ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic forced changes in the teaching methodologies, in both university and high school studies. After this unusual period, in the present course 21-22 the success of the first course pharmacy students of Salamanca University has been strikingly lower than in previous years. These unexpected and undesirable results make it necessary to analyse the academic yield trend of the students in the last years. Method(s): The study was based on the statistics provided by the USAL's grading management programme. The results of the first term corresponding to the last five years, from the course 2017-2018 to the actual 2021-22, were analysed. Result(s): During the first four years of the analysed period, the failure mean value remains nearly constant around the value of 37%. It is worthy to note that this period includes the 20-21 course in which master classes and a main part of the laboratory ones were online, due to COVID-19 pandemic. However, in the present course and despite the return to total face to face teaching, the rate of fails significantly increases to 48%. The university access exam taken by these students has been reviewed in order to make it easier to overcome the difficulties in trying to cover all topics included in the different subjects. These, apparently unreasonable results, could be due to deficiencies in the academic background of the incoming students. Conclusion(s): Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic enduced academic changes, a high increase in the failure percentage has been observed in the first course pharmacy students of Salamanca University. Strategies, such as an initial course, seem to be necessary to be promoted from the faculty, in order to reinforce the background knowledge of the students;which, in turn, will increase the success academic rate of the graduates in the faculty.
ABSTRACT
Given user choices and the commercial offerings of internet providers, WhatsApp has increasingly become established as a new standard for communication by audio, image, and text. This paper explores the role of misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic by using content disseminated through WhatsApp, thereby making three main contributions: a discussion about the potential shift toward nontextual and nonvisual forms of misinformation;the new social role of audio, namely related to the critique of policies and political actors during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic;and the questioning of the First Draft News disinformation conceptual model by proposing a complementary approach that focuses only on factuality. Conclusions were drawn after conducting a content analysis of 988 units of Covid-19-related audio files, images, videos, and texts shared via WhatsApp during the early stage of the pandemic. A typology was identified to address distinct claims that focus on five different topics (society, policy and politics, health science, pandemic, and other), as well as audio messaging trending as a novel format for spreading misinformation. The results help us to contextualize and discuss a potential shift toward nontextual and nonvisual forms of misinformation, reflecting the increasing adoption of the audio format among WhatsApp users and making WhatsApp a fertile environment for the circulation and dissemination of misinformation regarding Covid-19-related themes. In a society characterized by the rapid consumption of information, the idea that content must have a degree of falsehood to mislead is an indicator of the distance between theoretical models and social reality. This indicator is important to identify true content as potential misinformation on the basis of its factuality. © 2022, El Profesional de la Informacion. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Online dating platforms, which have progressively multiplied and migrated from website to mobile app format and grown in number of users, offer an increasing variety and multiplicity of forms of socialization, which typically unfolds in three stages: profile building, matching with other users and discovery. Even if its users seek more than relationships or sex, the pandemic of COVID-19 and consequent limitations, in particular physical social distance and confinements, have changed the assumptions of its functioning and the way users interact, namely by the impossibility of mutual discovery migrating to face-to-face encounters. In this sense, we sought to investigate three major dimensions of analysis anchored to the national context: 1) how users reacted, in terms of behaviour and consumption habits, to the changes brought about by the pandemic, 2) how platforms adapted and 3) what attention was given by the media to the transformations of online dating. To answer the questions a triangulated analysis of user consumption, communication and platform evolution and media attention was carried out, in a mixed analysis (quantitative and qualitative) carried out using digital methods and tools for extraction, organisation and analysis, and secondary data. The main results point to COVID-19 as an important variable in changes registered in the construction of profiles and consumption habits by users, and of the platforms' services, both in terms of advice and suggestions and new features. The Portuguese media also focused their attention on online dating in adaptive novelties in terms of offers and technologies, and in questioning its use in times of pandemic. Copyright © 2021 (Rita Sepúlveda, Miguel Crespo, Jorge Vieira).
ABSTRACT
This article presents the analysis and design of the intelligent agent model “IA-ACR”, which has the objective of monitoring movements, which are carried out in a coordinated and intelligent way in a robot, which will have the task of performing routines of physical exercises and dance, these routines will then be imitated by children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), in order to capture their attention so that therapies are more effective, which will be evaluated by the specialist (psychologist). Due to the current situation of the pandemic that is being experienced due to COVID-19, health protocols were established, such as avoiding contact between people, given this restriction, a digital platform was developed that serves as support for children in order to receive their sessions, where the robot appears through videos, this being an advantage of telehealth. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.