Implementing electronic health services with a patient-centric focus while adapting to the know-how of local contexts is a challenge. This paper addresses this challenge by establishing a template of modular requirements for designing a viable Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that enables transmission and sharing of patient data across primary, secondary, and specialized care, ensuring versatility in diverse healthcare environments and across varying socio-economic landscapes. The research is anchored in design science and employs an action research strategy, using northern Brazil as empirical case. The approach builds on generic requirements from standards established by the European Union, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and the Swedish ePrescription journal system. These requirements are refined and adapted to the Brazilian context through a participatory method, considering development disparities across municipalities and aligning with national policy. A key feature is the integration of knowledge graphs, which, when combined with fieldwork iterations involving healthcare professionals and patient association representatives, facilitated the extraction of patient-centric requirements. Strategies from Brazilian healthcare policies targeting chronic kidney disease, selected as a significant challenge for specialized healthcare in emergent areas, were incorporated to generalize the design of EHR modules aimed at prevention and monitoring of population at risk. Results support that harmonization towards legacy system is strongly advised and discourage the introduction of systems designed from scratch.
The emergence of autonomous learning has revolutionized educational systems, offering new pathways to enhance higher education. Across most Swedish universities, Bachelor's and Master's theses (final projects) represent an important part of students' academic journey. Embracing technology as a tool, rather than an end in itself, has become imperative in contemporary higher education and thesis processes. Departing from traditional instructional methods, the focus has shifted towards interactive and autonomous learning, propelled or supported by digitalization. Despite the growing emphasis on autonomous learning and the benefits of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), there are concerns about the misuse of digital tools such as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in educational contexts. The scarcity of knowledge to properly use available tools would potentially affect students' academic performance and future employment prospects, which has recently caused significant concern for educational authorities, educators, and even policymakers. This study reflects on students' perceptions of using digitalization and GAI to facilitate autonomous and interactive learning to support the thesis writing process. The focus is to understand how digital natives (predominantly Gen Z) view the integration of new digital tools in autonomous learning. A case-based approach in the form of an open survey conducted during the spring semester of 2024 gathered 52 responses from students within the informatics discipline at bachelor's and master's levels in a Swedish university. Results indicate that most students used digital tools such as GAI interactively, in the thesis process, mainly for constructive learning. They indicated that learning about digital tools as part of their formal learning leads them towards effective and more structured use of the tools for brainstorming, drawing inspiration, and developing interactive learning, which simulates real-world peer interactions or teacher-student dynamics. This instructional approach equips students with the skills to responsibly use tools as academic support rather than for any other inappropriate purposes. Effective utilization of digital tools promotes autonomous learning, leading to improved quality of bachelor's and master's theses and overall academic performance in higher education. Conversely, inadequate knowledge and improper use of these tools can negatively impact students' educational outcomes.
Part of ISBN 978-1-917204-22-4, 978-1-917204-21-7
Part of ISBN 978-1-917204-21-7, 978-1-917204-22-4
This presentation outlines the imperative of integrating academic research into developing higher education institutions’ digital learning environments to foster innovation and tailored educational experiences. It presents the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s co-creation model, where IT experts, administrators, learning designers, and researchers unite to create more engaging, equitable, and effective digital learning environments, showcasing how such integration can significantly enhance educational outcomes in the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education.
Although learning analytics (LA) often processes massive data, not all courses in higher education institutions are on a large scale, such as courses for employed adult learners (EALs) or master's students. This places LA in a new situation with small datasets. This paper explores the contemporary situation of how LA has been used for small datasets, whereby we examine how the observed LA provisions can be validated in practice, which opens up possible LA solutions for small datasets and takes a further step from previous studies to enhance this topic. By examining the field of LA, a systematic literature review on state-of-the-art LA and small datasets was conducted. Thirty relevant articles were selected for the final review. The results of the review were validated through a small-scale course for EALs at a Swedish university. The findings revealed that the methods of multiple analytical perspectives and data sources with the support of contexts and learning theories are useful for strengthening the reliability of results from small datasets. More empirical evidence is required to validate possible LA methods for small datasets. The LA cycle should be closed to be able to further assess the goodness of the models generated from small datasets.
The benefits of teacher-facing dashboards are incontestable, yet their evidence is finite in terms of long-term use, meaningful usability, and maturity level. Thus, this paper uses design science research and critical theory to design and develop TEADASH to support teachers in making decisions on teaching and learning. Three cycles of design science research and multiple small loops were implemented to develop the dashboard. The tool was then deployed and evaluated in real time with the authentic courses. Five courses from two Swedish universities were included in this study. The co-design with teachers is crucial to the applicability of this dashboard, while letting teachers use the tool during their courses is more important to help them to recognize the features they actually use and the tool's usefulness for their teaching practices. TEADASH can address the prior matters, align with the learning design, and meet teachers' needs. The technical and co-design aspects, as well as the advantages and challenges of applying TEADASH in practice, are also discussed here.
