Abstract-Effective presentation of information is essential in teaching and learning. We assessed the promoters of and barriers to utilization of a learning management system, namely Blackboard ! (Blackboard Inc., Washington DC, USA), by undergraduate nursing students. We investigated their utilization of Blackboard ! and provided recommendations to improve their teaching and learning. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 304 women in their second to fourth years of study using a validated questionnaire that evaluated their perceptions of Blackboard ! utilization. Data were collected between January and February 2017 and analyzed using descriptive and comparative statistics. The response rate was 67.5%. The most frequently reported promoters of Blackboard ! utilization were factors related to obtaining course specifications, materials, and grades (means: 3.54 ± 1.18, 3.54 ± 1.25, and 3.55 ± 1.34, respectively). The most commonly mentioned barriers to Blackboard ! utilization were factors related to loss of communication and feedback from educators (mean: 4.21 ± 1.05). Our results revealed that students experiences of using such systems are often negative, especially in terms of communication, interaction, and feedback. Investment in staff training and creation of new roles to monitor, maintain, and audit the quality of such systems are recommended.

No abstract

The aim of this study was to explore students' attitudes to formative feedback from classroom questions, peer interactions, and post-lecture sessions. We used a qualitative approach involving focus groups interviews. A complete cohort of second-year nursing students (n = 120) attending a therapeutic communication course as part of a Bachelor of Nursing Program participated in this study. Of them, 49 volunteered to contribute to focus group interviews. NVivo (QSR International, Melbourne, Australia) was used to organize data using the content analysis method. All students were women aged 18-24 years. Most considered the ARS a useful tool that aided learning by providing instant, anonymous feedback. Some felt that there were barriers to peer interactions, including lack of interest in participating or not knowing the answers. In conclusion, ARS use improved students' learning and encouraged a deep learning approach. Post-lecture feedback was most influential, followed by feedback from classroom questions, and lastly feedback from peer interactions.

BackgroundCommunication skills are taught in most Bachelor of Nursing programs; however, student performance is often not monitored or tested until the final exam. Audience Response System (ARS) technology enables the collection of feedback from students during lectures to improve their quality of learning.

The proportion of multimedia traffic in data networks has grown substantially as a result of advancements in IT. As a result, it's become necessary to address the following challenges in protecting multimedia data: prevention of unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data, in addition to tracking down the leak's origin, making sure no alterations may be made without permission, and safeguarding intellectual property for digital assets. watermarking is a technique developed to combat this issue, which transfer secure data over the network. The main goal of invisible watermarking is a hidden exchange of data and a message from being discovered by a third party. The objective of this work is to develop a digital image watermarking using discrete cosine transformation based linear modulation. This paper proposed an invisible watermarking method for embedding information into the transformation domain for the grey scale images. This method used the embedding of a stego-text into the least significant bit (LSB) of the Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) coefficient by using a linear modulation algorithm. Also, a stego-text is embedded with different sizes ten times within images after embedding the stego-image immune to different kinds of attack, such as salt and pepper, rotation, cropping, and JPEG compression with different criteria. The proposed method is tested using four benchmark images. Also, to evaluate the embedding effect, PSNR, NC and BER are calculated. The outcomes show that the proposed approach is practical and robust, where the obtained results are promising and do not raise any suspicion. In addition, it has a large capacity, and its results are imperceptible, especially when 1bit/block is embedded.