درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Virtual learning has been defined as any system of education and instruction that brings together participants who are separated by geographical distances or time. Significantly, in a virtual learning environment, interactive telecommunications systems are utilized to connect learners, resources, and instructors. As such, the present study sought to investigate the possible effect of a synchronous virtual learning environment on the reading comprehension of undergraduate EFL university students. To this end, from the population of students majoring in English translation at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran, one control group, and one experimental group were non-probabilistically selected based on their availability. Indeed, thirty students were chosen for the control group and thirty students were nominated for the experimental group. Live interactive teaching rooms were utilized in the experimental group during the term, whereas asynchronous instructional practices were adopted in the control group within the study. According to the results of paired samples t-test, the experimental group, which was instructed by live interactive teaching rooms over the term, progressed at the end of the period as compared to the beginning of the term. Moreover, the independent samples t-test showed that the students' scores on the post-test in the experimental group were higher than that of the control group. Evidently, the results of the present study may have practical implications for EFL teachers, online instructors, distance education programmers, materials developers, and syllabus designers.

The present research examined the effects of the affective and cognitive benefits of exercise in Instagram on users' physical activity through two consecutive studies. The results of the first study showed that the designed content provided sufficient cognitive and affective benefits. Similarly, the second study found that after adjusting the basic PA level, the affective and cognitive groups had more PA than the control group, and the cognitive group had more than the control group. Consecutively, 45.75% of subjects who were inactive were turned into active after one week of being taught of the benefits of exercise, with 71.43% in the affective group and 28.57% in the cognitive group. In terms of gender, 84.12% were women and 15.78% were men. As a result, visual exposure to sports participation might have led to an increase in positive feelings among users, especially women, which may have led to increased PA levels. The results of this study are useful for health professionals who are trying to communicate information about the benefits of exercise to their target audience based on a combination of evidence, gender, and PA level.

Disaster Management and current approaches in this field in one hand only has focused to physical vulnerabilities and in the other hand has included consequential action to reduce vulnerability and improve physical preparation as well as resistance institutional insignificant during the disaster. Therefore, these approaches usually have ignored the capabilities and capacities of residents to reduce vulnerabilities and consequently losses and damage. While recent approaches have entered, the field of disaster management emphasized that at first vulnerability is beyond the physical vulnerabilities and second vulnerabilities have an inverse relationship with the resident’s capacity in the face of disaster. So, community-based disaster risk management need to recognize indicators of vulnerability and community capacity and its relationship is essential. Accordingly, in the first step, the indicators of community capacity and community vulnerability are provided and in the second step based on these indicators, community capacity and vulnerability have been assessed. The assessment of community characters is based on GIS capabilities, spatial analysis tools and SPSS and correlation regression is used for analyzing the relationship of the variables. The results and findings of this research indicate that the vulnerability of urban areas is not only influenced by physical factors, but also social and organizational factors like community organizing and community educating have affected strongly the vulnerability.

Based on the importance of virtual classrooms and due to the inevitability of using them in difficult situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the current study was an attempt to investigate the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' experience. Also, probing the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' opportunities, exploring the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' challenges and threats, and informing the educational society of the solutions to the barriers of virtual learning systems based on the perception of high school EFL teachers were the other objectives of the current study. To this end, the attitudes of 120 EFL teachers (males=67, females=53) with the age range of 30 to 50 who were teaching at different high schools of West Azerbaijan province, Urmia, Iran, were gathered via a researcher-made questionnaire. The results of the study show that although high school teachers faced some barriers such as low internet access, low interaction, and low concentration by learners, actually they actually have positive attitudes toward the use of digital learning, particularly in virtual classrooms. Furthermore, the findings showed that data retention power and quick and easy access were favored by most of the teachers, and they believed these two items can be regarded as positive opportunities. In addition, teachers presented some comments such as adding visuals to the virtual classrooms, using chat boxes, and planning interaction hints to resolve the virtual classrooms’ existing problems such as poor connection and low concentration. The implications of the study will be discussed.