined functions (subroutines, triggers, aggregates
and window functions) or to create ad-hoc DO blocks.
PostgreSQL's standard installation allows the use of the following languages: PL/pgSQL
(a PL/SQL language equivalent to Oracle), PL/Tcl, PL/Perl and PL/Python. Other languages
available outside of the basic package include: PL/Java, PL/PHP and PL/Ruby.
3 Functions and design of the e-environment platform

3.1 Creating a user account
To create a new user, go to the Login menu on the right of the app window. The connection is
made by simply pressing the Login with Facebook button. An account with the credentials used to
connect to Facebook is automatically created, as in Figure 2.
3.2 Signing in with a user account

To sign in, you need to fill in the previously
created username or email and password fields
(using credentials from your Facebook
account).
If the values you enter for username or
password do not match, you will see an error
message (see Figure 3) that will specify this:
Username and password do not match!
Figure 2. The model of a business process
3.3 Adding POIs (Points of Interest)

The platform allows adding areas or points of
interest (POIs). These may be protected areas,
monuments, cultural sites, natural reservations, etc. To
add an area of interest, go to the POI menu and click
the map. The map is interactive and will be
permanently updated depending on the user's position
(this feature requires connection to the GPS system).
A form similar to Figure 4 will appear as a follow-
up to this action. To do this, connect to the platform.
Figure 3. Platform login menu
Figure 4. The form for adding a Point of Interest (POI)
The fields of the form will be completed according to Table 1.

Table 1. The fields of the Add POI form

Field Description
POI Title A descriptive name for the POI created
POI Description A brief description of the POI created
The POI coordinates are created.
By default, the field is automatically populated with user's
Coordinates
position. If one wants to add a new POI to another address, the
user can manually enter the new coordinates.
One can choose one of the following categories:
Select
A – high-risk area
Category
B – medium risk area
Type
C – normal risk area
POI General Description A general description of the POI created
Upload Files One can insert images for the POI created
3.4 Viewing POIs and their type

The e-environment platform allows viewing of areas of interest, even if the user is not logged
in. In the POI menu, users are informed in real-time about the points of interest in his vicinity, also
displaying their address. On the right, information about the type of risk areas is displayed, but
also the number of areas in each category, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Viewing Points of Interest (POIs)
3.5 Selecting POIs

By selecting an area of interest, a dedicated page will open with information about the selected
area, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The page of a Point of Interest (POI)
On this page, the user can view the general description of the POI, view images with it, or add
new ones. Another feature available to users is to invite a friend to the address: Invite friends to
location.
One can also create and initiate an online petition by selecting the Make a petition button as
shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Example of an online petition for a POI
To do so, a message will be posted on the user's Facebook page with a message from the
device and the POI name) covered by the petition.
If POI is changed or POI access is restricted, the user could delete that POI by selecting the red
POI Delete button if this function is implemented.
Conclusions
Currently, e-environment applications help users identify the points of interest they see and
allow them to take pictures, which are then automatically uploaded to a common conservation
database for classification and analysis. Such applications improve visitor experience and can
make a useful contribution to the data available to environmentalists.
There are Cloud-based community collaboration platforms that allow participants who are
subscribed (at no cost) to set up groups or join groups, participate in discussions, share ideas, ask
questions, provide or search for documents, videos and images related to the best practice
experience in the field. The e-environment platform is available through the Internet, with access
possible regardless of the area. These platforms are easy to set up and the software is cheap to buy.
However, platforms require management and an animated interface to be successful.
Community involvement and benefits can be the key to a good relationship with the
environment, which allows it to operate in relative stability. Without this interaction of
cooperation, the environment – and all its delicate systems – could be subject to vandalism,
poaching, and even personal conflict.
That is why the e-environment platform proposed in this paper is very useful in different types
of e-learning systems that address students, academics, researchers, specialists, but also civil
society or local communities involved in environmental support and activism.
References
Rădescu, R. (2011): The Easy-Learning Platform: Concept and Solution – An Educational Online System.
Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany-USA.
Rădescu, R. (2017): E-activities Management – Practical Works, Second Edition. Politehnica Press,
Bucharest.
Rădescu, R. and Manolache, M. (2014): Designing an Application of QR Recognition Techniques on
Android Platform. In Proceedings of The 9th International Conference on Virtual Learning (ICVL-2014),
October 24-25, 2014, University of Bucharest, University of Bucharest Press, 363-368.
Rădescu, R. and Tudor, C. (2014): Optimizing a GIS Map for an Archeological Management Web
Application. In Proceedings of The 9th International Conference on Virtual Learning (ICVL-2014),
October 24-25, 2014, University of Bucharest, University of Bucharest Press, 355-362.
Rădescu, R. and Ismail, B. (2014): Metodologia de concepere şi realizare a unei aplicaţii web dinamice
pentru un sistem de gestiune arheologică (Romanian). In Proceedings of Conferinţa Naţională de
Învăţământ Virtual “Virtual Learning – Virtual Reality”, Tehnologii moderne în educaţie şi cercetare
(CNIV-2014), 12th Edition, University of Bucharest, October 24-25, 2014, University of Bucharest Press,
62-69.
Rădescu, R. and Olaru, Şt. (2015): A Complex iOS Mobile Learning Platform for an Archaeological and
Architectural Management System of a Cultural Heritage Site. In Proceedings of the 10th International
Conference on Virtual Learning (ICVL-2015), October 31st, 2015, West University of Timişoara,
University of Bucharest Press, 234-239.
What is eLearning? (2018): https://community.articulate.com/series/getting-started/articles/what-is-e-
learning, accessed 2018
Pulsosocial (2018): http://pulsosocial.com/2016/02/05/internet-de-las-cosas-esta-cambiando-como-operan-
empresas-de-medios-y-comunicacion/, accessed 2018
AngularJS (2018): https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/introduction, accessed 2018
Spring Framework (2018): https://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/, accessed 2018
PostgreSQL (2018): https://www.postgresql.org/, accessed 2018
E-learning application for studying
video conversion and video editing
Radu Rădescu1, Mihail-Cristian Stancana1
(1) University Politehnica of Bucharest, Applied Electronics and Inform. Eng. Dept.,
313, Splaiul Independenţei, Sector 6, RO-060042, ROMANIA
E-mail: radu.radescu[at]upb.ro, cristi.stancana[at]gmail.com
Abstract
The original contribution of this work consists in designing and implementing a video
conversion application for different video formats with basic editing functions for multimedia
e-learning platforms. The programming language chosen is C++, the user interface is
implemented in QT, the video compression support and editing options are provided by the
FFmpeg open source multimedia library. The entire platform uses the open source concept
and as a result the application code is posted on GitHub to allow users interested in the
subject to contribute through personal enhancements. The application is cross-platform and
is therefore compatible with several operating systems, including Windows XP, 7, Vista, 8, 10.
Keywords: Multimedia Application Design, Software Tools, Advanced Web Technologies,

Online Management, Virtual Learning Platform, Video Processing
1 Introduction in video processing

Video is an electronic medium for recording, copying, playing, storing and displaying moving
images. In the simplest view, video images represent a very fast sequence of classical images
(frames, photograms) spatially correlated with an audio recording added. Basically, video can be
divided into two distinct categories: analogue video (classic video recording) from analog capture
environments, and digital video, coming from various modern video recording environments. This
paper focuses more on modern (digital) capture, processing and video playback techniques.
“(Video Signal, 2018)”
The general features of video images include: display resolution (digital image implies a
number of pixels, e.g.: 19201080, 25602048, etc.), frame rate or number of frames per second
(24, 25, 29.97 fps), method of exploring/scanning (interleaved or progressive).
Video editing is the manipulation and arranging of video frames. Video editing is used to
structure and present all video information, including movies and TV shows, ads, and video
graphics. “(Video Edit, 2018)” The technique used today in video editing of movies of all kinds
and in post-production TV is NLE (Non-Linear Editing), a digital technique that involves
accessing any frame of a digital video material with the same ease.
A video encoding format (or video compression format) is a content representation format for
storing or transmitting digital video content (such as a data file or bit stream).
Video compression is made taking into account several factors: quality, hardware space, cost of
hardware blocks used for decompression, codecs, so most of the video is compressed using lossy
algorithms. “(Video Compression, 2018)”
Lossy compression provides decompression data different from the original but good enough to
be used. It is used for multimedia materials for almost all domains, such as video-telephony, media
streaming, etc. “(Rădescu, 2013)”
The most important video compression techniques are: inter-frame and intra-frame. Inter-frame
compression performs the compression of the current frame by comparing it to previous or future
frames in the idea that these frames contain to a great extent the same information, which can be
copied from one frame to another. It is applied to the next video to be watched. Intra-frame
compression directly compresses the frame, comparing it to image compression. It is applied to
video that will be edited after compression. “(Video Edit, 2018)”
Most of today's compression methods use Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), but this is not the
only one, Fractal Compression or Discrete Wave Transform (DWT) being also used. In terms of
compression standards, the most important are: H.120, H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4.
“(H.264/MPEG-4, 2018)”
2 The FFmpeg multimedia library

FFmpeg (Fast Forward MPEG) is a free software project that produces libraries and programs
for manipulating multimedia data.
FFmpeg includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects,
libavformat (Lavf), a MUX and DEMUX audio/video connector, and the ffmpeg command line
program for transcoding multimedia files. “(Codecs, 2018)”
The FFmpeg library is published under GNU Lesser Public 2.1+ or GNU General Public
License 2+ (depending on the options enabled). “(FFmpeg, 2018)”
3 Describing the application and its functions

The multimedia editing and video compression application was developed using the C++
programming language, the user interface was made using QT “(QT, 2018)”, and the application's
functionality was implemented using the FFmpeg library. “(FFmpeg, 2018)”
The intent was for the application to run cross-platform, so the resulting software is compatible
with several versions of operating systems, including Windows XP, 7, Vista, 8, and 10. The
application is presented below from the user and the programmer perspectives, specifying how the
application was designer and can be used.
But before this, the setup part needed to make the application work properly will be presented.
“(Video Editing Software, 2018)”
3.1 Prerequisites and application setup

The first step for the conversion application to work is to unzip the ffmpeg.7z file and save it to
a disk folder, and then add the ffmpeg.exe executable file to the Path Variable in Windows.
“(FFmpeg, 2018)”
The file structure of the project can be traced to the image in Figure 1, taken from GitHub.
“(GitHub, 2018)”
Figure 1. The structure of the project

To do this, right click on My Computer, select Advanced Variable in the Advanced tab, and
ffmpeg must be added to Path, after which one must create a new environment variable called
ffmpeg and referring to the executable file. The initial configuration steps of the application are
shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Configuration of ffmpeg
Once this initial setup has been done, a codec, such as K-Lite, must be installed for the
application to work. This is necessary for the application to be able to perform video compression
in as many formats as possible. At this point, the entire initial setup is ready, and the application
can be used without any problems. The application launches from the executable file in the Bin
directory, the file name being videogui.exe.
3.2 Using the application and its menu

Below are all the options the app offers. The user interface of the application is represented by
the main screen, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. The application front-end

In addition to conversion and editing features, the app also

offers the features of a regular video player, such as VLC. First
of all, one needs to upload a video file in the application, using
the OPEN button in the left menu, as shown in Figure 4.
To play a video file and watch it on the main screen of the
app, one must press the PLAY button. Anytime the video can
STOP or PAUSE. The app also has a progress bar slider that
allows browsing the video as it wishes for the user.
The second important block of options is the conversion
menu, where the actual conversion operation is performed. The Figure 4. The player menu
user has the possibility to configure the format in which the
video clip and the codec used for that purpose are intended to be covered by using short selection
menus.
Converting is done by pressing the CONVERT button, after pressing it opens a new window in
the command line, where conversion of the video file starts. When the video conversion is
complete, this window closes, and the downloaded file is saved (in the same folder where the
video clip was uploaded) as videoname_converted.format, where format represents the extension
of the new format of the resulting file after conversion. For the app to work properly there must be
no spaces in the directory name.
In the conversion window one can see the values of the video conversion process features
(conversion type, codec) and parameters: frame rate (fps), bitrate (bps), speed (ms), as shown in
Figure 5.
Figure 5. The details of the video conversion process

The next option that the user interface exposes is an editing function, namely the CROP
function. This option gives the user the opportunity to enter two moments between the crop
operation can be applied on the video clip. In the text editing field, the format must be followed.
To find out the details of the format in which the data must be entered, the user can press the
HELP button for this section (?).
Once the user has entered the data, the CROP button has to be pressed and, as with the
conversion operation, a window opened simultaneously processes the video and saves it when the
operation ends as filename_cutted.extension. To observe the duration of the video and the time
spent with the conversion operation, the user can watch the right part of the screen where this
information is real-time displayed (in ms), as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The details of crop operation Figure 7. Conversion statistics
The last interface that the application presents to the user is conversion statistics, which gives
the user the ability to find out the compression rate obtained from one format to another, as shown
in Figure 7.
When first uploading a video, in the top right, the video size (in bytes) is displayed. Once the
conversion is done, one can press the GET CONVERTED FILE SIZE button, resulting in
displaying the size of the converted file. Pressing the COMPRESSION RATE button, the
conversion rate is displayed, calculated using the formula:
[1] Compression Rate = Converted File Size / Original File Size
This function can be used to produce statistics in order to observe the differences between
conversion operations in different formats and with different codecs. If no files have been
converted, a pop-up menu appears indicating this.
3.3 Details of the software implementation

An IDE called QT Creator ver. 4.0.3 has been used to develop the application, compatible with
all Windows versions “(QT, 2018)”. The compiler used is MINGW32, and the programming
language for implementation is C++. “(Video Editing Software, 2018)”
The project structure can be seen in Figure 8, the project being made up of “Makefile” (in the
videogui.pro file links for all libraries in the app are created), source files, headers and user
interface (mainwindow.ui), which allows for the design of the application. Then the associated
code is generated. To ease software development, this file is supported by an XML, parsed by the
QT generator to produce the source files to be implemented.
Figure 8. The software project structure
QT specific libraries such as QmediaPlayer, QvideoWidget, Qslider, etc. have been used to
work with video and audio. The app has behind the signal & slots mechanism specific to QT: a
signal is emitted by an action, and on the other hand there is a handler that captures this signal and
performs actions on its basis. Each interaction between the user and the app has this mechanism
behind, e.g., when the user presses the PLAY button, a signal is emitted and a function is activated
to make sure the video is on. “(Video Compression, 2018)”
For the part of the application that interacts with ffmpeg, when the user selects an option, the
code parses these options and creates a string stream that is a system command. This command
calls the ffmpeg executable file to perform this action on multiple threads in order to prevent
blocking the application's operation.
For example, when the user wants to use the CROP option, what happens in the back is
launching a command, which is interpreted as a system call parameter to the system executable for
ffmpeg. “(FFmpeg, 2018)”
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:30.0 -i input.wmv -c copy -t 00:00:10.0 output.wmv
Conclusions
As a result of running the application, it is clear that codecs and video formats are quite simple.
Each codec and media format is useful for the purpose it was created. In terms of coding general
purpose materials, things are pretty much the same.
The market for codecs for lossy compression is very large, with each codec offering various
advantages and disadvantages. The FFmpeg codec delivers highly compressed video (it takes up
very little physical storage space) but with a fairly low quality, unlike the Dirac or DivX codecs
that offer compressed material of relatively good quality but with physical space occupied
something bigger.
Analysis of compression ratio and time for various video formats as well as intuitive video
editing options using interactive GUI are the main feature of this e-learning app.
The e-learning multimedia application interface is simple to use, with clear and explicit menus,
intuitive and strategically placed buttons.
The editing and video conversion application proposed in this paper is used in the set of
practical works of the Multimedia Equipment and Technology subject, studied at the Master of
Science in Information and Computer Systems Engineering, Faculty of Electronics,
Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University Politehnica of Bucharest. The

application is integrated into the Easy-Learning online learning platform, an original product
developed within the E-learning & E-activities research team in the Applied Electronics and
Information Engineering Department. “(Rădescu and Preda, 2018)”
Because the entire project uses the open source concept, the application code was uploaded to
GitHub, in the event that users want to bring their own contribution to this project and add
improvements. The project repository is available at: “(GitHub, 2018)”.
As far as future implementations are concerned, the application's functionality can be extended
to encode in more formats and to make a broader and deeper analysis applied to a large set of
video clips. The purpose of this enhancement is to provide the ability to track all specific
parameters to decide which codec is best and in what formats it is best to code, both in terms of
quality and cost of the disk space.
References
Codecs (2018): https://www.mainconcept.com/, accessed 2018
FFmpeg (2018): https://www.ffmpeg.org/about.html, accessed 2018
QT (2018): https://www.qt.io/, accessed 2018
Video Compression (2018): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/multimedia/ video-compression-
manager-reference, accessed 2018
H.264/MPEG-4 (2018): http://iphome.hhi.de/wiegand/assets/pdfs/h264-AVC-Standard.pdf, accessed 2018
Video Editing Software (2018): https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397215,00.asp, accessed 2018
Video Edit (2018): https://www.lifewire.com/best-free-video-editing-software-programs-4128924, accessed
2018
Video Signal (2018): http://www-i4.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/content/teaching/lectures/sub/mms mmsSS05/
04_Video.pdf, accessed 2018
GitHub (2018): https://github.com/crististancana/videoconvertor, accessed 2018
Books:
Rădescu, R. (2013): Multimedia Equipment and Technologies – Practical Works, Second Edition. Politehnica
Press, Bucharest.
Rădescu, R and Preda, B.A. (2018): Multimedia Application Designed to Create E-learning Content for Video
Compression and Editing. In Proceedings of the 14th International Scientific Conference eLearning and
Software for Education (eLSE-2018), April 19-20, 2018, Bucharest, Romania, 465-473.
Experimental Elearning Application for
Distributed Data Mining Systems
Pupezescu Valentin1, Dragomir Marilena-Cătălina2
(1) Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology Faculty, Polytechnic

University of Bucharest,Bd. Iuliu Maniu, Bucharest, ROMANIA
E-mail: vpupezescu[at]yahoo.com
(2) Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology Faculty, Polytechnic
University of Bucharest, Bd. Iuliu Maniu, Bucharest, ROMANIA
E-mail: catalina.dragomir[at]protonmail.com
Abstract
The development of machine learning algorithms, computing and communication in
recent years is producing a world that depends on information. Nowadays, most of the
information is stored as raw data in real distributed database management systems. Although
many scientific discoveries were made in research fields such as Distributed Databases, Data
Preparation, Machine Learning, Distributed Data Mining and Elearning, there is a lack of
experimental applications that facilitates the deepen of knowledge in all these research fields
blended together. This paper presents an experimental Elearning application that allows
students to assimilate knowledge through experiments from the aforementioned research
domains. The application has a module that imports, prepares and transforms data in order
to be processed by the data mining task. The data is stored in the MySql database
management system in a distributed manner, achieved through the replication process in a
master-slave topology. Students can set the replication type: Statement, Row or Mixed Based
Replication. The Data Mining task (classification) is achieved in a distributed manner using
Distributed Committee Machines with a modified version of a multilayer perceptron proposed
in our previous research (autoresetting multilayer perceptron). The users can choose from
three standard data sets: iris1, wine1 and conc1. Through the web interface, the users from
the master system will send the configuration parameters for the neural network and the
addresses of the distributed slave systems. In the application the students can visualize the
classification results derived from the distributed experiments and choose the highest-scoring
classifier.
Keywords: Elearning, Distributed Data Mining, Distributed Database Management

Systems, Machine Learning
1 Introduction
Data Mining(DM) algorithms have become very popular nowadays because of their potential
to extract useful knowledge from large datasets. With the increasing of information availability
that is stored in database management systems (DBMS) came the necesity to obtain useful
information from distributed database management systems (DDBMS). Most studies that were
done in this research field did not take into account the implementation aspects of real DBMS.
Another problem is the fact that students and many researchers do not have at their disposal
elearning applications or tools that integrates real implementations of distributed databases and
machine learning algorhitms.
In this paper we proposed an experimental elearning application that allows its users to learn
and work with a classical neural network in a distributed manner using Distributed Committe
Machines (DCM) on a real distributed database management system. The proposed application is
called “Experimental DCM” and its current implementation is at version 1.0.
2 Application Architecture
The figure presented bellow (Figure 1) is a representation of the backend functionalities and
the backbone architecture of the proposed elearning application. This architecture was also used in
our previous works(Pupezescu V., 2015) but in this paper we integrate it in an elearning
application.
In this application we used the MySql database management system installed on multiple
computing systems. All MySql servers are arranged in a distributed manner in a master-slave
topology (Schwartz, B., et al, 2008). All the database operations are made on the master system
and propagated on the slave systems through the replication process (Schwartz, B., et al, 2008).
The developed application allows an experimental study of the interaction between the data
mining classification task and distributed databases. From our past research (Pupezescu V., 2015)
we reached the conclusion that the most suited structures for mining distributed data are the
distributed committee machines.
Figure 1 . The implementation of DCM Figure 2. Distributed Committee Machine

architecture (Pupezescu, V., Rădescu, R., 2016) (Pupezescu, V., Rădescu, R., 2016)
The DCM architecture (Figure 2) contain more than one neural structure that work in a
distributed manner in order to achieve better classification results (Tahir, M.A., 2007). In our case
we worked with a classical multilayer perceptron (MLP) that has a modification in the
backpropagation training algorithm: after a certain number of training and testing epochs, the MLP
resets by itself if it remains blocked on a local minima - Auto Resetting Multilayer Perceptron
(AMLP) (Pupezescu, V., 2017).
The developed elearning application work with a “winner takes all” policy applied to the
distributed neural networks.
On the slave systems we will have distributed AMLP structures that will run autonomous.
After the last system finishes its classification task, the user from the master system will use the
combiner module in order to extract the results from all distributed systems.
As we observe in Figure 1, we will have replicated all the training and testing data sets (TR
stands for training, TS stands for testing). The combiner extracts the classification results (Y1,...,
YN) and offers an overview for the user in order to interpret them.
3 Data Preparation Module
The problems that can be analyzed by the students/users with the Experimental DCM
application are iris1, wine1 and conc1 data sets (http://mlr.cs.umass.edu/ml/datasets/Iris,
http://mlr.cs.umass.edu /ml/ datasets/Wine).
For each data set we developed a Java module in the application that makes it easier for the
users to import data sets that are stored in csv files - they can export for instance data sets that are
stored in Matlab in a simple cvs file and import them in the MySql DBMS. This is one of the
problems that is very annoying for regular users. This happens because there is not a standard for
storing data sets yet in the industry. The data sets are arranged and stored in the DBMS in the
following format:
Table 1. iris1, wine1 and conc1 data sets (Pupezescu, V., 2016)
iris1 trr tsr trs tss
Lines 100 50 100 50
Columns 3 3 4 4
wine1 trr tsr trs tss
Lines 90 88 90 88
Columns 3 3 13 13
conc1 trr tsr trs tss
Lines 200 100 200 100
Columns 1 1 2 2
4 Experimental Distributed Committee Machine v1.0
The application was made entirely in the Java programming language. The implementations of
the neural networks are completely original - we did not use any neural network library in order to
achieve the DM classification task.
The neural networks are developed in the following manner: we had a class for the neuron
model (we use the classical neuron model).
After that we constructed a new class Layer that contains among its private members an array
of neurons. The final structure(MLP) contains a given number of layers: input layer, hidden layers
and the output layer. The modified version of the backpropagation (AMLP) is implemented in a
separate class.
In order to be able to start the elearning application, the students must first have installed the
eclipse platform on their system. Secondly, they must import the training and testing data sets into
their MySql servers. Thirdly, they must configure the replication on the entire distributed system
and start on each slave system the client servers (these were developed using TCP sockets in Java).
Lastly, the user from the master server(combiner) can run the index.jsp page in order to start the
entire distributed data mining task.
All the web pages were developed using Java Server Pages technology.
The frontend of the web app has a responsive design, developed using Bootstrap 4, a powerful
HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework which offers a large set of components that streamline the
process of creating mobile first designs.
The web app consists of 6 pages, which follow the same general structure: the header section
contains the name of the app which links back to the homepage, a left menu with 2 sections:
Execution architecture which allows the students to select the execution architecture they want to
experiment with as well as an easy way to access the documentation regarding the MLP and how
to configure the replication process and a section that contains the main content of the page(Figure 4).
Their layout is built using the flex box grid from Bootstrap 4 and predefined CSS classes to
customize the font-size, spacing, table, form and menu styling.
In the index.jsp (Figure 4) the students can choose the mode in which they want to run the
experiment: in the “Executie distribuita” mode (Distributed execution), users can start the
distributed experiment. After the experiment finishes, if one wishes, the entire experiment can be
reconstructed in a sequential manner in the “Reconstructie secventiala” mode (Sequential
reconstruction). The application offers another two modes that allow the reconstruction of an
experiment with a optimum DCM architecture that was proposed in our previous works
(Pupezescu, V., 2017).
If we enter in the distributed run mode the user will be able to set the configuration parameters
for the neural structure (Figures 4 and 5). Every optimum neural structure(from all the slave
systems) will be stored in database as BLOB objects.
Users can also configure the type of replication for the experiment: Statement Based
Replication, Row Based Replication or Mixed Based Replication.
Figure 3. The index.jsp page
Figure 4. The start.jsp page and the setup parameters for the AMLP structures
Figure 5. The distributed run of the DCM
After setting the configuration parameters for all the neural networks the user from the master
system must wait until the distributed runs finish their tasks. After this step, the user must set the
name of the csv file that will store the experimental findings for future interpretations.
Figure 6. The final results (misclassification rates and execution performance) for the DCM
Figure 7 shows the reconstruction module that was developed. In case that some experiments
must be re-run with the same neural structures from past executions, we have the possibility to
choose the experiments we are interested in.
Figure 7. The reconstruction module for the DCM architecture
Conclusions
In this paper we proposed an experimental elearning application for the students that are
interested in researching real implementations and interactions between distributed neural
architectures and a commercial DBMS (for this version we used MySql). This approach is unique
in the elearning field because the students are allowed to directly experiment and interpret data
mining solutions that are closer to the profile industry. The application is implemented using
modern technologies that allow work from desktops or mobile devices.
In the near future the application will be further enhanced with a login module and with other
neural structures. One of our future goal is to implement in this application a General Committee
Machine that is able to analyze big data sets in a distributed manner with multiple types of neural
networks. This work is useful in research fields such as Elearning, Machine Learning, Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Distributed Databases.
References
Pupezescu, V., (2015), The Influence of Database Engines in Distributed Committee Machine Architectures,
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Virtual Learning (ICVL-2015) Timişoara, pp. 240-
246, October 31, ISSN 1844-8933, 2015.
Schwartz, B., Zaitsev, P., Tkachenko, V., Zawodny, J., Lentz, A., Balling, D. (2008), High Performance
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E-Learning Improvement Using Computer Vision
George Suciu1, Muneeb Anwar1, Cristian Vasilescu1,

Hussain Ijaz1
R&D department, Beia Consult International

Strada Peroni 12, București, Romania
E-mail: george[at]beia.ro, ijaz[at]beia.ro
Abstract
In general, the present innovation is directed to systems and methods for detecting the
position and shape of an object. The computer vision innovation comprises a system with a
camera attached to a Raspberry Pi, and it is configured to provide automatically object and
person analysis from a picture. In an e-Learning scenario, the present innovation may use
background subtraction for person identification and tracking, probabilistic approach with
expectation-maximization for detecting the object and decision tree classification for behavior
identification. Thus, we design a computer vision system which is capable of automatically
monitoring an image to identify various persons and the person's position within the image.
The innovation is particularly useful for detect and classifying student e-learning behavior
such as facial detection too. Furthermore, based on affective computing technology - facial
expression recognition and posture recognition, a new e-learning system model was
proposed. Moreover, a system model and technique mean of harmonious human-machine
affective interaction system is described. The analysis of the model showed that the e-learning
affective interaction system could solve the problems caused by emotion deficiency, pull the
long-distance education into an intelligent period, and can be developed quickly on a
virtualized infrastructure.
Keywords: Raspberry Pi, e-Learning, Face detection, Computer vision, Facial expression,
Person count.
1 Introduction
Nowadays, face recognition had a fast growing due to its accessible methods to enhance
computer applications for e-learning. According to the thirteenth annual report for online learning
in US Higher education, there were 5.8 million foreign students in the US in 2014, among which
2.97 million were taking part of their course load online.
Recent studies showed that one of the main problems of the e-learning system is the need to
evaluate the emotional state and maintain the motivation of the students in the virtual classrooms
(Suciu et al, 2017).
The purpose of this paper is to research computer vision and show a methodology to
implement a facial recognition system using Raspberry Pi for e-learning.
Classification of humans by using facial recognition is still an exciting task, due to the
appearances according to mood changes, head orientation and pose. Over the years, several face
detection algorithms have been generated. Some face recognition systems examine the geometric
features of facial images, such as place and measure within the nose, eyes, and mouth (Paul et al,
2001). Face detection is the entirety of the on-going research subjects in the domain of computer
vision. The task of face detection is simple for a human being, but it is very challenging for
computers. The difficulties allied with face detection are disparities in scale, pose, adjustment,
lighting situation, facial expression and many more.
Many strategies have been implemented, but each has its benefits and constraints. The paper
illustrates the face detection method (Loh et al, 2005). Models are taught from a set of face images
to perform detection. It presents high exposure accuracy associated with all other detection
systems. Machine learning algorithms are applied to train the detector depending on the analytical
assets and probability distribution function (Keun et al, 2007). Raspberry Pi is well qualified for
beginners to use, compared to other platforms, which are not suitable to be used as a standalone
processing system or are targeted to more advanced developers (Jun et al, 2013). Raspberry Pi in
association with most of the others Linux-based secured systems, such as Arduino Yún (Mohamed
et al, 2014), Beagle Bone Black (Nikisins et al, 2015) and Intel Galileo (Shah et al, 2016) shows
services like better cost/benefit ratio, broader user community, standard programming language
and communication, many input/output pins and graphics interface. The rest of the paper is
structured as follows: Section 2 presents related work for face recognition and detection, methods
and technologies are used in the past, Section 3 discusses technical description on Rasberry Pi and
the methods used to extract the significant results, Section 4 concludes the whole article.
2 Related Work
A vital body of being work concentrates on the performance of biometrics for user
authentication in IoT (Internet of things) situations. The friendliest to work performed in the paper
is the study in (Viola and Jones, 2001), where the writers play a similar system to ours using a
Raspberry Pi. The authors implement a weighted Local Binary Pattern (LBP) algorithm to derive
feature histograms and associate them using histogram junction. The system is constructed in the
C++ programming language and with OpenCV. The authors develop a multi-biometric system
using a Raspberry Pi. The authors use the AZURE cloud for cost reduction and prominent
computational performance. They also propose certain encryption techniques like RSA and
improved AES-256 for greater security.
Multiple algorithms have been used to detect a face in an image frame automatically, for
example a cascading object detector, but the Viola Jones algorithm is considered a popular method
for face detection (Viola and Jones, 2001). Faces can easily be cropped from an image frame with
the help of face detection algorithms. Facebook utilizes a deep-face system in which a 3D face
model is employed to implement a piecewise affine transformation (Taigman, 2014). A nine-layer
deep neural network has been used to derive a face. The system is exercised with the largest
labeled dataset of millions of faces belonging to thousands of individuals and a simple classifier
reaches with an accuracy of 97.35% (Varun, 2015).
A recent feature extraction method is used for face identification that works through Hough
transform peaks (Xie et al, 2009). These peaks are used for featuring extraction and binary particle
swarm optimization is used for collecting optimal features from the feature vector. The image is
then classified using the Euclidean classifier. The Euclidean distance of a new Eigen face between
the stored Eigen faces, and the smallest Euclidean distance between the new Eigen face and the
stored Eigen face is considered the matched face (Yaji, 2012). Learned Local Gabor Patterns is a
method used for face detection. This technique is utilized on Gabor features, that makes use of
intensity mapped masking to lower the intensity of the background of a face image. The edges are
improved using a Laplacian or Gaussian filter, while binary particle swarm optimization is used
for optimal characteristics selection and the Euclidean classifier is utilized for classification. A 2D
Laplacian face technology is considered for feature detection, which is accurate than one
dimensional Laplacian face, and K-nearest neighbor technique is used for classification purposes
(Çarıkçı and Özen, 2012)
3 Experimental Setup
Raspberry Pi face detection and recognition is a technology, which can enable teachers to
easily identify students’ different suspects locally in a seamless way. Raspberry Pi face detection
and recognition can be operated through the local system. The proposed system will help not only
teachers but also help them in keeping the track of their students but also the reviews from the
students. Through this setup the computational power, storage, and bandwidth cost of the system
without affecting the accuracy and performance. Though, due to the limited facilities provided by
Raspberry Pi in computational power and storage, the implementation of fully independent
Raspberry Pi based face detection and recognition is not feasible perfectly, but further work
identifies its usage. Face recognition and classification is a computationally expensive task and
hence cannot be performed on Pi without affecting the performance and accuracy.
3.1 Facial Expression

Facial expressions can be ‘emotional’, or ‘non-emotionally’. Emotional expressions are
similarly indicating to as prototypic expressions. In order to generate a face prototype, all original
facial images portraying the same emotional expressions must be equalized in terms of their
corresponding pixels. The building of the prototype is customized for each person's face to the
usual stencil of the corresponding emotion, and this was recognized by matching the individual
reference points to the standard ones and including all other pixels of the image.
Non-prototypic expressions are expressions that been described in terms of facial features or
muscles movements. Facial muscles movements, which cause the displacements or appearances of
facial features (can be both perpetual and ephemeral features) are coded based on predefined rules,
such as eyebrows or cheeks raised, eyelids lowered, lip corners pressed against teeth, present or
absent of wrinkles and furrows and so on (Loh et al, 2013).
3.2 Face Detection

Face detection is a machine technology being utilized in a quality of applications that
recognizes human faces in digital images. Face detection also assigns to the mental process by
which individuals discover and attend faces in a visual scene. HAAR Cascade Haar-like features
are digital image characteristics used in object recognition. They owe their name to their
spontaneous similarity with Haar wavelets and were used in the first real-time face detector. Here
we will work with face detection.
Initially, the algorithm needs a lot of explicit images and negative images to train the
classifier. Then we need to obtain features from it. For this, Haar features are used. Each element
is a single value received by withholding the sum of pixels beneath the rectangle from the number
of pixels under box. For each feature calculation, we need to find the sum of pixels under white
and black rectangles. To determine this, they introduced the integral images. It clarifies
forethought of the number of pixels, how high may be the number of pixels, to an operation
involving just four pixels (Jun et al, 2013).
This Experiment requires Python 2, OpenCV installed in Raspberry Pi 3 b + and a webcam for
face detection. Face detection (FD) has been implemented using Haar cascades. It is a simple yet
efficient method which is based on machine learning and trained on a set made of both positive
images (photos of faces) and negative images (pictures which don’t contain any face).
The detector has several key-features, as follows:
1) Converting the pixel intensity values into an Integral Image.
2) Haar features: They are different rectangular images, as presented in Figure. 1.
3) The AdaBoost learning algorithm: used for selecting the best features out of the entire set.
4) The Cascades Filter: it discards the negative windows to focus on the computational process
on the positive ones as much as possible.
We have generated the codes then

Python 2 and copy the code in a new blank
file. It is essential to save the codes with
py extension, then begin it and execute it.
In case of error appears at the Python shell,
it can be exited, and this will clean the
variables and go rerunning the program.
And the result should show the face
detection as in Figure 2.
Figure 1. Haar Features
Figure 2. Face Detection on Raspberry Pi
3.3 Basic Motion Detector

The program is a basic motion detector. It captures images from camera (if the web camera is
available) or it reads a video file. The algorithm is applied on gray frames, and it computes the
absolute difference between every two consecutive frames in order to detect the object motion in
video. Timestamp and room status are displayed on the final frame.
Our objective is to run this system on a Raspberry Pi 3b +, so we can’t get too complex, we
are able to easily detect motion while tracking a person as they walk around. Notify how the
background of the image is black. However, regions that contain motion (such as the region of
myself sitting in the room) is much lighter. This implies that larger frame deltas indicate that
motion is taking place in the image.
Figure 3. Motion Detection with Raspberry Pi

