The Significance of Coordinated Research Against SARS-CoV-2

With many unanswered questions about SARS-CoV-2, the research community needs to immediately prioritize research areas in the fight against the current COVID-19 pandemic. An accelerated and coordinated multidisciplinary research effort is needed from the wider scientific community in many sectors from vaccine and antiviral development to digital technology. This mini-review highlights key research opportunities such as vaccine development, diagnostics, antiviral masks, environmental transmission and antiviral treatments, and outlines how systematic efforts can be focused in these key areas. Some alternate strategies such as the use of novel nanostructured surfaces to slow and prevent the spread of COVID-19 are presented. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Emergency remote learning acceptance among higher education students during COVID-19 pandemic

The current study investigates how attitudes towards digital transformation and personal innovativeness affect the acceptance of emergency remote learning in the COVID-19 pandemic environment. The pandemic has affected all aspects of societies across the globe, including higher education that was also a significant push-up factor for the digital transformation of higher education. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting emergency remote learning acceptance among the higher education students in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The results presented in this paper gained from a study carried out among higher education students in BiH cover the period of April – July 2020 via the open-source platform. The study focused on the students’ attitude towards a digital transformation is a significant factor in accepting emergency remote learning. Also, the personal innovativeness score has proven to be a crucial factor for adopting this new learning setting, i.e., more innovative students have a greater emergency remote learning acceptance than students with a lower personal innovativeness score. Hence, this study pinpoints the necessity of changing the attitudes towards technology applications in education. It would increase the usage of remote learning services and provide students with knowledge and skills for the new labour market. © 2021, University of Rijeka. All rights reserved.