Docent - Learning environments for computing education Address: Pervasive and Mobile Computing Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering Luleå University of TechnologySE-931 87 Skellefteå, Sweden Phone: +46(0)910585317 Web:https://www.ltu.se/staff/s/soloye-1.202588?l=en
Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has shown great potential in advancing education with m... more Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has shown great potential in advancing education with many pedagogical benefits for building the 21st-century teaching and learning experience. This study conducted a formative evaluation of an immersive VR expedition application with the aim of understanding users' learning processes and how the application facilitates higher education students' computational thinking skills. Six participants were randomly selected to conduct this evaluation. A mixed research approach consisting of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed. The study quantitatively analyzed users' scores from gameplay to understand how the intervention supported computational thinking skills. Participants were also interviewed to collect data after playing the mini-games to investigate users' experiences. The study showcases players' computational thinking competency, assessed automatically during gameplay. Further, this study used inductive content analysis to demonstrate users' reactions to prototyped VR mini-games. The qualitative findings suggest that users found the VR mini-games interactive and immersive, which provided an opportunity to foster learners' computational thinking skills. The quantitative analysis revealed that student's computational thinking competency can be enhanced through consistent playing of the mini-games. Moreover, the expedition aspect of the VR game stimulated learners' curiosity, which sustained their learning progress. Furthermore, users gained new knowledge and found the mini-games educative. Nevertheless, several aspects of the VR mini-games need improvements, according to users' perceptions. This study contributes to the knowledge in terms of the affordances of VR in education research and provides relevant insights that can shape future studies, for example, the recent hype of metaverse in education.
The educational community continuously seeks ways to improve the learner-centered learning proces... more The educational community continuously seeks ways to improve the learner-centered learning process through new approaches like Learning analytics and its dashboard, which is helpful to enhance the teaching and the learning process. It involves a process whose final goal is presenting results to support decision-making about improving the learning process. However, a descriptive Learning analytics interface for analyzing learning data of students, including the disadvantaged, where to view and interpret learners' historical data is -in general- missing in this research domain. Hence, more research is still required to establish the philosophy of learning analytics on inclusion with an interface for the stakeholders to understand learning and teaching in an inclusive learning environment. This paper fills this gap by providing an inclusive educational learning analytics dashboard to support teachers and students. This study aimed to present a learning analytics implementation in the context of a smart ecosystem for learning and inclusion. We gave the inclusive educational needs and discussed the workflow followed during the descriptive learning analytics dashboard development. Therefore, the study improved existing learning analytics dashboards with a descriptive approach and inclusiveness of students with disabilities. Owing to the software development nature of this study, agile methodology based on five stages was applied: requirement elicitation; data gathering; design and prototyping; implementation; and testing and integration. We performed an initial evaluation, which indicated that the dashboard is suitable for understanding teachers' and students' needs and expectations. Besides, the visualization of inclusive learning characteristics improves engagement and attainment of learning goals.
Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) Project is a consortium project, funded as part... more Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) Project is a consortium project, funded as part of ERANet JOINT CALL 2016/2017 with the number of ERANet17/ICT0076. In a two-year collaboration, higher educations from Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Poland, Turkey, and Uruguay worked together to create and actualize an open-access set of ICTbased approaches and conditions to support the digitization of the learning environment by providing training and improving inclusive education and across the EU and LAC regions. The project was funded by the following EU CELAC Research and Innovation funding agencies in each country: Ministry of Health, Vice Ministry of Science and Technology (MOH) in Bolivia, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Research Support Foundation of the State of Sao Paulo (FAPESP) in Brasil, Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCyT) in the Dominician Republic, Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) in Ecuador, Academy of Finland (AKA) in Finland, National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) in Poland, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in Turkey and National Research and Innovation Agency of Uruguay (ANII) in Uruguay
Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020, 2020
In recent years, open educational resources have been offered in initiatives that aim to reach a ... more In recent years, open educational resources have been offered in initiatives that aim to reach a wider audience, contributing to the democratization of knowledge. However, there is still a gap with regard to the accessibility of these educational resources. In this sense, this paper presents a digital ecosystem architecture, called SELI (Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion), which is being developed by a group of ten countries in Europe and Latin America. This ecosystem can be viewed in four different views (philosophical foundations, supporting infrastructure, concept and service bus). It aims to provide an accessible learning environment, involving recent technologies such as Blockchain, microsites and the use of universal accessibility guidelines.
