Educational Web Portals Research Articles

Educational Web Portal Software for Teachers, Tutors and Students

This article substantiates the feasibility of using the Data-Driven approach in education and creating a "one-stop shop" platform. The paper describes the advantages and disadvantages of modern domestic and foreign ED Tech products, on the basis of which a conclusion is made about the necessary functionality of the designed platform. The article describes the software requirements for the UML design methodology, describes the choice of creation tools, and considers the program for implementing the tool system, including the database structure. It is shown that such a scheme is scalable and can be easily supplemented with other functionality. Based on the requirements, a project prototype was created, located at kuzovkin.info; the project consists of several parts, including a database with tasks, an online simulator, an online board, a voice messenger and articles with task theory. In addition, in the future, it is planned to use an adaptive learning algorithm using artificial intelligence. It is shown that this prototype is successfully used for teaching students. In the future, a web portal with similar tools is planned to be introduced into the work of online schools.

Conceptual framework and documentation standards of cystoscopic media content for artificial intelligence

BackgroundThe clinical documentation of cystoscopy includes visual and textual materials. However, the secondary use of visual cystoscopic data for educational and research purposes remains limited due to inefficient data management in routine clinical practice. MethodsA conceptual framework was designed to document cystoscopy in a standardized manner with three major sections: data management, annotation management, and utilization management. A Swiss-cheese model was proposed for quality control and root cause analyses. We defined the infrastructure required to implement the framework with respect to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles. We applied two scenarios exemplifying data sharing for research and educational projects to ensure compliance with FAIR principles. ResultsThe framework was successfully implemented while following FAIR principles. The cystoscopy atlas produced from the framework could be presented in an educational web portal; a total of 68 full-length qualitative videos and corresponding annotation data were sharable for artificial intelligence projects covering frame classification and segmentation problems at case, lesion, and frame levels. ConclusionOur study shows that the proposed framework facilitates the storage of visual documentation in a standardized manner and enables FAIR data for education and artificial intelligence research.

RCSB Protein Data bank: Tools for visualizing and understanding biological macromolecules in 3D.

Now in its 52nd year of continuous operations, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) is the premiere open-access global archive housing three-dimensional (3D) biomolecular structure data. It is jointly managed by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) partnership. The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB) is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and US Department of Energy and serves as the US data center for the wwPDB. RCSB PDB is also responsible for the security of PDB data in its role as wwPDB-designated Archive Keeper. Every year, RCSB PDB serves tens of thousands of depositors of 3D macromolecular structure data (coming from macromolecular crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and micro-electron diffraction). The RCSB PDB research-focused web portal (RCSB.org) makes PDB data available at no charge and without usage restrictions to many millions of PDB data consumers around the world. The RCSB PDB training, outreach, and education web portal (PDB101.RCSB.org) serves nearly 700 K educators, students, and members of the public worldwide. This invited Tools Issue contribution describes how RCSB PDB (i) is organized; (ii) works with wwPDB partners to process new depositions; (iii) serves as the wwPDB-designated Archive Keeper; (iv) enables exploration and 3D visualization of PDB data via RCSB.org; and (v) supports training, outreach, and education via PDB101.RCSB.org. New tools and features at RCSB.org are presented using examples drawn from high-resolution structural studies of proteins relevant to treatment of human cancers by targeting immune checkpoints.

Additional professional education of medical doctors and clinical practice results (analytical online study)

PURPOSE. To study the opinion of ophthalmologists about the usefulness of training programs presented on the continuing medical education (CME) web portal, their significance and impact on the process of obtaining knowledge in modern conditions, when the scene is dominated by hybrid forms of education.MATERIAL AND METHODS. This study was multicenter scientific and analytical selective cross-sectional observational in design and was conducted in the period from June to September 2021; it was based on the data obtained by an online survey among Russian ophthalmologists with varying records and/or work experience, employed at institutions of different forms of ownership. The prepared questionnaire included two groups of questions: general statistical data and special questions related to the topic "glaucoma".RESULTS. The study involved 1113 clinically practicing ophthalmologists (88%), with an average medical experience of 18 (0; 50) years, without medical category (35%), and have a polyclinic as their main place of work (77%). According to the survey results, 46% of respondents give a high assessment of the content of educational programs, 35% — negative. When choosing therapeutic and diagnostic tactics, doctors prefer their own clinical experience (36.4%), while the main source of knowledge today is the CME training courses (30.8%). According to respondents, the target level of intraocular pressure is achieved in clinical practice in around 71% of cases, which is facilitated by the comprehensive approach to treatment (47%). At the same time, according to the majority of specialists (71%), only 25% of patients achieve target intraocular pressure.CONCLUSION. Representativeness of the sample is beyond doubt. Registration on the CME web portal, in general, does not depend on work experience, attitude to educational organizations, or place of work. With increase in work experience, there is an increase in the number of positive responses characterizing the information completeness of the CME training courses (from 39.7% to 61.8%). CME programs in the field of glaucoma and comorbid ophthalmic pathologies require adaptation taking into account personal skill levels of ophthalmologists.