Conclusion
A face detection system using Raspberry Pi 3 B + was developed. The system was
programmed using Python programming language and OpenCV. In Real-time face detection,
object detection was also carried out. The efficiency of the system was analyzed in terms of face
detection rate and the analysis resulted that the system shows excellent performance efficiency and
can be used even from poor quality images for face detection. Using Python and OpenCV in
Raspberry Pi, made the project flexible and adaptable to any required future changes. The Things
Network provides full documentation on how to build a true LoRa gateway, using a Raspberry Pi.
We tested an easier setup, where a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was used as the processing unit of a
single channel LoRa gateway used for point to point communication. We concluded that its low-
power consumption, low profile, full-computer capabilities, Wifi, and Bluetooth connection make
it suitable for LoRa devices, both nodes and gateways.
Face detection is by no means exhaustive of face perception-related responsibilities. As future
work using artificial intelligence, sex would be discriminated, age of any individual and
expressions from human faces.
The Face expression analysis of each learner in lesson time at 5 min interval helps teacher to
know the learner’s state: he/she is satisfied – that means he/she understands the lesson, he/she is
dissatisfied -that means he/she does not understand the lesson, he/she is surprised – that means
he/she does not understand a new, surprising and unclear idea. The teacher will adapt his/her
teaching according to these individual states. This is a way for teaching improvement and as future
work we envision experimenting the system in a real classroom.
Acknowledgement
This paper was partially supported by UEFISCDI Romania and MCI through projects
VIRTUOSE and PAPUD, and funded in part by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and
innovation program under grant agreements No. 777996 (SealedGRID project) and No. 787002
(SAFECARE project).
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Digital, e-Learning models of learners and teacher based on text
and image analysis in Artificial Intelligence
Cristian Vasilescu 1, Cristian Mocanu1
(1) R&D Department, BEIA Consult International,

E-mail:cristian.vasilescu[at]beia.ro; cristian.mocanu2604[at]stud.etti.upb.ro
Abstract
The paper presents how to use the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce major improvements
in e-learning by customizing the teaching of the lesson according to the needs of each learner.
AI also helps the teacher to correct and improve his/her teaching skill. To achieve these
improvements, one digitale-learning model / profile is built for each learner. The model is
made using AI analysis techniques, namely Text Analysis and Key-phrase extraction, applied
to answers to questions about the difficulty of the lesson and about the teaching style; AI is
also used for the learner's face analysis when he/she is asked to answer to a difficult problem.
A model of the teacher is also made based on learners' answers using the same techniques of
text analysis.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, dynamic system
1. Introduction
The paper presents a way to improve the e-learning by customizing the teaching of the lesson
according to the needs of each learner, using a his/her dedicated model. The model is made using
AI analysis techniques, namely Sentiment Analysis and Key-phrase extraction, applied to learner’s
answers to questions about the difficulty of the lesson and about the teaching style; the learner’s
Face expression Analysis - part AI is used for model also. This model is presented as a digital,
vectorial dynamic system; in this way the teacher can observe the learner’s evolution. A simplified
teacher’s model is presented too.
The novelty of this work is this new learner’s model for which Sentiment Analysis, Key
phraseextraction and Face expressions Analysis are used and its representation as a digital
vectorial dynamic system.
Chapter 2 presents State-of-the-Art in e-Learning, Chapters 3 and 4 present the proposed
learner’s and teacher’s models, Chapter 5 presents experiments for Sentiment and Face Expression
Analysis and Chapter 6 proposes the models’ improvement.
2.Related works
E-Learning creates a great advantage in learning because the learners can be placed anywhere
in the Earth.
The progress in telecommunications and cloud computing have had E-learning possible.
The present paper is based on some achievements in telecommunication, cloud computing,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) especially Deep Learning and Big Data analysis.
2.1. Achievements in Deep Learning

Deep Learning (DL) means creating an artificial neural network that self-defines by
learning/training using many examples of the appropriate input-outputpairs, and when output is
correct, learning is over, and the network can be used with application inputs.
In recent years, Deep Learning has taken on a great deal. DL is applied in many areas such as
image and video processing, speech processing, natural language processing (NLP). Supervised
learning, feedforward, convolution neural networks (CNN) are used in image processing and
video. In general, Recurrent Neural Networks likeLong Short Term Memory (LSTM) with
Supervised and Unsupervised learning types are used in speech processing and NLP.
Many IT companies work and achieve in AI; for example: Microsoft with Azure and Cortana,
Google with Cloud Platform, IBM with Watson, Amazon with Alexa, Facebook, Apple with Siri
etc. These companies offer their products as paid services.
Many companies work on autonomous vehicles based on AI.
It is also used in data analysis as part of the Big Data domain.
2.2. Learner and teacher models used to improve teaching in e-learning

The disadvantage for e-Learning is that the teacher is not face to face with learners and he/she
cannot see their behavior, he/she can only see the image transmitted by the camera, usually the
face. Hence the need for a model of each student's behavior.
2.2.1. Achievements in learner models

The paper "How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping the Future of Education" (Dickson, 2017)
presents the main ideas on the need for each model of each student, a personalized model; this
model allows the teacher to adapt the teaching of the lesson and to communicate with the learner
to the his/her specific profile. However, the paper says: "education and learning are fundamentally
social experiences that are extremely hard-if not impossible-to automate. AI cannot replace
teachers. "
The model can be made from the learner's interaction with the course material and context.
The paper presents several companies and products in this field namely:
2.2.1.1. DreamBox Learning is an intelligent math-learning, adaptive-learning platform which
“uses the data it collects from students to uncover learning gaps and then helps teachers to address
them at the class level or for specific groups or individual students”.
2.2.1.2. Zoomi uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) that parses the content and context of
written material, to weigh the quality of a teacher's course material.
2.2.1.3. Third Space Learning is an online education platform to provide one-to-one math
tutoring, is now leveraging AI algorithms to help improve the performance of teachers.
2.2.1.4. MATHIA is an AI-powered math learning platform developed by Carnegie
Learning that mirrors the behavior of human tutors.
2.2.1.5. Thinkster Math is a tutoring app that blends real math curriculum with a personalized
teaching style.
2.2.1.6. Brainly is the social media site for classroom questions.
2.2.1.7. Netex Learning provides tools for video conferences, digital discussions, personalized
assignments, and learning analytics
Others Internet Sources concerning AI used in learning are: Lynch, M. (2017), Lynch, M.
(2018).
3. New digital, e-learning model / profile for each learner

The model is partially based on Deep learning and it is presented as a digital dynamic system.
3.1. Model based on Deep Learning

The model is partially based on Text Analysis namely Sentiment Analysis and Key Word
finding and based on Image Analysis. Open Source or Services were used for these Analyses
namely: Stanford Core NLP for Sentiment Analysis, Microsoft Azure Text Analysis for Key Word
finding and Google Cloud Vision API for understanding the facial expressions. The results of
these analyses are not so accurate, so the result metrics is not very clear, and the weights of these
results are lower than other weights.
3.1.1. Sentiment Analysis is used to the analysis of 4 learner’s answers (sentences) to 4
corresponding questions asked by the teacher at the end of the lesson. The questions are:
a) How much did you like the lesson content?
b) How much did you like the teacher's teaching?
c) How much did you like that you were asked by a professor from the previous lessons?
d) Would you like to be asked more often by professor?
The answers to these questions are numbers in the range 0 ... .10, with 10 for the most positive
feeling.
3.1.2. Keywords Finding is used to the analysis of 4 checks fields corresponding to 4 questions
asked by the teacher at the end of the lesson. The questions are:
e) How do you consider the difficulty of this lesson?
Possible answers: very difficult; difficult; medium; easy; very easy;
f) Do you think more explanations would be needed?
Possible answers: yes-many more; yes; not;
g) Do you think more examples would be needed?
Possible answers: yes-many more; yes; not;
h) Is the rhythm of teaching too fast?
Possible answers: yes; no, it's good;
Answers to these questions are converted into numbers in the 0 ....10 range, with 10 for a
learner who considers the lesson is easy, does not need more explanation, does not need more
examples, the teaching rate is good.
3.1.3. Facial expressions are approximated by the Google Cloud Vision API module. The
teacher sends a difficult problem that needs to be solved in max. 5 minutes at the end of the lesson
and 10 seconds after the sending he captures the learner's facial images (6 images at 1 sec interval).
The hypothesis of this paper is that facial expression reflects the degree in which the student
knows how to solve the problem. We consider 3 facial expressions: joy, sorrow, surprise. The
following are proposed:
i) Joy -------- means the learner knows to solve the problem very easy
j) Sorrow – means the learner is not sure that he can solve the problem
k) Surprise – means the learner has no idea how to solve the problem
When using the Google Cloud Vision API-Facial expression analysis module, the result is
more complicated because:
- Each facial expression has 5 degrees: very unlikely; unlikely; possible; likely; very likely –
see Table 1.
- The result may also be a combination of two facial expressions with different degrees
- Google still has the expression "anger," but it is not used in this paper.
In the present paper we convert the results into numbers in the range 0 ... 10 according to the
following tables – Table 1, Table 2:
Table 1.Degrees of probability for face expression converted into numbers:

Degrees of Probability conversion
Very likely 10
Likely 8
Possible 5
Unlikely 2
Very unlikely 0
Table 2. Face expressions converted into numbers:
Joy with degrees: Likely or Very 1

likely
Joy with degrees: Possible or Unlikely or 0,95
Very unlikely
degree of Joy >= degree of Surprise 0,9
degree of Joy < degree of Surprise 0,85
Surprise with degrees: 0,8
Unlikely or Very unlikely
Surprise with degrees: Possible or Likely or 0,75
Very likely
Sorrow with degrees: Unlikely or Very 0,7
unlikely
Sorrowwith degrees: Possible or Likely or 0,65
Very likely
Surprise and Sorrow 0,6
3.2. The model as a dynamic system

The model is presented as a digital, dynamic system with input and output [1]. Thus, the
learner's evolution can be highlighted.
[1]
model_learner(t) = model_learner_present(t) * b0 + model_learner(t-1) * a1
+model_learner(t-2) *a2 + model_learner(t-3)*a3
where:
t --- index of the present lesson (t-1 – previous lesson….)
model_learner_present(t) --present model, without average, as input
model_learner(t) ---present model,a weighted averagewith old values, as output
model_learner(t-1) --- model of previous lesson….
Weights: b0; a1; a2; a3 -with
b0+a1+a2+a3 = 1
b0 = 0.4; a1 =0.3; a2 = 0.2; a3 = 0.1
Thejustifying the choice of weightsb0, a1, a2, a3: the answers to the questions in present lesson
are based on the knowledge accumulated in previous lessons, so the weightb0 for this lesson is
higher than for previous lessons,b0 > a1 > a2 > a3 (the answers are part of the model- see later).
The model is a vector and has itscomponents model_learner [k] (t) with values in the range 0 ...
10, where 10 is the best score. Thevalues of the components for the first 3 lessons are 8 (initially,
the learner is considered as a good learner).
The components model_learner[k](t),k = 0….9 are:
k = 0: the teacher's mark for lesson;
k = 1: the time the problem has been resolved -namedshortly “time(or Time)”, in the following
formula –[2] and in [3]
[2]
(time_allowed- time / time_allowed) * 10; time_allowed = 5 min=300 seconds
k = 2: the degree to which he / she likes the subject taught; corresponds to the answer to 3.1.1. a)
k = 3: the degree to which he/ she likes teaching; corresponds to the answer to 3.1.1. b)
k = 4: the degree in which he/ she wants to demonstrate to the teacher that he/she knows all the
subjects taught; corresponds to the answers given in 3.1.1. c) and 3.1.1. d)
k = 5: the degree of difficulty of the lesson, appreciated by the learner against his / her
possibilities; corresponds to the answer to 3.1.2. e)
k = 6: the degree to which explanations are needed; corresponds to the answer to 3.1.2. f)
k = 7: the degree to which examples are needed; corresponds to the answer to 3.1.2. g)
k = 8: the degree to which the teaching rate should be lowered for an easier understanding;
corresponds to the answer to 3.1.2. h)
k = 9: global indicator – final mark- including a) the teacher's mark on the difficult problem, b) the
time the problem has been resolved and c) facial expression as number- corresponds to 3.1.3. The
global indicator is calculated using the formula [3]:
[3]
Final mark  
 Mark  * 0, 9   300  Time  * 0, 075  Facial expression * 0, 025
  
 10   300 
The weightings are: 0.9 for teacher’s mark, 0.075 for time the problem has been resolved (time,
in seconds), 0.025 for emotion from facial expression. Thetime_allowed = 5 min =300sec
4. New digital, e-learning model / profile for teacher

The teacher’s model is similar to the learner’s model but using only the components for k=3; 6;
7; 8.
5. Experiments
We did experiments for Sentiment and Face expression Analysis.
5.1. Sentiment Analysis experiments

We have used the open source for Sentiment Analysis from Stanford, namely Stanford
CoreNLP. The scores obtained for answers analysis at questions presented in 3.1.1, as examples are:
Q1: How much did you like the lesson content?
A1: I liked very much.
Sentiment Analysis score1: 0.75* 10
Q2: How much did you like the teacher's teaching?
A2: I did not like it too much.
Q3: How much did you like that you were asked by a professor in previous lessons?
A3: I did not like it at all.
Q4: Would you like to be asked more often by professor?

A4: Not.
Sentiment Analysis score4: 0.5 * 10
Note:
In order to get a better result in Sentiment Analysis, we recommend answers in longer sentences or
more sentences. If no sentiment is detected the score is 5.
Also, we have used services for Sentiment Analysis from Microsoft Azure and Google.
5.2. Face expression Analysis experiments

We have used Google Cloud Vision API to analyze the learners’ faces after they received a
difficult problem to solve. Fig. 1 is an example.
Example --- result for the above picture:

Joy: Possible
Anger: VeryUnlikely
Sorrow: VeryUnlikely
Surprise: VeryLikely
Future work
We intend to improve the models using more data from learners and
more experiments.
Conclusions
Fig. 1. Face expression The paper presents the way in which a personalized model of the
learner can be built on the his/her answers to a questionnaire. The
answers are analyzed using AI techniques. The model is completed with learner’s facial expression
analyzed using AI too.
The model is a vector andis represented as a digital dynamic system; in this way the evolution
of the learner can be observed. The paper also presents a model of the teacher. Learners' models
are used by the teacher to adapt his/her teaching of the lesson to each learner, thus improving the
quality of teaching through e-learning.
The novelty of this work is this new learner’s model for which Sentiment Analysis, Key Word
Find and Face expressions Analysis are used and its representation as a digital vectorial dynamic
system.
Acknowledgement
This paper was partially supported by UEFISCDI Romania and MCI through projects SoMeDi
and PAPUD, and funded in part by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation
program under grant agreements No. 777996 (SealedGRID project) and No. 787002 (SAFECARE
project).
References
Dickson, B. (2017) How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping the Future of Education
https://www.pcmag.com/article/357483/how-artificial-intelligence-is-shaping-the-future-of-educati
Lynch, M. (2018) Does artificial intelligence improve student
outcomes?,https://www.thetechedvocate.org/does-artificial-intelligence-improve-
Lynch, M. (2017) 5 Examples of artificial intelligence in the classroom,https://www.thetechedvocate.org/5-
examples-artificial-intelligence-classroom/
Dierking, P. (2018) New AI Technology Lets Students Evaluate Professors by
‘Chatting’,https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/new-ai-technology-lets-students-evaluate-professors-
by-chatting/4301189.html
SoMeDi: Successful Internship Programs Matching Job Offers
with Candidates Skills
George Suciu1, Adrian Pasat1, Ioana Rogojanu1
(1) R&D Department, BEIA Consult International, Str. Peroni 16, RO-041386,
ROMANIA, E-mail: george[at]beia.ro
Abstract
Companies are searching for ways to maximize the employees working time. Hiring
internship candidates can serve numerous purposes for the employer depending on the
organizational structure, and also aid interns to obtain work experience and improve their
professional skills. A successful internship program should create opportunities for internal
development of existing employees, identify their strength and weaknesses for expansion or
backfill. SoMeDi platform proposes an online recruitment platform which offers several
Digital Intelligence Tools (DIT) designed to assess the professional level of the users from
their cover letters/or letters of recommendation and determine the user sentiment regarding
the company's different fields of activity and suggest an e-Learning program. Several
approaches, like natural language processing (NLP), machine learning algorithms and
unsupervised learning methods from Cloud platforms can be applied to automate these
sentiment analysis processes. This paper will present a review of several Cloud platforms that
are making use of sentiment analysis tools and how to make the most of the metadata
surrounding the DIT application. Also, we will present the recruitment and e-Learning
process for both types of users, companies and internship candidates.
Keywords: e-Learning, Natural language processing, Unsupervised learning methods,

Machine learning, Social media
1 Introduction
The prominence of Social Media as a mass of communication is part of today’s daily lives for
citizens worldwide. Communities and personal relations of all sorts are now inextricable from the
Internet tools which have appeared over the last decade. Impacts are felt everywhere: from news
spreading through personal relationships and artistic movements, social media has grown to cover
a majority of the spectrum of human activities. Thus, the use of social media has moved from the
experimentation phase to a more mission-critical action, placing significant pressure on social
programs to efficiently monitor, analyze and engage this variety of information.
Nowadays, online social media has become a necessary tool for recruiting since it has the
potential to be cost-effective and efficient for text analysis. New technologies are emerging every
day, and Natural language processing (NLP) has contributed to the field of human-computer
interaction providing practical applications. NLP is defined as a computer's capacity to understand
and process a large amount of the natural human language (Suciu et al, 2018a).
Over the years, NLP improved using Machine Learning (ML) technologies and General-
purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) for the manipulation of text and speech.
The use of NLP for social media is a complete study which refers to text pre-processing,
normalizing words and the evaluation of applications using data collected from social media. In
the early stages, the trend was to collect and process public data from social media to train a model
for every domain, but recently pre-trained models from Microsoft, Google or IBM are used
instead, as these models allow the integration of the ML algorithms (Suciu et al, 2018b).
The main advantage is that companies can use NLP techniques and semantic analysis to
develop and improve their recruitment strategies. Taking into consideration the occurred changes
and the need to obtain relevant data, the recruitment process must be adapted to social media since
traditional forms of media are not as popular as before. To analyze this case study, the researchers
must take into consideration several important aspects of the contextual research, the need to apply
UX (User Experience) and the interaction with passive candidates.
SoMeDi's main goal is to unlock the hidden values in the digital content and traces of human
interactions using applications which require artificial intelligence and machine learning
techniques. To reach this goal, SoMeDi project develops methods and DITs to analyze digital
interaction data, including social media. The provided methods produce improved sentiment
analysis and opinion mining to increase the perception of the user's attitude towards topics and
concepts at aspect level.
This paper aims to describe several sentiment analysis tools and compare them in order to
improve the SoMeDi platform.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II provides an overview of the available
sentiment analysis solutions, Section III describes the conceptual architecture of the SoMeDi
platform, Section IV presents the results, while Section V concludes the paper.
2 Related Work
Sentiment analysis has been a subject of an intensive research effort which has been applied in
different domains from identifying polarity (positive, neutral or negative) to a computational
treatment of opinion, sentiment or subjectivity.
In this section, we described five sentiment analysis tools: Alchemy, SentiStrenght, Natural
Language Toolkit (NLTK), Stanford CoreNLP, Google Cloud Natural Language API and Text
Analytics API from Microsoft Azure. In the next sections, we will analyze SoMeDi platform and
we will make a between the sentiment analysis tools provided by Google and by Azure.
2.1 Lexicon-based tools

Lexicon-based solutions use dictionaries of words. Every word is annotated with its semantic
orientation and it incorporates the negation and intensification.
Alchemy is a lexicon based tool which uses ML techniques (specifically, deep learning) to do
semantic text analysis using NLP, including sentiment analysis and also enables the use of custom
models for increased accuracy. Alchemy returns the status, the language detected, the score and
the type of the sentiment resulted after the text analysis. The score is in the range (-1, 1). For a
negative score, the type is negative, conversely for a positive score, the type is positive. If the
score is 0, the type is neutral. The main disadvantage is that any result obtained using a non-
English language is ignored. It is described at https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/natural-
language-understanding.
SentiStrenght is a lexicon-based classifier which employs several novel methods to extract
sentiment strength from short informal electronic text using a dictionary of sentiment words with
associated strength from an informal text. The dictionary is a collection of 465 negative terms and
298 positive terms classified for either negative or positive sentiment with a value ranging from 1
to 5 for positivity, p and similarly, a value ranging from -5 to -1 for negativity. In order to
calculate the scores and the level for a document, we follow M. Thelwall's approach. It is
considered that a text is negative when , positive when . A text is considered
to be neutral if and . If it is considered that the text has undetermined
sentiment and it should be removed from the datasets. The main advantage is that SentiStrenght
uses non-lexical linguistic information in order to detect the sentiment for an informal text
(Jongeling, et al, 2015).
NLTK, installed from https://www.nltk.org/install.html, is a platform which provides a
practical solution for working with human language data. It provides an easy to use interface to
over 50 lexical resources, a suite of text processing libraries and wrappers for NLP libraries.
NLTK returns the text's probability for each kind of sentiment (positive, negative or neutral). If the
probability score for neutral sentiment is greater than 0.5, the text is considered to be neutral.
Otherwise, the text is considered to be the sentiment with the highest probability.
Standford CoreNLP, installed from https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/, is designed to be
extensible and flexible. Its goal is to apply the linguistic analysis tools easily to a piece of text.
Standford CoreNLP breaks down the text into sentences and assigns to every sentence a score with
a value between 0 and 4, where 0 is very negative, 2 is neutral and 4 is very positive. The main
disadvantage is that the tool does not provide the score for the full text. In order to determine the
level of the sentiment, the user has to compute [1] where n denotes the
number of negative sentences, z, denotes the number of neutral sentences and p is the number of
positive sentences. The text is considered to be negative, neutral or positive according to the
resulted scores.
2.2 Cloud-based tools

Cloud Computing aims to provide reliable, high-quality, customized and dynamic computing
services for users. The technologies utilized for Cloud Computing are still in the process of
maturing.
Google Cloud Natural Language API, installed from https://cloud.google.com/natural-
language/, is a cloud-based service which provides natural language understanding technologies
including syntax analysis, sentiment analysis, and entity sentiment analysis.
The main advantage is that Google Cloud Natural Language API can support several
languages. The sentiment analysis tools inspect the text an identify the emotional opinion to
determine the attitude. The sentiment's score ranges between -1 and 1 and corresponds to the
overall emotional learning of the text.
Also, besides the score, Google Cloud Natural Language API gives a magnitude score which
indicated the strength of emotion. It ranges between 0 and +inf. For example, a text is considered
to be clearly negative if the score is -6 and magnitude is 0.4, neutral if the score is 0.1 and
magnitude is 0.0, clearly positive if the score is 0.8 and magnitude is 0.3 and mixed if the score is
0.0 and magnitude is 4.0.
Text Analytics API, installed from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
services/text-analytics/, from Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based service which provides advanced
natural language processing services and includes three main functions: language detection, key
phase extraction, and sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis tools generate a score between 0
and 1 using classification techniques.
3 SoMeDi platform
SoMeDi platform is intended to analyze the text and calculate the sentiment since there is a
strong correlation between social profiles and users. The sentiment analysis tools developed within
SoMeDi platform will be used for mining data from professional networks, social media platforms
to provide personalized recommendation, evaluation of internship and/or apprenticeship programs
offered by companies. The goal is to identify the candidates' opinion regarding several aspects:
company activity, required aptitudes, and knowledge. Compared to direct competitors, SoMeDi
platform will set a novel approach by using the latest technologies such as Machine Learning,
Natural Language Processing, and Sentiment Analysis backend services deployed within a reliable
cloud infrastructure easily scalable, according to the number of subscriptions.
Figure 1. SoMeDi dashboard
SoMeDi has identified value mining of social and other digital user interactions as a viable
business model mainly related to business trends such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The
objective is to applied technological innovations in the area of artificial intelligence, opinion
mining, big data to exploit the digital user interactions and transform them in Digital Interaction
Intelligence (DII).
Figure 2. Sentiment Analysis process
The main task is to find and innovate current technologies to pass through the Input – Analysis
– Output process, and here SoMeDi will enhance deep syntax structured resources that go beyond
the n-gram and bag-of-words paradigm and better capture the complexity of natural language
sentences, integrating the target of sentiments, or considering the holder of the opinion via a
deeper syntactic and semantic representation or inference system.
4 Comparison of sentiment analysis tools

This section will provide a comparison of the Cloud-based sentiment analysis tools presented
in section 2 in order to identify the most reliable tool.
We will start by presenting the corpus of several journals and we will see the usage of every
sentiment analysis tool in research articles and we will continue by evaluating their performances
on the same text.
4.1 Distribution of sentiment analysis tools

We created a relevant database, based on all available article, in a specific JSON format using
a Python script and Scopus API. We will present the obtained results, and we will analyze the
distribution of topics. We used the tools presented as keywords.
Figure 3. Distribution of articles
4.2 Comparison between Google Cloud Natural Language API and Text Analytics API
In this section, we present a comparison between the two Cloud services in order to see which
is the most efficient.
The main purpose of SoMeDi project is to build an efficient recruitment platform, focused on
the professional level, which collects and analyze the users’ work experience using their cover
letters and/or letters of recommendation and calculates the user sentiment.
In Table 1. is presented the sentiment analysis score after bringing the results in the same
range.
Table 1. The score obtained using the two cloud-based services

Sentiment analysis tool: Score for full text:
Google Cloud Natural Language API 0.9279513955116272
Text Analytics API 0.8
We have created a form to analyze people’s sentiment regarding the presented cover letter. In
order to determine the efficiency of both tools, we calculated the correlation coefficient using a
reference work (Taylor, 1990).
First, after we gathered the data, we will use parametric tests to obtain the relevant dataset.
After that, the text is broken into fragments and we analyzed each fragment and then we calculated
the correlation coefficient.
The values of the correlation coefficient show how strong is the relationship between the two
variables.
Table 2. The values of the correlation coefficient

Sentiment analysis tool: Correlation coefficient:
Google Cloud Natural Language API 0,681168117
Text Analytics API 0,402209226
In our case, the values show how efficient are the proposed techniques. The value
corresponding to Azure's technology shows a reasonable relationship between the two methods.
The value corresponding to Google's technology shows a strong linear relationship.
Conclusions
In this article, we have presented an overview of sentiment analysis tools and compared two
Cloud solutions due to the fact that the Cloud solutions are better than the lexicon based solutions.
The main purpose was to identify the most reliable tool in order to implement it further for the
SoMeDi platform. The results of the comparison showed that the results from Google Cloud
Natural Language API is the most used technique for research articles and it fit with the user’s
opinion.
For future work, we will make a comparison of the Cloud-based techniques using an increased
number of cover letters and we will use the translation API for both techniques in order to see their
performances for a non-English text.
Acknowledgement
This paper was partially supported by UEFISCDI Romania and MCI through projects SoMeDi
and PAPUD, and funded in part by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation
program under grant agreements No. 777996 (SealedGRID project) and No. 787002 (SAFECARE
project).
References
Taylor R. (1990): Interpretation of the Correlation Coefficient: A Basic Review. Journal of Diagnostic
Medical Sonography
Jongeling, R. et al. (2015): Choosing Your Weapons: On Sentiment Analysis Tools for Software
Engineering Research in IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME).
Suciu G. et al. (2018a): Design of an internship recruitment platform employing NLP based technologies
in ECAI 2018 - International Conference, June 2018, BEIA Consult International.
Suciu G. et al. (2018b): Geolocation and Social Media for Enhanced Recruitment Campaigns in Scientific
Conference eLearning and Software for Education Bucharest, April 2018, BEIA Consult International.
https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/natural-language-understanding, accessed 2018
https://www.nltk.org/install.html, accessed 2018
https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/, accessed 2018
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/, accessed 2018
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/, accessed 2018
Video tutorials' scenarization: development and implementation
for educational purposes
Natalia Burlacu1
(1) Ion Creanga" Chishinau Pedagogical State University

Faculty of Educational Science and Informatics, Department of Informatics
and Mathematics, Chișinău city, str. I. Creangă 1, MD-2069, Rep. Moldova
E-mail: natburlacu[at]hotmail.com
Abstract
Today, the didactic act is inconceivable without the broad integration and use of
educational resources in various digital formats. In this context, author of the present paper
describe the consecutiveness of steps for scenarios of video tutorials and the importance of
developing this kind of resources with the perspective of its implementation in the teaching-
learning process.
Keywords: Tutorial, Video Information, Scenario Development
1 Introduction or prerequisites for developing video tutorials

Actually the competence to process video information is an integral part of the set of "[...]
special competencies for the professional use of information processing tools [...]" (Burlacu
Natalia, 2016), and the updating of the university courses to the study program 0613.4 Informatics
(Computer Science) (in the field of vocational training 0613 Development Program Products and
Applications) cause the emergence of a course that forms the given skills and is also justified by
the fact that there is such demand on the labor market. This circumstance being visible at the level
of the specification of the numerous and various types’ projects and, particularly, in the process of
launching European initiatives "[...] about the wide implementation of ICT in social, economic,
educational, scientific, etc. which pursue two basic objectives: (1). development of video
information processing tools; (2.) reflection on the process of using new technologies in the
relation of video information processing "[ibidem].
Having both the prerequisites for developing a study area dedicated to editing video content
and the special interest, shown by the learners of different ages, which have come from different
specialties and / or fields of study, type of education, etc. to the audiovisual and as a recreational
object and as a tool for learning, at the moment, the need to create the various products resulting
from the action of processing video information has reached a peak of its development in an
extremely fast regime. The huge flow of information favored the development of new branches of
exposure to visual information being developed as different types of dedicated editors, and
multiple solutions invented their implementation in various fields, particularly for educational
systems.
Thus, in the virtual space daily are placed tens of thousands of tutorials (videos) containing
some educational materials, educational approaches to applying various technical equipment,
software and / with pedagogical strategies aimed at teaching-learning-evaluation of a variety of
materials from various fields of study (modern languages, computer science, cybernetics,
didactics, medicine, mathematics, etc.).
We can certainly assert that such teaching content in various video formats already has a
significant impact on the educational process of different educational institutions around the
world. Numerous platforms delivering such video tutorials include Coursera, Standford Online,
MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), etc.
In our opinion, video tutorials today are a digital remedy, a product of information and
communication technology applications, called video information processing software that allows
an interested audience (pupils, students of cycles: Bachelor, Master, retraining, etc.) to study
and/or accumulate knowledge from various curricular areas, from elementary to performance
grades: medium level and above the medium level.
Respectively, video tutorials, placed by authors and/or developers on certain platforms in the
virtual environment (such as those listed above, as well as Khan Academy, Alison, etc.) offer the
opportunity to access and browse information from different scientific fields, these being already
very well worked out, systematized and provided to the beneficiaries.
2 Arguments for implementation the resulting product of video information processing

in educational act
There are voices that support the emergence and implementation of these types of teaching
support, but there are also criticize them here.
Speaking about the benefits of this type of educational content among them, we can enumerate
(1) its significant impact in the educational process; (2) the possibility to access the study material
from anywhere and anytime; (3) student's opportunity to list it according to their personal learning
rhythm, etc.
Among the inconveniences of video tutorials (specially which are made by dilettantes) are
contained such reasons: lack of live contact with the learners, which can lead to the incorrect
implementation of the solutions regarding distributed tasks and/or partial misinformation of the
beneficiaries.
It is for these reasons that it is important to know and differentiate the ways of implementing
some didactic approaches in the existing calculation systems in the form of the offer.
We believe here it is necessary to take into account the limits of the application we use; the
need to use video tutorials in the process of teaching-learning-evaluation (scenarios of the
educational approach) on certain themes, modules, courses; the differences: from one platform to
another, the quality of the video material which is being played; settings made by the developer;
the methodical-scientific aspects of correct reflection of information, etc.
In this context, the software for editing video scenarios with the perspective of their
implementation in the didactic act is very current. Both free and paid software can be found on the
net and, depending on the needs, the user's wishes and the hardware configuration, these can be
downloaded and/or purchased to process the video information in an extensive palette offering:
from beginner-user oriented to professional.
In particular, such software for the processing of video information is also implemented in the
creation, editing of certain educational sequences to be inserted in digital textbooks (DT), targeting
various objectives according to the age of the DT users, studied discipline, relevant
methodological recommendations regarding thematic topic explored in the tutorial.
For example, in the textbook for the Romanian language, recommended for the first class of
Moldovan national schools, it is necessary to demonstrate the calligraphic writing models for both
the representation of some letters (in its uppercase and lowercase characters) as well as the step of
calligraphy of certain word combinations, sentences, etc.
It is noteworthy that this technique is illustrated differently in the Romanian language
textbooks of the Republic of Moldova (see Figure 1) and Romania (see Figures 2-4), and as an
example, for our understanding, there are also some countries on Earth where the pupils are not at
all taught to write calligraphy or, how we name this technique, "by hand".
Figure 1. Graphic representation of the lettering Y, Q, W in the ABECEDAR edited in

Republic of Moldova; page 63, available at: https://bit.ly/2BAEL3P
Figure 2. Graphic representation of the lettering O (upercase letter) in ABECEDAR edited in

Romania; page 26, available at: https://bit.ly/2BC5jSj (Iliana Dumitrescu, 2014)
Figure 3. Graphic representation of the lettering O (lowercase letter) in ABECEDAR edited in

Romania; page 27, available at: https://bit.ly/2BC5jSj (Iliana Dumitrescu, 2014)
The countries with such visions are the US (there is the experience of the Indiana state here),
India and Turkey, while Finland has already removed from its curriculum the development of this
competence. By the way, studies on the impact of handwriting versus digital writing are done also
in the UK.
Researchers and the scientific and civilian community that opposes handwriting argue their
position by saying that "[…] the time invested in learning of calligraphic writing could be used to
master modern skills such as typing from the computer's keyboard or even programming"(Andreea
Ghinea, 2017).
Figure 4. Graphic representation of the lettering V (upercase letter) in ABECEDAR edited in

Romania; page 55, available at: https://bit.ly/2MI0lYA
(Costin Diaconescu, 2014)
Supporters of the classical idea of teaching pupils from the primary cycle handwriting highlight
the advantages of this technique compared with the typing of the texts from the keyboard. They
say that some studies confirm the usefulness of physical action to write by hand, and the
subsequent benefit of this learning situation would be that the given technique somehow facilitates
the learning of reading by pupils from primary school.
Finally, in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, for the time being, it is being followed the
teaching-learning-evaluation formula of the handwriting, fact which is demonstrated by the
content of traditional textbooks (see Figures 1-4).
The use of such sequences is argued by the fact that the teacher demonstrates to the pupil in the
classroom only one time this technique on the blackboard, and then the pupil spends roughly half a
semester writing different characters during of his / her homework classes after school.
What can an involved pupil/parent do in such a learning situation if have been omitted the
explanation and demonstration from the class (maybe because of illness reasons, etc.) or because
of some visual impairments and/or simply because was not enough careful? The question is
applicable in similar situations to other study subjects with other themes (artistic drawing,
technical drawing, demonstration of a theorem, exemplified explanation of the syntactic analysis
of a sentence and/or periphrasis in the study of the mother language or another foreign language, etc.).
As a solution to solving this kind of teaching circumstances, we strongly welcome video
tutorials. Either elaborated, distributed and/or placed in free circulation for pupils, parents and
teachers or embedded in advanced digital products such as DT.
In the DT developed on the basis of the prototype of the traditional handbook, are necessary
various interactive didactic activities in which scenarios also must be present various types of
video sequences (video clips, movies, cuts from the classic to the postmodern film, cuts from TV
reports, etc.). Of course, besides the entire set of films, the authors also use some authoring
sequences, molded and processed specifically for the given DT.
2.1 Applications dedicated for the processing of video information and tutorials'
development
For creating video products and/or developing some video tutorials, we can recommend only
specialized software either used autonomously or as a whole with other applications, having the
same purpose (on various video production segments can be applied various tools, depending on
its technical possibilities and the underlying scenario requirements).
Such would be:
A. Adobe After Effects - video editing software that enables dynamizing, composing,
animation and creation of various effects to be used in visual image processing systems. Speaking
of these effects we refer to color corrections and/or post-production; creating advertising; musical
videos; (for television, games and/or other digital and/or Internet applications), including a series
of other tasks requiring the use of digital video effects (Brie Gyncild & Lisa Fridsma, 2017).
Thanks to plug-ins libraries developed by third-party companies, After Effects is used also to print
graphic design production and to edit static graphics.
B. Adobe Premiere Pro is a professional non-linear video editing program released by Adobe
Systems, the Adobe Premiere heir. Adobe Premiere (the latest version is the 7th) has become the
most massive program on the professional video production market. Premiere Pro supports high-
quality editing of 4K x 4K video resolutions with a 32-bit color in both RGB and YUV color
space. It is able to edit audio sequences, to support VST (plug-in) audio and 5.1 surround
soundtracks. The Premiere Pro plug-in architecture allows importing and exporting QuickTime or
DirectShow container materials, also ensuring compatibility with a huge number of video and
audio formats from MacOS and Windows.
Adobe Premiere Pro is used by such companies as the BBC, The Tonight Show.
C. Sony Vegas Pro renamed May 2016 in VEGAS PRO is a non-linear editing software
package originally published by Sonic Foundry, then Sony Creative Software and now by Magix.
This software runs under the Windows operating system. Originally developed as an audio editor;
finally has been developed into a nonlinear editing system for video and audio. Beginning with
version 2.0. Vegas offers real-time video and audio reproduction in several ways: independent
video sequences, complex effects and composition tools, 24-bit / 192 kHz audio support, VST and
DirectX plug-in and mixer support surround sound Dolby Digital (Duncan Wood, 2012).
VEGAS PRO does not need specialized hardware to function properly. Thus, it is able to work
on virtually any standard Windows computer on a wide range of hardware. In the composition and
motion graphics areas, Vegas offers a wide range of tools including the 3D composition of track
movements, Z-depth control (in three dimensions), as well as the spatial layout of the visual plans
including the plane intersection.
Additionally, the program also supports advanced features, such as working with multiple
processors and dual monitors. It is possible to import MPEG / AC3 files from a DVD camcorder.
Vegas lets to transfer VOB files from the AC3 audio channel directly into the chronology, it has
the ability to export the finished material to MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, QuickTime,
RealVideo, Windows Media Video, Ogg, SWF and more.
Although all reviewed software for video information processing, at first glance, seem to be
very different from each other, they are based on the most popular and important rendering
formats, through which the final product is obtained after the work in the development and editing
levels.
Mostly, we appeal to software products that enable video editing for creating of video
production (tutorials, animated animations, etc.) in order to implement its later in our DT on which
we do some referral in the present research (Burlacu Natalia and Balmuș Nicolae, 2017).
Additionally, the calling to the application toolkit is indispensable when is necessary to
develop authoring video sequences and/or adjusting free-to-air video clips to the educational and
technical requirements (configuration) imposed by a specific DT (Burlacu Natalia and Balmuș
Nicolae, 2018) (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Video sequence processed in Vegas and inserted the Romanian language's DT, edited in
Republic of Moldova (Burlacu Natalia and Balmuș Nicolae, 2017)
3 Phasing of the video tutorial development process