This chapter describes how the Ebola virus is considered extremely infectious with a series of ph... more This chapter describes how the Ebola virus is considered extremely infectious with a series of physical and psychological traumas on the victims. Common clinical signs associated with the disease i ...
African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 2021
In Tanzania, street traders face the challenge of limited markets caused by employing weak market... more In Tanzania, street traders face the challenge of limited markets caused by employing weak marketing and promotion strategies. This study developed a mobile application to solve the problem address...
2015 International Conference on Cyberspace (CYBER-Abuja), 2015
There is a rapid growth of the application of mobile devices as a learning aid especially in deve... more There is a rapid growth of the application of mobile devices as a learning aid especially in developing countries such as Nigeria largely due to affordability, interest and availability of mobile handheld devices. Though web-based learning systems such as m-learning are used nowadays to support several learning activities and learners are generally willing to use the devices for learning, cybersecurity negligence poses a huge threat to this beneficial system. This work used questionnaires and interview survey approaches to obtain lecturers and students' opinion and standpoints on the harmful effects of cybersecurity negligence on m-learning as well as possible solutions to the menace of cybersecurity threats. The results of this study identified harmful effects of cybersecurity negligence in m-learning. Also, mitigating approaches were proposed to counter cybersecurity issues on m-learning. It was recommended that appropriate plan and implementation of systems applied in web-based learning must have sufficient cybersecurity administration for m-learning platforms. This must be considered for enhanced learning, efficiency, satisfaction and acceptability of m-learning solutions.
Imbalanced Data (ID) is a problem that deters Machine Learning (ML) models from achieving satisfa... more Imbalanced Data (ID) is a problem that deters Machine Learning (ML) models from achieving satisfactory results. ID is the occurrence of a situation where the quantity of the samples belonging to one class outnumbers that of the other by a wide margin, making such models’ learning process biased towards the majority class. In recent years, to address this issue, several solutions have been put forward, which opt for either synthetically generating new data for the minority class or reducing the number of majority classes to balance the data. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of methods based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) mixed with a variety of well-known imbalanced data solutions meaning oversampling and undersampling. Then, we propose a CNN-based model in combination with SMOTE to effectively handle imbalanced data. To evaluate our methods, we have used KEEL, breast cancer, and Z-Alizadeh Sani datasets. In order to achi...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Virtual reality is an emerging field in mental health and has gained widespread acceptance due to... more Virtual reality is an emerging field in mental health and has gained widespread acceptance due to its potential to treat various disorders, such as anxiety and depression. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of virtual reality (VR) use in addressing depression and anxiety from 1995 to 2022. The study analysed 1872 documents using the Scopus database, identifying the field’s most relevant journals and authors. The results indicate that using VR for addressing anxiety and depression is a multidisciplinary field with a wide variety of research topics, leading to significant collaborative research in this area. The Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine was identified as the most relevant journal, while Behavior Research and Therapy was found to be the most cited journal. The analysis of keywords suggests that there is more research on using VR for anxiety and related disorders than for depression. Riva G. was identified as the top author in producing research outputs on...
Many empirical studies have shown that educational games and recent technologies impact education... more Many empirical studies have shown that educational games and recent technologies impact education and increase learning effectiveness, students’ motivation and engagement. The overall aim of this study is to evaluate the usability of Imikode, a virtual reality (VR) game that was developed to introduce the concepts of object-oriented programming to novices. The improved version of the Imikode VR game consists of three features: An artificial intelligence component designed to provide real-time error feedback to users, an intelligent agent that guides and teaches users how to play the game and finally, the integration of multiple game play that gives learners more opportunities to explore the VR environment for greater immersive learning experience. This study adopted a survey approach and recruited first-year computer science students to measure learner satisfaction with educational virtual reality games and examined the correlations among the attributes of the Usefulness, Satisfacti...
