Students’ Perceptions of the Sustainability of Distance Learning Systems in the Post-COVID-19: A Qualitative Perspective

The new Sustainable Learning and Education (SLE) concept was formulated in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the United Nations. In order to achieve SLE, educational bodies need to utilize new technologies. Notably, the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has forced educational institutions to utilize more innovative technological approaches to meet the objectives while still being in compliance with the doctrines of SLE. This research was conducted to explore the role of e-learning in transforming the academic industry in the post-COVID-19 time. The qualitative technique for interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was applied to closely examine the participants’ lived experiences. The respondents were chosen from a private university in Jordan, and data were acquired through semi-structured interviews. Quality education, ease of technology, instructor accessibility and the use of online learning resources were the dimensions used for e-learning adoption. The findings highlighted that the students were truly overwhelmed by joining online platforms, but a lack of immediate feedback discouraged them. Besides this, the study will be useful to educational institutions in Jordan and other developing nations in gaining a better understanding of students’ attitudes about e-learning adoption. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

An Efficient Ensemble Model for Various Scale Medical Data

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are the digital form of patients??? medical reports or records. EHRs facilitate advanced analytics and aid in better decision-making for clinical data. Medical data are very complicated and using one classification algorithm to reach good results is difficult. For this reason, we use a combination of classification techniques to reach an efficient and accurate classification model. This model combination is called the Ensemble model. We need to predict new medical data with a high accuracy value in a small processing time. We propose a new ensemble model MDRL which is efficient with different datasets. The MDRL gives the highest accuracy value. It saves the processing time instead of processing four different algorithms sequentially;it executes the four algorithms in parallel. We implement five different algorithms on five variant datasets which are Heart Disease, Health General, Diabetes, Heart Attack, and Covid-19 Datasets. The four algorithms are Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). In addition to MDRL (our proposed ensemble model) which includes MLP, DT, RF, and LR together. From our experiments, we conclude that our ensemble model has the best accuracy value for most datasets. We reach that the combination of the Correlation Feature Selection (CFS) algorithm and our ensemble model is the best for giving the highest accuracy value. The accuracy values for our ensemble model based on CFS are 98.86, 97.96, 100, 99.33, and 99.37 for heart disease, health general, Covid-19, heart attack, and diabetes datasets respectively.

A transfer learning-enabled optimized extreme deep learning paradigm for diagnosis of COVID-19

Many respiratory infections around the world have been caused by coronaviruses. COVID-19 is one of the most serious coronaviruses due to its rapid spread between people and the lowest survival rate. There is a high need for computer-assisted diagnostics (CAD) in the area of artificial intelligence to help doctors and radiologists identify COVID-19 patients in cloud systems. Machine learning (ML) has been used to examine chest X-ray frames. In this paper, a new transfer learning-based optimized extreme deep learning paradigm is proposed to identify the chest X-ray picture into three classes, a pneumonia patient, a COVID-19 patient, or a normal person. First, three different pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models (resnet18, resnet25, densenet201) are employed for deep feature extraction. Second, each feature vector is passed through the binary Butterfly optimization algorithm (bBOA) to reduce the redundant features and extract the most representative ones, and enhance the performance of the CNN models. These selective features are then passed to an improved Extreme learning machine (ELM) using a BOA to classify the chest X-ray images. The proposed paradigm achieves a 99.48% accuracy in detecting covid-19 cases. © 2021 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Hygienic performance evaluation and effect of training in confronting with the COVID-19 virus in metal industries staff

