Teenagers and multimodal digital writing in a written communication course during the COVID-19 pandemic

Centennial teenagers have complex multimodal literacy practices that need to be examined for incorporation and assessment in higher education. This article explores how students in a distance written communication course at a Peruvian university use multimodal literacy practices to express the complexity of their thematic interests: gender violence, technology and video games, and the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, we highlight how students use various semiotic resources in order to represent their critical perspective on their thematic choices and the challenges posed by digital writing in the construction of their identity. © 2021 IEEE.

Augmented reality and online live surgery to teach HPB procedures during COVID-19

Purpose: Formation in surgery and, more specifically, in hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery is demanding and time-consuming for medical students and residents. Lots of surgeries complemented with teaching resources and mentoring must be followed to be able to understand and perform them. Nevertheless, current pandemic condition complicates existing conventional academic training as presence of students/residents in operating rooms is highly limited. Method: To ensure and improve medical formation in current conditions a novel formation plan has been proposed. Students and medical residents were invited to follow online live surgeries assisted with augmented reality, not having to physically be in the operating room. As first experiences, an open cephalic duodenopancreatectomy and a robotic left lateral hepatic sectionectomy were performed. Later, an online survey was delivered. Results: Both surgeries were performed and streamed for 120 minutes using the surgical field camera and the robotic platform camera. Augmented reality resources such as patient’s CT, MRI, explanatory pictures and videos and 3D virtual models were presented using Hololens 2 smart glasses. More than 70 medical students and residents followed the surgeries, being able to discuss the cases with one of the surgeons. We received 39 answers from the online survey. 32 of them considered that these online lessons were useful and complementary virtual teaching resources made surgery understanding easier. Moreover, 18 attendees preferred this kind of teaching model to an in-person one. Conclusion: Online surgical formation complemented with augmented reality resources seems an interesting complementary tool for university hospitals.

EDUCATION AND PANDEMIC. AN APPROACH TO A REALITY IN THE PROVINCE OF PASTAZA

After the appearance of the COVID-19 virus in China in 2019, the world took another reality, both socially and economically, by adopting very drastic measures in order to protect the world population from what later the World Health Organization WHO, on March 11, 2020 declared a Global Pandemic, and all countries would be involved in adopting measures of confinement to its population. In March 16, the National Government of Ecuador, declared a state of health emergency and issued regulations to regulate services in public and private institutions, one of those estates was education at all levels, and alternatives were sought so that they can establish the continuation of educational activity through virtual platforms, provided by the government and / or private, in such circumstances began a new paradigm of training and education in the country. In the province of Pastaza, the considerations and guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education were taken into account and online academic activities were continued, but with a reality different from the national average because the internet connectivity in homes does not reach 65%, limited to the urban area mostly, while possibly in the rural area this coverage would not reach levels of 15%, so the governmental directives to continue with studies at the basic and high school level are far from being achieved.