РОЗРОБКА ТА ВПРОВАДЖЕННЯ У НАВЧАЛЬНИЙ ПРОЦЕС ЗЗСО ВЕБ-ПОРТАЛУ ДЛЯ ВИВЧЕННЯ ІНФОРМАТИКИ

The article is devoted to the issue of development and subsequent implementation of a web portal for the study of computer science by students of GSEI. It was done overview of the subject area of research, an analysis of capabilities and structure of educational portals. There is a process of gaining experience, finding ways to improve the quality of education and new forms of using information and communication technologies in various educational processes. An analysis of similar research in this regard shows that software products that meet such needs can be developed on the basis of web technologies. Web technologies have a number of advantages for the realization of educational needs of students and teachers. The purpose of this article is to design and develop a web portal for the study of computer science in the 9th grade GSEI on the basis of CMS WordPress. The choice of web resource development platform is substantiated; detailed information system design process; proposed structural and functional scheme of the design object. The integration of scientific and educational resources in the portal allows simplifying administration and making resources more accessible. The purpose of building such an environment is to provide wider access to scientific and educational information compared to traditional technologies of scientific and pedagogical communication. A detailed description of each of the resource blocks and their functionality was made. The web portal is introduced into the educational process and outlines the prospects for further scientific research in the chosen direction. We see the prospect of further research in the current direction in expanding the functions of the educational web portal for studying computer science in the 9th grade of GSEI, in particular, the possibility of organizing an internal forum, video communication between students and teachers, cooperation with larger educational web portals.

Online education empowerment with artificial intelligence tools

The experience of organizing the educational process during the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is considered. Using of interactive technologies that allow organizing instant audio communication with a remote audience, as well as intelligent tools based on artificial intelligence that can help educational institutions to work more efficiently. Examples of sufficient use of artificial intelligence in distance learning are given. Particular attention is paid to the development of intelligent chatbots intended for use in communications with students of online courses of educational web portals. The use of technologies of ontology formation based on automatic extraction of concepts from external sources is offered, what can lead to greater acceleration of construction of the intellectual component of chatbots. Artificial intelligence tools can become an essential part of distance learning during this global COVID-19 pandemic. While educational institutions are closed to quarantine and many of them transitioned to distance learning lecturers and schoolteachers, as well as students and schoolchildren faced with the necessity to study in this new reality. The impact of these changes depends on people's ability to learn and on the role that the education system will play in meeting the demand for quality and affordable training. The experience of organizing the educational process at the University of Education Management of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine in the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic showed that higher and postgraduate institutions were mostly ready to move to distance learning. However, most distance learning systems, on whatever platform they are organized, need to be supplemented: the ability to broadcast video (at least ‒ one-way streaming), providing fast transmission of various types of information, receiving instant feedback when voting, polls and more. The structure of each section of the training course for the online learning system should fully cover the training material and meet all the objectives of the course. Appropriate language should be used, and wording, syntax, and presentation of tasks should be considered. One of the areas of application of artificial intelligence technologies in online learning is the use of chatbots which are characterrized by the following properties. It is advisable to use computer ontologies to ensure the intellectualization of chatbots. In this case, the metadata must be understandable to both humans and software and meet the requirements of modern standards in the field of information technology. The extraction of concepts from external data sources was carried out to build the ontology.

Educational Web Portals of Higher Education and Their Problems

Web-based Education is becoming very popular in India at every level of education, which can be attained through online websites or Educational Web Portals. Educational Web Portals provide a variety of eBooks, articles, journals, research papers, online courses, and other educational resources. In this paper, we will discuss the utilities of Educational Web Portals in higher education and evaluate a different type of web portals that provide different options of learning in the Higher education field. This study is based on the experiences students and scholars who are the part of a Facebook page community from all over India and they are engaged in Web-Based Learning and help each other through online communication. The experience for English speaking scholars is different from non-English speaking scholars. The scholar coming from a non-English speaking background does not get the same quality of online resources as English Speaking Scholar has. This is a challenging problem and the researcher dwelled deeper for the solution. The researcher will discuss possible solutions to overcome this problem. She will suggest creating a glocal web portal which can be a bridge between the content creator and a learner in their local language. Such Glocal Educational web portals will help the non-English speaking scholars and will enhance researches at the local level.

