The paper investigates experiences of employees and middle managers in relation to the transition from working from office to working from home in the context of COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. Three online focus groups were conducted to explore working experience in the new mode of work. The conclusions are multifaceted, covering four dimensions: time, spatial, social and technical, and point out how employees and middle managers understand the transition and what impact telework had on their job satisfaction and work productivity.

What do business and education have in common when it comes to continuous improvements? The answer is Lean Principles. Case studies and implementation challenges from some pilot PBL projects in one university, in Romania, are analysed and described in depth, while comparing the educational experience in the university to the challenges and resistance to change that facilitators in the private sector face inside their own companies. Taking this into consideration and based on qualitative data retrieved from interviews carried out in the private sector and in the educational sector, the authors of this paper will present deep insights that are meant to serve as a basis for understanding the “wicked problem” of scalling continuous improvements like Problem Based Learning throughout the entire teaching organization.

The professional standards for teachers provide the competences needed for this occupation, in function of the level of education and of the career stages. This study aims to discover the most important training factors which contribute to the acquisition of teacher competences and to establish the implications for teacher education. We have used a mixed-method design as the procedure for collecting, analyzing, and combining both quantitative and qualitative data. To detect the main agents in the teacher competences’ achievement, we applied a questionnaire and we asked the personal opinion of the teachers regarding their evolution in the career. The findings indicated that the principal factor was the individual study, followed by the continuing professional development, through training courses, the collaborative learning, and, almost on the last place, the initial teacher education. Implications for teacher education: the changes in the future are incalculable, so we have to rethink the teacher education to ensure future teachers able to learn and adapt themselves to different conditions. We appreciate the recommendations to reform teacher education in the context of lifelong learning very useful (Dolan, 2012) and we will study the applicability of them in our university.

Developments in the IT field have led to the development and variety of e-learning objects so that video or gaming lessons are found in most online courses and are developed in order to maintain the student’s interest. The current Learning Management Systems challenges refer to how to generate a dynamic content that automatically adapts to the a priori level of a student’s knowledge and behavior during lessons. Starting from the model student, the component of adaptive learning, the aim of this paper is to keep student motivation by designing a course with content related to the level of knowledge of the students. At the same time, lessons combine elements of gamification with quizzes, textual contexts and infographics in order to make the content more varied, and in order for the student to be more engaged, to assimilate, to understand or to recall the concepts presented in the course.

It often happens in teaching that due to complexity of a subject or unavailability of an expert instructor the subject undergoes in a situation that not only affects its outcome but the involvement and learning development of students also. Although contents are covered even in such a situation but their inadequate explanation leaves many question marks in students’ mind. Artificial Intelligence helps represent knowledge graphically and symbolically which can be logically inferred. Visual and symbolic representation of knowledge is easy to understand for both teachers and students. To facilitate students understanding teachers often structure domain knowledge in a visual form where all important contents of a subject can be seen along with their relation to each other. These structures are called ontology which is an important aspect of knowledge engineering. Teaching via ontology is in practice since last two decades. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a combination of computation and linguistic and is often hard to teach. Its contents are apparently not tied together in a reasonable way which makes it difficult for a teacher that where to start with. In this article we will discuss the design of ontology to support rational learning and efficient teaching of NLP at introductory level.