Online and digital education, which was once perceived as demanding financially and academically, became the most viable option to continue teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their lack of prior experience, capabilities, or willingness, many teachers shifted their courses online in a short period to continue teaching during the pandemic. To understand the efficacy in making such a shift, the nature of digital capabilities the teachers recognize within themselves and if these capabilities correlate with their socio-cultural and geographical backgrounds are to be realized. In this study, two cases from the global North and South are compared to investigate the similarities and differences in making choices of digital tools, and, to capture their digital affordances and ability to manage technology in the teaching and learning process. A sample of 50 teachers from two higher education institutions is used to capture the perceptions. The discovered trends in the choice of tools may shed light on region-specific disparities in digital affordances in technology-enhanced learning and global digital education development.
The traditional subject of information search and retrieval (IR) paradigm shifted to an entirely new era since artificial intelligence (AI) techniques were introduced into the field. Browser-based IR solutions powered by AI for personalised recommendations-based information retrieval, such as the Google search engine, were one of the early examples. The IR field has advanced to its next level with the newest conversational applications based on large language model (LLM) techniques. It is becoming clear that Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) applications such as ChatGPT will significantly impact information retrieval behaviour in the education sector. Though this application has become widespread in acclaim, no previous study has shown its impact on information seeking and retrieval. However, based on the observation of the fast penetration of this technology and the growth of public interest, a pre-assumption was built that it is essential to investigate if students may also be showing a similar interest in this new tool. Hence, this study is set up to systematically and empirically explore how ChatGPT influences the IR behaviour of students in HEIs. A survey approach is utilised to collect the perceived IR behaviour through a questionnaire administered to 60 students in HEIs. The findings reveal that the tool is already widely known among HEI students. They also perceived the use of the tool in the context of information retrieval and proclaimed its usefulness, acknowledging its efficiency (reduced time) in finding information. Furthermore, the technology has considerably affected the typical use of other conventional information retrieval and search engine tools. On the contrary, 10% of the respondents are less likely to use ChatGPT during information seeking for various reasons, from credibility and relevance to technology infrastructure issues such as connectivity. Although a deeper analysis is required to establish a general conclusion on how and in which ways GPT-based models will override contemporary IR practices, the study outcome provides evidence for a possible behavioural change among HEI students in their IR habits in the future.
Soft skills are becoming equally crucial as hard skills in today's labour market. In contrast to hard skills which are teachable typically through formal education, soft skills are non-technical and interpersonal, allowing individuals to be able to find and succeed in their studies, jobs, and professional life. Despite the increasing emphasis on soft skills, many universitystudents are either unaware of or neglect enhancing them. Soft skills deficiency among university students has become a significant concern for employers, educators, and policymakers, as it negatively affects students' academic performance and future employment prospects. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions of the demand for soft skills and the possibility and availability of learning opportunities. The expected outcomes intend to provide insights about awareness of soft skills among students and pathways to reduce the soft skills gap through training provisions in higher education settings. Furthermore, it aims to find out how the young generation (mainly Generation Z) would perceive digitalisation and specifically gamification as a solution to facilitate soft skills training. This is a mixed method study, in which, an open survey was the data collection media. The survey was conducted during the spring semester of 2023 and analysed using visualisation and summarisation methods. Based on the outcome of 66 master’s and bachelor's students attending the digitalisation courses in two classes in Sweden, over 50% of the students perceived a lack of soft skills in their curricula. They were also positive toward the use of gamification as an effective digital strategy, recognising it as a powerful tool to facilitate training and developing soft skills as a part of formal learning in higher education. As a suggested approach, gamifying soft skills training potentially creates simulations that mimic real-world situations to allow students to practice and develop their soft skills in a safe and low-stakes training environment. This facilitates training soft skills for better communication and collaboration during their academic journey and after their graduation and to prepare students for successful careers.
Part of ISBN 9781914587900
Technology has become an indispensable element in education that challenges conventional teaching. The pandemic significantly forced a paradigm shift in education from traditional methods to digital platforms. Emerging technology expanded the teacher’s role faster than predicted, and technology has become a significant criterion in defining 21st-century teachers. Teachers had to upgrade education and act as change agents in creating and managing technology-enhanced learning environments requiring teachers to be digitally literate. Considering teachers as significant stakeholders, this paper investigates how literature contributes to the knowledge of their perceptions of digital literacy in education by systematically investigating 59 research articles searched in EBSCO discovery services, covering commonly included 80 different databases in the default search. The review focuses on how teachers use technology, their challenges, and what teachers expect from successful technology integration. Results revealed a contradiction between expectations for technology integration into education before the pandemic and the experience after the lockdown. Even though teachers are confident using basic technology, many have observed a disconnect between technology and pedagogy that emphasises digital literacy’s need. Teachers struggle with technology integration due to lack of knowledge, accessibility, cost, disconnection, infrastructure, time, workload, and technology anxiety Therefore, teachers expect institutions to play a significant role in integrating technology by assisting them in mitigating challenges that require defining the institutional role of a technology-integrated learning environment.