SCORE – Leveling the Playing Field for Surgical Training Programs

The Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) web portal provides a uniform, comprehensive, competency-based curriculum for general surgery residents. One of SCORE's principal founding goals was to provide equal opportunity for access of educational resources at programs across the United States which reported having a range of resources. We aimed to determine if there was a difference in portal usage by trainees in independent versus university programs, and across geographic areas. Using analytic software, we measured SCORE usage by trainees in 246 subscribing programs from August 2015 to March 2017. The primary outcome was the average duration of SCORE use per login. Secondary outcomes were the geographic region of each program, and university versus independent designation. Encounters lasting >8 hours (comprising 7% of the data set) were excluded to eliminate the likelihood of failure to log off the portal. Over the study period, there were 669,501 SCORE sessions with 22% of these lasting 1 to 5 minutes, 33% lasting 6 to 30 minutes, and 28% lasting 31 to 120 minutes. Between the university (64.4% of encounters) and independent (35.6% of encounters) program types, there was no significant difference in average visit length overall, or in the normally-distributed designated time categories (t test -1.0, p = 0.3). When mean encounter length per program was compared by geographic regions, there was also no difference in the three time categories (ANOVA p = 0.9, 0.2, and 0.5, respectively). Most (50%) of SCORE encounters lasted 30 minutes of less, confirming prior work that shows trainees use the portal in relatively short bursts of activity. While there were more encounters from university program trainees (proportional with their greater numbers), the mean duration of an individual encounter did not significantly differ by program type as a whole or by region. These results suggest that SCORE is an equally accessible educational resource and is used by surgical trainees, regardless of program type or geographic region.

Accessibility Analysis of Some Indian Educational Web Portals

Web portals are being considered as excellent means for conducting teaching and learning activities electronically. The number of online services such as course enrollment, tutoring through online course materials, evaluation and even certification through web portals is increasing day by day. However, the effectiveness of an educational web portal depends on its accessibility to a wide range of students irrespective of their age, and physical abilities. Accessibility of web portals largely depends on their userfriendliness in terms of design, contents, assistive features, and online support. In this paper, we have critically analyzed the web portals of thirty Indian Universities of different categories based on the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The purpose of this study is to point out the deficiencies that are commonly observed in web portals and help web designers to remove such deficiencies from the academic web portals with a view to enhance their accessibility.

Methods of analysis of a modern university’s presence in the Internet communicative space

Today a university cannot build and promote its identity unless it communicates successfully on the Internet. Internet presence is a challenging issue that requires thorough analysis. A communications audit that makes competent assessment of a university's Internet presence is necessary to ensure successful communication by universities on the Internet. This communications audit includes: assessment of Web site traffic of a university, assessment of user activity on the university's social networking sites, assessment of frequency of mention of the university on expert and educational Web portals, and justification for the university's presence in virtual cities and Web blogs. This research explores different techniques of assessment of universities' Internet presence: content analysis, press clippings, and Internet services such as Google PR, Alexa Ranking, IQBuzz, and others. This research presents an analysis of several universities: Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russia), Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russia), Moscow State University (Moscow, Russia), Harvard University (Massachusetts, USA), Oxford University (Oxford, England), and other universities. The technique developed for auditing a university's communications includes an invariable component, which consists of assessment of universities' Internet presence and their exposure in scientific and educational portals and analysis of their social media profiles, and a variable component, which is determined by the researcher and depends on the objective of the audit.

CASE-TECHNOLOGIES IN EXCEL ENVIRONMENT IN BYOD PROJECTS AS AN INSTRUMENT OF MODERN UNIVERSITY MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOAL ACHIVEMENT

The article deals with the fundamental problems of the modern university including the need to combine large-scale students’ involvement, their knowledge control with an individual approach to university students. The task of organizing efficient learning in multicultural and multilingual environment in the globalizing world faced by modern universities implies organising the process of education with due regard to ethno-cultural and lingual peculiarities of different student groups. At the same time the process of education should be focused on the traditional goals of higher education: to involve students into scientific research, to develop the next generation of scientists and researchers. The comprehensive solution of the outlined problems is provided by applying information and communication technologies as well as computer-aided testing materials development (the programme mixes questions from the test base and produces test models containing 20 questions) with the use of online tools such as Microsoft OneDrive, translation tools and systems of testing and test results processing such as Excel-online. The authors introduce case-technologies in Excel environment on the basis of BYOD projects with the participation of teachers and students (including international students) applied to the course of “Bioethics”. The technology was tested during the academic year 2013-2014 and involved nearly 600 students. The educational web portal of PFUR served as an online medium. The study showed that case-technologies in Excel environment (training simulators and tests) based on BYOD projects help university teachers to control students’ knowledge and organize midterm and final examinations as well as short tests during the term, to improve their courses; allow students to take part in educational technologies development; ensure a higher efficiency of the academic process in multicultural and multilingual environment.

