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This volume of Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) contains the post-proceedings of HELMeTO 2022, the fourth International Conference on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online, which took place during September 21–23, 2022 in Palermo, Italy. The conference was organized by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Palermo and by the Institute of Educational Technology of the National Research Council of Italy. The 2022 edition of HELMeTO also marked the return of the event in presence, as the previous two editions had been held entirely online due to the Covid-19 emergency

Nowadays, Web Applications (WAs) are complex software sys- tems, used by multiple users with different roles and often devel- oped to support and manage business processes. Due to the chang- ing nature of the supported processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to adapt and align them to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) ap- proaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolveWAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the de- velopment of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In par- ticular, (flexible) workflow models have never been integrated with the models (e.g., presentation, information models) used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. In this paper, we present M3D (Model Driven Development with Declare), a tool for developingWAs that integrates three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of aWA with the metamodel of De- clare, a declarative language to model business processes. The tool exploits and combines the declarative nature of Declare and the ad- vantages of MDE to get an efficient roundtrip engineering support to develop and evolve flexible process-centric WAs.

In this contribution, we discuss phenomenological research related to a pilot study carried out by the Consortium of the MaTeK Horizon 2020 project during the 2020–21 academic year. The research aims to analyse the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of teaching resources in mathematics in five coun- tries. A questionnaire made of seven questions was administered to a data sample made of teachers of all grades. The answers coming from the questionnaire were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. Closed-ended questions were analysed by using a clustering methodology called k-means. Open-ended questions were qualitatively analysed. The results show that almost all the teachers are aware of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education. However, their perception of how the pandemic situation changed the use of educational resources mostly appears linked to cultural factors, age, teaching experiences and school grades of the teachers.

Comunicació presentada a 4th International Conference (HELMeTO 2022), celebrada del 21 al 23 de setembre de 2022 a Palerm, Itàlia. Social media are offering new opportunities for communication and interaction way beyond what was possible only a few years ago. However, social media are also virtual spaces where young people are exposed to a variety of threats. Digital addiction, discrimination, hate speech, misinformation, polarization as well as manipulative influences of algorithms, body stereotyping, and cyberbullying are examples of challenges that find fertile ground on social media. Educators and students are not adequately prepared to face these challenges. To this aim, the COURAGE project, presented in this paper, introduces new tools and learning methodologies that can be adopted within higher education learning paths to train educators to deal with social media threats. The overarching principles of the COURAGE project leverage the most recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and in the educational domain paired with social and media psychological insights to support the development of the COURAGE ecosystem. The results of the experiments currently implemented with teachers and students of secondary schools as well as the impact of the COURAGE project on societal changes and ethical questions are presented and discussed.

Being digitally wise allows today’s students not only to strengthen their natural abilities through existing technologies, but also to respond appropriately to learning networks that are increasingly complex. As a result, it is crucial that teachers and educators continually update and expand their professional knowledge base and improve their practices in order to meet the learning needs of their increasingly diverse students. The research has been conducted during the academic year 2021–2022 with the participation of 1173 teacher trainees enrolled in the Primary Education Degree Program at the University of Palermo. The trainees carried out their activities through digital tools. Brown and Green’sWisdom Development Scale (2006) tool was used to measure eight factors of wisdom development - across 79 sevenpoint Likert-type scale items: self-knowledge, emotional management. Altruism, judgement, inspirational engagement, life knowledge, life skills and willingness to learn. In addition, some items were selected from the SELFIE for Teachers Tool to help student teachers to review and get feedback on how they are currently using digital tools and technologies for their future profession.

Today, the acquisition of additional skills by the teacher is a central fac tor in addressing contemporary changes in educational practices. Parallel to this, teaching profession requires an identity and practical teaching skills to improve the ability to help the younger generation in their self-realization. As a result, the teacher is no longer just a disseminator of knowledge, but a professional committed to consolidating his/her profile through paths of training and cultural growth, participation in experiences that intertwine teaching activity, with multi disciplinary design, educational research and ongoing training. Taking a closer look at how coaching can support teachers’ development, this study aims at explor ing how teachers’ knowledge can be expanded through coaching, and understand ing how coaching can be an educational, relational and motivational competence. So, we should seek answer to the following question: What is the better way to invest in the professional learning of teachers? Having a reflective approach to help the teachers develop skills naturally reinforces their inner doubt and dissatisfaction regarding what they do, which in turn encourages them to reflect on their actions, play the role of the researcher in collecting data, and use critical thinking to reach a deeper understanding of the problem, and thus develop appropriate solutions for it. For this reason, the paper aims at analyzing the empowerment of leadership skills and soft skills of teachers through an individual coaching intervention because a range of contemporary publications forcefully argue that teachers should play a far more central role in decision making and policy formation.

