Collaborative Setting Research Articles

Self‐regulation and shared regulation in collaborative learning in adaptive digital learning environments: A systematic review of empirical studies

AbstractAdaptive learning technologies are closely related to learners' self‐regulatory processes in individual and collaborative learning. This study presents the outcomes of a systematic literature review of empirical evidence on adaptive learning environments to foster self‐regulation and shared regulation of learning in collaborative settings. We provide an overview of what and how adaptive technologies have been used to understand and promote self‐regulated learning in collaborative contexts. A search resulted in 38 papers being analysed. Specifically, we identified the seven main objectives (feedback and scaffolding, self‐regulatory skills and strategies, learning trajectories, collaborative learning processes, adaptation and regulation, self‐assessment, and help‐seeking behaviour) that the adaptive technology research has been focusing on. We also summarize the implications derived from the reviewed papers and frame them within seven thematic areas. Finally, this review stresses that future research should consider developing a converging theoretical framework that would enable concrete monitoring and support for self‐regulation and socially shared regulation of learning. Our findings set a baseline to support the adoption and proliferation of adaptive learning technology within self‐regulated learning research and development. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic By providing personalized and learner‐centric adaptive learning environments (ADLEs), adaptive learning technology can support and foster self‐regulated learning (SRL) practices. It is possible to create a more student‐centred and effective learning environment by combining adaptive learning and collaborative learning. Socially shared regulatory activities can involve planning, monitoring, controlling and reflecting on a group's learning processes. What this paper adds Provides a systematic literature review of empirical evidence on ADLEs, SRL and socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) in collaborative contexts. Summarizes the insights on (S)SRL through ADLEs in collaborative learning. Identifies challenges and opportunities for ADLEs to support (S)SRL in collaborative learning. Implications for practice and/or policy Learning analytics and educational technology researchers will be able to use the systematic review as a guide for future research. Learning analytics and educational technology practitioners will be able to use the systematic review as a summary of the field's current state.

A Web-Based Intervention Based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Family Caregivers of People With Dementia: Mixed Methods Feasibility Study.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), as an empirically based third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy, has shown promise in enhancing well-being and functioning across diverse populations. However, in the context of caregiving, the effect size of available ACT interventions remains at best moderate, sometimes accompanied by high dropout rates, highlighting the need for more effective and feasible intervention designs. The objective of our study was to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a fully online ACT program designed for family caregivers of people with dementia. This study aimed to boost psychological flexibility and support caregivers, enabling them to realize and prioritize their own life values alongside their caregiving responsibilities. A mixed methods feasibility study using an uncontrolled pretest-posttest design was conducted. This intervention included a 9-week web-based self-help program based on ACT incorporating collaborative goal setting and weekly web-based motivational coaching for family caregivers of people with dementia. This study involved 30 informal caregivers recruited through memory clinics and social media platforms in the Netherlands and received approval from the Medical Ethics Committee of the Maastricht University Medical Center+ (NL77389.068.21/metc21-029). A total of 24 caregivers completed the postintervention assessment, indicating a high adherence rate (24/29, 83%). Caregivers reported positive feedback regarding collaborative goal setting, but some found challenges in implementing new skills due to their own habitual responses or the unpredictable context of dementia caregiving. Personalizing the intervention based on individual value preferences was highlighted as beneficial. Compared to other web-based self-help ACT interventions for family caregivers, this intervention showed a high adherence and sufficient level of feasibility, which underscores the use of personalization in delivering web-based interventions. Moreover, the potential of this ACT-based intervention for family caregivers of people with dementia was demonstrated, suggesting that further research and a larger-scale controlled trial are warranted to validate its effectiveness. RR2-10.1136/bmjopen-2022-070499.

Understanding factors that influence goal setting in rehabilitation for paediatric acquired brain injury: a qualitative study using the Theoretical Domains Framework.