Background and aims: Recently, the respiratory acute syndrome or Covid-19 disease has been become as one of the most important concerns in the national and global level. Covid-19 disease is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 or Covid-19. Covid-19 virus is spreading through saliva drops or nasal discharge when coughing or sneezing. Covid-19 disease not only has significantly negative affect on the general health of the society but also on job activities of the people like business, economy and industries activities. Therefore, outlook of this disease create stress and concern for the workers and employees as it can be transferred to other workers, family and customers. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has classified the workplaces into 4 categories in terms of potential of disease: very high risk, high risk, intermediate risk and low risk. Jobs has also been classified into four groups: 1. Very high exposure risk jobs are those with very high potential to meet the discovered cases or suspected of Covid-19 disease during medical cares, after death or during clinical experiments like healthcare stuff and laboratories stuff. 2- High exposure risk jobs: jobs with high potential and lower than previous class jobs to meet the discovered cases or suspected of Covid-19 disease like healthcare and support services employees, medical transportation and funeral workers. 3. Medium exposure risk jobs: jobs where workers are in repeated contact with other workers, public or in close contact with people those possibly with Covid-19 disease but are not diagnosed as suspected ill. These jobs include schools, some crowded retails and activities with high population density. 4. Low exposure risk jobs: jobs where workers are not in close and continuous contact with other works, public or people suspected of Covid-19 disease. The work international organization announced people who are affected to Covid-19 in the workplace must have access to healthcare and treatment services including usual medical cares, specialized cares(inside and outside of the hospital) pharmaceutical, hospital and medical rehabilitation services. On the other hand, since no vaccine or certain treatment is known for this disease until now, the best way to prevent and decrease this disease is to raise the awareness and information about this virus, how this disease is created and how it spreads. Hence, the present study was conducted with the aim of determining the hygienic performance and effect of training in order to confronting with the Covid-19 virus in the metal industries staff. Methods: This analytical-descriptive study is cross-sectional in terms of time. 5 metal industries were studied by the census method in Isfahan province (3 industries) and Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province (2 industries). The studied units include employers and directors, administrative, production, Facilities (Technical) and services stuff. To collect data, researcher-made checklist was used to evaluate the personal hygienic of stuff and to evaluate the industry environment and building, environment checklist was used. Totally 569 stuff and 11 checklists were studied to consider environmental health status in the studied industries buildings. Research team was composed of 2 experts. One expert was required to study the personal health of stuff and buildings environments hygiene and the other was responsible to teach stuff. The education subjects included properties of Covid-19 virus, symptoms of affecting to disease, disease transmission methods, methods of preventing the spread of the disease and importance to observe the personal health and the correct method to use the mask and gloves. After studying the personal health by the checklist, stuff specially who did not observed the personal health were trained for 10-15 minutes. Training was performed face to face while observing the hygienic protocols and standard physical distance. In order to study the effect of training in the personal health observance, the studied industries were referred after 3 weeks and pers nal health checklist was completed for all workers participating in the research. Data analysis was performed by the SPSS 21 software and paired-samples T-test. Results: The total studied stuff was 569 persons, 7.38% were women and 92.62% were men. The age average of stuff was 36.7± 8.31 years and 81.27% were married. Before training, 23.73% of stuff used mask and gloves and 30.93% just used mask. Also 78.21% observed the appropriate distance with others and 76.8% observed using personal devices or common surfaces disinfectant solution and 31.46% had hand disinfectant solution. However, after training, the personal health observance was raised significantly so that the significant relation (PValue<0.001) was obtained between before and after training personal health observance. Table 1 shows the results of studying stuff personal health after and before of training. Results of the environmental health study suggested that cases such as 1. Personnel fever test when coming factory, 2. Installment of Covid-19 dealing with disease training poster and stand, 3. Training personnel about this disease, 4. Instruction installation of washing hands in WC, 5. Preparation of enough detergents, disinfectants and cleaning equipment, 6. Existence of ventilation system in WC, 7. Preventing presence of workers suspected of Covid-19, 8. Use of special personnel as responsible for cleaning and disinfection, 9. Using mask, gloves, and work cloth of personnel when cleaning and disinfecting, 10. Observance of method of cleaning and disinfecting instruction, 11. Separation of napkin bucket and cleaning and disinfecting supplies from other devices and parts, 12. Discharge of buckets at the end of work shift, 13. Using of personal items for prayer, 14. Existence of liquid soap piping system with contained having hand washing liquid, 15. Keep doors and windows open, 16. Deactivating finger presence and absence system in more than half of studied saloons were observed. While, other cases of observing environmental health including 1. workers' blood oxygen test when entering the factory (9.1%), 2. Installment of dealing with Covid-19 environmental control guide (18.2%), 3. Daily Cleaning and disinfecting (45.45%), 4. Collecting rubbishes in the pedal bucket with lid (45.45%), 5. Availability of first aid box (27.27%), 6. Removing water coolers (0), 7. Placing hand disinfecting solution in the entrance of buildings and next to elevators (36.36%), 8. Existence of smart toilet or foot pedal faucet (9.1%) were less observed. Conclusion: More than half of workers observed the personal health but increasing their information about these diseases, methods of transmission and preventing outlook of it caused workers to pay more attention to preventive actions and follow personal health instructions seriously. Also environmental health actions in the studied industries buildings were observed but were not observed in some cases due to lack of awareness or economic problems of industrial factory. Therefore, to achieve the best performance in control and decreasing the Covid-19 disease, 3 essential actions are required: 1. Preparation of health supplies (like: mask, gloves, disinfectant solution) and delivering the health supplies to the workers daily 2. Training workers about the correct method of using the health supplies 3. Supervising use of the health supplies and implementation of health protocols. It should be noted that since Covid-19 disease is a new and unknown disease, training about this disease should be continuously performed and according to updated information. © 2020 Iran University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.