We present a digital media literacy activity composed of (i) an educational talk and (ii) a game-based activity. The aim is to support teachers in developing learning activities to increase awareness of social media threats among students. Through this activity students directly experience phenomena like echo chambers and filter bubbles that can be provoked by harmful online interaction dynamics controlled by social media platforms’ recommender systems while remaining invisible to the affected users. Our preliminary findings show that a game-based direct experience, inspired by the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, can increase the perception of social media influence on participants with statistically significant results compared to standard lecture-based activity. We conclude that developing a tool enabling educators and scholars to easily perform the proposed activity can be helpful to improve digital media literacy effectiveness.

Comunicació presentada a 4th International Conference (HELMeTO 2022), celebrada del 21 al 23 de setembre de 2022 a Palerm, Itàlia. The provision of toxic content and misinformation is a frequent phenomenon in current social media with specific impact and risks for younger users. We report on efforts taken in the project Courage to mitigate and overcome these threats through dedicated educational technology inspired by psychological and pedagogical approaches. The aim is to empower adolescents to confidently interact with and utilize social media and to increase their awareness and resilience. For this purpose, we have adopted approaches from the field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, namely the provision of a virtual learning companion (VLC). The technical system is a browser-based environment that allows for combining a controllable social media space with a VLC as a plugin. This environment is backed by an API that bundles Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms for detecting and classifying different types of risks. The pedagogical scenarios that are supported by this technical environment and approach range from chat-based dialogues to more complex narrative scripts.

Comunicació presentada a 4th International Conference on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online, celebrat del 21 al 23 de setembre de 2022 a Palerm, Itàlia. Social media platforms provide opportunities for users across the world to connect and communicate between them and engage into acts of social support and entertainment. Yet it can also bring negative consequences as it has been associated with poor mental health and life dissatisfaction. This underlines the importance of delivering social media literacy (SML) interventions that raise awareness of the dangers and threats that are hidden within. To this date, SML initiatives have shown their benefits towards the acquisition of SML skills through the forms of school interventions and mini-games. However, studies on promoting SML through social media platforms need to be also encouraged and innovative approaches to provide interactive scenarios with hands-on experiences need to be formulated. Hence, the project COURAGE introduces a new approach towards SML by proposing the integration of educational opportunities within a controlled social media platform. To provide students the opportunity to learn whilst they naturally explore social media we propose the integration of virtual learning companions. In this paper we report seven empirical approaches towards SML skills acquisition powered by virtual learning companions. The paper concludes with a discussion towards the benefits and limitations of using this type of SML interventions. This work has been partially funded by the National Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry (PID2020-112584RB-C33/MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, MDM-2015-0502) and the Volkswagen Stiftung (Courage, ref. 95 566). D. Hernández-Leo (Serra Húnter) acknowledges the support by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme.

One of the greatest limitations of Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery is the capability to obtain an arbitrarily high spatial resolution. Indeed, despite optical sensors, this capability is not just limited by the sensor technology. Instead, improving the SAR spatial resolution requires large transmitted bandwidth and relatively long synthetic apertures that for regulatory and practical reasons are impossible to be met. This issue gets particularly relevant when dealing with Stripmap mode acquisitions and with relatively low carrier frequency sensors (where relatively large bandwidth signals are more difficult to be transmitted). To overcome this limitation, in this paper a deep learning based framework is proposed to enhance the SAR image spatial resolution while retaining the complex image accuracy. Results on simuated and real SAR data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

The thyroid is an endocrine gland located in the anterior region of the neck: its main task is to produce thyroid hormones, which are functional to our entire body. Its possible dysfunction can lead to the production of an insufficient or excessive amount of thyroid hormone. Therefore, the thyroid can become inflamed or swollen due to one or more swellings forming inside it. Some of these nodules can be the site of malignant tumors. One of the most used treatments is sodium levothyroxine, also known as LT4, a synthetic thyroid hormone used in the treatment of thyroid disorders and diseases. Predictions about the treatment can be important for supporting endocrinologists’ activities and improve the quality of the patients’ life. To date, there are numerous studies in the literature that focus on the prediction of thyroid diseases on the trend of the hormonal parameters of people. This work, differently, aims to predict the LT4 treatment trend for patients suffering from hypothyroidism. To this end, a dedicated dataset was built that includes medical information related to patients being treated in the ”AOU Federico II” hospital of Naples. For each patient, the clinical history is available over time, and therefore on the basis of the trend of the hormonal parameters and other attributes considered it was possible to predict the course of each patient’s treatment in order to understand if this should be increased or decreased. To conduct this study, we used different machine learning algorithms. In particular, we compared the results of 10 different classifiers. The performances of the different algorithms show good results, especially in the case of the Extra-Tree Classifier, where the accuracy reaches 84%.