bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
NEW EDUCATIONAL LITERACIES. CHANGES BROUGHT BY THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICT'S) IN EDUCATION
Authors: Chisalita Oana
Published: February 2023

Technology changes the way we use to do things. It already changed the way we learn, we talk, we play and we work. While in the first years, technological knowledge was the aim of those professionals working on the engineering field, nowadays, no matter of the work activity, you do need to possess the knowledge and the specific competences to work on a computer, to use a scanner or a printer, to search the information and to work with it and through it in order to create new knowledge results. In this study we aim to analyze all this changes at the level of the specific knowledge and competences. Therefore, we will focus on the technological literacy, information literacy and digital literacy. While technological literacy becomes more important due to the rapid spread of the ICT use in most of the activity fields and generates a constant pressure towards the involvement of all members of the society, regardless of age or cultural background, the information literacy is the result of the internet access and use. Students have access to a great extent of information and if they learn how to look for reliable information sources, they become more responsible on how they'll use it. In a world where schools aim is to prepare students in order to get integrated in the society, we do need to train them on how to use the instruments of this technological world to find a good answer to their needs by identifying the proper ICT tools and, therefore, developing their digital literacy.
E-TEACHING AND E-ASSESSMENT IN ACCOUNTING USING INTELLIGENT PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS
Authors: Patrut Bogdan
Published: February 2023

Internationally, there are several preoccupations concerning accounting training by the use of ICTs, no matter if they are performed in an institutionalized environment or not.
The creation of an intelligent training system requires the incorporation of certain software elements with initiative, a certain humanized intelligent agent. These elements are very important in humanizing the artificial process, leading thus to the idea of using intelligent pedagogical agents in educational software. Intelligent pedagogical agents can express human-like feelings; they can learn the user?s interests, habits and preferences, and display human and social behavior, or even they can substitute some of the teacher?s features. ContTest is a multi-agent system for teaching and learning accounting. It uses a group of intelligent agents for initial and constant assessment, for teaching and illustrating, for generating tests, for checking answers, and for the final assessment and grading. Some of the agents used in ContTest are pedagogical agents.
The pedagogical agents use both animated artificial characters and video-sequences with real teachers. In this paper, we will proof that the combined use of these technologies is very useful. The animated artificial character, although less human in aspect, can be more flexibly designed and can have a bidirectional message exchange with the learner. On the other hand, pre-made video sequences, although more rigid, will give the impression of a person?s real presence that instructs the student in an interactive manner. Our paper will present the architecture of the general system, with focuses on the combination of the both type of pedagogical agents. Also, we will present the results of using the pedagogical agents of the ContTest system in a class of students at ?Accounting and Business Information Systems?.
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH REGARDING UTILITY OF ELEARNING PLATFORMS IN ROMANIAN BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
Authors: Stoica Ivona , Valceanu Gabriela laura
Published: February 2023

It is really important for enterprises and institutions to use eLearing platforms for their employees. This paper work represents a thoroughly research regarding the usefulness of eLearning platforms; it has been developed an exploratory research and in the end of the paper will be presented the key findings and the most important conclusions regarding the eLearning platforms. Online social media represents a very poplar mean that could be used in special programs for long live learning, in specializing employees in certain fields and by investing in them, they will provide the expected benefits. Nowadays, is the era of new generation, and Internet is the perfect way of learning by exploring and also in the same time exploiting all the benefits brought by an eLearning platform. There is a special need in exploring all kinds of media because traditional information is not very well received by the student, they need a change, and the teachers also have to change, to seek modern ways of transmitting information. Developing eLearning platforms in Romania means also a cross cultural strategy because this way, we can attract not only students, teachers, business environment but lots of foreign people who can recommend the eLearning platform to other people, by using a strategy of word of mouth marketing, the number of users will increase substantially. This paper aims to bring information about how open-minded are enterprises in Romania for their kind of learning and how much are getting involved the higher school education institutions to implement an eLearning platform for their students.
LEARNING ABOUT HERITAGE THROUGH AUGMENTED REALITY GAMES
Authors: Maiorescu Irina , Sabou Gabriel cristian
Published: February 2023