Video information processing applications are a solution in the process of creating and
implementing video tutorials scenarios.
The process of developing a video tutorial can be compared with the design of an artistic work
that requires some stages of its realization.
The first step in creating a video tutorial is to determine the theme and curricular area of
the future tutorial.
The second step of creating a video tutorial would be to collect the necessary materials that
may differ in both content, form and quantity depending on the theme, the expected result, etc.
Primary information collections can include: music, various images, video sequences,
screenshots or video clips made using programs such as "Hyper Cam", "Move Avi Screen
Capture", etc., creation in various graphics applications, such as Photoshop, of certain graphics
sequences to integrate them into a finished video scenario, etc. All collected materials must be
legally obtained (the downloaded materials can be free of charge and those for a fee must be
purchased) and its source of origin must be indicated.
Otherwise, the video placed on the global network may be blocked due to copyright
infringement.
The third, next step, in the implementation of the video tutorial is the intro elaboration. An
intro contains a sequence of video frames that represent the introductory part of a program
product, movie, computer game, etc. and contains in some compressed visual form some allusions
to the product content. The into requires a lot of attention from the developer because it focuses on
the spectator's special attention. There are informative data such as theme and / or video author can
be placed inside of the intro. The message of an intro has to be so focused and abstracted that the
viewer will see in a certain approximation about what the tutorial will be.
Video tutorial developers also use some intro templates, surnamed footage. The highest order
professionals in order to personalize and enhance the expressiveness of the video sequences create
the footage. As a rule, these are belong to certain developers, to some people and/or group of
people, companies, etc.
Because the intro is just the introductory part of a tutorial, the run time of the tutorial in the
video entire must be minimal in order not to distract the learner from the actual theme.
The fourth step in developing video tutorials is content editing that assembles all the
information, the materials collected for the video product, the implementation of the effects
(subtitling, blurring of sequences, color retouching, etc.).
The editing stage is the most difficult part of the work. Effective assembling of pre-collected
materials improves (for the user) the degree of comprehension of the reflected material, the
popularity of the future tutorial, increasing the learner's ability to focus its attention on content,
regardless of its complexity.
The whole stage editing to be run according to the scenario preventive structured so that in the
during of future views beneficiary to bring the sequence of rational presentation materials and/or
information in the tutorial and the student can travel efficiently necessary steps reflected in the
lesson contained in the video and can comes to the end. The length of a video tutorial can be from
a few minutes to an hour. If the tutors of the tutorial have more information to reflect the video, it
is advisable to divide the video into several parts, so that the learner does not lose attention /
interest in the story.
The fifth step is the end. It may contain informative subtitles (about: when the video product
was written, who is the author, what authors refer to the input materials used in the tutorial); audio
and/or video sequences; embedded statistics and / or graphics, the use of footage or other video
templates designed to customize the work.
The sixth, final step, in the process of developing a video tutorial, is it's rendering.
Rendering is a process of transforming the component elements of a scenario (didactic or

artistic) implemented in a video processor into a video sequence format that will, to a large extent,
depend on the technological quality of the final product.
Considering that the majority of the population is quite familiar with high-performance video
and, actually craved, by the quality of the finished video file, the success of the tutorial will also
depend on these.
Being rendered inappropriate, the entire work of authors for creating a tutorial may be
misleading, so the video / audio effects used in the work may disappear; format may be
incompatible with video information software, etc. The most commonly used rendering formats
are: HD, Internet, Mbps hd, mp4.
Conclussions
Although the scripting and implementation of video tutorials is a difficult process that requires
some complex skills from the authors, many time resources and significant hardware resources,
the effort deserves to be deposited.
We consider that the practice of creating video tutorials should be implemented in the training
and / or initial forming of some specialists, as the video production process allows the
multidisciplinary development of more transdisciplinary skills both for the learners studying the
given subject and for the consumers of such video products.
The creation and use (in the educational process) of video tutorials developed in specialized
applications help learners to increase their imagination, creativity, ingenuity, critical thinking and,
in the case of joint projects, they contribute to the formation collaborative working skills and team
spirit among the members of a group.
By its nature video tutorials developed in video information processing software, being
implemented in the didactic process in various fields of science and / or professionalization, allow
for a thorough assimilation of the subject matter.
References
Costin Diaconescu. (2014): Autori: CD Press coordonat de Simiona Dobrescu. Comunicare în limba română.
Manual pentru clasa I. Partea I. Editura CD Press.
Duncan Wood. (2012): Sony Vegas Pro 11 Beginner's Guide. 264 p. ISBN 13: 9781849691703.
Iliana Dumitrescu. Daniela Barbu. (2014): Comunicare în limba română. Manual pentru clasa I. Partea I.
Editura CD Press.
Burlacu Natalia. (2016): Conceptualizarea cursului “Prelucrarea Informației Video” la specialitatea de
Informatică. In: Acta et Commentationes Științe ale Educației, nr. 1(8), 2016. Tip. UST, p. 105-114. ISSN
1857-0623.
Burlacu Natalia. Balmuș Nicolae. (2017): Activități valorificate în manualului digital de limba română pentru
clasa a II-ua. In: Materialele conferinței științifice anuale a profesorilor și cercetătorilor UPS „Ion
Creangă”. Chișinău, 23 - 24 martie, 2017. Seria XIX, volumul II. pp.278-288. 352 p. ISBN 978-9975-46-
333-1.
Internet Sources:
Andreea Ghinea. (2017): De ce mai obligam copiii sa invete sa scrie de mana cand viitorul este digital? In:
https://bit.ly/2BBABbT
Brie Gyncild. Lisa Fridsma. (2017): Adobe After Effects CC. Classroom in a Book. 56 pp. In:
https://bit.ly/2MHiDsW ISBN-13: 978-0-13-466532-0. ISBN-10: 0-13-466532-5.
Burlacu Natalia, Balmuș Nicolae. (2018): AGEPI. Seria PC Nr: 5862 din 17.01.2018. Nr. cererii: 608.
Denumirea: MANUAL DIGITAL (MD) DE LIMBĂ ROMÂNĂ.
Creating Multiple Courses in “Google Classroom” using Google’s
Sheets and Apps Script
Miroslav Karabaliev, Boyana Paarvanova, Bilyana Tacheva
Trakia University – Stara Zagora; Faculty of Medicine

Stara Zagora 6000, BULGARIA
E-mail: miroslav.karabaliev[at]trakia-uni.bg
Abstract
Google Classroom has been accessible for a few years now. In this work, we describe
how by using a Google spreadsheet and the built-in Google Apps Script Editor multiple
courses can be created in the Classroom app by a single command. The code of the script is
presented and explained. Functions for creating the courses, adding teachers to the courses,
and delete selected courses are described. Few important hacks are also outlined that are
necessary for the smooth execution of the code.
Keywords: G Suite for Education, Google Classroom, Google Apps Script, Google Sheet
1 Introduction
Google Classroom is one of the G Suite for Education applications (https://classroom.
google.com). It is designed to organize and control the educational teaching and learning
processes. Each teacher can create an online Classroom for a class and invite students in it. The
teacher can share learning content with the students, appoint assignments and mark the student's
homework. Starting 2017 the Google Classroom is also available for individual Gmail-users so
that everyone can use it and create Classroom courses, even when the school or university is not a
customer of the G Suite for Education.
To create a single Classroom is very easy - it consists of making few clicks, filling few text
fields and inviting the students by sending them the automatically generated enrollment code (Bell,
2015). However, when the teacher has to create a separate classroom for each different student
group, the task becomes quite cumbersome, especially if the number of groups or classes is big
enough.
In this work, we share our experience of creating multiple classes in a row. For the purpose, we
use a Google Sheet in combination with the built-in macro language Google Apps script (Ferreira,
2014). The work contains the script and description of the Sheet, as well as, description of how
they work in combination.
2 Creating the Spreadsheet

The Spreadsheet has two sheets. The first one is for the courses and the second one for the
students that would be invited and added to each of the courses.
The Courses Sheet comprises a list of the classes the teacher wants to create. It has columns
with the discipline name, the year, the group number and/or any other information that would
characterize different classes. Each class is in a separate row. We use Google Apps script to write
a software code which, when run, reads the information from the Sheet row by row and creates a
classroom for each row. The idea is that the different cells provide the information needed from
the script to create the classes. Basically, each class can be created having only two arguments -
the course name and course owner which is the main teacher of the class. There are also a few
additional arguments - Class description, Section, Room and Subject. The Sheets contains few
additional columns in which the scripts write back a valuable information for the created
classrooms - id number, enrollment code, link. This information can be sent to the students and/or
listed on a website.
In our university, we teach two different courses, Physics and Biophysics, to students of
medicine in their first year of education. The students are distributed in 13 different groups, 10
with teaching in Bulgarian language and 3 with teaching in English. That is why we have to create
26 different classrooms.
The full list of columns in our sheet is as follows: Speciality, Year, Course name, Language,
Group, Main Teacher, Co-teachers, section, description Heading, description, room, id,
enrollmentCode, courseState, creationTime, updateTime, alternateLink, Created, Co-teachers
Added.
To create a new class we have to fill some of the cells in a new row (Table 1).
Table 1. Example of the first columns and rows in the Sheet that is used to create
Classroom courses
Speciality Year Discipline Language Group Main Teacher
medicine 2018/19 Physics en 13 first.last@domain.name
медицина 2018/19 Физика bg 8 first.last@domain.name
We can also fill the “room” column with the room number, floor and building information, as
well as, the “description” column with some more information about the course.
The "Main Teacher" cell should contain the email address of the teacher in charge. Depending
on the type of account the scenarios are different. If the school/university is a G Suite subscriber
and the Sheet and Scripts are run by an administrator the "Main Teacher" cell could contain the
email address of any teacher in the organisation. In the same case, additional co-teachers could be
added by their emails-addresses in the "Co-teachers" cells. On the other hand, if one uses a
personal Gmail-account the "Main Teacher" can be only the person that owns the Spreadsheet and
the Script, and no co-teacher could be added by the script.
In order to create classrooms that differ in title and subtitles, we use the Sheet's built-in
concatenation formula, to create different titles and subtitles for the corses. We do this in the cells
of the "Course name" and "section" columns.
Table 2. The formulae in the “Course name” and “section” cells, that is used to create the title
and subtitle of the courses.
Course name section
=CONCATENATE(C2;" -
";E2) =if(D2 = "en"; CONCATENATE("- ";B2;", "; A2; ", group
"; E2); CONCATENATE("- ";B2;", "; A2; ", група "; E2))
=CONCATENATE(C3;" -
";E3) =if(D3 = "en"; CONCATENATE("- ";B3;", "; A3; ", group
"; E3); CONCATENATE("- ";B3;", "; A3; ", група "; E3))
The "Course name" formula addresses relatively the cells in the "Discipline" and "Group"
columns. The "section" formula addresses the cells in "Year", "Speciality" and "Group" columns,
and uses an "if" statement to create outputs either in English or Bulgarian, depending on the value
in the "Language" column cell. The created output is shown in Table 3.
Table 3. The generated output by the formulae shown in Table 2.

Course name section
Physics - 13 - 2018/19, medicine, group 13
Физика - 8 - 2018/19, медицина, група 8
The cells in the columns “id”, “enrollmentCode”, “courseState”, “creationTime”, “updateTime”,

“alternateLink” and “Created” are left blank and are filled by the Script itself when it si runned.
Before running the script we create a full list of courses to be created by copying the cells in
the columns Speciality, Year, Course name, Language, Group, Main Teacher, Co-teachers,
section, description Heading, description, room, and pasting them in a number of rows that
correspond to the numbers of the students groups. After this we have to change only the Group
number in each row, the Language and the name of the Discipline if necessary. If we are G Suite
users we can also change the email address of the main teacher and add co-teachers.
3 Creating and running the Google Apps Script

The Apps script editor is accessible through the Spreadsheet menu: “Tools” -> “Script editor”.
The script can be organised in one or several script files, each containing one or several functions.
Before running the main functions we declare some general variables and assign values to
them, as well as, we make a help-function that returns the number of the column with a specific name.
Figure 1. Declaring the general variables and a help function necessary to run the main script.
The variables in lines 1 to 4 get the "course" sheet, reads the numbers of the last column and
the last row, gets the values in the first title row in the sheet and stores them in an array named
"firstRowValues". The function "colNum" takes a string "header" as an argument and searches for
that string in the "firstRowValues" array. When it finds it, the function returns the column number
of the column with that name.
The two main functions of the script are shown in Figure 2.
The main function that creates the classes is the function "createCourses()" from line 14 to line
21 in figure 2. When it is run it iterates from the second to the last row in the Sheet and runs the
other function "createCourse(fromRow)" for each row. Notice that it does this in an "if" statement,
so that the second function "createCourse(fromRow)" is run only if the course is still not created.
In such way, we can add additional rows in the "course" sheet, without the need of deleting rows
with the courses already created.
The basic function that creates each individual course is the function "createCourse
(fromRow)". It takes the sheet row number as an argument. In lines 25 to 31, the function reads the
values of the corresponding cells in that sheet row. The course is created by using a JSON-object
(https://developers.google.com/classroom/ reference/rest/v1/courses). That JSON-object is
declared in lines 33 to 39. The values assigned to the json keys are the values of the variables from
lines 25 to 31. The course is created by the statement in line 42. Notice that it is inside a try-catch
statement. The reason for this is a kind bug in the Google servers. Initially, there was no need for
such a trick but last year it happens that no more than two or three courses could be created in a
row. After this, the servers threw an error and the script had to be run again in order to create the
next classes in the sheet. The reason for this was related to the execution time. With the try-catch
statement, if a server error is thrown, we call again the creation of the course in the catch statement
(line 44). In such way, all the courses in the list could be created.
Lines 47 to 53 write back the attributes of the newly created course in the corresponding cells
in the row in the "course" sheet . Especially useful are the "id" of the course, "the enrollment code"
and the "alternate link". The value in the "created" column indicates whether the course is already
created.
Line 55 calls the function presented in the next figure 3. The aim of the function is to add
co-teachers to the course. The co-teachers have the same rights as the main teacher in the course,
concerning posts, assignments and marks. The co-teachers can be added by the script only if it is
run by a G Suite customer. Individual Gmail-users do not have permissions to add other Gmail-
users by a script. They can invite them using the Classroom interface.
Fig. 2. The two main functions that create the courses in the Classroom app by reading the
information from the sheet row by row.
The function "addTeacher" reads the content of the "Co-teachers" cell and store it as an array
containing the emails of the individual teachers. After this, the scripts iterates through the elements
of that array and add each of the teachers to the course.
Figure 3. A function that can add co-teachers to the course.
The described above three functions are run in a single call of the "createCourses()" functions.
This function can be run from the Spreadsheet toolbar by adding new Entry in the toolbar menu. It
can be done again by the Apps script with an onOpen() function (Figure 4).
Figure 4. A script of a function that is called with the Spreadsheet open event and creates a menu
entry so that the main functions can be run without opening the Script editor.
The main entry in the toolbar is "Macros" with a drop-down menu with commands running the
corresponding functions. As can be seen in fig. 4 there is one additional functions that can be run
from the menu, "deleteCourse". The function gives the possibility to delete a course selected by
the user directly from the SpreadSheet. The script of the "deleteCourse" function is shown in
Figure 5.
The approach of this function is not to iterate the whole sheet, as it was in the creatCourses-
function, but rather to previously select the courses, that the user wants to delete. It is sufficient to
select whatever cell in the sheet row describing the course. The first few lines in the function, from
line 81 to line 84, are meant to determine the selected range, and in line 85 the values of the IDs of
the selected courses are entered in an array. After this, the function iterates the elements of this
array, deletes one by one the courses and clears the content of the cells that keep the information
of the corses attributes. If the course has been assigned a Calendar, it is deleted too. Two things to
be noted here. First, in order to prevent deletion by mistake, an alert message is displayed to the
user prompting for confirmation of the deletion (lines 86, 94 and 95). If the user confirms the
followings lines are executed. The second important moment is that the lifecycle of the course
requires that the course is archived before it can be deleted. That is why the lines from 90 to 93,
and the line 100 are written in order that the course state is updated to "ARCHIVED". Only after
this the course can be deleted be a remove-command in line 101.
Figure 5. A script of a function that can be used to delete courses directly from the Spreadsheet.
4 Authorising the Script and enabling the Advanced Google Services.

Each Apps Script needs to be authorised after the first run of whatever function in the script. It
is the Apps Script that displays a message for this, so nothing extraordinary in this step. However,
in order that the script runs smoothly, some Advanced Google Services should be turned on for the
project. If this had not been done the script would throw an error. The Advanced Google Services
are turned on from the "Resources" command in the Script toolbar. The Services that should be
turned on are "Admin Directory API", "Calendar API" and "Google Classroom API". These same
services must also be enabled in the Google API console, for which a direct hyperlink is shown in
the UI of the Advanced Google Services.
After these authorisations and enabling are done all functions can be run from the toolbar
menu, according to the descriptions that we made.
Conclusion
The Google Apps Script is a wonderful instrument that gives the opportunity to do repetitive
tasks automatically. We showed how the creation of multiple courses can be done by using a
previously prepared Google Spreadsheet and the built-in Script editor. Besides the described here
creation and deletion of courses, many other tasks could be done with the Apps script, such as
creating and getting the Calendar of the course, inviting and/or adding a list of students, creating
assignments. In such way, many of the cumbersome tasks of the teachers can be automatized so
that they focus on the content of the course rather than on its organization.
References
Bell, K. (2015): The Teacher’s Guide to Google Classroom, Shake Up Learning. LLC.
Ferreira, J. (2014): Google Apps Script, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA.
Internet Sources:
https://classroom.google.com, accessed 2018
https://developers.google.com/classroom/reference/rest/v1/courses, accessed 2018
Solutions For Designing Software Modules
Used By Android Devices In Inventory Management
Liviu Şerbănescu
Hyperion University Bucharest, E-mail: livius969[at]gmail.com
Abstract
In the use of software, the issue of minimizing the operating time appears. Inventory
logistics software applications involving high operating times due to take over the
merchandise item to item. Lately scanning devices have operating system and software
applications allow running specific mobile devices. This can lead to an improvement software
systems in order to reduce operating times. This paper addresses this aspect, in case of
logistics stocks in the telecommunications sector. It is shown extending a logistics software
for stocks with a client interface for mobile devices. In the case presented, data servers can be
accessed directly from mobile scanners, allowing for real-time operation. The system also
allows for a dynamic configuration of existing warehouses.
Keywords: stock inventory, software arhitecture, android devices, postgresql.
1 Introduction
In the telecommunications industry, inventory equipment has a wide variety, from integrated
circuit boards to antennas. We can also have series or non-series equipments such as cables or
other mounting accessories. Existing equipment in stock has, besides the series (except
accessories), various references such as commercial or technical, which can also be taken over by
bar code scanners. To control these references they are organized into nomenclatures, thereby
ensuring their uniqueness. It is also considered that the series of items are unique. The construction
of the entire software system developed and centered follow the more serious because the
equipment can leave the system (can be
mounted or is going to be repaired) and can
return the system. The existing desktop
application allows multiple storages that are
configured dynamically. By using this
application, operators learn to use new
techniques, resulting in reduced operating
times.
2 System Architecture
The application in this case uses the
PostgreSQL DBMS and has a client interface
developed in C ++. It communicates with
Oracle applications through the Foreign Data
Wraper mechanism and proprietary DBMS
applications through CSV files synchronized
with the pgAgent service (Figure 1). In terms
of operations, the main modules are: Figure 1. General data flow
- module inputs and outputs (in a warehouse entry may correspond to the output of another
storage);
- inventory management module;- nomenclatures;
- import / export modules with other applications;
- reporting modules;
- Interface with mobile devices.
The overall diagram application interfacing with other applications can be accomplished
through the foreign data wraper mechanism, which allows mapping of other servers such as
Oracle. An Oracle server will appear in PostgreSQL as a postgresql schema. This mechanism
allows only the use of standard SQL common to both DBMSs.
3. Module deliveries operated from mobile devices

In order to simplify the code on mobile devices and for better control over writing code,
several plpgsql functions have been developed to simplify operation. So we have the plpgsql
functions:
Access function – android.acces_utiliz –
takes as input: username, the default password
and identifier Android (optional) and returns the
password generated for the current user, the
password with which will log automatically to
each section of database access; Also function
returns a list of warehouses where the user has
access. Using the android system identifier
simplifies access since it is no longer necessary
to enter username and password, the android
identifier being automatically sent to the
application server.
The function consists of the following steps:
• In table access check for the username-
password combination data;
• Examine the user's existence in the access
table separately. If no user ID is registered
android supervisor can associate application
identifier with a user name and may therefore
allow access to that user;
• Check existing role within the database, if
there is any temporary objects will be detached
and will be deleted role;
• A new password is generated randomly and
the appropriate role is created;
• Identify storages where the user has access
and build a string with them;
• It takes control of the new role, it will enter
with the new password after the expiry of the
current session (the new password is not user-
accessible and is for the application only).
Delivering validation function –
android.blx_valid – the function takes over the
Figure 2. The main activities WO(Work Order) for which the selected items
are taken, and returns the generated number by which the delivered delivery is identified. In the
function android.blx_valid is performed:
• Record the current event;
• Verify the WO reference validates, otherwise it leaves the function with the corresponding
error code;
• Add information at delivery level; all items within the selected WO site will have the same
number identification Delivery
◦ generate and add delivery number;
◦ search for the corresponding WO destination and add it;
◦ add a reference for the current WO.
• Add the series (less accessories) to the delivery table with the validated / transmitted option
with the attached delivery number (there is a table linking the series and the rest of the attached
information such as code, description and so on);
• Removes from stock the series involved;
• In the case of accessories, breaks down the series encountered according to the quantities
selected for delivery and registers them in the series table;
• Remove previous series from stock;
• Add in stock the series resulting from splitting that remain;
• Add to the item-level delivery table the series resulting from splitting that are for delivery;
• Also add the delivery number to the delivery table.
Delivery report in html format – android.blx_html - the function has as its argument the
delivery identifier and returns the contents of the report in html format. In this regard, both
headline information (for example delivery number, delivery date, operator, destination) and item
level information (series, code, description and so on) are added.
4. The Techniques used

The base of the application consists of
implemented plpgsql functions (over one
hundred) so that it provides increased flexibility
to the application, and the client interface can be
easily changed.For client interfacing on the
mobile side, the development option in Android
Studio and the JDBC library for postgreSQL
was chosen because there are a number of Figure 4: Access to delivery management
Android-based scanners. For the client interface
on the desktop side were used libraries such as
Graphic Control Classes Group - VCL (Boland /
Embarcadero), C ++ Interface classes with
PostgreSQL PgDAC (Microolap) and for the
mobile client interface libraries classes Android
SDK and JDBC - PostgreSQL
Each user will only deliver items from the
warehouses where access is assigned, and will
only be able to deliver the items that are found
in the application.
Execution classes for SQL codes will run in
separate threads. These are like:
public class PgExecutie extends
AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> Figure 3. Example - java classes for logging
The SQL code is written in the public

method
public Void doInBackground(Void... params)
The transfer of data to the data model is
given in the method:
protected void onPostExecute(Void result)
The class that implements the data model
has the form:
public class ModelData1 extends
ArrayAdapter<ClassData1> implements
Filterable
The Filterable interface class was used to
implement the interactive search for the series
in the list.
Figure 4. The work order received The view WAREH_TO_ANDR_WO has
the fields: woref (WO reference), dateWO
(date to apply), code (item code), descr (item
description), qtywo (quantity within WO),
entity_site_client (client) the quantity already
delivered in the current WO), qtysel (the quantity
selected for delivery, it is only informative - the
machining is at the serial level), type (if it is an
accessory)
The WAREH_TO_ANDR_SN view contains
the series that can be selected / scanned for the
current WO. It has the following fields: code
(item code), descr (description of item), sn (item
series), warehouse (warehouse where item is
located), po (order number), locact (current
location).Retrieving items that have serialThe
accessories have series-generated applications
with a special format:~ [BASE] [SUFFIX] + Qty Figure 5. Retrieving items from warehouse
~ [BASE] [SUFFIX] + Qty
~ - means that the series is generated by the
application
BASE - is an alphabetic code generated at the
entrance to the system and does not change during
operations.
The SUFFIX is alphabetical (a-z, A-Z) and is

generated at each operation (the resulting codes are
consecutive) of reception or delivery. In the case of
a delivery, the suffix is divided into two consecutive
suffixes.Qty - represents the quantity corresponding
to each series, when splitting the series the quantity
will be properly split.
This encoding allows for better tracking of
Figure 6. Populate the table with data - from accessories. The operator using the mobile device
android to DBMS will be able to identify the series by quantity and
location. The WAREH_TO_ANDR_AUX view is for selectable accessories. This view is similar
to WAREH_TO_ANDR_SN but it also has the field for the quantity required to split the series to
extract the quantity.
5. Expanding the module on the mobile devices side

It is necessary that the changes within the application do not lead to rewriting the application
on the mobile device side. In this respect it is necessary to introduce an intermediate layer of
interface between the server and client application.
This way the client will be able to make small changes like:
• showing additional parameters regarding the order for delivery;
• editing a status of items in the
warehouse by the operator.
The overall diagram abstraction level

consists of plpgsql functions and views that
map the server data to the client and vice
versa. Additional delivery information can be
organized as a JSON structure. These can be
displayed by the client in a list. Storing the
postgresql database server structure can be
accomplished using a JSON-type field.
6 Conclusions
Difficulties encountered when developing
a mobile application module:
• Graphical display and communication
with the database are on separate threads,
• The tasks for database communication Figure 7. Integration of external modules
are asynchronous and can create problems in
the classes that implement the data model (derived from the Adapter class) in the sense of delaying
the refresh of the information retrieved from DBMS
• Only non-persistent connections to the database can be used, requiring localized storage of
information;
• The system is suitable if a secure network can be created between the suppliers and the
beneficiary.
For large amounts of data (over a hundred thousand records loaded in memory) can enter
windows that will allow additional selections. The application can also be deployed in other
industry sectors and provides a simple solution for reducing operating times.
References
[1] www.postgresql.org (active April 2018)
[2] https://www.android.com (active April 2018)
[3] Nguyen Viet Khoa, Warehouse Management Application for Android,
Oulu University of Applied Sciences, 2017,
[4] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/building-real-time-inventory-systems-retail (active sept. 2018)
[5] James Maes, The Changing Face of Devices in the Warehouse, sept.2016, http://www.infopluscommerce.
com/technology/the-changing-face-of-devices-in-the-warehouse
Design an assisted editing software module based on
DBMS server side programming
Liviu Şerbănescu
Hyperion University Bucharest, E-mail: livius969[at]gmail.com
Abstract
With the increasing variety of user interface devices comes the need to use the same
application to different types of interfaces (desktop, web or mobile). This requires reducing
the tasks assigned to the user interface. For database applications, the complexity of user
interfaces is transferred to the DBMS server by increasing the complexity of server-side
procedures. Therefore functions on the server database will reside on the model and the user
interface will only be a template to be populated with data from the DBMS, and the controller
that takes events from the user will be configured through the model provided by the
database. Procedural functions implemented at the DBMS level will generate the template for
the interface based on a set of default rules. In order to implement such a mechanism it is
necessary to decompose the user's activities at the interface level in states and transitions.
The article aims to describe such an architecture, which uses PostgreSQL as a database
management system, this DBMS offering great flexibility in server-side programming.
Keywords: software arhitecture, mobil devices, postgresql, plpgsql.
Introduction
Developing a multi-window / desktop software application within a mobile application can
lead to a considerable increase in development time. An application can be more easily controlled
and corrected if the written code is predominantly on the server side.
Developing the code for native mobile applications as opposed to web ones can be more
complex. The application can be simplified if a window can be adapted to many requirements.
Thus, depending on the context same controls may have a different role. Windows / Forms can
have several types of controls: buttons, editing boxes, check box, radio buttons, list, list with
checkbox etc. The text that appears next to the controls can vary depending on the context.
Similarly, data validation functions may vary depending on the context.
The Model View Controller (MVC) model [2] is common in developing client interface
modules, but in the past years, the Model View Controller Service (MVCS) is increasingly used.
Compared to MVC, the MVCS have a Service layer between the controller and the model.
For this it is necessary to develop procedures on the server that will operate between Controller
and Model.
System Architecture
In order to reuse the windows / forms, a status and transitions representation is required. Each
window / form will have a unique status within the application. The generated forms will be based
on a template, for the forms that will be generated, we will have a set of such templates. The
windows/forms of the application, which will constitute the space of the states, will be defined by
the supervisor. When designing them, it will be remembered that elements that differ from window
to window will have to be reduced. There will be three groups of data:
 Data - There are work data of the application;

 Set editing rules - The data needed to elect the next state and event handling
 Form template - Contains the data that lead to the generation of a specific form
Figure 1. General flow
In order to construct the forms we will make sets of rules. Generating the form will take
into account the form template, the set of rules established by the supervisor, and the existing data.
Figure 2. Overview Diagram Generation's form / window
Choosing window controls is done depending on the type of data to be retrieved or the
type of event needed to be generated. For example, if we have a list of true or false values, we will
use a list of checkbox items. The text for each item can be changed according to the displayed
window.
The structure of each form can be stored in a JSON structure, which in turn is stored in a
table. The JSON structure will contain the list of controls for each form (id control, control type,
list of items in the control frame - if applicable, etc.). PostgreSQL allows JSON data and provides
functions for working with them. Each window will respond to different events; for example the
same event from a button control has different treatments depending on the window / status.
Figure 3.Builds set editing rules
The “Form Template” database will also store links to the plpgSQL procedures
responding to those events, materialized in actions on the application database (Data). There are
also situations where certain selections or values of the input data are mutually exclusive, either at
the form level or relative to values previously entered in other windows. To better control these
procedures plpgSQL can be replaced with one procedure that takes as a parameter plpgSQL state
code / window and execute code sequences in the CASE type structures.
Figure 4. States and Transitions - example
After an event in a state we can go into another state or we can remain in the same state
(Figure 4). For example, entering an erroneous data will keep us in the same state / window. It is
also possible that by going through several states to return to its initial state (eg F3 -> F4 -> F5 ->
F3).
Figure 5. Transitions between states / windows
The transition between two states involves:

 assumes the existence of an event in the initial state;
 check validation rules of operation;
 saving form data to the database;
 determining the new window that will be displayed to the user;
 generate the new window, based on the newly calculated state.
Figure 6. Generate edit form / window
Controls, data accessed via the “Form Template” are populated with data corresponding
to the current status.
Implementation
For deployment we can have plpgSQL functions that treat each state separately or a single
function that takes the status code argument. Thus we have plpgSQL functions:
 function for data validation : validation_function( IN status_no text, IN datax JSON,
OUT cod_mess text, OUT mess text ) - take the current status code and the data in the
form into a JSON structure and return a message code and message text as a result of the
checks;
 function for generating the form : generate_form( IN status_no text, OUT cod_mess text,
OUT mess text ) - take the current status code and return a message code and message text
as a result of code generation execution;
 function to determine the next state: next_state( IN old_status_no text, OUT

new_status_no text, OUT cod_mess text, OUT mess text ) - take the current status code
and return next status and/or a message code and message text as a result of compute the
new state.
Figure 7. The procedures involved in building the form
The next_state function determines the following state based on: set of rules and data already
entered. The set of rules may contain elements related to history states and transitions such as to
avoid repeated circular completion.
Conclusions
By applying this technique, the development effort moves from the client interface to the
server side of the DBMS. With the complexity of the application, including the number of
windows, the complexity of the plpgSQL functions will increase only by their size and not by the
complexity of the code. This may lead to a treatment unit at the application level and a better
tracking code.
References
[1] www.postgresql.org (active April 2018)
[2] Asher Toqeer, MVC and MVCS : Software Engineering, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mvc-
mvcs-software-engineering-asher-toqeer/ (activ sept. 2018).
Section
INTEL® EDUCATION
Innovation in Education and Research
21st Century challenges (IntelEDU):

 Digital Curriculum, collaborative rich-media
applications, student software, teacher software
 Improved Learning Methods, interactive and
collaborative methods to help teachers incorporate
technology into their lesson plans and enable
students to learn anytime, anywhere
 Professional Development, readily available training
to help teachers acquire the necessary ICT skills
 Connectivity and Technology, group projects and
improve communication among teachers, students,
parents and administrators
Experimental Design of Passive House
Roxana-Elena Ion1, Sanda Voinea1
(1) University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, Măgurele, Atomiștilor Street,

no. 405, Bucharest, ROMANIA
E-mail: sandavoinea[at]3nanosae.org
Abstract
The paper aims to describe the design of passive house and to implement an experimental
stand for a semi-automated house that can be used in classes by students for measuring
temperature and humidity and providing solutions for passive house ventilation systems. The
model house scale is 1:40. The experimental model is built using Forex boards and Cork
boards. The ventilation system consist in a temperature and humidity sensor DHT-11,
Arduino shield D1 ROBOT for reading temperature and humidity, Arduino Mega 2560
development platform and a 12 V ventilator, controlled by Arduino. The paper highlights the
advantages of using an experimental stand by students in order to test and design solution for
improving energy efficiency and ventilation system at passive or conventional buildings.
Keywords: Passive house, Arduino, temperature sensors, automation, physics education
1. Introduction
A passive house is a standard for energy efficiency in a building that has very low energy
consumption for space heating and cooling, therefore the ecological footprint is reduced
(Schnieders and Hermelink, 2006). The concept of Passive House was introduced by Germans and
refers to a house with an annual space heat requirement of 15 kWh/ (m 2 ‧year); a total energy
consumption for heating, hot water and electricity that not exceed 120 kWh/ (m 2 ‧year) and leaked
air volume must not be higher than 0.6 of the house volume per hour (Schnieders and Feist, 2015).
The purpose of the paper is to create a passive house replica, a model house that can be used to
test different types of ventilation system and can be used to observe the thermal changes in terms
of temperature and humidity.
The main advantage in using an experimental stand at classes is that students have the
opportunity to learn by practice, working directly with the materials they are studying and taking
part in real-time data sampling. By participating directly in the changes that may occur on the
experiment, they observe the process in real time (Eyler, J. 2009). In adition the students becomes
aware about the positive environmental impact implementing this model house in ordinary
constructions. Many studies showed that domestic heating is one of the important factor for air
pollution (Skliros et al 2014, Manolache et al 2017, Voinea et al 2018).
2. The model house design and the ventilation system

The model house is build using forex and cork boards. These boards were first cut using a
digital cutting table, than the plates were joined using adhesive (Figs.1,2). The wall has a thickness
of 100 mm.
Figure 1. 3D model of the house Figure 2. Model house design
For project implementation we used the following materials: breadboard, an Arduino Mega
2560, one Arduino D1 ROBOT shield for reading data, one DHT-11 temperature and humidity
sensors, one 12 V ventilator, 2 LEDs (Green, Red), 1 x 220 ohm resistors and jump wires to
connect (Fig.3).
Figure 3. Components used to create the model house

