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The rapid transition in teaching format due to COVID-19 gives rise to many challenges, especially for research and lab activities since they may require a different approach with more constrained resources compared with lecture-based courses, in which various virtual communication platforms have now been employed. As essential parts for student’s active learning, effective strategies to perform undergraduate research and lab courses during the current circumstance need to be carefully designed. To address this challenge, we have revisited different distance learning resources and implemented four critical methods in undergraduate research activity in our research groups, including question-driven literature review, visualizing experiments from virtual scientific resources, performing safe and simple home-lab experiments, and learning new computational tools. These approaches provide versatile opportunities for remotely engaging students in research and lab activities besides just participation in group meetings and scientific webinars. We believe insights gained from revisiting and implementing these resources could have a long-term positive impact for improving teaching and mentoring infrastructure for undergraduate lab activities post-COVID-19.

The impact of pandemic COVID-19 is observed in every sector around the world. The education sectors of India as well as world are badly affected by this. It has enforced the world wide lock down creating very bad effect on the students' life. Around 32 crore learners stopped to move schools/colleges, all educational activities halted in India. The outbreak of COVID-19 has advised us that change is inevitable. It has worked as a catalyst for the educational institutions to grow and opt for platforms and techniques, which have not been used before. The education sector has been fighting to survive the crises with a different approach and digitising the challenges to wash away the threat of the pandemic. This paper highlights some measures taken by Govt. of India to provide seamless education in the country. Both the positive and negative impacts of COVID-19 are discussed and some fruitful suggestions are pointed to carry out educational activities during the pandemic situation.

Trinidad and Tobago responded decisively to the COVID 19 pandemic and was successful in containing community spread of the virus. By mid-march 2020, there was closure of key business and educational institutions. To minimise the loss of learning time, emergency remote learning became the modus-operandi, a response which challenged the most socially vulnerable students. At the University of the West Indies (UWI) the 500 participants enrolled in the Early Childhood, and Primary education programmes, and the in-service post-graduate diploma in Secondary education were struggling to adjust to online teaching, the existential anxiety of coping with a dangerous disease, and programme completion. The UWI instituted a COVID-19 policy that facilitated a structured response to programme completion and assessment across all faculties.The paper analysed the decisions taken by the UWI School of Education that supported its teachers through the practicum and pedagogy courses. Using a qualitative case study methodology, data were collected through observations, documents, and informal discussions with faculty. Thematic analyses allowed the emergence of three key constructs that facilitated effective learning during the crisis period : Community as an empathetic connection to stakeholders, Creativity as the ability for agile and imaginative responses, and Connectivity through technological readiness.

To combat the spread of COVID-19, many primary and secondary schools in the United States canceled classes and moved instruction online. This study examines an unexplored consequence of COVID-19 school closures: the broken link between child maltreatment victims and the number one source of reported maltreatment allegations---school personnel. Using current, county-level data from Florida, we estimate a counterfactual distribution of child maltreatment allegations for March and April 2020, the first two months in which Florida schools closed. While one would expect the financial, mental, and physical stress due to COVID-19 to result in additional child maltreatment cases, we find that the actual number of reported allegations was approximately 15,000 lower (27 percent) than expected for these two months. We leverage a detailed dataset of school district staffing and spending to show that the observed decline in allegations was largely driven by school closures. Finally, we discuss policy implications of our findings for the debate surrounding school reopenings and suggest a number of responses that may mitigate this hidden cost of school closures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has closed schools for over 1.6 billion children, with potentially long-term consequences. This paper provides some of the first experimental evidence on strategies to minimize the fallout of the pandemic on education outcomes. We evaluate two low-technology interventions to substitute schooling during this period: SMS text messages and direct phone calls. We conduct a rapid trial in Botswana to inform real-time policy responses collecting data at four- to six-week intervals. We present results from the first wave. We find early evidence that both interventions result in cost-effective learning gains of 0.16 to 0.29 standard deviations. This translates to a reduction in innumeracy of up to 52 percent. We find increased parental engagement in their child’s education and more accurate parent perceptions of their child’s learning. In a second wave of the trial, we provide targeted instruction, customizing text messages to the child's learning level using data from the first wave. The low-tech interventions tested have immediate policy relevance and could have long-run implications for the role of technology and parents as substitutes or complements to the traditional education system.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a large increase in mortality in the United States and around the world, leaving many grieving the sudden loss of family members. We created an indicator—the COVID-19 bereavement multiplier—that estimates the average number of individuals who will experience the death of a close relative (defined as a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child) for each COVID-19 death. Using demographic microsimulation-based estimates of kinship networks in the United States, the clear age gradient in COVID-19 mortality seen across contexts, and several hypothetical infection prevalence scenarios, we estimate COVID-19 bereavement multipliers for White and Black individuals in the United States. Our analysis shows that for every COVID-19 death, approximately nine surviving Americans will lose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child. These estimates imply, for example, that if 190,000 Americans die from COVID-19, as some models project, then ∼1.7 million will experience the death of a close relative. We demonstrate that our estimates of the bereavement multiplier are stable across epidemiological realities, including infection scenarios, total number of deaths, and the distribution of deaths, which means researchers can estimate the bereavement burden over the course of the epidemic in lockstep with rising death tolls. In addition, we provide estimates of bereavement multipliers by age group, types of kin loss, and race to illuminate prospective disparities. The bereavement multiplier is a useful indicator for tracking COVID-19’s multiplicative impact as it reverberates across American families and can be tailored to other causes of death.