Research on Data Mining Optimization and Security Based on MapReduce

The paper addressed the issues of limited resource for data optimization for efficiency, reliability, scalability and security of data in distributed, cluster systems with huge datasets. The study’s experimental results predicted that the MapReduce tool developed improved data optimization. The system exhibits undesired speedup with smaller datasets, but reasonable speedup is achieved with a larger enough datasets that complements the number of computing nodes reducing the execution time by 30% as compared to normal data mining and processing. The MapReduce tool is able to handle data growth trendily, especially with larger number of computing nodes. Scaleup gracefully grows as data and number of computing nodes increases. Security of data is guaranteed at all computing nodes since data is replicated at various nodes on the cluster system hence reliable. Our implementation of the MapReduce runs on distributed cluster computing environment of a national education web portal and is highly scalable.

A Web simulation of medical image reconstruction and processing as an educational tool.

Web educational resources integrating interactive simulation tools provide students with an in-depth understanding of the medical imaging process. The aim of this work was the development of a purely Web-based, open access, interactive application, as an ancillary learning tool in graduate and postgraduate medical imaging education, including a systematic evaluation of learning effectiveness. The pedagogic content of the educational Web portal was designed to cover the basic concepts of medical imaging reconstruction and processing, through the use of active learning and motivation, including learning simulations that closely resemble actual tomographic imaging systems. The user can implement image reconstruction and processing algorithms under a single user interface and manipulate various factors to understand the impact on image appearance. A questionnaire for pre- and post-training self-assessment was developed and integrated in the online application. The developed Web-based educational application introduces the trainee in the basic concepts of imaging through textual and graphical information and proceeds with a learning-by-doing approach. Trainees are encouraged to participate in a pre- and post-training questionnaire to assess their knowledge gain. An initial feedback from a group of graduate medical students showed that the developed course was considered as effective and well structured. An e-learning application on medical imaging integrating interactive simulation tools was developed and assessed in our institution.

Towards a Conceptual Framework of an Educational Web Portal

Technology plays an important role in everyday life of K-6 students born in the digital age. In the past several decades, educational institutions have made substantial investments in technology infrastructure with the aim of enhancing student learning, increasing student achievement, and helping students acquire digital literacy skills early on in their education. However, to fully leverage web-based technologies for student learning and communication inside and outside of school, teachers must be prepared to effectively plan, develop, and integrate technology into the curriculum-based activities of their classrooms. Educational web portals with resources for teaching, learning and communicating, can help teachers create a “connected” classroom environment that extends student learning well beyond the school’s brick-and-mortar boundaries. This article delineates a framework of an educational web portal for an elementary school classroom. Three inter-related dimensions comprise the framework: 1) web portal structure, 2) web portal impacts, and 3) web portal development strategy. This framework is of value to educators and school administrators interested in integrating web portal technologies into the educational and social infrastructure of their schools.

Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

A Pilot Comparison of Standardized Online Surgical Curricula for Use in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Surgical conditions are an important component of global disease burden, due in part to critical shortages of adequately trained surgical providers in low- and middle-income countries. To assess the use of Internet-based educational platforms as a feasible approach to augmenting the education and training of surgical providers in these settings. Access to two online curricula was offered to 75 surgical faculty and trainees from 12 low- and middle-income countries for 60 days. The Surgical Council on Resident Education web portal was designed for general surgery trainees in the United States, and the School for Surgeons website was built by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland specifically for the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa. Participants completed an anonymous online survey detailing their experiences with both platforms. Voluntary respondents were daily Internet users and endorsed frequent use of both print and online textbooks as references. Likert scale survey questionnaire responses indicating overall and content-specific experiences with the Surgical Council on Resident Education and School for Surgeons curricula. Survey responses were received from 27 participants. Both online curricula were rated favorably, with no statistically significant differences in stated willingness to use and recommend either platform to colleagues. Despite regional variations in practice context, there were few perceived hurdles to future curriculum adoption. Both the Surgical Council on Resident Education and School for Surgeons educational curricula were well received by respondents in low- and middle-income countries. Although one was designed for US surgical postgraduates and the other for sub-Saharan African surgical providers, there were no significant differences detected in participant responses between the two platforms. Online educational resources have promise as an effective means to enhance the education of surgical providers in low- and middle-income countries.