Background While goal setting with children and their families is considered best practice during rehabilitation following acquired brain injury, its successful implementation in an interdisciplinary team is not straightforward. This paper describes the application of a theoretical framework to understand factors influencing goal setting with children and their families in a large interdisciplinary rehabilitation team. Methods A semi-structured focus group was conducted with rehabilitation clinicians and those with lived experience of paediatric acquired brain injury (ABI). The 90-min focus group was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were thematically coded and mapped against the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) to understand influencing factors, which were then linked to the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation - Behaviour (COM-B) model. Results A total of 11 participants (nine paediatric rehabilitation clinicians, one parent and one young person with lived experience of paediatric ABI) participated in the focus group. Factors influencing collaborative goal setting mapped to the COM-B and six domains of the TDF: Capabilities (Skills, Knowledge, Beliefs about capabilities, and Behavioural regulation), Opportunities (Environmental context and resources), and Motivation (Social/professional role and identity). Results suggest that a multifaceted intervention is needed to enhance rehabilitation clinicians' and families' skills and knowledge of goal setting, restructure the goal communication processes, and clarify the roles clinicians play in goal setting within the interdisciplinary team. Conclusion The use of the TDF and COM-B enabled a systematic approach to understanding the factors influencing goal setting for children with acquired brain injury in a large interdisciplinary rehabilitation team, and develop a targeted, multifaceted intervention for clinical use. These represent important considerations for the improvement of collaborative goal setting in paediatric rehabilitation services to ensure that best practice approaches to goal setting are implemented effectively in clinical practice.

Research Ethics Committee and Integrity Board Members’ Collaborative Decision Making in Cases in a Training Setting

AbstractThis research focuses on how research ethics committee and integrity board members discuss and decide on solutions to case scenarios that involve a dimension of research ethics or integrity in collaborative settings. The cases involved issues around authorship, conflict of interest, disregard of good scientific practice and ethics review, and research with vulnerable populations (children and neonates). The cases were set in a university, a hospital, or a research institute. In the research, we used a deductive qualitative approach with thematic analysis. Twenty-seven research ethics committee and research integrity board members from 16 European countries and one country outside Europe participated. Participants represented natural and life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. They worked on cases involving ethical/integrity issues in six different constellations. Results show that experts apply key elements of ethical decision making, namely identification of ethical issues, stakeholders, guidelines, solutions, and own positionality, in dealing collaboratively with ethics/ integrity problems, and the nature of the application depends on the complexity of the case. Understanding how individuals knowledgeable in research ethics and integrity, in this case, individuals serving on research ethics committees and integrity boards, approach ethical/ moral issues can help to identify strategies that may be useful in the development of research ethics and integrity training for junior researchers who may benefit from learning professional strategies.

Comparative performance of undergraduate students in micro-teaching using Telegram and WhatsApp in collaborative learning settings

The growing concerns to accommodate large classroom sizes, lack of microteaching laboratory and inadequacy of time for every student to present and be properly assessed has affected the performance of students in micro-teaching in Nigeria. This therefore calls for different innovative approaches backed up by technology to ameliorate the problem. Thus, this study checked the ­­­comparative performance of undergraduate students in micro-teaching using Telegram and WhatsApp in collaborative learning settings in Gombe State, Nigeria. A sample of 282 students enrolled on Telegram and WhatsApp from Federal University Kashere and Gombe State University, respectively was purposively selected for the study. The two sampled groups were assigned into experimental group I (Telegram) and experimental group II (WhatsApp) in collaborative learning settings using a simple random sampling technique. The instruments for the study comprised of micro-teaching achievement test validated by experts in the field of educational technology and curriculum studies, where a split-half method of reliability was used to obtain a figure of 0.91 using Pearson product moment correlation. Descriptive statistics involving mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions while inferential statistics involving an independent sample t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that while the students in both Telegram and WhatsApp platforms performed better in the post-test, a significant difference was obtained in the achievement and retention of the two groups in favor of WhatsApp. It was therefore recommended that lecturers should deploy the use of Telegram and WhatsApp in collaborative learning settings to cover for large classroom sizes and lack of micro-teaching laboratory.