The increasing attention to Machine Learning (ML) in K-12 levels and studies exploring a differen... more The increasing attention to Machine Learning (ML) in K-12 levels and studies exploring a different aspect of research on K-12 ML has necessitated the need to synthesize this existing research. This study systematically reviewed how research on ML teaching and learning in K-12 has fared, including the current area of focus, and the gaps that need to be addressed in the literature in future studies. We reviewed 43 conference and journal articles to analyze specific focus areas of ML learning and teaching in K-12 from four perspectives as derived from the data: curriculum development, technology development, pedagogical development, and teacher training/professional development. The findings of our study reveal that (a) additional ML resources are needed for kindergarten to middle school and informal settings, (b) further studies need to be conducted on how ML can be integrated into subject domains other than computing, (c) most of the studies focus on pedagogical development with a de...
Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has shown great potential in advancing education with m... more Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has shown great potential in advancing education with many pedagogical benefits for building the 21st-century teaching and learning experience. This study conducted a formative evaluation of an immersive VR expedition application with the aim of understanding users' learning processes and how the application facilitates higher education students' computational thinking skills. Six participants were randomly selected to conduct this evaluation. A mixed research approach consisting of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed. The study quantitatively analyzed users' scores from gameplay to understand how the intervention supported computational thinking skills. Participants were also interviewed to collect data after playing the mini-games to investigate users' experiences. The study showcases players' computational thinking competency, assessed automatically during gameplay. Further, this study used inductive content analysis to demonstrate users' reactions to prototyped VR mini-games. The qualitative findings suggest that users found the VR mini-games interactive and immersive, which provided an opportunity to foster learners' computational thinking skills. The quantitative analysis revealed that student's computational thinking competency can be enhanced through consistent playing of the mini-games. Moreover, the expedition aspect of the VR game stimulated learners' curiosity, which sustained their learning progress. Furthermore, users gained new knowledge and found the mini-games educative. Nevertheless, several aspects of the VR mini-games need improvements, according to users' perceptions. This study contributes to the knowledge in terms of the affordances of VR in education research and provides relevant insights that can shape future studies, for example, the recent hype of metaverse in education.
The educational community continuously seeks ways to improve the learner-centered learning proces... more The educational community continuously seeks ways to improve the learner-centered learning process through new approaches like Learning analytics and its dashboard, which is helpful to enhance the teaching and the learning process. It involves a process whose final goal is presenting results to support decision-making about improving the learning process. However, a descriptive Learning analytics interface for analyzing learning data of students, including the disadvantaged, where to view and interpret learners' historical data is -in general- missing in this research domain. Hence, more research is still required to establish the philosophy of learning analytics on inclusion with an interface for the stakeholders to understand learning and teaching in an inclusive learning environment. This paper fills this gap by providing an inclusive educational learning analytics dashboard to support teachers and students. This study aimed to present a learning analytics implementation in the context of a smart ecosystem for learning and inclusion. We gave the inclusive educational needs and discussed the workflow followed during the descriptive learning analytics dashboard development. Therefore, the study improved existing learning analytics dashboards with a descriptive approach and inclusiveness of students with disabilities. Owing to the software development nature of this study, agile methodology based on five stages was applied: requirement elicitation; data gathering; design and prototyping; implementation; and testing and integration. We performed an initial evaluation, which indicated that the dashboard is suitable for understanding teachers' and students' needs and expectations. Besides, the visualization of inclusive learning characteristics improves engagement and attainment of learning goals.
Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) Project is a consortium project, funded as part... more Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) Project is a consortium project, funded as part of ERANet JOINT CALL 2016/2017 with the number of ERANet17/ICT0076. In a two-year collaboration, higher educations from Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Poland, Turkey, and Uruguay worked together to create and actualize an open-access set of ICTbased approaches and conditions to support the digitization of the learning environment by providing training and improving inclusive education and across the EU and LAC regions. The project was funded by the following EU CELAC Research and Innovation funding agencies in each country: Ministry of Health, Vice Ministry of Science and Technology (MOH) in Bolivia, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Research Support Foundation of the State of Sao Paulo (FAPESP) in Brasil, Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCyT) in the Dominician Republic, Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) in Ecuador, Academy of Finland (AKA) in Finland, National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) in Poland, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in Turkey and National Research and Innovation Agency of Uruguay (ANII) in Uruguay
Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020, 2020
In recent years, open educational resources have been offered in initiatives that aim to reach a ... more In recent years, open educational resources have been offered in initiatives that aim to reach a wider audience, contributing to the democratization of knowledge. However, there is still a gap with regard to the accessibility of these educational resources. In this sense, this paper presents a digital ecosystem architecture, called SELI (Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion), which is being developed by a group of ten countries in Europe and Latin America. This ecosystem can be viewed in four different views (philosophical foundations, supporting infrastructure, concept and service bus). It aims to provide an accessible learning environment, involving recent technologies such as Blockchain, microsites and the use of universal accessibility guidelines.
