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Introduction: The year 2020 brings in a paradigm shift in medical education with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the government of India initiated the first countrywide lockdown, educational institutions, including medical colleges, have adopted online mode for undergraduate teaching. Medical education is virtually incomplete without appropriate practical exposure. This study was conducted to understand the opinion of the medical students towards online classes as an impact of this pandemic on medical education. Materials and Methods: A descriptive online survey was conducted using a google form among medical undergraduate students from across India. Snowball sampling was used to recruit study participants. The responses were analyzed using numbers and percentages. Continuous variables were expressed as the mean and standard deviation of the mean. Results: The mean age of the 1426 respondents was 20.46 years. The majority of the responses were from Karnataka (412), followed by Odisha (167). While fairly a good number of respondents agreed that online classes provided a conducive environment and independence in learning, a large proportion disagreed or remained neutral in terms of its usefulness. This could be attributed to several reasons, which may be categorized into three important groups: the technical competence of the students, the provision of an enabling environment and the ability of the teachers. Conclusion: Students had varying opinions on online classes, but most emphasized the need for redoing the lessons taught online.

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BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a broad influence on health and society across the globe, especially on the education sector as its educators have had to continue the provision of teaching and learning opportunities to their students online in the midst of pandemic. This has led to learning loss and psychological health issues among students, which is now being recognized worldwide. This study aims to explore the perceptions, perspectives, and experiences of teachers with regards to learning loss and psychological health issues among students during the COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand. METHODS: Descriptive qualitative research was employed to gain a richer understanding of this interesting phenomenon. The experiences of twelve primary and secondary teachers were looked into by dividing them into several focus groups and interviewing them through video conferencing. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed through the use of content analysis. RESULTS: The findings that include the perceptions, perspectives, and experiences among teachers focused on three main themes, which are teaching and Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and support to deal with the psychosocial issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are then divided into fifteen sub themes. CONCLUSIONS: Through these findings, this study is able to provide an understanding of the perceptions, perspectives, and experiences of teachers regarding learning loss and psychosocial issues among students during the COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand. It also highlights the psychological issues that were met, the social and family support offered, ways how learning loss among students could have been prevented in the midst of the pandemic, and finally suggests what the education administrators and healthcare or public health sector administrators can do to enhance the quality of education and resilience skills of the students during and after the pandemic.

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BACKGROUND: The increasing prevalence of COVID-19 affected all aspects of life, including education. Communication and interaction are vital in any form of education. This study explained health profession educators' and students' experiences regarding the challenges of communication and cooperation in exclusively online classrooms during the COVID-19 era. METHODS: The present descriptive explanatory qualitative study examined health profession educators' and students' experiences with exclusively online classrooms during the COVID-19 era. They were included in the study by purposive sampling. In-depth and semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted to collect data. The content analysis presented by Graneheim and Lundman was used to analyze the data. The present study employed four strength criteria: credibility, confirmability, transferability, and dependability. RESULTS: The results of the present study included communication and cooperation challenges in exclusively online classrooms related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Two themes emerged from 400 open codes: lack of students' socialization and communication-related concerns, which each had subcategories. CONCLUSIONS: Lack of students' socialization and communication problems were identified as the participants' main experiences. Defects in teacher training due to the sudden transition to virtual education, acquiring a professional identity that is possible in in-person education was also flawed. The participants experienced challenges in their class activities, leading to a decrease in trust, a lack of motivation to learn from students, and teachers' teaching. Policymakers and authorities should adopt new tools and techniques to improve exclusively virtual education outcomes.

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Though considerable research has been reported on COVID-19-related distance education, some dimensions of remote foreign language teaching experiences during the pandemic crisis remain to be explored. The study reported in this paper investigated Saudi university foreign language teachers' accumulated experiences and reflective beliefs of emergency remote instruction. The study focused specifically on: a) the general educational challenges the teachers encountered and their attempts to overcome them; b) the teachers' perceived difficulties in remotely teaching and assessing foreign language areas and their strategies for coping with them; and c) their reflective evaluation of remote foreign language teaching after doing it for three academic terms. Questionnaire data was collected from 112 teachers of Arabic and English as foreign languages, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 teachers. The analysis of both data types showed that the participants had a number of general educational and language-teaching-specific challenges in their COVID-19-related remote teaching. The teachers generally viewed the remote assessment of language areas is a more challenging task than teaching them. Reading was rated as the least difficult language area to teach and assess remotely, whereas writing was the most difficult one. The teachers reported using various coping strategies to overcome the educational and language teaching-specific challenges. They perceived their remote teaching experiences positively, but reported their needs for further training in developing better online assessment methods, using different teaching platforms and technological tools, and managing classroom interactions. The paper ends by discussing the results of the study and their implications.

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BACKGROUND: COVID-19 outbreak has changed the traditional teaching method of using blackboards to digital devices assisted online classes. Spending long hours in front of digital devices might lead to different ocular problems in children. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted among school-going children attending digital online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. A web-based online form was used to evaluate the impact of digital classrooms on the visual status of school-going children. Children were selected from 5 randomly selected schools from different parts of Kathmandu Valley who had online classes for at least 2 hours during the COVID-19 pandemic era. RESULTS: A total of 303 usable responses were obtained from a response rate of 41% with an average age of 10 years. Sixty-four percent of children had online classes up to 6 hours a day and 44% used laptops for online classes followed by smartphones (38%). The most common symptom was headache affecting 39.3% of the children, followed by difficulty seeing bright light (35%) and itching of the eyes (35%). Forty percent of the children felt that their eyes were affected after online class. Multivariate analysis showed that the total duration spent on digital devices was the greatest risk factor associated with the ocular symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Ocular symptoms and digital eye strain related to the excessive use of digital devices have increased due to the increased duration of online classes. Awareness about the prevention and measures to reduce the adverse effects should be stressed.

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Prior studies in translanguaging have investigated its role in education from different perspectives to understand its efficiency, practicality, and how it promotes or challenges educational and societal aims in different multilingual contexts across the world. However, little attention has been paid to translanguaging in universities with a monolingual environment. To cover this gap, the current study examines teachers' online translanguaging practices and ideologies in Saudi Arabia, where the community language is Arabic but English is commonly a medium of instruction in higher education. The study investigated (a) teachers' practices and perspectives toward translanguaging while communicating online with learners; and (b) how, when, and where teachers find translanguaging to be productive. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach to survey 260 bilingual instructors from universities in Saudi Arabia. In addition, 20 teachers' video-recorded sessions are observed to assess the functions of translanguaging during online synchronous instruction. Five of these teachers are interviewed using stimulated-recall techniques. Results show that the teachers mostly hold positive views about translanguaging, considering it productive in helping students understand complex terms and in engaging in communication inside and outside the classroom. The data suggests that bilingual teachers of Arabic and English prefer the new bilingual approach of translanguaging and appear to depend less on the traditional monolingual approach to teaching in multilingual contexts.

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SignificanceTo date, researchers and practitioners have focused on the academic challenges of underrepresented ethnic groups in the United States. In comparison, Asians have received limited attention, as they are commonly assumed to excel across all educational stages. Six large studies challenge this assumption by revealing that East Asians (but not South Asians) underperform in US law schools and business schools. This is not because East Asians are less academically motivated or less proficient in English but because their low verbal assertiveness is culturally incongruent with the assertiveness prized by US law and business schools. Online classes (via Zoom) mitigated East Asians' underperformance in courses emphasizing assertiveness and class participation. Educators should reexamine pedagogical practices to create a culturally inclusive classroom.

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