On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic to be confronted by humanity. As a result, social isolation has become the norm in most countries, with the consequent replacement of face-to-face classes by classes mediated by information and communication technology. Within this context, this work sets out to investigate the factors necessary for courses mediated by technology to attain their pedagogical objectives. Additionally, the study examines how subjects that develop hard and soft skills differ in a technology-mediated setting. The results show that the teacher’s digital competence on the technological platform and the metacognitive support available in the digital environment are significant factors for a course to attain its pedagogical objectives successfully. Lastly, the study revealed that hard skill disciplines, when they migrate to technology-mediated environments, are more likely to fail to achieve their educational goals than soft skill disciplines subject to the same migration.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2531/pdf

Zoom In, Zoom Out: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Classroom

Soft skills, hard skills: What matters most? Evidence from job postings

The main purpose of this study is to explore any existing gap between business students’ skills/competences provided by college of businesses and the needs of the current job market. The study examines twenty important employability skills needed for the 21 st century workforce and global economy from the perspective of both employers and business educators. The participants responded to a survey that dealt with twenty important skills identified by experts and drawn from the literature. The results indicated that a gap does exist between business students’ skills/competences and the needed skills/competences in the job market. Moreover, employers and business educators differ on the relative importance of these skills. While employers emphasize the importance of the soft skills, business educators emphasize the importance of the hard skills. The results of this study are important for both business educators and employers in bridging the skills gap.

A Gap Analysis of Business Students Skills In the 21st Century A Case Study of Qatar

According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with industry needs. To synthesize that body of knowledge, we present in this paper a systematic literature review (SLR) which summarizes the findings of 33 studies in this area. By doing a meta-analysis of all those studies and using data from 12 countries and over 4,000 data points, this study will enable educators and hiring managers to adapt their education / hiring efforts to best prepare the software engineering workforce.

Closing the gap between software engineering education and industrial needs

Factors affecting the adoption and use of AVR technology in higher and tertiary education

The research paper proposes a skills gap methodology that utilized the respondent experiences in the internship program to measure the importance of the Information Technology (IT) skills gap as perceived by IT students and the industry. The questionnaires were formulated based on previous studies,  however,  was slightly modified, validated and pilot tested  to fit into the needs of the research.  Respondents  of this study were IT students enrolled in internship while industry respondents were the supervisors of the IT students in their respective company.  Internship IT students were selected since they have a strong background on the needs of the company based on their internship experience. The findings revealed that teamwork and communication skills are very important soft skills to be possessed by IT graduates  as perceived by the respondents.  Further, results reveal that there was no significant difference in the perception of the respondents in terms of the  importance of soft skills. However, this finding contradicts the results in the case of hard skills were in there was a big range of disagreement on the importance of hard skills.   IT students perceived that hard skills were very important while industry perceived hard skills were somewhat important. It is recognized that s oft  skills are very important communication tool for a customer oriented industry and  that  it is essential to enhance the communication skills of IT students for their future employment. The study suggests that the university should target improvements of soft skills and specific personality development component in the curriculum.

/pdf/exploring-the-importance-of-soft-and-hard-skills-as-fi5l84kvk1.pdf

Exploring the importance of soft and hard skills as perceived by IT internship students and industry: A gap analysis

Online job vacancy sites have become an important source of information about the characteristics of labor market demand. It has become an avenue for job matching by both employers and employees and to study and analyze the labor market. This study proposed a methodology for identifying and analyzing skill-job relationships using frequency word occurrences of skills as a requirement of the job. It employed association rule mining which aims to discover frequent patterns, relationships among a set of items in the database. It collected published job vacancy data to IT job and skills requirements from various job portal websites. The proposed job skill requirements for specific I.T. jobs published online analyzing using the FP-growth algorithm of association rule provide a new dimension in labor market research. The study revealed that skill words are highly related to a certain job requirement. The results of the study could provide insights on the gap between the school acquired skills and actual IT industry skill needs and as the basis for curriculum enhancement and policy-making interventions by the Philippine government in its educational system.

