Universal Access in the Information Society最新文献

Recently, due to the spread of COVID-19, the implementation of remote learning has been increasing worldwide. This study aims to analyze the difficulties and convenience of using information and communication technology (ICT) for students with disabilities and changes in their perceptions of ICT use after the completion of courses for each form of remote learning. The survey included 122 students with disabilities and 314 students without disabilities via a web-based questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of four situations, categorized according to the type of remote classes. We conducted an analysis of variance using a two-factor mixed design with disability (non-paired: two levels) × situations (paired: four levels) regarding perceptions of resistance toward ICT and self-rated comprehension as the dependent variables. Results show that students with disabilities were more positive about using ICT than students without disabilities in many items. However, before the courses that required the use of relatively new application software, such as web conferencing systems, students with disabilities showed significantly higher levels of resistance and lower levels of self-assessed comprehension. Further, a comparison of the amount of change in perceptions before and after the course reveals that students with disabilities showed significantly more improvement in negative items before the course. These results suggest the importance of providing opportunities for students with disability to learn how to use ICT and understand its convenience in an environment similar to an actual classroom, given the rapid changes occurring in ICT.

Live streaming commerce has emerged as a novel form of online marketing that offers live streaming commerce platforms a means of meeting different user groups' needs. The objective of this article is to examine the effects of age and gender on live streaming commerce platform usage and investigate user characteristics of these platforms in China. This study adopted a data-driven persona construction method combining quantitative and qualitative methods through the use of survey and interview. The survey involved 506 participants (age range = 19-70), and the interview involved 12 participants. The survey findings showed that age significantly affected users' livestream platform usage, while gender did not. Younger users had higher device proficiency and operation numbers. With more trust and device use, older users used the platforms later in the day than younger users. Interview findings revealed that gender affected users' motivations and value focus. Women tended to use the platforms as a means of entertainment. Women valued service quality and enjoyment more, while men focused on the accuracy of product information more. Four personas with significant differences were then constructed: Dedicated, Dependent, Active and Lurker. Their various needs, motivations and behavior patterns can be considered by designers to elevate the interaction of live streaming commerce platforms.

Research has proved learner engagement is a strong predictor of academic achievement, especially in the online learning environment. The lack of any reliable and valid instrument to measure this construct in the context of online education made the researchers of the current study develop and validate a potential measurement inventory to assess EFL learners' engagement in the online learning environment. For this purpose, a comprehensive review of the related literature and careful investigation of the existing instruments were carried out to find the theoretical constructs for learner engagement which led to the development of a 56-item Likert scale questionnaire. The newly developed questionnaire was piloted with 560 female and male EFL university students selected based on nonprobability convenience sampling. The results of the factor analysis indicated the reduction of items to 48 loaded on three main components, namely behavioral engagement (15 items), emotional engagement (16 items), and cognitive engagement (17 items). The results also revealed that the newly developed questionnaire enjoyed a reliability index of 0.925. The findings of the current study will undoubtedly help teaching practitioners assess EFL learners' engagement in the online learning context and make principled decisions when it comes to learners' engagement.

Cognitive accessibility aims to make content more accessible for people with cognitive impairments, such as the elderly and people with intellectual and learning disabilities. In this sense, it is possible to design an accessible user interface from a cognitive point of view. As a contribution, this article presents cognitive accessibility design patterns and their application in designing the Easier web system's user interface. The Easier web system provides a tool that assists in the understanding and readability of text content geared towards people with intellectual disabilities. It detects complex words and offers easier replacements and other resources such as a definition of the complex word. In addition to applying the design patterns, user tests with people with intellectual disabilities and older people have been carried out to evaluate the cognitive accessibility of the Easier system's interface. The results indicate that people with cognitive impairments know how to use the interfaces and have a satisfactory experience. In addition, a design proposal to provide a glossary mechanism to be used in web interfaces with simplified texts is presented and validated.

This study offers a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 research in education. A multi-methods approach was used to capture the full breadth of educational research. As such, a bibliometric analysis, structural topic modeling, and qualitative synthesis of top papers were combined. A total of 4,201 articles were retrieved from Scopus, mostly published from 2019 to 2021. In this work special attention is paid to analyzing and synthesizing findings about: (i) status of research about COVID-19 regarding frequencies, venues, publishing countries, (ii) identification of main topics in the COVID-19 research, and (iii) identification of the major themes in most cited articles and their impact on the educational community. Structural topic modeling identified three main groups of topics that related to education in general, moving to online education, or diverse topics (e.g., perceptions, inclusion, medical education, engagement and motivation, well-being, and equality). A deeper analysis of the papers that received most attention revealed that problem understanding was the dominating theme of papers, followed by challenges, impact, guidance, online migration, and tools and resources. A vast number of papers were produced. However, thoughtful, well-planned, and meaningful research was hard to conceptualize or implement, and a sense of urgency led to a deluge of research with thin contributions in a time of dire need to genuine insights.

Nowadays social media usage has increased drastically among the stakeholders of higher educational institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly increased the surge of social media users due to the forced implementation of online pedagogy and travel restrictions. The research study presented in this paper attempted to analyze social media usage in higher education. The data were collected from primary and secondary sources with the help of leading research databases, survey questionnaires, the Delphi method, and brainstorming sessions. Statistical tools and analytic techniques incorporated in the study included bibliometric analysis, word cloud, co-occurrence network, thematic map, thematic evolution, co-word analysis, country-wise analysis along with collaboration network, statistical survey, mind mapping, and analytic hierarchy process. The study justified the aspects of social media usage in the higher educational environment. It was found that the research fraternity around the globe focused more on understanding the aspects of social media and higher education during the trying times of the Coronavirus crisis. The maximum impact of social media usage on higher education was found to be from teaching-learning and discussions, and public relations and networking. It was also found that social networking platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter were very common among the stakeholders of higher education. This study is of huge importance because it can help in paving the way to strategize remedial measures for increasing positivity and minimizing the negativity of social media usage in institutions of higher education across the world.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10209-023-00988-x.