Case-Based Collaborative Learning in Undergraduate Radiology Teaching—Are Essential Conditions for Group Discussions Met?

BackgroundDelivering case-based collaborative learning (cCBL) at scale using technology that both presents the clinical problem authentically and seeks to foster quality group discussion is a challenge, especially argumentation which is critical for effective learning. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of essential conditions to capitalise on a technology-enhanced cCBL scenario for teaching radiology and facilitating quality group discussion. MethodsA questionnaire was administered to 114 fourth-year medical students who completed a technology-enhanced cCBL scenario for teaching neuroradiology. It consisted of individual online pre-class work and face-to-face in-class work, where group discussion followed individual work at a workstation. Items from the ‚Heedful Interrelating in Collaborative Educational Settings‘ scale and ‚positive emotional engagement‘ questionnaire assessed the quality of social-cognitive processes and emotional engagement during the group discussions. Structured interviews were used to explore the teachers’ awareness of and engagement with the technology. ResultsThe mean scores of most,heedfulness’ items were below 3.5 (7-point scale), suggesting that participants did not enter the debriefing with a mindset conducive for argumentation. However, for the affective states 'interest' and 'enjoyment' the mean scores were above 5. Free text comments suggested participants enjoyed the superficial interactions, but did not necessarily engage in argumentation. Structured interviews revealed teachers were aware of the possibilities of the learning dashboard and used it as a common frame of reference, but didn't really succeed to use it as a springboard for discussion. ConclusionsA technology-enhanced cCBL scenario is useful for teaching radiology in undergraduate medical education, but the added value of acquiring in-depth knowledge will only be achieved when students are aware of the importance of an ‚heedful’ mind-set.

Annexation of Crowdsourcing Technique to Aid the Research Pedagogy

The synergistic integration of crowdsourcing into teaching-learning pedagogy is explored in this extensive trialing, which presents a coherent story derived from several dimensions, including mass engagement, collaborative pedagogy approaches, and an experimental project evaluating pedagogical impact on preschool-aged children. The research article explains how crowdsourcing may be revolutionary, highlighting its benefits for information collecting, problem solving, and project execution. Moving from traditional teacher-centric to Student – centered approaches, smoothly transitioning into the field of teaching and learning pedagogy. The study covers the constructivist, collaborative, integrative, reflective, and inquiry-based learning pedagogies. It emphasizes how important pedagogy is in encouraging collaborative learning settings, removing monotony, and accommodating various learning preferences. An experimental project aimed at evaluating the effects of teaching-learning pedagogy on young children in preschool. College students mediated contacts between high school students and non-digitalized preschoolers by using human networks as mediators. The approach demonstrates the viability and effectiveness of crowdsourcing for research in education while emphasizing the need for cautious execution, middleman training, and quality assurance.

Collaborative Hyperspectral Image Processing Using Satellite Edge Computing

The advancement of nanosatellite techniques has boosted the growth of satellite-originated data and applications. Satellite edge computing (SEC) is envisioned to provide in-orbit processing of the sensed data to save the scarce terrestrial-satellite communication resources and support mission-critical services. While most of the existing SEC studies mainly focus on general computing tasks, we present a two-tier collaborative processing framework for the important and unique hyperspectral image (HSI) processing task. Our framework carefully selects bands out of the collected HSIs and sends them back for further analysis. We first conduct a comprehensive data analysis to reveal the non-trivial relationship between the band selection and the eventual analytic performance. We then formulate the band selection problem in this collaborative setting as a utility maximization problem that jointly considers the analytic, energy, and communication factors. A novel multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, named MaHSI, is proposed to solve it in the dynamic SEC environment. Our multi-agent design judiciously embeds the complex correlations among bands as collaborations among agents and significantly reduces the exploration space. Extensive experiments on real-world HSI datasets prove that our approach not only outperforms the existing classical band selection algorithms in accuracy and inference speed but also brings the highest utility to the satellites.