For the real house it can be used four
sensors, placed each one in the four
corners of the house as shown in figure 4.
The energy consumption can be supplied
using a solar panel system integrated in the
command system of the house.
The Arduino Mega 2560
microcontroller is controlling the
ventilation system. Inside the house is a
DHT-11 temperature and humidity sensor
that collects data about the environment.
When the temperature has reached the
maximum accepted level, the red led is on,
Figure 4. The placement of the four DHT-11
and the ventilator starts cooling the
sensors at the real house
interior of the model house. The two LEDs are using as visible alarm when the temperature has
changed in the room.
Figure 5. Programming cod fragment
The ventilation system build for the model house is an experimental representation of the heat
pump that provides heat and cooling for the building.
Figure 6. Block diagram of the house automated system design
The ventilation system can be used for both heating and cooling, so the ventilator used at the
model house can either cool the air inside the experimental stand or heat the air, depending on the
air source supply.
Figure 7. Representation of the experiment
3. Energy efficiency
In order to have a passive energy house, the building has to achieve a passive house standard in
which the energy consumption per year for heating and cooling must be less than 15 kWh/ (m 2
‧year) (Riederer and Marchio, 2002; Rekstad et al, 2015; Dan et al, 2016; Mihai et al, 2017;
Ekström et al, 2018). In order to determine the amount of energy consumed for the heating/cooling
of house, the students calculate the total amount of energy needed using the “Normative for the
calculation of global coefficients for thermal insulation in housing buildings” (Indicative C 107/1-
2005). So, by knowing the value of thermal resistance for every material used in building the
envelope of the house, it can determine the efficiency of the house from equation [1].
[1]
Therefore, the students can establish the thickness of thermal insulation necessary for the
design house to meet the standards for a passive energy house.
Conclusion
As shown in a series of educational physics papers, the teachers can use appropriate teaching
strategies and various computer tools, virtual experiments or smart phones to motivate students in
the study of science (Iofciu et al, 2010; Iofciu et al, 2011; Stoica et al, 2011; Oprea and Miron,
2014; Marciuc et al, 2016; Grigore et al, 2017).
The model house can be built with different types of materials and it can be improved by using
multiple sensors for different data sampling.
The experimental stand is an educational way for students to enhance their knowledge about
energy efficiency, passive energy field and renewable energy.
The stand can be improved by adding solar panel for the energy supply and students can test
and determine which energy supply is more efficient.
An important role of testing the experimental house by students and determine the energy
efficiency of a passive house is to change the mentality of young people in order to be friendlier
with the environment.
References
Dan D., Tanasa C., Stoian, V., Brata, S., Stoian, D., Nagy Gyorgy, T., Florut, S.C. (2016): Passive house
design—An efficient solution for residential buildings in Romania, Energy for Sustainable Development
32, 99–109.
Ekström T., Bernardo R., Blomsterberg Å. (2018): Cost-effective passive house renovation packages for
Swedish single-family houses from the 1960s and 1970s, Energy and Buildings 161 89–102.
Eyler, J. (2009): The Power of Experiential Education, Liberal Education, 95, 4, 24-31.
Grigore, I.; Miron, C. and Barna, E.S. (2017): Exploring Excel Spreadsheets to Simulate the Projectile
Motion in the Gravitational Field, Romanian Reports in Physics, 69, 1, 901.
Marciuc, D., Miron, C. and Barna, E.S. (2016): Using Geogebra and Vpython Software for Teaching Motion
in a Uniform Gravitational Field, Romanian Reports in Physics, 68, 4, 1603–1620.
Manolache G., Voinea S., Dimitrios S., Stefan S (2017): Comparative study of urban and rural atmospheric
aerosols in and near Bucharest Romania, Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, 16,
10,.2381-2389.
Mihai M., Tanasiev V., Dinca C., Badea A., Viduc R. (2017): Passive house analysis in terms of energy
performance, Energy and Buildings 144, 74–86.
Oprea, M. and Miron, C. (2014): Mobile Phones in the Modern Teaching of Physics, Romanian Reports in
Physics, 66, 4, 1236-1252.
Rekstad J., Meir M., Murtnes E , Dursun A. (2015): A comparison of the energy consumption in two passive
houses, one with a solar heating system and one with an air–water heat pump, Energy and Buildings 96,
149–161.
Riederer, P. and Marchio, D. (2002): Visier J.C. Influence of sensor position in building thermal control:
criteria for zone models”, Energy and Buildings, 34, 785-798.
Schnieders, J. and Feist, W. (2015): Ludwig Rongen, Passive Houses for different climate zones, Energy and
Buildings 105, 71–87.
Schnieders, J. and Hermelink, A. (2006): CEPHEUS results: measurements and occupants’ satisfaction provide
evidence for Passive Houses being an option for sustainable building, Energy Policy 34, 151–171.
Skliros D., Iordache AM., Ceaus C., Cucu A., Popovici L., Voinea S. (2014): Mass spectrometry at
atmospheric pressure: the analysis of the volatile organic compounds and SO 2, Romanian Journal of
Physics, 59, 9-10, 1074-1083.
Voinea S.,. Manolache G., Iorga G., Stefan S (2018), Relationships between PM10 mass concentrations and
aerosol optical parameters over Magurele, Romania, Romanian Reports in Physics, – in press
http://www.rrp.infim.ro/inpress.html
Iofciu, F., Miron, C. and Antohe, S. (2010): Interactive Conceptual Maps Part of Constructivist Environment
for Advanced Physics Teaching, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Virtual Learning,
ICVL, 95-100.
Iofciu, F., Miron, C. and Antohe, S. (2011): A constructivist approach of advanced physics concepts: using a
cognitive map for the study of magnetoresistive materials, 3rd World Conference on Educational Sciences
(WCES), 2011. Published by Elsevier Ltd. in Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 461-465.
Stoica, D., Paragina, F., Paragina, S.; Miron, C. and Jipa, A. (2011): The interactive whiteboard and the
instructional design in teaching physics, 3rd World Conference on Educational Sciences (WCES), 2011.
Published by Elsevier Ltd. in Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 3316-3321.
Indicative C 107/1-2005 - http://www.tmt.ugal.ro/crios/Support/IEACA/Anexe/C107-1-3-2005.pdf
E-learning in the russian internet: an overview of major platforms
and resources
Elena Aksenova1
(1) Russian Peoples’ Friendship University, Miklukho-Maklaya str.6, 117198, Moscow,

Russia, eiak[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
E-learning is one of the innovative technologies of formation of students' professional
competence. The distance learning in the Russian educational organizations has both
advantages over the traditional forms of education and some peculiarities. It sets certain
specific requirements for the teacher and the learner. In particular, one should keep in mind
that all foreign educational resources suggest a proficient command of a foreign (primarily
English) language. There are resources in the Russian Internet too that favor the formation of
general cultural and professional competence. And all courses and modules are available in
Russian. The most popular websites are: LendWings, Uniweb, Zillion, Universarium, etc.
They offer teaching materials on business, design, photography, programming and other
subjects. There are mostly free courses, pay courses can be acquired in batches (several
pieces at a time within one subject). After completing the course, students are awarded
certificates. The courses place emphasis on the programs, but not on individual video
lectures. Upon completion, you can be awarded a university diploma, or a certificate. The
Runet currently offers more than 400 training programs. Their prices vary depending on the
prestige of the university and other factors. Thus, the educational innovations contribute to
the expansion, implementation and use of innovative technologies of adoption of educational
programs and the formation of a wide range of competencies. E-learning as an educational
innovation promotes the development of competencies and is aimed to provide opportunities
to citizens of the Russian Federation residing in remote and hard-to-reach areas for
additional professional education.
Keywords: distance learning, the Runet, platform, resources
1 Introduction
Distant education is one of the innovational technologies of forming the professional
competences of students.
The introduction of distant education in Russian educational establishments has the advantages
over the traditional forms of education and its own peculiarities as well, having the specified
requirements to teachers and students. One should not forget that all foreign learning resources
assume a good level of foreign language, English in particular.
2 The tendencies of distant education in Russia

According to IPOboard [Review of the market of direct and venture capital investments, 2014],
following the results of 2014, the volume of the distant education market in Russia is estimated at
9,3 billion rubles and the average annual rate of growth amounts to 16,9%. The experts suppose
that the Russian market of online education is behind the Western market for 5-7 years. In its
calculations, IPOboard took into consideration the training courses on products or client-oriented
approach, programs for new employees, administrative education, trainings on sales, IT-trainings
and other kinds of services.
The review of the Russian market of online education is represented in the report by the
consulting company, J’son & Partners Consulting (for 2014 year). According to the analysts' data,
about 15 million dollars were involved into the Russian market in 2013-2014 years. The market
includes over 50 large projects with tens of thousands of listeners and the audience of the market
leaders may count several millions of students (Lingualeo service covers 6 million of users from
Russia).
As estimated by Edutainme, the number of Russian projects in edtech field is rather bigger:
EdIndex catalogue includes about one and a half hundred of projects. In monetary terms, the
market volume amounts to 400 million of rubles for 2014 and the market growth in monetary
terms exceeds 70 % since 2013 [Market of online education in Russia and in the world: the
segment of mass online courses].
Let us make some important conclusions, based on the report by J’son & Partners Consulting:
about 7,2 million of Russians participated in online education just for once; most of them are
interested in learning of English, also the platforms preparing for the Unified State Examination
and the platforms developing the programming skills are popular; most of online students study
using their PCs, but not the mobile devices; payment for courses contributes to their successful
completion.
If the Western market of online education was developed with free projects, the Russian
market, on the contrary, primarily used the commercial model of education.
The additional information can be found in the investigation of audience in MOOC-platforms
for the national platform «Open Education», carried out by Edutainme in 2015. The investigation
considered only the platforms of Mass Open Online Courses (MOOC).
It’s important to notice that pupils were absent among the interrogation participants, the
average age was 25–45 years.
The investigation, carried out by Edutainme, Dnevnik.ru and the Institute of Psychology of
Russian Academy of Education in 2014, was dedicated to the online resources, oriented directly at
pupils.
The questionnaire survey covered 26 thousand of pupils, over 100 school principals, 4000
teachers and 4000 parents, and it showed the following results [Sinelnikov, Chebotar, Tarasenko,
Milyakina, Abasheva, 2015]:
- 25% of parents are ready to pay the educational digital services regardless their price
- Pupils prefer to find the services and applications in the Internet by themselves as these
services help them in the studies when the teachers' explanations are not understood;
- Only 5% of puplils don't have their own PC, tablet PC or a smartphone;
- The most popular educational resources among pupils and their parents: specialized websites
(47%), video tutorials (28%), mobile applications (22%), electronic textbooks (19%).
- The most effective educational resources in parents' and teachers' opinion: video materials
(average grade— 8,45 at a 10-point scale), websites (7,49), electronic textbooks (6,60) and
laboratories (6,25), video games (6,08), mobile applications (5,70) and simulators (5,26).
In 2016, the number of Russians, participating in educational online courses on domestic and
foreign platforms, has increased twice, compared to the previous year and it has achieved 1 million
of people. At that, the residents of Central Russia chose more often IT-destination, as for Siberia
and Ural— programming, astronomy and marketing. Such statistics was originally represented by
the largest online educational resources in the collective report. In 2017, the experts expect further
growth of open courses which may lead to the "giant staff scarcity on the market of online
education".
Nowadays many universities provide faculties of distant education. Students get higher
education, communication with the teachers via the Internet, attending webinars, reviewing the
recorded lections, exchanging electronic textbooks, etc. The most popular disciplines are available
in online format, modern students have a wide choice of subjects to study. Practically,
sophisticated university students do not limit themselves with "live lections" as they understand
that it is more convenient to find the most actual and highly sought information by virtue of the
distant education. According to the statistics, the most popular online disciplines for students and
adults are programming, business theory and practice, marketing and foreign languages. More
frequently pupils learn online maths, English, Russian, physics, they actively prepare for the
Unified State Examination and the State Final Examination with online pedagogues. In recent
years the demand for humanities knowledge is growing: online lessons of literature, rhetoric,
cultural studies and philisophy are also eagerly sought. Besides, nowadays various educational
resources offer online courses of photography, design, home-based business, meditation, yoga, art,
music, etc.
If to speak about the effect, the rector of the National Research University Higher School of
Economics, Yaroslav Kuzminov considers that the introduction of online courses can be compared
with the coming out of a printed book: "It will allow to significantly improve the quality of
education and to widely expand the number of people, admitted to the best knowledge".
Alongside with that, this is an "internal source of resources saving in the education system and a
possibility to get rid of low-performing and noncompetitive teachers". As it follows from the
report, in 2017 online education in Russia will continue to expend: "The paper certificates of study
will be gradually replaced by digital portfolios. The forms of collective student work will be
developed, as well as the interactive lessons in virtual environments",— the Deputy Prorector on
educational technologies of the Ural Federal University, Vasily Tretiakov points out.
3 Russian educational resources in the internet

The resources, contributing to the forming of cultural and professional competences also
function in the Russian Internet space. Notice that all courses and modules are available in
Russian. LendWings, Uniweb, Zillion, Universarium, etc. are the most popular resources. They
offer training materials on business, design, photography, programming and other disciplines.
Basically the platforms contain free courses, as for the paid courses, they can be obtained in
packages (several units at once, within one discipline). After passing the course, students get their
certificates.
Almost all Internet resources of distant education can be divided into the following categories:
— by various academic disciplines: from computer studies to psychology;
— for learning the performance skills;
— for development of personal performance and growth;
— further and additional training;
— other courses.
One can distinguish the main Russian resources which allow to get professional knowledge,
skills and competences in a distant form:
1. EduMarket (the developer – EduMarket Limited Liability Company)
This is the aggregator of training programs and educational establishments. Portal №1 on the
Russian market, providing the additional professional education. The unique services for those
who want to study and improve their professional level. Over 20 000 actual activities from 5 700
teaching companies. Currently the system has over 1200 free courses.
The short list of destinations where one can find free courses: Administration, management,
business education; Bookkeeping, economy, finances, audit; Personal competences, growth and
careers; Personnel, staff management, HR; Marketing, advertising, PR; Small business activities,
entrepreneurship; Foreign languages; Sales, distribution, work off; Education, coaching, training
skills; Young specialists and youth; Construction and architecture; Legal studies, law; others.
2. National platform of Open Education
The platform has been created by the Association «National Platform of Open Education»,
established by the leading universities— Lomonosov Moscow State University, Peter the Great
St.Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg State University, the National University of
Science and Technology MISiS, the National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Ural Federal University and ITMO University.
Nowadays it functions under the patronage of the Ministry of Education and Science of the
Russian Federation. The platform represents courses, presentations, video lections on the basic
disciplines, studied at Russian universities. Currently the resource disposes over 400 training
programs. Costs vary depending on the status of higher education institutions, duration of training
and other factors.
All courses, placed on the platform, are available without formal requirements to the basic
educational level. The platform foresees the possibility to get a verified certificate for those who
desire to pass an online course while participating in the bachelor or specialist program in their
higher education institute (this opportunity is unique for Russia). It is possible to get the certificate
upon condition of passing the control activities of the online course with the students' personal
identification and the control of passing conditions.
3. «Theory and Practice of Moscow» is the local platform of knowledge exchange.
Themes of courses: business, design, art, science, technologies, psychology, etc. Cost: paid
and free online courses. T&P unites people and institutions with the educational events. Every day
thousands of organizers add there the information about their lections, master classes, courses and
conferences in all fields of knowledge. Now T&P helps to create online communities as regards to
inspiring ideas and it allows talented people to find ways for self-fulfilment, effectively developing
the knowledge-driven economy.
Essentially, this platform is designed for those who gropes for knowledge and wants to share it.
The resource functions in the following way: event organizers add on the website the information
about the lections, master classes and conferences, managed by them, and citizens of Moscow and
St-Petersburg find the events of their interest and attend them. Besides, T&P is also an online
community. The section «Video» contains the recorded lections on design, art, business,
humanities and technology sciences. All videos are accompanied by the introductory description
and they are free of charge.
Opportunities, provided by the project: job vacancies, voluntary programs, money for projects,
competitions, payment for education, residences, probations.
4. TutorOnline is the system of distant education based on Skype interaction, Skype
consultations and online lessons with a private tutor. The company works exclusively in this
segment during 5 years. Over 8000 thousand of people learn on this website with online tutors and
get the necessary knowledge on all school subjects, foreign languages, academic courses, etc.
In view of the typological analysis of Russian online resources, one can make the general
conclusions regarding the theme and functional of projects:
– The Russian market is notable for the popular distant tutoring (minimum five large services
exist) and paid platforms with online courses (over ten platforms with paid and free courses).
– The world and the Russian market contain a wide choice of resources for exam preparation,
study of maths, programming and foreign languages. In the meantime, services for humanitarian
subjects are less developed in both cases.
– The Russian market represents on a limited scale the irregular formats, moving away from
the traditional model of education as a content delivery (rare examples — educational video games
and trainings with the adaptive mechanisms).
– Such demanded functions as a real-time feedback, the possibility of personal conversation
with a teacher and other students, testing, statistics of the progress, services for the document
exchange are poorly represented.
Conclusion
Therefore, the development of educational innovations provides the progress, introduction and
use of the innovational technologies which help to assimilate the educational programs and to form
a wide range of competences. Online training, as an educational innovation, contributes to the
development of competences and it is aimed to provide the possibilities of additional and
professional education for citizens of the Russian Federation, residing on remote territories.
References
Market of online education in Russia and in the world: the segment of mass online courses. J’son &
PartnersConsulting. URL: [http://json.tv/ict_telecom_analytics_view/rynok-onlayn-obrazovaniya-v-
rossii-i-mire-segmentmassovyh-onlayn-kursov-20141209065340]
Review of the market of direct and venture capital investments (2014). URL:
[http://ipoboard.ru/files/cms/200dff3c0e542cd52294f166a762cfe0]
Sinelnikov V.V., Chebotar N.А., Tarasenko А.N., Milyakina А.G., Abasheva Е.V. (2015): The results of all-
Russian investigation: to what extent the school system is ready to the introduction of new technologies in
education. Piter, St-Petersburg.
E-learning: will distance education replace traditional one?
Elena Aksenova1, Dilbar Amonova2
(1) Russian Peoples’ Friendship University, Miklukho-Maklaya str.6, 117198, Moscow,

Russia, eiak[at]yandex.ru
(2) Russian-Tajik (Slavic) University, M. Tursunzade St. 30, 734025, Dushanbe,
Republic of Tajikistan, dilbar_amonova[at]mail.ru
Abstract
Many experts in education agree that training students for the future, modern high school
uses educational technologies of the past. That is why many students voluntarily refuse to
attend full-time sessions and opt for remote education in order to acquire necessary
professional skills without leaving home. The authors of this article carried out a study of
students' reasoning for mastering the undergraduate and graduate educational programs, as
well as advanced training and retraining in the short-term and medium-term courses and
trainings. The study showed that the following groups of learners chose the distance
education as a technology of mastering necessary knowledge and skills: (i) students
combining studies and work; (ii) students from outlying localities; (iii) students receiving the
second higher professional education and therefore of older age; (iv) attendees of refresher
and professional retraining courses and (v) students with disabilities. Each of these
categories is characterized by their features of motivation and organization of the educational
process on the basis of remote technologies. There are a number of restrictions (primarily of
legislative nature) that forbid to entirely shift from full-time training to remote one. However,
the activity of Russian universities, modern worldwide trends and the demand for distance
learning from the target groups of learners allow us to predict the change in legislation and
the increase of e-learning hours in the educational programs.
Keywords: e-learning, traditional training, alternative, selection, target group
1 Introduction.
Major players in the online learning market are Open, Virtual, Electronic, Network, and Cyber-
universities, Smart universities, the main growth of which has been observed in the last decade.
The scale of their activities is staggering, each of them has trained more than 500 thousand people.
What are "big data" and how can they help modern students? Will on-line instruction
technology replace traditional classroom training? These questions are currently of particular
relevance to educational science theoreticians, and representatives of university management, state
administration bodies, directly for teachers and students. Development prospects for distance
learning technologies are actively debated in international and national scientific events, in
particular, they were discussed at the conference "EdCrunch" organized by NUST "MISIS", the
center of technological entrepreneurship Digital October and the online magazine about new
educational technologies "Edutainme.ru" with the support of the Ministry of education and science
of the Russian Federation.
2 Trends in distance education

In 2010 more than 6 million students in the United States used the remote platform training. It
is expected that by 2019, half of the training will be held online.
The global eLearning market for 2015 is estimated at $107 billion and is without doubt one of
the most rapidly growing markets, which, according to reliable research forecasts, by the end of
2017 will reach the value of 107 billion dollars. The structure of the world market of e-learning is
segmented as follows: Europe – 41,6%, Asia – 28,4%, North America – 22.4%, and South
America – 3.3%.
Global development of distance education has reached its turning point. A large number of
world-renowned institutions of higher education included this type of training into their
programmes as an option, requested by a modern approach to education. We will name just a few
of the most important educational institutions that use distance learning in its educational system.
In the USA these are: National Technological University, Western Governors University,
University of Phoenix, California Distance Learning Program and Columbia Network for
Engineering Education. In Europe e-learning is used by the International Council for Open and
Distance Education (abbr. ICDE, Oslo), United Kingdom Open University, Virtual University
Enterprises, University for Industry, and many others. These well-organized educational programs
are characterized by a large number of students. Data show that in 2012, more than a billion
people worldwide, studied online, and it is predicted that by 2019 50% of all teaching will be
conducted online [Remote or traditional training?].
3 The development of distance learning technologies in Russia

Distance learning technology opens up opportunities for different categories of citizens,
regardless of their gender, age, educational status, experience, mode of the day in getting a new
profession, qualification, updating of professional competences, etc. But the greater concern is the
fact that in Russia these processes are presented slightly. The question is how to intensify the
process of integrating new technologies in the national education system?
Distance learning has been implemented in Russia largely due to the experiment, the need for
which arose after the Congress of UNESCO held in Moscow in 1996. The Congress showed
clearly that many countries saw further development of national education systems with the
increasing use of remote technologies. Russia declared of its readiness to develop this educational
area by presenting at the Congress of the UNESCO a comprehensive development program for
distance education. For the purpose of testing the initial phase of this program in July 1997, the
experiment was initiated in the field of distance education. Initially the experiment involved two
universities with different forms of ownership: state – Moscow state University of Economics,
statistics and Informatics with affiliated educational institutions and non-state – Modern
Humanities University (Institute). In the second phase, the experiment was joined by the
international Institute of Management LINK, Moscow State Industrial University, All-Russian
Correspondence Financial-Economic Institute, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. A total
number of experiment participants amounted to 16 higher educational institutions of Russia.
During the experiment, they established 588 training centers. More than 206 thousand students and
trainees are trained with the use of distance learning technology with the assistance of 13
thousand lecturers, tutors and teachers. Almost 45 thousand graduates successfully passed the final
examination in state attestation commissions. If in 1997 distance learning was regarded only as
one of the possible ways of obtaining education, 20 years later, many elements of the technology,
namely: case-study, Internet technology is widely used in traditional forms of education. Basing
on the experience obtained in the experiment of distance learning implementation, new normative
documents were prepared and came into effect, in large measure legalizing methods of distance
learning. A large share of responsibility for the quality of training was transferred from the
branches and representative offices to the head university. "Methods of distance learning
organization in institutions of higher professional education of the Russian Federation" were
prepared, drafts of several industry standards being developed. At the parliamentary hearings last
year, the distance learning experiment connected with the development of distance learning
methods based on information and telecommunication technologies received a positive rating. The
heads of several universities participating in the experiment were awarded the government prize
for the development of scientific-methodological and organizational-technological bases of the
Federal University network of distance learning.
At the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year 254 universities (out of the total number of 950)
in the Russian Federation implemented an innovative technology training and carried out
educational programs completely in off-campus remote mode [Indicators of education, 2016].
4 Perspectives of distance learning: opinions of students

Modern innovative learning technologies, including distance form, are becoming more and
more relevant to the modern education system. The Russian national education system by
declaring active use of e-learning still needs to be studies reflecting the satisfaction level of
students of different specialties of training in distance form. Such studies allow to monitor the
needs of the students "comfort zone" and "zone of discomfort" as part of the educational process in
a timely manner to track weaknesses and reinforce strengths. Monitoring of student satisfaction
(students, pupils) should become a regular practice educational organizations that seek not only to
formally declare distance learning, but also to ensure its high quality and comfort for students.
The authors of this article conducted a survey reflecting the demand for distance learning for
University students.
We formulated the hypothesis that the demand for e-learning technologies among students of
the same speciality may be different and depends not on the content of the educational program
and educational process, but more on social characteristics of the student.
As the main social characteristics that were diagnosed during the study were selected as
follows:
- gender;
- age;
- marital status;
- residing with parents;
- attitude to work (working or unemployed);
- the combination of work and training;
- distance from place of residence to the place of study;
- state of health;
- self-assessment of financial situation;
- size of the parent family (student from the multi-child family or quasi-planned family);
- the basic educational status (whether the student receives the first or subsequent professional
education);
- the parental status.
The survey involved 560 respondents enrolled in the specialty "Management" and undergoing
training under the program "Business Management".
Among other, respondents were asked a question: “Assess the attractiveness degree of remote
classes for your using 5-grade system, where
- 5 grades – “Very attractive, this is what I need!”
- 4 grades – “Attractive, I would like to obtain remote education”
- 3 grades – “Why not, I can try to study remotely”
- 2 grades – “Not quite attractive, I consider the traditional study better than remote one”
- 1 grade – “Not attractive, I don’t want to obtain remote education. Only traditional
education”.
Therefore, based on the correlation analysis, the attractiveness of the remote study for students
with different social characteristics, the following figures were received (correlation coefficient):
- sex – 0, 04;
- age – 0,5;
- marital status – 0,03;
- living with parents – 0,07;
- attitude to work (a jobholder or an unemployed) – 0,4;
- combining of work and education – 0,7;
- distance from the place of residence to the place of study – 0,6;
- health status – 0,5;
- self-assessment of the material status;
- size of the family (a student from a family with many or few children) – 0,1;
- basic educational status (whether a student receives the first or advanced vocational
education) – 0,6;
- parental status – 0,2;
- type of educational program (basic vocational education or advanced courses) – 0,4.
The study showed that distance learning as a technology to obtain the required knowledge and
skills has been chosen by the following groups of students:
1) the students who have to combine study and work;
2) students from remote communities;
3) students receiving the second higher education and, hence, older;
4) courses of improvement of qualification and professional retraining;
5) students with disabilities.
Each of these categories is characterized by the motivation features and organization of
educational process on the basis of remote technologies. However, the list of motives, allowing to
make a choice between traditional and distance learning in favor of remote education, is presented
in table 1.
Table 1. Comparison of distance and traditional learning.
Criterion Distance Traditional
learning training
1. Regardless of where the learning (Independence of place of
+ -
learning)
2. Independence of training time + -
3. Low price for the user + -
4. The possibility of teaching time self-organization + -
5. Discussions with other students from the course + +
6. Individual consultations with a teacher + +
7. Technical support + +\-
8. Texts for reading + +
9. Learning tools + -
10. Multimedia materials + -
11. A list of additional training resources + +
12. The deferred study and unlimited repetition of the material + +/-
13. Documents for projects and seminars + +
14. Exercises, practical assignments + +
15. Testing in real time + +
16. Final exams or other assessment tools + +
17. Immediate availability of results of final grades + -
18. Dictionary and FAQ database + -
19. Document upon completion of training + +
5 Perspectives of distance learning: experts

Assessing the prospects of dissemination of distance learning and the possibility of absorption
of traditional forms, experts in the field of distance learning note the following:
1. The growing popularity of distance learning courses with consumers through access to
quality content provided by the top-rated universities, gives grounds to talk about the rapid growth
of demand on the distance learning. And the market will respond to this demand by the inevitable
decline of traditional educational products. One of the world's most popular projects in the sphere
of mass on-line education Coursera provides free access to educational courses of the best
universities in the world. The project collaborates with universities who publish and provide
system courses on various branches of knowledge. Students attend courses, interact with fellow
students, take tests and exams directly on the website Coursera. In July 2014, Coursera registered
more than 7 million users and 702 courses from 108 educational institutions. The founder of
Coursera Daphne Koller said: "the Students say that they "are inspired by" the possibilities of new
technologies. They have the opportunity to access educational courses, developed at Princeton,
Stanford, the University of Lausanne and other leading universities of the world – this is the level
of knowledge that is impossible to obtain in its home market of education" [Whether on-line
education replace traditional universities?].
2. Learning efficiency depends on the intersection and continuous mutual integration of off-
line and on-line education. Anant Agarwal, the founder of the educational platform "edX", notes:
"We understand importance of using modern technologies now for teaching a variety of
disciplines, including technical ones. For edX, it is very important to maintain a high quality of
education, and we believe it to be inadequate to teach technical subjects without the use of
technology. Now we have virtual labs in biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry and other
subjects. There will be new labs and all of them will be working on-line. If in the work process
people conduct research using the computer, it is possible to train them with the help of the
computer. And it is important, that these technologies penetrate into the universities. Now two of
the three bachelors graduating from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of technology – note of the
authors), use computers for teaching in the classroom. An increasing number of universities
significantly change the technology of teaching, not only on-line technology, but off-line
technology as well [3].
Increasing content quality and the development of technological support will lead to a social
reassessment of the advantages of distance learning compared to traditional one. Michio Kaku, an
American physicist of Japanese descent, best-selling author of "Introduction to the theory of
superstrings", "Physics of the impossible", "Physics of the future", notes: "University online
courses already exist, it really is a brilliant idea. However, the dropout rates for these programs are
very high. This is due to the fact that people are still not rebuilt, not learned to work without a
mentor on the principle of "just you and the computer monitor", they have no high motivation. On
the other hand, the online system is in its infancy, it should be corrected. But it is developing and
improving rather quickly, and, of course, it will be basic type of education for next 50 years.
Universities will continue working, but it will be mainly virtual universities, and training therein
will be based on cloud system. Those who attend lectures in traditional educational institutions
will be considered losers. They will be described: "He was not able to construct his own
education" [Michio Kaku,2016].
As for Russian specialists, the participants in the previously mentioned international
conference "EdCrunch", noted the following:
- It is recognized that many employers still doubt efficiency of the diplomas obtained through
virtual learning. However, it is only a matter of time. The online education market is experiencing
rapid growth and this trend in the future will only increase. And that means that employers will
have to recognize the efficiency of preparation of graduates on the basis of distance learning
technologies.
- Can we say that online education has become an alternative to traditional training? The
growing popularity and demand for virtual classes in different options proves this. Of course,
online education still has many tasks to be addressed: from the technical to the social. But it has
been described as a phenomenon of our days. We can hardly say that it will completely replace
schools or universities we got used to attend. But perhaps online learning has the strength to
become the catalyst that will push our educational institutions to the qualitative change.
- Development of new educational technologies and educational forms in the system of general
and higher education in Russia requires taking a number of measures. According to the Regulation
on licensing of educational activities, obligatory requirements are quantitative indicators for the
areas of buildings, as well as the conditions for taking care of students' health. In the case of
distance learning, these indicators are not important, but the obligatory requirement to have them
at the disposal stops the development of the whole educational branch.
- Will on-line education suppress off-line education. No, it won't. If we are talking about such
occupations as surgeon, pilot, they require important practical skills, which can be received only in
the traditional education system. We must convince our pupils, students, applicants to academic
programs, that they don't have to choose one or the other. Studying at universities today you have
a unique opportunity to use on-line knowledge. The future belongs to aggregation. Students now
have the opportunity to use knowledge, objects, approaches that are often completely unique from
open courses and universities [3].
Conclusion
The prejudice that distance learning does not provide results of sufficient quality, can be
refuted by anyone who had experienced this type of education. Distance learning is the choice of
ambitious and hard-working people who don't let lack of time or spatial boundaries interfere with
their learning, not those who want to minimize their obligations and to justify hardships in the
learning process by their laziness. Isolated people and those living in remote areas often prefer this
type of learning to traditional one. Distance learning also provides equal opportunities for persons
with disabilities to fully participate in the educational activities.
Experience shows that learning on the Internet offers plenty of advantages. Education must
adapt to innovations and use the possibilities they provide. Rapidly growing competition among
universities for talented and motivated students, the ever-increasing requirements to the quality of
education pose new challenges to universities. On-line training provides a great opportunity, but,
nevertheless, it is unlikely to completely replace the traditional University in the near future.
References
Indicators of education (2016): The statistical compilation. 2016.
Michio Kaku (2016): The Study will not be based on memorization// http://www.vospitaj.com/blog/mitio-
kaku-uchjoba-uzhe-ne-budet-bazirovatsya-na-zapominanii/.
Remote or traditional training? http://www.link-academy.com/ru/distancionnoe-ili-tradicionnoe-obucenie#
Whether on-line education replace traditional universities? http://www.unkniga.ru/company-news/3565-
smozhet-li-online-obrazovanie-zamenit-universitety.html
E-learning as a tool for regional educational space virtualization
Tonkonog Victoriya1, Polina Ananchenkova2
(1) Federal State Educational Institution of higher vocational training, “Admiral Ushakov
Maritime University”, Leninsky av., Novorossiysk, Russia,
E-mail: tonkonogvv[at]yandex.ru
Russia
Abstract
One of priorities of training in modern system of higher education is forming competences
providing for competitiveness, mobility and professional solvency of future specialist. Since
young people receiving higher professional education are of high mobility and tends to go for
study and work to major metropolitan, economically developed cities and industrial centers,
one of objectives of policy in the field of professional education in Russian Federation is
keeping graduate in region of study and residence. This problem can be solved through
formation of single educational space on basis of remote learning programmes. Applicable in
Russia Federal State Educational Standards in their structure assume so called "basic" block
of disciplines that are mandatory for study by students of all educational institutions of the
country as well as block of "optional" disciplines. As a rule, among others, this block include
disciplines reflecting the sectoral specifics of the region. And such disciplines are studied only
in universities of region concerned, or the Federal District. This article gives concept of
innovative development of regional educational space based on use of remote learning
technologies. Purpose of this work is to provide a mechanism for upgrading educational
space of the region based on remote network system of interaction of regional universities.
The article discusses such issues as: - relevance of problem of educational space
virtualization in accordance with the Federal Law "On education at the Russian Federation";
- mechanism of integration of universities into remote educational space; - methodical
principles for virtualization of regional educational space.
Keywords: educational space, region, virtualization
1 Introduction
Updating research virtualization of the country's educational space is determined by the
following factors:
a) the trend towards virtualization, which manifests itself in an almost unlimited access to
information and problematisizes algorithm selection information in the global world. Today it is
becoming a leading vector for a specific subject of educational interaction and educational space
of Russia;
b) the inconsistency of the system of educational interactions that are becoming virtual. The
main contradiction is:
- the contradiction between the information, including non-constructive information flows, and
the need to obtain constructive knowledge;
- deformation of the traditional axiological scale and the formation of new values and meanings
that do not contribute to the solution of problems related to the selection and systematization of
information in the educational process. Virtual axiological scale fundamentally affects the subject
of cognition, questioning core values;
- virtualization of the modern educational process redefines the goals and objectives of the
educational system. The key to success for a young specialist gets is a quick orientation in
information space – knowledge, and not sustainable of skills, which is often interpreted as negative
consequences of virtualization of the educational space.
The one of the priority tasks of education in modern higher education is the formation of skills,
providing the competitiveness, mobility and professional competence of the future specialist.
Young people receiving higher professional education have high mobility and tend to go to study
and work in major Metropolitan, economic development of cities and industrial centers. Therefore,
one of the objectives of the policy in the field of vocational education in the Russian Federation is
the retention of graduates in the region tuition and accommodation. The solution to this problem is
possible through the formation of a common regional educational space-based on the basis of
distance learning programs.
The goal is to provide a mechanism of modernization of the educational space of region (on an
example of Krasnodar territory) - based remote network system between regional universities.
2 The approach to the formation of the educational space that focuses on the region
The concept of regional educational space in the study of educational problems implies to take
into account the territorial organization of society, as one of the determining factors for the
development of education.
Educational space includes a set of educational programs, events (shares), services
implemented by educational and other institutions and organizations in the region, used in the
methods and technologies of learning.
In each region of the Russian Federation has its own educational space, which is constantly
evolving. This space reflects the specifics of a particular region, its traditions, culture, national and
religious composition of the population, level of economic development etc. The isolation of the
region as a spatial educational units based on the following strategic factors: the commonality of
the territory, natural, climatic, ethnic, social, demographic, economic, cultural and other features
of the development and the resulting community goals, objectives and locations in the country
territorial division of labor; community relations of production and social infrastructure, settlement
system, population affinities, environmental management [Anisimov, 1998]. Accordingly, based
on these assumptions, we can say that the regions differ from each other in geographical, socio-
economic, demographic, climatic, natural and other features.
Regional educational space covers the territory of the Russian region – subject of Federation
and has a dual feature: on the one hand, acts as a space for educational activities, ensuring the
creation of a unified system of information and methodological support on the basis of integration
of information resources that provide the possibility of remote use for educational purposes; on the
other hand, as a complex hierarchical multi-level system of educational institutions and authorities
within the framework of a single educational space, which is in constant interaction with other
spheres of social life, providing for its a direct and indirect impact.
It seems appropriate allocation the region as a special unit of the educational space: first, it is
consistent with the traditional approach in Russian studies approach; secondly, at the level of
constituent entities of the Russian Federation is particularly clearly reflected the differences in the
development of the education system, its relevance to the needs of the population, culture and
economy; thirdly, the regional level of the education system forms the backbone of
communication to consider domestic education as a socio-cultural system, not a collection of
various educational institutions.
Thus, we define regional educational space as a set of educational programs, events