E-learning through covid-19 crisis in developing countries

The research aims to study E-learning through COVID-19 crisis in Developing Countries . The results revealed a strong relationship between perceived ease of use, perceived benefit, infrastructure for managing cultural knowledge, and the acceptance of E-learning in Jordan.

Hygienic performance evaluation and effect of training in order to confronting with the COVID-19 virus in the metal industries staff. (Special Issue: COVID-19.)

Background and aims: Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has classified the workplaces into 4 categories in terms of potential of disease: very high risk, high risk, intermediate risk and low risk. Jobs classification include: 1. Very high exposure risk jobs are those with very high potential to meet the discovered cases or suspected of Covid-19 disease during medical cares, after death or during clinical experiments like healthcare stuff and laboratories stuff. 2- High exposure risk jobs: jobs with high potential and lower than previous class jobs to meet the discovered cases or suspected of Covid-19 disease like healthcare and support services employees, medical transportation and funeral workers. 3. Medium exposure risk jobs: jobs where workers are in repeated contact with other workers, public or in close contact with people those possibly with Covid-19 disease but are not diagnosed as suspected ill. These jobs include schools, some crowded retails and activities with high population density. 4. Low exposure risk jobs: jobs where workers are not in close and continuous contact with other works, public or people suspected of Covid-19 disease. The work international organization announced people who are affected to Covid-19 in the workplace must have access to healthcare and treatment services including usual medical cares, specialized cares(inside and outside of the hospital) pharmaceutical, hospital and medical rehabilitation services. On the other hand, since no vaccine or certain treatment is known for this disease till now, the best way to prevent and decrease this disease is to raise the awareness and information about this virus, how this disease is created and how it spreads.so, the present study was conducted with the aim of determining the hygienic performance and effect of training in order to confronting with the Covid-19 virus in the metal industries staff Methods: This analytical-descriptive study is cross-sectional in terms of time. 5 metal industries were studied by the census method in Isfahan province (3 industries) and Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province (2 industries). The studied units include employers and directors, administrative, production, Facilities (Technical) and services stuff. To collect data, researcher-made checklist was used to evaluate the personal hygienic of stuff and to evaluate the industry environment and building, environment checklist was used. Totally 569 stuff and 11 checklists were studied to consider environmental health status in the studied industries buildings. Research team was composed of 2 experts. One expert was required to study the personal health of stuff and buildings environments hygiene and the other was responsible to teach stuff. The education subjects included properties of Covid-19 virus, symptoms of affecting to disease, disease transmission methods, methods of preventing the spread of the disease and importance to observe the personal health and the correct method to use the mask and gloves. After studying the personal health by the checklist, stuff specially who did not observed the personal health were trained for 10-15 minutes.

A Three-Stage Periodic Model: An Initial Analysis of Government Preventive Measures against COVID-19 Epidemics

In early spring 2020, Covid-19 was categorized as a pandemic and has since infected several millions of people in many countries and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Various strict strategies and prevention measures, such as curfews and lockdowns of cities or entire countries, have been enforced by governments to mitigate the spread of the virus. While the results of the aforementioned enforced measures deemed promising for some countries, the same could not be said about others. This paper serves as an initial analysis of the effect of government enforced strategies and safety measures on the transmission of Covid-19. We propose a three-stage periodic model: The rise stage, plateau stage, and decline stage, to describe the changes of the spread of Covid-19. The results show a positive and constructive answer to our proposed three-stage model. © 2020 ACM.