Designing for collaborative learning in immersive virtual reality: a systematic literature review

Immersive learning technologies such as virtual reality have long been deemed as the next generation of digital learning environments. There is a limited number of studies addressing how immersive technologies can be designed, applied, and studied in collaborative learning settings. This paper presents a systematic review of empirical studies reporting on use of immersive virtual reality in collaborative learning within educational and professional learning settings. 11 studies have been grouped and coded in a textual narrative synthesis, outlining the pedagogical concepts behind the learning design, as well as the design of virtual reality environments and the collaborative learning activities in which the technology is employed. The results suggest that collaborative learning in virtual reality can currently be conceptualised as a shared experience in an immersive, virtually mediated space, where there is a shared goal/problem which learners must attend to collaboratively. This conceptualisation implies a need to design technologies, environments, and activities that support participation and social interaction, fostering collaborative learning processes. Based on the outlined conceptualisation, we present a series of recommendations for designing for collaborative learning in immersive virtual reality. The paper concludes that collaborative learning in virtual reality creates a practice- and reflection space, where learning is perceived as engaging, without the risk of interfering with actual practices. Current designs however struggle with usability, realism, and facilitating social interaction. The paper further identifies a need for future research into what happens within virtual reality, rather than only looking at post-virtual reality evaluations.

Privacy-Preserving Breast Cancer Classification: A Federated Transfer Learning Approach.

Breast cancer is deadly cancer causing a considerable number of fatalities among women in worldwide. To enhance patient outcomes as well as survival rates, early and accurate detection is crucial. Machine learning techniques, particularly deep learning, have demonstrated impressive success in various image recognition tasks, including breast cancer classification. However, the reliance on large labeled datasets poses challenges in the medical domain due to privacy issues and data silos. This study proposes a novel transfer learning approach integrated into a federated learning framework to solve the limitations of limited labeled data and data privacy in collaborative healthcare settings. For breast cancer classification, the mammography and MRO images were gathered from three different medical centers. Federated learning, an emerging privacy-preserving paradigm, empowers multiple medical institutions to jointly train the global model while maintaining data decentralization. Our proposed methodology capitalizes on the power of pre-trained ResNet, a deep neural network architecture, as a feature extractor. By fine-tuning the higher layers of ResNet using breast cancer datasets from diverse medical centers, we enable the model to learn specialized features relevant to different domains while leveraging the comprehensive image representations acquired from large-scale datasets like ImageNet. To overcome domain shift challenges caused by variations in data distributions across medical centers, we introduce domain adversarial training. The model learns to minimize the domain discrepancy while maximizing classification accuracy, facilitating the acquisition of domain-invariant features. We conducted extensive experiments on diverse breast cancer datasets obtained from multiple medical centers. Comparative analysis was performed to evaluate the proposed approach against traditional standalone training and federated learning without domain adaptation. When compared with traditional models, our proposed model showed a classification accuracy of 98.8% and a computational time of 12.22s. The results showcase promising enhancements in classification accuracy and model generalization, underscoring the potential of our method in improving breast cancer classification performance while upholding data privacy in a federated healthcare environment.

The impact of collaborative processes on target text quality in translator training

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of collaboration on target text quality in translator training. By comparing team translations with those by individual peers, and analysing the highest and lowest scoring teams, the authors aimed to understand the impact of collaboration on quality. The comparison indicates that translations in a skills lab setting marginally outperform individual translations, but that carelessness is more likely to be observed in the intermediate individual target texts produced in a collaborative setting.

