ABSTRACT
Background: The 2020–2021 school year shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic brought an unprecedented burden on parents, especially those with special needs children. Parents with children with special needs were left to assist their children with remote learning at home using technology for the first time. These students with special needs were used to face-to-face and one-to-one classroom learning by skilled educators but are now left to be educated by their parents. Objective: This study explored parents' experiences assisting their special needs children with remote learning for the first time, using technology at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A transcendental (descriptive) phenomenology was undertaken to explore the experiences of nine participants, recruited from two school divisions in Manitoba, Canada, on their child's education and the challenges they experienced during remote learning from home. A purposive sampling technique was used, and data were collected through telephone interviews. Results: Eight out of nine parents reported a negative experience with remote learning. Four major themes emerged after the data analysis: participants' fear and anxiety during remote learning, difficulty maintaining routines during remote learning, students' behavioral issues and mental health changes during remote learning, and lack of home support during remote learning. Furthermore, results indicated that integrating technology in remote learning for students with special needs was ineffective. Conclusion: This study suggests poor communication between parents and teachers, and parents' desire to be involved in planning remote learning for students with special needs during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was not met. This study also suggests that schools failed to meet students' IEPs during remote learning. Furthermore, this study highlights that remote learning for special-needs students is inappropriate without educational assistance. Copyright © 2023 Sankoh, Hogle, Payton and Ledbetter.
ABSTRACT
When COVID-19 Vaccines became first available, there were a lot of questions and uncertainty related to them [1]. In this paper, we aim to model the evolution of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy through an opinion dynamics model. We extend the model in [5] to general polygons and explore the parameter space. We compare our model with the real data available for Floyd County, Texas. Our findings imply that our model is good in predicting evolution of Vaccine Hesitancy in other counties. We also think that our model can be used to model and predict evolution of opinions on other topics. © 2022 IEEE.