Compared to the way heritage assets are regarded in other developed nations, the Romanian ones are very often poorly managed, left unknown to the very own Romanian people, they are neglected and even damaged. Promoting and taking advantage of the country national heritage assets - be them tangible or intangible, involves first of all a raised awareness; it implies knowing about them and understanding their true meaning. Learning is the key to acquiring knowledge and people are prone to retaining information important to them or information that has a strong sensorial, emotional, cognitive impact upon them. As nowadays learning processes are more and more influenced by the powerful online environment and the complex technology, the sensitive area of heritage may take great benefits from it. National heritage assets bear within themselves historical and cultural information. They are the key to building a strong and proud national identity and a valuable social cohesion, to contributing to a sustainable economical development. As the way of retaining information and learning is changing, augmented reality gives the learner the live experience of the past and makes him aware of the heritage importance and of its true significance in the most appropriate way. The augmented reality technology makes the information more powerful by enhancing its substance with visual, audio and sensorial attributes, building thus a real live experience. The current paper aims to bring in discussion the possibilities of transmitting the knowledge about heritage assets through specific applications of augmented reality, making a particular reference to the educational games that transform learning into an entertaining activity.
DESIGNING A MOBILE CLICKER SYSTEM FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES
Authors: Hatziapostolou Thanos , Neskovic Ivo , Zafirovski Mitko , Bisercic Dragan
Published: February 2023

Research suggests that student participation and interaction in the classroom facilitates learning and problem solving skills. However, the increasing number of students in classrooms, as well as, traditional classroom dynamics, impose limits to student engagement and participation. In order to facilitate these important learning principles academic institutions often utilize technology among which are audience response systems. Such systems, which are often called clickers, utilize hand-held devices and allow large groups of people to provide answers to questions and have the ability to instantly analyze and project the results. While traditional and proprietary clickers are still widely used, advances in mobile technologies have created new approaches in developing and using such systems. The widespread use of modern mobile phones and their increasing functionalities make them ideal to act as clickers, and in fact, a number of proprietary mobile phone clicker systems are available.
This paper presents an open-source mobile phone-based clicker system that is specifically designed and developed for educational purposes. The paper is organized as follows. Section one introduces audience response systems and presents the aim, originality and contribution of the paper. Section two presents and critically evaluates a number of popular traditional audience response systems, as well as, mobile phone clicker systems that are used in educational settings. Section three explains in detail the design and development of our mobile clicker system and discusses the unique advantages that it offers to students but most importantly to the lecturers. Section four provides an evaluation of our system and finally section five draws a number of conclusions and describes future enhancements.
INFLUENCE OF PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN SUBJECT INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ON SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Authors: Mainz Denis , Lovasová Vladimíra
Published: February 2023

The paper describes a research conducted on the Faculty of Education of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen in 2011. The research aims to map the influence of project-based learning on the subjective perception of the academic achievement of students in the subject Information and communication technology (ICT). Target group was composed of high school students. Described research is a part of a broader research conception that focuses on a potential of project-based learning in educational area Information and communication technology. This conception of a project-based learning application in an educational area of ICT was determined problematic by an initial survey. Within the scope of this broader conception we already focused on adolescent student experience during project-based learning in ICT that included possibilities of emotional disorder reduction, published in (Mainz, Lovasov?, Magdin, 2012). This time, we focused on a potential of project-based learning in an area of perception of the academic achievement. Student?s performance in a subject is not determined only by his skills, but also by a manner in which he is aware of his skills. Self-perception is a major factor that influences learning, work motivation and determines a level of anxiety experienced by student in a task situations (Balcar, 1983).
The research design consists of a preparatory part and a research and implementation part. In the preparatory phase, projects have been implemented in high school lessons of ICT. The projects were drawn according to the methodology of the Buck Institute for Education that allows very clear definition of boundaries among project-based learning, theme-based learning and problem-based learning. In the research and implementation part, the self-concept of student?s academic achievement was observed in these categories: evaluation of common intellectual skills, evaluation of specific skills for informatics and self-confidence in a performance in a context of a social group. For the purposes of the observation, a modified standardized psychometric tool - SPAS "Self-concept of the Academic Achievement of Children" (Matějček, V?gnerov?, 1992) was used. This tool was successfully used many times for evaluation of newly implemented educational methods. The results were processed according to the manual for the standardized psychometric tool and were compared to the results of control groups, in which project-based method was not implemented. The research was conducted in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science and Educational Technology and the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Education of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen.
INTEGRATED LEARNING SYSTEMS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON ATTENTION OF CHILDREN WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY
Authors: Simion Elena , Folostina Ruxandra
Published: February 2023