This chapter describes how the Ebola virus is considered extremely infectious with a series of ph... more This chapter describes how the Ebola virus is considered extremely infectious with a series of physical and psychological traumas on the victims. Common clinical signs associated with the disease i ...
African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 2021
In Tanzania, street traders face the challenge of limited markets caused by employing weak market... more In Tanzania, street traders face the challenge of limited markets caused by employing weak marketing and promotion strategies. This study developed a mobile application to solve the problem address...
2015 International Conference on Cyberspace (CYBER-Abuja), 2015
There is a rapid growth of the application of mobile devices as a learning aid especially in deve... more There is a rapid growth of the application of mobile devices as a learning aid especially in developing countries such as Nigeria largely due to affordability, interest and availability of mobile handheld devices. Though web-based learning systems such as m-learning are used nowadays to support several learning activities and learners are generally willing to use the devices for learning, cybersecurity negligence poses a huge threat to this beneficial system. This work used questionnaires and interview survey approaches to obtain lecturers and students' opinion and standpoints on the harmful effects of cybersecurity negligence on m-learning as well as possible solutions to the menace of cybersecurity threats. The results of this study identified harmful effects of cybersecurity negligence in m-learning. Also, mitigating approaches were proposed to counter cybersecurity issues on m-learning. It was recommended that appropriate plan and implementation of systems applied in web-based learning must have sufficient cybersecurity administration for m-learning platforms. This must be considered for enhanced learning, efficiency, satisfaction and acceptability of m-learning solutions.
Imbalanced Data (ID) is a problem that deters Machine Learning (ML) models from achieving satisfa... more Imbalanced Data (ID) is a problem that deters Machine Learning (ML) models from achieving satisfactory results. ID is the occurrence of a situation where the quantity of the samples belonging to one class outnumbers that of the other by a wide margin, making such models’ learning process biased towards the majority class. In recent years, to address this issue, several solutions have been put forward, which opt for either synthetically generating new data for the minority class or reducing the number of majority classes to balance the data. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of methods based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) mixed with a variety of well-known imbalanced data solutions meaning oversampling and undersampling. Then, we propose a CNN-based model in combination with SMOTE to effectively handle imbalanced data. To evaluate our methods, we have used KEEL, breast cancer, and Z-Alizadeh Sani datasets. In order to achi...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Virtual reality is an emerging field in mental health and has gained widespread acceptance due to... more Virtual reality is an emerging field in mental health and has gained widespread acceptance due to its potential to treat various disorders, such as anxiety and depression. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of virtual reality (VR) use in addressing depression and anxiety from 1995 to 2022. The study analysed 1872 documents using the Scopus database, identifying the field’s most relevant journals and authors. The results indicate that using VR for addressing anxiety and depression is a multidisciplinary field with a wide variety of research topics, leading to significant collaborative research in this area. The Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine was identified as the most relevant journal, while Behavior Research and Therapy was found to be the most cited journal. The analysis of keywords suggests that there is more research on using VR for anxiety and related disorders than for depression. Riva G. was identified as the top author in producing research outputs on...
Many empirical studies have shown that educational games and recent technologies impact education... more Many empirical studies have shown that educational games and recent technologies impact education and increase learning effectiveness, students’ motivation and engagement. The overall aim of this study is to evaluate the usability of Imikode, a virtual reality (VR) game that was developed to introduce the concepts of object-oriented programming to novices. The improved version of the Imikode VR game consists of three features: An artificial intelligence component designed to provide real-time error feedback to users, an intelligent agent that guides and teaches users how to play the game and finally, the integration of multiple game play that gives learners more opportunities to explore the VR environment for greater immersive learning experience. This study adopted a survey approach and recruited first-year computer science students to measure learner satisfaction with educational virtual reality games and examined the correlations among the attributes of the Usefulness, Satisfacti...
