ABSTRACT
Most North American colleges and universities switched to online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is important to explore the impact of the newly remote courses on the academic lives of postsecondary students with and without disabilities and on technology use by students. It is also important to ascertain which newly used technologies are likely to be useful in the future. To do this, we surveyed 121 students with disabilities and 51 without disabilities and asked them about their academic performance and about the smartphone and tablet technologies they used to do schoolwork during the pandemic. Results indicate that most students were having a difficult time with learning and studying and that students with disabilities were experiencing more challenges, including the need to drop courses. The most common problems dealt with concentration, motivation, and discipline. The only positive impact reported relates to flexibility and time management. Approximately 70% of students used some form of mobile technology to do schoolwork, primarily Apple devices. The most common technologies reported by students were: Zoom, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word. Overall, most of these worked well, although over one third of both groups indicated that Zoom worked poorly. Where there were differences between the two groups, results show that the technologies were more problematic for students with disabilities. The variety of smartphone and tablet apps used by postsecondary students during the pandemic suggests that now that they have learned to use these, students will continue to use many of these once the pandemic is over.
ABSTRACT
STUDY OBJECTIVES: In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic situation, we address the following important questions: (1) How can patients be identified for possible OSA while sleep clinic testing is temporarily unavailable or limited? and (2) What measures can be suggested to improve sleep health until proper diagnosis and treatment become safe and available again? METHODS: As a proxy for home or in-laboratory testing, validation of a symptom-based measure of OSA risk is presented, based on an ongoing larger prospective study of 156 family medicine patients with OSA (88 women, 68 men; mean age, 57 years) and 60 control participants (36 women, 24 men; mean age, 54 years) recruited from the community. Participants completed the Sleep Symptom Checklist (SSC) and a range of other self-report measures; primary care patients also underwent a polysomnographic sleep study. RESULTS: Results showed that (1) individuals with OSA reported more symptoms on the SSC related to insomnia, daytime symptoms, sleep disorders, and psychological maladjustment than did the control group (all P < .001), and (2) their sleep-related symptoms were significantly more severe than those of the control patients. In addition, several polysomnographic indices in recently diagnosed untreated individuals with OSA were significantly correlated with SSC measured sleep disorder symptoms, and SSC scores significantly distinguished participants with OSA from control participants. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that family practitioners can effectively prescreen patients for possible OSA by inquiring about 5 items that form the SSC sleep disorders subscale. If OSA is suspected, then we can recommend a range of behavioral techniques to improve symptoms. The current pandemic causes us to reflect that the provisional targeting of symptoms and guidance regarding mitigation strategies while waiting for specialist care could serve patients well at any time.