A widely spread acknowledgement states that most children are enticed by computer games as well as by every other activity related. In this respect, neither the children with intellectual disability are an exception, while many of them have not the opportunity to use a computer at home, therefore they have to ?benefit? from the occasion offered by the school they attend. We purposely planned the time spent by the pupil in front of a computer to at utmost efficiency, as o helped by an educational software adapted for the pupils with special educational needs. The present research was thus developed on the hypothesis that those pupils using this educational package would prove visible progress in acquiring a higher attention level, both in quantity and quality terms.
Following the theoretical considerations, we built an investigative procedure with the target of identifying the impact resulted from using a computer-aided educational software adapted to the children with special educational needs, as mainly concentrated on the direct influence on pupils? focused and distributive attention.
The research was applied to two sampling lots of subjects ? a control lot and an experimental lot, each of them containing 90 pupils selected from the special education system in Bucharest. In compliance with their chronological age, the subjects are ranging between 10 and 16 years old, boys and girls, while their years of study vary from the 4th to 8th grade.
As results, progress can be noticed in terms of the attentional level, both within the experimental lot and the control lot. However, the experimental lot recorded a meaningful progress form the statistic point of view as related to all variables investigated, if compared to the control lot, where progress is insignificant.
DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH VOCABULARY THROUGH COMPUTER BASED SIMULTED SITUATIONS
Authors: Alexe Maria , Miclea Loredana
Published: February 2023

Studding foreign languages at academic level, in technical universities means not just improving your students' vocabulary. The main target should be to develop all their language skills, but from the perspective of their future professional life. This is quite a difficult task because foreign languages, in Technical University of Civil Engineering, are part of the first two years curricula, a period when students are not familiar with their future profession and as a consequence they are not mastering professional vocabulary in their native language. . As many pedagogical approaches are underlining an adequate context through which new words are introduced is always of great help. That statement leads to the question of creating that context and here I may say virtual reality that can be imagined on the digital support is of great help
The research main question refers to the advantages of using virtual reality, simulation if necessary, to improve students' language abilities, to help them to learn faster and easier. Secondary research questions refer to the efficiency of this pedagogical approach and to the time management (can it be improved? Is it a time consuming method?). As this type of research refers to different case studies, the methodological approach, generally used for such research was implemented. This paper presents the results of suggested experiment which has been developed for two academic years (2009-2011) at the Faculty of Technological Equipment and Building Equipment (TUCE) and was extended to other foreign languages such as German and Spanish. Although they are not distance learning students, best practices of that type of learning methodology are often used. Its efficiency was measured through different types of tests.
TWEETS TOPIC MODELING ACROSS DIFFERENT COUNTRIES
Authors: Abdelwahab Ahmed , Robles Jose , Rebedea Traian , Chiru Costin
Published: February 2023

Every culture has its own topics of interest and its hot topics. In this paper we present a system that helps for a better understanding of different cultures, starting from the topics that are debated between their members. In order to do that, we recorded and analyzed the content of the messages that are sent by the citizens of different countries on Twitter (a worldwide conversations system), hoping that this way we will be able to capture the topics of interest for each culture and predict their hot topics. We did our analysis on English written tweets, based on the fact that English has become a global language, being spoken even by internet users from non-English speaking countries when they want to share their thoughts and have a global understanding amongst the readers.
Our study is trying to capture the topic model for the tweets and for the URL shared in those tweets separately and then to compare the distribution of topics across different countries for both the tweets and the URLs to check how consistent these models are. For the topic modeling task, we designed a specialized way of developing them that is adapted for tweets (which have a maximum of 140 characters, being too short for applying classic topic modeling methods). Our developed application has been tested on a corpus consisting on English tweets that have a location attached and contains URL which were collected using the Twitter sampler API. In order to eliminate our bias, we extracted tweets without any restrictions (including tweets written in other languages, tweets without URLs, tweets without location attached) and then we checked the percentage of our targeted tweets for each country. As a consequence, we extended the period of collecting the tweets to decrease the risk of dealing with abnormal events occurring in a certain country.
INTEGRATING MOOCS IN BLENDED COURSES
Authors: Holotescu Carmen , Grosseck Gabriela , Cretu Vladimir , Naaji Antoanela
Published: February 2023

Integrating MOOCs in Blended Courses

Authors: Carmen Holotescu, Gabriela Grosseck

Numerous recent studies appreciate that "MOOCs bring an impetus of reform, research and innovation to the Academy" (DBIS, 2013).

