Informatica

State of emergency affects many areas of our life, including education. Due to school closure during COVID-19 pandemic as a case of a long-term emergency, education has been moved into a remote mode. In order to determine the factors driving the acceptance of distance learning technologies and ensuring sustainable education, a model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology has been proposed and empirically validated with data collected from 550 in-service primary school teachers in Lithuania. Structural equation modelling technique with multi-group analysis was utilized to analyse the data. The results show that performance expectancy, social influence, technology anxiety, effort expectancy, work engagement, and trust are factors that significantly affect teachers’ behavioural intention to use distance learning technologies. The relationships in the model are moderated by pandemic anxiety and age of teachers. The results of this study provide important implications for education institutions, policy makers and designers: the predictors of intention to use distance learning technologies observed during the emergency period may serve as factors that should be strengthened in teachers’ professional development, and the applicability of the findings is expanded beyond the pandemic isolation period.

Tablet computers and other mobile devices are widely used in education and other life activities. However, touch screen keyboards are not adapted to languages using alphabets with more letters than the English alphabet has. In this paper, we analyze the existing keyboards on such devices for various languages, influence of keyboard usability on the number of typing errors, and propose keyboard design guidelines for non-English languages. As an example, the layout for the Lithuanian language keyboard (32 native letters and 3 foreign letters) has been presented here. The described solution is not strictly related to the peculiarities of the Lithuanian language alphabet (apart from the number of letters), therefore it is suitable for other languages using a similar number of letters.

The number of digital resources to be used and reused for learning (learning objects) is constantly increasing, therefore describing learning objects with metadata is important to enhance learning object search, retrieval, and usage. Learning objects can be considered not only as resources, providing learning content, but as methodological resources, including teachers' experiences, reflections, examples or instructions of usage of content objects, and descriptions of learning methods. However, existing standards and specifications for learning objects metadata are not intended for including methodological resources and learning method descriptions together with content objects. In this paper, we present the results of a study, carried among general school teachers, which present a view of teachers on methodological resources and their importance, and propose a new model of learning object metadata for the learning object repository to include methodological resources, descriptions of learning methods and their links with content objects.

Software localization is one of important tasks to insure a successful computer user experience. The paper discusses how localization of the software dialog text can be accelerated and how to raise the quality of software product localization. We also discuss the main features and common structure of localizable software resources, their formats and preparation for localization. As a result, we suggest applying a modified formalism of attribute grammars to describe localizable resources, taking the graphical user interface as a basic grammar structure, localizable strings and their parts as terminal symbols, and using the attributes to add important metainformation and context to the resources. The main principles of creation of such attribute grammars are presented.