Smartphones play an increasingly large role in the professional lives of teachers in low-income contexts, creating an urgent need to better understand the role of technology-related stress (technostress) in teachers' smartphone use for work. We contribute a mixed methods study analyzing the impact of smartphone use on teachers' work lives in low-income Indian schools. Findings from 70 interviews and 1,361 survey responses suggest that although smartphones aid teaching and administrative functions, smartphone use also significantly predicts burnout among teachers, with technostress providing a major explanation for this relationship. We reveal how teachers’ work is constantly surveilled and monitored via technology and how teachers' personal smartphones were controlled and repurposed through socio-technical structures by the higher management to serve management's goals, substantially increasing the work teachers were required to perform outside of work hours. We then extend technostress in HCI4D contexts and discuss the need to develop better support structures for teachers and rethink how smartphones are used in their work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476081
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the transition of workflows across sectors to digital platforms. In educational contexts, teachers and schools previously reluctant to integrate computing technology in the classroom now find themselves with little choice but to embrace it. This move to the digital brings additional challenges in underserved contexts with limited, intermittent, and shared access to mobile or computing devices and the internet. In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, we investigate how educational institutions (schools and non-profit organizations) working with underserved populations in India are managing the transition to online or remote learning. We conducted twenty remote interviews with students, teachers, and administrators from underserved contexts across India. We found that online learning efforts in this setting relied on a resilient human infrastructure comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, and non-profit organizations, to help navigate and overcome the limitations of available technical infrastructure. Our research aims to articulate lessons for educational technology design in the post-COVID period, outlining areas for the improvement in the design of online learning platforms in resource-constrained settings, and identifying elements of online learning that could be retained to strengthen the education system overall.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476055
2020’s COVID-19 crisis has given rise to ubiquitous emergency remote learning (ERL). Guardians, mostly parents, have had to help their children transition and adapt to this difficult learning context. Previous work on remote learning has explored guardian involvement in pre-planned and well-developed remote learning programs, such as established virtual schools. However, ERL lacks pre-planned procedures, policies, and resources. In this paper, we look at how teachers and guardians collaborated to manage the situation. We present an interview study of guardians and teachers of K-12 students in China and look at their collaboration during the COVID-19 ERL. We report how teachers and guardians collaborated to carry out techno-procedural, surveillance, and material work to make ERL possible for K-12 students. Lastly, we reflect on the challenges our participants faced and discuss design implications not only for remote learning during COVID-19 but also future emergency remote learning situations.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479543
This paper aims to understand the educational settings of children with autism (CWA) in the specialized schools of Bangladesh from their parents’ perspective. Sparse research in the same context to understand teachers’ perceptions has been found. Though parents and teachers are an integral part of these children’s educational experience, limited research has been conducted to deeply understand and facilitate parent-teacher relationships to offer CWA an improved learning experience in Bangladesh. Our in-depth qualitative study on urban parents (N=10) showed current challenges and opportunities relating to the schools designed for CWA. The work takes a close look at the existing concerns and confirms that parent-teacher communication in special schools here is not a straightforward one because of other complicated interferences (e.g., social and familial stigma, lack of transparency from administrators, insufficient qualified teachers) as felt by the parents. Nevertheless, the remarkable coverage of cellular networks and increasing usage of mobile phones in Bangladesh places us in a unique position to expect positive changes by employing ICT, which we believe will open avenues for future researchers and guide them in implementing robust technology to support an improved learning environment for the CWA and their families.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449134
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a popular approach to instruction that supports students to get hands-on training by solving problems. Question Pool websites (QPs) such as LeetCode, Code Chef, and Math Playground help PBL by supplying authentic, diverse, and contextualized questions to students. Nonetheless, empirical findings suggest that 40% to 80% of students registered in QPs drop out in less than two months. This research is the first attempt to understand and predict student dropouts from QPs via exploiting students' engagement moods. Adopting a data-driven approach, we identify five different moods for QP students, which are namely challenge-seeker, subject-seeker, interest-seeker, joy-seeker, and non-seeker. We find that students have collective preferences for answering questions in each engagement mood, and deviation from those preferences increases their probability of dropping out significantly. Last but not least, this paper contributes by introducing a new hybrid machine learning model (we call Dropout-Plus) for predicting student dropouts in QPs. The test results on a popular QP in China, with nearly 10K students, show that Dropout-Plus can exceed the rival algorithms' dropout prediction performance in terms of accuracy, F1-measure, and AUC. We wrap up our work by giving some design suggestions to QP managers and online learning professionals to reduce their student dropouts.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449086
Hundreds of millions of people learn something new online every day. Simultaneously, the study of online education has blossomed within the human computer interaction community, with new systems, experiments, and observations creating and exploring previously undiscovered online learning environments. In this study we endeavor to characterize this entire landscape of online learning experiences using a survey of 2260 adults who are balanced to match the demographics of the U.S. We examine the online learning resources that they consult, and we analyze the subjects that they pursue using those resources. Furthermore, we compare both formal and informal online learning experiences on a larger scale than ever before to better understand which subjects people are seeking for intensive study. We find that there is a core set of online learning experiences that are central to other experiences and these are shared among the majority of people who learn online. We conclude by showing how looking outside of these core online learning experiences can reveal opportunities for innovation in online education.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449220
This paper explores the potential of distributed emulation networks to support research and pedagogy into historical and sociotechnical aspects of software. Emulation is a type of virtualization that re-creates the conditions for a piece of legacy software to operate on a modern system. The paper first offers a review of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature engaging with software as historical and sociotechnical artifacts, and with emulation as a vehicle of scholarly inquiry. It then documents the novel use of software emulations as a pedagogical resource and research tool for legacy software systems analysis. This is accomplished through the integration of the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) distributed emulation network into a university-level course focusing on computer-aided design (CAD). The paper offers a detailed case study of a pedagogical experience oriented to incorporate emulations into software research and learning. It shows how emulations allow for close, user-centered analyses of software systems that highlight both their historical evolution and core interaction concepts, and how they shape the work practices of their users.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476035
Social presence is known to be important for distance education, and a common approach in online classes is to provide chat boxes and forums to provide the social presence. In such a class, however, learners must explicitly act beyond their normal learning activities, so often there is no social presence in the class even when there are several learners working on the same course material. In this paper, we develop an approach where learners can share the social presence without any explicit action; their normal learning activities would be used to provide visual cues for social presence. We present Cocode, a system designed for an online programming class that shows other learners' code editors and running output in the programming environment with minimum privacy issues. For evaluation, we ran two user studies with groups of participants who took an offline class and an online programming class from the university; results from the studies showed that learners felt less social presence in Cocode than in offline classes, but they felt significantly more social presence in Cocode than in online classes with live video lectures, forums, and chat sessions.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476041