Even though MOOCs are usually developed and delivered as independent online courses, experiments to wrap formal university courses around existing MOOCs are reported by teachers and researchers in different articles (Bruff et al., 2013).

This paper describes a different approach, in which the participation of students in different MOOCs was integrated in a blended course run on a social mobile LMS.

The topics of MOOCs delivered on different platforms and having different characteristics were connected with the fall 2013 undergraduate course of Web Programming.

The main parts of this study deal with:
- The reasons to integrate MOOCs in the university course
- How the course was designed, how the students' activities on different MOOCs platforms were assessed and integrated in the course scenario
- The results of a survey that evaluates students experiences related to MOOCs: a number of MOOCs features were assessed (Holotescu, Grosseck and Cretu, 2013); also answers to a few problems are analysed:
o Did the participation in MOOCs support students to clarify and expand the course issues?
o What are students' suggestions for a more active participation in MOOCs?
o Comparing the learning scenarios of MOOCs with the Web Programming blended course how the course and its virtual space can be improved?
o Do the students consider that the MOOCs phenomenom is important for professional and personal development?

The conclusions of the paper can be used by other teachers/instructors for integrating MOOCs in the courses they deliver/facilitate.

References:

Bruff, D. O., Fisher, D. H., McEwen, K. E., & Smith, B. E. (2013). Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning. Journal of Online Learning & Teaching, 9(2). https://my.vanderbilt.edu/douglasfisher/files/2013/06/JOLTPaperFinal6-9-2013.pdf

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, London. (2013). The Maturing of the MOOC. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/240193/13-1173-maturing-of-the-mooc.pdf

Holotescu, C., Cretu, V., & Grosseck, G. (2013). MOOC'a Anatomy: Microblogging as the MOOC's Control Center. Conference Proceedings of "eLearning and Software for Education" (eLSE) (No. 02, pp. 312-319), Bucharest, April 2013.

Hill, P. (2012). Online Educational Delivery Models: A Descriptive View. Educause Review, 47(6), 84-86. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1263.pdf
WRAPPING MOOCS - ANALYSIS FROM A TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Authors: Mihaescu Vlad , Vasiu Radu
Published: February 2023

Started in 2002 as an open course policy (named OCW Open CourseWare) and then developed in a global concept, MOOC is one of the most recent concepts in online education. A MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is an online course with no limit to its number of participants and open access provided you have internet access. While a MOOC might accommodate enrollment in the thousands, some of these courses enroll far fewer--the "massive" part of the name speaks more to the potential to include vast numbers of students than to the actual size of the class. In the last two years millions of users registered in MOOC platforms and thousands gained certificates or badges. Several top universities started or joined a MOOC in an open or more closed mode (MOOCx). However, there are many who are questioning the future of MOOCs, as possibly being overhyped, the argument being that companies prefer to hire people with traditional educational background in favor to the ones who did their education mostly online.
In this paper the authors analyze the MOOCs specifics, based on their evolution, the educational market needs, student body requirements, existent curricula and faculty staff opinions. The history of MOOCs is presented, with focus on the education methodologies, the technical components and the impact on today's information society. The most known platforms, Coursera, Udacity and edX, are analyzed based on authors' experiences and on existing literature. The analyze focus on the used technologies, the multimedia tools implemented, and how the entire learning environment is structured. The paper tries to argue the success and failures of existing MOOCs from a technological perspective.
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE LINKED DATA WEB
Authors: Vert Silviu , Andone Diana
Published: February 2023

There is a significant growth in the number and quality of Open Educational Resources that are published online. These resources are published both in an education-specific context, in open educational repositories, specifically built for storing educational material, and in a generic context, for other purposes, but having a relevance to teaching and learning.

The current map of OER repositories shows a heterogeneous landscape, due to various tools, methods and standards used for publishing the educational content. Significant effort has been made in promoting standards such as SCORM and IEEE LOM, to facilitate reusability of educational resources. However, the current amount of Open Educational Resources lacks integration and interoperability.

To address these issues, the Linked Data principles can be used to discover, integrate and reuse educational content published online. Linked Data has been proven to foster web interoperability at a general level, by providing now widely used principles and standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. Steps for publishing Open Educational Resources as Linked Data include: selection of data sources, modelling the data through the use of vocabularies and ontologies, conversion to the RDF data model, including cleaning of the data, publishing the semantic-enriched data to Linked OER Repositories and consuming the data, usually through SPARQL endpoints.

