This article provides an overview of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca's digital ecosystem, focusing on a digital security protocol that includes simulations, training, and awareness resources to tackle cyber vulnerabilities. It analyzes user behavior during cyber attacks and aims to raise awareness among the academic community about these risks while documenting preventive measures. A new iteration of simulation of cyber-attack techniques within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca is proposed, comparative analysis of the results obtained from previous simulations of 2023 is conducted, consolidating the prevention practices promoted within the institution, based on centralization and analysis of results. Findings highlight implications for cybersecurity education in higher education, including the development of tailored learning modules to address skill gaps and improve digital infrastructure resilience. The results show that certain phishing techniques, like Drive-by URLs, were effective despite mitigation strategies, pointing to varying user awareness levels. (Abstract)

The current study presents a systematic mapping of text-based formative assessment tools and services used for evaluating online student assignments. Research conducted between 2012 and 2022, specifically in engineering/ICT education, is analyzed, drawing from academic databases such as IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, and Springer Link. Previous literature, mainly focused on certain tools like Turnitin for plagiarism detection and spell checking, has been found to lack evidence of user perception. To address these gaps, this paper poses two questions: mapping the landscape of these assessment tools over the studied years and understanding perception of their use in classrooms. Using a PICO strategy, the search strings made reference to specific tools like Grammarly, Copyscape, SafeAssign, and Quetext etc. A total of 38 relevant studies were selected, which revealed the increasing prevalence, especially during the pandemic period, of such tools in education. User perception has been analyzed both from a student and teacher perspective. The study further explores usage trends and perception in relation to features such as feedback, plagiarism check, grammar correction, and assessment protocols, which commonly range from qualitative to quantitative.

Cybersecurity represents a critical challenge in the protection of educational institutions' digital assets and the sensitive data they hold. Phishing attempts are exploiting user vulnerabilities at an alarming rate, in a context defined by a substantial increase in internet usage and in the personal information shared online. Preliminary findings suggest a varying degree of security literacy, indicating the need for targeted educational interventions. The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca's digital ecosystem encompasses over 20,000 users, including students, faculty, and administrative staff. In November 2023, an attack simulation was conducted through the configuration of various attack scenarios using social engineering techniques via Office 365's educational services. Including elements such as deceptive emails and fraudulent login pages, the initiative aimed to observe phishing behaviours closely. The simulation campaign captured quantitative data on click rates, report rates, and feedback on user confidence and perceived difficulty of the phishing attempts. Furthermore, it engaged participants in reflective practices, enabling the identification of potential improvements in individual and institutional cybersecurity protocols. Training-related data was collected and synthesized from users who exhibited varying rates of compromise. Such a simulation can reveal a broad overview of the ecosystem's vulnerabilities, offering critical insights into the users' level of readiness to counter such threats and fostering a culture of continuous monitoring against cyberattacks. Strategic implications for the structuring of cybersecurity education in higher education institutions are envisioned, along with the development of customized, adaptive learning modules that envision to identified skill gaps and strengthen the overall resilience of the digital infrastructure (Abstract)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest and application of Virtual Reality (VR) in transversal skills education, resulting in many studies on the topic. In this study, we use bibliometric analysis to map out the role of virtual reality as a pedagogical approach in fostering transversal skills in higher education contexts. This bibliometric analysis delves into the interdisciplinary landscape of VR application in higher education for fostering transversal skills. Surveying 382 publications, we narrowed our focus to 122 through meticulous criteria, revealing a diverse contributor base mainly from STEM fields, complemented by education scholars. Co-authorship analysis revealed the collaborative dynamics within the field, showcasing 69 clusters comprising 320 authors, highlighting two key authors bridges collaboration across research groups. The co-citation analysis showed that using VR for transversal skills is an interdisciplinary field with 31 items forming 10 clusters from documents from various disciplines. Our co-occurrence analysis exposed a highly interconnected research domain with 31 clusters and 10,655 links among top keywords, emphasizing the richness of topics within VR for transversal skills. Notably, amidst the general research interest in VR in education, this subfield demonstrates significant potential for further exploration and development. With this study, we aimed to map current research trends, and our results unveiled collaborative dynamics, intellectual foundations, and interdisciplinary interconnectedness in this field, offering crucial insights for educators, researchers, and policymakers. These findings lay a solid foundation for future exploration, development, and enhancement of immersive learning experiences in higher education.

Within the vision of the European University of Technology (EUt+), a University Alliance of 8 European partners, augmenting a Mobility Friendly Plan through a virtual worlds approach, helps prepare students to overcome communication, language and cultural barriers. Such virtual environments can allow students to be immersed in the academic environments of the destination location, creating spaces for team building, collaboration, and creative activities. In the context of effective social interaction, communication and language learning become key pillars. Technological means that develop key competencies and abilities in such immersive environments, should be tackled. The current paper describes three uses cases of VR environments from the European University of Technology Alliance, implemented with the purpose of facilitating communication skills to overcome language and cultural barriers. The application of various technology levels, from prototype-based to customization of existing platforms is analyzed, under a TAM adoption assessment, to identify common challenges that may accompany the development of a shared VR campus, intended for effective communication, while providing the students a feeling of comfort, safety and confidence.