The increasing attention to Machine Learning (ML) in K-12 levels and studies exploring a differen... more The increasing attention to Machine Learning (ML) in K-12 levels and studies exploring a different aspect of research on K-12 ML has necessitated the need to synthesize this existing research. This study systematically reviewed how research on ML teaching and learning in K-12 has fared, including the current area of focus, and the gaps that need to be addressed in the literature in future studies. We reviewed 43 conference and journal articles to analyze specific focus areas of ML learning and teaching in K-12 from four perspectives as derived from the data: curriculum development, technology development, pedagogical development, and teacher training/professional development. The findings of our study reveal that (a) additional ML resources are needed for kindergarten to middle school and informal settings, (b) further studies need to be conducted on how ML can be integrated into subject domains other than computing, (c) most of the studies focus on pedagogical development with a de...
The convergence of Wi-Fi technologies and mobile devices present prospects to design and implemen... more The convergence of Wi-Fi technologies and mobile devices present prospects to design and implement applications that will support learning on the move. Mobile learning (m-learning) is the study and practice of using mobile devices, such as smart phones, mobile phones, tablets, PDAs, MP3s and pocket PCs to support learning for anyone, anytime and anywhere. Through well-situated and flexible mobile devices and network infrastructure, researchers and developers endeavor to offer users with new learning applications and services. We have applied the design research (DR) approach in the course of developing m-learning application, MobileEdu, for computing education in Nigerian higher education context. The application is intended to facilitate the learning of computer science courses on mobile devices, support ubiquitous, collaborative, and social learning for undergraduate students. Moreover, the application eases access to learning resources. In this article we present the analysis, design and implementation activities related to the development of the first MobileEdu prototype. The research also deliberated on the characteristics and scope of the adherence of MobileEdu to the traits and ideas of DR.
Adult Education 2018 – Transformation in the Era of Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, 2019
The paper is a brief overview of the possibilities of using new, ICT-based teaching solutions. It... more The paper is a brief overview of the possibilities of using new, ICT-based teaching solutions. It presents the positive results of integrating flipped learning, digital story telling methods into the learning and teaching process. The text refers to the latest solutions from the border areas of media pedagogy, adult education and ICT. It was written as part of the international project Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion.
IEEE 19th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Maceoi, Brazil 2019 , 2019
This paper investigates the impact of puzzle-based learning technique (PbLT) for teaching introdu... more This paper investigates the impact of puzzle-based learning technique (PbLT) for teaching introductory programming in the context of Nigeria. The participants in the study were computer science students at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria. The study adopted the quantitative research method using simple descriptive statistics to analyze the data collected. The study shows that PbLT has positive impact on the students' understanding of introductory programming. In addition, the students confirmed that MobileEdu-Puzzle learning application was supportive and easy to use. Nonetheless, the result revealed that information technology infrastructure especially internet connectivity is a major challenge that may hinder the use of mobile learning technologies such as MobileEdu-puzzle. The overall outcome shows that PbLT holds a lot of promise towards enhancing students learning experiences.
This study investigated the role of virtual reality (VR) in computer science (CS) education over ... more This study investigated the role of virtual reality (VR) in computer science (CS) education over the last 10 years by conducting a bibliometric and content analysis of articles related to the use of VR in CS education. A total of 971 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences were collected from Web of Science and Scopus databases to conduct the bibliometric analysis. Furthermore, content analysis was conducted on 39 articles that met the inclusion criteria. This study demonstrates that VR research for CS education was faring well around 2011 but witnessed low production output between the years 2013 and 2016. However, scholars have increased their contribution in this field recently, starting from the year 2017. This study also revealed prolific scholars contributing to the field. It provides insightful information regarding research hotspots in VR that have emerged recently, which can be further explored to enhance CS education. In addition, the quantitative method remains the most preferred research method, while the questionnaire was the most used data collection technique. Moreover, descriptive analysis was primarily used in studies on VR in CS education. The study concludes that even though scholars are leveraging VR to advance CS education, more effort needs to be made by stakeholders across countries and institutions. In addition, a more rigorous methodological approach needs to be employed in future studies to provide more evidence-based research output. Our future study would investigate the pedagogy, content, and context of studies on VR in CS education
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
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Papers by Solomon Sunday Oyelere