As a result of this process, a significant number of educational datasets are currently published as Linked Data by universities, government institutions, publications and specific projects in this area.

This paper presents a literature review of the current efforts toward publishing of Open Educational Resources as Linked Data. It also highlights some research challenges and suggests suitable approaches to overcome these challenges.
THE INTEGRATION INTO THE THE COLLECTIVE TRAINING OF PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES ABOUT GAME AND SIMULATION IN ORDER TO DESIGN A LABORATORY FOR THE URBAN COMBAT
Authors: Badea Dorel , Ispas Lucian
Published: February 2023

The article presents the essential coordinates concerning the achievement of feasible versions (from a constructive and functional point of view) of a laboratory for urban operations, with high potential for implementation in military higher education institutions. Are envisaged data to identify the optimal correlation (in terms of technical, systemic and operational views) between game and simulation, applicable in the military field and a comparative study of the variants of dedicated software and simulators (based on the use of available weapons) existing on the specialized market for military and / or civilian use. The domain of modeling military actions used in the instruction, which combines judiciously the advantages of game and simulation, addressed both theoretically and practically, starting from the common points (resources, rules, actors) is a modern, into the complete agreement with the requirements of demands based society knowledge, less exploited at national level but having a great potential to transform and implicitly to adapt land forces to the demands and challenges of the new security environment. The main novelty lies in the implementation of some technologies and methodologies specific to the simulation in educational military processes. Article aims partial representation (based on documented analysis which produces the essential elements) of the specific realities of urban battle in which fundamental features are selected (replicas of weapons and building infrastructure elements) of a situation that will be played by the group of military students involved in a training situation. This operational model ensures reduction and representation of a more complex system that allows experimentation in a direct manner, minimizing physical risks possible (wearing appropriate protective equipment) but maximizing awareness of the associated risks with these types of battle procedures.
ENHANCING E-LEARNING COMMUNITIES THROUGH RECOMMENDER AGENTS
Authors: Dascalu Maria iuliana , Mohora Anca
Published: February 2023

The paper proposes a model for enhancing e-learning communities using recommender agents. The platform for creating such e-learning communities is described, as well as the provided recommendation mechanism. A recommender agent exploits web mining techniques and user's profile intensively to increase the members' satisfaction within an e-learning community. The recommender agent is presented in the context of a platform for self-built e-learning communities, in which a trainee enrolls into the educational process, gains points through achievements and ultimately becomes a trainer, based on those points. The agent acts as a recommender system: it produces suggestions and shortcuts for learning materials, helping the learner to better navigate through online materials and quickly find needed resources. The main difference between suggestions and shortcuts, in the context of our recommender agents, is that shortcuts are created taking into account only the user's profile, but the suggestions are created using a collaborative recommendation mechanism. Besides recommending learning materials, our recommender agent can suggest suitable learning activities and tools (e.g. formative e-assessment, collaborative task management tools), depending on the optimal learning style of each user. In order to perform its functions, the recommender agent exploits an XML-based user profile, which can be filled either by the user himself or can be extracted from an e-learning system/social network, using customized connectors. The authors claim that the use of a recommender agent would personalize the educational experience of the e-learning community members, thus enhancing their engagement and increasing the efficiency of learning. In addition, the agent can be used as a stand-alone application, to create a personal learning environment, as well.
TYPING OR WRITING? A DILEMMA OF THE DIGITAL ERA
Authors: Petrescu Anca
Published: February 2023

The present paper focuses on the latest research about the difference between cursive writing and keyboarding, in an era where children are texting, tapping and typing on keyboards more than ever, leaving less time to master that "old-fashioned" skill known as handwriting. But what is the real value of learning handwriting skills versus being able to type 100 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard? Since the personal computer and now the telephone have become the primary methods for recording our ideas, we simply do not write with an actual writing implement like a pen or pencil as much as we used to. Or, the benefits of gripping and moving in a controlled manner a pen or pencil on a piece of paper reach beyond communication. Emerging research shows that handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child's academic success in ways that keyboarding can't.
So, we must ask ourselves, is this really a problem? Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this basic skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Instead of asking questions about the validity of teaching handwriting in schools at a time when technology is asserting its primacy, it would be more beneficial for the educational actors to understand that both of these views are not mutually exclusive, and that we can even use, in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, to reinvigorate the practice. The pages below aim to reflect that, regardless of what age they are in, students need a variety of technologies, including cursive handwriting, in order to succeed.
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE EQUALIZATION OF OPPORTUNITIES
Authors: Simion Elena , Chirvasiu Narcisa delia valentina , Michel Theodora
Published: February 2023