Investigating boundaries and boundary crossing between mathematics and visual art teaching in a collaborative setting

Our study explores boundaries and boundary crossing between communities of mathematics teaching (MT) and visual art teaching (AT). We focus on teacher collaboration, draw on communities of practice and examine the existing boundaries and the way collaborating members handle them. We present data from 17 group meetings of secondary school art and mathematics teachers who try to develop ways of linking ΜΤ and ΑΤ. Results indicate the emerging boundaries by means of discontinuities regarding mathematical practices and tools used in MT and AT, and the disciplines’ teaching and curriculums. Via analysis of the central boundary – the analytical or visual ways of thinking – we present members’ boundary handling that indicates the development and developmental process of integrated practice. The study incorporates boundary crossing processes and learning mechanisms in which the two separate ways of thinking are gradually transformed into an integrated one and reveals possible ways of integration in teaching and learning.

Learning About Resilience from Rural Interprofessional Healthcare Teams: Insights from the “First Wave” of COVID-19

Building resilience is a key concern for adult educators today as we face unprecedented global challenges such as the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Nowhere is this more apparent than in educational initiatives with health professionals who experience many stressors in their work, now amplified by the pandemic. This paper reports the results of focus groups with three interprofessional primary healthcare teams in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, in the fall of 2021. The aim was to learn about their lived experience during the first year of the pandemic, as a basis for considering how resilience could be nurtured and supported in rural team-based collaborative practices settings. Findings reveal that, while each collaborative team experienced recognized COVID-19 workplace stressors, they leveraged a store of collective resilience to navigate the pandemic. The trust, sense of purpose, and shared problem-solving skills they derived from working in collaborative structures over time enabled them to regain equilibrium and to adapt to new norms, and to transform thier practices. The study highlights the power of collaborative learning to strengthen overall ability for resilient performance, and the adaptive capacity that is required to deliver and sustain quality healthcare. The study highlights the need for continuing professional education that values naturally occurring practice-based learning. Adult educators are well positioned to support health professionals and health systems to nurture and support resilient action. They bring an understanding of effective collaborative tools and processes that foster dialogue and collective awareness that leads to a shared identity and understanding. As this study reveals, it is this shared identity and capacity arising within a group that enables them to draw on their collective sources of support to deal with adversity.

Learning within fiber-crafted algorithms: Posthumanist perspectives for capturing human-material collaboration

AbstractA key commitment of computer-supported collaborative learning research is to study how people learn in collaborative settings to guide development of methods for capture and design for learning. Computer-supported collaborative learning research has a tradition of studying how the physical world plays a part in collaborative learning. Within the field, a material turn is emerging that considers how digital and tangible technologies actively contribute to collaborative learning processes. Studying how tangible materials produce collaborative learning visibly and algorithmically is particularly important at a time when advanced algorithms are integrated into educational contexts in ways that are not always transparent. However, the needed methodologies for capturing how non-human agents take part in collaborative learning remains underdeveloped. The present study builds on current CSCL research that investigates materials in collaborative learning and introduces posthumanist perspectives with the aim to decenter humans methodologically and to probe empirically whether and how these perspectives contribute to empirical understanding of collaborative learning processes. Taking fiber crafts (e.g., weaving and fabric manipulation) as a context for computational learning, the present study conducted a posthumanist analysis of differences among human and non-human participants in collaboration using video data to investigate how middle school youths and fiber craft components performed algorithms over time. The findings show how both youths and craft materials actively contributed to the performance of algorithms. In weaving, algorithms became repeated youth-material movements one dimension at a time. In fabric manipulation, algorithms became a repeated confluence of component parts. Decentering humans through an analysis of differences among human and non-human introduced human-material collaboration as a productive unit of analysis for understanding how materials and people together contribute to producing what can be recognized as computational performance. The findings of this research contribute to ongoing conversations in CSCL research on how computational materials can be considered in collaborative learning and present a new approach to capture collaborative learning as physical expansion over time. The study has implications for future research on capturing collaborative computational learning and designing physical computational learning opportunities that show technology as evolving.