(promotions), services implemented by educational and other institutions and organizations in the
region, used the methods and techniques of teaching. This approach to the definition of
educational space in line with the concept of the educational trajectory of the individual. All public
and private educational institutions are interrelated educational trajectories of students - a set of
specific knowledge acquired by students in the learning process and are determined by their
individual needs and interests [Rybalkina, 1999].
Organized educational space acquires the properties of educational environment is special, and
implies the existence of two main units: the system of educational institutions and system services
that provide an analysis of the functioning of educational institutions that help their effectiveness,
developing the criteria for evaluating the activities of these institutions (methodological,
psychological, sociological service).
3 The Concept of virtualization of the educational space

The concept of "virtual education space" is quite extensive and indicates a special information
space in which the educational process. Virtual reality for education is an interactive environment
created with a computer whose properties allow subject educational interaction to exist as an
active figure.
Modern educational policy has a tendency of virtualization: progress learning technique that
uses the advantages of minimizing information carriers; the loss of a teacher their traditional role
(at least, typical for Russian teachers); the influence of liberal ideas on education, which is
manifested in the destruction of traditional roles in the system "teacher – student", but also the
physical distancing them. Virtual learning space is information space of interaction of participants
of educational process posed by information and communication technologies. Such space is both
the process and the result of the interaction of subjects and objects of education, the coexistence of
which is hardly possible if disrupted communication training, trainees and educational facilities.
Today, Informatization and virtualization of education is a field which integrates a whole range
of important fundamental and applied interdisciplinary research: psycho-pedagogical, medico-
social, physiological and hygienic; technological. Its are in a complex relationship to each other
and form certain integrity, which is focused on providing the education sector a methodology for
solving the following tasks: the methodological basis of the change objectives, content, methods
and forms of education; education in a global world, taking into account characteristics of the
information society; mass communication network; improvement of methodical training systems
based on information interaction in network communities with the purpose of providing academic,
social and professionally-oriented learning outcomes; skills to independently carry out information
activities; the information security of the individual. The sequencing process of the educational
space in the resulting embodiment is a remote education system – a tiered system that provides
users access to a variety of cognitive, educational, value-orienting, and other resources.
Under distance education (DE) is currently defined as a complex of educational services
provided to the wider population in the country and abroad with a specialized informational and
educational environment, based on the means of sharing educational information at a distance
(satellite TV, radio, computer communication, etc.) [The Concept of creation and development of
a unified system of distance education in Russia. 2018]. Distance education is a form of continuing
education, which is intended to realize the human rights to education and information. In Russia it
is in the field of pre-University education, higher education, or as a form of advanced training and
professional retraining of specialists [Koshkarev, 2013].
Distance education is integrated into the existing educational system, complementing and
developing them, contributes to the creation of a mobile educational environment, is also the most
promising form of education of wide layers of the population of Russia in the XXI century,
promoting continuing education of the citizens [Ananchenkova, Kuznetsov, 2017].
The highest aim of creation and development of regional distance learning system (DLS) is to
provide the pupils, students, civilian and military professionals, the unemployed and the widest
possible circles of the population in any area of the country and beyond its borders equal
educational opportunities. Also the ability to raise the level of education through more active use
of scientific and educational potential of leading universities, academies, institutes, industry-
leading centers of training and retraining, vocational training centres, other educational
institutions. The DLS will allow the student to have both basic and advanced education in its core
activities [Dneprov, 2008]. In the end, created DLS aimed at expanding the educational network in
Russia, the most complete satisfaction of needs and human rights in education.
We think that the virtual education space, there is a special system of provision of educational
services, the ontological status of which is the use of modern information technology and
epistemological status of virtual educational space is determined from the ratio of Informatization
and virtualization as public and private, that is, the virtual learning space is represented as the
invariant of information and educational space in General.
Consider the characteristics of the virtual educational space: spatial distancing of subjects of
educational process; the possibility of temporal optimization of educational process taking into
account the interests of each participant in the educational process; benefits maximum
individualization of education taking into account the level of information-technological support
of subjects of educational process.
Thus, our research allows us to represent "virtual learning space" as a particular system of
provision of educational services, the ontological status of which is the using of modern
information technology and epistemological status of virtual educational space (based on the
above ratio of Informatization and virtualization) can be represented as the invariant of the
educational space in General. In this approach, the leading features of virtual learning spaces are
the benefits of maximizing the individualization of learning activities based on the level of
information-technological support of subjects of educational process, but also the spatial
distancing of the subjects of the educational process and the possibility of temporal optimization of
educational process taking into account the interests of each participant in this process.
4 Expert assessment of the prospects for virtualization of the regional educational space
4.1 Methodology
Virtualization of the educational space in scale as the whole country and a particular region is
an actual task for development of the Russian national education system. Considerable remoteness
of educational institutions from each other, low population density, poor transport infrastructure in
some areas, and many other reasons even more require the building of an accessible learning
environment that under the conditions of the country is possible only through the development of
an adequate system of distance education.
Krasnodar Krai is one of the regions of the Russian Federation. According to the statistics of
Rosstat, as of 1 January 2017, the population of Krasnodar Krai is 5 570 945 people In terms of
population the region takes the third place among Russian regions after Moscow and Moscow
region. The population density is 73,80 per square meter, the urban population is 54.6 per cent, the
level of urbanization is much lower than the national average (74,27 %).
The low level of urbanization is associated with the traditional orientation of the region on the
rural way of life (the region is a leader of agricultural production), which is manifested in the
territorial location of urban and rural settlements at a considerable distance from each other. In the
region there are 26 towns, 12 settlements of urban type, 411 rural, town, village districts, only
1725 of rural settlements, 11 of them abandoned.
54,1% of the population are people of working age (18-59 years) actually or potentially
interested in maintaining professional level. In other words, more than half of the population
interested in access to educational resources, allowing to obtain basic vocational education, pass
courses of improvement of qualification and professional training, internship etc. The regional
education system consists of 74 organizations of higher 174 organizations of secondary
professional education.
The authors conducted an expert survey the method of half-formalized interview to determine
needs and possibilities of the virtualization of the regional educational space of the region (in the
segment of professional education). The survey was conducted in the period from may to October
2017. 129 people participated in the expert survey. As experts were representatives of three
groups:
1. workers in the secondary and higher professional education: teaching staff, methodologists,
heads of teaching departments (deans) (42);
2. the specialists of the employment service, whose job duties included the organization of
professional training and retraining for the unemployed (36);
3. graduates of educational programs in the distance form (51).
4.2 Results
Expert survey showed the following results:
1. The experts recognized the need for virtualization of the regional educational space as the
main mechanism for ensuring the availability of educational services in conditions of high
geographically distributed professional educational organizations.
2. Consumer demand for online educational services in the vast majority is formed by the
"adult" audience: citizens aged 30 years and over with basic vocational education who wish to
improve their skills, but do not have the opportunity to go to school for a long time. For these
students distance learning – the only way to increase their professional level and their
competitiveness at the territorial labour market.
3. The main problems of virtualization of the regional educational space named:
- high organizational costs, which include the mechanism of participation of educational
institutions in forming a common virtual learning space; identify areas of responsibility of each
participant; establishment and regular update of appropriate educational content; determine the
mechanism and procedure of financing virtual education system and so on;
- technological support of the learning process (choice of platform, the mechanism of
interaction between teacher-student, assessment of learning outcomes, etc.);
- staffing of the educational resources (capabilities and skills of teachers to maintain and
promptly update courses, create content, conduct group and individual online contact with
students; the ability to support training on the part of the Methodists, Tutors); the problem of
determining the level of remuneration of teachers and staff – participants of the educational
process;
- legal security: the prevention of monopolization of educational services and promote fair
competition; ensuring copyright of content and replicating it on legal grounds and other;
- information provision, including a mechanism to inform potential students about available
educational opportunities and so on.
4. To enhance the process of virtualization of the regional educational space is a necessary a
bilateral public-private partnership of bodies of the state (regional) authorities and educational
organizations in the implementation of activities that reduce and eliminate these problems.
Important is the fact that the state (regional) authorities should play a coordinating role, providing
legal support, organizational, informational and partly financial. But educational organizations
should be given a meaningful, human and educational role.
4.3 Recommendations
Thus, the solution of the main problems of development of the regional innovative educational
system in Krasnodar region and its virtualization should be aimed at creating conditions for the
mass distribution of the distance learning system; ensuring the quality and continuity of
educational innovations; development of public administration, social partnership of educational
organizations, business and regional authorities.
Virtualization of the single educational space (SES) of Krasnodar region on the basis of
distance learning programs should be carried out in several stages.
Step 1. The creation of information-educational environment of the SES:
- development of scientifically based principles of creation of SES of Krasnodar region;
- definition of the subject, form and format of innovations produced and disseminated within
the framework of the SES on the basis of expert assessments of professionals in the educational
space and analysis of training and training needs in different areas and specialties, as well as
educational levels (primary, secondary and higher professional);
- definition of formats of SES organization (in the unity of scientific research, educational,
educational work and other forms of educational activity);
- providing diversity of distance learning technologies and introducing innovative educational
practices;
- creation of a database of innovative educational programs, methods of their implementation
in various formats of the organization of the educational process;
- raising the qualifications of the teaching staff of educational organizations and preparing for
the implementation and replication of innovative educational practices;
- formation of a reserve of scientific and pedagogical staff, focused on the implementation and
replication of innovative educational practices;
- improvement of the material and technical base of educational organizations focused on the
implementation of innovative educational practices;
- creation and implementation of the elements of the distance learning system and its
methodological support for individual business education programs.
Stage 2. Creation of the information and communication environment of the unified
educational space:
- development of principles and directions of information support of development processes of
SES in the Krasnodar region;
- formation of a system of communication links (advertising, Public Relations) between the
SES system (represented by educational organizations), business, funds, foreign partners and other
stakeholders;
- interaction with other SES subjects to create horizontal links for individual programs for the
development of educational and innovative components.
Stage 3. The functioning of business incubators, laboratories, research centers in the
municipalities of the region, united in a regional innovative educational system:
- formation, replenishment and updating of educational programs portfolio;
- formation, replenishment and updating of research programs portfolio;
- formation of curricula and class schedules of groups on the implemented programs of
business education;
- organization and conduct of on-site training sessions;
- organization and conduct of internships and practices;
- development of innovative educational practices;
- evaluation of the effectiveness of educational innovations, their replication and forecasting
demand for the future.
Thus, in our opinion, the development of a single virtual regional educational space will
promote the development of innovative educational technologies and the dissemination of
effective educational practices, ensure a high professional and competence level of cadres for the
regional economy, enhance research and development, modernize production, transition on higher
technologies and service standards
Conclusion
Thus, implementation of interactive forms of education – one of the most important directions
of enhancement of training of students in the modern higher education institution. Now for the
teacher it isn't enough to be competent of area of the specialty and to transfer huge the knowledge
base in the audience filled with the students who are eager for knowledge.
And though new views on training aren't accepted by many teachers, it is impossible to ignore
data of many researches confirming that use of the active approaches is the most effective way
promoting training of students. In simple terms, students investigate easier, understand and
remember material which they studied by means of the active involvement in educational process.
Proceeding from it, the main methodical innovations are connected using interactive methods of
training today
References
Anisimov P.F. (1998): Formation of regional system of vocational education (managerial aspect).ATiSO,
Moscow.
Rybalkina N.V. (1999): The concept of the individual educational categories. MSU-press, Moscow.
The Concept of creation and development of a unified system of distance education in Russia (2018).
Koshkarev A.V. (2013): Geoinformatics. Znanie, Moscow.
Dneprov E.D. (2008): Contemporary school reform in Russia. The Science, Moscow.
Ananchenkova P.I., Kuznetsov M.Y. (2017): The Use of E-Learning Technologies in the Process of Training
of Women on Parental Leave. In Proceedings of The 13th eLearning and Software for Education
Conference - eLSE 2017. Bucharest, 316-321.
Comparative analysis of satisfaction with distance learning among
students of different specialization
Tonkonog Victoriya1, Polina Ananchenkova2
(1) Federal State Educational Institution of higher vocational training, “Admiral Ushakov
Maritime University”, Leninsky av., Novorossiysk, Russia,
E-mail: tonkonogvv[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
The use of distance learning technologies in educational process at various higher
learning institutions in the course of Bachelor's and Master's degree training, given the
transition to new educational standards, is an important task for Russian higher learning
institutions. The article presents results of research conducted among students in the
following areas: "Tourism", "Social Work" and "Ship Navigation" specialization. The goal of
the research was to determine the students' satisfaction with distance learning technologies.
The total number of respondents was 450 persons (150 in each area). The study showed that
students specializing in Ship Navigation were the most satisfied group (97% of the
respondents). They said the key advantage of distance learning is the ability to combine the
practice of navigating ships with the theoretical studies. Students in this group would like to
combine their journey time with the ability to learn the theoretical disciplines (History,
Philosophy, Social Studies, etc.) Students in the "Tourism" area demonstrated similar
satisfaction levels. However, only 84% in this group were satisfied with the advantages of e-
learning. As for would-be social workers, the humanitarian specifics of their profession
results in a lower level of satisfaction with distance learning technologies - only 52% in this
group consider e-learning the most suitable form of acquiring the profession.
Keywords: education, students, satisfaction, specialization, area of education
1 Introduction. Topical issues of application of remote technologies in the

educational processes higher educational institutions
The use of remote technologies in educational process of educational institutions in the
training of bachelors and masters in the conditions of transition to new educational
standards is an actual problem of the Russian higher educational institutions. This
problem is due not only to the new law "On education in Russian Federation", but also
the needs of students who seek educational opportunities without interrupting their work,
and a number of other circumstances. These trends eloquently indicate that in Russia now
perceive e-learning as equivalent to learning face to face. According to opinion polls, 74
percent of the respondents answered affirmatively to the question: "Is it Possible to get
real knowledge in the learning process?" [The Russians on reforms in education, 2017].
Despite the fact that remote technology from year to year are becoming more popular
with students and are reflected in the educational programmes of the Russian educational
institutions, very little research to assess the level of satisfaction of students and make
appropriate adjustments to the learning process.
The Russian system of higher professional education is in the process of reform.

Accession to Bologna Convention, the introduction of a two-tier system of training
(bachelor, master), the transition to new Federal state educational standards, competence-
based approach – all of these institutional changes lead to the reform of the content of
educational process in higher education.
29 Feb 2012 the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has signed the law on
amendments to the Law of the Russian Federation "About education" regarding
application of e-learning, distance educational technologies, which gave impetus to the
development of systems of distance learning in the Russian educational system. As noted
Ponomareva E. and Ananchenkova P. "Use of remote technologies in educational process
of higher educational institutions by preparation of bachelors and masters in the
conditions of transition to new educational standards is an urgent problem of Russian
higher education institutions, not only due to the new law "On education in Russian
Federation", but also the needs of students who seek educational opportunities without
interrupting their work and a number of other circumstances. A classical form of
education (classroom instruction – lectures and seminars – independent work, tests and
exams) becomes less effective for the formation of professional knowledge and skills. On
the one hand, the new standards require the implementation in the educational process
variant forms and methods of training. On the other hand, among the students there is a
demand for flexible forms of learning which allow you to effectively combine study and
work" [Ananchenkova, Ponomareva, 2016].
2 Sociological research: methods and characteristics

The article presents the results of a study conducted among students enrolled in
directions of preparation "Tourism", "Social Work" and specialty "Ship Navigation". The
aim of the study was to determine the level of student satisfaction of distance education
technologies. The total number of respondents was 450 people (150 in each direction).
The study was conducted using questionnaires. Processing of the results was carried out
using the program SPSS. At the end of the survey and processing the results, the authors
conducted a series of focus groups of 7 people for each specialty. In the process of the
meeting of the focus group comments were received on some issues, and results which
required explanation and clarifications. The study was conducted in the 2015-2016
academic year among students of 3-4 courses who had experience of teaching in remote
mode for at least 2 semesters.
Students were asked to estimate a number of parameters reflecting the content of the
educational process conducted in the distance form: a comfortable education environment;
quality training and methodological support; interaction with teachers; group interaction.
Each of the selected parameters were specified more detailed elements. The
respondents had to answer the question "How are you satisfied with ...?", and to rate each
item on a 5-point scale, where:
1 – "absolutely not satisfied";
2 – "rather not satisfied than satisfied";
3 – "rather satisfied than not satisfied";
4 – "overall satisfied";
5 – "absolutely satisfied."
Then the question was asked to students "Analyze your overall impression of the
learning process in the distance form and tell me, would you like to continue learning in a
distance form?", assuming the answers are only "Yes" or "No".
3 Some results of the study

The study involved students in two training areas "Tourism" and "Social Work" (the
standard period of study – 4 years) and on the specialty "Ship Navigation" (the standard
period of study is 5 years). Each of these specialties has its own specific features. So, in
particular, students of "Tourism" have very much practice-oriented disciplines and their
classes are often held in tourist company, exhibitions, tour routes, etc. Future social
workers on the contrary, have fundamental training in the Humanities. Skippers in
accordance with the educational standard required to have a certain number of hours on
the ship while in flight, away from home, from the educational institution. Thus, the
specificity of each type of professional activity determines the characteristics of
perception of those or other educational methods, techniques, and technology.
In our study, we evaluated the differentiation of indicators of the degree of student
satisfaction with the training based on distance learning technologies and it was important for
us to understand that likes and dislikes the students in their educational process. What factors
of distance learning in one way or another impact on their satisfaction after the training.
Thus, in particular, assessing the comfort of the educational environment, the
respondents have demonstrated the following answers (table 1).
Table 1. The comfort of the educational environment, the average score.

Specialty/item «Tourism» «Social Work» «Ship Navigation»
The organization of the educational
4,3 4,7 4,7
process
The schedule of educational process 4,8 4,6 3,2
The schedule of tests (tests, exams, etc.) 4,7 4,3 3,3
Communication with the inspectors of
4,7 4,1 4,8
the educational process
Feedback from inspectors of the
4,7 3,9 4,3
educational process
Training cost 3,2 4,1 4,9
THE FINAL AVERAGE SCORE 4,4 4,3 4,2
Evaluating training and methodological support of educational process, the

respondents showed the following estimates (table 2).
Table 2. The quality of training and methodological support, the average score
Specialty/ «Tourism» «Social Work» «Ship Navigation»
item
Provision of educational and 4,8 3,3 4,8
methodical materials
A variety of educational and 3,9 3,4 4,8
Availability of educational and 4,1 4,9 4,6
methodical materials for download and
viewing
The design and Ship Navigation of 4,4 4,9 4,4

electronic educational and methodical
materials
The quality of educational and 4,1 4,8 4,6
The usability of educational and 4,7 4,7 4,4
Interaction with teachers as the main element of the learning process, students rated
the following scores (table 3).
Table 3. Interaction with teachers, the average score

item
Technical conditions in process of 4,8 4,6 4,2
interaction with the teacher
The regularity in the interaction with 4,3 4,9 4,6
the teachers
Variability in interaction with teachers 4,6 4,2 3,1
(chat, social networking, Skype, email,
etc.)
The quality of interaction with teachers 4,6 3,3 4,9
Feedback in interaction with teachers 4,7 3,8 4,4
Evaluating an indicator such as "group interaction", the respondents gave the

following estimates (table 4).
Table 4. Group interactions, average score

item
The possibility of organizing group 4,2 4,6 3,6
discussions
The ability to work on group projects 3,3 4,4 3,1
presentations
training sessions
Technical conditions in process of 4,3 4,4 2,0
group interaction
Thus, using the formal approach, it is possible to calculate the average of the set of
parameters, which allows to determine the level of satisfaction of students of one or
another specialty their experience of learning in the distance learning process (table 5).
Table 5. The level of student satisfaction in distance learning (average score) (formal
approach).
item
The comfort of the educational 4,4 4,3 4,2
environment
The quality of training and 4,3 4,3 4,6
methodological support
Interaction with teachers 4,6 4,2 4,3
Group interaction 3,8 4,4 3,0
The results show that the overall level of satisfaction with the learning process in a
distance form the lowest of students of the specialty "Ship Navigation" (4.0 score), and
students training in the areas of "Tourism" and "Social Work" is equally assess their
learning experiences. However, answering the question "Consider your overall
impression of the learning process in the online form and tell me, would you like to
continue learning in a distance form?", students of different specialties ambiguously
evaluated the possible prospects continue their education using distance technology (table
6 and picture 1).
Table 6. Satisfaction with distance learning (persons, % of total respondents in the

corresponding group) (interview)
Persons %
«Tourism» 126 84
«Social Work» 78 52
«Ship Navigation» 145 97
97%
100% 84%
90%
80%
70% 52%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
«Tourism» «Social Work» «Ship Navigation»
Picture.1. Satisfaction with distance learning.

The study showed that, despite the low rating of the individual elements of the
educational process (primarily the parameter "Group interaction"), the highest level of
satisfaction and desire to continue their education using distance learning technologies
demonstrated by students specialty "Ship Navigation" (97%). In their opinion, the main
advantage of distance learning is the ability to seamlessly combine the practice of
operation and management of the marine vehicle with theoretical training. Students in
this group would like to combine during flight with the possibility of developing
theoretically-oriented disciplines ("History", "Philosophy", "Sociology", etc.).
Students of training direction "Tourism" demonstrate similar results in the level of
satisfaction. Low scores in this group of respondents also earned the elements of the
educational process that are associated with group interaction. Despite the fact that this
group of respondents 84% are fully satisfied with the benefits of e-learning, and this high
figure, there is scope for increasing the degree of satisfaction of the recipients of
educational services.
As for the students of the direction "Social Work", the humanitarian-oriented specifics
of future professional activity determines low level of satisfaction of distance learning
technology. For all investigated parameters, in this group of students are the highest
estimates for individual elements, but in this group, only 52% of respondents believe
distance learning is the most appropriate form of development profession.
Conclusion
Modern innovative learning technologies, including distance form, are becoming more
and more relevant to the modern education system. The Russian national education
system by declaring active use of e-learning still needs to be studies reflecting the
satisfaction level of students of different specialties of training in distance form. Such
studies allow to monitor the needs of the students "comfort zone" and "zone of
discomfort" as part of the educational process in a timely manner to track weaknesses and
reinforce strengths. Monitoring of student satisfaction (students, pupils) should become a
regular practice educational organizations that seek not only to formally declare distance
learning, but also to ensure its high quality and comfort for students.
References
1. The Russians on reforms in education. A Study of the public opinion Foundation.
URL:http://www.mazm.ru/article/a-1907.html (accessed 17.01.2018).
2. Ananchenkova P. I., Ponomareva E. G. (2016). The Introduction of remote technologies in educational
process: problems of organizational, methodological, human and technological support". Labor and
social relations, 2, 21-34.
The concept of system of remote training of specialists in the field
of advertising and public relations in the conditions of formation
of uniform educational space
Moreeva Elena1
(1) Russian State University named after A.N.Kosygin, Lenina av., Moscow, Russia,
moreevaev[at]yandex.ru
Abstract
The Ministry of education and science of the Russian Federation is consistently
developing a single educational space throughout the country, defining this work as one of
the most important tasks of the education system. This task corresponds to the objectives and
strategic plans for the development of the national education system, which seeks to unify
educational programs in the relevant areas of training. Network interaction of educational
organizations, provided by the Law "About education in the Russian Federation " is most
effectively implemented in the process of cooperation of universities in the framework of
distance learning programs. In particular, by signing an agreement on network cooperation
in the training of specialists in the field of advertising and public relations, Moscow
universities – participants of the agreement (Russian state University for the Humanities,
National research University "Moscow energy Institute", Moscow University of Finance and
law, Moscow University named after S.U.Witte) developed a unified distance learning
program. On the basis of expert assessments of teachers of the participating universities, a
unified concept of training specialists was developed, including a list of basic disciplines and
their duration in hours:Imagemaking as a direction of PR-activity-26 hours;PR in politics
and public administration – 30 hours; Communication theory-32 hours; Branding and
marketing communications-72 hours; and some others. The article discusses the conditions
for the implementation of distance learning program by participating universities, as well as
the data reflecting the degree of satisfaction of students with the process of distance learning.
Keywords: network interaction, unified educational space, distance learning programs
1 Introduction
The Ministry of education and science of the Russian Federation is consistently developing a
single educational space throughout the country, defining this work as one of the most important
tasks of the education system. This task corresponds to the objectives and strategic plans for the
development of the national education system, which seeks to unify educational programs in the
relevant areas of training.
The relevance to form a common educational space is associated with globalization in
education - convergence and harmonization of educational systems in order to create a unified
(European) educational space, including the unified higher educational space. Therefore it is
important to search the most effective mechanisms and technologies, allowing the effective
interaction between educational organizations within local, national, and - as a result - the global
education space.
One such mechanism is the networking interaction of universities, set by the "Law on
education of the Russian Federation" with the available implementation practices.
2 The concept of universities network interaction under the unified educational space
The universities network interaction - is sustainable, institutionalized interaction between
educational institutions and with external environment subjects to enhance the efficient use of the
total educational system capacity, optimize the used resources and achieve the quality of training
the graduates meeting the requirements of the labor market
Benefits of implementing the network interaction:
 network interaction as a resource to develop education;
 dynamic change of the education activity structure according to changes of the demand at
the market of educational services;
 expanded nomenclature of educational programs realized by institutions of all vocational
levels and their increased availability;
 provision of the educational organization flexibility due to realization of individual learning
trajectories;
 improved quality of training the graduates from educational organizations;
 additional stimulus to develop the system of continuous education;
 reduced costs and expenses due to more efficient use of resources and development of
integrated services.
In the modern scientific literature there are some formed approaches to comprehend the
process of realizing the network educational programs, in particular:
 Network educational program as a part of the large network project - integration of the
staff, integration of training and researches, integration of training and internships;
 Network educational program as the result of forming the network infrastructure (CCT or
departments) - integration of the staff (program developers);
 Network educational program as a separate network project - integration at the level of
program consumers;
 Joint international educational programs including the programs of two and three diplomas;
 Internships and practice of students and teachers in partner - organizations, invitation of
professors.
The network form provides the following:
 The university competitiveness in the contest for students and resources to provide
educational activities;
 Quality and guarantees of the education quality;
 Increased prestige of the university;
 Promotionofeducationalcooperation;
 Strengthening of the intellectual and scientific - technical potential.
2. Realization of the network distance program to train the staff for the sphere of
advertising and public relations
The network form to realize educational programs (further on - the network form) provides the
students with the possibility to master the educational program with using resources of several
organizations carrying out educational activities, including foreign, and also, if necessary, using
resources of other organizations. When realizing educational programs with using the network
form jointly with organizations realizing educational activities, and also with involvement of
scientific organizations, organizations of culture, physical - sport and other organizations with the
resources needed to implement the training, organization of the learning and industrial practice and
realizing other types of academic activities provided by the relevant program.
The network form to implement educational programs is used under the contract between
educational organizations.
To organize realization of the educational programs with using the network form by several
organizations carrying out the educational activity, such organizations also jointly develop and
approve educational programs.
Network interaction of educational organizations, provided by the Law "About education in the
Russian Federation " is most effectively implemented in the process of cooperation of universities
in the framework of distance learning programs.
In particular, by signing an agreement on network cooperation in the training of specialists in
the field of advertising and public relations, Moscow universities – participants of the agreement
(Russian state University for the Humanities, National research University "Moscow energy
Institute", Moscow University of Finance and law, Moscow University named after S.U.Witte)
developed a unified distance learning program.
On the basis of expert assessments of teachers of the participating universities, a unified
concept of training specialists was developed, including a list of basic disciplines and their
duration in hours:
- Imagemaking as a direction of PR-activity-26 hours;
- PR in politics and public administration – 30 hours;
- Communication theory-32 hours;
- Branding and marketing communications-72 hours;
- Media planning - 30 hours;
- Normative - legal base of PR-activity and advertising– 16 hours;
- Anti-crisis PR – 30 hours;
- PR-technologies in internet - space – 30 hours;
- Internal corporate PR – 30 hours;
- Speech writing and copyrighting – 30 hours.
But for these basic disciplines, each university includes in the curriculum the own subjects
reflecting specifics of the educational organization. Thus, for instance, in the Russian state
humanitarian university the studied disciplines are "Social advertising and PR", "Public relations
in the public sector", etc.
Such network interaction allows the student not to depend on the university timetable, and
study the disciplines which are interesting from those excluded from the educational organization,
but available in another.
A 4 - year experience in the network realization of the distance education program
"Advertisement and public relations" showed that just the distance form is demanded by students,
and to the greatest extent promotes formation of the unified educational space. Efficiency of this
training form is proved by the following indicators of monitoring results of the educational
program and the satisfaction level of students:
1) Graduation of the students (the number of graduators in relation to the students enlisted in
the 1 year) makes 100%;
2) Academic debt (the amount of final tests /exams in disciplines unattested by end of the
training session) makes no more than 3%;
3) Evaluating generally the training process and content, the students gave the following
scores (Table 1).
Table 1. Indicators of satisfaction with basic elements of the educational process

Indicator Average score
Quality of basic teaching materials 4,7
Quality of additional teaching materials 4,3
Quality of video-materials 4,9
Availability and quality of the teacher's work (possibility to ask additional 4,1
questions, enter into correspondence, etc.)
Availability and quality of group sessions (possible organization and 4,2
participation in group chats, discussions, Skype-sessions, etc.)
Quality of the training technical support 3,8
3. Development prospects of the universities network interaction under the unified

distance educational space
The positive experience in realization of the distance educational program under the training
direction "Advertising and public relations" under the unified educational space allowed
developing and launching other educational programs.
Thus, for instance, for the professional orientation and for "pre-university" preparation of
schoolchildren there is the "Network school of advertisement and public relations",which involves
not only Moscow children, but everyone wishing to learn the world of advertising from any
regions of the Russian Federation.
For school teachers, colleges and other educational organizations there are the distance courses
to improve qualification. In the last year of 2017 the training courses of 72 hours were attended by
more than 500 teachers.
There is the formed "Network library of educational materials": all courses of disciplines are
supplied with the learning - teaching set including electronic lecture notes, electronic tests for the
current control and for the interim control of knowledge, materials for the additional and self-
study, video and audio-materials, etc.
Thus, it is possible to note several positive moment at organizing the distance network
interaction, contributing to development of the distance learning practice:
 Use of the network interaction for the innovation development of educational
organizations allows to overcome limited interaction of personal relations, individual
problems of the teaching practice and results to occurrence of new interaction forms,
formation of project groups and resource center (head organization) of the educational
network.
 Opportunities of the distance network interaction allows developing the design
technologies. The joint design on this basis develops the scale of innovation activities
performed by the teachers. A new position of the teacher as a co-developer makes him
realize the importance of innovative activities affecting the involvement in innovation
activities of more teachers and practitioners (representatives of the companies and
enterprises wherein the students are practiced).
 At the distance network interaction there is a new form of the joint organization to
improve qualification created around the subject of collective development.
 Formation of the network from educational organizations at realizing innovation projects
presupposes establishment of efficient communications in the network, the unified
information system for the innovative development of educational organizations.
 The use of the distance network interaction allows to overcome the locality of innovation
processes, develop the scale of implementing educational innovations, enter a wider level
of scoping the students.
Conclusion
Due to the network interaction of different educational organizations and the systems of
supplementary education there are optimal methodological approaches allowing to affect the
educational and training process, improve their efficiency and results. Through the similar
activities it became possible to design completely the content of education, which enriches the life
activity of students, provides their rich social experience. The practice of such interaction between
various participants of the educational process is proved by occurrence of numerous innovation
moments. Results of statistic researches confirm high efficiency of the network interaction. Only
joint classes, aimed at improving the training conditions, raising the quality of the material-
technical base, development of the out-of-class activities can bring the desired result. The similar
system should become a perfect stimulus to develop the unified educational space.
References
Mozolin A.V., Razumova E.A. (2016)Professional program of authority’s press-service specialist.
Ekaterinburg
Vasilov S.I., Ananchenkova P.I. (2012): Image management of public authorities (on the basis of analysis
of publications in mass-media). Labour and social relations.No. 12. P. 47-54.
Vasilov S.I., Ananchenkova P.I. (2013): Information and communication policy in activities of public
authorities. Guide of entrepreneur. No. 17. P. 48-54.
Some aspects of using distance technologies during vocational
training of unemployed citizens
Kuznetsov Mikhail1, Dilbar Amonova2

E-mail: mukuz[at]rambler.ru
(2) Russian-Tajik (Slavic) University, Dushanbe, Republic of Tajikistan
dilbar_amonova[at]mail.ru
Abstract
One of the most advanced forms of training unemployed citizens and unemployed
population, in addition to the traditional, is a complex system of distance learning. Its
creation and application contributes to the more effective realization of the right to work and
the full employment of population and provides the possibility of sufficient quality education
at the place of residence with using modern network information technology. Highly
appreciating the availability of modular programs, taking into account the existing foreign
experience, available programs developed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and
adapted to use in Russia, educational institutions of the employment service facilitate the
creation of a mobile, flexible educational environment. The analysis of training under new
technologies shows their high economic efficiency, including reduction of expenses on
training. Approbation showed that the system of distance learning, based on modern
information technologies with using modular programs and multimedia training courses, is
an additional tool for traditional forms and it allows carrying out vocational training of
unemployed citizens with high quality and efficiency.
The article considers the matters of organizing the vocational training of unemployed
citizens with using distance learning technologies. Foreign and domestic experience is
analyzed. The mechanisms to adapt distance learning technologies to the process of
retraining citizens registered in the service of population employment are offered.
Keywords: vocational training, jobless, distance learning
1 Introduction
The present Russian labor market is experiencing a significant impact from
ecomomicprocesses that occur both in territory of the Russian Federation and throughout the
world generally in the global scale. Globalization of trade – economic relations, export-import of
production technologies make business managers, on the one hand, ensure the competitiveness by
reducing costs, switching to new technologies, which is related to less number of personnel and –
as a result – more unemployment; on the other hand - raise demands on the personnel, the level of
their professional competence, that actualizes the need of retraining the unemployed citizens under
the programs, to a greater extent meeting the needs of employers. Thus, there is the need to
develop ideas of possible using innovative – firstly distance technologies for the professional
training of unemployed people under the acive employment policy.
2 Training of unemployed people as a form of the active employment policy

Active programs to assist employment were realized in foreign countries during the financial
crisis period in such directions as:
 Humancapitaldeevelopment;
 Stimulating the balance of manpower supply and demand in the labor market;
 Stimulating creation / retention of workplaces.
We are to consider the active programs aimed at the human capital development including
professional training and retraining, including, the use of distance learning technologies.
Programs of vocational training and retraining, realized in foreign countries during the
international financial crisis in interests of the human capital development, were focused on
specific target groups of people (people groups with low competitiveness in the labor market),
including senior citizens, disabled people, youth and representatives of indigenous people.
In the United States, for instance, there was developed and implemented the Senior
Community Service Employment Program − SCSEP. Under this program the poor and
unemployed pensioners received training and practice paid by the government in professions to
work in social services, and also assistance in employment through employment centers
(American Job Centers).
In Canada since 2006 there has been a similar by the contingent of participants the target
program for older worker - Targeted Initiative for Older Workers (TIOW). The program is funded
by the central government jointly with the regional and municipal governmental authorities and it
is aimed at assistance in vocational training and subsequent employment of people who have lost
their job, at the age from 55 up to 64 years old, residing in places or employed in economic
branches which are mostly damaged from unemployment.
In Germany a special federal program was implemented on supplementary training of older
and low-qualified workers in occupations related to road construction under the program of
retraining participants promoting preservation of their work or employment for new jobs.
For development of the human capital abroad during the international financial crisis the
programs were realized on training of the youth in non-commercial organizations and on public
works (mainly environmental specifics), funded from the governmental budget.
3.Performance analysis of realizing the distance learning programs for unemployed

citizens
During the period of 2015-2017 under the Academy of Labor and Social Relations there was
realization of professional retraining programs for unemployed citizens by direction of the people
employment service. Training of unemployed was organized in the distance form.
Each year by end of training in each group of trainees there was the survey making possible to
evaluate the satisfaction degree of trainees with the learning process. In 2017 the control survey of
trainees was carried out to find out their satisfaction with learning with using distance
technologies.
When accessing satisfaction with the training program on 4-point scale, where:
4 points – “I liked training and I am completely satisfied”
3 points – “generally I liked the training”
2 points – “generally I disliked the training”
1 point - “I disliked the training but left satisfied”,
The respondents demonstrated the following results:
Firstly we are to note that in 2015 only 6 % trainees had the learning experience in distance
technologies whereas in 2016 their number turned out to be more - 14 %. In 2017 the percentage
of respondents knowing the distance learning technologies turned out to be slightly higher - 17%
(Figure 1). As the age contingent of trainees is practically unchanged, it suggests that getting both
the basic and further vocational training the trainees more often encounter innovative (including
the distance) learning technologies.
Figure 1 –Distribution of answers to the question “Have you had previous training in programs
with using distance technologies?”, %
Table 1.Indicators of satisfaction with the training program, persons