Information and communication technology (ICT) is a useful expression to describe the multitude and variety of ways in which technology has infiltrated into many aspects of everyday life, in education, at work or at home in the spare time.
The last 20 years have brought remarkable innovations in the delivery of educational content. Traditionally distinct, text, sound, graphics and video content are now combined into a single "multimedia" document. The world around us is becoming increasingly interconnected through computer networks. Moreover, the evolution of the field of ICT is closely intertwined with the advancement of science in general and technology in particular and with the development of legislative initiatives that support research, implementation and dissemination of its applications within the educational system.
The use of assistive technologies allows students with special needs to participate actively in the process of interaction and communication; in other words, technology can recover or replace deficiency to a very great extent, depending on several factors: the moment when its use was introduced, the manner of implementation, ongoing support from the persons around etc.
The use of interactive information technologies has great potential for the education of children with special educational needs.
Technology can be an equalization factor - for many people with disabilities, technology can serve as a support to overcome or compensate for cognitive difficulties in learning.
This paper attempts to summarize some of the current directions for the deployment of information and communication technologies in education. Various possibilities of using these technologies in the educational process are presented, with reference to the use in teaching, to the use as a communication tool, as a compensatory tool or means for training, exploration or evaluation.
CASE STUDY - A FREE LMS BASED ON GOOGLE APPS FOR CREDIS, UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST.
Authors: Logofatu Bogdan , Mureanu Alina
Published: February 2023

The University of Bucharest has been actively contributing to the development and modernization of Romanian education, science and culture. A brief chronological history is presented on the official site (http://www.unibuc.ro/e/n/despre/History.php). The important milestone was the moment when Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza decided to bring together the Faculties of Law, Sciences and Letters under the umbrella of a single institution and signed the Decree of Creation (decree no. 756 of 4/16 July 1864) of the University of Bucharest.
During 2014, the University of Bucharest will celebrate 150 years of existence.

During 1994 - 1999, University of Bucharest was included in the project "Phare Multi-Country Programme for Distance Education", aimed at creating a network of 40 Centres of Studies IDD (CSIDD) in 11 countries of Central and Eastern . By Order no. 3289 of 02.19.1998 of the Minister of National Education, the CSIDD centers, their managers, and their affiliation with European Training Foundation (ETF) in Turin, were recognized by the Ministry of National Education.
Based on the University of Bucharest Senate's Decision(May 1999), the CSIDD together with other centres already established within international financed projects (CTI Pilot Centre, REDEC, EDUCO) were brought together and named the Department for Distance Learning (acronym CREDIS). CREDIS was created to focus on Distance Learning, lifelong learning and professional conversion.
During 2014, will celebrate 15 years of existence.

This paper is aiming to present, in details, the Google Apps implementation for CREDIS; the objective was to implement a free LMS with high performance, able to allow future developments, in agreement with the world wide trends in HE. The main idea was to implement and to run a free LMS with high performance, able to allow future developments, in agreement with the world wide trends in HE (ONLINE, MOOC).
The authors and the CREDIS Team, declare this project as one of their contributions to the 150th anniversary of UB
MOBILE ROBOT D.I.Y - A MODERN PROJECT BASED EDUCATION METHOD
Authors: Florea Andrei george
Published: February 2023

In the academic world, masters degree course and seminar attendance is a general administrative concern as more and more students fail to see the importance of the course domain, mostly due to the lack of self studying and experimentation.
One example are robotics courses where students rarely understand the connection between mathematical and physics expressions and the real world, until they are faced with a real problem in this domain and must solve it without the help of the teacher, most often during a seminar.
Because of the fact that in a semester, there is a limited number of seminars, a project based education method has the main advantage of continuous learning throughout the semester.
This study presents a modern, team based project approach where the students are given a fully functional moving robot and have the task of studying, implementing and understanding the underling mathematical expressions in order to improve the robot in various ways. Some of the improvement goals are as follows : constructing a mathematical movement model, adding more sensors, handling errors, creating a remote control using an Android application, ultimately automating the robot's movement.
The students are encouraged to research the various domains involved (computer science, mathematics, physics, electronics) in order to fully comprehend the complexity of each task and also to improve their self-learning abilities.
This paper describes the measures taken by the teacher in order to ensure that the students are constantly following their current objective and gradually learn how to answer many questions on their own.
Each task has individual goals which are presented by the teacher, along with certain study directions that will be useful in achieving the given goal.
The student has to implement a running solution of the given assignment and to document his research.
IMPACT OF ONLINE MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEMS ON LIFELONG LEARNERS
Authors: Navlea Mirabela
Published: February 2023

