The paper analyzes the results of the introduction of the distance learning form (DLF) using electronic educational resources (EER) and the teacher's virtual classroom in primary school. The experiment took place within the framework of the "Smart Kids" All-Ukrainian project during the long quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The educational process took place both synchronously and asynchronously. The present paper substantiates the model of organization of distance learning of primary school students using EER and outlines its three main components: the organization of learning, conducting online classes (explaining new material or practicing skills by students) and monitoring the quality of students' independent performance of tasks. The results of the experiment prove that it is necessary to provide teachers and students with computer equipment, Internet access, digital resources for teaching and assessment to implement DLF. It has been established that EER in distance learning can be used both on a regular basis - in each class, and periodically - to explain new material or train skills, the quality of tasks performed by students can be monitored in the virtual office of the teacher and shape an individual trajectory of students' development. The teachers identified the following main problems of DLF implementation: internet interruptions, problems with providing new computer equipment to students and some teachers; lack of state aid in providing EER to all participants in the educational process; limited access to students' computers during complete isolation due to online work of parents. Despite the outlined problems, the quality of distance learning of primary school students during the pandemic using EER was positively and highly assessed by teachers.
The article sets out to analyze national and foreign experience of use of electronic textbooks in the system of education; to justify the use of Smart Kids technology as a system of methods, forms, and electronic educational game resources, electronic textbooks for educational process in the system of elementary school. Four forms of implementation of Smart Kids technology (Smart Case, Smart Teacher, Smart Class, and Smart Kids) were described con-sidering the facilities of every school as well as the level of information and communication technology qualification of the elementary school teac…
With the recent COVID-19 breakup, it became necessary to implement remote classes in schools and universities to safeguard health and life. However, many students (teachers and parents, also) face great difficulties accessing and staying in class due to technology limitations, affecting their education. Using several nationally representative datasets in Colombia, this article documents how the academic performance of students in their final high school year is affected due to technologies, aggregated by municipalities. We conclude that internet access strongly affects these results, and littl…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound change in the daily lives of a large part of the global population during 2020 and 2021. Such changes were mirrored in aspects such as changes to the overall energy consumption, or long periods of sustained inactivity inside public buildings. At the same time, due to the large proliferation of IoT, sensors and smartphones in the past few years, we are able to monitor such changes to a certain degree over time. In this paper, we focus on the effect of the pandemic on school buildings and certain aspects in the operation of schools. Our study is based o…
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）；Palantir Technologies（Palantir科技公司）；CDC COVID-19 Response Team（美国疾病控制与预防中心新冠疫情应对团队）
In this study, learning modalities offered by public schools across the United States were investigated to track changes in the proportion of schools offering fully in-person, hybrid and fully remote learning over time. Learning modalities from 14,688 unique school districts from September 2020 to June 2021 were reported by Burbio, MCH Strategic Data, the American Enterprise Institute's Return to Learn Tracker and individual state dashboards. A model was needed to combine and deconflict these data to provide a more complete description of modalities nationwide. A hidden Markov model (HMM) was …
During the Coronavirus 2019 (the covid-19) pandemic, schools continuously strive to provide consistent education to their students. Teachers and education policymakers are seeking ways to re-open schools, as it is necessary for community and economic development. However, in light of the pandemic, schools require customized schedules that can address the health concerns and safety of the students considering classroom sizes, air conditioning equipment, classroom systems, e.g., self-contained or compartmentalized. To solve this issue, we developed the School-Virus-Infection-Simulator (SVIS) for…
In this paper, we use SIR model to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic for Cincinnati Tri-State Area. We have built a representative population of Cincinnati that includes movements for traveling to stores, schools, workplaces, and traveling to friends houses. Using this model, we simulate the effect of quarantine, return to work, and panic buying. We show that that there will be a second wave of infections when people return to work and significant increase in number of infections when there is panic buying at stores with the announcement of the quarantine measures.