Career counseling assists students in the decision-making process for a future career path. The current work augments the counseling activity conducted by a professional, with a proposal of an assistive NLP agent (chatbot) that provides a support for identifying and mapping out action tracks for a future career under the student’s profile. The resulting prototype has been deployed as a conversational service, though an institutional eCampus infrastructure and has been validated by both a focus group of students and experts in the field.

Gamified assessments have been mainly implemented for STEM education, focusing on motivational objectives and performance evaluation of teaching-learning processes. This paper presents a gamified educational 3D virtual world developed to provide a complementary tool for teaching software engineering students the fundamental concepts of computer hardware. The research design follows the needs identified across a focus group, but the prototype may also serve as support for K-12 with technical specializations. A beta-test has concluded that the learning outcome is improved when a gamification framework is provided. The engagement level has been assessed among engineering students, validating the prototype as a new complementary method for an Applied Informatics laboratory.

Conversational agents assist traditional teaching-learning instruments in proposing new designs for knowledge creation and learning analysis, across organizational environments. Means of building common educative background in both industry and academic fields become of interest for ensuring educational effectiveness and consistency. Such a context requires transferable practices and becomes the basis for the Agile adoption into Higher Education, at both curriculum and operational levels. The current work proposes a model for delivering Agile Scrum training through an assistive web-based conversational service, where analytics are collected to provide an overview on learners' knowledge path. Besides its specific applicability into Software Engineering (SE) industry, the model is to assist the academic SE curriculum. A user-acceptance test has been carried out among 200 undergraduate students and patterns of interaction have been depicted for 2 conversational strategies.

Emergency trainings simulated in alternative environments are fundamentally dependent on user engagement and may be addressed as crucial validation scenarios for proposing new approaches to learning designs. Developing an interactive engaging experience while building a know-how becomes a challenging demand to be addressed in current training setups. A fire-safety training has been recreated as a gamified learning experience, where coordinative multiplayer gameplay elements have been integrated in 3D fire emergency simulation. 3C implications (collaboration, cooperation, coordination) have been analyzed for modeling multiuser navigation and a coordinative approach has been selected for accomplishing the goal-oriented mission of successful evacuation in a fire-based emergency scenario. Game-based analytics have been collected and analyzed in an experimental pre-test, addressed to 1styear students enrolled in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where out of a total number of 196 students, 22 participants actively ran the simulation as either belonging to the control or experimental group.

Using team projects for teaching agile product development processes requires regular task status reports, following evaluation and further planning. In such scenarios, task boards (like Kanban) provide the most efficient means of centralized team tracking with frequent task status updates. Regular task boards are physical equipment (i.e. whiteboards) having the working area divided in task status zones (i.e. to do, done, in progress), while tasks are noted down on cardboards and then pined to the board. The current paper proposes an improvement in the process of teaching and tracking product development processes classes by implementing a computer-aided task board with real time tracking features. Tickets are defined and created online, then printed and pinned to the physical task board and tracked by a camera. Processing is applied to detect any changes in board status, with real-time update online. The advantages of the proposed blended solution are discussed.

According to the latest trends, users prefer to acquire knowledge through unconventional streams, using cumulative senses (hearing, viewing, sensing). Access to informational data should be characterized through its ease of use, consistency and reliability. Libraries have become target spaces for the deployment of applications for Augmented and Virtual Reality worlds, due to their complexity of information repositories and the associated indexing processes, as well as to its users' profiles (students, professors, librarians) and their access to technology. The current work models interaction in a virtually rendered library aiming to provide the users with an immersive experience of viewing library resources (books) and their metadata. A low-cost, affordable, technical setup is proposed for deployment, consisting of a mobile device and the Google Cardboard VR Headset. With the purpose of further integration, the virtual scene has been rendered using panoramic-based imagery. Complementary to the state-of-the art virtual tours for educational landscapes (museums, classrooms, libraries), such solutions could enhance indoor exploration for informational or marketing purposes.

Context: Heuristic optimization has been of strong focus in the recent modeling of the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), but lack of evidence exists in systematic assessments.New solution methods arise from random evaluation of existing studies.Objective: The current work conducts a secondary study, aiming to systemize existing primary studies in heuristic optimization techniques applied to solving classes of RCPSPs.Method: The systemizing framework consists of performing a systematic mapping study (SM), following a 3-steped protocol.Results: 371 primary studies have been depicted from the multi-stage search and filtering process, to which inclusion and exclusion criteria have been applied.Results have been visually mapped in several distributions.Conclusions: Specific RCPSP classes have been grounded and therefore a rigorous classification is required before performing a systematic mapping.Focusing on recent developments of the RCPSP (2010-2015, a strong interest has been acknowledged on solution methods incorporating AI techniques in meta-and hyper-heuristic algorithms.