The economic growth, but also the provision and storage of multilingual texts, in considerable quantity, by the development of the Web and powerful computers, have increased the demand for automatic translations for different pairs of languages, within companies and administrations worldwide. The automatic translation is an entirely automatically process to translate a text from a source language to a text in a target language. No human intervention is required.
However, current machine translation systems generate a lot of errors and obviously the human output intervention is still necessary in order to obtain a high quality for a given translation. If the purpose of the translation is not its high quality, but rather the comprehension of the transmitted message, online machine translation systems are tough very effective for quick translations, in real time, within companies and administrations. Thus, these systems can help professionals to improve their knowledge in their various areas of activity, from multilingual Web content, but also to learn foreign languages or to write technical documents in several languages.
Machine translation systems are based on linguistic approaches or on purely statistical methods. The latest systems are hybrid. They combine statistical techniques and linguistic information. If linguistic systems provide effective results by requiring tough a major human and material effort, the hybrid systems can provide similar results by using less expensive resources.
In this paper, we present the state of the art in machine translation field. The advantages and the disadvantages of these methods are also presented. The particular case of the Romanian which is a language less rich in electronic resources is also discussed.
GAMIFIED 3D VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR IMPROVED STUDENTS' MOTIVATION AND LEARNING EVALUATION. A CASE STUDY ON "3DUPB" CAMPUS
Authors: Stefan Livia , Moldoveanu Florica
Published: February 2023

The current paper presents a research and experimental implementation of a gamified virtual learning environment and a case study to evaluate the results.
The 3D virtual worlds, designed either as a mirror of the real learning settings or as pure virtual 3D spaces, offer numerous advantages for learning and teaching, which were researched and demonstrated in several papers and implementations. To be used as learning environments, virtual worlds need special design principles to support teaching and learning but mainly to engage users, similar to those used in video games. They also share a common issue, i.e. the challenge to extract useful in-world information regarding the usage of the virtual world and the learning outcome as a result of this usage. While a serious game is more complex in design and implementation and helps students understand and learn a specific topic, the gamification (i.e. use of game elements in serious environments) can cover a specific activity or a more complex process and supports both students' engagement and learning assessment, with less complex implementation effort.
In our research we used the gamification concepts in a 3D graphical and interactive environment to motivate the students (intrinsically or extrinsically) to use and revisit a virtual learning environment and to evaluate their learning outcome. "3DUPB" is a virtual clone of the Politehnica University of Bucharest implemented on an infrastructure of services based on the OpenSim platform, whose main goal is to allow students to participate at courses and laboratories in a mixed (real-virtual) and immersive environment. In our research we leveraged the main feature of the virtual campus, i.e. the extensibility with other virtual spaces (regions or simulators) or/and functionalities, to gamify activities and also the usage and behaviour of the virtual learning environment.
The paper makes a short introduction on existing implementations of learning gamification, further describes the design of the experimental learning simulator (virtual classrooms as sub-spaces of the "3DUPB" campus) and explains the gamification: category of activities and characteristics of the virtual learning environment, gamification elements, rules and levels, the implementation on OpenSim platform. A schematic diagram of the workflow of the gamified simulator is also added. A case study during the courses "3D computer graphics" at the Department of Computers from the University Politehnica Bucharest and results of the experimentation are further summarized. The final paragraphs are dedicated to conclusions and further work.
ONE STEP AHEAD: FROM WEB 1.0 TO WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Authors: Dumitrescu Virginia mihaela
Published: February 2023