Indicator 2015, persons 2016, persons 2017,
persons
4 points 11 32 252
3 points 68 83 107
3 points 29 9 19
1 point 7
The percentage of these indicators is given in Figure 2:
Figure2.Indicators of satisfaction with the training program, persons
The figure shows that the percentage of trainees who are satisfied with leaning is growing:
totally responses to 3 and 4 points have made:
- in 2015 – 68,7%
- in 2016 – 93%
- in 2017 – 95%.
Among the comfort indicators of the training environment, the respondents of high points have
such indicators as follows:
 In 2015 –“training schedule” and “comfort of training classes”;
 In 2016 – “learning technologies”, “training program content” and “professionalism of
teachers”;
 In 2017– “thematic content of each discipline”, “professionalism of teachers”, “learning
technologies” (Table 3).
Table 3. Evaluation of educational environment parameters, average point

Indicator 2015 2016 2017
Training program content 4,2 4,8 4,8
Thematic content of each discipline 4,4 4,6 4,9
Training schedule 4,7 4,6 4,8
Quality of training classes 4,3 4,6 4,8
Professionalism of teachers 4,4 4,8 4,9
Learning technologies 4,1 4,9 4,9
Comfort of training classes 4,6 4,7 4,7
From the given data it is clear that the average point of such indicators as “thematic content of
each discipline” and “professionalism of teachers” have raised significantly in assessments of
students, suggesting that the vocational and training program in the distance learning system
turned out to be useful for teachers and improved their competitive level and ability to conduct
training classes with using distance technologies.
4 Assessment of economic efficiency in the use of distance technologies when training

unemployed citizens
Comparison of costs for listed prices allows measuring the money savings (cost effectiveness)
when organizing auditorium and distance learning.
We are to calculate these costs.
As the program volume in 2012 and in 2013 made the equal number of hours, we can compare
the costs of both programs in prices of 2012. In this example we are to calculate the probable
economic efficiency only through savings on labor remuneration of teachers.
In 2012 the number of hours on auditorium classes made 128 hours, and in 2013 – 56 hours.
The budgeted costs on the work of a teacher made 36 rubles per person /hour, or 720 rubles per
a training group.
Thus, in 2012 the costs on labor remuneration of teachers when conducting auditorium classes
made:
720 × 128 = 92160 rubles.
The cost of distance learning makes 70 % from the cost of auditorium classes which makes 504
rubles.
Accordingly, the total cost of distance learning makes:
504 × 102 = 51408 rubles
Total costs on labor remuneration of teachers made:
92160 + 51408 = 143568 rubles

In 2013 the costs on labor remuneration of teachers when conducting auditorium classes made:
720 × 56 = 40320 rubles
Total costs on distance classes make:
504 × 174 = 87696 rubles
Total costs on labor remuneration of teachers made:
40320 + 87696 = 128016rubles
Thus, money savings on labor remuneration of teachers made 11 %, which is a good indicator.
Moreover, we are need to note that transfer to the distance learning of unemployed citizens
makes possible to release the classroom facility as well as costs on transportation of trainees to the
place of learning (which is assumed by the Technical specifications for training), and also saves
money.
Conclusion
According to results of the experiment in 2012 and 2013 it is possible to note the following
main advantages of the distance learning system in relation to unemployed citizens:
 Opportunity to be trained at the convenient time, place and rate (a special period of time to
master the discipline);
 Possible access to many sources of educational information and also communication
through email with each other and the teacher;
 Concentrated presentation of educational information in the form of modules and multi
access to it, which increases the efficiency of mastering the material;
 Equal educational opportunities despite the place of residence, equal quality of educational
services;
 Increased creative and intellectual potential of a trainee due to self-organization and tend to
knowledge;
 Maximum differentiation and individualization of learning accounting individual needs of
trainees, their training level with orientation to development of the need in independent
acquisition of knowledge and skills;
 Reliance on the life experience of the trainee and the previous complex of acquired
knowledge, which allows individualizing the training and as a result to reduce the learning
period without affecting quality of the learning process and formation of the self-leaning
skills;
 Development and renewal of the teacher’s role according to innovations and novelties.
Results of the performed survey has proved that distance learning is a perspective way to get
qualitative education for unemployed citizens and unoccupied population, residing remotely from
territorial areas, concentrating scientific and educational centers. But organization of the distance
learning in the system of people employment service needs the corresponding methodical skill of
teachers and their willingness to use innovative technologies of the distance learning in the
educational process.
References
Ananenkova, P. I., Kuznetsov, M. Y. (2016) Professional training of the unemployed in the system of the
employment service. Proceedings of the Russian Academy of entrepreneurship.47, 24.
Bernard, I. Collie, J.-K.(1994) Explanatory economic and financial dictionary.International relations,
Moscow, 1994.p. 348.
Novikov, V. A. (1999) Practical market economy. Flint: Moscow a psycho.-soc. in-t, 1999. p. 31.
Virtual Learning Spaces With Go-Lab
Ristea Lidia
Technological High School Teodor Diamant,

Boldesti-Scaeni, Prahova, Romania, e-mail: lidiaristea2004[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The Scientix platform features various projects including Next Lab, which is a
continuation of Go-Lab, a platform that offers free educational resources that opens virtual
labs, remote labs and datasets from laboratory experiments for various disciplines, widely
used in education. It also provides access to information sources, wider and more varied
knowledge, promotes student's independent work, inventiveness and creativity, and the
applications and the labs posted on the platform can integrate into teaching, learning and
assessment activities. It is a platform accessible to all and contributes to the development or
improvement of "Inquiry Learning Spaces" (ILS) known as a virtual learning space that offers
a constructive, interactive and integrated environment centered on learning, teaching, and
evaluation.Because Go - Lab includes a very wide range of applications and services that use
browsing (the Web), being a unified platform, organized on communication, it is very
important for students to know the applications, to use and integrate them into various lesson
plans. The Go-Lab portal offers the opportunity to use personalized scientific experiments
with the many innovative teaching tools and resources that are structured according to the
students' learning level. Integration of online platforms into lessons can lead to usable
products by connecting with other disciplines.\
Keywords: Education, STEM, Virtual Labs and Experiments
1. Introduction
Go -Lab is a complex Open Source free licensing platform that allows you to manage a
subdomain, to create and to manage applications on areas of interest.Go-Lab it is also a platform
that opens virtual labs, remotes labs and datasets from laboratory experiments for various
disciplines, widely used in education.
In the same time, Go Lab provides access to information sources, wider and more varied
knowledge, promotes student's independent work, inventiveness and creativity, and the
applications and the labs posted on the platform can be integrated into teaching, learning and
assessment activities.
It is a platform accessible to all and contributes to the development or improvement of
"Inquiry Learning Spaces" (ILS) known as a virtual learning space that offers a constructive,
interactive and integrated environment centered on learning, teaching, and evaluation.
2. The aim of the Go-Lab Initiative

Go -Lab facilitates the use of online laboratories and virtual learning spaces for scientific
education in school. The platform offers teachers opportunities to customize and create ILS's
which can be publishedon platformin order to be usedby other teachers.
Because Go-Lab includes a very wide range of applications and services that use browsing (the
Web), being a unified platform, organized on communication, it is very important for students to
know the applications, to use and integrate them into various lesson plans.
Figure 1. Online Labs
This platform is a challenge, and any teacher is motivated when working for a personal,
professional objective, or when creating their own applications which they can publish to make it
available to other teachers and students.
3. The innovative character of the Go-Lab platform

The use of the Go-Lab platform in the classroom provides a wealth of tools useful in teaching-
learning-evaluation, and the way in which applications can be defined makes it possible to adapt to
the needs of educated - pupils or other categories through a training process either initial or on
going.
This platform is a bridge between many teachers in Europe, outside the EU,it is an important
resource for learning activities and will contribute to the development of a strong online learning
community.
Figure 2. Authoring Platform
The Go-Lab portal offers the opportunity to use personalized scientific experiments with the
many innovative teaching tools and resources that are structured according to the students' learning
level.
Due to the ILS structure and support applications, students are focused to a research and
investigation process, being assisted in:
 preparation of experiments,
 formulation of research questions and assumptions,
 performing experiments,
 analyzing the results and
 drawing conclusions, which help them to develop critical thinking and decision
making, a very important thing for them to integrate into the labor market after
completing the high school.
Figure 3. Inquiry Learning Spaces
All created ILSs are not just activities themselves but, their products are further integrated and
exploited by other teachers to improve or create a new ILS, to integrate them into the curriculum,
in collaborative online projects that are a reason in addition to increasing the number of
applications created.
From my point of view, learning becomes effective when the teacher builds a learning material
for students to interact with this learning material and to experience, to understand.
In this context, the student is part of a learning community, in which he is placed in a position
to understand what he has to do, to explain to others and to work together, to inform, document
and extract useful information for his development by using the resources available on the
platform.
Involvement in the Go-Lab project consisted in popularizing it both at school and outside the
school (at county, national and international level) by creating promotional materials (flayers,
presentation brochure, posters, multimedia presentations, documentary films and also the lesson
plans we shared with colleagues in the school and the country, posted on the project socialization
page, on the school's website, but also in various online publications and specialist journals.
Presenting students to the classroom of some applications and laboratories for the purpose of
conducting scientific experiments and for making final products which they can customize,
depending on the field of qualification.
The Go-Lab platform is based on discovery learning, enables online access to scientific
laboratories around the world, and facilitates the work of teachers and students through the
development of end-to-end products with practical applicability.
Go-Lab / Next Lab is a community that will gain more and more members in the coming years
due to the applied promotion policy by developing communication, collaboration and cooperation
links between students and teachers in the country through organizing on-line training sessions,
combined learning courses aimed at personal and professional development, as well as improving
the use of technology (ICT) skills by attaching and integrating project activities to some curricular
areas.
Online Labs-based learning is an approach that involves an active learning style by integrating
into online learning platforms based on students' learning styles and intelligence.
The student has to be involved in the process of his / her own education and must become
responsible for the progress he/she is making.
Conclusions
Integration of online platforms into lessons can lead to usable products by connecting with
other disciplines. There is a possibility to group collaborative activities, learning in the online
environment, which is a powerful tool for implementing modern learning methodologies, focusing
on the trained individual.
With virtual labs, students acquire a tool to experiment without space or time limitations and
are available throughout the year and also can acquire better computerized skills by using virtual
environments that can be considered as learning abilities throughout life and orientation towards
the S.T.E.M. domain.
Science is a subject that encompasses everything in life, helps students to connect with real
life, helps them to explain and appreciate in different ways, to understand our world.
Using efficient new technologies, students and teachers can be trained to acquire the skills
needed to carry out knowledge-based activities.
The advantages of these platforms are multiple, but the most important are:
 accessibility and flexibility
 are available to all teachers at all times and allow sharing a common
experience with people away from each other and discussion based on this experience,
facilitating practically the transfer of know-how among teachers.
References
http://support.golabz.eu/about
Didactic Excel tool for the study of elastic hysteresis
Ionel Grigore, Daniela Stoica, Mihai Popescu
“Ion Luca Caragiale” National College, Ploieşti, Romania

E-mail: grigore_1965[at]yahoo.com, prof_dana_stoica[at]yahoo.com,
mihai_popescu[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
In this paper is described a didactic tool made with Excel spreadsheets for the study of
elastic hysteresis. The input data used are the undeformed initial length of the elastic rubber
band and the values of the band length in deformed state, corresponding to the values of the
applied force. The facilities of the spreadsheet allow the approximate mathematical modeling
of hysteresis by finding the proper interpolation functions of the experimental data. With the
interpolation functions found, for the two branches of hysteresis, the energy dissipated in heat
per the cycle of hysteresis was calculated. For this we have implemented the trapezoidal rule
in the spreadsheet to evaluate the area delimited by the elastic hysteresis loop. Also, starting
from the mathematical modeling of the hysteresis, we have graphically plotted the
dependence of the first-order elastic constant on the applied force, at loading and at
unloading. The use of spreadsheets in the study of the elastic hysteresis presents a series of
advantages in the classroom with the students. Thus, by easily processing the data with the
mathematical modeling tools in the spreadsheet, the students can take a first step in clarifying
the difference between linear elasticity and nonlinear elasticity.
Keywords: spreadsheets, elastic hysteresis, elastic constant, interpolation, numerical

integration, Physics Education.
1 Introduction
The notions of elasticity occupy an important place in the introductory courses of Physics
(Halliday et al, 2013; Serway and Jewett, 2013). The literature has addressed aspects of both
teaching and learning of concepts from linear or nonlinear elasticity, as well as the way of
processing the experimental data in didactic experiments of elasticity.
The realization of a remote experiment has been described for students who learn about the
elastic properties of materials in order to understand Hooke’s law. Using the distance experiment
can facilitate students’ learning by reducing the difficulties that arise in traditional classes, such as
the lack of experimental means or the direct interaction with the physical phenomenon (Michels et
al, 2013). In order to clarify the difference between the modulus of elasticity and the modulus of
rigidity, two hands-on experiments have been presented. By configuring and performing these
experiments, students can see that the modulus of elaticity and the modulus of rigidity do not
depend on the geometry of the elastic body but only on the nature of the material (Joyce, 2004).
There have been concerns for the mathematical modeling of the bungee-jumping game. For
example, in a research project conducted by secondary school students, it was discussed how
measurements with sensors, video analysis and computer modeling allow the study of physics of
bungee jumping (Heck et al, 2010). By processing the data from the bungee-jumping simulation in
the laboratory, the acceleration of the jumper was calculated according to the gravitational
acceleration (Biezeveld, 2003). Also, by generating an energy model, the equations for designing
the bungee rubber cord size were solved (Kockelman and Hubbard, 2004).
Elasticity problems have been successfully addressed with the help of spreadsheets. Thus, an
Excel didactic tool was described to verify the linear dependence of the displacement of the
applied force and the calculation of the elastic constant at an elastic spring (Grigore et al, 2014).
Also, a general hysteresis model was presented and it was shown how the hysteresis cycle
modifies when changing the input data in the spreadsheet (Ehrmann and Blaschowicz, 2015).
This paper describes an Excel didactic tool to study the elastic hysteresis. The experimental
data have been acquired from a simple experiment measuring the deformation of an elastic rubber
band. Measurements were made, both at loading, when the applied force increases, and at
unloading, when the applied force decreases. More precisely, marked weights were hung by the
elastic band; it progressively elongated, and after 10 measurements, the weights have been
removed, one by one, starting with the last added weight up to the first one. Graphically
representing the displacement of the applied force revealed the phenomenon of elastic hysteresis.
We have shown how the spreadsheet facilities allow for the approximate mathematical modeling
of the hysteresis by finding the appropriate interpolation functions of the experimental data. Using
these, which describe the two branches of hysteresis, we calculated the energy dissipated in heat
per hysteresis cycle. For this purpose, in order to evaluate the area limited by the hysteresis loop,
we have transposed into the spreadsheet the trapezoidal rule. Taking into account the mathematical
modeling of the elastic hysteresis we have shown how the first order elastic constant varies with
the applied force on the elastic band, and finally discussed the advantages of using this didactic
tool in the classroom, with the students.
2 Organization of spreadsheets
The Excel tool for studying the elastic hysteresis consists of four interactive spreadsheets. We
will further describe the spreadsheets and how they interact with each other for the operation of the
tool.
Figure 1 shows the main spreadsheet with the Input Data and Results sections. The Input Data
section contains two subsections, Constants and Variables. In the Constants subsection, delimited
by the A4:D6 domain, the following measures are introduced: the gravitational acceleration, g, in
cell D5 and the initial length of the undeformed band, l0, in cell D6. In the subsection Variables,
delimited by the A8:D19 domain, the following measures are introduced: the mass hung from the
elastic band, m, in column B, the length of the deformed band at loading, l, in the column C, and
the length of the deformed band at unloading, l’, in column D.
In the Results section, delimited by the domain E8:G19, the following are calculated:
 the values of the applied force, F, in the column E, as the product of the mass values in
column B and the value of the gravitational acceleration;
 the values of the displacement of the band at loading, x, in column F, as the difference
between the values of the deformed band at loading and the value of the initial length;
 the values of the displacement of the band at unloading, x’, in column G, as the difference
between the values of the length of the deformed band at unloading and the value of the
initial length.
By selecting the data in the E-F-G columns, corresponding to the Results section, the
displacement was represented against the applied force. The blue circles represent the
experimental data corresponding to the loading of the band, when the applied force increases,
while the red triangles represent the experimental data corresponding to the unloading of the band
when the applied force decreases. From the graphical representation, the non-linear character of
the dependence of the displacement on the applied force is observed. Also, the phenomenon of
elastic hysteresis is emphasized, because at unloading, the red triangles are above blue circles at
loading on the graph.
Figure 1. The main spreadsheet of the tool with the graph of the elastic hysteresis
To find the interpolation functions in accordance with the experimental data, we have used the
“Trend Line” command in the object menus of the two data series corresponding to the hysteresis
branches. From the trend line formatting window, for the function type, we have chosen the
fourth-order polynomial function. We have thus obtained the graphs drawn between the points
corresponding to the experimental values, the blue curve at loading and, respectively, the red curve
at unloading. Using the “Trend Line” options, we showed the analytical forms on the graph of the
interpolation functions, x(F), at loading in the blue box and at unloading in the red box. The values
of the coefficients of the two polynomials of fourth order shown on the hysteresis graph were
inserted into the C26-G26 and C27-G27 cells of the main spreadsheet.
Figure 2. Annex spreadsheet with the interpolation of the experimental data

Figure 2 shows the spreadsheet with the interpolation of the experimental data. In this
spreadsheet we can observe the difference between the experimental values and the values
calculated for the two branches of the hysteresis, x(F) at loading, respectively, x’(F) at unloading.
Also in this spreadsheet, the first-order elastic constants are calculated according to the applied
force, at loading and respectively unloading of the elastic band.
In the annex spreadsheet, as shown in Figure 2, the data from the main spreadsheet is
imported into columns B, C, D, E, F, J. Thus, in column B, are imported the values for the total
mass placed at the lower end of the elastic band, in column C the values for the length of the
deformed band at loading, in the column D the values for the length of the deformed band at
unloading, in the column E the values of the applied force, in column F the values for the
displacement of the band at loading, and in column J the values for the displacement of the band at
unloading.
In columns G, H, I the following measures are calculated:
 The displacement according to the applied force at the loading of the band, x(F), in column
G
[1] x( F )  a0 F 4  a1F 3  a2 F 2  a3 F  a4
 The derivate of the function x(F) in relation to F, dx/dF, in column H
[2] dx / dF  4a0 F 3  3a1F 2  2a2 F  a3
 The elastic constant of the first order at the loading of the band, k(F), in column I
1
[3] k ( F ) 
dx / dF
In relations (1) and (2), a0, a1, a2, a3 and a4 are the coefficients of the interpolation function
taken from the C26-G26 cells of the main spreadsheet shown in Figure 1 and F represents the
values of the applied force in column E. In columns K, L, M the same measures are calculated as
in columns G, H, I but at the unloading of the elastic band.
It can be seen that the differences between the experimental values x and the values x(F)
calculated with the interpolation function, both at the loading and unloading of the band, are very
small, generally less than 1 mm. Because the maximum absolute error in measuring the elastic
band length was 1 mm in the experiment that provided the data, the choice of the interpolation
functions as polynomials of the fourth order is justified.
Figure 3.a shows the graph of the dependence of the elastic constant on the applied force. The
source table of the graph is in a secondary spreadsheet. The step for generating the values of the
applied force was chosen as being equal to the 100th part of the range delimited by the minimum
applied force and maximum applied force. The graph of the elastic constant, k=k(F), is placed in
the main spreadsheet alongside the graph of the elastic hysteresis, x=x(F), to notice the link
between them. Thus, when the angle between the graph x(F) and the horizontal axis F increases,
the elastic constant decreases with the applied force. Conversely, when the angle between graph
x(F) and horizontal axis F decreases, the elastic constant increases with applied force. If the angle
between graph x(F) and horizontal axis F remains constant, then the elastic constant does not vary
with the applied force.
In cell F29 of the main spreadsheet, we calculated the energy dissipated as heat in medium
over the cycle of hysteresis. This energy is equal to the area between the branches of the hysteresis
cycle:
Fmax
[4] E  [ x' ( F )  x( F )]dF

Fmin
where x(F) and x’(F) represent the functions describing the branches of the hysteresis cycle at
loading, respectively, unloading, and Fmin, Fmax are the limits of the range of values for the applied
force.
The calculation of the integral defined by relation (4) has been done with the trapezoidal rule.
The use of the respective rule in the spreadsheet to solve Physics problems has been presented in
different papers (Grigore et al, 2015; Grigore et al, 2016; Grigore et al, 2018) and that is why we
will further adapt the results obtained in the current situation.
By dividing the interval [Fmin, Fmax] in equal parts and noting x’(F)-x(F)=y we have:
 n
1 
[5] E  

yi 1
i  ( y1  y n )F
2 
where y1=y(Fmin), yn=y(Fmax) and F is the elementary interval, F=(Fmax-Fmin)/(n-1).
Figure 3. a) The graph of the dependence of the elastic constant of the first order on the applied
force; b) The secondary spreadsheet with the transposition of the trapezoidal rule to calculate the
area of the hysteresis cycle
The transposition of the trapezoidal rule in the spreadsheet is rendered in Figure 3.b. In the
first section of the spreadsheet, delimited by the range A4:E13, we have done the following
operations:
 In cell E4 we have introduced the number of divisions, n, in which we divided the interval
[Fmin, Fmax];
 In cell E5, we have calculated the minimum applied force, F min, with the Excel function
MIN having as argument the range of the values of the applied force;
 In cell E6 we have calculated the maximum applied force, Fmax, with the Excel function
MAX having as argument the range of the values of the applied force;
 In cell E7 we have calculated the length of the elementary interval, F, using of the values
from cells E4, E5 and E6;
 In cells A11, C11, D11 and E11 we have calculated the function x(F) for Fmin, Fmax at
loading, respectively, unloading;
 In cells E12, E13 we have calculated the functions y1=x’(Fmin)-x(Fmin), respectively
yn=x’(Fmax)-x(Fmax).
In the second section of the spreadsheet, delimited by the range A15:E1016, we have done the
operations:
 we have generated the values of the applied force in column B considering the length of
the elementary interval F calculated in cell E7;
 we have calculated the values x(F) in column C for the values of the applied force F from
column B with relation (1);
 we have calculated the values x’(F) in column D for the values of the applied force F
from column B with a relation analogous to relation (1) but with the coefficients of the
polynomial function from the unloading of the elastic band;
 we have calculated the values of the function y=x’(F)-x(F) in column E for the values of
the applied force F from column B.
To adapt relation (5) in the spreadsheet we have named cells E7, E12 and E13 with Delta_F,
Y_FMIN and Y_FMAX and the range of values E17:E1016 of the function y=x’(F)-x(F) with
Domain_YF. With these cell names and domains we have written in cell F29 of the main
spreadsheet the Excel formula to calculate the energy dissipated in the heat on the hysteresis cycle:
“=(SUM(Domain_YF)-(1/2)*(Y_FMIN+Y_FMAX))*Delta_F”.
When changing the input data, to recalculate the value in cell F29, the new values must be
introduced for the coefficients of the interpolation functions in cells C26-G26, at loading,
respectively, C27-G27 at unloading. This operation is done after the re-display of the functions of
interpolation on the graph of the hysteresis by using the window “trend line” again.
Conclusions
With the help of the tool described in this paper, it is easy to process the data from didactic
experiments that highlight the phenomenon of elastic hysteresis. The presentation of the results,
both in analytical and graphical form, allows for an efficient comparison between different types
of measurements. For example, the tool can be used to confront the experimental results from the
elastic spring elasticity study with the experimental results from the elasticity of the elastic rubber
band study. Thus, it is possible to quickly test under what conditions Hooke’s law is valid and, at
the same time, when the elastic hysteresis occurs.
The construction of the tool, in the classroom, with the students, provides a good example of
transferring important concepts of applied mathematics, such as the interpolation of observation
data and numerical integration, into experimental physics. By translating these concepts into the
spreadsheet, the students have the opportunity to clarify the difference between linear elasticity
and nonlinear elasticity, and to mathematically model the elastic hysteresis cycle, in a first
approximation.
References
Halliday, D., Resnick, R., Walker, J. (2013): Fundamentals of Physics, 10 th Edition, John Wiley & Sons.,
Inc., ISBN-13: 978-1118230725.
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Microsoft Excel 2010
Shaping Online Identity and future work identity
Magdalena Velciu1
(1) National Scientific Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection,
Bucharest, Povernei street 6-8, ROMANIA
E-mail: magda.velciu[at]incsmps.ro
Abstract
The paper aims to shape the perception of young Romanian users about the online
identity they have in virtual environment. I present the results of a questionnaire-based
survey searching for information about creating an online identity and the impact on real
life, inquiring young persons, students or graduates who are Internet users. By doing so, I
pursue not only to know the social status of Internet users, but also to make the young
aware of the risks involved and to determine them to be more careful with managing online
presence, as future workers. The theme of this paper is in line with recent concern about
how young people build their work identity, emphasizing the need for raising awarness and
managing online identity by careful communication in virtual environment, especially for
young persons either in education, graduates or searching for a job. Managing work
identity, as a a two-edged weapon for performance, could influence reputation inwork
environmentand future career, so not only relates to informations but become more, a
potential toolfor succesfull work transitions.
Keywords: Online identity, virtual environment, work identity
1 Introduction
In actual work environment, information and communication technologies (ICT’s) become
essential. The virtual environment involves new definition for business environment, by emerging
digital technologies and programms in whole social and working life.
We are leading to a new stage of evolution of ICT’s and Europe meet new challenges such as
aging of population, reducing energy consumption, improving transport efficiency and mobility
(Digital Agenda for Europe, 2010). The next step after the industrial revolution is to move toward
an economy based on information transmission, processing and storage, changing the way we
work, live, communicate. Industry 4.0 will bring many transformations of economy and industrial
products, also society and working life, at individual level.
Our challenge of future workplaces is how all of us, young people, graduates and professionals,
will be able to manage this huge volume of data and turn it into relevant information for real life.
Information management develop tools and recommendations for managing and controlling risks
and clarifies the types of potential threats, providing tools and methods to ensure information
security, minimizing potential damage, maximizing profits and development prospects.
1.1 Two out of three Romanians have a personal computer at home and Internet access
The Romanian National Institute of Statistics states that in 2017, there were 11 million internet
users in Romania, aged between 16 and 74 years old. According to official statistics, figures are up
3.8% over the previous year. In Romania, two out of three households (65%) have access to the
network. In 2017, most people are current users, a total of 86.8% of people aged 16-74 was using
the Internet in the last 3 months of the survey, of which 73.3% use online environment daily or
almost daily and 22% with weekly frequency. Over the last 3 months the internet has been
accessed daily by more than 9 out of 10 students.
2 Online identity: reality and dysfunctionality

The definition of identity has interdisciplinary coordinates at the intersection of multiple
domains. In the socio-human sciences, the term is a tribute to the way the individual positions and
is influenced by the social, economic, global context and the way the individual is placed in this
context.
Work identity is the representation of workers perception related to work environment.Identity
is done with our self-perception of own interactions within micro and macro environment. The
identity formation process is influenced by many factors inherent to the specific social, economical
or virtual environment. Researchers found out that work-based identity and work engagement
give similar appearing results as potential predictors of turnover intention and task performance
(Bothma Fc, 2012). At this point, the difference between a successful activity and a failure lies in
the ability to make well-documented decisions on work activities. However, particular attention
should be paid to the protection of informations uploaded on the net.
Online identity or identity on network is an individual's identity that a user create in online
communities and websites. The action is varied: spending leisure time, games, information,
socializing, e-commerce etc. In online, there are two major categories of identities depending on
the purpose users are pursuing: a real identity created for information, promotion, or professional
purpose, and a non-real identity created for the purpose of expressing opinions or spending leisure
time. Sometimes, as a result of being anonymous, the effect of online disinhibition appears,
referring to impulsive and disinhibitory behavior on the Internet (Bray, 2004). At this time, the
online identity trust problem arises. When using the Internet, online identity is the sum of the
features and actions that are being carried out. A person interacts differently with each site they
visit, so each of these sites will have another features of who persons are and what they do.
Sometimes different characteristics of the person refer to partial identities, because present just a
singular role.
On the other hand, some users can create a false image and therefore are not trustworthy.
Malicious people can access information from their personal computer and steal information about
what is called "identity theft" or use information for other financial, commercial, advertising,
personal, etc. purposes. That is why many people have learned to adopt and follow strategies that
allow them to control the level of disclosure of personal information and to create various, more or
less real, identities in the online environment according to their immediate purpose. Identity theft
is one of the most dangerous threats to an Internet user.
Identity management is the process of managing access to virtual identity information over
time. This activity involves the creation of distinct identities for individuals and organizations as
well as the association of systems with application level accounts with these identities. Identity
management processes are used to initiate, capture, record and manage user identities and access
permissions related to them with proprietary information. Online identity management is the
process of handling the information and access to virtual identity over time, usefull to initiate,
capture, record and manage user identities and access permissions related to them with proprietary
information.
In the current context, it has become clear to everyone that privacy is an illusion on the
Internet.We must start from the premise that nothing we do in the virtual environment belongs to
us exclusively, that when we share something, this may be viewed by more people, maybe the
future employer.
2.1 Methodology
We aim to identify the perception of young Romanian users about their actions they have as
online users. By doing so, we seek not only to know the experience with online identity, but also
to become aware of the risks involved and discernment of the necessary steps on managing online
identities that the young interviewees will discover.
To investigate how Internet users remark the status and implications of online presence and
online(virtual) identity of Romanian young people, I conducted a questionnaire-based survey and
collected 77 answers via online. The average age of the respondents was 23.8 years. The
dimensions of the analysis were: the status of online presence or identity keeping in mind its
subsequent risks; many faces of identity in social media like true-fake and practices focusing on
managing personal information. All highlighting that fact that online presence imply many effects.
2.2 Resultsand data interpretation
The status of online presence

This is essential because online presence will to an online identity and can influence future jobs
and professional career and young have to be carefull about keep a clear online
presence.Keepingonline presence related data in user profiles is possible due to online services that
allow capturing of some individual identity aspects, activities, pictures.
For monitoring the frequency and time spent in online environment, I asked young people
about how often do they use the Internet?The vast majority of Romanian young respondents
(97.4%) used the Internet every day, once or more times a day, accessing the internet for various
purposes as study, searching for information, spending leisure time, etc. Only 2.6% of respondents
said they use the internet once every 2-3 days. No person said they were visiting for a longer
period, once a week, or per month (figure 1).
The majority of young (89.6%) used online activities and sites for which they need to register,
set up a user account, and therefore create their own online identity, providing data about their
name, age, sex, concerns, and activity, etc. Only 10.4% of respondents said they use the internet
without need to register.
Figure 1: How often do you use the Internet?
Young people in social media

There could be many concerns about theeffects that social media has on the futureprofesional
life of young people, some positive and negative.This is important in our circumstances because
social media and social networking sites are the strongest in creating online identity but also
permit exposure, information and the risks that may be hidden behind such activities.
I interogate young people about their activity like users of social media as means of interaction
and sharing information in virtual communities and networks. Theseinclude networking sites
(Facebook), blogs (Twitter), pictures or video sharing (Instagram, YouTube), etc.Very interesting, all
respondents have a user account on social networking sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
Concerning about the the truth of the information circulating on the net, I asked young if the
image provided on social accounts is real one and do represent them.Therespondents had different
answers, a half of them, or 58.4% said that the image created in online environment is real as they
think, so online identity is the same as real identity. Less than half, 41.6%, said that the image
provided on social accounts does not really represent them, so online identity is not the same as
real identity (figure 2). However, the number of people who chose to offer another image is quite large.
Figure 2:Do you think that your online image actually represents you?
The above answer is in line with the following results, which shows that young people are
aware that online identity may reflect or not reflect reality. Asked „to what extent do you identify
yourself with the image provided as a user on social networking sites”, young users said they only
identify to a certain extent. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 corresponds to the value to a very small
extent and 7 corresponds to the value to a very large extent, the respondents appreciated that the
value of the identification is 5.16 on average.
Take care for your online identity...