In a normal year approximately 3 months pass between students taking their final examinations in high school or college and beginning an undergraduate course in chemistry. In the months prior to those examinations, students will usually have undertaken an extensive period of revision and consolidation of the key concepts learned throughout their course. Some of this will be supported by their teachers and some will be independent study. The COVID19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of these examinations in the UK and Ireland, potentially leaving students with a 6-month gap between their last formal study and beginning their undergraduate courses. Insights from the literature and from teachers of students in the 16–18 age range show that it is likely students beginning undergraduate courses in the autumn of 2020 will have weaknesses in subject knowledge compared to previous cohorts. This is likely to be more significant in the areas of synthetic transformations in organic chemistry and core physical chemistry topics. In this communication we present a brief analysis of the potential issues with subject knowledge in order that instructors in higher education may be better informed about the potential challenges in teaching and learning following the COVID19 disruption.

There is no doubt that public education has suffered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are comparing the COVID slide to summer learning loss, noting this loss could be much worse for those already underserved by U.S. schools (Kuhfeld & Tarasawa, 2020). In order to understand who this loss impacts and how, we need data on school, district, and statewide responses to the pandemic as it unfolded. Luckily, these data are available, as school districts across the country updated their communities about plans for spring 2020. To capture these updates, our team uses multiple approaches for collecting COVID-19-related information via school district websites and social media to create a new, nationwide dataset of district responses.We also analyze how these responses relate to contextual characteristics of districts and their surrounding communities, which will provide a picture of how district characteristics may drive disparities in access to and quality of schooling during the pandemic. Identifying these associations are critical for understanding and disrupting the reproduction and deepening of educational inequality caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting dataset will provide researchers with the information necessary to understand how education during the pandemic may impact students for years to come.

<p>Transgenic mice expressing genetically encoded activity indicators are an attractive means of mapping mesoscopic regional functional cortical connectivity given widespread stable and cell-specific expression compatible with chronic recordings. Cortical functional connectivity was evaluated using wide-field imaging in lightly anesthetized <i>Emx1-cre</i>X<i>Rosa26-GCaMP3</i> mice expressing calcium sensor in cortical neurons. Challenges exist because green fluorescence signals overlap with endogenous activity-dependent autofluorescence and are affected by changes in blood volume and oxygenation. Under the conditions used for imaging and analysis (0.1–1 Hz frequency band), autofluorescence and hemodynamic effects contributed 3% and 8% of the SD of spontaneous activity-dependent GCaMP3 fluorescence when signals were recorded through intact bone. To evaluate the accuracy and sensitivity of this approach, the topology of functional connections between somatomotor cortex (primary S1 and secondary S2 somatosensory, and primary motor cortex M1) was estimated. During sequences of spontaneous activity, calcium signals recorded at each location of area S1 were correlated with activity in contralateral area S1, ipsilateral area S2, and bilateral areas M1. Reciprocal results were observed when “seed pixels” were placed in S2 and M1. Coactivation of areas implies functional connections but could also be attributed to both regions receiving common upstream drive. These apparent connections revealed during spontaneous activity coactivation by GCaMP3 were confirmed by intracortical microstimulation but were more difficult to detect using intrinsic signals from reflected red light. We anticipate GCAMP wide-field imaging will enable longitudinal studies during plasticity paradigms or after models of CNS disease, such as stroke, where the weighting within these connectivity maps may be altered.</p>

We experimentally compare on-site with virtual coaching of South African teachers. After three years, on-site coaching improved students’ English oral language and reading proficiency by 0.31 and 0.13 SD, respectively. Virtual coaching improved English oral language proficiency (0.12 SD), had no impact on English reading proficiency, and an unintended negative effect on home language literacy. Classroom observations show that on-site coaching improved teaching practice and that virtual coaching led to larger crowding-out of home language teaching time. Implementation and survey data suggest that the use of technology did not preclude effectiveness, but rather that in-person contact enabled more accountability and support.

Published article by Vijay Rajput at MedEdPublish

The study sought to assess the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in motivating digital transformation in the education sector in South Africa. The study was premised on the fact that learning in South Africa and the rest of the world came to a standstill due to the lockdown necessitated by COVID-19. To assess the impact, the study tracked the rate at which the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) tools were used by various institutions during the COVID-19 lockdown. Data were obtained from secondary sources. The findings are that, in South Africa, during the lockdown, a variety of 4IR tools were unleashed from primary education to higher and tertiary education where educational activities switched to remote (online) learning. These observations reflect that South Africa generally has some pockets of excellence to drive the education sector into the 4IR, which has the potential to increase access. Access to education, particularly at a higher education level, has always been a challenge due to a limited number of spaces available. Much as this pandemic has brought with it massive human suffering across the globe, it has presented an opportunity to assess successes and failures of deployed technologies, costs associated with them, and scaling these technologies to improve access.