The present paper explores some of the reasons why technology integration is a must of 21st-century education, and looks at the practical benefits of using technology in conjunction with new approaches to teaching and learning based on the connectivist theories of cognition and instruction that best support the present-day student-oriented educational paradigm. It looks at the necessity (confirmed by our first-hand experience with students of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies) to keep the education process in sync with the spirit of our times, or the way the highly digitized world outside the classroom has come to approach communication, knowledge/ information acquisition, meaning-making, problem-solving, and even socializing and entertainment. It outlines the evolution of computer-assisted instruction from its early stages marked by more static learning tools and (Web 1.0) technologies that place students in the less intellectually stimulating situation of receptacles or consumers of Internet knowledge, to the more recent, more evolved and dynamic Web 2.0 technologies and learning environments that lead to the emergence of new models in education, facilitate student interaction, collaboration and creativity, and enable mind-stretching and enjoyable learning experiences. After examining various psychological and behavioural changes in both teachers and learners as a result of incorporating technology in the education process, the paper focuses on the importance of technology use in tertiary education, where the increased complexity of the learning content calls for more sophisticated and diversified instruments of teaching and learning that may develop students' intellectual autonomy, creativity and adaptiveness, along with their critical thinking, continuous learning and professional skills, preparing them for a more and more competitive and challenging work environment.
USING ROBOBRAILLE PROGRAM IN CURRICULAR AND EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES FOR PEOPLE WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS
Authors: Oprisan Emilia , Gabriela Ianculescu
Published: February 2023

RoboBraille is a complex program, specifically designed for dislexo-dysgraphic people, for those with serious visual impairments and for blind people, developed by the National Centre for Children and Youth with Visual Impairments from Denmark in collaboration with Sensus ApS.
The program is presented as an e-mail and web-based service and aims to achieve the automatic transformation of documents in a variety of alternative electronic formats which come to support people with reading and writing difficulties and those with visual impairments.
Romania has been participating in the project destined to promote this service since 2012.
This research aims to train 30 blind children from the Special Secondary School for the Visually Impaired in Bucharest, students and teachers with a serious visually impairment and blind people to use RoboBraille and to observe the degree of satisfaction after using this program for extracurricular activities for three months.
As a research method we used a satisfaction questionnaire containing a total of 10 questions with five possible answers and three open questions.
We considered that the use of RoboBraille by this people is important because it proposes a variety of services: Braille services (transcription of documents in and from Braille), audio services (conversion into MP3 files and Daisy), e-book services (in which documents can be converted both in EPUB and Mobi Pocket, e-book formats), accessibility services (conversion of inaccessible documents, as image files and all types of PDF files in accessible formats and conversion of Microsoft Office documents into PDF and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations files into RTF and web projects. What is important to note, is that the program allows the processing in Romanian language, both in terms of the written files and of the audio files.
INTEGRATION OF THE E-LEARNING IN TEACHING/ LEARNING COURSES AT PRESCHOOL AND PRIMARY PEDAGOGICAL TEACHER
Authors: Tudor Sofia loredana , Stan Maria magdalena , Paisilazarescu Mihaela
Published: February 2023

E-Learning is an educational environment with continuous upward trend, a collaborative process aimed at increasing individual and organizational performance. Success in the educational field results not only in facilitating access to information and knowledge, modern forms of presentation and assessment, but also e-learning providing differentiated access the various categories of learners with specific training and professional individual needs. Averages open, participatory and social features offers both teachers and learners the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and connect with each other, thereby contributing to the change in the design of teaching strategies and teaching - learning and assessment. Therefore, during the last decade, there is an increase in the supply of electronic resources and tools in the educational environment, especially in the university, where students, as adults, have some experience in using electronic technologies.
In this study, we analyzing how to implement modern technologies in teaching pedagogical disciplines of Foundations of Pedagogy and Theory and Methodology of Curriculum in Preschool and Primary Education in conjunction with the factors that pedagogical influence the acceptance and use of e-learning.
Effective management of learning situations involves overcoming formal educational space and integration of new technologies, developing the ability to cooperate with others to make a good team. School should use elements which are performed abroad, at institutions that do not follow in priority formative purposes. To achieve the four pillars of education, "learning to know", "learning to do", "learning to live with others", "learning to be" , education must be responsive to influences to all learning environments. Without diminishing the role of school education, Lucian Ciolan appreciates that it should not be neglected contribution of other educational environments. "Profile of an individual's skills can be the cumulative result of a series of training experience and formal training, non-formal education, informal experiences of life. (...) It's rather a necessary revision of the traditional roles of school and classical vision that educational institutions have on offer (...)."