Development and Validation of Student’s MOOC-efficacy Scale: Exploratory Factor Analysis

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the fast developing teaching and learning platforms of global interest, are the product of higher education's expanded usage of e-learning. MOOCs have been heralded as the potential educational breakthrough for the 21st century. A positive attitude toward self-efficacy is essential for successful MOOC implementation. However, only a few studies have been conducted to ascertain a student's MOOC efficacy level, and a very limited scale for assessing a student's MOOC efficacy has been identified in the context of Malaysia. This study aims to develop and validate a student’s MOOC-efficacy scale for higher institutions. In this study, students’ MOOC-efficacy was conceived in four ways (i.e. information searching, making queries, MOOC learning, and MOOC usability). A descriptive research design with a scale was employed to collect information from 289 students enrolled in higher institutions. The Educational and Psychological Testing Standards were adapted to develop a scale to gauge students’ MOOC-efficacy. The scale's appropriate items, as well as its validity and reliability, were determined using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Significant levels of validity and reliability for the developed scale were found. The scale comprised four dimensions, i.e., information searching (three items), making queries (seven items), MOOC learning (six items) and MOOC usability (seven items), amounting to a total of 23 items. This scale was then used to determine the efficacy of higher institution students in using MOOCs. The eigenvalues of the four MOOC efficacy dimensions were within the range of 1.39 to 8.49. The factor structures explained 63.9% of the total variance. The scores of reliability varied in the range of 0.822 to 0.890. This work produced a psychometrically sound scale to measure students’ MOOC efficacy. Students, educators, administrators, and other individuals may benefit from the application of the verified MOOC efficacy scale. The information generated from the scale can be utilized to determine the training needs of students, educators and MOOC developers. Keywords: Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), student’s MOOC-efficacy, scale development, higher institutions.

Risk Communication and the Prevention of COVID-19 Transmission in Dangerous Zones, Jabota

Until the beginning of June 2020, the COVID-19 virus has spread to more than 215 countries, infected more than 6 million people and killed more than 300,000 people in the world. This causes public panic and misperceptions about COVID-19. Under circumstances like this, risk communication is needed to control and mitigate information about this plague to reduce the spread of this disease and manage public fear. The main objective of this study is to assess COVID-19 information searching behaviour and explore how risk communication is associated with personal hygiene habits in preventing transmission of COVID-19 in dangerous zones. This study was conducted among a community of educators in Jakarta, Bogor, and Tangerang, Indonesia. Questionnaires were distributed to 132 respondents, consisting of lecturers and teachers who are living in the red zone area. The results showed that there was no relationship between the perception of risk communication, both on personal hygiene habits and prevention of COVID-19 transmission. This can be attributed to two possibilities. Firstly, the risk communication message strategy is seen as irrelevant to people’s personal hygiene habits and prevention of COVID-19 transmission. Secondly, personal hygiene habits and prevention of COVID-19 transmission are not influenced by risk communication from the government and at media level. Keywords: Risk communication, prevention, COVID-19, transmission, dangerous zones.

Digital Health Literacy About COVID-19 as a Factor Mediating the Association Between the Importance of Online Information Search and Subjective Well-Being Among University Students in Vietnam

Introduction: Digital health literacy (DHL) has recently been proposed as a means of enabling healthy decisions for protective behavior, preventive measures, and adherence with COVID-19 policies and recommendations especially in the era of the “infodemic”. This study aimed to (1) identify COVID-19 related DHL and its association with online information seeking; (2) to elucidate COVID-19 related DHL as a mediator predictor between the importance of online information search and its association with subjective well-being among Vietnamese university students.Methods: A cross-sectional web-based survey was used to elicit the responses of Vietnamese students over 2 consecutive weeks (from April 25 to May 9, 2020, n = 1,003, 70.1% female students, mean age 21.4 ± 3.1). The online survey questionnaire collected data on the sociodemographic characteristics of participants, DHL about COVID-19, information seeking behavior, and subjective well-being. Mediation analysis was conducted using the importance of searching COVID-19 related information as independent variables, subjective well-being as a dependent variable, and DHL as a mediator variable.Results: Among 1,003 students, the mean (SD) of DHL related to COVID-19 was 2.87 ± 0.32. In the survey, 87.2% of the students reported sufficient well-being, while almost 13% reported low or very low well-being. The findings also indicated that search engines were the most popular platform for information seeking by Vietnamese students (95.3%) and 92.8% of participants had searched for information related to the current spread of COVID-19. Not searching for hygiene regulation as part of infection control and an average level of information satisfaction were associated with limited DHL (p < 0.05). The importance of online information searching related to COVID-19 increased the subjective well-being of students significantly and limited DHL (p < 0.05). DHL was found to mediate the relationship between the importance of online information searching and the subjective well-being of students.Conclusion: The finding provides insight into DHL about COVID-19 among university students, and their ability to find, understand, appraise, and use online health related information during lockdown throughout the first COVID-19 pandemic wave. DHL should be highlighted as a mediating factor that enhances the positive effect of the importance of information seeking on psychological well-being. However, further studies are needed to better define the mediating role of DHL across other factors.