In order to reflect the young concerning for their online image and awareness of the
implications of their actions, I interrogated them about the behavior of searching for information
about themself, names, activities etc in the online environment. This is a subjective and facil
method for managing personal information and one's identity. As a result, more than half of young
people (53.2%) searched for information about themselves as they appear in the virtual
environment. A lower percentage, only 35.1% have not yet searched for information online.
Fortunately, 11.7% of the young people who participated in this questionnaire said they have not
yet searched for information but will do so in the near future (figure 3). This could be a sign of
need for raising awareness and improve the practices for administration of online identity.
Figure 3: Did you search Google for information about your on-line identity?
The gain of this interviews was the real alarm signal I fired through young people regarding
what an online identity means in the virtual environment, foe now and for their future jobs they
want to apply and take care about how they manage their web presence better. Young people
understood that online identity is anewest unique asset, like a personal marque as future
professionals.
Conclusions
The Internet has gained a central place in our lives. Also there are many things to know about
online identities which could impacts on our lives with positive and negative unwanted
consequences. We have to be aware about some information we put on virtual space. Inquiring
Romanian young people, students or graduates who are Internet users, about their online presence,
I confirmed my assumption that Romanian young respondents (97.4%) used the Internet every
day, once or more times a day, accessing the virtual environment for various purposes especially
through presence in the online social media. A half of them said that the image created in online
environment is real one so, in many cases, they do not identify theirself with the image provided as
a user on social networking sites. More than half of investigated young people already searched for
information about their appearance in the virtual environment, but from now on, many more will
do it carefully. That is essential because online identity can influence future jobs and career and
young have to be carefull about keep a clear professional online presence.
Once more, I want to emphasize the importance for managing online identity by careful
communication in virtual environment, especially for young persons either in education, graduates
or searching for a job.
References
Bray, Z. (2004)Living Boundaries: Frontiers and Identity. Presses interuniversitaires européenes - Peter
Lang, Brussels
Brubaker, R. and Frederick C. (2000) Beyond 'Identity'. In: Theory and Society, no. 29, p. 1–47
Bothma,Fcand Roodt, Gert. (2012). Work-based identity and work engagement as potential antecedents of
task performance and turnover intention: unravelling a complex relationship. SA Journal of Industrial
Psychology. 38. 27-44.
Kroger, J. (1997). Gender and identity: The intersection of structure, content and context. SexRoles, 11/12 ,
747–770.
Digital Agenda for Europe(2010) download from: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/digital-
agenda-europe-key-publications
Institutul Naţional de Statistică, Romania, Accesul populaţiei la tehnologia informaţiilor şi comunicaţiilor în
anul 2017, 8 decembrie 2017.
The aptitude for school education from different perspectives
Flavia Mălureanu1, Luiza Enachi-Vasluianu1
(1) University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences,

Department for Teachers’ Training, Focşani Branch, 50, Mărășești Street, 620063,
ROMANIA, E-mail: flaviamalureanu[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
The aptitude for education or school maturity is the expression of a phase in child’s
development, marking the level of school debut (5-7 years). The moment of school debut
presupposes a certain level of physical, intellectual and socio-emotional development of the
child. The aptitude for schooling is circumscribed to these indicators, translated into abilities,
skills, aptitudes absolutely necessary to school debut. Our study intends to present a
descriptive analysis of the teachers’ opinions on children’s aptitude for school education
based on a series of indicators that define this aptitude. The teachers involved in the study are
200 kindergarten teachers and primary school teachers from urban environment. The goal of
the research is to register the perspectives of teachers from the two school levels and to make
them known in order to achieve smooth continuity between kindergarten and primary school.
The results of the study can constitute the basis for thematical meetings or projects of
cooperation between kindergarten and primary school in order to identify focal points for the
formation and the development of the aptitude for school education.
Keywords: Aptitude for education, School maturity, Kindergarten children, Primary

school students
1 Introduction
The aptitude for school education is a complex and dynamic structure of psychic functions
such as thinking, language, attention, will etc. which, alongside motivation and other aspects of
personality, determine the student’s success in school (Golu, 2009). It is part of the general
aptitudes, as it represents a combination of physical and psychic abilities which facilitate the
successful approach of a very large range of situations and tasks from various fields. It constitutes
a condition for child’s integration into school activity and, at the same time, is the result of the
actions of formation in kindergarten, to a large extent, and in the family, to a lower extent. The
kindergarten prepares the children cognitively and gets them accustomed to the social life in the
institution. The family contributes with the motivational support and by continuing the actions of
the kindergarten within the familial environment.
The schooling aptitude is a synthesis, is the infrastructure of the personality captured in the
dynamic of its formation, perceived through the dominant activity the child is involved into, that is
learning. The specific literature (Cucuteanu, 1998; Golu, 2009; Voiculescu 2003, Sălăvăstru,
2004) identifies the following components of the aptitude for school education: the communication
level, the cognitive level, the degree of awareness of the events in the real world, the level of
formation of motricity, the degree of socialization, the development of affectivity, the level of
formation of elementary axiological values, the degree of motivation, the development of a series
of personality traits necessary for the involvement in school life. All these variable components
converge towards the development of the aptitude for school education, as unique and individual
trait of each child, based on biological, physical, social and familial influences (Sălăvăstru, 2004).
The cognitive level makes reference to the stage of formation of the thinking operations such
as analysis, synthesis, comparison, classification, simple exercises of abstraction, generalization. It
may also include the level of argumentation in cases of simple judgements, the resistance to
intellectual effort, transfer of information. The level of communication includes the degree of
acquisition of elements of phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, logic coherence and expressiveness.
The child should be willing to take part in dialogues, obeying the rules of the communicational act.
Another relevant component of the aptitude for school educations is motricity. At this level of
age (5-7 years), most of the times, children’s motricity skills are still developing, but the basics
have already been sustained through exercise in kindergarten and family.
Socialization implies skills of self-control, abilities of cooperation, negotiation, problem
solving, obeying rules specific to a social situation, spontaneity in establishing relationships,
integration into groups, fulfilling tasks, avoiding conflicts and reconciliation skills etc. (Botiș,
Mihalca, 2007; Ștefan, Callay, 2010). The child should manifest all these behaviours in order to
deal successfully with the integration into a new social group, in this case primary school
classroom. The education of sociability is made through task giving, through social
responsibilities, through involving children into games and collective activities. The kindergarten
instructive-educational process makes the children apt for the new requirements and provides them
live lessons of socialization that is, it makes them learn from success and failure, from
appreciation and disapproval, from joy and sorrow etc. (Șchiopu, Verza, 1995).
The affectivity state relates to a scale of sensitivity manifestations in reference to the events
lived, the persons around. It includes the recognition and the expression of emotions (recognition
of one’s emotions and the others’, verbal expression of emotions, expression of sympathy towards
other people, expression of complex emotions such as guilt, pride, shame etc.), understanding the
emotions (identification of cause, acknowledgement of the consequences of the emotions in a
given situation), emotional adjustment (emotion grasping, manifestation of emotions in a socially
adequate form) (Botiș, Mihalca, 2007).
The formation of axiological elementary values is the result of the assimilation of value models
met in the social environment, in stories, in films etc. The kindergarten and the family usually
establish the basis for the formation of the axiological consciousness. Children are taught to
treasure positive essential values such as good, truth, aesthetics. They are also encouraged to
manifest these values in concrete situational contexts.
At this level of age, motivation undergoes the process of formation. Now the motives are
influenced extrinsically and affectively to a large extent. The children have to become aware of the
necessity of acceding to a superior form of school and as such they should want to integrate into
primary school life. At the same time, they should be aware of the events in the real world. As
such, they should be aware that they will change their status from preschoolers into primary school
students. They will go to a new institution, with new teachers and new colleagues. These aspects
will ease the transition from one school level to the other, placing less emotional pressure on the
child and increasing the level of motivation.
The correlation of the components mentioned above become the expression of manifests of
solidarity, perseverance, punctuality, fairness, communication skills, adaptability, receptivity to
new, challenge acceptance etc. Getting ready for primary school presupposes the correlation of all
these components. As a result the children should be apt for school, able to deal with the
instructive-educational requests and compatible biologically, psychologically, sociologically with
the norms and the rules imposed in the school curriculum (Voiculescu, 2003). The children are
psychologically ready for school when they are able to pass from mainly ludic activities to
learning, as a systematic, organised activity. Children are not apt to enrol primary school if they
have not developed a certain capacity for work, that is they have become aware of the necessity of
accomplishing tasks that sometimes they do not display affinity for. This is tightly related to the
level of will and motivation development (Drăgan, 1976).
2 Research design
Objectives
The research objectives were a) to identify the components of the aptitude for school
education, b) to realize descriptive analyses of the selected components in order to determine a
hierarchy for two school levels, kindergarten and primary school.
Participants
The research sample was made of 200 teachers from Vrancea County, Romania, split evenly in
number: 100 from kindergarten and 100 from primary school. The teachers got involved
voluntarily in the research.
Research instrument
The main method applied in our research was the questionnaire-based investigation. The
questionnaire was built based on specific literature and on focus-group discussions with teachers
from the two school levels. This led to the identification of a set of components transposed into the
following items: level of communication, cognitive level, degree of awareness of the changes in
the school level, motricity skills, socialization, affectivity, axiological elementary values,
motivation, development of personality traits.
The respondents selected one of the following variants of a five-step scale: (1) to a very low
extent, (2) to a low extent, (3) to an average extent, (4) to a large extent, (5) to a very large extent,
thus showing the relevance of each component as part of the aptitude for school education.
3 Results and discussions
Table 1.Means and standard deviation of aptitude for school education

Kindergarten Primary school
Items of aptitude for school education Mean Mean
(std. dev.) (std. dev.)
Level of communication 4.58 (0.538) 4.76 (0.824)
Cognitive level 4.32 (0.886) 4.82 (0.438)
Degree of awareness of the changes in 3.64 (1.025) 3.88 (1.189)
the school level
Motricity skills 4.00 (0.881) 4.16 (0.658)
Socialization 4.78 (0.420) 4.62 (0.845)
Affectivity 4.64 (0.564) 4.02 (0.995)
Axiological elementary values 3.78 (1.234) 3.52 (1.446)
Motivation 4.08 (1.010) 4.68 (0.614)
Development of personality traits 4.34 (0.268) 4.04 (0.854)
The hierarchy resulted from the investigation shows that the highest mean was registered for
the degree of socialization (m = 4.78) for kindergarten. Kindergarten teachers consider that the
harmonious development of personality is important at this level of age because it represents the
debut in a different social environment, based on new interactions, new rules of behaviour. A good
social integration influences positively the affective and the intellectual aspects as well, facilitating
successful didactic activities.
In primary school, the highest mean was registered for the cognitive level (m = 4.82). The
teachers in this level of school state that the cognitive level is the most important because the
primary school activity lays emphasis on the intellectual operations. On the other hand,
kindergarten teachers consider the cognitive aspect less important (ranked 5 th in the kindergarten
teachers’ opinions hierarchy) than the aspects dealing with the socio-affective adjustment to the
school environment, as in Romania kindergarten is not mandatory and children do not attend this
level of school constantly. The result of this reality is that children’s intellectual formation is
heterogeneous and, in this context, the cognitive level is not relevant for entering primary school.
The lowest means were registered for the degree of awareness of the changes in the school
level (m = 3.64) for kindergarten, and for axiological elementary values (m = 3.52) for primary
school. Kindergarten and primary school teachers think that the main models of morals and value
promotion are within the family and children at 5-7 years of age are too young to develop moral
consciousness and have solid positions in reference to a dichotomy of values. All the same,
teachers lay emphasis on a minimum contrast among basic values and promote the positive ones.
Kindergarten responses registered means above 4 for the following items: the degree of
socialization, (m = 4.78), the development of affectivity (m = 4.64), the communication level (m =
4.58), the development of personality traits (m = 4.34), the cognitive level (m=4.32), the degree of
motivation (m = 4.08), the development of motricity skills (m = 4.00). Primary school responses
registered means above 4 for the following items: the cognitive level (m = 4.82), the
communication level (m = 4.76), the degree of motivation (m = 4.68), the degree of socialization
(m = 4.62), the development of motricity skills (m = 4.16), the development of personality traits
(m = 4.04) and the development of affectivity (m = 4.02).
Table 2.Descriptive of hierarchy of the aptitude for school education

Rank Kindergarten Primary school
1. Socialization Cognitive level
2. Affectivity Level of communication
3. Level of communication Motivation
4. Development of personality traits Socialization
5. Cognitive level Motricity skills
6. Motivation Development of personality traits
7. Motricity skills Affectivity
8. Axiological elementary values Degree of awareness of the changes
in the school level
9. Degree of awareness of the changes Axiological elementary values
in the school level
The top three ranks belong to the degree of socialization, the development of affectivity, the
communication level at kindergarten, whereas at primary school there are the cognitive level, the
communication level, the degree of motivation. For both levels, communication is important as it
facilitates all aspects of child development and allows a smoother integration into school activities.
Kindergarten teachers spent approximately the same amount of hours with children as primary
teachers do, however, the specifics of the preschool didactic activities allow the formation of
profound affective interrelationships. That is why kindergarten teachers lay more emphasis on the
role of affectivity for the formation of school aptitude and the harmonious development of
preschoolers’ personalities. On the other hand, primary school teachers do not consider affectivity
particularly important as enrolling in primary school means a process of mutual acquaintance and
adjustment, which automatically involves the emotional readjustment. Moreover, child’s
affectivity aspects will be largely dealt upon and intertwined in the educational process through the
activities of the discipline Personal development, which aims at socio-emotional development. The
time spent with the children outside the classroom is significantly less than in the kindergarten
level. These are the reasons the primary school teachers stated, and proved through the means
granted to this item, that they lay less emphasis on the affective dimension.
As for the development of personality traits, primary school teachers consider that for a
successful integration of children into the didactic activities, the personality traits such as
perseverance, adaptability, receptivity to new etc. must be already formed by the age of 5-7. This
simplifies the work in the classroom and the social interactions.
As for motivation, the teachers in the focus-groups stated that the motives children go to
primary school are: “because I have to”, “because my parents and my teacher want me to”,
“because I want to learn new things and I want to make new friends”, “because it is important for
my development to become a primary school student”. In this context the kindergarten teachers
consider motivation as less important as it centres on “I have to”. On the other hand, primary
school teachers think preschoolers must be motivated to go to the next level of school so as to get
involved actively in the didactic activities and not get frustrated because of the little amount of
ludic activities in comparison to the more structured learning activities specific to this school level.
The T test was used for the independent groups to determine the differences of the opinions
regarding the components for the school education aptitude. The significance level was set to 0.05.
Starting from the significant differences from a statistical point of view among teachers’
appreciations, we could state the relevance of the components of the aptitude for school education.
Thus, the analysis of the appreciations of the teachers from the kindergarten and primary school
brought to light significant differences for six items (the cognitive level, the development of
personality traits, the development of affectivity, the degree of motivation, the level of formation
of elementary axiological values, degree of awareness of the changes in the school level, p<0.05).
The divergence of opinions regarding the six elements is reflected on the hierarchy in Table 2.
Statistically insignificant differences were registered for three items (level of communication,
socialization, motricity skills), indicating convergence of opinions of the teachers from the two
school levels.
Conclusions
In conclusion, the aptitude for school education involves preschoolers’ capacity to integrate
into successful didactic activity and a new group of students. The kindergarten must create
favourable premises to realise smooth continuity between preschool and primary school and as
such the teachers from the two school levels should cooperate more.
The results of the present research provide the different perspectives of kindergarten and
primary school teachers on the formation of the aptitude for school education. They can constitute
the basis for thematical meetings or projects of cooperation between the teachers in order to
achieve agreement on a hierarchy so that they have convergence of action for the benefit of the
children.
References
Botiş, A. and Mihalca, A. (2007): Despre dezvoltarea abilităţilor emoţionale şi sociale ale copiilor, fete şi
băieţi, cu vârsta până în 7 ani. Ghid pentru cadrele didactice din învăţământul preşcolar. Editura Alpha
MDN, Buzău.
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Golu, F. (2009): Pregătirea psihologică a copilului pentru școală. Editura Polirom, Iași.
Sălăvăstru, D. (2004): Psihologia Educaţiei. Editura Polirom, Iași.
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practic pentru părinți. Editura ASCR, Cluj-Napoca.
Voiculescu, E. (2003): Pedagogie preşcolară. Editura Aramis, București.
A study on disruptive communicative behaviour in school
Luiza Enachi-Vasluianu1, Flavia Mălureanu1
(1) University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences,

Department for Teachers’ Training, Focşani Branch, 50, Mărășești Street, 620063,
ROMANIA, E-mail: vasluianu_luiza[at]yahoo.com
Abstract
Synthesizing specific literature, one can define disruptive communicative behaviour as all
the aspects that negatively influence the efficiency of the communicational act. Psychologists
draw attention that these kind of disruptive behaviours send messages which should be
interpreted as forms of communication: need for attention, getting rid of unwanted tasks,
avoiding chores etc. As a rule, children display such behaviour in order to solicit adults’
reactions. As such adults should pay more attention to the causes that determine such
behaviour than to the behaviour itself. The context of our study is educational and it deals
with disruptive communicative problems teachers encounter in their daily practice. The
sample is made up of teachers from two levels of school, gymnasium and high school. The
intention of the study is to describe and analyse their opinions on the frequency of the
disruptive communicative behaviours in the classroom. The set of indicators subjected to
research is selected based on specialised literature and discussions in focus-groups with
teachers involved in the study. The results of the study for each school level draw attention on
the aspects that affect the quality of communication in the classroom and it also provides an
opportunity for teachers to reflect on some familiar and some less familiar ways of thinking
about and approaching such problems. The study could be prolonged with the analyses of the
causes which lead to such behaviours in order to try to avoid them.
Keywords: Disruptive communicative behaviour, Efficiency of classroom communication,

Forms of communication
1 Introduction
Teachers, irrespective of school levels, see disruptive communicative behaviour as a major
concern in schools today. The specific literature (Cerghit, 2008; Pânișoară, 2004; Mălureanu,
2017; Sălăvăstru, 2004) has dwelt largely on this issue focussing on causes, manifests, effects and
successful strategies to deal with it in classroom. Synthesizing the information, the definition of
disruptive communicative behaviour stands out as all the aspects that negatively influence the
efficiency of the communicational act. Our research focuses on students’ display of disruptive or
inappropriate behaviour. Its purpose is to emphasize aspects that influence negatively the didactic
communication. By acknowledging them teachers may think of and develop strategies to prevent,
eliminate or diminish the disruptive communicative behaviours in classrooms.
2 Literature review
The interruption of the communicational flow is connected to acts of indiscipline or lack of
ethics in communication. As a rule, students may ask questions that are not related to the topic of
discussion or they want to show off by anticipating teacher’s message or they simply talk out of
turn. Teachers become frustrated in such situations. The more they occur, the less willing they are
to listen to ideas. Such behaviours prevent the smooth development of the didactic activities and
consequently affect students’ learning process.
Lack of attention leads inevitably to passivity in the reception of any message, that is the
rational factor and the critical attitude in creating the sense are almost eliminated (Albulescu,
2003). Manifests of lack of attention in the classroom are: concerns disconnected to the classroom
topic, signs of boredom, of impatience, states of agitation, stray glances associated with
daydreaming, completely motionless states, apathy, sleepiness etc. Under these circumstances it
goes without saying that the message will not be grasped and the didactic activity will not be based
on dialogue.
Talking off topic refers to the situations in which a person initiates or gives replies in a
discussion they do not know anything about. The educational communication involves the
simultaneous accomplishment of two conditions: cognitive competence, that is the student needs
to understand the phenomena, the processes or the relationships the language expresses in a field
cognitively specialised, and linguistic competence, that is the student must master the system of
specialised signals by means of which the process of the field is expressed and received. The lack
of mutual linguistic and cognitive repertoire between teachers and students may lead to failure of
communication (Mălureanu, Enachi-Vasluianu, 2014).
Inflexibility of opinions is about speaker’s opacity to the arguments of the interlocutor, while
the rigidity of the positions is constantly maintained. Inflexibility of opinions can take the form of
verbal arguments in which the speaker engages in developing their own ideas in a personal style,
with, most of the times, ever more vehement counterarguments or critics (Anghel, 2003). The
refusal to accept different points of view, the maintenance of a contradictory position, even if the
interlocutor may be right, demonstrates stubbornness, inability to involve into dialogues, to
cooperate.
Lack of respect is signalled quite often in schools. Specific literature (Crețu, 2005; Șchiopu,
Verza, 1995 etc.) explains this phenomenon as a form of authority defiance, a form of rebellion, as
well as a form of distraction of students and teachers’ attention in order to interrupt the process of
didactic communication. The typical manifestations of lack of respect are the refusal to go on, rude
gestures, facial expressions suggesting indifference, boredom etc. The relationship of respect
between student and teacher is an effect-relationship of several factors. Many teachers blame it on
the education in the family, considering that the respect for the teacher and any other adult is
learned in the family. But respect is not univocal. It is conditioned by the respect received. As
such, when students feel they are not respected by their teachers, they change their behaviour
(Ionescu, 2010).
Threat, even blackmail, is informing on the intention of doing harm on somebody. In tight
connection with lack of respect, sometimes, some children threat or even blackmail their teachers
with reprisals from parents or close relatives with high social positions. Psychologists state that
such behaviour is emotionally motivated and it shows the child’s or the teenager’s vulnerability in
front of the teacher, as they fear of the possible consequences the teacher might administer. Such
behaviour is not justified under any circumstances as it is aggressive and exaggerated. However,
students display such attitudes with teachers who do not do their jobs properly, who punish them
unreasonably, who discriminates them by grading preferentially or superficially (Ionescu, 2010).
It is important for a child to show adults that they know the rules and obey them. That is why,
each time they notice someone breaking a rule, they signal the situation to the adults (Crețu, 2005).
However, this is inappropriate behaviour as it produces resentments and damages the relationships
with the others (Tremblay, R. E., 2008). During the class, telling on other student’s misbehaviour
is also a way of interrupting didactic communication. Most of the times the student signalling the
misbehaviour only wants to draw teacher’s attention, to get into his good graces. One of the
advantages of reporting misbehaviour is the opportunity to be on teachers’ side. Children who are
rejected or marginalized by the group try to switch sides with the grown-ups to payback for the
cruelty of the group, or simply to have a sense of belonging. Teachers and parents feel ambivalent
regarding this type of behaviour. On one hand, it is looked upon as an act of responsibility and
maturity, on the other it is considered a form of clinging and flattery (Cohen, Thompson, O’Neill
Grace, 2016).
One of the conditions of the physical context which may impede the communicational act is
represented by the noises or the sounds produced by students in the classroom. We talk about the
noises which are produced voluntarily, such as knocking on the desk, whistling, interjections or
applause, be it out of admiration, approval, aggression, sarcasm etc. These noises make it difficult
for the teachers to make their point or listen to students’ points. As a result teachers tend to raise
their voices, to lose calm, to consume time and energy trying to regain focus of attention. All these
aspects generate gaps in the didactic activity (Mielu Zlate, 2008; Cerghit, 2008).
3 Presentation of research
3.1 The research objectives

The objectives of our study are: a) to identify forms of disruptive communicative behaviour in
the didactic activity at gymnasium and high school levels, starting from the theoretical background
sketched above; b) to achieve descriptive analyses of the forms identified in order to determine
their hierarchy for each of the two school levels with a view to realise an adequate diagnosis that
allows the exact localization of the problematic aspects of the communication process, a starting
point for further studies which should provide specific solutions.
3.2 The participants

We have applied a questionnaire to a sample of 100 teachers (50 for each school level:
gymnasium, high school) from Vrancea County, Romania. The teachers were selected from among
experienced teachers with 6 to 30 years of experience in the educational system.
3.3 The instrument

We have used a questionnaire which analyses the opinions of the teachers in the gymnasium
and high school environment regarding the disruptive communicative behaviour in the didactic
communication. The questionnaire was conceived based on the study of specialized literature and
on the discussions in focus-groups with the teachers from each of the two school levels. This led to
the identification of a series of disruptive communicative behaviours in the didactic
communication transposed into the following items: interruption of the communicational flow,
lack of attention, talking off topic, inflexibility of opinions, lack of respect, threat, telling on
other’s misbehaviour, noises.
4 Results and discussions
Table 1.Means and standard deviation of disruptive behaviour in school

Gymnasium High school
Items of aptitude for school education Mean Mean
(std. dev.) (std. dev.)
Interruption of the communicational flow 4.64 (1.084) 3.54 (1.147)
Lack of attention 4.54 (0.646) 4.60 (0.639)
Talking off topic 4.16 (0.912) 4.30 (0.735)
Inflexibility of opinions 2.54 (0.969) 3.56 (1.140)
Lack of respect 3.20 (1.161) 4.40 (1.309)
Threat 3.28 (1.230) 2.64 (1.047)
Telling on other’s misbehaviour 3.44 (1.110) 2.58 (1.020)
Noises 3.04 (1.195) 3.40 (0.965)
Based on the means obtained, we established a hierarchy of disruptive communicative

behaviour for the two school levels. As such, the indicator ranked 1 st was considered highly
relevant as a form of disruptive communicative behaviour, whereas the one ranked 8th was less
appreciated in this respect.
Table 2.Descriptive of hierarchy of the disruptive behaviour in school

Rank Gymnasium High school
1. Interruption of the communicational Lack of attention
flow
2. Lack of attention Lack of respect
3. Talking off topic Talking off topic
4. Telling on other’s misbehaviour Inflexibility of opinions
5. Threat Interruption of the communicational
flow
6. Lack of respect Noises
7. Noises Threat
8. Inflexibility of opinions Telling on other’s misbehaviour
The hierarchy indicates that the highest means were for interruption of the communicational
flow (m=4.64) for gymnasium and for lack of attention (m = 4.60) for high school. The students
who have just attended primary school are used to an indulgent perspective on the interruption of
the communicational flow during the didactic activity. As such they tend to transfer such
behaviour to gymnasium as the next school level as well. At the same time, they want to show off
and do not obey the ethics of communication, such as talking in turns, talking when asked to,
waiting for turns etc. Gymnasium teachers do not encourage this kind of behaviour as they impede
the didactic course of activities. Lack of attention was signalled as a major problem during the
didactic activities of high school in the focus groups discussions. Teachers state that students lose
focus easily as they are distracted by the use of mobile phones, by discussions with desk mates, by
their own thoughts, by particular interests, by fatigue etc.
The lowest means were for inflexibility of opinions (m = 2.54) for gymnasium and for telling
on others’ misbehaviour (m = 2.58) for high school. These means suggest that these behaviours are
not present to a large extent. Inflexibility of opinions is due to gymnasium students’ inability to
argue their points in a conversation because their informational level is still reduced and they tend
to give up more easily to science and to teachers’ authority, as stated by Laberthoniere (apud Stan,
2006). In high school, telling on others’ misbehaviour is unacceptable behaviour and is sanctioned
by peers. At this level of age adolescents tend to reject authority and solve problems among them.
If it does happen, however, such behaviour is seen as betrayal or challenge for the targeted person.
The top three ranks in gymnasium, viewed as having the greatest relevance as disruptive
communicative behaviour, are for interruption of the communicational flow (m = 4.64), lack of
attention (m = 4.54), talking off topic (m = 4.16). At high school the top three ranks are for lack of
attention (m = 4.60), lack of respect (m = 4.40), talking off topic (m = 4.30). Ranked 3 rd in the
hierarchies of both school levels, talking off topic is caused by a low volume of knowledge and
lack of patience combined with the need to stand out in the group. Just like gymnasium students,
high school students share the same desire to make their points known, but the little amount of
knowledge due to low interest for learning prevents them sometimes.
Lack of respect is typical for adolescents of 14-18 who tend to ignore authority under any form
or situate themselves on contradictory positions. On the other hand, they evaluate their teachers
strictly and the ones who, in their opinion, make mistakes (the grading system is too subjective,
too strict or too tutorial) are sanctioned through lack of respect.
We used the T test for the independent groups to determine the differences of the opinions
regarding disruptive communicative behaviour. The significance level was set to 0.05. Starting
from the significant differences from a statistical point of view among teachers’ appreciations, we
could state the relevance of the disruptive communicative behaviour in the two school levels.
Thus, our analysis of the appreciations of the teachers from gymnasium and high school
emphasized significant differences for six items (interruption of the communicational flow,
inflexibility of opinions, lack of respect, threat, noises, telling on others’ misbehaviour, p<0.05).
We registered statistically insignificant differences for two items (lack of attention, talking off
topic), indicating the convergence of opinions of the teachers from the two school levels.
Conclusions
Disruptive communicative behaviour is part of the dysfunctions in the didactic communication.
The forms of disruptive communicative behaviour are more, but we chose to insist upon the ones
which are most commonly met in the school environment. The teachers involved in the focus
groups have been particularly interested in the theme proposed for discussion and evaluation as
they admit that indeed disruptive communicative behaviour is problematic for the present
educational process. They state that such behaviour is caused by the precarious education within
the family, by the lack of will in applying the principles of communication, by the lack of respect
towards the adult, in general. The discussions could be continued with the identification of
possible strategies of prevention and intervention in the case of disruptive communicative
behaviour in schools.
References
Albulescu, I. (2003): Educaţia şi mass-media: comunicare şi învăţare în societatea informaţională. Editura
Dacia, Cluj-Napoca.
Anghel, P. (2003): Stiluri şi metode de comunicare. Editura Aramis, Bucureşti.
Bocoș, M.; Gavra, R. and Marcu, S.D. (2008): Comunicarea și managementul conflictului. Editura Paralela
45, Pitești.
Cerghit, I. (2008): Sisteme de instruire alternative şi complementare. Structuri, stiluri şi strategii. Editura
Polirom, Iaşi.
Cohen, L.; Thompson, M. and O’Neill Grace, C. (2016): Mama, sunt tachinat! Cum să-ţi ajuţi copilul să facă
faţă problemelor vieţii sociale. Editura Trei, București.
Crețu, T. (2005): Psihologia copilului. MEC, PIR, București.
Ionescu, M. (2010): Portretul elevului – o schiță a realității. Vanemonde, București.
Mălureanu, F. (2017): Disfuncții în comunicarea educațională. Editura Universitară, București.
Mălureanu, F. and Enachi-Vasluianu, L. (2014): A Comparative Analysis of the Linguistic Dysfunctions in
the Didactic Communication. In Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and
Education Sciences, University of Bucharest, 10-14.
Pânişoară, I., O. (2003): Comunicarea eficientă. Editura Polirom, Iaşi.
Sălăvăstru, D. (2004): Psihologia Educaţiei. Editura Polirom, Iași.
Stan, E. (2006): Managementul clasei. Editura Aramis, Bucureşti.
Șchiopu, U. and Verza E. (1995): Psihologia vârstelor. Ciclurile vieții. Editura Didactică și Pedagogică,
București.
Tremblay, R. E. (2008): Anger and Aggression. In M. M. Haith & J. B. Benson: Encyclopedia of Infant and
Early Childhood Development. Academic Press, San Diego.
Zlate, M. (2008): Tratat de psihologie organizaţional-managerială. Editura Polirom, Iaşi.
Developing ICT’s skills for women practicing a hobby
Magdalena Velciu1, Grecu Liliana1
(1) National Scientific Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection,
Bucharest, Povernei Street 6-8, ROMANIA
E-mail:magda.velciu[at]incsmps.ro,gliliana[at]incsmps.ro
Abstract
The paper intent to show a case study of experiential learning for developing ICT’s skills
of inactive women and housewives by which we presented the results of a survey regarding
the women experienceand ICTS’s potential to give the opportunity to develop their creative
hobbies like hand made products, and improve inactive life quality. The question-based
interview aimed to collect data regarding the interest of women in hobbies, including hand
made products, as well as what type of available applications and electronic devices the
target-group is more open to use for this purpose. We emphasize the fact that turning a hobby
into a career can make sense due to usage of e-learning and digital applications. As a target,
we intend to develop an e-learning platform as a virtual space that gathering women willing
to improve their skills and practice a hobby.
Keywords: ICT’s skills, inactive women, experiential learning
1 Introduction: digital inclusion

We are living in a world of change and Europe meet new challenges such as aging of
population, improving efficiency and mobility (Digital Agenda for Europe, 2010). The next human
society means many transformations in social and working life, effects felt at individual level.Our
big challenge is how we will be able to manage virtual environment, opportunitiesand use
information for improving life quality. Digital inclusion is the common effort to ensure that
everybody can contribute to and benefit from the digital economy and society.European
Commission supportactivitiestargeted to:making ICT more accessible, empowering citizens to
fight marginalisation and social exclusion, including careers etc.
In future jobs and socio-economic environment, skills in information and communication
technologies (ICT’s skills) become essential. The development of virtual activities and businesses
claim for new expansion of people abilities and competences, in whole social and working life, by
developing ICT’s skills of both working people as well inactive people like housewives,
unemployed persons, even retired persons.
The main trigger in developing ICT’s skills is to raise awareness of the opportunities that
digital skills offer for enjoying and employment too and show all categories of people like inactive
women, unemployed, older low-educated, disadvantaged persons the potential that ICT provides,
while also ensuring that all are able to take the opportunities offered by the digital economy.
The Figure 1 present data on internet users reflected by indicator Digital Skills Indicator
defined byindividual having "above basic" skills in Digital Competence domains measured by
percentage of individuals who used Internet in the last 3 months. As we can see, there are
differences between European countries.Luxembourg is the leader with over 55% of individuals
who used Internet in the last 3 months,followed by Netherlands, U.K., and Denmark where 50% of
persons accessed it. Atthe opposite pole, there are countries where less than 20% of individuals
used Internet in the last 3 monthsamong which Bulgaria and Romania, the last one.
Figure 1: Digital Skills in European countries, 2017

Source: E.C. Digital Scoreboard
In order to develop the ICT’s skills through experiential learning, in a friendly way,
weimplemented an Erasmus+ project, namely “Increasing Hobby-Based ICT Skills of Inactive
Women and Housewives at Home”. The partnership involve four countries: Romania, Turkey,
Portugal, and Slovakia. We aimed for developing skills in utilizing smart phones, tablets and
computers, in case of inactive women and housewives, in order to giving them the opportunity to
develop their competencies in fashion design. Hobbies are more important in our stressful lives
and even more important for inactive persons and housewives, in order to give them a sense of
activating. More, it can be a first step for engagement their entrepreneurial spirit andinitiate an
income generating activity. Every module has self-assessment questionnaire for both users to test
their perception levels after they successfully complete the e-course.
As a project result we created an electronic platform for e-learning, available at
http://www.women-athome.eu/. Here are presented exciting tools,useful external links, and
learning material like tutorials for supporting women hobbies. As an additional result, the platform
content will help inactive women to boost their skills in ICT’s and facilitate better utilize devices
like smart phones, tablets and personal computers. The e-course has anaudio and video content
through which they can utilize social media accounts and improve online presence. The detailed
curricula contain three modules:1. How to use the recent technology devices (smart phones, tablets
and laptops) efficiently and for teaching hobby purposes,2. How to improve fashion design
competencies by using current digital tools.3. How to use social media for fashion design hobbies.
Also, we used national and European statistical resources analysing that can give us the
possibility to better understand the level of mechanism of learning and skills need and also
opportunities for learning existing in partner countries.
1.1 ICT’s skills and experiential learning

Experiential learning focuses on the individual learning in its own way. According to Kolb D.
(1984), knowledge is continuously gained through both personal and environmental experiences. It
requires self-initiative, an "intention to learn" and an "active phase of learning". Experiential
learning or learning from experience is based on three pillars: knowledge (concepts, information
and previous work experiences), to-do activities (fulfilling the tasks they perform daily) and a part
of reflection (or reasoning and critical thinking focused on the analysis, finding new and effective
solutions and finally the evaluation of work results. Also, it contributes to its own personal
development.Experiential learning is more efficient than passive learning like reading or listening.
The role of emotion and feelings in learning from experience has been recognised (Moon J, 2004)
as an important part of experiential learning.
The ability “learning to learn” is essential because it engages people to build on prior abilities
and life experiences (Kovalchick, Ann, Dawson, Kara, 2004). Peoples use and apply knowledge
and skills in different contexts. Motivation and confidence are crucial to an individual's willing to
learn, positive attitudes, self-discipline etc.
More, development of Internet access and the increase of users’ number for various e-activities
have facilitated the development of online activities for leisure, entertainment and hobbies, as well
as experiential learning.
In Romania, researchers (Maer M. and col., 2018) analyse attitudes and decisions of
individuals for chosen educational paths. Basedon data from a national survey among adult
Romanian population they show that vocational education is considered a valuable education path
or an educational alternative for those with lower socio-economic background.
Retention of learning is a special issue in adult education. As a tribute to original “cone of
learning” done by Edgar Dale (1946), we still take in serious the effectiveness of learning and
retention of learning results regarding experiences. The additional studies were performed and
show that people learn just 5% of what they hear or lecture, 10% of what they read, almost 70% of
what they practice by doing and 90% of immediate application of learning results in a real
situation (figure 2).
Knowledgeretentio
n
Figure 2: Learning and knowledge retention pyramid (adapted)
2. Methodology
In this paper, all this characteristics of learning from experience are used in aim of developing
ICT’s skills for women and the active phase of learning is the women’s ability for practicing a
hobby and sense of fashion design.
The project’s target groups are inactive women and housewives defined as women, who are
classified neither as employed nor as unemployed, in other words, who are capable of being
employed but not seeking for a job because of various personal or family responsibilities and
reasons; such as elderly parents, small child, physical disabilities, being located at distant to
workplace.
In this case, the development of ICT’s skills for inactive women is hampered by barriers that
can’t be overcome. Difficulties are related to many external and internal factors. External factors
are: the low level of education of inactive and domestic women, older age, family problems, and
poor incomes.
There are also “personal” factors like: problems related to the lack of knowledge of
technological openness and ICT tools, personal resistance to change, lack of self-initiative,
retention of knowledge, to-do activities and practical application of acquired competences, etc.
The last ones will be our preoccupation.
The survey was carried among 140 inactive women and housewives from all partners’
countries Romania, Turkey, Portugal, and Slovakia. The age is between 31 years and 66 years old,
in average 45.9 years.
The qualitative analysis was based on data and information collected usinga questionnaire
regarding needs for learning and practicing a bobby, such as: existing common hobbies suitable
for e-learning, existing technologies and their daily usage by women, etc.Survey reflect users'
preferences in their way of learning their hobbies, the tools and learning means they are using or
intend to use, or if they are willing to enjoy new opportunities, especially concentrating to inactive
women population. The questions aimed to collect data regarding the interest of women in
hobbies, including “fashion design”, as well as what type of electronic devices the target-group is
more open to use for this purpose.
2.2.Results and data interpretation

For developing ICT’s skills of inactive women a qualitative analysis of responses was done. By
doing so, we seek not only the give them the opportunity to develop their TIC skills along with
competencies in fashion design as a hobby, but also to learn through experience about online
presence, social media, utilising smart phones, tablets and computers, use tutorials regarding
learning and develop ICT’s skills in this way. There are also internal factors like: problems related
to the lack of knowledge of technological openness and ICT tools, also personal resistance to
change, lack of self-initiative, retention of knowledge, to-do activities and practical application of
acquired competences, etc.
Results are focused in 2 main dimensions. First,the intention to learn practicing a hobby in on-
line and motivation to overcomechange resistance also boosting self-initiative. Secondly, try to
approach the lack of knowledge about technological opportunities and usage of ICT tools and
devices.
a) The intention to learn,motivation, practising
Practicing a hobby is important because assure the motivation of women to have an online
presence and can influence the desire fordeveloping ICT’s skills. Keeping them online is important
for learning process and possible due to online services that allow capturing of some individual
preferences, activities, pictures and tutorials.
For inquiring the potential intention to learnof inactive women to access online environment
for entertainment, we asked women if they have a hobby or would like to have one.The majority
ofinactive women (82.2%) used to practice a hobby and 17.8% deny this. In Romanian, people
appreciate enjoying a hobby and doing leisure activities because of their positive effects on quality
of life, on health and reducing stress, socializing etc. Moreover, some of them can turn into an
entrepreneurial idea to increase family income.The women's abilities for tailoring, sewing,
decoration are reinforced by coming back in fashion of home-made products.
For investigate the intrinsic motivation of inactive women we inquire the desire to have a
hobby using TIC. The results were relevant. Thus, from total of hobby practitioners’ women, even
if they already have a hobby, they would like to learn practicing a new hobby in percent of 79.1%.
Those who don’t have a hobby claim they would like to practice a hobby, in percent of 84% and
only 16% of respondents said they don’t have and don’t want to practice a hobby. It’s obvious
from the results, most responding women have a positive motivation for learn and practice hobbies
and those who don’t have are interested in having one. Motivation and self-confidence are crucial
to an individual's willing to learn, positive attitudes, self-discipline of practice by doing etc.
b) Usage of ITC’s tools and devices