University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI)（瑞士南部应用科学与艺术大学）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Temporary school closures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have posed new challenges for many teachers and students worldwide. Especially the abrupt shift to online distance learning posed many obstacles to be overcome and it particularly complicated the implementation of Educational Robotics activities. Such activities usually comprise a variety of different learning artifacts, which were not accessible to many students during the period of school closure. Moreover, online distance learning considerably limits the possibilities for students to interact with their peers and teachers. In an atte…
The last three years have been an extraordinary time with the Covid-19 pandemic killing millions, affecting and distressing billions of people worldwide. Authorities took various measures such as turning school and work to remote and prohibiting social relations via curfews. In order to mitigate the negative impact of the epidemics, researchers tried to estimate the future of the pandemic for different scenarios, using forecasting techniques and epidemics simulations on networks. Intending to better represent the real-life in an urban town in high resolution, we propose a novel multi-layer net…
According to the United Nations, schools' closures have impacted up to 99 per cent of the student population in low and lower-middle-income countries. This research-in-progress report introduces a project on Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) measures in the ten member states of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) with a focus on the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in primary and secondary education levels. The project takes a comparative approach within a resilient ICT-for-Development (ICT4D) framework, where the coping, endurance, and return to pre-crisi…
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic started, all the governments have been trying to limit its effects on their citizens and countries. This pandemic was harsh on different levels for almost all populations worldwide and this is what drove researchers and scientists to get involved and work on several kinds of simulations to get a better insight into this virus and be able to stop it the earliest possible. In this study, we simulate the spread of COVID-19 in Lebanon using an Agent-Based Model where people are modeled as agents that have specific characteristics and behaviors determined from stati…
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the adoption of severe measures to counteract the spread of the infection. Social distancing and lockdown measures modifies people's habits, while the Internet gains a major role to support remote working, e-teaching, online collaboration, gaming, video streaming, etc. All these sudden changes put unprecedented stress on the network. In this paper we analyze the impact of the lockdown enforcement on the Politecnico di Torino campus network. Right after the school shutdown on the 25th of February, PoliTO deployed its own in-house solution for virtual teaching. Ever …
The move to university life is characterized by strong emotions, some of them negative, such as loneliness, anxiety, and depression. These negative emotions are strengthened due to the obligatory lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research indicates association among the use of social media, university satisfaction, and the aforementioned emotions. We report findings from 248 international undergraduates in The Netherlands, all students at the International School of Business. Our results indicate strong correlations between anxiety, loneliness, and COVID-19-related stress with un…
Information security in the context of digital literacy is a digital skill that enables safe and purposeful movement through virtual space. The age limit and frequency of use of the Internet by young generations has been moved back a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the concern for information security of young people is increasingly emphasized. If, and to what extent, knowledge of the issue of identification and authentication affects the information security of high school students aged 16 to 19 in the virtual space, the research question addressed by the authors of this paper was to d…
University of Sindh（信德大学）；Institute of Business Administration, University of Sindh（信德大学工商管理学院）；Nimbus Research Centre（尼姆布斯研究中心）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）
After affecting the world in unexpected ways, COVID-19 has started mutating which is evident with the insurgence of its new variants. The governments, hospitals, schools, industries, and humans, in general, are looking for a potential solution in the vaccine which will eventually be available but its timeline for eradicating the virus is yet unknown. Several researchers have encouraged and recommended the use of good practices such as physical healthcare monitoring, immunity-boosting, personal hygiene, mental healthcare, and contact tracing for slowing down the spread of the virus. In this art…
These are the proceedings of the first teacher training of the Erasmus+ project No. 2020-1-PT01-KA203-078646 -- Sustrainable. The full title of this project is Promoting Sustainability as a Fundamental Driver in Software Development Training and Education and the interested reader may know more about it at: https://sustrainable.github.io The flagship contribution is the organization of two summer schools on sustainable software production. The first summer school is moved due to the Corona pandemic. It is now scheduled for July 2022 in Rijeka, Croatia. This summer school will consist of lectur…
Policy makers have implemented multiple non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the COVID-19 worldwide crisis. Interventions had the aim of reducing close proximity interactions, which drive the spread of the disease. A deeper knowledge of human physical interactions has revealed necessary, especially in all settings involving children, whose education and gathering activities should be preserved. Despite their relevance, almost no data are available on close proximity contacts among children in schools or other educational settings during the pandemic. Contact data are usually gathered via …
Distance education had existed for a long time, then it has undergone a renaissance with the advent of computers and the Internet. Distance education relied on physically delivered material and assessments to students, who work offline at home. More recently, online learning or e-learning introduced virtual classrooms, assessments, online tests and transformed the classroom an into interactive online classroom. Despite the large number of online degrees offered, face-to-face remained the dominant mode and e-learning was just used to complement the classroom. The Covid-19 pandemic continues to …
The rapid spread of the novel corona virus, SARS-CoV-2, has prompted an unprecedented response from governments across the world. A third of the world population have been placed in varying degrees of lockdown, and the Internet has become the primary medium for conducting most businesses and schooling activities. This paper aims to provide a multi-prospective account of Internet performance during the first wave of the pandemic. We investigate the performance of the Internet control plane and data plane from a number of globally spread vantage points. We also look closer at two case studies. F…
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors of this paper organized a Reinforcement Learning (RL) course for a graduate school in the field of data science. We describe the strategy and materials for creating an exciting learning experience despite the ubiquitous Zoom fatigue and evaluate the course qualitatively. The key organizational features are a focus on a competitive hands-on setting in teams, supported by a minimum of lectures providing the essential background on RL. The practical part of the course revolved around Hearts Gym, an RL environment for the card game Hearts that we developed…
COVID-19 resulted in an infodemic, which could erode public trust, impede virus containment, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape is a key driver of the spread of misinformation. Using misinformation identified by the fact-checking platform by Tencent and posts on Weibo, our results showed that the evolution of misinformation follows an issue-attention cycle, pertaining to topics such as city lockdown, cures, and preventions, and school reopening. Sources of authority weigh in on these topics, but their influence is complicated by peoples' pre-existing b…
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has transformed almost every facet of human society throughout the world. Against an emerging, highly transmissible disease with no definitive treatment or vaccine, governments worldwide have implemented non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) to slow the spread of the virus. Examples of such interventions include community actions (e.g. school closures, restrictions on mass gatherings), individual actions (e.g. mask wearing, self-quarantine), and environmental actions (e.g. public facility cleaning). We present the Worldwide Non-pharmaceut…
