Impact of Coronavirus Pandemic on Education

Learning using the Internet or training through E-Learning is growing rapidly and is increasingly favored over the traditional methods of learning and teaching. This radical shift is directly linked to the revolution in digital computer technology. The revolution propelled by innovation in computer technology has widened the scope of E-Learning and teaching, whereby the process of exchanging information has been made simple, transparent, and effective. The E-Learning system depends on different success factors from diverse points of view such as system, support from the institution, instructor, and student. Thus, the effect of critical success factors (CSFs) on the E-Learning system must be critically analyzed to make it more effective and successful. This current paper employed the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with group decision-making (GDM) and Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) to study the diversified factors from different dimensions of the web-based E-Learning system. The present paper quantified the CSFs along with its dimensions. Five different dimensions and 25 factors associated with the web-based E-Learning system were revealed through the literature review and were analyzed further. Furthermore, the influence of each factor was derived successfully. Knowing the impact of each E-Learning factor will help stakeholders to construct education policies, manage the E-Learning system, perform asset management, and keep pace with global changes in knowledge acquisition and management.

Social media (SM) provide new opportunities to foster collaboration and engagement between students. However, the moderating effect of cyberstalking and cyberbullying on the relationship between students’ academic performance and collaborative learning has not yet been addressed. Therefore, this study aims to bridge the literature gap concerning the use of SM and explore its effect on student performance through Cyberstalking and cyberbulling. A questionnaire was designed based on both the Technology Acceptance Model and Constructivism Theory for data collection. It was handed to 538 university students. This study found a significant relationshipbetween social presence, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment with SM use. As shown by the use of communication and communication indicated by the results, SM is a powerful tool for developing and enhancing educational settings. However, this study found a negative relationship between student interactions and SM use. A positive relationship was found from SM use on collaborative learning and student performance that was dampened by Cyberstalking, which is considered a dampening factor and a moderator. Moreover, collaborative learning was reported to be negatively influenced by perceived usefulness as Cyberbullying was found to dampen the relationship between student performance and collaborative learning.

The digital millennials are very interactive in nature. They love to learn and interact with their peers, teachers, relatives, and environment through digital platforms. These interactions are being facilitated by the increasing rate of internet penetration and emerging digital media across the globe. The nature of today’s learners has increased the demand for use of student-centred learning approach such as Online Discussion Forum (ODF) across different levels of education. Online Discussion Forum (ODF) is being employed as a supportive tool to enhance interactive learning and student-teacher communication. The present study developed an Online Discussion Forum nicknamed “CSC forum” with a view to promote interactive learning, and communication among students, and teachers at the Department of Computer Science, Tai Solarin University of Education, Nigeria. The “CSC forum” facilitates exchange of ideas among students regarding course content and assignments, and also improved the quality of communications and relationship between students and teachers. The platform has a “Live Chat” module where members can engage in active conversations, and participate on group discussions on the go. It also provides a framework for improving the department’s information literacy programme, and specifically students’ participation in active learning as a way of improving their digital literacy skills. Given the relative importance of ODF, teachers are required to devote more time on the forum to provide feedbacks to pending student’s queries/postings, and also to offer clarifications on trending topics being deliberated upon on the forum. The discussion forum presented in this study proved effective for student-teacher interactions, communication and information dissimilation to students on school/departmental activities. More so, the study affirms that teacher guidance is crucial to stimulate student’s interest and participation in online forum. While factors such as poor power supply; low student/teacher commitment, poor quality of postings, Abusive posts, delayed feedbacks, poor internet connections and time constraints were found to limit the success of online forum.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to various security threats. One of the most common types of vulnerability threat is the jamming attack, where the attacker uses the same frequency signals to jam the network transmission. In this paper, an edge node scheme is proposed to address the issue of jamming attack in WSNs. Three edge nodes are used in the deployed area of WSN, which have different transmission frequencies in the same bandwidth. The different transmission frequencies and Round Trip Time (RTT) of transmitting signal makes it possible to identify the jamming attack channel in WSNs transmission media. If an attacker jams one of the transmission channels, then the other two edge nodes verify the media serviceability by means of transmitting information from the same deployed WSNs. Furthermore, the RTT of the adjacent channel is also disturbed from its defined interval of time, due to high frequency interference in the adjacent channels, which is the indication of a jamming attack in the network. The simulation result was found to be quite consistent during analysis by jamming the frequency channel of each edge node in a step-wise process. The detection rate of jamming attacks was about 94% for our proposed model, which was far better than existing schemes. Moreover, statistical analyses were undertaken for field-proven schemes, and were found to be quite convincing compared with the existing schemes, with an average of 6% improvement.