For search for preferences and the usage of electronic support and available modern devices to
make possible the e-learning, we ask inactive women about what devices women use in enjoying
their hobbies. As results, majority of them, in percent of 87.2% prefer electronic tools like PC,
tablet, Smartphone and only 12.8% deny this. We have to keep in mind that our target group is
represented by inactive women and housewives and them age is between 31 years and 66 years
old. So, the results are quite satisfactory.
Conclusions
We aimed developing ICT’s skills of inactive women to support their online presence.
Experiential learning is one best appropriate solution for this target group and inquiring this. The
main conclusion of the paper is that developing ITC’s and practicing a hobby in on-line
environment meets the interest of inactive women and housewives. Moreover, data collected from
women show that the experiential learning is a proper method to better engage women in
developing ITS’s skills and use electronic devices in a positive way. Keeping them online is
important for learning process.
They have apositiveintention to learn that can be better explored through practicing ahobby and
can influence the desire for developing ICT’s skills. Practicing a hobby using the TIC is an
important factor for knowledge retention and skills development.
Motivating women to engage in practicing an activity is vital for experiential
learningMotivation and self-confidence are crucial to an individual's willing to learn, positive
attitudes, self-discipline of practice by doing.
These results reinforce the need for ICT’s skills development and the opportunity of e-learning.
It’s useful to create a virtual platform for learning and enable people to use recent technology
gains and discover things about TIC and on-line opportunities also how to use social media and
Internet for practicing an activity.
In conclusion, an effective e learning program requires a common effort and supported. With
this premise are assessed several aspects thanks to a broader range of signals. On the other hand,
the women have the freedom to define their own way of learning and use free or available
resources and opportunities.
References
Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kovalchick, Ann; Dawson, Kara (2004). Education and Technology: An Encyclopaedia. ABC-CLIO.
MaerMatei, Monica &Mocanu, Cristina & Zamfir, Ana-Maria. (2018). Educational paths in Romania:
choosing general or vocational education. DOI: 10.2478/hjbpa-2018-0016
Moon, J. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning:Theory and Practice. London:
Routledge Falmer.
***Institutul Naţional de Statistică, Romania, Accesul populaţiei la tehnologia informaţiei şi comunicaţiilor
în anul 2017, 8 decembrie 2017.
***Digital Agenda for Europe (2010) download from: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/digital-
agenda-europe-key-publications
Examination of Adolescents’ Media and Technology Usages based
on Various Demographics
Yalın Kılıç Türel1, Özlem Dokumacı2
(1)Firat University, College of Education, Dept. of Computer Education and Instructional

Technology, Turkey, Elazig yturel[at]gmail.com
(2)Dept. of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Institute of Educational
Sciences, Turkey, Elazig ozlemdokumaci7[at]gmail.com
Abstract
Nowadays, due to rapid development of technology, users can easily access and purchase
various information and communication technologies (ICT) with fair prices. Because of these
changes our life habits are being changed day by day. In order to examine how Adolescents-
as the future consumers- will be affected by these changes it is necessary to focus on their
actual use of media and technology. While we were working on the adolescents’ daily
activities such as watching TV and movies, listening to music, playing video games, and
listening to radio before the time Internet was not as prevalent as today, now we have to focus
on the frequencies and densities of the use of contemporary internet based technologies such
as social media, digital collaborative games etc. Thus, while considering the pervasive use of
smart phones, the purpose of this research study is to examine adolescents’ use of media and
technology in terms of several demographic variables including gender, grades, ownership of
electronic devices (tablet, smart phone etc.), parents’ educational levels and so forth. Based
on this purpose, a questionnaire that consists of two forms -“Personal Information Form”
and “Media and Technology Usage and Attitude Survey”- conducted over 1278 students from
7th, 8th, and 9th grades in two different cities in the middle eastern part of Turkiye.
Consequently, we found that there was no meaningful difference of students’ use of media and
technology based on gender and educational level of mothers while there were meaningful
differences based on students’ grades and educational levels of their fathers. The findings is
hoped to shed light for stakeholders and policymakers.
Keywords: Media, technology, demographics, adolescents, smart phones
1. Introduction
New technologies and media environments come into our lives with the ease of purchasing
technological tools and making them easy to access, making the internet access easily accessible
everywhere. According to “Digital in Global Overview”, the report by “We Are Social and
Hootsuite more than half of the world’s population now use at least one smartphone, two-thirds
own a mobile phone, and more than half of the world’s web traffic is now in the form of mobile
phones (URL1,2017).
According to the same report, 48 million to 80 million people in Turkey are internet and social
media users, when these figures are compared with that of 2016,the number of internet users in
Turkey was 4% while the number of active social media users have grown to 14%. With the
increasing usage rate, information and communication technologies and social media are
becoming an important part of our lives.
With the widespread use of smart phones, social networks are one of the environments where
adolescents often spend time. Information and communication technologies support this
independence in the process of gaining family independence. From adolescents, a transition period
from childhood to adulthood and the young generation makes them their access to social relations
(Choliz et al, 2012). Uncontrolled, inappropriate or excessive use of mobile phones can lead to
various problems, especially in interactions between parents and other areas of adolescents, change
the rules of interpersonal relations and even affect the health or wellbeing of the users (Choliz, 2012).
Considering these effects, parents and educators have various concerns about the impact of
social networks on children and students (Ahn, 2011). An examinations of adolescents who are
media consumers of the future, using traditional media and social media is important to understand
the possible effects of these tools. This study has been conducted in order to examine the use of
various media and technologies of adolescents studying at 7th ,8th and 9th grade according to some
demographic variables.
2. Method
The data of this study have been collected through the scales which are composed of closed-
ended questions and quantitative research method, a correlational survey model, have been used to
carry out this study.
2.1. Participants
While the cosmos of the study covers adolescents studying in two different cities in Turkey,
7th, 8th and 9th grade, the sample of the study includes 1278 students still at 7th, 8th and 9th in 11
different schools in these provinces.
2.2. Data Collection Tools

In the study, as a data collection tool, “Personal Information Form” and “The Use and Attitude
of Media and Technology Scale have been utilized. Personal information form developed by the
researchers is a form which is made of 16 articles, which provide receiving the data of educational
background of parents, gender and class level of the students who are included in sample.
“The media and technology usage and attitude scale” is a kind of scale that was developed by
Rosen et al, is composed of 60 articles consisting of 15 factors and two subscales to reveal the
frequency of media and social media and technological tools such as smart phones.
3. Findings
The findings which are about whether the use of media and technology in adolescents
differentiate in view of gender are presented Table 1.
Table 1. The result of T-Test about the use of media and technology according to different gender
p<.001
Std.
Gender N Mean df T p
Deviation
Female 643 160.80 63.79
1276 -2.089 .037
Male 635 168.64 70.25
In order to examine the situation of differentiation according to gender the use of media and
technology, the analysis of T-Test has been carried out. It has turned out that there have been no
dramatic differences in gender in the media and technology usage.
The findings about whether the use of media and technology in adolescents differentiate in
view of class level are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. The result of ANOVA about the use of media and technology according to different class
level p<.05
The Source of Sum of Mean
Df F p
Variance Squares Squares
Inter Group 214534.24 2 107267.12
In Group 5546777.94 1275 4350.41 24.657 .000
Total 5761312.18 1277
As seen in Table 2, the difference between the average of the groups and the use of technology
and the average of the scale is significant. (F=24.657; p<.05).
According to the calculated effect size value (ղ2=.04), the grade level variable in which the
students are studying has a small effect on the scale of media and technology use scale. It can be
interpreted that the level of the students who study here has an impact on the scores of the media
and technology use scale, and after the transition from middle school to high school there is an
increase in the use of media and technologies.
Table 3 presents the findings that adolescents usage of media and technology differ according
to their parents' educational status.
Table 3. ANOVA Test Results for Differentiation of Media and Technology Usage by Mother /
Father Education Status p<.05
The Source of Mean of

Variable Sum of Squares df F p
Variance Squares
Mother Inter Group 17048.31 3 5682.77 1.260 .287
Education In Group 5744263.87 1274 4508.84
Status Total 5761312.18 1277
Inter Group 59503.27 3 19834.42 4.432 .004
Father
Education In Group 5701808.91 1274 4475.52
Status Total 5761312.18 1277
As seen in Table 3 adolescents’ media and technology usage din not show a significant
difference according to mother’s education level (F=1.26; p<.05); the father’s education level is
different (F=4.432; p<.05) .
It has been determined that the students whose fathers are graduated from high school use
media and technologies considerably more than those whose fathers are from primary school. The
calculated sphere of influence degree (ղ2=.01) states that the father’s education status variable
explains the variance of the scores of media and technology use scale in a small level.
Conclusion, Discussion and Suggestions
According to the results of the research, it has been determined that there has been no
important difference between the male and female students in terms of media and technology
usage. This result is similar to some studies in literature. Günüç (2009) found that internet
dependencies of high school students did not vary in gender. It seems that the students who are at
9th grade have used media and technology significantly more than those at 7 th and 8th grade
students, this may be because of the increasing number of having phones by the students passing
from middle school to high school. According to the result of this study, the situation of having
smart phone increases as class level rises. Moreover, 8 th grade students take an exam to place high
school at the end of the year. Due to the obligation of preparing for the exam, the use of media and
technology tools of the students are controlled and restricted.
The students whose fathers are graduate of high school use media and technology more than
those whose fathers are graduate of elementary school. Considering the distinctive role of the
father in the structure of Turkish family and the fathers’ social economic status, it is said that as
the education level of father increases, the social economic level of the family improves, and it is
very easy to access thetechnologies such as electronic tools, internet and so on.
Depending on the results of the studies, adolescents can be directed to physical activities in the
process of passing to high school and by providing them acquiring various hobbies (i.e. outdoor
activities), their use of media and technology can be under control. Because the status of the
fathers’ education is very effective in the use of media and technology, informative meetings could
be held about the subjects with parents.
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The Effect of XBOX Kinect in a Classroom Motivation
Yalın Kılıç Türel1, Muhammad Muhammad Inuwa2
(1) Firat University, College of Education, Dept. of Computer Education and Instructional
Technology, Turkey, Elazig yturel[at]gmail.com
(2) Federal University Dutse, Jigawa, Nigeria, Muhammad.m[at]fud.edu.ng
Abstract
Having motivation as an essential factor for teaching and learning attracted research
interest on several ways of improving the motivation and the tools to use for achieving that.
This paper focused on finding how much Kinect can contribute to learner’s motivation. In the
process of achieving that Keller’s Instructional Material Motivation Survey (IMMS) was used
to obtain the quantitative data, where pretest and posttest was applied. Besides, open-ended
questions were implemented to get the qualitative results of the research. The following
hypothesis was set to test the data for both the quantitative and qualitative data; is there a
notable distinction between pretest and posttest of the participant’s motivation? Also, what
are the perceptions of the participants? An application Essential English Vocabulary (EEV),
which is a vocabulary based application integrated with Kinect was utilized for the
implementation. The research was implemented on 40 participants aging from 9 to 10 with A1
level of English. To analyze the quantitative data, paired-sample t-test was used. For the
qualitative data, four questions were set and analyzed. The first question asked, what do you
think about the application? – this test the participant thought about the application. The
second, what do you like about the application? – test the participant on what they actually
like about the application, which is categorized in to three including, the kinetic function, the
pedagogy or the application feedback. The third, what didn't you like about this application?
– test the participants on the part they dislike in the application, which might be the Kinect
camera, the EEV design or else the participants are satisfied. The fourth question asked, what
kind of problem did you experience when using the application? – focused on the problems
experienced by the participants during the implementation of the application and it
categorizes their reaction to the problem into three; technical, design, and satisfied. The
results quantitative and the qualitative show that Kinect can improve student motivation with
positive perception in a classroom implementation. These findings also added value many
researches that portray Kinect as an effective tool for learning. Additionally, the research
open opportunity to scholars in exploring the contribution of different cameras with functions
similar to Kinect for learning sake.
Keywords: Kinect, motivation, primary school, language learning
1. Introduction
Motivation has been a standing factor for the success of learning. Willingness to engage in an
educational process define the student motivation. However, the cause and the source that lead to
the student engagement may be different. The motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic (Lumsden,
1994). Kinect was among the tool reported to have been effective in motivation after
implementation (Chang, et al., 2011; Chung, et al., 2014). It will be in the best interest for the
teachers to be diligent in academic social interactions that can boost the student motivation.
Student positive impression in the classroom is an important factor that can motivate the learner,
which in turn help in increasing his/her participation actively (Lumsden, 1994). Moreover, a
research finding portray a classroom motivation as effective in mastery goal attitude and more
interest in broadening the classroom attempt (Clayton, et al., 2010). This paper focused on finding
how much Kinect can contribute to learner’s motivation in a classroom. The paper implemented a
qualitative and quantitative test and analyze it.
2. Method
The design of the study choses to apply motivational test using the Turkish version of
Instructional Material Motivation Survey (IMMS) to be applied before the use of the application
and after. One-Sample t-test were employed for testing the hypothesis validity.
2.1. Participants
The project involved 40 volunteer participants, which were chosen from grade 4 and 5 of
private college X, aging from 9 to 10 from 19 boys and 21 girls. The project chooses to use
examenglish.com in the selection of the participants to assure their similarity of their level of
language learning, which proved to be at A1 level using CEFR, (CEFR refer to Common
European Framework Reference that is used in describing the learner’s language level).
Examenglish.com is one of the English test site set to assist and train the candidates that are
preparing for international examinations such as IELTS, TOEFL. FEC etcetera (WANG, et al., 2017).
2.2. Data Collection Tools

For measuring the learner’s motivation ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and
Satisfaction,) motivational model is used for this purpose to get the level of stimuli that motivates
the students to learn John M. Keller designs ARCS motivational model. ARCS model is widely
accepted model that portrays the motivation of learners as a dependent of four variables, namely;
Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction, which abbreviated by ARCS. Therefore, for a
learner to be fully motivated these variables need to be achieved(Keller, 2015; Keller, 2016;
Poulsen, et al., 2008). Instructional Material Motivation Survey (IMMS) is going to be used.
IMMS is a survey tool that is designed purposely to measure motivational aspect of instructional
tools and it is proven a dependable tool for survey(Gunter, et al., 2016). IMMS reliability was
tested using Chronbach Alpha with four variables Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and
Satisfaction as coefficients. The survey contains 36 enquiries which the student will answer in
relation to the instructional tool, using the range of acceptance level from 1-5, with 1 indicate
absolute dissatisfaction while 5 indicate extreme satisfaction. Ten from the enquiries are in
negative form therefore to measure uniformly a reverse system must be employed for accurate
result(Bauer, 2010; Keller, 2006). However, this IMMS is adopted and modified to fit in into
Turkish educational system, in which the items were reduced to the number of 24 with two
coefficients of Attention-Relevance and Confidence-Satisfaction. Turkish IMMS reliability was
also tested using Chronbach Alpha with 0.79, 0.69 and 0.83 for the two coefficient and the total
respectively(KUTU, et al., 2011). Significant positive result was recorded using the adopted
Turkish version of IMMS, which was applied on University preparatory class (Kurt, et al., 2017).
3. Findings
This is where John Keller’s ARCS Motivational model, the Turkish version of Instructional
Material Motivation Survey (IMMS) was used to find out how the participant are motivated with
the instructional tool.
As can be seen in Table 1 of the pre-IMMS and post-IMMS of the motivation test shows a
significance difference from the maximum statistic with 0.15. this shows that there exists a
motivation from the instructional material.
Table 1. Motivation Pre and Post-IMMS Variation

Motivation Pre and Post-IMMS Variation
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance
Pre-IMMS 40 2,45 4,82 3,9975 0,58895 0,347
Post-IMMS 40 2,45 4,97 4,1537 0,63031 0,397
Valid N (listwise) 40
The finding in Table 2 shows that the statistic of the skewness and kurtosis indicated a normal
distribution of the motivation scores. Having the post-IMMS result of the skewness statistic as -
0.836 and the kurtosis 0.263 which are all not far from zero portray the probability of positive
impact. However, having the result within the range of -0.8944 and +0.8944 for the skewness, and
-1.7888 and +1.7888 for the kurtosis (Brown, 1997) indicated that the result is within the expected
range of fluctuations.
Table 2. Pre and Post-IMMS Skewness and Kurtosis

Pre and Post-IMMS Skewness and Kurtosis
Skewness Kurtosis
Statistic Std. Error Statistic Std. Error
Pre-IMMS -0,669 0,374 -0,058 0,733
Post-IMMS -0,836 0,374 0,263 0,733
Valid N (listwise) 40
Table 3 shows a significant difference between pre-IMMS and post-IMMS with Mean =
3.9975 and 4.1537 and Std deviation = 0.58895 and 0.63031 respectively.
Table 3. Motivation Paired Samples Statistics

Motivation Paired Samples Statistics
Mean N Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Pair 1 Pre-IMMS 3,9975 40 0,58895 0,09312
Post-IMMS 4,1537 40 0,63031 0,09966
The result in the Table 4 above indicated a high degree of ascending correlation with 0.820
coefficient. The result indicated a relation between the two variables is associated with how higher
pre-IMMS determine how higher the Post-IMMS would be.
Table 4. Motivation Paired Samples Correlations

Motivation Paired Samples Correlations
N Correlation Sig.
Pair 1 Pre-IMMS & Post-IMMS 40 0,820 0,000
The result in Table 5 shows that there is a significant increase of motivation after the
implementation Kinect Xbox 360 in the class (M = 4.1537, SD = 0.63031) than before the
implementation (M = 3.9975, SD = .58895); t(39) = -2.690, p = 0.010.
Table 5. Motivation Test Paired Samples Test

Paired differences
95% Confidence
Std. Std. Error Interval of the Sig. (2-
Mean t df
Deviation Mean Difference tailed)
Lower Upper
Pair 1 Pre-IMMS – -0,15624 0,36740 0,05809 -0,27374 -0,03874 -2,690 39 0,010
Post-IMMS
Gender difference
This finding from the Table 6 shows the gender difference with respect to the use of the
application Female participant and Male participants. The result indicated that there is not much
gap between the male and female participants in the motivational score, and that portray a fair play
that included all the genders.
Table 6. Gender Group Statistics
Gender Group Statistics
Gender N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Pre-Test F 19 13,6316 4,78668 1,09814
M 21 12,8095 5,45545 1,19048
Post-Test F 19 22,8947 8,81851 2,02310
M 21 19,1905 6,68296 1,45834
Pre-IMMS F 19 4,1842 0,51754 0,11873
M 21 3,8286 0,61012 0,13314
Post-IMMS F 19 4,3970 0,53790 0,12340
M 21 3,9336 0,63814 0,13925
a. Perceptions of the Learners

In this phase qualitative data were used to support the quantitative an Open-ended question
were administered to get free and fair thoughts of the participants.
The first question is: “What do you think about the application?”
The finding indicated clear positive thoughts of the participants with a large percentage of
92.50. This shows that the instructional material can be utilized in the class to happily engage the
students which will in turn yield a positive learning outcome. Most of the participant’s comments
include “Very beautiful, I think it's beautiful, it was good, it’s very good, it's really awesome, I
liked it so much, it was very beautiful and it's very swanky. I wish it was mine, we learn new
words while having fun. It was a nice application, it was beautiful. It excites me, etc.”
The second question is: “What do you like about the application?”
In this phase the application function was divided into three; kinetic, pedagogy and feedback.
The result indicated a high satisfaction with the pedagogical function of the application followed
by the kinetic function 48% and 37% respectively. This shows that the Kinect can also play a vital
role in a class system of learning environment. Sample of the participant’s comments that refer to
the kinetic function include; “Playing with hand, moving with my hands, following my hands on
the computer, Controlling the game with my hands, your hand is mouse in a board, the words are
not easy and not hard, I like the fact that we can move it without touching it with our hands”
The third question is: “What didn't you like about this application?”
The question here is negative and the participant’s response was categorized in to three;
Design, Camera (Kinect) and Satisfied. The result indicated a high percentage of those with
satisfaction and the focus of the research take the least dislike but significant percentage. Some of
the participant’s comments in relation to the camera (which is the focus of the research) include;
“Not perceiving my hands, it’s difficult to control, moving hands was difficult. It didn’t perceive,
it sometimes didn’t perceive our hands, nothing else, it was beautiful but it didn’t perceive my
hand, it sometimes freezes, etc.” from the comment above, it is clear that the Kinect camera could
not accurately capture the hands of the participants.
The fourth question is: “What kind of problem did you experience when using the
application?”
This focused on the problems experienced by the participants during the implementation of the
application and it categorizes their reaction to the problem into three; technical, design, and
satisfied. The major concern here is the technical problem in which the Kinect related problem is
being categorized and it appeared to be the highest problem experienced by the participants. Some
of the participant’s comments include; “Not perceiving my hands, I had difficulty using it, not
moving, not perceiving my hands, perceiving problem, it sometimes don’t see our hands, it
perceive my hand late, etc.” these are the repeated reported problems, which all relates to the
effectiveness on how the camera capture the motion of the participants.
Discussions and Conclusion

Considering the driving force of this paper, which is focusing on finding the effect of Kinect
Xbox in a classroom motivation. The results of pre-IMMS and post-IMMS presented a positive
outcome as the skewness and kurtosis output a normal distribution of the motivation data and it is
within the expected range of fluctuations. The correlation coefficient is of high degree of
ascending order. Also the paired sample t-test shows that there is a statistical difference between
the two means of pre-IMMS and post-IMMS. The results proved that Kinect can improve the
student’s motivation.
Considering the fact that Kinect has made a tremendous achievement in exercise games but
still the language learning environment cannot be left behind. After the development of EEV
integrated with Kinect, the application was implemented and through user study, motivation test
(IMMS) and open-ended questions were implemented to provide quality to the result. This paper
had the aim of exploring the effect of Xbox Kinect in classroom motivation and whether Kinect
Xbox 360 can be used in a classroom setting to maintain the fun status of educational games. In
this paper, findings indicated that in as much as the classroom curricula can be adjusted to fit the
kinesthetic learning style Kinect can swiftly fit into classroom teaching and learning. Therefore,
the findings pave the way to conclude that Kinect Xbox 360 is suitable for implementation in
grade 4 and 5 of middle schools. It can support the student’s learning process and motivate them
while providing necessary fun. These findings are clearly indicating that an educational game that
focused more on the pedagogy can be integrated with Kinect Xbox 360 to provide the necessary
fun that can be maintained.
References
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E-learning and equal access to quality education
Dineva Snejana,Nedeva Veselina
Faculty of Technics and Technology - Yambol, Trakia University of Stara Zagora,

“Graf Ignatiev” str. 38, Yambol 8600, BULGARIA
E-mail: sbdineva[at]abv.bg.veselina.nedeva[at]gmail.com
Abstract
The article discusses the opportunity of e-learning to provide equalaccess to high
qualityeducation. Based on scientific publications and our observations the review of
possibilities offered by the distance education to those willing to study have been made; the
reasons to impose distance in front of traditional training also; and the Moodle's advantages
as a platform for the development of e-learning.The conclusions are that e-learning has
agreat potentiality for acquiring high qualityeducation under different forms of training. The
one of positive side of e-learning is that it allows applying DL and can be recognized as a tool
for equal access to education. The DL allows to be realized in practice the right for anyone to
be educated. The existed barriers to learning in DL can be overcome in future.
Keywords:Moodle, e- learning, blend learning, equal access to education
1. Introduction
Education perhaps is the most important function of government (Shields et al., 2017).The
access to quality education is not a privilege – it is a basic human right (Noorani, 2011). The
education is extremely important for the growth of a country; it brings political, economic and
health advantages. Educating young people can achieve their full potential and help further
society(Zoe, 2017). Therefore the equal access to educationis one of the main goals of society.
2. The advantages of using Moodle and Distance learning (DL)
2.1. The advantages of using Moodle

Moodle is Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, available under the GNU
public license. The creation, maintenance and development of this VOC is a prerequisite for the
development of distance learning and an example of creating equal opportunities for access to
training.
Moodle is a well-known and successfully utilized e-learning platform; widely used in various
purposes, for blend learning, distance education, and e-learning projects in private or public
institutions, for both in full-time and part-time learning (Oproiu, 2015; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/).
Moodle is in the top list of the 20 most popular LMS (Learning Management System) in the world.
The main reasons are listed as follow:
 it’s a free, open source software and developer can make modifications based on their
needs;
 it’s a cost-effective - absolutely free with no license fee, only maintenance costs;
 user-friendly - has simple interface of three distinct columns based on HTML5;
 designed to be responsive; can be access it on any mobile device;
 easy to be customize with offline access (Dudhagundi, 2018).
According to Oproiu (2015), the advantages of using Moodle are:

 Teaching staff have a more facile contact with the students that applied for the course, by
the virtual classes created;
 It may constitute an environment where courses, to pics of laboratories and seminars or
necessary bibliography can be posted;
 A space where students’ data can be easily dealt with (virtual secretariat) may be
constituted;
 It provides knowledge assessment and self-assessment opportunities by online testing;
 It enables good communication and socializing by means of chat or forum, both between
trainees and with the teaching staff. Individual communication with the teaching staff can be
achieved or topics can be debated on by all members that access the platform.
The mentioned disadvantages of using Moodle are the fact that Moodle is not fully developed
to cope with big projects; and that the system might not work efficiently with larger schools or
serve as a great way to conduct all classes in a city (Yorkshire, 2010).
2.2.Distance learning (DL) and equal access to quality education

Distance learning (DL) lets to gain useful skills remotely with less cost than a full-time degree;
set own pace of study; study when and where want; and obtain a degree from anywhere in the
world without being in regular face-to-face contact with a teacher in the classroom. The objective
of e-learning in developing countries is to provide basic education to a large number of poor
students (Bhuasiri et al., 2012). However, according to Midgley (2018) the main advantage of DL
is that it permits to fit learning around every day work and home life.
Distance learning (DL) is an excellent method of teaching adult learners, students with
disabilities, or learners living in isolated regions. Nonetheless, there are some academic problems
with that mode of study, such as easy loss of motivation because of face-to-face contact absence
with teachers and lack of faculty support. Learners involved in DL have insecurities about the
learning, not correct self-evaluation, and feelings of isolation. Faculty barriers to DL include lack
of technology and training in course development, lack of support for distance learning.
Organizational barriers include infrastructure, lack of technology, course curriculum, and student
evaluation (Galusha, 1998).
Theways in which one can complete their studies through DL (SACOB, 2017) are:
 Online Learning: Students complete their studies online, where they have 24/7 access to
their studies via an online portal, what is offered would be dependant on what the specific
institution is providing;
 Part time Learning: This is where students combine face to face and distance learning
together by attending classes in the evening or weekends while still completing studies
out off campus;
 Blended Learning: This combines face to face learning with online learning;
 Self Study: This is when students complete studies solely on their own without the
support of a tuition provider.
Nevertheless, according to Gal-Ezer and David Lupo (2002) based on their study, the Web
cannot substitute entirely for face-to-face learning, but it can serve as a reasonable alternative
when the latter is unavailable.
Today, organizations are increasingly adopting distance learning methods to train and
develop their employees (Burgess & Russell, 2003). The increase in the use of VLE by
universities and other institutions is a reality and will definitely have an important impact on the
learning process (Oproiu, 2015). Using the Web to its full pedagogical potential requires a high
level of self-study ability (Gal-Ezer & Lupo, 2002). E-learning is based on ideas of self-
determining learning, active learning, self-directed learning, problem-based education, virtual
reality, and work-based learning (Martens, 2004). Most of these models are based on
constructivism in which, learners become responsible for regulating their own learning process
(Reiser, 2001). The outcomes widely mentioned as factors of the efficiency of DL are perceived
learning outcomes and student satisfaction (fig.1) (Alavi et al., 1995; Graham & Scarborough,
2001; Sean et al., 2006).
Figure 1. Students achievement grade report – Moodle statistics
The design of Moodle is based on socio-constructivist pedagogy (Brandl, 2005). The Moodle
become more and more used, provided a set of tools that support online learning, and comes as a
support for the educators (fig.2).
Figure 2. Moodle development, teacher support and educational institutions

Teachers aim to increase the quality of online courses, students’ intention is to facilitate their
learning (Oproiu, 2015). According to Kotzer & Elran (2012), the students’ perception of web-
based homework testing using Moodle LMS was very positive when they implemented to a fully
online program without any hardcopy booklets.
3. Materials and methods –Trakia e-University

The virtual learning environment (VLE) in Trakia University, and in FTT - Yambol has been
created using Moodle software platform and has been applied since 2008. The open source
software MOODLE is used. The checkup of the opinion of students enrolled in e-learning
supported courses, showed that 80% of students support the idea of blend learning supported by
Web-based e-learning materials, and they found e-learning more interesting in comparison with
traditional classroom face to face study. Approximately 80% of students gave positive answer
about the e-quizzes for self-preparation, followed by 70% for video materials and the same range
of 70% for lecture presentations (Dineva & Ducheva, 2011).
Self-regulated learners are more motivated, independent, and meta-cognitively active learners
in their own learning (Wolters 1998; Bastiaens & Martens 2000; Herrington & Oliver 2000).
According to Oproiu (2015), benefits of using MOODLE identified by students are:
 they get the course and the topics, a virtual library they can access any time, according to
their study availability;
 they can collaborate with their colleagues in doing homework;
 they are familiar with the e-environment, they find that learning method easy, at hand;
 they can create information and post it on the forum or blog;
 they can contact the professor directly;
 online assessment is more objective than the traditional one;
 self-assessment can be easily completed.
Students contributed in e-Learning environments often complain about the lack of feedback
that is available in traditional classroom settings (Kotzer & Elran 2012). In Moodle, almost all
modules are designed to allow teachers to provide feedback (Kotzer & Elran 2012). In our e-
courses using Moodleplatform,the questions in quizzes of self-assessment are evaluated
automatically using the instant feedback feature and that is great for the students, and they like it
that possibilityindeed(Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Moodle platform and instant feedback feature in test for self-evaluation
4. Barriers to learning in distant education

Nevertheless, there are some barriers in applying DEin learning yet,as lack of technology,
training and support from the faculty; lack of developed infrastructure and etc., shown on fig.4. In
addition to that in many countries the main obstacles of obtaining education at all is low-income
students that needs financial aid availability (De La Rosa et al., 2006).
Figure 4. Barriers to learning in distant education
Conclusion
The conclusion is that one of thepositive sides of e-learning is that itallows applying distant
learning in different forms of training and can be recognized as a tool for equal access to
education. That with the existence of e-learning students has opportunity to obtain high quality
education and in practice to accomplish the right for anyone to be educated. Thebarriers to
learning in distant learningcan be overcome in future.
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Authors Index
Adăscăliței Adrian, 63, 78 İscioglu Ersun, 236, 240

Adler Alexandru, 45 Istrimschi Petru-Adrian, 332
Alla Petrova, 167, 174 Ivanova Svetlana, 142
Amonova Dilbar, 163, 781, 457 Jugureanu Radu, 39
Ananchenkova Polina, 149, 155, 163, 463, 470 Karabaliev Miroslav, 428
Anastasiu Popescu Doru, 197, 205 Kosinszki Sorin-Alin, 272
Anwar Muneeb, 403 Kuznetsov Mikhail, 781
Arădoaiei Sebastian, 63, 78 Lasković Branka, 184
Ashraf Salah El-Din Zein El-Din, 63 Lavrova Anastasia, 142
Baidak Yurii, 136 Magdaș Ioana Cristina, 278
Baycheva Stanka, 124 Mălureanu Flavia, 502, 507
Besschetnova Oksana, 149, 155 Marin Marian, 272
Bogdan Mihai, 311, 315 Mariya Petrova, 167, 336
Bogdanović Zorica, 184 Martirosyan Oksana, 179
Bucur George Bogdan, 57 Miron Cristina, 210, 217
Buhu Adrian, 285 Mironov Bănuță Daniela, 39
Buhu Liliana, 285 Mocanu Cristian, 409
Burlacu Natalia, 421 Moreeva Elena, 476
Buzduga Andreea C., 332 Muhammad Muhammad Inuwa, 522
Caraman Dorothea, 319, 325 Naumović Tamara, 184
Chircu Sorina, 368 Opariuc-Dan Cristian, 210, 217
Chiuchișan Iuliana, 361 Oprea Mihaela, 51, 57
Deliu Gabriela, 210, 217 Paarvanova Boyana, 428
Deniz Iscioglu, 236, 240 Pasat Adrian, 415
Despot Katerina, 119 Pehlivanova Margarita, 92
Despotović-Zrakić Marijana, 184 Popel Oksana, 136
Dokumac Özlem, 517 Popescu Mihai, 490
Domșa Ovidiu, 205 Preda Octavian-Marius, 319, 325
Dragomir Marilena-Cătălina, 397 Pupezescu Valentin, 397
Ducheva Zlatoeli, 92, 106 Radenković Božidar, 184
Dulamă Maria Eliza, 272, 278 Rădescu Radu, 383, 390
Elena Aksenova, 452, 457 Ristea Lidia, 486
Enachi-Vasluianu Luiza, 502, 507 Robert Beloiu , 290
Garabet Mihaela, 319, 325 Rogojanu Ioana, 415
Gheorghiu Dragoș, 299 Sandeva Vaska, 119
Gornea Bogdan, 39 Sazonova Natalia, 142
Grecu Liliana, 512 Şerbănescu Liviu, 435, 440
Grigore Ionel, 490 Shivacheva-Pineda Nikolaeva Ivanka, 112
Groza Silviu Teodor, 57 Snejana Dineva, 87, 99, 106, 130, 190, 528
Ijaz Hussain, 403 Stan Magda, 39,45
Ilovan Oana-Ramona, 272, 278 Stancana Mihail-Cristian, 390
Ion Roxana-Elena, 447 Ștefan Livia, 299
Ionesi Savin- Dorin, 349 Ștefănescu Cornelia, 223, 229
Dulgheriu Ionut, 349 Ștefănescu Valeriu, 223, 229
Iorgulescu Mariana, 374 Stofor Ovidiu, 332
Stoica Daniela, 490 Vasilescu Cristian, 403, 409

Stoican Oana, 223, 229 Velciu Magdalena, 497, 512
Suciu George, 403, 415 Vereitina Iryna, 136
Tachev Bilyana, 428 Veselina Nedeva, 99, 106, 130, 528
Temneanu Marinel, 63 Victoriya Tonkonog, 463, 470
Toma Camelia Ioana, 197 Vlada Marin, 27
Trifan Alexandru-Cristian, 383 Voinea Sanda, 447
Tripon Cristina , 259, 265 Volkova Olga, 149, 155
Trocaru Sorin, Bartos-Eleke István, 355 Yalın Kılıç Türe, 517, 522
Turcu Cornel, 361 Zaharescu Eugen, Zaharescu Atena
Turcu Cristina, 361 Georgeta, 342
Ursu Andreea, 253 Zlatev Zlatin, 119, 124
Ursu Cosmina-Daniela, 278
Tiparul s-a executat sub c-da nr. 4405 / 2018
la Tipografia Editurii Universităţii din Bucureşti
B-dul Iuliu Maniu, 1-3, Complex Leu
Tel.: 0799 210 566, E-mail: tipografia_unibuc@yahoo.com

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The 13th International Conference on Virtual Learning

VIRTUAL LEARNING – VIRTUAL REALITY

Phase II - Period 2010-2020: e-Skills for the 21st Century

ISSN: 1844-8933 - ISI Proceedings, accessed

ICVL 2018 dedicated to The Centenary

ICVL and CNIV Coordinator: PhD. Marin Vlada, University of Bucharest

OCTOBER 26-28, 2018

MODELS & METHODOLOGIES, TECHNOLOGIES, SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

ISSN: 1844-8933 – ISI Proceedings,

Şos. Panduri, 90-92, Bucureşti – 050663, România

Desktop publishing: Meri Pogonariu

“The informatics/computer science re-establishes not only the unity between

Grigore C. Moisil (1906-1973)

Solomon Marcus (1925-2016)

“Learning is evolution of knowledge over time”

About ICVL 2018 ................................................. 15

Section Intel® Education

Authors Index ..................................................................... 535

Differentiated success rate in e-testing of students of pedagogical specialties

Social Network Analysis in E-Education

Usefulness of Web Sources in Geography Bibliographical Research and

Section Technologies & Virtual Laboratory

Light Intensity Control Using Arduino and LabVIEW

Gas Detector Using Arduino and LabVIEW

Virtual Image Processing E-Learning System Re-architecture on Cloud

Section Software Solutions

Video tutorials' scenarization: development and implementation for

Section Intel® Education

Didactic Excel tool for the study of elastic hysteresis

ICVL Project – www.icvl.eu

© Project Coordinator: Ph.D. Marin Vlada, University of Bucharest, Romania

Institutions: The Romanian Ministry of Research and

October 26-28, 2018 – ALBA IULIA, EUROPE-

Location: “December 1st 1918” University of Alba Iulia –

The Conference is structured such that it will:

 provide a vision of European e-Learning and e-Training policies;

Participation is invited from researches, teachers, trainers, educational authorities,

 General Chair Dr. Marin Vlada, Professor of

 Technical Programme Chair Dr. Grigore Albeanu,

 Associate General Chair Dr. Dorin Mircea Popovici,

 Associate General Chair Prof. Radu Jugureanu, AeL

 Associate General Chair Dr. Adrian Adăscăliţei,

 Associate General Chair Dr. Olimpius Istrate, Prof. at

Scientific Committee/Technical Programme Committee / Executive reviewers

Dr. Grigore Professor of Computer Science, Spiru Haret University,

Dr. Radu Professor of Computer Science University of Bucharest, Faculty

Thomas Osburg Intel Education Manager, Europe www.intel.com/education

Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VIRART)/Human

Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Lab., Department

Research papers – Major Topics

Thematic Areas / Sections

 MODELS & METHODOLOGIES (M&M)

Phase II - Period 2010-2020: e-Skills for the 21st Century

Relevant topics include but are not restricted to:

 Education – supporting the development of key life skills and competences

The implementation of the Information Society Technologies (IST) according to the

 The development of a Romanian Framework supporting the professional and

 To promote and develop scientific research for e-Learning, Educational Software,

Models & Methodologies (M&M):

Technologies & Virtual Laboratory (TECH):

Software Solutions (SOFT):

Innovation in education and research (IntelEDU):

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Virtual Environments for Learning (VEL):