Web Crawling on News Web Page using Different Frameworks

Now a days Internet is widely used by users to find required information. Searching on web for useful information has become more difficult. Web crawler helps to extract the relevant and irrelevant links from the web. Web crawler downloads web pages through the program. This paper implements web crawler with Scrapy and Beautiful Soup python web crawler framework to crawls news on news web sites.Scrapy is a web crawling framework that allow programmer to create spider that define how a certain site or a group of sites will be scraped. It has built-in support for extracting data from HTML sources using XPath expression and CSS expression. BeautifulSoup is a framework that extract data from web pages. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods for navigating, searching and modifying a parse tree. BeautifulSoup automatically convert incoming document to Unicode and outgoing document to UTF-8.Proposed system use BeautifulSoup and scrapy framework to crawls news web sites. This paper also compares scrapy and beautiful Soup4 web crawler frameworks.

Problema Bidang Pertanian

Penulisan ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui unsur yang menentukan berlangsungnya aktivitas pertanian seperti tenaga dan keterampilan manusia, alat produksi pertanian, sarana produksi (saprodi) pertanian dan lahan pertanian. Akar masalah di bidang pertanian adalah problem penguasaan lahan. Metode artikel ini menggunakan sestem pencarian informasi (information searching behavior) merupakan perilaku yang dilakukan oleh pencari informasi dalam berinteraksi dengan segala jenis sistem informasi. Hasil artikel ini mendapatkan informasi tentang kehidupan para petani di Indonesia dan juga berbagai kendala mereka yang masih belum memiliki mempunya milik lahan pertanian juga solusi sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan dampak sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan solusi sistem ekonomi islam

PROBLEMA BIDANG PERTANIAN

Penulisan ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui unsur yang menentukan berlangsungnyaaktivitas pertanian seperti tenaga dan keterampilan manusia, alat produksi pertanian, saranaproduksi (saprodi) pertanian dan lahan pertanian. Akar masalah di bidang pertanian adalahproblem penguasaan lahan. Metode artikel ini menggunakan sestem pencarian informasi(information searching behavior) merupakan perilaku yang dilakukan oleh pencari informasidalam berinteraksi dengan segala jenis sistem informasi. Hasil artikel ini mendapatkaninformasi tentang kehidupan para petani di Indonesia dan juga berbagai kendala merekayang masih belum memiliki mempunya milik lahan pertanian juga solusi sistem ekonomikapitalisme dan dampak sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan solusi sistem ekonomi islam.

KAJIAN PENGGUNAAN PORTAL BERITA DALAM KALANGAN REMAJA DI SABAH

Penggunaan portal berita dalam kalangan remaja di Sabah merupakan sesuatu yang menarik untuk dikaji khususnya melihat pola penggunaan portal berita yang semakin berkembang. Kajian ini mempersembahkan pola kegunaan dan kepuasan portal berita dengan menggunakan survei ke atas 367 remaja yang terdiri dari etnik Kadazandusun, Bajau, Murut, Melayu dan Cina berpandukan teori kegunaan dan kepuasan (U&G). Hasil dapatan kajian mendapati keperluan utama yang mendorong remaja Sabah mengakses portal berita ialah keperluan kognitif, penyepaduan sosial dan penyepaduan diri. Data juga menunjukkan remaja kerap menggunakan portal berita untuk pembelajaran, pencarian maklumat dan hiburan. Sementara itu, kepuasan yang paling tinggi diperolehi remaja ialah sifat mudah portal berita itu sendiri, kepuasan pengawasan dan kepuasan interaktiviti. Dalam fenomena kaya media hari ini portal berita sentiasa memainkan peranan penting dan diterima dengan baik dalam kalangan remaja di Sabah khususnya. News portal usage among teenagers in Sabah is an intriguing subject to study as the news portal industry in Sabah itself has tremendously bloomed. This study presents finding from a survey conducted of 367 teenagers (Kadazandusun, Bajau, Murut, Melayu and Chinese) concerning their pattern of news portal usage based on uses and gratifications (U&G) theory. Findings found that cognitive, social and personal integrative needs are most important in news portal usage among Sabahan youngsters. In addition, these data found that news portal are used primarily as learning, information searching and entertainment. Meanwhile, the highest gratifications derived are convenience, surveillance and interactivity. This study conclude that in a media rich environment, the news portal has consistently played an important role and is well accepted among teenagers in Sabah.