Subscription to the Surgical Council on Resident Education Web Portal and Qualifying Examination Performance

The Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) curriculum for general surgery was developed to guide surgery residents in the acquisition of knowledge for patient care. We hypothesized that residents in programs that subscribed to the SCORE web portal would perform better on the American Board of Surgery (ABS) Surgery Qualifying Examination (QE). Scaled scores and the percent passing the 2011 ABS Surgery QE for individual residents and programs were compared between programs that subscribed to the SCORE portal in 2010 to 2011 and those that did not subscribe. Regression analyses were performed to control for program QE percent passing from 2004 to 2008 (baseline performance), as well as demographic factors known to affect examination results. There were 200 programs and 893 residents that subscribed to the SCORE web portal and 33 programs with 139 residents that did not subscribe. Regression analysis comparing predicted 2011 mean program QE scores based on 2004 to 2008 results showed that subscribing programs had a substantial increase in mean scaled scores of 1.4 points (adjusted means of 81.5 and 80.1, respectively), controlling for the percentage of international medical graduates and program size (p = 0.048). Residents from SCORE portal subscribing programs had a QE percent passing that was 1.6% higher than nonsubscribing residents, and the mean percent passing was higher for subscribing programs (86.4% vs 82.7%), but neither difference was statistically significant. The SCORE subscription status did not correlate with program size, percent of international medical graduates, or baseline scale scores. There was a considerable improvement in mean QE scaled scores for residents in programs that initially subscribed to the SCORE web portal. The percent passing the QE showed a trend toward improvement for subscribing programs and their residents. This association is promising and deserves additional investigation.

Use of Mapreduce for Data Mining and Data Optimization on a Web Portal

paper studied the design, implementation and evaluation of a MapReduce tool targeting distributed systems, and multi- core system architectures. MapReduce is a distributed programming model originally proposed by Google for the ease of development of web search applications on a large number of clusters of computers. We addressed the issues of limited resource for data optimization for efficiency, reliability, scalability and security of data in distributed, cluster systems with huge datasets. The study's experimental results predicted that the MapReduce tool developed improved data optimization. The system exhibits undesired speedup with smaller datasets, but reasonable speedup is achieved with a larger enough datasets that complements the number of computing nodes reducing the execution time by 30% as compared to normal data mining and processing. The MapReduce tool is able to handle data growth trendily, especially with larger number of computing nodes. Scaleup gracefully grows as data and number of computing nodes increases. Security of data is guaranteed at all computing nodes since data is replicated at various nodes on the cluster system hence reliable. Our implementation of the MapReduce runs on distributed cluster computing environment of a national education web portal and is highly scalable.

A Unified Educational Platform of Multimedia Support in Education at Medical Faculties of MEFANET Project

The paper presents an educational network of medical faculties in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Its activities started within the project Medical faculties educational network in 2007 and the main role is to support modern multimedia information technologies usage in clinical and health care study programs. The network is based on open cooperation among faculties with respect to effective medical teaching and learning. To achieve this goal, an original and uniform platform for educational web portals was developed and it is used, together with central gateway, to offer and share digital educational content. The fundamental principles of this innovative solution are described. Both the authors and the users may utilize a wide range of sophisticated functionalities that make the processes of publication and accessibility more intuitive than ever.

Assessment of health sciences and science and technology librarian e-science educational needs to develop an e-science web portal for librarians

In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science issued its report outlining five goals to guide research libraries' burgeoning endeavors in offering e-science services and initiatives [1]. Since 2007 and the ARL report, the library scholarly literature, including recent communications from ARL e-science task force member James Mullins and task force liaison Neil Rambo, has contained a number of discussions on roles for librarians and libraries pursuing e-science initiatives [2–,6]. The ARL report included strategies and actions for libraries to take to prepare and position themselves to support this emerging process of scholarly communication. The report's third outcome states that librarians should seek to become “knowledgeable and skilled research library professionals with the capacity to contribute to e-science and to shape new roles and models of service.” Although the scholarly literature discussing e-science collaboration is growing [7–,10], few articles exist that have actually addressed how and where current and future health sciences and science and technology librarians should turn to develop the specific e-science capacity prescribed in the ARL report. In the summer of 2009, the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School applied for and was awarded funding from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region (NN/LM NER), to begin the construction of an e-science educational web portal specifically for librarians wanting to develop this capacity. The motivation for the portal came from feedback and conversations with librarians attending a regional e-science symposium and subsequent science boot camp, jointly sponsored by the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the University of Massachusetts Libraries, and the NN/LM NER.