Comparing learning outcomes of two collaborative activities on random genetic drift in an upper-division genetics course

Abstract Background Random genetic drift is a difficult concept for biology undergraduates to understand. Active learning activities in a collaborative setting have the potential to improve student learning outcomes compared to traditional lectures alone and have been shown to help foster success for underrepresented students. However, few activities in this content area have been evaluated for effectiveness in improving student outcomes using peer-reviewed instruments backed by evidence of their validity and reliability. Our aim in this study was to use the Genetic Drift Instrument (GeDI) to evaluate and compare student learning gains in an upper division genetics course in which two different genetic drift activities, a faculty-developed collaborative exercise and a commercially published lab tutorial, were administered in an active-learning classroom with students working in small groups. Methods The GeDI was administered in both pre- and post-testing in two semesters (n = 95 and 98 students), with the semesters differing in which activity was assigned. Instrument dimensionality, person and item fit, and reliability were evaluated using Rasch analysis. Hierarchical Linear Models (HLMs) with two-way interactions were fitted to assess whether being in a certain Intervention Type, Race/ethnicity, Gender, or First Generation Status affected learning gains. HLMs with three-way interactions were used to assess whether the activities benefited students of all backgrounds equivalently. Results We found that the GeDI demonstrated unidimensionality, with high item reliability and relatively low person reliability, consistent with previous studies. Both the faculty-developed activity and the commercially available lab tutorial were associated with significant learning gains on genetic drift concepts. Students in the SimBio group had higher learning gains but the difference in effect size was small. No significant differences in learning gains were found between students from different demographic groups, and both activities appeared to benefit students of different backgrounds equivalently. Conclusions The GeDI instrument could be improved by adding items that more consistently differentiate students of different ability levels, especially at high ability levels. The greater impact on learning gains in the SimBio group while statistically significant does not translate into actual meaningful differences in student understanding. While students of different background variables in the sample have equivalent learning gains and are benefitted equivalently by the different interventions, our interventions did not ameliorate inequities in genetic drift understanding as measured by the GeDI that were uncovered in pre-testing.

Understanding Teachers’ Lived Experiences of Instructional Collaboration in Inclusive and Mainstream Settings: A Transcendental Phenomenological Approach

ABSTRACT This project investigates teachers’ lived experiences of instructional collaboration in mainstream and inclusive education settings, looking both at the factors that special and general education teachers believe hinder instructional collaboration, and those that teachers identify as critical to facilitating it. The study draws upon a transcendental phenomenological approach, with initial in-depth and follow-up interviews with nine special and general education teachers from the southern region of Saudi Arabia. The data analysis generated several themes and a number of sub-themes that helped provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. These themes were school culture, work pressure, and facilitating factors. Thus, examining the experiences of teachers in inclusive instructional collaboration settings revealed various factors that influence the successful implementation of this practice. Recommendations for future directions that may contribute to strengthening instructional collaboration in schools are discussed in the paper.

Instructional strategies and challenges for implementing teledentistry in dental hygiene curricula: A qualitative study.

Research has documented the implementation of telecommunications and virtual technology use in health care disciplines to expand accessibility. Despite the current trend of digital innovations in healthcare systems, telehealth technology is not readily adopted in the dental hygiene profession yet. Currently, no standardized educational framework exists in dental hygiene curricula to prepare professionals with the technical skill set and professional knowledge necessary for telehealth applications. The aims and objectives of this research were (1) to investigate existing dental hygiene educators' pedagogical frameworks for incorporating telehealth technology into dental hygiene curricula, (2) explore these educators' instructional strategies for teaching telehealth technology, and (3) examine the theoretical implications and practical outcomes of teaching telehealth technology for professional development and transferrable work-force ready skills. A nine-item, open-ended, semi-structured interview guide was prepared and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) in January 2023 to qualitatively investigate accredited entry-level dental hygiene programs in the United States. Thematic interpretational analysis was conducted using NVivo software. A total of 54 of the 328 dental hygiene programs volunteered for participation. Thirteen full-time and part-time dental hygiene educators met inclusion criteria. The core salient themes identified included (a) curriculum mapping, (b) technology integration, (c) professional collaboration, and (d) supplemental skill set. These findings provide guidance to dental hygiene programs for bridging the teledentistry knowledge gap in curriculum development. Incorporating telehealth applications into dental hygiene curricula prepares future dental hygienists with the specialized training needed to function as a member of contemporary health care teams addressing access to care.

