Educational institution | EPFL Graph Search

An educational institution is a place where people of different ages gain an education, including preschools, childcare, primary-elementary schools, secondary-high schools, and universities. They provide a large variety of learning environments and learning spaces. Types of educational institution Types of educational institution include: Early childhood

Infant school
Kindergarten
Preschool or nursery

Primary

Comprehensive school
Elementary, grade or primary school
Junior school
Middle school (partly)
Preparatory school (United Kingdom)

Secondary

Academy (English school)
Adult high school
Boarding school
Collegiate institute
Comprehensive school
Comprehensive school (England and Wales)
Grammar school
Gymnasium (school)
Hauptschule
Independent school (UK)
Middle school (partly)
Military high school
Minor seminary
Realschule
Secondary school or high school
Staff college
Studio school
University

Detecting Latent Training Needs Using Large Datasets

Ramtin Yazdanian

In today's world, there is no shortage of disruptors acting on various professional domains. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, with its AI-driven and automation-focused technologies, has fundamentally changed many domains -- particularly the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) domain -- and continues to do so. The COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns have resulted in dramatic change in the workplace. These disruptors are fast-acting and rapidly change the skills landscape of many professional domains, introducing new skills and rendering old ones obsolete. In such a situation, it is imperative for educational institutions to keep their curricula updated in order to (re)train the workforce with the right set of skills for the new economy. However, most of the methodologies commonly used for analyzing training needs and effecting curricular change were developed during a time when the pace of change was slower, and thus have trouble quickly and effectively responding to today's rapid changes. As a result, the development of new approaches for the analysis of training needs is of utmost importance.The present dissertation is the result of an effort to develop such new approaches, using different types of data and approaching the problem from different perspectives. These approaches use big data methods on data sources that are large, pre-existing, and continually updated in order to identify the skill needs of the present and/or predict the skill needs of the future for various professions. Focusing on the ICT domain but also making forays into vocational domains, the present work examines the usefulness and feasibility of methodologies such as the estimation of topical difficulty, the prediction of the appearance of new skills, and the prediction of emerging skills (less popular skills expected to experience a surge in hiring demand) for the identification of training needs. The findings of this dissertation are twofold. Firstly, they demonstrate the pivotal role that decentralized educational platforms such as Stack Overflow (an online Q&A platform for ICT) and Udemy (a MOOC platform where anyone can create a course) play in lifelong learning, essentially making the case for a policy of sponsorship and promotion of such platforms in other professional domains. Secondly and more importantly, the results showcase the feasibility of predicting the emerging skills of the near future. The successful emerging skills methodology can therefore be used to provide valuable insights to training providers at a moment's notice, giving them time to prepare for the skills landscape of the future in advance. Thus, AI can be used to help solve the challenges it creates for educational institutions and the workforce. Future work, both in the form of policymaking and in the form of research, can help capitalize and expand on the results of this dissertation, furthering the cause of rapid curricular change.

EPFL2022

Architectural strategies to integrate wellbeing and health effects of daylight into the design of primary schools: a comparative analysis of exemplary case studies

Jean-Denis Bernard Marie Ghislain Thiry

Starting from an architect’s point of view, the aim of this research is to combine the daylight performance of educational spaces with a broader spatial, cultural, and historical approach. Through a rigorous study of school typologies, the geometry of their spaces, and their associated daylighting strategies, this work aims to connect design practitioners with aspects of health and well-being for the pupils, as far as these aspects are related to the quality of daylight. The proposed methodology seeks to analyse a range of outstanding case studies from the masters of modern architecture, embodying architectural strategies specifically designed to ensure adequate illuminance levels in learning areas throughout the day. A selection of some singular primary schools will be established through a historical analysis which emphasizes the impact of hygienists’ principles – legacies of Modernism – on the evolution of plans and volumes of different school typologies in Switzerland and Europe, from 1945 to the present days. An analysis of the selected case studies will be carried out using an innovative representation method of average illuminance received at eye-level and combined with a HLR model – currently under development at LIPID [1, 2] – which assesses the health potential of daylight using a dynamic approach. Through a validation of the simulated results using different in situ measurements and analyses following a specific protocol, we aim to accurately identify architectural criteria and propose strategies for achieving “circadian design”, more specifically those having a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of occupants. We will also carry out a comparative critical assessment of the buildings selected as case studies in the initial phase of this proposed research. The goal is to positively influence decisions related to the design of naturally lit spaces, specifically in schools and according to their impact on health, wellbeing and student productivity. The methodology will be a complementary blend of observations, in situ measurements and qualitative and quantitative analyses, both in a simulated environment and in actual working conditions of the selected case studies.

2015

Expanding Eye-Tracking Methods to Explain the Socio-Cognitive Effects of Shared Annotations

Andrea Mazzei

Social technologies are leading to transformations in education, by empowering the way learners connect to each other, by introducing new means for teaching and learning and by reshaping the way knowledge is delivered. Annotating texts is a learning strategy that is spontaneously adopted by learners during lectures or while reading text books. Students still individually take annotations on paper, that tend to be thrown away when the learning goal is achieved. Students also engage occasionally in the spontaneous practice of note sharing. Our work explores experimentally the benefits of note-taking and note-sharing behaviour. First, we study how sharing student-annotated instructional texts can improve learning, enriching an experimental approach with a new eye tracking method. Second, we conduct experiments on computer-mediated note sharing in the classroom. Our results demonstrate the virtuous circle of note-taking: both annotating while reading and reading annotated documents lead to a better learning achievement. In the first experimental study, we measure if the presence of annotations, on an instruc- tional text, can influence the reading pattern, and how visual features of annotations can elicit the reader’s attention. To complement the results concerning learning and reading comprehension, we look into the readers’ gaze patterns, to explain how the students’ learning outcome relates to reading annotated texts. For this purpose, we design a novel eye tracker, that can be used to study reading and note taking in unconstrained experimental settings. This eye tracking system is based on a systematic error correction procedure that exploits the appearance similarity between the annotated texts and the spatial distribution of the fixation points. We show that this method can extract accurate gaze measures without introducing experimental constraints, that could disturb the note taking process and affect the readers’ comprehension. In the second study, we move from a controlled experimental setting to the classroom. We discuss how the use of technology can facilitate a spontaneous transition from personal to shared annotations and support students in the learning process. We complement the analysis by reporting a friendship bias in browsing the shared annotated material. We further speculate on the potential of shared annotations in triggering adaptations of the instructional material and teaching workflow. These two studies provided an insightful understanding of the effects of student-generated annotations on reading comprehension, and the underlying impact on a community of learners. The obtained findings should inspire further experimentation on social learning environments, meant to facilitate knowledge sharing through shared annotations and their diffusion within educational institutions.

EPFL2013