https://beei.org/index.php/EEI/article/download/2590/2338

Analyzing the relationship between information technology jobs advertised on-line and skills requirements using association rules

This research proposed and developed a multimedia courseware in Information Technology (IT) Fundamentals based on the dynamic learning environment which provides self-paced learning material for IT Fundamentals students. Further, this study asked the participation of faculty members to contribute lecture materials and recommend presentation for each lecture material that were suggested while past students were tapped to contribute localized questions and problems that were included in the quiz database. In addition, this research addresses the challenges in creating a learning module that caters the needs of different types of learners in a student-centered environment employing educational materials that were displayed in various formats which enable students to interact with the materials being presented as needed in their own time. The proponents utilized the descriptive and developmental research design. Descriptive was used to de?ine the needed requirements as an input in the development of the proposed multimedia courseware. These requirements were processed through different phases using developmental research namely: (1) planning phase, (2) development phase, (3) validation phase, (4) acceptance phase, and (5) output phase. The result of the validity and acceptability showed that faculty members and students agree on the content and features of the proposed multimedia courseware. The validity and acceptability test indicate positive acceptance from both faculty members and students, however, there are still rooms for improvement before gaining maximum acceptance from the students.

Design and development of an information technology fundamentals multimedia courseware for dynamic learning environment

The study tried to analyze the relationship of the numerical value of the faculty performance rating and the actual observations, opinions, feelings, and description of the students towards the performance of the observed faculty members using text analytics. The result reveals that students describe faculty members with a rating of 1 with negative words. Faculty members with rating 2 were described by the students using neutral words/word patterns. In the case of faculty members with rating 3, positive word/word pattern “good” was used by the students to describe the performance of the faculty members. The results revealed that if a faculty members was evaluated and rated 4 and 5 the descriptions are positive observations / comments from the student respondents. The results reveal not only the quantitative values of faculty evaluation it also exposed the qualitative description of the students in the performance of their faculty members. This study brings out significant aspects of the teaching performance of the faculty members of Pangasinan State University. The results can be used for coaching and mentoring by university and campus heads to their faculty members in terms of their weaknesses. Moreover, the results can be utilized by Pangasinan State University to evaluate the teaching performance of their faculty members based on the comments or opinions of the students.

/pdf/analyzing-pangasinan-state-university-students-2ub8l1qd.pdf

Analyzing Pangasinan State University Student’s FacultyTeaching Performance Rating Using Text Mining Technique

This paper investigates students’ success at Pangasinan State University by identifying patterns and models that might be used to correctly classify and predict if a student will transfer or finish their studies. In this study, three categorical variables or attributes and one continuous variable were considered independent variables due to the availability of the data. The results from the binary logistic regression model with the high school general average and course as independent variables (Model 3), and the decision tree model with transition gain as a splitting criterion were fitted to the dataset to generate a model that possibly best describes the students’ mobility in Pangasinan State University Urdaneta City Campus. The decision tree model is better than the binary logistic regression model based on accuracy, AUC, and sensitivity values. This implies that the decision tree model is better at correctly classifying observations as "transferred" than Model 3. Thus, it was concluded that the decision tree model with information gain as the splitting criterion best describes the mobility of PSU students. The results of this paper can be used for school administration involving students’ mobility/success, particularly in classifying whether a student will transfer based on other.

/pdf/predicting-students-mobility-using-different-statistical-2zrmbp37.pdf

Frederick F. Patacsil

Papers

Exploring the importance of soft and hard skills as perceived by IT internship students and industry: A gap analysis

Analyzing the relationship between information technology jobs advertised on-line and skills requirements using association rules

Design and development of an information technology fundamentals multimedia courseware for dynamic learning environment

Analyzing Pangasinan State University Student’s FacultyTeaching Performance Rating Using Text Mining Technique

Predicting Students’ Mobility using Different Statistical Tools : Basis for Students’ Success