Novel Management of Ocular Surface Inflammation in Patients With Ocular Graft-Versus-Host Disease in the Setting of Cataract Surgery.

To report the outcomes of cataract surgery in patients with ocular graft-versus-host disease (oGVHD) using a novel preoperative immunomodulatory regimen in a collaborative subspecialty care setting. Retrospective case series of patients with oGVHD who underwent cataract surgery using a novel preoperative immunomodulatory regimen in a collaborative care setting. A preoperative regimen consisting of pooled human immune globulin 1%, autologous serum 50%, and methylprednisolone 1% eye drops was prescribed. Outcome measures included visual acuity (VA), ocular surface disease index (OSDI) score, lissamine green staining, and complications with a minimum of 2 years of follow-up. Thirty-five eyes from 20 patients with oGVHD were studied. The mean age was 59 years (range 30-70 years). A healthy comparison group included 35 eyes from 24 patients with a mean age of 63 years (range 44-74 years). At the 2-year follow-up, the mean corneal staining score was 2.3/15, the mean OSDI score was 37.5, and the mean VA was 20/30 (logarithm of the minimal angle of resolution 0.17). The global complication rate was 2.8% at the last follow-up with no difference versus a healthy comparison group. A collaborative care model improving ocular surface health before cataract surgery with dry eye and cataract subspecialists can optimize outcomes in patients with oGVHD.

Automatic Control of Virtual Cameras for Capturing and Sharing User Focus and Interaction in Collaborative Virtual Reality

As VR technology advances and network speeds rise, social VR platforms are gaining traction. These platforms enable multiple users to socialize and collaborate within a shared virtual environment using avatars. Virtual reality, with its ability to augment visual information, offers distinct advantages for collaboration over traditional methods. Prior research has shown that merely sharing another person’s viewpoint can significantly boost collaborative efficiency. This paper presents an innovative non-verbal communication technique designed to enhance the sharing of visual information. By employing virtual cameras, our method captures where participants are focusing and what they are interacting with, then displays these data above their avatars. The direction of the virtual camera is automatically controlled by considering the user’s gaze direction, the position of the object the user is interacting with, and the positions of other objects around that object. The automatic adjustment of these virtual cameras and the display of captured images are symmetrically conducted for all participants engaged in the virtual environment. This approach is especially beneficial in collaborative settings, where multiple users work together on a shared structure of multiple objects. We validated the effectiveness of our proposed technique through an experiment with 20 participants tasked with collaboratively building structures using block assembly.

Creating inspiration by developing digital mood boards in student teams

Mood boards have notable potential to serve as inspirational tools in design. However, we still do not fully understand how mood boards are created utilizing material found online in collaborative educational settings. The purpose of our study is to deepen our understanding of both team design and the creation of shared digital mood boards through a qualitative analysis on how three student teams created shared mood boards using computers, and how they gathered inspirational material from the Web. We discuss how the creation of a shared mood board is a complex process, including deepening and broadening cycles, where a key idea is either explained more thoroughly, or then expanded with additional, related ideas. In relation to mood board ideas, the teams decided the specific keywords to be used to gather images online, balancing the design constraints, with an intuitive yet systematic way of working. We encourage to acknowledge a digitally created mood board as a collaborative method for creating meaningful starting points for designing, and for finding inspiration outside the direct design problem. Our study provides information which is beneficial for developing pedagogies that include collaboration and the use of online inspirational material.Keywords: team ideation; mood board; sources of inspiration; online material; metaphor; design education