The World Health Organization has declared Covid-19 as a pandemic that has posed a contemporary threat to humanity. This pandemic has successfully forced global shutdown of several activities, ...including educational activities, and this has resulted in tremendous crisis-response migration of universities with online learning serving as the educational platform. The crisis-response migration methods of universities, faculty and students, challenges and opportunities were discussed and it is evident that online learning is different from emergency remote teaching, online learning will be more sustainable while instructional activities will become more hybrid provided the challenges experienced during this pandemic are well explored and transformed to opportunities.
As the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2019–2020 school year, education systems scrambled to meet the needs of students and families with little available data on how school closures may impact ...learning. In this study, we produced a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on (a) estimates from absenteeism literature and (b) analyses of summer learning patterns of 5 million students. Under our projections, returning students are expected to start fall 2020 with approximately 63 to 68% of the learning gains in reading and 37 to 50% of the learning gains in mathematics relative to a typical school year. However, we project that losing ground during the school closures was not universal, with the top third of students potentially making gains in reading.
Intense nonpharmaceutical interventions were put in place in China to stop transmission of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). As transmission intensifies in other countries, the interplay ...between age, contact patterns, social distancing, susceptibility to infection, and COVID-19 dynamics remains unclear. To answer these questions, we analyze contact survey data for Wuhan and Shanghai before and during the outbreak and contact-tracing information from Hunan province. Daily contacts were reduced seven- to eightfold during the COVID-19 social distancing period, with most interactions restricted to the household. We find that children 0 to 14 years of age are less susceptible to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection than adults 15 to 64 years of age (odds ratio 0.34, 95% confidence interval 0.24 to 0.49), whereas individuals more than 65 years of age are more susceptible to infection (odds ratio 1.47, 95% confidence interval 1.12 to 1.92). Based on these data, we built a transmission model to study the impact of social distancing and school closure on transmission. We find that social distancing alone, as implemented in China during the outbreak, is sufficient to control COVID-19. Although proactive school closures cannot interrupt transmission on their own, they can reduce peak incidence by 40 to 60% and delay the epidemic.
As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is rapidly spreading across the globe, short-term modeling forecasts provide time-critical information for decisions on containment and mitigation strategies. A ...major challenge for short-term forecasts is the assessment of key epidemiological parameters and how they change when first interventions show an effect. By combining an established epidemiological model with Bayesian inference, we analyzed the time dependence of the effective growth rate of new infections. Focusing on COVID-19 spread in Germany, we detected change points in the effective growth rate that correlate well with the times of publicly announced interventions. Thereby, we could quantify the effect of interventions and incorporate the corresponding change points into forecasts of future scenarios and case numbers. Our code is freely available and can be readily adapted to any country or region.
COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as ...frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of
n
= 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.
With all learning institutions pre-maturely closed on 20 March 2020 and all citizens advised to self-isolate in a bid to control the spread of COVID-19, it was hypothesized that COVID-19 would ...negatively impact on the performance of students in the 2020 Grade 12 national examinations vis-à-vis mathematics, science and design and technology subjects. An observed steady increase in the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases and the low levels of technology use in secondary schools in Zambia due to limited technology resources signifies a very difficult period in a young country which has just rolled out a nation-wide implementation of STEM education, This study collected data from three teachers at a public secondary school in Chipata District of Eastern Province in the Republic of Zambia. The Head of Department for Mathematics, the Head of Natural Sciences Department and one science teacher were interviewed. Semi-structured interviews via mobile phone were used to collect views of what these specialists thought would be the COVID-19 effects on the general performance of students in their subject areas. Results of this study revealed that there is likely to be a drop in the pass percentage of secondary school students in this year’s national examinations if the COVID-19 epidemic is not contained in the shortest possible time considering that the school academic calendar was abruptly disturbed by the early untimely closure of all schools in the country.
As in many countries worldwide, as part of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown schools in Germany closed in March 2020 and only partially re-opened in May. Teachers were confronted ...with the need to adapt to online teaching. This paper presents the results of a survey of early career teachers conducted in May and June 2020. First, we analysed the extent to which they maintained social contact with students and mastered core teaching challenges. Second, we analysed potential factors (school computer technology, teacher competence such as their technological pedagogical knowledge, and teacher education learning opportunities pertaining to digital teaching and learning). Findings from regression analyses show that information and communication technologies (ICT) tools, particularly digital teacher competence and teacher education opportunities to learn digital competence, are instrumental in adapting to online teaching during COVID-19 school closures. Implications are discussed for the field of teacher education and the adoption of ICT by teachers.
The school closures owing to the 2020 COVID‐19 crisis resulted in a significant disruption of education provision, leading to fears of learning losses and of an increase in educational inequality. ...This article evaluates the effects of school closures based on standardised tests in the last year of primary school in the Dutch‐speaking Flemish region of Belgium. Using a 6‐year panel, we find that students of the 2020 cohort experienced significant learning losses in three out of five tested subjects, with a decrease in school averages of mathematics scores of 0.17 standard deviations and Dutch scores (reading, writing, language) of 0.19 standard deviations as compared to previous cohorts. This finding holds when accounting for school characteristics, standardised tests in Grade 4 and school fixed effects. Given the large observed effect sizes, the effect of school closures appears to be a combination of lost learning progress and learning loss. Moreover, we observe that inequality both within schools and across schools rises by 7% for mathematics and 8% for Dutch. The learning losses are correlated with observed school characteristics, as schools with a more disadvantaged student population experience larger learning losses.
During school closures forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, remote/online learning has been adopted to help students continue to learn. Student engagement, which is energized by motivation as explained ...by self-determination theory (SDT), is a prerequisite for learning. Therefore, this study investigated how the three perceived psychological needs in SDT affected student engagement in online learning using pre- and post-questionnaires completed by 1201 Grade 8 and 9 students within 6 weeks of partaking in online learning. The results suggested that digital support strategies better satisfied students' needs, that all of the needs were predictors of the level of engagement, and that relatedness support was very important.
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